The House on Fortune Street (19 page)

party. I poured her a glass of wine and said we hoped she’d stay to supper afterward. She’d met a number of our friends on previous occasions, and over the next hour I glimpsed her in conversation with various people; whoever she was talking to seemed to be backing away. Twice I was about to intervene when Louise asked me to pass the hors d’oeuvres or open more wine. And then I looked around our few remaining guests and discovered that Dara was gone. Every other year she had stayed to help us clear up and to eat scrambled eggs. I phoned but reached only her answering machine.

A week later a card came saying she was, as usual, going to Edinburgh for Christmas. I sent back a card and a check for art supplies. Louise and I were visiting Rome, I wrote. We hoped to see her early in the new year. Louise’s Italian family Christmases were always a pleasure, but that year everyone seemed in especially good health and spirits. As I sat at the candlelit table, my daughter-in-law on one side teasing me about my Italian, my oldest granddaughter on the other asking me about a magic trick I’d shown her, I felt blessed. I smiled across the table at Louise and she, in the midst of talking to our other granddaughter,

smiled back.

Two days later I had just returned from a solitary stroll around the Piazza Navona when my daughter-in-law called me to the phone.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” said Sean.

he essays I read about Dodgson did not say if he had a counterpart to the days he marked with a white stone, days to be marked with blood and thorns. Certainly he suffered such days. On 27 June 1863, or shortly thereafter, he did something that caused a difficult break with his beloved Alice. The crucial page is missing from his

diary.

I left for London within an hour of hearing the news of Dara’s death. I met Fiona at the hospital. Together we saw our daughter. A soft-spoken woman told us that there would be an autopsy but that an empty con-tainer of sleeping pills had been found in her bathroom. Then we took a taxi to her flat. We searched everywhere, hoping to find a note. Fiona remarked on how tidy everything was, how clean. The Christmas cards Dara had received were stacked on the dining room table, unopened. She had told Fiona that she would be spending Christmas with Louise and me.

I have no memory of her funeral other than the women, the many women, coming up to me one by one, mostly in tears, to say how Dara had helped them, had rescued them, had understood their shortcom-ings. “She never made you feel bad about yourself,” said one. “However often I messed up,” said another, “she was there.” Her coworkers offered the same story. The director of the center, I recognized her from a photograph Dara and I had seen in an exhibition, told me that Dara was one of the most lovely and selfless people she had ever met. “But we failed her,” she said, her eyes brimming. “Somehow we failed her.” A couple of people remarked that Christmas was a tricky time. I kept searching the congregation for a man who might be Edward. Finally I asked Sean, who told me that he hadn’t been able to get away.

uring the weeks that followed I worked, I ate, I slept, I did whatever I was meant to do, but all the time it was as if I were standing in front of a huge black wall. Sometimes, for a few seconds, I would become absorbed in a task, but when I looked up the wall was still there, blocking my view of everything and everyone. A fortnight after the funeral a letter arrived from Sean. It turned out that Dara had written a note and torn it up. In the confusion of finding her, Sean had

taken the envelope. “Forgive my presumption,” he wrote. “I thought it would make things worse.” Now he enclosed the fragments. I put them in the drawer where I kept the photographs from Sissinghurst. Dara had not wanted us to read her letter; surely there must be a good reason for that?

One Saturday afternoon in early March when Louise was out with a friend—she found it hard to be around my despair day after day— Davy phoned and suggested a walk. We met at the British Museum and, with no destination, wandered through Bloomsbury toward the City of London. It was a misty day, not quite raining. Most of the shops were closed for the weekend, and the streets were deserted. Presently we found ourselves in the shadow of St. Paul’s; the front facade was half covered in scaffolding. We crossed the road and headed down the flight of shallow steps to the footbridge across the Thames. Halfway across, Davy stopped to lean on the railing; I joined him. We were facing upstream toward the painted arches of Blackfriars Bridge. The river, swollen with spring rain, flowed swiftly beneath us.

I don’t know how long passed before Davy began to speak. “A few days before my father died,” he said, “he asked if he was to blame for my being the way I am. I said no, I’d been this way for as long as I could remember. I also told him that I knew my being gay was hard for him but that I felt lucky to have been born at a time when I could live according to my affections without fear, or shame. He didn’t speak but he smiled.”

On the last phrase his voice cracked. I knew, if I turned to look at him, I would see his eyes watering. It’s not the same, I wanted to say—my affections could never have found a place in the world—but I held my peace. The therapist I had consulted years before was dead; Fiona and I, even in our grief, never ventured beyond polite necessities. Davy was the only one now who knew, and spoke, about that hidden part of my life. “Dara was the way she was,” he continued.“Someone else might have

had more ballast, might have coped better with your leaving, with whatever drove her to despair. Of course you’re to blame, but you mustn’t be greedy. You have to share the blame with Dara’s friends and colleagues, with her mother and her boyfriend, with her own fragility.”

A branch floated past, a beer bottle wedged in the fork. Behind us a group of heavy-footed tourists marched by.

“The day we went to Sissinghurst,” I said, “she said two things I can’t get out of my head. We were chatting on the doorstep with her neighbor Sean, and she told him that at a certain point you have to stop blaming your parents for everything. Then later, in the gardens, she talked about damage and how it surfaces if we don’t deal with it.” I clutched the metal railing of the bridge in my bare hands.

“You didn’t tell her?” said Davy sharply.

“No. She did ask again why Fiona and I split up. I finally told her about Lionel and how his death separated me from other people.”

Almost but not quite, I told Davy the true lie I had told Dara—my fear that I had been Lionel’s unwitting executioner—but even as the words formed I offered them to the river and the wind. Davy already carried enough on my behalf. At last I did turn to look at him. On his face I saw the same marks of age that I saw in the mirror. He was already sixty-three; I would be in a few months. How unimaginable that would have seemed to the two boys who shot Mabel. And how unimaginable the alternative of never being sixty-three.

Eyes still watering, Davy returned my gaze. “Poor Lionel,” he said, “always coming to your rescue.”

he day after I came back from Italy that summer, I was

finally able to put up the photographs the two women had taken at Sissinghurst. They are almost identical. In neither is Dara or I smil-

ing. We are sitting side by side on the bench, the leafy hedge behind us, our hands clasped in our laps, our ankles crossed. But in one photograph we aren’t quite ready and the camera has captured on her face an expression of despair and on mine a bewildered frown. In the other, a few seconds earlier or later, we are facing the camera intently, reso-lutely, ardently. You can see that Dara has my mother’s widow’s peak and Lionel’s eyebrows, which are also mine.

ven as Dara stood watching, the mist began to steal away,

thinning and dissipating from one minute to the next, reveal-ing the lawn, gray with dew. Standing on the terrace in front of the quiet house, holding a cup of coffee, she looked down and tried to decide whether she minded getting her new shoes, red sandals, wet in a way that would make them irrevocably less new. She had risen early unnerved by the silence of the countryside and the way it rendered the occasional noises—the whine of a power tool, the cry of a bird—so much more intrusive than the endless roar of London. In the strange kitchen she had made coffee and, eager to escape her hosts, decided to go for a walk. As soon as she got off the train the evening before and saw Sean and Abigail waiting on the platform of the little country sta-tion, she had worried that this weekend was a mistake; their incandes-cent happiness would only cast her own solitude into relief.

A tawny shape emerged from behind a clump of tall grass. A handsome male pheasant glanced at her with red-rimmed eyes and continued, stiff-legged, across the lawn. Dara set her coffee cup on a win-dowsill and followed. Her momentary concern for her shoes was com-pensated for by the satisfying chain of dark footprints that appeared behind her in the wet grass. At the gate into the lane she looked in both directions, hoping for something to determine her choice and, seeing nothing, turned left. She found herself walking between two

rows of tall, evenly spaced chestnut trees; someone who believed in the future, she thought, must have planted them a century ago. The leaves were fringed with brown and the branches thick with nuts; many had already fallen. By the time Dara reached the road she had gathered a pocketful, choosing not those lying loose but the ones still in their cases that shone so brightly when she released them.

Again she hesitated, uncertain which way to turn. Then, on the far side of the road, she spotted a small stone church surrounded by trees and beyond it the canal Abigail had mentioned the previous evening. She crossed the road, skirted the verdant graveyard, and climbed down a short flight of steps to the towpath. While the mist was fleeing in other places, here it almost entirely concealed the dark green waters. Three narrow boats floated in the vaporous clouds, each looking—with chairs, a wineglass half full, a doll in a pink dress, even a book lying on their respective decks—as if the Rapture had occurred in the night. Dara walked by, gazing curiously at the curtained windows.

Her friendship with Abigail was one of the more unlikely and persistent facts of her life. They had met at university in the laundry room. One day they didn’t know each other; the next they were best friends. At least that was Abigail’s version. Dara’s first memories dated from a few weeks earlier. One rainy afternoon she had seen a girl standing outside the library, wearing a duffle coat, a long red skirt, and Wellington boots, and talking to two men. As Dara approached, the girl burst out laughing with such gaiety, such a seeming lack of reserve, that everyone nearby had smiled. Then the following week in an English seminar she had heard Abigail read a page of Mrs. Dalloway and somehow, although she didn’t appear to be acting, the whole scene was magically present in her voice. When she finished there was a rare moment of silence. “Thank you, Ms. Taylor,” said the lecturer.

The mist thinned and two ducks with subtle brown plumage swam by. Now that she was past the narrow boats the towpath was bordered

by fields; on the other side of the canal willow trees hung low over the water. Dara would have liked to draw the ducks and the trees—before leaving the house she had slipped a sketchbook into her pocket—but there was nowhere to sit. Then, at the end of the second field, she came to a stile. She took off her jacket, spread it on the top step, and sat down.

After university Abigail had gone to America to study theater and come back to nurse her father. Then she had moved to London and, for several years, with Dara in Glasgow, they had been in touch only intermittently until Dara had got her present job, and moved south. Gradually they had renegotiated their relationship as adults living in the same city, rather than students living side by side. She had helped Abigail to write a one-woman show based on interviews with some of her clients at the women’s center. And Abigail had helped her to feel at home in London.

Now Dara drew the willow tree on the far side of the canal with its long, flowing branches; she added a narrow boat, the ducks, and, in the distance, a church spire. She was shading the spire when she heard a soft tearing sound. Two cows, one black and white, one brown, had approached and were grazing nearby. “Hello,” said Dara, but neither raised its head: all those stomachs to feed. Turning back to the canal, she was in time to see a large black dog, like something out of a fairy tale, bounding along the towpath. It passed her without a glance. As the dog disappeared she heard pounding footsteps. Someone in pursuit? No, the man who came into view, wearing dark shorts and a white T-shirt, was just running. From the stile, Dara had an excellent view of his approach, arms and legs pumping steadily. And then, quite suddenly, he was sprawled on the ground at her feet.

She jumped down to help. “Are you all right?”

“What the hell?” He struggled into a sitting position, his shirt grazed with dirt. “Where did you come from?”