The House on Fortune Street (27 page)

theory was that it had to do with Brontë’s cunning use of autobio-graphical elements.” As he put the book away an expression had passed over his face so rapidly that Dara wondered if she had imagined it. For a few seconds Sean had looked utterly despairing.

Since then she had come home most evenings to see the lights on upstairs, to hear music, either Brazilian or classical, and to smell the fragrance of cooking. Meanwhile in her own flat everything was as she had left it, only a little colder and staler. She had never lived alone before, and she missed the humdrum conversations with her old housemates, their weekly dinners. That missing, combined with Abigail’s busyness—she hadn’t knocked on Dara’s door once—and Sean’s presence, made it hard to get in touch. So she was delighted when, a week after Twelfth Night, Abigail phoned to ask if she was free for supper. At the news that Sean was out, she insisted on playing host.

Abigail had not been downstairs since the floor was sanded, and she couldn’t stop exclaiming how lovely the flat looked. “You’ve got such good taste,” she said, surveying the living room. “Did Edward put up those shelves?”

“No, my father. He must have made a dozen trips to the DIY shop and the supermarket. And look what he gave me.” She pointed to the rug at their feet.

She had opened the door to find him standing there, the rolled-up rug like a sentinel beside him. He had tied a red ribbon around it. “Surprise,” he had said. “You have ten days to change it so please don’t pretend to like it.” But Dara had liked it from the moment they unrolled it to reveal the cream-colored background, patterned with blues and greens, reds and golds. “It’s beautiful,” she had said. Only as she saw his smile did she understand how nervous he had been about her reaction.

Now Abigail said the rug was perfect. “Here,” she added, “I brought a bottle, and some nuts.” When they were seated on either side of the coffee table, she asked how things were at work.

“Weirdly peaceful. A month ago Halley was leaving, Joyce was furious, everything was fraught. Now it’s as if none of it ever happened. But there’s something I want to tell you.” Sipping wine, in the company of her oldest friend, she went into far more detail than she had with Frank: her realization that she had made it harder for Edward by putting him on a pedestal, his insecurities about his parents.

“You know,” said Abigail when she finished, “I do remember thinking it was odd for him to be at the pub alone if he was visiting friends. But if he was there with his family, that makes sense. Cordelia stayed with the baby, and he came out for a drink.”

Dara kept her gaze on the rug, trying not to show her dismay. It had not occurred to her that, even at their first meeting, Edward had been accompanied.

“So, what are you going to do?” said Abigail.

“Follow your excellent example. Help him to leave Cordelia.” “Does he know this?”

“It’s his idea. The relationship has been over for years, but there are various practical problems.”

“Like a child.”

Quickly, seeing her expression, Abigail continued. “I don’t mean to sound negative. Plenty of people with children split up, but it is more complicated. Sean and his wife ended up at daggers drawn, which was awful for them but no one else. Whereas Edward and Cordelia need to stay on good terms if at all possible.”

“I know that.”

She stood up and walked over to the kitchen. She had pictured Abigail greeting her as a comrade in arms, offering to strategize. Instead here she was pointing out problems of which Dara was already only too well aware, and once again confirming her suspicion that Abigail saw her as a poor relation rather than an equal. Of course Sean would leave his wife for Abigail, but who would ever leave his partner for Dara?

But as she opened the fridge, Abigail was standing beside her.“Don’t be cross,” she said. “I’m just surprised. I knew from the beginning that Sean was married. I was duly warned, and I pursued him anyway. You’ve been going out with Edward for four months and none of us had a clue about his family. You didn’t have a chance to decide whether you were up for this before you fell for him.”

“He fell for me,” said Dara. “Literally and metaphorically.”

“Okay, but you can’t expect me to be thrilled that he’s been deceiv-ing you.”

“Not thrilled.” Dara set a saucepan on the cooker and turned to face Abigail. “But you could try to understand. I hate that he lied to me but I’m not like you. If he had told me immediately, I wouldn’t have gone out with him; I’d never have known what it was like to feel this way. However much I wish he’d move in tomorrow, I couldn’t care for a man who would walk out on his daughter.” In all their years of friendship she had never spoken to Abigail so forcefully. “I need you to understand,” she repeated.

The next thing she knew Abigail was hugging her. “I do understand.

Really, I do.”

As they cooked, they had the kind of conversation they had had so often at university, and seldom since. For the first time Dara realized how painful it had been for her friend to endure Sean’s indecision. “We’d have these amazing days together,” Abigail said, slicing garlic to almost transparent thinness, “days when I felt that here was the person I knew best in the world. Then he’d go back to Judy and I wouldn’t hear from him for a week.”

“You never thought of giving up on him?”

“Hundreds of times.” She slid the garlic into a frying pan. “Remember when I went to Paris? Beforehand I’d told him it was over. I don’t think I’ve felt so wretched since my grandparents died. I kept walking

to get away from the pain. I walked from Notre Dame to Sacre Coeur, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place des Vosges. When I got back, he’d filled the answering machine, there were so many letters I could barely get through the door. And suddenly there he was.”

“I had no idea,” said Dara. “From the outside you always seemed so sure you were destined to be together.”

“One of us had to be.” She gave the frying pan a shake. “I know this sounds arrogant but I used to think there were special cases, and that I was one of them. I’m attractive and I have an interesting life. Sean changed that. Over and over he said one thing and did another. People may make extravagant claims when they first start fucking, but once the novelty wears off, they pretty much revert to type.”

“But you do still love him,” said Dara, “don’t you?” She was startled by the bitterness in Abigail’s voice, and by how much she sounded like her old, pre-Sean self.

“Yes, but not in an ‘I will go to the ends of the earth, die without you’ way. I was right when I thought that was all an illusion, a nice, big middle-class illusion. For a year I woke up most mornings with a quote from Keats running through my head: ‘Life must be undergone.’ According to Sean”—she stepped back from the stove—“he believed that suffering is what gives us souls.”

“I believe suffering makes us stupid,” said Dara.

When they were seated at the table, with plates of roast chicken, potatoes, and spinach, she asked if Abigail remembered the woman she had told her about last autumn, the one who had been molested by her father. She described her encounter with the Lyalls. “It was so confus-ing. I completely believed each of them.”

“So somebody’s a good actor,” said Abigail. “Or completely deluded.

I take it that now you’re siding with the parents?”

“Yes, but I worry I’m being unduly swayed by the father’s frailty.”

“Who wouldn’t be swayed by the sight of him wobbling on his walking sticks? It doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t do everything he’s accused of. And more.”

“That’s what gives me a headache. I suddenly understood the value of lie detector tests. I wanted so badly to know who was speaking the truth.”

“Although if Claire really believes her story she’d pass the test with flying colors. Some people can’t tell the truth, even if they want to.”

When Frank had made almost the same comment, Dara had nodded sagely. Now Abigail’s words seemed to hover over the table. She felt a stab of pain in her forehead. The metaphorical headache was suddenly piercingly literal. Was she having a stroke? A seizure? She felt a curtain of darkness slowly falling between her and everything else. If she moved, she knew, even the table, even her plate, would vanish. She pressed her hands to her forehead, trying to push the pain back through the bone, back into some hidden crevice of her brain from which it had emerged and where it belonged.

“What is it? Is something wrong?”

Abigail was on her feet, squeezing Dara’s shoulders, but Dara couldn’t speak, or move. Abigail’s hands disappeared. There came sounds: a drawer opening, the fridge door. “I’m going to hold ice to the back of your neck,” Abigail said. “If you’re having a migraine, that will help. And I’ve put the kettle on for coffee.”

The ice shocked, then burned, but at least she felt something besides the pain. Abigail moved away; the smell of coffee filled the air.

Dara lifted her head a few millimeters; she ventured a few more. The curtain was rising, the pain slipping away, leaving in its place a memory of pain that was almost as frightening. Abigail was sitting beside her, gazing at her anxiously. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Even this simple sentence was an effort. “I felt as if my head was going to break open.”

“Your lips turned white. If you hadn’t started talking, I was going to phone for an ambulance.”

“Thank goodness you didn’t. I’d have felt like an idiot.”

“Promise you’ll go and see your doctor tomorrow. I’ll come with you, if you like.”

Dara protested that she had no other symptoms, but Abigail was determined; the first sign of her father’s fatal illness had been headaches. Finally Dara promised she would go. Abigail tucked her into bed, loaded the dishwasher, fetched a hot water bottle from upstairs, and exhorted her to phone immediately if the pain returned.

Alone in bed Dara lay staring at the ceiling, both exhausted and pre-ternaturally alert. Sometimes she asked her clients to imagine themselves in a significant landscape. Now she saw herself walking in a wood at dusk. Leaves and twigs crackled underfoot. In the distance she could make out the lights of the house she was trying to reach, glowing and welcoming. But as she wound her way toward them through the trees, she began to realize she was not alone. Someone was following her, stalking her. If she wasn’t careful, she would catch sight of this dark figure. It took all her energy, all her vigilance, not to turn around.

he doctor, a young Indian woman close to Dara’s age, listened to her account of the previous evening, checked her blood pressure and advised rest and exercise. Perhaps you’ve been under stress recently, she suggested. A multivitamin with iron is a good idea. Dara nodded, and confessed to sleeping badly. “Which of course can make you dizzy,” said the doctor. She scribbled a prescription. “This should

do the trick,” she said. “Good luck.”

While Dara waited, she had been telling herself stories about brain tumors and strokes, not so much to ward off these dark possibilities

but to keep at bay the more immediate threat that the doctor might ask awkward questions: Do you have a partner? Are you in a monoga-mous relationship? Now, once again, her strategy was vindicated. She filled the prescription and treated herself to a taxi home. Back at the flat, she retrieved Jane Eyre from the bookshelf and returned to bed. Remembering Sean’s comments, she started with the brief biography of Brontë. She knew the main facts about the grim parsonage and the mother’s death, but she had forgotten that the dreadful school, Lowood, was based on the one Charlotte and her sisters had attended. Later, in Belgium, Charlotte had developed an attachment to a married man. In writing Jane Eyre she had combined this passion with several accounts of madwomen kept in attics, and one in particular about a man revealed on the eve of his marriage to already have such a wife. Brontë herself, the biography concluded, had married when she was nearly forty, and died a few months later.

Quickly Dara turned to chapter one. Almost as soon as she read the opening sentence—There was no possibility of taking a walk that day—these disagreeable facts melted away. She became absorbed in the struggle of Jane’s childhood, first with her aunt, then at school. At last, after a typhus epidemic, the latter improved. The eighteen-year-old Jane advertised for a job as a governess and received a single reply, from a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield Hall. Dara got out of bed and went to the desk in the living room. In the top drawer was the sheet of paper on which Edward had written his address: Edward Davies, 79 Thornfield Road, London SE 11. So that was why the name had seemed familiar. She was still staring at his neat printing, unnerved by the coincidence, when the phone rang and there was Edward. At the news that she was in bed, he at once said he would come round. “Can I bring you anything?” “Orange juice would be great.” She hung up and went to hide the

carton she had bought that morning.

By the time he arrived, she was sitting up in bed working on reports

for the center. She had stopped reading soon after Rochester’s arrival; she had no interest in the vicissitudes that Brontë seemed to need to inflict on her lovers. Still, at the sight of Edward, his hair spilling over his collar, his shoulders broad in his heavy coat, her first thought was that he could have stepped out of Thornfield Hall; his carriage would be waiting outside, ready to bear them away to some extravagant ball. While she told him about her headache and how Abigail had made her see the doctor, he took off his coat and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Maybe you should stop bicycling until it gets warmer,” he said, gazing at her earnestly. Then he told her that two new pupils had signed up and a third was coming for a trial lesson. “I probably need six or seven more, given that people quit and cancel for all kinds of reasons.”

“That’s wonderful. Have you a chance to talk to Cordelia?”

“Not yet, but I did talk to our friend Gordon. He said I should wait until I’m ready to move out to tell her about us.”

Dara clasped her knees, trying to conceal her happiness. At last she was no longer a secret. “What else did he say?” she asked greedily.

“He’s happy for me.” Edward bent to take off his shoes. “Very. He’s known for ages that things were difficult. And he thinks it’s good you’re not a musician.” Before she could question him further, he stepped out of his trousers and climbed into bed.

or several weeks Dara waited for the headache to return. Once or twice she felt the smallest twinge, enough to make her pause in whatever she was doing, but it vanished as quickly as it came, and by the time she met her father in late February her wariness was gone. He had suggested they go to a photography exhibit and she had invited him to lunch beforehand. It was the first time he had been to the flat since he helped her move in, and he was the ideal guest, prais-