The House on Fortune Street (18 page)

A year after she came south, she became involved with a violinist who made his living teaching and playing in various orchestras. She moved from the group house where she’d been living to the garden flat in her friend Abigail’s house. Edward, she explained, lived with his former girlfriend, they had a daughter, and his erratic comings and goings required privacy. Once she’d realized that I wasn’t shocked, she talked about him with increasing frequency. She still had her childhood openness, and when she spoke I could see in her face her longing for this man. As soon as his daughter got over measles, he would leave. As soon as he had more pupils. As soon as they’d sorted out the insurance claim on their roof.

At first I believed her confident pronouncements. But as six months passed, a year, nearly two years, I began to suspect that Edward’s version of events might be rather different. Meanwhile Dara lived like a soothsayer, poring over signs and omens, always, apparently, convinced that he was about to make good on his promises. I was painfully aware that her skills as a counselor did not make her own life easier.

The autumn of her thirty-second year she suggested that we pay a visit to Sissinghurst. A couple of her friends had been and had enthused about the exquisite gardens. That September we had a spell of glorious weather, and I pictured us wandering among the flowers in brilliant sunshine. But when the chosen day arrived the sky was so overcast that I would have canceled if we hadn’t each taken time off work.

I arrived at Dara’s flat in Brixton soon after ten and had just knocked at her door when the other door opened and Abigail’s partner, Sean, appeared. He’d been very helpful when Dara was moving in, and I’d thought him a pleasant young man. Today he seemed startled to see me; his pale face was haggard and unshaven. We exchanged greetings and I remarked on the dahlias in the front garden.

“All Dara’s doing,” he said. He was explaining how his boyhood chores had left him with a hatred of gardening when she appeared.

“Hi, Dad,” she said. “Come on, Sean. At a certain point we have to stop blaming our parents for everything.” She added that we were on our way to see the gardens at Sissinghurst.

“I’ve heard they’re beautiful,” he said, his voice suggesting the opposite, and headed down the street.

“Sean seems a little out of sorts,” I said as we walked toward my car. “He’s just overworked,” said Dara. “He has a contract for a book about euthanasia, and Abigail is away a lot, touring. I think he doesn’t

know whether he’s coming or going.”

As we drove out of London, she described our destination. Sissinghurst was famous because of its owners: Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West. He was a diplomat and a writer; she was an aristocrat and a writer. They had bought the fifteenth-century manor house more or less as a ruin in 1930, and gradually restored it and made the famous gardens. Harold and Vita were also famous, she continued, for their open marriage. Vita had had several passionate relationships with women; Harold too had explored the pleasures of his own gender. One of the sons had written a wonderful book about his parents.

We swooped through a hilly village and the Kentish countryside spread out before us. A few miles later signs led us from the main road into the village of Sissinghurst and out again, down a narrow lane, to the grounds of the house. The gloomy weather had kept people away and the car park was virtually empty. We paid our admission and walked through the main building into the gardens. I was amazed by the orderly profusion. The different areas were divided by hedges and walls; many of the beds were organized by color. “How pretty,” Dara kept exclaiming, bending down to touch or smell the flowers. Her skirt was almost the exact blue of the periwinkles. I took several photographs.

Only one part of the house was open to the public: the tower. At the bottom the name Vita was spelled out in tiles on a windowsill, and halfway up the winding wooden stair was the room that had been her

study. We leaned against the grille that covered the doorway looking at the walls lined with books and the floor with its shabby Oriental rugs. Vases of fresh flowers on the desk and the mantelpiece made the room feel inhabited.

We continued climbing and stepped onto a flat roof surrounded by a four-foot-high brick wall. Above us fluttered a flag, the ropes rattling against the flagpole. The tower was only fifty, perhaps sixty feet high but we seemed significantly closer to the sky. As far as the eye could see dark clouds were massing. Beyond the garden a small lake ruffled in the wind.

“Do you remember,” said Dara, she was staring out toward the orchards and the wild garden, “that time we went camping? We went up a tower then, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “There was a castle near the campsite and we climbed up to the battlements.” Whenever Dara asked why Fiona and I separated I had taken refuge in vague generalizations about drifting apart. Years ago my therapist had said on no account should I try to tell her and Fergus my version of events. “Normally,” he had added, “I’m in favor of honesty between parent and child. But this would demand too much of your son and daughter.”

Now I looked at Dara where she stood leaning over the wall and wondered how much she remembered of that weekend. “We were on the battlements,” I went on, “when we saw the men trying to steal stuff from our tents.”

“And that Australian guy stopped them. Then he disappeared in the night and you left a few weeks later. It was our last family holiday. I used to go over and over those days in my mind, trying to cheer myself up.”

“I’m sorry.”

She turned around to face me, hands resting on the top of the wall. “Why did you leave?” she said, blinking rapidly.“I’ve never understood. You said we could bake Mum a cake for her birthday and then you dis-

appeared. Of course I was only ten, but you and she seemed to get on pretty well.”

“We did,” I said helplessly. The top of the tower was the size of a small room.

“I talked about it with Ingrid,” Dara went on. “She was one of the few girls I knew whose parents were divorced. But she just said her dad drank and couldn’t hold down a job and I knew neither was true of you.”

“Whatever happened to Ingrid? The two of you were inseparable.” I had not had news of her in nearly a quarter of a century.

“I don’t know. She started going to a different school and suddenly she was into makeup and boys whereas I was playing hockey and learning French. Then a couple of years later Iris got a job in Glasgow and they moved. At one point”—she waved away an insect—“I wondered if you might have had an affair with Iris.”

“With Iris? Absolutely not.” I was glad to hear the genuine surprise in my voice. “I took the job in London because it paid so much better, and then Fiona and I—”

My feeble words were interrupted by the clock, a few feet below us in the tower, striking the hour. When it finished, Dara said, “Yes, yes, you drifted apart but it didn’t feel like that. After that holiday Mum was furious with you. Fergus and I learned never to mention you. Then for years we didn’t see you. You even stopped phoning. We thought you must really hate us.”

The last sentence was spoken in a voice so small that she could have been ten years old again. So this was the rock and the hard place: allow my daughter to think I didn’t care for her or tell her why her mother had banished me. I ran my hand over the mossy stone. Later I thought how much might have been changed if I had crossed the few feet that separated us, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. Wasn’t that all she was asking? But I was too worried about my own

plight to register her pain. The sound of approaching footsteps, other visitors to the tower, rescued me. “Let’s go down,” I said.

Outside we followed a path to the white garden. Dara bent to exam-ine a small, starry flower. “Obviously,” she said, “the situation with Edward has made me think a lot about all this. I would never want to inflict on someone else what I suffered as a child. Part of what I love about Edward is that he would never walk out on his daughter. Anyway this summer when I was up in Edinburgh I asked Mum again what had happened between you two. She said I should ask you.”

She left the flower and wandered over to a tree, some sort of willow, beneath which stood a statue of a woman. “Stand still,” I said, raising the camera. “Move a little closer.”

“For heaven’s sake, Dad. That’s another thing I remember from our last few months. You always had a camera between you and whatever was going on. Snap, snap, snap. It was infuriating.”

“I’m sorry. You looked so pretty with the statue. I am listening.” “But not answering.”

She had moved away from the tree and now stood no longer blinking but gazing at me sternly across a rose bush. I wondered if all along she had planned to bring me here and have this conversation. My temples were throbbing and for a few seconds I thought I might faint as I had, long ago, when the headless hen stepped toward me. Dara gasped and raised her hand to her mouth.

“What is it?”

“The rose,” she said, “protecting itself.” She held out her hand, displaying a few bright beads of blood on her index finger.

“Let’s find somewhere to sit down.”

We walked across the lawn, past several more flower beds to an avenue of trees. Beyond, the edge of the garden was marked by a beech hedge. Two benches, both empty, gave a view across a field and down to the lake. I chose the nearest bench and Dara, leaving a careful distance,

sat beside me. We were entirely alone, or perhaps more accurately all our companions were absent or dead. In the silence I could hear the rustling sounds of Dara arranging her skirt; she didn’t speak. She had asked her question. It was up to me to answer. A couple of sparrows hopped hopefully around our feet.

“Did you know,” I said, “that I had a brother?” “You do?”

“Did. Losing Lionel was the worst thing that ever happened to me, until the divorce. He was on the rugger team and his neck was broken in a scrum. It was the first time I had been to see him play. I held him as he died. He was fourteen and a half. But then afterward, after the funeral, we never spoke of him. It was how my parents dealt with disaster. You pulled yourself together and went on as if nothing had happened.”

As I spoke the wind sighed in the trees. Lionel, I thought. “What was he like?” said Dara gently.

“He was great. I mean he was only a boy, but he was so lively and thoughtful and funny. I don’t think you could be with him for ten minutes without sensing that here was someone who liked people—not just other kids but Dad’s bowling pals, Mum’s friends, the neighbors—and people liked him. You knew that he was on your side.”

“I wish I’d known him.”

“I do too. It’s hard to explain—I’ve never tried to put this into words before—but Lionel made everything easier for me. When he was around I could connect with other people. My whole life changed when he died.” I stared down at the camera on my lap, the small birds at my feet. “What I’ve never told anyone is that I moved his head. I couldn’t bear to see him lying with his face in the mud. Later, much later, I realized that maybe I’d killed him. People can survive a broken neck; he might have been one of them. When I met Fiona, I thought I’d put all that behind me. But then, and please don’t take this the wrong way, something about you and Fergus began to bring it back. As a boy, Fergus was

very like Lionel. I had these fears, irrational fears, that I inflicted on our family, especially on your mother. Not that I understood any of this at the time.”

Beside me Dara stood up. Before I knew what was happening she was bending over, hugging me tightly. Then she began to talk. She said what a familiar story this was. How over and over in her work she saw people who had suffered some terrible event and never come to terms with it. Years later it would surface, destructively, in their lives. The only way to end the cycle, to stop passing the damage down to their children, was to face the event and endure the fear. “When we went to that exhibition in Whitechapel,” she said, “I remember thinking that you had a secret, but I had no idea where to look.”

As she spoke the sky darkened and the wind began to stir. A couple walked by, two women arm in arm, both white-haired, the taller one wearing plaid trousers, the smaller a colorful skirt. The one in the skirt smiled at us as they passed. In spite of the ominous weather they sat down on the next bench.

“Thank you,” Dara was saying. “I always assumed that your depar-ture had to do with us, with Fergus and me, that if you’d loved us you’d have stayed. You don’t know how much it means to me to hear that it was the other way round. You left because you loved us, to save us from your limitations.”

That wasn’t what I’d been saying, not exactly, but maybe it wasn’t so far from the truth. “Would you do something for me?” I said.

“What?”

“Would you allow me to ask one of those women to take a photograph of us? I’d like to have a souvenir of today.”

“I’d like that too,” she said.

As I approached the two women, I heard them talking in some lan-guage I didn’t know, but as soon as I said, “Excuse me,” they switched fluently to English. After a brief argument as to who was the better

photographer, they both came to take our picture, one each. The first drops of rain fell as they handed back the camera.

Over lunch at a pub in the village Dara talked about Edward. They finally had a plan that made sense. He was going to see his daughter through her first term of kindergarten, keep everything together for Christmas, and then break the news to his partner as soon as school started again. Meanwhile he and Dara would find a flat to rent, or buy, ideally within walking distance of his present flat so that his daughter could go back and forth easily between the two households. And sometime soon, maybe even next year—she looked down shyly—they were going to try to have a baby.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. Her tone did not permit a shred of doubt.

e spoke on the phone several times in the next couple

of months, but I didn’t see Dara again until she came to the drinks party Louise and I gave in mid-December. She arrived late, a number of guests had already gone home or on to other engagements, and, when I first caught sight of her in the hall, I thought that a bag lady had wandered into our house. It was not just that she was carrying several bulky bags—other guests had arrived similarly burdened—but that she was wearing such ill-assorted clothes: a threadbare Eastern jacket, several clashing scarves, a faded black skirt with a tear in one side and, in spite of the weather, red sandals. When I reached to hug her I smelled an odd, almost chemical odor.

“Is everything all right?” I said.

“Fine. Fine. Sorry to be late. Things are hectic at work. We had a review recently and several people are off with colds . . .”

Alarm bells should have rung at the way she delivered this speech, much too loudly and quickly, but I was thinking about my precious