The House on Fortune Street (32 page)

that was the purest feeling I’ve ever known. I would have done anything for her.”

“I felt like that about my grandparents,” said Abigail. Coaxed on by his questions, she told him about the summers in Chatham, the walks by the River Medway, and the visits to the town of Rochester with its ancient cathedral, and its many reminders of Dickens. “My grandfather thought he could learn everything he needed to know about England by studying Dickens. He said everyone had a book, or a writer, that was the key to their life.”

“That’s an appealing idea,” said Alastair, getting up to refill their glasses.“Does the person have to have read the book? Or is the connection there anyway, and some people figure it out and others don’t?”

“I don’t know.” She was abruptly dismayed. “He died before I could ask him. I do know that he thought of my father as being like Mr. Micawber, overly optimistic about practical matters.”

“To put it kindly. There aren’t a lot of great choices in Dickens for girls. I don’t see you as Little Nell. Maybe Estella, though she’s a cold bitch. Better to give up on gender and be poor, blundering Pip. That scene when he meets Magwitch again makes my hair stand on end every time.”

She was still registering the word “bitch,” as he continued.“There are three great novels about romantic love and they all have great in the title.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Great Expectations, Le Grand Meaulnes, and The Great Gatsby.”

“I haven’t heard of Le Grand Meaulnes,” she said, hoping to keep the conversation on literary topics.

“It’s by a French writer, Alain-Fournier, who died in the First World War. The same story as the other two: boy loves inaccessible, mysterious girl. Boy loses out. You’re probably already too old to read it.”

“I’m only twenty-one.”

“Oh, Abigail, you’ve never been twenty-one.”

To disguise her discomfort she reached for her glass and, finding it

empty, got up to go to the bathroom. When she came out into the hall, it took her a few seconds to realize that she was not alone. Alastair was leaning against the wall, holding another bottle of wine.

“You’re a hot little thing, aren’t you?” he said in a low, thick voice.

For a few seconds Abigail was torn between running out of the house and kicking him, hard, on the shins. Then she did the only thing that seemed feasible: pretended he hadn’t spoken. “I’m going to start supper,” she said.

In the kitchen her hands trembled as she opened cupboards and began blindly taking out pasta, onions, olives, tomatoes, basil, pine nuts. Why was she wearing this flimsy dress? She put on the biggest, dirtiest apron she could find, pulled her hair back into a rubber band, and set to chopping onions as if their odor could keep him at bay.

Ten minutes later she heard the sound of the front door. Fiona came into the kitchen. “What a treat,” she said. “You’re making supper.”

“Yes.” Abigail could feel herself smiling breathlessly. “I was wondering whether to put in anchovies as well as olives.”

“Why not? They’ll give everything a little more zip.”

At the table the three of them talked and laughed as they had done on half a dozen occasions that summer, but later Abigail walked home with a heavy heart. The safe, well-run house was no longer quite so safe. Why did this have to happen, she thought fiercely. She had never flirted with Alastair, not for a second. He was Dara’s stepfather, Fiona’s husband, and besides, with his gray hair, his abstruse conversation, it had never occurred to her that he was like the men who eyed her in the street, or cornered her at the restaurant behind the kitchen door.

hat year she was starring in one of the Drama Society

plays, but instead of giving out martinis she went, at Axel’s urging,

to see as many other plays as possible. Day after day she leaned forward in her seat, studying the actors, trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Later she would scribble notes and discuss her observations with Axel in person, and with Dara on the phone. Why was Masha’s grief in The Three Sisters so powerful? How was it possible for a brief shrug to resonate across a theater? What made a one-person show absorbing? Was physical theater still possible?

In return Dara told her about life with Kevin; they had visited Marx’s grave, they were giving out leaflets for a local Labour candidate. After they said good-bye, Abigail would wander around the flat, restless and out of sorts. However long they talked, she didn’t have the feeling of being understood that she almost always did in Dara’s presence.“I miss you,” she would say, and Dara would say the same, but Abigail knew that her missing didn’t have the same weight.

Dara had planned to spend the last week of the vacation at home, but she kept postponing her return; she couldn’t bear to leave Kevin. Finally she came north the day before classes began, stopping in Edinburgh only to repack her suitcases. Abigail had returned to St. Andrews the previous day and had put up a sign on the door of Dara’s room— Welcome back, Dara—with a red balloon bobbing above. “You idiot,” Dara said and threw her arms around Abigail. They went to the local fish and chip shop and sat there for three hours. Abigail acted out highlights of the plays she’d seen and Dara listened and asked exactly the right questions and then answered all of Abigail’s. Most of her answers involved Kevin—he would be coming up for a weekend in November; they would see each other at Christmas—but Abigail smiled and nodded. She and Dara were here, together, and he was more than four hundred miles away. As they parted outside their rooms, Dara said, “I forgot to tell you Alastair sent his love. He said how nice it was having you around this summer.”

“Wait until I make you the chicken puttanesca your mother taught me.”

Maybe when they were older, twenty-five or, unimaginably, thirty, she could tell Dara what had happened with Alastair. For now she must wrap it up tightly, tightly, and hide it away.

uring the next few weeks Abigail discovered, over and over, that she was wrong about Kevin. He might be physically in London but in every other respect it was as if he were still here. Dara talked about him incessantly. She canceled plans in order to phone him or write letters; she insisted on seeing the films he’d seen, reading the books he’d read. She was too busy to help Abigail rehearse her lines, too busy to discuss arrangements for December. Abigail had spent the last three Christmases in Edinburgh, staying at Dara’s house, working at the store and the restaurant, but now Dara was planning to visit Kevin and seemed to forget that Abigail had nowhere else to go. Not knowing how to raise the topic without mentioning Alastair, Abigail reluctantly contacted the last hotel she’d worked. At first the manager said he didn’t need anyone but when she agreed to waitress both Christmas

Day and New Year’s Eve he hired her.

Two days later Abigail was just getting into bed—it was almost midnight—when she heard an odd scraping sound at her door. She opened it to find Dara huddled on the floor, her face red and swollen, her hair tangled, sobbing. Abigail pulled her inside and guided her over to the bed. Her first thought was that something terrible had happened: Fiona had been in a car crash, or was deadly ill. Or Dara herself had discovered a lump, or a virus. When she pieced together that Kevin was the cause of this distress—he’d met someone else—she was so relieved, she almost laughed. “I hope someone else treats him like dirt.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t live without him.”

“Of course you can.” She knew she oughtn’t to scold but she couldn’t

bear such hyperbole. People couldn’t live without food and air and shelter and money. Romantic love was an extra, nice if it came along, but definitely superfluous to the main requirements of existence. Trying to be more tactful, she added that perhaps Kevin hadn’t meant it. But Dara had disappeared again into a storm of weeping. She was cough-ing and gasping for breath, and nothing Abigail said seemed to reach her. At last, at her wits’ end, Abigail recalled what Dara had said the students at the counseling center were told to do in emergencies. She got dressed, went out into the hall, and phoned the porter.

“Stay right there,” he said. “I’ll have someone with you in five minutes to take her to the medical center.”

She went to Dara’s room and hastily chose a jacket and a pair of shoes. In her own room Dara was still lying on the bed, moaning. She managed to get the shoes on and wrapped her in the jacket. Then the porter appeared and together they maneuvered Dara into the lift, and out to the waiting car. At the center while Dara wept, Abigail told the doctor what had happened. “She won’t stop crying. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You did just the right thing,” said the doctor. With his crumpled shirt and bitten nails he looked disturbingly like a student. “Has she taken anything?”

“Taken anything?’

“You know, pills, booze.”

“No, of course not,” said Abigail, appalled.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “When you go back to her room, have a look. Phone me if you find any empty bottles.”

Walking back to the hall of residence, Abigail was torn between fury and worry. How could Kevin have done this? Didn’t he know Dara was fragile? And how could Dara be so fragile when Fiona and Alastair were always there? Love was about the people who loved you, which in Abigail’s world meant only her grandparents and Dara. Men were strictly

for pleasure and for experimenting with versions of the self. What had made Dara give such a large piece of herself into Kevin’s careless hands? I never want to feel this way, thought Abigail.

She let herself into Dara’s room and checked the wastepaper basket and the desk. In the former were tissues and an empty coffee cup. On the latter was a crumpled piece of paper: Kevin’s last words. She picked it up, suddenly hopeful. Perhaps this was merely a lovers’ quarrel; she could phone him, get him to phone Dara. But as she read his feeble sentences, any fantasy of reconciliation fled. Dara was wonderful; he’d always think of her as a friend but this was the real thing. Liza worked at the House of Commons, she’d grown up in London and shared his politics and his ambitions. I hope you find someone who suits you as well, he concluded. You deserve it.

She nearly tore the letter to shreds but it was not hers to destroy. She returned it to the envelope and slipped it into Dara’s copy of Mrs. Dalloway.

he next day at the medical center she found Dara lying

in bed, her face no longer red but rather pale. Her eyes were closed and, standing in the doorway, Abigail noticed, as she had the first day they spoke, the delicate crease of Dara’s lower eyelids, which was part of what made her appreciation of the world seem so wholehearted. She stepped forward and Dara opened her eyes. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

“How are you?” Hesitantly she sat on the edge of the bed and studied her friend. Overnight the color of Dara’s eyes had darkened and against the pillow her matted hair showed no hint of the reddish highlights that, Abigail had once observed, made her look like Mary, Queen of Scots, in the famous portrait.

Dara shook her head. “I keep thinking about last summer, how we’d race home to be with each other and talk about our plans. When I graduated we were going to work for a year, travel for a year, then Kevin would go into politics and we’d have a baby. We both liked the name Emma. It’s as if all that meant nothing.”

A baby, thought Abigail in bewilderment. She began to say that Kevin was a rat, but Dara’s lips quivered. “I brought you some books,” she said hastily. “Ms. Wilson gave a terrific lecture today on Whitman and Ginsberg.”

“I need to ask you a favor. Please don’t tell Mum. She’d just worry and it wouldn’t help anything.”

“I won’t,” said Abigail, startled to realize that it hadn’t occurred to her to tell Fiona. Despite all the time she’d spent in Dara’s company, she still hadn’t mastered the ways normal people behaved. “Promise, though, that you’ll try to get better. Think of what you tell your clients: remember the people who do love you, the small things you enjoy. Remember how you rescued me that first Christmas. And that boy you helped to pass his exams last term? He’d have failed without you. And”–she was groping, trying to summon memories that wouldn’t upset Dara—“that day we climbed Arthur’s Seat with Fiona.”

Dara gave the faintest of nods.

he following day she returned to her room and started going to classes again. Abigail tried to make sure she was home every evening; they studied, as they had when they first met, with their doors ajar. If she went out she persuaded Dara to come along. Neither

of them mentioned Kevin.

A fortnight after the letter, Dara worked a shift at the counseling center. That evening, she told Abigail that her own despair had helped

her to understand that of other people. “It doesn’t matter how stupid the reasons are, if you’re in the grip of a feeling it isn’t stupid. You can’t imagine it will ever change.” The only thing that did help, she went on, was not being alone. “If you hadn’t been here that night, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

A year ago, even six months, this acknowledgment of their inti-macy would have made Abigail happy. Now she said,“What about your family? Your friends? Your work?”

“Everything was hidden by his letter.”

“The doctor asked me if you’d taken pills.” She felt embarrassed by the revelation but Dara seemed unmoved.

“We’re taught to ask that at the first appropriate occasion,” she said. “You need to know if you’re dealing with a medical emergency as well as a psychiatric one.” She did not, as Abigail had hoped, say that she would never do such a thing.

Later, when she was sure Dara was asleep, Abigail paced back and forth in her small room. For months, while Dara doted on Kevin, she had felt herself being relegated to a smaller and smaller place in her friend’s thoughts, and that feeling had led her to do what would once have been unimaginable: without telling Dara, she had applied to study drama at several universities, including Yale University in America. Now Kevin was gone and Dara needed her again. But for how long? As soon as another man came along, she would be shoved aside. Yet if she hadn’t met Dara in the laundry room she would probably have had to leave St. Andrews. Every turn of the room brought a different, contra-dictory thought.

A week later, in an overheated tea room, she finally confessed what she’d done. To her surprise Dara said Yale sounded perfect; they would be mad not to give her a scholarship.

“But what will you do?” said Abigail.

And then another surprise, another betrayal; Dara announced that