The House on Fortune Street (17 page)

not to worry, she would take the girls to and from ballet that evening, I was mildly disappointed but such changes of plan were common. I settled down to play snap with Fergus and make his favorite supper: plain pasta with tuna. The next night Dara announced that she and Ingrid were going to a friend’s house. On Friday I was working late and Fiona took care of the children.

That Saturday I went to visit my mother, and while I was gone Fiona did something so obvious and so clever that I realized I had always underestimated her. She collected the rolls of film from my camera bag, including the one that was in the camera, and took them to be developed. Five days later, on Thursday evening after the children were in bed, she closed the dining room door and spread the pictures out on the table.

They were fine, they were all fine, except for the last one: Ingrid lying on her back in the tent, kicking her bare legs in the air.

“Dara was there too. I must have pressed the button by mistake.” I reached for the picture but she stayed my hand.

“Iris was so embarrassed when she told me what Carol had said about you, she barely managed to get the words out after three glasses of wine. I was dumbfounded. Then I couldn’t say enough to defend you. You were a great father. Carol was just jealous that you didn’t pay her more attention. Iris kept nodding. But why were you constantly photographing the girls, she asked. I told her that had been my idea and that clinched it; she apologized profusely.

“Afterward, though, I kept wondering why you hadn’t mentioned Carol’s comment. I decided to get the films developed. I was sure they would show that Ingrid was your daughter’s best friend and nothing more.” She exhaled with such force that her hair fluttered. “As soon as I saw this picture, I knew I’d been deceiving myself.” She waved at the wall behind us. “Over and over Ingrid is at the center; Dara is off to the side. And it wasn’t only when you were taking photographs. Suddenly I

could recall dozens of occasions when you were a little too attentive to Ingrid, when you ought to have been focusing on Dara and instead you were chatting away with her best friend. I used to feel so smug when my friends talked about their husbands: you were such a good father, I was sure you’d never pay attention to another woman. Which was true but in the worst way. I just didn’t want to see it. God knows what harm you’ve done.”

I reached out my hand but I didn’t dare to touch her. “Fiona, this is ridiculous. We’re talking about a hysterical outburst by a teenage girl who’s babysat for us a few times. Of course I was nice to Ingrid. She’s Dara’s friend. In my opinion that’s part of being a good father.” I was trying to muster a tone of outraged innocence.

“So why did you take this photograph? And why didn’t you tell me what Carol said? We spent the whole drive home talking about what had happened and you never once mentioned it. When Iris asked if we’d discussed it, I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.”

I started a dozen useless sentences but what could I say? Except for the moment in the bathroom when I had stared too long at Ingrid, the moment in the tent when I had raised my camera, half a dozen other moments in the course of nearly a year, I was blameless. And yet I was utterly to blame.

Fiona, however, knew exactly what she wanted to say: “I want a divorce.”

With ferocious calmness she outlined her terms. “I get the house and the children and as much money as you can manage. You get my promise that I won’t tell people as long as you leave Edinburgh and stay away from the children.”

I begged, I protested my innocence, I promised to get professional help, I swore up and down that I had never done anything untoward, that I loved Dara and Fergus, that I would give my left hand to prevent harm coming to a hair on their heads. I said how much I loved her,

how happy she made me. But Fiona was relentless. She didn’t cry; she didn’t shout. Her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, even her eyelashes seemed to stiffen. Whatever I said she simply pointed to the photograph. She would have liked me to move out that very evening. I argued that we needed time to break the news to the children, to sort out arrangements. Fiona’s promise of secrecy was worthless if we separated so suddenly; everyone would guess there was a sinister secret.

n the end she let me stay for four excruciating weeks, sleep-

ing in the guest room. My life in Edinburgh, which I had thought so

fir

mly

established, turned out to be surprisingly flimsy. I gave notice at

work and applied for a job in London. When I came to pack I had only a few more possessions than the first time I went south, and our mutual friends, relationships of nearly a decade, were now all Fiona’s. With colleagues I used the phrase “trial separation,” and they offered con-dolences. As for my mother I tried several times to explain that I was moving and would be visiting less often. She nodded and continued to describe the night she’d first seen radar. “And then the beam leaped up,” she said, clasping her hands, smiling. Fiona and I communicated mostly through notes. Before we had shared child care and household tasks. Now I did the shopping, cooking, and cleaning while she took care of the children, keeping them away from me as much as possible. Of course they sensed the tension and were difficult by day and rest-less at night. Together one Saturday morning she and I explained that I had a new job in London and would be living there for the foreseeable future.

“Where’s London?” said Fergus, cheeks quivering. “Can I come?” “Maybe when you’re older,” I said.

“London is where I was born,” said Dara. “Why do you have to go, Daddy? Why can’t you stay here?”

“Darling,” I said. “I have to earn money to take care of us.”

“You can talk to him on the phone,” said Fiona. “Get your shoes on.

We’re going swimming.”

I packed stealthily until the fatal Monday arrived. Then I announced at breakfast that I was going to London that day. Dara frowned and started to question me, but Fiona interrupted to ask what kind of sandwich she wanted. Fergus didn’t seem to register my remark; he was too busy talking about his spelling words. I had got permission from Fiona to walk them to school one last time. As we made the familiar journey—the school was only a few streets away—Dara asked about Fiona’s birthday. Would I take her shopping for a present? Could we bake a cake? I said yes to everything. At the school gates, I bent to kiss first her, then Fergus. As soon as I released them, they darted off to join their friends.

I was waiting to cross the road when, on the far side, I saw Iris and Ingrid. I had run into all three members of the family several times since our camping trip but, given that I was working overtime, leaving early and returning late, not as often as usual. Each occasion had been horribly awkward. In spite of her claim to believe in my innocence, Iris treated me with a breezy reserve. Carol seemed to simply hate me. As for Ingrid, that was worst of all. She ran toward me smiling and suddenly checked herself. What words, I wondered, had her mother used to warn her against me? Now I stood watching her and Iris. They still hadn’t noticed me. Iris, on her way to work, wore a navy suit. Ingrid was dressed in the school uniform: a short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. For a few seconds I saw her as my singular, golden beloved. Then that moment too passed and she looked just like all the other girls I had seen milling

around in the playground. There was a pause in the traffic and, at the same instant, we stepped off the curb. As we passed each other in the middle of the road, I raised my hand in a little wave. So did Ingrid.

xcept for my manner of earning a living, my life changed

utterly. The dissolution of my marriage swept away my family and my friends. I rented a bedsit in North London which was as grim as it sounds. I got a job that was well paid and then—I was lucky—another job, even better paid. For a few months I did phone the children but it was too hard. I was no longer part of their daily lives; I no longer knew what questions to ask: Who were their teachers? Who were their friends? Instead I wrote weekly, trying to make my letters entertaining with stories and little jokes. I even attempted a few sketches as Dodgson had used to do in his letters to his many young friends.

The one person who survived this radical housecleaning was Davy, who was also now living on his own, although in a far pleasanter and more sociable fashion. He had moved to a different, even smarter furniture shop and become part owner. We started meeting regularly to swim or play squash. I told him that Fiona and I had separated because of irreconcilable differences and he said how sorry he was. The first few times we met I was braced for prying questions—if anyone had the right to ask surely it was my oldest friend—but he said nothing. So I was caught off-guard when, almost a year after I moved south, he said, “Are you ever going to tell me why Fiona threw you out?”

We were at his flat, nearing the end of a leisurely dinner and well into the second bottle of wine. “How do you know she threw me out?” I said.

“Why would you leave your lovely family for a crummy bedsit?” He reached across to refill my glass and topped up his own. The light

hung low over the circular table, illuminating the remains of the stuffed trout, and when Davy sat back his face was in shadow. “Whatever you’ve done,” he said, “I’m sure I’ve done something worse. I speak as someone who’s buggered an underage boy in a public toilet. He charged me twenty quid.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

For one minute, perhaps two, the silence expanded around us. “Remember Dara’s friend Ingrid?” I said at last. “She was in several of the photographs in the hall.”

“The roller-skater,” he said.

Slowly, haltingly, I began to tell him what had happened since that day Annabel took my hand. Davy listened in silence. He expressed neither shock nor dismay. Finally I got to the camping expedition and my injudicious photograph. “I never touched her, I never said a word to her, I was never alone with her, but Fiona wouldn’t listen.”

“So if you were alone with Ingrid, if you could do whatever you wanted with no fear of the consequences, what would you do?” said Davy.

“Feast my eyes.”

“Not a little fondling? A little”—he tilted his head—“squeezing?”

When his meaning reached me, I was so angry that I forgot to breathe. He hadn’t understood anything, not a word, if he thought that I would do with Ingrid the smallest part of what I’d done with Fiona. “I would not,” I said stiffly, “touch her in any way that a good father doesn’t touch his daughter.”

“But of course you’re not her father. Calm down, Cameron. I’m not accusing you. I’m trying to understand.” He stood up and left the room. I heard him cross the small hall and then the sounds of pissing, flush-ing, hand washing. When he came back, he was carrying a new bottle of wine. “So,” he said, “I was right.”

“Right about what?”

“When I thought you were different though not in the same way as me.”

“You’re not”—I hesitated—“repulsed?”

He shook his head.“I’m just sorry. Sorry that everything came crash-ing down, that Fiona freaked out, that you feel all alone with this. At least if you were gay you’d have company.”

I asked if he thought there was any chance Fiona would allow me to see Dara and Fergus again. “That’s what I feel worst about. It’s as if I’d abandoned them and they’ve no idea why.”

Davy promised to test the waters the next time he went north. “Maybe,” he said, “if you talked to someone, a psychiatrist or therapist. If Fiona knew you regarded this as a problem and that you were trying to fix it, that might mollify her.”

He stood up, swaying slightly, crossed the room, and bent to kiss me.

did what Davy suggested. With his help I found a sympa-thetic therapist, a man of about my age. I went and talked to him every week for over a year, after which he wrote a letter saying that in his opinion the possibility of my harming any child, particularly my own, was remote. Meanwhile Davy talked to Fiona. He must have exercised all his diplomatic skills. Almost four years after I left Edinburgh, she allowed me to see the children again in meticulously regulated cir-cumstances. It was probably no coincidence that her leniency coincided with her remarriage. Her new husband was a barrister, a long-faced Scot with a comfortable income and, I gathered, a keen wit. I appreci-

ated his kindness to the children even though it gave me a pang.

As for the visits, they were, I imagine, what most divorced parents endure: better than nothing but painful. Gone was the easy flow of daily life. We had to have plans, and Dara and Fergus were at such different

stages that it was not easy to find common activities. Then too they each grew busier with friends, and spending time with their father was not a priority. But at least I was present again in their lives; there was a relationship, however attenuated.

here are two more parts to this story. Let me begin with

the easy one. Shortly before my forty-seventh birthday I remarried. Louise is buoyant, energetic, sociable; she sings in a choral society and has two grown children from her first marriage to an Italian. After living in Rome for nearly twenty years, she now works at the Italian Embassy in London. Thanks to her I have another life: sunnier, simpler, full of good food and music. Every summer we spend a month in Italy with her sons and their families. I am always on hand at these gatherings as the photographer. Two granddaughters are fast approaching what for me is a difficult age. I have learned to take pleasure in their company, but not too much. Neither, happily, possesses Ingrid’s charms.

The other, the harder part, concerns my children or, to be precise, my daughter. Fergus took a degree in engineering, got a job in Aberdeen, and married a fellow engineer with whom he has a son. He seems unscathed by his childhood, and our rare meetings are jolly occasions. As for Dara, she studied English at St. Andrews University and then trained as a counselor in Glasgow. I would see her when I went to visit my mother once or twice a year. Several times she pressed me about why I had left the family, and I seldom felt at ease in her company. Then, in her late twenties, she got a job in London, working at a wom-en’s center. I hoped proximity would at last allow us to be comfortable together. Louise and I made a point of having her over to dinner every few months, and periodically she and I would go to an exhibition or on an outing.