The House on Fortune Street (33 page)

the manager at the counseling center had suggested she apply for a course in counseling at Glasgow; she was thinking about it. Abigail was so upset that she finally brought up Christmas.

“I thought I’d better make my own plans,” she said, “given—” She waved toward the steamy tea room window behind which lurked the unmentionable Kevin, and, unbeknownst to Dara, her even more unmentionable stepfather.

“I’m sorry,” said Dara, blinking. “I wasn’t paying attention. God, I feel terrible.”

She went on and on until Abigail had to comfort her and say it was fine; the hotel was paying her well. Later, alone in her room, she tried to reimagine the conversation: Forget the hotel, said Dara. You have to come to Edinburgh. It won’t be any fun without you. But she kept hearing the words Dara had actually said: “I suppose it’s for the best. I need to catch up on all the work I missed.”

rom the moment the plane landed at Kennedy airport and she stepped out into the sultry heat, Abigail was enthralled. Once again she was the outsider, but this time it was for comprehensible, even desirable reasons. People had no idea how different she really was. After three years at Yale, she moved to New York to share a house in Brooklyn with four other aspiring actors. Life in America stretched before her; she was sleeping with several men she liked, she was getting parts, she had a waitressing job where they let her off for auditions. When the postcard came from her father—the doctor says four months, maybe six—she was rehearsing a new play. She sent back a postcard of the Chrysler building: So sorry, hope you feel better soon. But the morning after the play opened she woke to an image of her father, sitting in the stern of a small boat, smiling as the wind filled the sails. Staring up

at the cracked ceiling of her shabby room, Abigail knew she couldn’t ignore what was happening three thousand miles away. This was her last chance to get revenge, before the tumor in her father’s brain beat her to it.

“But I was planning to come over and see you do your stuff on Broadway,” he said when she phoned to announce her visit.

“I’m not on Broadway, or even off it.”

After all his wandering, he was living in the seaside town of Whitstable, not far from Chatham, when the headaches started. He had moved there after running into an old friend, an oyster fisherman. The two of them had a scheme for selling bivalves directly to London restaurants. But by the time she arrived in Whitstable, ten days after the phone call, it was clear that her father was no longer going anywhere. For the first time that she could remember, he was preoccupied not with the future but with the past. If she had wondered about getting a second opinion, his detailed account of how his parents left Germany in 1938 would have convinced her that there was no need.

That her grandparents were Jewish had always struck Abigail as a small oddity, like her grandmother’s hatred of carrots, or her grandfather’s tapping the barometer each time he passed. In every other way, with their tea drinking, their gardening, their churchgoing, they had seemed quintessentially English. But now her sojourn in America had made her more aware of Jewish history. She listened eagerly as her father described their heroic flight from Hamburg. They had walked, ridden in carts, hidden in the coal wagon of a train, and finally crossed the North Sea in a herring boat. Once they were settled in Chatham, his father had returned to Germany to fetch their parents.

“My earliest memory,” her father said, “is of the night he came back, he and my mother in the kitchen, crying.” His father’s parents had been too frail to travel; they had both died of natural causes in 1940. As for his mother’s parents, that was even sadder. Teachers in a small town,

they didn’t think of themselves as Jewish and refused to believe that anyone else would. In 1941 they boarded a train for Belsen.

“So why didn’t I know any of this?” Abigail said. “I never heard of Hanukkah until I was twenty.”

“Hanukkah,” her father said dismissively. “When Mama and Papa got off that herring boat all they wanted was to forget this shame-ful thing that had happened to them, to be like everyone else. That’s why they changed my name, mine and my sister’s, to the most English names they could find: George and Mary. Remember how Mama used to praise your hair and complain if we cut so much as an inch? She believed when the next pogrom came your hair would save us.” He pulled back his lips in the disturbing grimace that was now his smile. “You should put that in a play.”

“I’m not writing a play.” But even as she spoke she was thinking that wasn’t a bad idea. Actors often wrote plays; it would be an occupation for the long days. “Did Mum know about this?”

“No. She wasn’t interested in the past, her own or anyone else’s. It was one of the things I liked about her. We probably weren’t ideal parents”—he smiled again—“but we did have fun together.”

“Ideal? You were a nightmare. I never knew where I’d be sleeping, where my next meal was coming from. You haven’t a clue what it was like, being dragged from pillar to post, watching the two of you make a mess of everything.”

“But look how well you’ve turned out.” He patted his head, as if to quiet the tumor, and shut his eyes.

He had told her he didn’t sleep anymore but that sometimes it was too much trouble to pay attention. All her efforts to make him acknowledge his wrongdoing foundered on the rocks of his insouci-ance. At least you got to see the world, he said. Remember the Channel Islands? The beautiful walk down to the sea?

She remembered the fields of dying daffodils, the empty rooms waiting for guests.

ut she had also forgotten things, and one was her father’s

interest in other people, his enthusiasms on their behalf as well as his own. The nurses, who came daily, urged him not to talk so much. What am I saving myself for, he would say. I hope your mother-in-law liked her birthday cake. Did Eddy pass his French test? He read Abigail’s handful of reviews and was full of questions. Might she make a film soon? Or a commercial? “You’re much prettier than that trollop in the Bacardi ads at the cinema.”

“It’s awfully hard to get into films. Anyway I’m not sure I’d be any good.”

“What about one of those long-running serials? Though you have to be careful they don’t put you in a coma or”—he patted his head—“give you one of these.”

hen she had first arrived from New York, with a return

ticket for three weeks later, she had had a talk with her father, using words like “tumor” and “terminal.” He had joked, feinted, par-ried, and tried repeatedly to change the subject. “Okay,” he had said at last. “I’m not in great shape. If I could I’d go to the racetrack and fling myself under the winning horse. Or set sail in a small boat for the Azores. Neither of these being feasible, I’d prefer to stay at home for as long as possible. Hospitals are all about rules and you know how bad I am at rules.”

“So after leaving me to sink or swim for most of my life you want me to stay and fucking nurse you?”

“Yes. Stay and swear at me and in six months you’ll feel better and I’ll be dead.” He had spread his hands, as if he were offering her an irresist-ible bargain.

Abigail had talked to herself, talked to Dara, argued with her father, and at last, for reasons she couldn’t comprehend, agreed to stay. She took over the living room of his modest ground-floor flat and shopped and cooked and answered the occasional phone calls. Her father was a man with many friends, but the friendships depended on his being out and about. Only the nurses and Yoav, the oyster fisherman, visited. Soon after she arrived, Abigail had phoned her mother. Any thoughts she had had that her mother would rush to her first husband’s bedside, or at least commend her daughter for being there, were at once dispelled. “Jesus, Abby, if he’s ill he ought to be in hospital. That’s why we pay

taxes.”

“When did you ever pay taxes?” said Abigail and hung up. That her mother, following the divorce, had turned into the stable, law-abid- ing person she had long wanted her to be, was another cause for rage. When she told Dara about the conversation, Dara said, “You mustn’t feel bad. Some people are afraid of illness.” She was still in Glasgow, but their relationship, which had dwindled to occasional letters while Abigail was in the States, had revived. They talked on the phone several times a week.

radually, almost without noticing, she stopped hoping that her father would make reparation, or that she would achieve revenge. Once or twice she purposely forgot to buy the newspaper or to get a book he wanted from the library, but he was blithely forgiving—

he didn’t need to do the crossword, he could read something else—and her small meannesses gave her no pleasure. He was going to die as he had lived: feckless and unrepentant.

Her conversations with his sister, Mary, in Vancouver, only served to confirm this. Mary had moved to Canada with her husband at the age of twenty-three and come back twice, for her parents’ funerals. Abigail had a dim memory of a woman in a black dress bending over her on one of those terrible occasions, the sole person present who seemed to understand that Abigail was speechless with grief. Now, despite her own poor health, Mary phoned often. If George’s eyes were closed, she and Abigail would talk.

“George never did have a handle on reality,” she said. “Even at pri-mary school he had these schemes. Once he told everyone in his class that if they gave him a penny a week he would provide all the sweets they wanted.”

“What happened?”

“He was forced to declare bankruptcy and three of the boys beat him up. Now tell me, do you need money? I can’t get on a plane but I can send a check.”

Three days later Abigail’s bank account had a balance of five thousand pounds, the most money she’d ever had.

n a funny way, as she told Dara, nursing her father was almost like returning to her childhood summers with their quiet rou-tines. She worked on her play, a fictionalized account of her grandparents’ flight from Hamburg. She walked on the pebbly beaches, admiring the seascapes and the brightly colored beach huts. She started fucking one of her father’s nurses, Robert, a large, good-looking man with an abundant supply of marijuana. Occasionally she had a drink with her

father’s friend Yoav. He was handsome in a dark, Israeli way, but he wore his shirt open a button too low and was right on the edge of being old. It was Yoav who suggested that her grandparents’ household, idyllic for her, had been less so for her father. “I know those immigrants and their sons,” he said.“They were pressing him all the time to excel, and at the same time passing on their suffering. George is a remarkable man.

He refused to excel and he kept his suffering to himself.”

They were sitting in the back garden, drinking the sherry she had found under the sink. In the next-door garden the lilacs were in bloom. “Suffering?” said Abigail. “He’s never suffered an hour in his life, until now. Did you ever meet my mother?”

“A few times in Cornwall. Anyone could see she was losing confidence in George. She wanted someone who could support her. And maybe”—he put his hand on Abigail’s bare knee—“younger pastures suited her better.”

“Greener,” she said, looking down at his hand until he removed it.

or months her father’s decline was so slow as to be almost

imperceptible. He apologized for taking so long. “It’s not like me,” he said. “I’ve always been good at moving on.” Then, quite suddenly, he was hurtling toward the end. Week by week he ate less, talked less, shat less. Each day it was easier for Abigail to lift him. Soon she would be free to return to America. But one morning she woke on the living room sofa and, like that morning in Brooklyn when she had known she was coming here, knew that she would not go back there. She did not want to be an immigrant, a wanderer. She would make a life here, in London with its many theaters, growing out of a single root. She carried her tea into her father’s room and told him. “It wasn’t even a decision,” she said. “I just knew.”

“Did Robert change your mind?”

“I thought we were being so discreet.”

He gave one of his grimace smiles. “Is it September yet? If it is what I’d like to do is eat oysters. That’s why I moved here, to eat the maxi-mum number of oysters.”

It was the second day of September. After she had bathed and fed him, she walked into town and bought a bottle of good champagne and two dozen oysters. That evening she and Robert scrubbed and shucked them and carried them in a basin of ice to her father’s bedside. She had arranged various sauces but George was a purist. “Just the sea,” he said. “I want to eat the sea.” He drank two glasses of champagne and discoursed on oysters and the previous occasions on which he had enjoyed them. He ate five, then patted his head, lay back, and closed his eyes, leaving her and Robert to experiment with the remainder. They screwed once before, and once after, eating them. Neither of them noticed a difference.

wo days later her father failed to recognize Yoav when he

bent over his bed. “Dalmatians,” he said, “bred to have no brains.

Nothing but teeth and assholes.”

Yoav stayed for half an hour, reading aloud from the newspaper. Afterward, in the kitchen, he and Abigail spoke in whispers. “Sometimes,” said Yoav, “he’s his old self. Sometimes he’s someone totally different.” They agreed it was time to call the hospice.

The people at the hospice didn’t care who George was. To them death was a way station; they helped people to pass through. They tended his body and played him classical music, which he had never liked. Hearing is the last sense to go, they told Abigail. She visited him twice, three times a day. At night she stayed up late, smoking joints with