It had begun to rain. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her coat and walked back across the bridge, fast, arranging in her head the opening paragraphs of an article.
After Frances and Harry arrived back in London one or two newspaper reporters telephoned. Harry, stiffly, gave minimum replies: yes, thank you, he was better; no, he didn't know quite what he'd be doing next; no, he didn't really want to talk about the airport bombing. There was a photograph of him in The Standard, with a few lines of comment that referred more to Steven than to Harry. The other British casualty, a middle-aged woman from Bristol, was not mentioned.
It had become hot: dusty London mid-summer. Tabitha came back from Cambridge and went away again almost at once to an archaeological dig in Scotland. She was irritable and abstracted. Frances, hurt, asked Harry what was wrong.
‘There's some bloke, I think,’ said Harry, embarrassed.
‘You mean she's in love? It's nothing to be ashamed of. She was so furtive. I wish she'd talk to me.’
Harry shrugged, evidently finding the whole matter distasteful. He spent his time sitting in the garden reading, or shuffling around on his crutches, patiently waiting for the leg to mend. He never complained. He is doing, Frances thought, exactly what Steven would have done. If he were Steven's natural son people would say he had his temperament; he is pragmatic and rational, like Steven, almost disconcertingly so. But he isn't Steven's son, nor mine, we are just people with whom he has spent his life. He has never displayed the slightest interest in his origins; that, too, of course may be a matter of temperament. Since he is what he is, and has what he has, there is no point in considering what might have been. That also would have been Steven's position.
She visited the new house; the smaller house in another part of London. The house suitable for a widow whose children were no longer permanently resident. Its present owners were a young couple expecting a third baby, seeking expansion. The mother, a toddler slung across her hip, wandered round the rooms as Frances measured floors and windows. ‘I'm sad to be going, in a way, I mean, the new place is great, there's a real garden for the kids, somewhere for John to have a workshop. But you leave a bit of yourself in a house, don't you?’ Frances, looking out on to the unfamiliar street that soon would not be so, nodded. She saw the terrace opposite, its doors and flights of steps and frontages with small displays of personality by way of plants or new paint, and thought of houses as vessels through which people unceasingly flow. Passive, and ultimately triumphant. These houses were over a hundred years old. And doing nicely. The mother set the child down and he began to poke spent match sticks from an ashtray through a crack in the floorboards with tiny, delicate fingers. ‘Don't do that, Tom. This'll be Mrs Brooklyn's house next month. She doesn't want a lot of rubbish under her floors.’ The child flung itself at her, clutching her round the knees, and she stroked his hair, absently, automatically. ‘The neighbours are nice. We've never had neighbour problems. And there's the new Sainsbury's just opened beyond the tube station – you know…’ Frances shook her head; she had chosen this area for just those reasons: it was unfamiliar, a blank sheet. If Steven had ever walked these streets she knew nothing of it, she had not been with him. ‘Oh well, it's five minutes away, and you can park round the back. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
The subterranean thunder of the underground was just audible; Frances pictured, far below, the seated figures lined up in the canister of the train, hurtling through darkness. Scores of strangers, scores of faces one would never see, sharing nevertheless the same small segment of the city, the same moments of time, the same sights and sounds. And, when she looked again out of the window, the sky too was occupied: one plane crawled slowly across the skyline just above the rooftops, purposeful but leisurely, as though searching for a likely spot to land, while another – so high as to be nothing but a silver flash of light – drew a white pencil of vapour across the sky. She imagined these people also, adjusting their seatbelts, opening magazines, talking in foreign tongues. The strangeness of sharing the physical world with unknown others, whose eyes see what we see, whose lives touch ours and then spin off into a mysterious oblivion, had always astonished her. Once, she tried to talk to Steven of this. She saw now his expression, at once puzzled and slightly impatient. He had not understood her; it was not the kind of thing about which he thought, it did not interest him. He would have found the idea sterile.
When the day of the move arrived she came downstairs early in answer to the doorbell and found Zoe on the step.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Come to help.’
‘You can't do that,’ said Frances, following her into the hall. ‘You've got work to do.’
‘Phooey – it's my day off.’ She surveyed the packing-cases, the cartons spewing books and papers. ‘Lovely. I like a scene of chaos.’
Frances sat down on the bottom step of the stair. ‘You've come because you think leaving here is going to send me into a decline.’
‘If you want to put it like that,’ said Zoe, ‘you're at liberty to do so. How about I get the bed-clothes off the beds and take them on over to the new place in the car and get it swept out?’
‘As a matter of fact I'm not really feeling anything very much about going. I'm glad if anything.’
‘Then it's merely a question of nuts and bolts, over which I might come in handy. Where do I start?’
‘Let's have some breakfast first. Harry's got his plaster off, by the way.’
‘Good. And I had a card from Tab. One, mind, in six weeks or thereabouts.’
‘Apparently she's in love,’ said Frances.
‘Ah. Well, few of us are spared that.’ Zoe dumped nerself on the kitchen chair. ‘And some of us are addicted. Eric has a new fancy lady, incidentally.’
Frances, making toast, glanced at her. ‘Oh, Zoe… But it's not…’
‘The first time. Oh dear me, no. He'll get over it. She's all of twenty-eight and she has ginger curls. Enough of her, though. I am rising above her. Effortlessly. Tab's postcard was all about things called brochs, I couldn't understand a word of it. And signed Elizabeth T. Brooklyn. Has she turned against that crazy name?’
‘It's a joke,’ said Frances. ‘She's always rather liked it. She used to say, at least you never meet another.’
Zoe scowled into her tea-cup. ‘My fault. My fault entirely.
‘I like it. I always have.’
They looked at each other: an old look, a private look. Zoe said, ‘Do you think she ever notices me glowing at her?’
‘She's not all that perceptive.’
‘Rubbish. She's as perceptive as she is beautiful, talented and intelligent. You know, my love, one day soon…’
Frances rose abruptly. ‘Maybe. Look, I'd better rout Harry out of bed. The removal men will be here any minute.’
That night, she lay in her own bed in the strange house and felt, for a while, a resurgence of the panic that had visited her in Venice. She thought, I may have done the wrong thing. I may have been unspeakably stupid. I may have made things worse. She felt like the passenger in a ship from whom the shore slowly recedes. She would live, from now on, between walls that had never known Steven's presence. She would return to what from now on she must call home through a door never opened by Steven. Loss, as so often, gripped her with a clutch that almost took her breath away. She lay staring at the pale square of the curtained window, chilled with the burden of it. And there came into her head suddenly the memory of Ruth Bowers; she saw that ugly kindly face, heard that slightly hoarse voice, talking on. In the first months after Steven's death she had flinched from making any kind of relationship; the admission into her life of people he had not known seemed a kind of betrayal. But in Venice she had felt a satisfaction; even, a small achievement. My friend. And this house, she thought, is mine. Mine alone. I am alone in it.
She held the fact to her, concentrated on it, and presently the panic ebbed. No, she thought, I was not wrong to
do this. I have to go on, not stay still. I am not happy but there are times, now, minutes, hours, when I am not miserable either. When I begin to live again.
She lay there, in the alien darkness. Warily, she summoned up one of those moments. Dorset. That hillside.
There are days, which succeed one another, and in which we do what has to be done and in which time runs level; passing, simply, bringing with it pleasure and irritation and satiety and tiredness and all those ordinary furnishings of life. And then, rarely and unpredictably, there are fragments and passages from days which are of another order altogether. They are beyond and without chronology; they hang suspended, possessions for all time. To be called up out of darkness.
She stood on the side of this hill, at the top of which there was a prehistoric fort or something, and the blue day rolled away below her: fields and trees and a sky with small coasting clouds. And the wind blew through her hair. The children were running on ahead, bobbing in and out of view between the contours of the hill. She had thought herself alone, had thought Steven was with them, and then suddenly she felt his hand on her back, between her shoulder-blades. And the touch was extraordinary, as though he had never touched her before, as charged as his first touch, the first time he had taken her hand, the first time he had kissed her. She stood there, without turning to look at him, and he said, ‘I love you.’ He who so rarely spoke those words.
There was a kestrel that hung at eye-level, negotiating the winds. And very small brown butterflies on the cropped bouncy turf.
She said nothing. He took his hand from her back but she felt still the print of it (as she felt it now… lying in the darkness of another time…). She had thought: why suddenly does happiness descend, out of nowhere, like an archangel, out of a day that on the face of it is like any other? How can it be that life is quite unexceptional, and then all of a sudden it is not: it becomes a marvel?
Steven said, ‘I am not with you enough. I know that. But you must never think it is because I don't want to be. It is because I cannot help being the sort of person I am.’
‘I know. It doesn't matter.’
‘Last week, when I rang you from Paris, I was missing you unbearably.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That happens to me too.’
They began to walk up the hill. Ahead, above, the children scurried in the sunshine. Tabitha, aged eight. And Harry, seven.
‘Just so long as you realize,’ he went on, ‘I don't talk about this sort of thing very much, I know. But that doesn't mean…’
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I know. It's all perfectly all right.’
‘Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of something, I think of you. Committees. Teaching. I think of you and I know that you are there, that you are always there, and I can hardly believe it.’
Frances said, ‘I love you too.’
And later, in the bedroom of a hotel that had faded subsequently to an impression of over-patterned rooms and walls that crawled with flowers they had made love, late into the night, and as though that too were for the first time. Steven had said, in the middle of it, ‘I'm sorry about being sharp sometimes. And distant. When that happens, please think of this, if you can.’ And Frances had replied, ‘I will. It's all right – I do.’
All this, now, in the awful solitude of the new house, she summoned up. Deliberately and in fear. Over the last months, that time and others had summoned her, when she least wanted it, when she could least resist it, and she had suffered them, in anguish. She had longed to be without the power of recollection; bleached of memory. Tonight, she sought out the Dorset hillside of her own free will, and while the pain was still there, so also was something else. A privacy. That is mine also, she thought, mine alone. Eventually, she slept.
The new house was in that north London area of early nineteenth century terraced houses north-east of King's Cross. To Frances, used to the leafier heights of Highgate and sensitive, as Londoners are, to nuances of change in architecture and the pattern of streets, it seemed more densely urban and disproportionately strange. A landscape that is unknown is also unresponsive; she was walking around now in a place without associations. She was irritated by the nostalgia she felt for the familiar shops and banks and bus-stops and arterial roads from which she had come and to which she had never been particularly attached; to be so vulnerable to place seemed an unnecessary frailty. Determinedly, she stumped this new environment, attaching herself to it.
It was an area hustled by change, ever since the linked villages of which it was composed had erupted and fused with the city. The terraces had mostly been built within ten or twenty years of each other suggesting that at the time the place must have been one feverish building site, and indeed this state of growth and mutation persisted, with piles of ginger sand along the pavements, stacked bricks and timber, the occasional churning cement mixer. Now, those stolidly surviving structures were being shored up and reconstructed and improved and thus hauled into the late twentieth century and a different strata of society. They housed today the youngish middle class. Though by no means entirely so; survivors of another time still brought kitchen chairs out on to doorsteps on sunny days, as determinedly as the cobbles that bubbled up from beneath the tarmac of the roads after a bad winter. And the corner shops lived on, run now by Asians, their cluttered and comprehensive stock of sugar, toothpaste, birthday cards, washing powder and newspapers competing nicely with the gleaming shelves of Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer. The past does not lie down and die, Frances saw, a good deal of it is regenerative, like those primitive organisms that reproduce by splitting off their more resilient parts.
When she was not thus acclimatizing herself, she spent the time getting the house to rights and going through the many boxes of Steven's papers, resolutely destroying everything that seemed unimportant. She was determined that the house should not be one of those overstocked domestic archives in which everything is indiscriminately preserved. She had kept only those furnishings she liked best or which were most useful and set about, now, keeping only those things of Steven's that she felt to be especially significant.
On one of these occasions, kneeling on the floor with boxes and files spread out around her, she was interrupted by Harry. He hung around for a few minutes, picking things up and putting them down again and then said awkwardly, ‘By the way I think I'll be off again next week. Some people I know are hitching for two or three weeks in France and I thought I'd go with them.’
‘Are you sure the leg's strong enough?’
‘Hitching, not walking. At least that's the idea.’ He fiddled with the window catch. ‘You don't mind?’
‘Of course I don't mind. But be sensible.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Harry irritably. After a moment he went on. ‘Actually, I've got a present for you.’
‘A present? How nice.’
‘Hang on…’ She heard him stump down the stairs. When he returned she stared in amazement. ‘Heavens!’
He put the puppy down in the middle of the room; it was brown, with sparse wiry fur through which pink skin faintly gleamed. ‘I'm not quite sure what kind it is; I think it's a sort of mixture but apparently it won't get very big. I'm afraid it seems to pee on things rather.’
‘It's sweet,’ said Frances doubtfully. ‘But Harry, I'm not sure if I like dogs. We've never had one.’
‘Only because Dad didn't like them. All right,’ he added, offended. ‘I'll take it back to the shop.’
‘No, no… No, of course I'll like it. Thank you. It was a lovely thought. I'm sure we'll be very happy together.’
Harry, complacent, looked down benignly at the dog. ‘It eats sort of biscuit stuff. And meat out of tins. I got some for you to start off with.’
‘Thank you very much, darling.’
‘That's O.K. Well… see you later. I've got to go out.’
She sat down and contemplated the puppy, which was paddling around on a heap of Steven's papers. It, too, sat, and looked at her for a moment with an ex
pression of, it seemed, subservience mixed with expectation. Its stumpy tail convulsively twitched. Downstairs, Frances could hear Harry telephoning a friend: a terse and worldly discussion about cross-channel ferry fares and the route from Dieppe to Aix-en-Provence.
At the end of the street in which Frances was now living there was a triangular piece of derelict ground, half an acre or more in size, separated from the roads at either side by a crumbling brick wall. Its apex was bordered by the last house of a four-storey terrace, the tattered wall that had once been the inside of rooms showing the hollows of fireplaces and the ghost of a staircase. The level of the ground was several feet below the street; an oasis amid the tarmac and crammed frontages, it billowed with greenery – willowherb and brambles and rangy clumps of buddleia amid which roosted old bedsteads and mattresses, skeletal television sets and a doorless refrigerator. Frances, who as a schoolgirl had seen the waste land of the City around St Paul's in the late nineteen forties, recognized this distinctive scenery with another kind of nostalgia and learned from neighbours that it was indeed a bomb-site, though no-one any longer knew when the bomb fell or what precisely it had fallen on.
A week after Harry had brought the puppy it managed to slip its head through the collar and shot excitedly through a gap in the wall whence it slithered down into the bomb-site. Frances could see it rummaging in the bushes. At that point she realized the mistake she had made in failing so far to give it a name; feeling foolish, she shouted ‘Come here!’ once or twice. Passersby looked at her and hurried on. The puppy continued to explore. Frances watched for a few minutes, and then to her dismay saw it settle down on one of the old mattresses, apparently preparing to go to sleep. She called again. The puppy pricked its ears, gave a propitiating twitch to its tail and laid its nose between its paws. Looking at the drop from the gap in the wall down into the waste ground she saw now that in any case it would be most unlikely to be able to jump up again.