The House on Fortune Street (28 page)

ing all the improvements she’d made, commenting on the possibilities of the garden, where snowdrops and crocuses were already blooming beneath the plum tree.

When they were seated at the table, each with a bowl of carrot soup, she told him about Edward. “Do you remember,” she said, hearing her voice, despite her best intentions, grow awkwardly stiff, “that I’ve been seeing a violinist?”

“Of course.” He smiled; with his new short hair, the smile spread right up to his forehead. “We’re looking forward to meeting him. Louise was saying this morning that she hasn’t seen you in ages. The Christmas party was so crowded it doesn’t count.”

Dara refrained from saying that she had spent over an hour helping Louise clean up after the guests left. She was determined to tell her father everything, not to be guilty of Edward’s evasions. “I want you to meet him,” she said, “and he’s eager to meet you, but life is a little tricky at the moment. He’s still sharing a flat with his ex-girlfriend, and their daughter.”

Her father took a mouthful of soup. “Delicious. How old is their daughter?”

Searching for signs of disapproval, Dara found none. If only her mother were this sanguine. “Rachel,” she said. “She’s two and a half. We haven’t met yet but I’m eager to get to know her.”

“Patrizia, Louise’s younger granddaughter, was two when I met her and we’ve become very good friends. Well, the four of us must get together soon.”

“Would you like to see the picture I did of him?” She led the way to the bathroom.

“This is fabulous,” her father said. “Your mother would be proud of you. I love the swans and the cows.” He remarked other details of the landscape, the willow trees, the sky, the canal, before leaning closer to the running figure and saying how handsome Edward was.

“And do you know who that is?” said Dara, pointing to the figure on the stile.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” said her father. “I remember those red shoes.”

he exhibition was titled “Lovers in Black and White,” and the gallery consisted of one large room and two smaller ones. The photographs showed amorous adults of all ages. In the large room her father pointed out the work of his friend Harvey: an elderly man and woman sitting on a bench at the seaside, eating fish and chips. Next to them was a portrait of a much younger couple on a motorcycle, the

man glowering, the woman, with her arms around him, smiling.

Dara moved from picture to picture, happily absorbed. A few months ago the exhibition would have struck her as yet more evidence of her father’s persistent failure to understand her, but now romantic love was a subject about which she had many proprietary opinions.

The photograph was in one of the side rooms. Halley was standing behind Joyce with her arms around her. They each appeared to be naked from the waist up, though Halley was largely hidden by Joyce and Joyce’s breasts were hidden by Halley’s embrace. Halley was looking at the camera, wide-eyed, joyful, the light gleaming off her dark skin. Joyce was gazing down at her own pale hands resting on Halley’s arms.

Did Dara gasp or utter some sound? All she could think, for those first few seconds, was that the two women looked as if they belonged together. Then, as she stepped over to read the placard, came the second shock. The photograph was dated not back in the mists of time, as Frank had claimed, but last year.

She was still standing there when her father came over. “Beautiful,” he said. “I like how the photographer has lit the black woman and

included some of their possessions, like a sixteenth-century painter.” He pointed to the left of the photograph, where, on a table, lay a fencing foil, a bicycle helmet, a book, and an egg whisk.

“They work at the center. Remember I told you there was this furor because our director, Halley, might be leaving? That’s her, and Joyce is our Bangladeshi expert.”

“Her plainness is part of what makes the picture so affecting. I must keep an eye out for this photographer.”

He took out a notebook, wrote something down, and was moving toward the next photograph, when Dara heard herself saying, “I didn’t know they were having an affair.”

Her father stopped. “But most of the women you work with are les-bians,” he said, “aren’t they?”

He was standing twenty feet away, looking at her across the empty space with that expression which suggested simultaneously surprise, helplessness, and detachment, and which he had worn that last morning when he said good-bye to her and Fergus at the school gates and during every major quarrel they had had since then. Yes, his raised eyebrows and barely parted lips signaled, this was upsetting, but what could he do about it? At the sight, Dara’s anger leaped the always-narrow divide between the present aggravation and the enraging past.

“Who cares,” she exclaimed,“who the fuck cares, whether people like men or women or poodles? I don’t. What hurts is that they lied to us; they pretended to have one kind of relationship, to be friends, and, all the time, they had another.”

Her father’s still raised eyebrows drove her on.

“Do you remember Kevin?” she said. “My boyfriend at university. Once he asked me what was the happiest day of my life. I told him about an afternoon at Granny and Grandpa’s. I was maybe five or six and we were having tea in the garden. Granny was bustling around, laying the table. Grandpa was showing me the upside-down flowerpots

he used to lure the earwigs away from his dahlias. You’d been cutting the lawn and your feet were covered with bits of grass. You and Mum were trying to get Fergus to walk and he kept sitting down, which made you laugh.

“A few years later it was all gone: Grandpa dead, Granny confused, you and Mum mortal enemies, Fergus and me too different to be friends.”

While she was speaking two women and a man had come in and stopped before a photograph of a Jamaican couple. The women were deep in discussion but the man glanced over at Dara and her father.

Her father didn’t seem to notice their audience. “Maybe,” he said, “they couldn’t help it, Joyce and Halley. Maybe, in spite of themselves, they fell in love, and they couldn’t speak about it without changing everything. Secrecy isn’t always a lie. People talk nowadays as if there are no taboos, as if everyone should act on their feelings, but what if you have the wrong feelings, what are you meant to do then?”

As he spoke his voice rose until Dara saw the two women look up, but her father’s eyes never left her; he was waiting for her answer. And her head was full of answers, too many to speak aloud. If the photograph was true then Joyce and Halley’s behavior at the center was a lie. If her father loved her and Fergus and their mother, then his leaving was a lie. Or if his leaving was true, then the first ten years of Dara’s life had been a lie.

She blinked, shutting him out, letting him in again. But it’s not all lies, she reminded herself. Feelings change; change can be for the good. If I hadn’t stopped imagining I was in love with Kevin, and Edward hadn’t realized his mistake with Cordelia, he and I couldn’t be together. Not everyone can be like Jane Eyre and meet the love of their life at eighteen.

The man and the two women moved on to the next photograph. Dara took a step toward her father, then another. As her feet carried

her across the wooden floor, she remembered that first drive with Edward through the moonlit fields while the exquisite music played; if she had turned around, she would have seen Rachel’s car seat. She stopped a yard away and fixed her gaze not on her father’s face—no need to see that earnest expression—but on the second button of his blue shirt.

“I don’t know,” she said, “who gets to say what’s right and what’s wrong but I do know that I used to be furious with you and that now I can enjoy an afternoon in your company. Some feelings change, and some”—she turned to wave at the couples on the wall—“don’t.”

But just as she was about to say that that was how she felt about Edward, her gaze snagged on Halley’s joyful smile, Joyce’s downcast gaze, and at the same moment, her father reached out to touch her upraised arm.

“Never mind,” he said softly. “Never mind.”

hen Abigail was asked about her first memory, what she

most often recounted was the afternoon she and her grandfather had gone for a walk and found a Roman plate buried in the muddy foreshore of the River Medway. She would describe herself in her T-shirt and shorts, skipping along beside her grandfather. He was wearing a white shirt, faded gray trousers, and a straw hat that was almost the same color as his mustache. The tide was out, and he had said they should dig for Roman remains, or Saxon as a second best, but only for twenty minutes.

“We can’t excavate the entire shore,” he said, “so we depend on luck. Without it, we could dig all day and find nothing but stones and worms.”

“I like worms,” Abigail said, thrusting her trowel into the mud. What she did not like was her grandfather mentioning that mysterious phe-nomenon which played such a large and aggravating role in the lives of her parents. Great luck, her father would say at any piece of good news. This is my lucky day, her mother frequently announced, opening her blue eyes wide as if to trap every particle of good fortune. One reason Abigail loved spending the summers with her grandparents was that their household did not depend on such random interventions: they got up at seven-thirty every day, they went to the library on Thursday afternoon, and on Saturday, if it wasn’t pouring, they bicycled or took

the bus to the nearby town of Rochester. When she went shopping with her grandmother, they met the same neighbors who made the same remarks: how much Abigail had grown, what beautiful hair she had.

Her grandfather marked out a square in the mud. “You start in this corner,” he said. “I’ll take that one.”

They had been digging for eighteen minutes; she had asked how much longer twice, when he held up a thin gray disc with one small shard missing. “Who do you think ate dinner off this?” he said.

“You,” said Abigail, coming to look. “Granny.”

“No.” He shook his head so that his straw hat rocked from side to side. “This is very old. You can tell by the kind of pottery. Julius Caesar could have used this plate, or Maximinus I. We’ll take it home to show Mama, then we’ll ask the museum if they want it.” One case at the local museum already contained several fragments labeled as the finds of Hans Taylor.

The memory grew less exact at this point, but probably they had done what they did most Sundays: headed to the large oak tree at the bend in the river. While they walked her grandfather would have talked about a writer called Charles Dickens who had lived in Chatham when he was a boy. The marshes of the Medway and the convict ships moored in the River Thames had inspired his novel Great Expectations, which Abigail would enjoy when she was older. Charles was the second of six children and sometimes, on afternoons like this, he had walked with his father in the woods near Higham. On one such outing they had come across a house known as Gad’s Hill Place; his father had told Charles that the name appeared in Shakespeare and added that if he, Charles, was per-severing and worked very hard he might someday live in such a house. “Thirty years later,” said her grandfather, “he discovered Gad’s Hill for sale and he bought it and came to live here with his children; he had nine or ten. But the happiest days of his life were when he was your age,

before the boyslaughter.”

“Boyslaughter?” The strange word filled her mouth in a satisfying way. “It’s a made-up expression. When a part of his childhood was destroyed, a place or a memory he loved, Charles called it boyslaugh-

ter.”

Her grandfather knew all this because, when he first arrived in Eng-land from Hamburg, he had started reading Dickens to improve his English; the great writer had been his guide to his new country. More than most people, he told Abigail, Dickens understood how suddenly life can change: one day you can be respectable, the next in debtors’ prison. And the next back again, in your top hat and gloves.

“I want a top hat,” said Abigail.

At the tree they turned and walked home to where her grandmother would have tea waiting. Later the three of them would play snap or pellmanism, and later still one of her grandparents might read a story by Hans Christian Andersen. The Danish writer had idolized Dickens and paid him an interminable visit. Abigail listened, enthralled, although the stories made her eyes water; the children had such hard lives.

Week followed blissful week. But in late August she would notice, at first doubtfully, soon with awful certainty, that the sun was no longer shining when she went to bed. She would attempt to bargain the calendar to a standstill, try to keep her eyes open all night to prevent the arrival of a new day. Please let me stay, she would say to her grandparents, over and over. I can go to school here. Over and over they would say that they would like nothing better but that she belonged with her parents.

“They don’t want me,” said Abigail.“Sometimes they don’t even have a bedroom for me.”

During that period her parents were moving among various towns north of London: Chigwell, Enfield, Watford, Barnet, Cheshunt, Potters Bar. When, at the end of the summer, her father came to collect her, she never knew where he would be taking her, what shabby dwelling