They returned to the sitting room. Where, for a few moments, a potent silence descended.
‘Tell me about indexing,’ said Morris.
‘I told you about indexing, at Zoe's party. Didn't I?’
‘Yes,’ said Morris. ‘I'm afraid I didn't listen properly.’
Frances laughed. ‘You can't really want me to tell you the technicalities of indexing for the second time at… at a quarter past midnight. Oughtn't I, by the way, to ring for a taxi?’
‘No. I mean no, don't ring for a taxi.’
‘That was a delicious dinner. You're a very organized cook.’
Morris, modestly, ducked his head. ‘Rather different from our last meal together, though.’
‘At which I'm afraid I did an awful lot of incoherent talking. I was in a bad state then, as I imagine you realized.’
‘Yes, I did. You look, if I may say so, much better. But it wasn't incoherent talk. You said things about happiness that I have thought about since.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Frances. ‘I'm afraid I can't remember that bit. I just remember going on about myself rather.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Morris, ‘I feel like that tonight. The kind of happiness you were talking about. Those moments one is always going back to, that were perfect. Except that for once it is now, and not then.’ He looked straight at her, across his sitting room, across the low glass table strewn with books and music magazines, across the balding turkish carpet. He could not imagine why he was being so rash as to say this; he waited in horror for an expression of distaste to come into her eyes.
Frances studied her hands. Then she looked straight at him and said, ‘I'm so glad. That's a lovely thing to hear someone say.’
He breathed again. The implications of what she had said, if there were implications, would have to be investigated later. But he had not wrecked the evening. He beamed.
And Frances saw this puzzling man lit from within, his face – or as much of it as you could see above and behind that neat badgery beard – glowing, his eyes still mild and faintly sad but bright now too. And looking at her in a way that made her feel like another, distant Frances. She too pondered, and discarded for the time being, implications. They sat, for a few moments, in absolute silence; not, this time, so much potent as confused. Morris, washed still with pleasure, could find nothing to say that would not be either banal or a further plunge into hazardous revelations. Frances was seized now with vague alarm and premonitions of melancholy; she knew suddenly that she would wake in the night feeling miserable. She would be obsessed with thoughts of Steven.
They began to talk of their children. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of Morris's son, Mike, as a schoolboy. Frances said, ‘He lives with his mother?’
‘Yes. In Brighton. But he stays with me here often.’
‘He looks like you.’
‘So I'm told. Which pleases me. I wonder why that should be – he would be aesthetically better off if he were more like his mother. Very atavistic – the urge to see one's physical self reproduced.’ And as the words left his mouth he remembered that her children were adopted. He closed his eyes in horror. ‘I'm sorry.’
‘Don't be. Yes, it's certainly an instinct I recognize, but I never feel I missed so much. I just needed children. Not having borne them, in the end, mattered less and less, so long as they were there.’
Morris nodded, reprieved.
‘When Harry was small I used to feel a certain mystery about him. All those physical characteristics of people unknown to me. He has this very straight black hair that must come from someone. And a distinctive nose. Tabitha…’ She stopped.
‘Mike is totally unmysterious,’ said Morris. He felt that this talk of children had gone far enough; it smacked of middle age and the side-lines of life and at this moment he felt less middle-aged and more centrally placed than for many a year. He began to talk about a concert series. Frances remarked, with a note of apology, that she was not very musical. ‘Just so that I don't get myself into a false position.’
‘But you like to go to a concert occasionally?’ said Morris anxiously.
‘Oh yes, very much. I just meant that I've never played anything, and I can't read music.’ She looked at her watch. ‘You know, Morris, I really should go.’
‘I'll phone for a taxi.’
At the door, he prolonged the departure. The taxi sat throbbing. He had made up his mind to kiss her – after all, social kissing was ubiquitous nowadays, not to do so indeed could be seen as positively dismissive – but when it came to the point he lost his nerve and stood there chuntering on about something until Frances sweetly smiled and turned and was gone.
He went back into the flat and set about the washing up. There was opportunity, now, for analysis of feelings and of what had been said and done. He was amazed at himself. He had not felt like this for such a long time that the experience had the same nostalgic shock as recovery of a taste or smell: peanut butter and childhood, mimosa and his honeymoon in France. He examined his feelings with awe and with apprehension; he searched the evening for what had been right and what had been wrong.
Tabitha, waking, hung for a moment in that calm anaesthetized world of semi-consciousness in which all was well and then swam up into her gloom as into a chronic illness. She assumed it like a garment and as she did so that insistent something lurking also in the mind took shape, spoke, and last night came pouring back. She lay there and knew that she was a different person from the person she had been yesterday. Across the passage, the phone rang twice in Frances's bedroom; downstairs, the puppy began to bark.
Yesterday she had known one set of things about herself; today, she knew another and consequently nothing could ever be the same again. She thought of a snake she had once seen in the Zoo that had just shed its skin; the old skin lay alongside, a pale abandoned replica. This morning, yesterday's unknowing self seemed to lie beside her.
She got out of bed and went to the mirror. She studied herself and Zoe's eyes looked back at her. She thought of Zoe, and of Frances, and of Steven, and they too were different people, not the people she had known all her life. ‘I am not going to ask you what you feel about it,’ Zoe had said, ‘because you don't know yet. You may not know for some time.’ But I don't think I am feeling at all, Tabitha thought. What this is like is not so much feeling as being; it is like walking in the wind or sudden blinding heat or that kind of cold that stops you thinking. It is not what I feel but what I am. Simply, I am not who I thought I was, but someone else.
She heard Frances come out of her room and go downstairs. She had a bath and dressed. When she came into the kitchen Frances was at the table, drinking coffee. Tabitha stood there. She said, ‘Zoe told me.’
‘I know. She rang just now. She was feeling awful about doing it just like that, without talking to me first. I'm glad, though. We both knew it had to be soon. Here…’ She poured coffee. ‘I wish I'd been here when you came in last night.’
They faced each other across the table. Frances looked at Tabitha and felt distanced, as though a stranger also sat there. Tabitha looked at Frances and saw someone so familiar that, if required, she could not possibly describe her. She said, ‘Did you have a nice evening?’
‘Did I what? Oh heavens, that… Yes, it was fine. Tab… I wish I could think of something reasonable to say. Are you all right?’
Tabitha considered. ‘Actually, I think I'm much more all right than you or Zoe probably expected.’ Suddenly, she grinned. ‘Isn't it lucky I've always liked Zoe. I know people who absolutely hate their aunts. Imagine what it would be like then, discovering something like this.’ She put her elbows on the table, cupped her face in her hands: that small, neat, young face. ‘Did you know him? The… man.’
Not, ‘My father.’ ‘No,’ said Frances.
‘Zoe says she has no idea where he is, even. And doesn't want to, unless I do. I don't.’
Zoe. Not, ‘My mother.’
‘He doesn't seem to com
e into it, really. Which is odd, I suppose. I don't care about him. Like before I never cared specially about who my parents might have been. Except when I was in a temper with you and Dad.’
‘You had fantasies sometimes. More than Harry.’
‘Yes. Even in my wildest fantasies I wouldn't have thought of this.’
‘No,’ said Frances, ‘I daresay not.’
‘I suppose,’ Tabitha continued thoughtfully, ‘there must have been a question of not having me at all. I mean, most people, in that situation, would have had an abortion. She must have thought of that.’
‘Not for long. For about two and half minutes.’
‘It's rather odd to think that one might not have been born at all.’
‘Well,’ said Frances briskly, ‘you were. Thank goodness.’
‘Where did you first see me?’
‘In a sort of convent nursing-home place somewhere in France.’
A high, shuttered window, stripes of sunlight falling through on to the floor; a street-crier outside; Zoe swamped in huge white pillows, saying, ‘Give us a kiss. Take her. Quick, take her and go. Before I can think. Take her. She's gorgeous.’
‘Such ages ago,’ said Tabitha. ‘You must almost have forgotten.’
‘Not all that long ago.’
‘Do the grandparents know?’
‘No. We didn't think they ever should.’
Tabitha nodded, apparently in agreement. ‘Grandma would have had a fit. All much too untidy.’ She sighed. There were small dark rings under her eyes; she looked suddenly older than twenty-one. Frances, helpless, thought: how old people are depends on what happens to them, not on years.
‘Zoe feels guilty,’ said Tabitha. ‘She didn't say so, last night, but it kind of leaks out all the time. She must have felt guilty for ever, which is awful. She says she would have made a bloody awful mother. Do you think that's true?’
‘I've no idea,’ said Frances. Unable, now, to look up.
Tabitha sighed again. She rose. ‘Well, I don't think she needs to feel guilty. I came out of it all rather well, in the end. I mean, I did all right.’ She touched, for an instant – a quick little dab of the fingers – Frances's hand. ‘I must do some work See you later.’
Frances, when she had gone, put her head on her arms and cried.
Tabitha, later in the day, telephoned Zoe's office. ‘I just thought I'd say I'm all right. I mean, I'm not feeling dramatic reactions or anything. In case you were wondering. I daresay you weren't, but just in case.’
‘I was, as it happens,’ said Zoe. ‘Well, good.’
‘It's difficult to work, that's the only thing. But that's been difficult for weeks.’
‘Then chuck it. Go and do something fun.’
‘I talked to Mum.’
‘Ah.’
‘'Bye, then. See you.’
‘See you, love,’ said Zoe.
Tabitha stowed her books tidily at the back of her desk and, again, went out into London. For quite long periods, during the last twenty-four hours, she realized, she had not thought of him. She wondered if perhaps she might be on the mend, but when the bus passed Great Russell Street the mourning returned. She saw that other unreachable Tabitha, forever crossing the street with her hand in his, in a glass bubble of happiness, while she, the real Tabitha, was swept away and onwards like a swimmer amid unrelenting tides. She wondered, if this was how it was, how people got through life, always yearning backwards, picking up the afterglow of other times like the heat that lingers in a stone wall at the end of a sunny day. How do people carry all this around, without being dragged down? It seemed extraordinary that she and they should look out on to the same streets and buildings, locked each into private visions.
She went to Trafalgar Square. She wandered for a while among the crowds and then into the National Portrait Gallery. She walked from picture to picture; she looked into the dead varnished eyes and thought about feelings, about grief and joy. Admittedly, these were the famous, but the famous presumably have feelings like anyone else. Charlotte Bronte was in love. Charles the First must have known about fear. There is religious fervour and fanaticism and greed. People look outwards from portraits as though it were they who were the spectators; they look over your shoulder at some invisible display. Ranged in the cool creaking rooms of a gallery it is they who are permanent, not those who pass before them.
Tabitha sat down in front of an eighteenth-century grandee with whose name she was unfamiliar and tugged at the strap of her sandal, which was making her foot hurt. The man in the picture had lived from seventeen twenty until seventeen eighty-five and indeed his face was so firmly of that time that there was no need for the little gold plaque, though whether this was due to a style of painting or to some curious chronological conditioning it would be impossible to say. Her own face, swimming above his in the reflection on the glass, seemed equally firmly of today. Its kindred looked at her from advertisements and off the television screen – girls who of course were not the same but bore a family resemblance. Everything about you, she thought, ties you up to something else: parents, the time in which you live. Who you are is where you come from. And all the while we leave ourselves behind reflected in their gilt frames. Like I am left behind in Great Russell Street and on that hillside in Scotland and here on this seat, bending down to fix the sandal strap so it won't rub.
Zoe crammed papers into a briefcase, rummaged in her bag for glasses, keys, cheque book, let herself out of the flat, raced down the stairs. In the taxi she subsided. When in my life, she thought, have I ever started the day except like a bullet from a gun? Ah well, tranquillity was never for me. She got out her diary, scribbled on a page already clotted with entries, opened a newspaper. But, as the taxi sat at a traffic light, the paper dropped from her hands and she stared at a woman on the pavement, a woman holding the hand of a small girl. The child, for an instant, had Tabitha's face: Tabitha's face in another summer, an eight-year-old face, warily looking out from behind a screen of dark hair. The woman and the child crossed the road, holding hands, and Zoe continued to watch them until the lights changed. I don't deserve it, she thought, I don't deserve it that she should have taken it as she has. She could have hated me, she would have been entitled. Instead of which she sits there with her grave odd face, taking it all in, making God knows what colossal adjustments.
And Zoe was filled, all of a sudden, with pleasure. Life is not too bad, she thought, in fact come to that life is pretty damn good. She rode through the city, intent upon this inner well being, and when at last the taxi stopped she continued to sit until the driver craned round to say ‘Barts. The hospital. You said Barts, didn't you?’
Re-dressing, she could hear the doctor washing his hands beyond the curtain. When she came through he was sitting at his desk, writing. ‘And this has been going on for several months, Miss Brooklyn?’
‘Yes.’
‘You should have come before.’
How they do like to rap you over the knuckles, these people, Zoe thought. ‘If you turn a blind eye to a problem there's always a good chance it'll lose its nerve,’ she said cheerfully. And I never could be bothered fussing over the blights of femininity. Certainly I'm not going to waste time over some damn menopausal ailment. She glanced at her watch. You kept me waiting fifty minutes, chum, my time costs money too. ‘O.K.’ – placatingly – ‘I should have come. Sorry.’
The doctor, now, was consulting a list. He looked at her. He began to talk. And Zoe, listening, registering with shock and amazement what he was saying, found herself studying his face, an unfamiliar face, a somewhat unappealing face. How perverse, she thought, that some of the more intense moments of one's life should take place in intimacy with people one does not know. She saw, quite clearly, the long-since face of a French nun leaning over her, holding a mewing baby. The doctor finished what he had to say and waited for her to speak; she could think only that his face, too, would loiter in the head.
*
She said
to Frances, ‘Oh, by the way – I'll be away for a few days from the end of next week. A job in Rome. So don't bother to ring.’
Through the ensuing days she smiled. She smiled at people and talked of other things and within she felt the queasy hollowness of fear. And a great solitude. She lay awake at night, reading to pass the hours. But her eyes travelled over the print and she talked to herself. She said: It is not necessarily cancer. From what he said I would make an informed guess that there is about a fifty per cent chance that it is not. Which means that there is a fifty per cent chance that it is. And if it is, as he so delicately explained, there is a good deal that can be done. ‘One of the more treatable ones.’ Well, this time next week I shall know. I shall come out of the anaesthetic and someone in a white gown will sit by the bed and tell me, in good B movie style.
She was suffused with rage. The rage, at times, drove out the fear and she hurried about what she had to do in a storm of indignation. I haven't time to be ill, she fumed, I have too darn much to do, above all I haven't time to die.
The world had never shone so brightly. Wherever she went in the city she was transfixed, as though she saw for the first time the crisp frontages of the Nash terraces, the symmetries of the darkly stooping trees in the parks, the opalescence of clouds above the river. She watched from her window, from buses and taxis, and recorded its indifference. She could not decide if the inhumanity of what she saw outweighed its pleasure; she worried at this as though there might be a correct answer. Is the physical world a comfort or not?
When Tabitha telephoned Zoe was brisk and gay. Tabitha would be going back to Cambridge next week. ‘I have to go away for a few days,’ said Zoe. ‘See you thereafter…’