The House on Fortune Street (37 page)

romance. He gave up a grubby flat in Oxford and a boring marriage.” She was surprised to hear her voice shrill. She had thought she was long past caring about how matters had unraveled with Sean, but Dara could still make her feel terrible. Afraid of what Dara might say next, or she herself, she asked about Edward.

Her ruse worked. At the sound of his name Dara forgot to scold and gave a radiant smile. At last they had a plan. He would spend Christmas with Rachel and Cordelia and then, as soon as the kindergarten started again in January, he would move in with Dara. “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, “that I’ll be giving notice. We need a place that’s big enough for three.”

“You mean Rachel?”

“A baby.” Dara beamed. “We’re going to have a baby.”

“A baby?” echoed Abigail. “But does Edward want a baby?”

“Yes, yes, he does, very much.” Edward wanted a baby with her, and she—she smiled again—would have one tomorrow if she could. “I used to think all this talk about biological urges was a male chauvinist conspiracy but now I see babies everywhere. Don’t you and Sean ever think about having one?”

“No.” Hadn’t she and Dara talked about this dozens of times at university? Didn’t she remember that it was Abigail who had made the comment about male chauvinists? Furious, she stared at the surface of the table which was marked with so many beer rings and cigarette burns that there was nothing left to spoil. “Let me know your plans,” she said brusquely. “I need to figure out what to do about the flat.”

She stopped, dismayed. One thing to charge Sean rent, quite another to treat her oldest friend as if their relationship were based on money, but—and this was worse than everything else—Dara didn’t seem to notice.

“Of course,” she said, reaching for her bags. “Maybe we should be getting home?”

ack at the house Sean was in the kitchen, kneeling beside his upside-down bicycle, wielding a spanner. He barely looked up when she came in. So much for her fear that he’d been waiting for her.

She explained that she’d gone to the pub with Dara and, as she put away the groceries, told him the news about Edward.

“Oh,” Sean said, his face lighting up, “great. I’m so glad.”

His pleasure intensified her own jumbled reactions. “But what if he doesn’t do it?” she said crossly. “He’s been vacillating for so long. Dara will be crushed if this doesn’t work out.”

Clearly taken aback by her tone, Sean set aside the spanner and reached for the oil can. As he dropped oil into the gears, he said that not everyone was as decisive as she was. Of course he meant himself but as she listened to him, to his eloquence on her friend’s behalf, her distress and confusion subsided. She did love him; nothing she did with Valentine changed that. He finished his speech, stood up, and in one dexterous move turned the bicycle over. She crossed the room to rest her hand on the handlebars.

“Would you like to come to Coventry?” she asked impulsively. “You could visit the cathedral, work at the library.”

He smiled and, for a moment, she thought he was going to say yes. “I’d love to,” he said, “but I’m afraid my chapters aren’t very portable.” Was she disappointed that he wasn’t coming? Or that there would be no need to rearrange Valentine’s visit? To hide her uncertainty, she

kissed him.

ver since their first Christmas together she and Dara

had, when in the same city, gone out for a festive dinner in December. This year, however, Dara said they were both so busy, why not meet when she got back from Edinburgh, in the new year. Abigail had been

mildly dreading the occasion but, in the face of Dara’s reluctance, she discovered an attachment to their tradition. She suggested breakfast, lunch, a drink—until Dara agreed to a late supper on the Sunday before Christmas. They were both working that day and they made their separate ways to the dimly lit restaurant in Southwark.

For years afterward Abigail would think about that evening and her many failures of attention. If she had seen Dara across the room perhaps she might have noticed how thin she’d grown, might have been concerned that her sweater had a hole in one sleeve and her dark trousers were frayed, but close up she still saw her familiar friend. When Dara filled their glasses and a few drops of wine splashed on the table, she attributed it to clumsiness rather than to Dara’s trembling hands; when their food came and Dara feigned eating, moving the food around her plate rather than to her mouth, Abigail carelessly assumed she was, once again, trying to lose weight. The truth was that she was preoccupied. Coventry had brought several unwelcome revelations. While she and Valentine were in bed, he had made a joke about Mr. Cupid. In an instant she had guessed what she should have known all along: he had written the anonymous letter. When she confronted him, he had laughed and said who else. She had laughed too; if she had any power left it lay in not letting him see how upset she was. Then she had fucked him, and asked him to leave. The following morning, when she tried to take refuge in the newspaper, there was more bad news.

Now she confided this last humiliation. “I got a terrible review in Coventry. Not just the play but me in particular. Everyone was very nice about it but I knew it was true. I’ve got sloppy recently. Please.” She raised a hand to stop Dara interrupting. “More than anyone, you know how far I’ve come. But for the last year or two, I’ve stopped getting better. I’ve become one of the scores of second-rate actors who almost make a living in London. I always used to wish that my grandparents could see me act. Now I’m glad they can’t.”

Dara set aside her silverware. “I’m sorry about Coventry but you’re not second-rate. You were fantastic in The Three Sisters and you were great in that Caryl Churchill play. Your grandparents would be very proud of you. I know they would.” For the first time that evening she sounded like her old self.

Abigail was suddenly unable to speak. She cleared her throat, trying to pretend it was just a cough, knowing Dara would know it wasn’t. When she trusted her voice again, she said she’d been remembering something her father’s friend Yoav had said.“He had a theory that Dad’s lack of ambition was a way of rebelling against his parents. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do know that I grew up believing that you went for walks by the river, had some nasty experiences with rats and factories, and became the world’s most famous writer. If I went to school and worked hard, I was destined for greatness.”

Abashed at her own naivete she fell silent, but Dara was nodding. One of the first things she’d learned in their friendship, she said, was that Abigail had this core of ambition that she lacked.“We both had our lives fall apart when we were ten, but that only made you more deter-mined to succeed. Whereas I ended up with the illusion that paying my dues as a child meant I’d be rewarded as an adult. But the truth is,” she was speaking faster and faster, “and I see this all the time at the center, most people who get a difficult start in life continue to reap those difficulties. Damage gets—”

Abruptly, as if some renegade thought had leaped across her syn-apses, she broke off. Before Abigail could question her—what happened to damage?—the people at the next table launched into “For she’s a jolly good fellow.” By the time the cheering died down, Dara was back in counseling mode. Maybe Abigail hadn’t given her best performances in Coventry; perhaps she needed to cut down on administration, take some classes. Abigail allowed herself to be consoled. The idea of classes at once appealed.

Over Black Forest cake they exchanged gifts: a biography of a well-known actor for Abigail, a necklace for Dara. They exclaimed and Dara tried on the necklace. In the shop Abigail had pictured how it would suit her new elegance, but now the beads hung gaudy and askew. She was glad when Dara didn’t go to the ladies’ to look.

There was no part of the evening that Abigail could recall without dismay, but the taxi ride home was the worst. She talked blithely about plans for Christmas; she and Sean were going to Tyler’s house in the country. “Maybe the four of us can go there in the new year,” she said. “Revisit the spot where Edward fell at your feet.”

From the other side of the dark taxi came a sound, at the time Abigail thought, of agreement. Later she realized that Dara must have been choking back a cry of grief, a howl of rage. How could her lighthearted remark have seemed like anything but the keenest cruelty?

In the hall they embraced. As her arms met around her friend, Abigail felt as if she were embracing layer upon layer of empty clothes. “You’re so—”

But Dara was already pulling away. “Thanks for a lovely evening,” she said. Before Abigail could say more, she had opened the door of her flat and stepped inside.

ine months later Abigail was in the lobby of the National Theater, buying a cup of coffee, when a voice said her name. She turned to find Dara’s father standing beside her. She had not laid eyes on Cameron since the awful day of the funeral and if she had seen him first she would have slipped away. Instead they kissed awkwardly, and

when he asked if he could join her, she said yes.

They chose a table near the window, and for ten minutes they did an excellent job of making conversation. But even as Cameron described

his summer in Italy, even as she described the company’s new project, Abigail could feel their real subject inexorably drawing closer. Suddenly, mid-sentence, he fell silent. “I miss her every day,” he said. “And every day I remind myself that, when she was alive, weeks passed without my seeing her.”

Abigail clutched her coffee cup. She could have said almost the same thing.

“I tell myself,” he went on,“that guilt is a kind of indulgence, another way of not thinking about her.”

“Dara,” said Abigail. One night a few weeks after Dara’s death she had awoken to the thought that she would never again use her friend’s name in the same way, to address or summon her. Her vocabulary was, forever, one word smaller.

“Dara,” Cameron repeated. “She was lucky to have you as a friend.”

Abigail raised her hands as if to ward off the words. “I wouldn’t say that. At every turn these last couple of years I failed her. I kept her at a distance.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” Then he frowned. “I’m sorry. That’s what Louise does: contradicts me, tries to cheer me up. It doesn’t help. Why did you keep her at a distance? You were best friends; she lived in your flat.”

“I know—I would never have finished university, let alone become an actor, without her—but after she moved to London things got complicated and her living downstairs only made them worse. Actually”—it seemed essential to be scrupulously honest—“they’ve been complicated for years.” She began, as best she could without Dara’s help, to describe the arc of their friendship: how her easy affairs had upset Dara, how she had suffered from the way Dara became so absorbed in her lovers. “She used to say that suffering makes you stupid. Maybe that’s what happened to me with her.”

She asked if Cameron remembered Kevin, and described their

breakup, how upset Dara had been. “The point is that I knew how frail she was, but I thought she’d changed. I thought she believed what she told her clients: you won’t always feel this way, take pleasure in small things. The evening she arrived in London, we talked about suicide. She said she’d never do it and I believed her.”

“I’m sure she believed herself. But why did things get worse when she moved in downstairs? I remember how excited she was about being your neighbor, decorating the flat. It seemed like the ideal arrangement.”

From the next table came soft laughter. A man and a woman were reading a picture book to a small girl. In the midst of her grief Abigail was grateful for these oblivious bystanders. “You could say I was busy,” she said, “that I couldn’t stand Dara’s devotion to Edward, that I found life with Sean harder than I expected, but the truth is I had a certain idea about myself, and someone—Dara’s stepfather to be precise—took that idea away. And then”—it was a relief to say this aloud—“I started sleeping with Sean’s friend. I didn’t dare tell Dara. It wasn’t just that she’d have disapproved but that it would have changed the whole way she saw me. I wasn’t sure we would still be friends.”

Did her answer make any sense? She couldn’t tell, but Cameron was listening as if he had taken lessons from Dara, his face intent. “So I began avoiding her. I began not asking about Edward. I began shutting her out. And when I did see her, I was preoccupied with my own problems and with making sure she didn’t guess my secret.”

For one minute, nearly two, Cameron simply sat there. “I regret to say,” he said at last, “that I know exactly what you mean.”

Abigail could tell from the sound of his voice how dry his mouth was. She had thought when Dara died that she had nothing more to lose in their relationship, but now she felt the winds of danger blowing. What if Cameron were to reveal something that entirely changed her memories of her friend?

“It was like this,” he said. He gazed over her shoulder at a scene far outside this room. “Soon after I first came to London I met a girl called Annabel. She was pretty, sweet-tempered, bright, and when she took my hand, I felt my life had finally begun. She was also eight years old. Her parents were friends of Fiona’s and we used to go round to their house. I would play with her, help her with her homework. Nothing more. Then Fiona and I moved north, and I more or less forgot about Annabel. I was happy in my job, happy with my family.

“We’d been in Edinburgh for three years when my father died and— I don’t know how else to say this—things started to shift.” He described his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, how he’d gone to stay with her and, in his boyhood bedroom, come across a copy of Alice in Wonderland with an essay about Charles Dodgson. “For the first time I knew there was someone else like me, someone else whose desires didn’t fit into any appropriate category. A few months later a family moved into our street, a single mother, Iris, and her two daughters.”

Sentence by sentence he built the case against himself. Once or twice he turned from the distant horizon to look at Abigail, searching perhaps for judgment or condemnation, but she was too busy listening to do either. This was the story Dara had wanted to hear for more than twenty years; she was listening for both of them.

“Ingrid and Dara,” he went on, “became best friends. Ingrid was in and out of our house all the time. I was always aware of her, tuned to her frequency, but I was careful not to show it. Or I thought I was. Then Iris invited us to go camping one half-term.”

“Dara said that was the best holiday of her life, the last good time.”

Now it was Cameron’s turn to react as if he’d been slapped. He raised his hands to cover his face, and she noticed how small they were for a man of his size, and how clean.

“This must be more than you want to know,” he said, lowering them. “No,” said Abigail. “I want to know everything.”