Perfect Happiness

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PERFECT HAPPINESS

  Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She is married to Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxford-shire and London.

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger in 1987. Her other novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister and Heat Wave, and her most recent book is Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories. Many of her books, including Going Back, which first appeared as a children's book, and Oleander, Jacaranda, an autobiographical memoir of her childhood days in Egypt, are published by Penguin.

  Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children's literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

  TITLES BY PENELOPE LIVELY IN PENGUIN

  Fiction

  Going Back

  The Road to Lichfield

  Treasures of Time

  Judgement Day

  Next to Nature, Art

  Perfect Happiness

  According to Mark

  Pack of Cards: Collected Short Stories 1978–1986

  Moon Tiger

  Passing On

  City of the Mind

  Cleopatra's Sister

  Autobiography

  Oleander, Jacaranda

  PENELOPE LIVELY

  Perfect Happiness

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1983

  Published in Penguin Books 1985

  Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1983

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-190992-9

  TO

  ANN AND ANTHONY

  The fifth Brandenburg. Somewhere, some place, every moment, an orchestra is playing the fifth Brandenburg concerto. Violins are tucked under chins, bows rise and fall; in recording studios and concert rooms, and here in the dining-hall of a Cambridge college where a hundred and fifty people are gathered together for no reason except circumstance which is perhaps the reason for everything. They are together for one hour fifty minutes and for the most part will never see one another again.

  Some, of course, will.

  Zoe, scowling at the ceiling of the hall and thinking of the perversity of such places in which everything was hitched once to a day, to an hour, but is adrift now in a distant day, an unheeded hour. Once careful hands created the plasterwork of that ceiling. Other eyes have blinked in the light from that window. Through this room have passed beliefs too alien to contemplate. She directs her scowl – which indicates concentration rather than mood – to the portraits at the far end, above the orchestra. The portraits too are adrift. Their hefty gilt frames are a matching set but they wall in people tethered by their appearance to seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century: ruff, armour, cravat, wig. They are left behind, these people, of no account, present and yet profoundly absent, presiding mindless over Brandenburg Five undreamed of in their unimaginable yesterdays.

  Tabitha, in a frilled white shirt, furiously intent among the second violins.

  Morris.

  Frances, sitting with hands folded and face blank, recollecting not in tranquillity but in ripe howling grief her husband Steven dead now eight months two weeks one day.

  It is for one of them, for two, perhaps for several, a moment outside time, one of those moments when the needle gets stuck, when what happens goes on happening, down the years, again and again, recorded messages of glassy clarity whose resonances are always the same and yet also subtly different, charged with the insights of today, and yesterday. Forever, people are playing Brandenburg Five.

  Frances Brooklyn stood outside to wait for her sister-in-law. Glossy heaps of cloud cruised in a clear pale sky, the buildings glowed, people eddied around her. She waited, saw that the college clock stood at twelve forty-five, and looked no further. She never, now, looked further; she did not much care what happened in the next hour, or day, or week.

  Zoe came down the steps, burrowing into an enormous bag in which seethed notebooks, scarves, wallets, spectacle cases. ‘That, frankly, was gorgeous. Where's my blasted purse – I'll have to ring the office before we eat. Does the child meet us here or in the pub?’ She stared with sudden suspicion at Frances. ‘You haven't been weeping, have you? Music can be fatal.’

  ‘No. Look.’ Frances turned for inspection, half a head taller, looking down on to Zoe's dark frizzy hair, speckled here and there with grey, at her interesting ugly face to which always all glances are drawn, into her glittering clever eyes. Small vital powerful Zoe; friend and counsellor.

  ‘Good for you. I was on the point, once. All those bloody nice young, not throwing bricks through shop windows, not beating people up. Oh, I know, I know – privileged to the eyeballs. But all the same. Where is the child? Look, I'm going to dash to a phone – I'll meet you. Good grief – what are you doing here, Morris?’

  ‘Zoe!’

  ‘My sister-in-law, Frances. Morris Corfield. And here's my niece, Tabitha. Hi, Tab.’

  Frances, finding that useful mechanical smile, hugging Tabitha with one arm, looked at this dumpy man with pointed beard and noticeable brown eyes and saw in his expression the flicker of awkwardness that she generated now all around her. The bereaved are faintly leprous. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Morris,’ said Zoe, ‘knows more than anyone else in the world about – hang on – Baroque opera. Have I got that right? In other words, he's a musicologist. And music critic. Morris why don't you…’

  … join us for lunch, thought Frances, finishing in the head the sentence as one does for those one knows through and through, in depth, in totality, whose responses are learned as a familiar landscape.

  ‘… give me a ring at the paper and we'll have a meal,’ said Zoe, thinking: no, dammit, I want Frances and Tab to myself, we want to talk, I haven't seen Tab for a month and there's a god-awful week ahead goodness knows when I'll see Frances.

  And Morris Corfield, smiling, commenting on the concert, thought for a moment and with passing interest of Steven Brooklyn whom he had not known but whose face and whose incisive irrefutable style were familiar from the television screen and from newspapers. Chairman of this and that. College Principal. A public man. Writer. Authority on, um, international relations wasn't i
t? His widow and daughter, then. Um. Handsome woman, pale oval face with the bruised look of those who grieve, fair untidy hair flopping over one eye. Girl carrying a violin.

  Goodbye… Goodbye… Zoe. Mrs Brooklyn. Yes, I'll give you a ring…

  ‘He's nice,’ said Zoe. ‘But not just now, I want you to myself. He writes for the paper sometimes, that's how I know him. From time to time he chucks me free concert tickets he can't use. Anyway, enough of him… That was smashing, Tab. I want to take the conductor home and keep him for a pet, by the way. I never saw such a delectable young man.’

  Tabitha said, ‘There's a boy called Mike Corfield in the orchestra.’

  ‘Ah. Son, no doubt. I'm famished. For heaven's sake let's go and eat.’

  Later, Frances drove back to London alone. Zoe had gone north, on some journalistic assignment. Tabitha was in midterm. There was no further reason to be in Cambridge.

  Or, indeed, anywhere.

  She laid out her reactions to the day, and examined them. When you have been in the habit of expectation, of dangerous and excessive expectation, and when planning, fruitless planning, has been the practice of a lifetime, and when such habits are arbitrarily broken, a substitute is necessary. When you have learned finally and too late that life cannot be arranged and does not make sense, then there is nothing left but to move through days as they come, passively. Noting, simply, what happens.

  No tears, today. The twisting of the guts, at points, but that is standard. A moment of uplift, once: the skyline of King's chapel. Warmth of Zoe and Tabitha. Music, of course, a torment.

  She would return to an empty house, but that was something she had often done. Those who are married to public people become accustomed to returning to empty houses, to last-minute changes of plan, to apologetic telephone calls. Once, time out of mind ago, in the first months of marriage, she greeted Steven weeping and reproachful because he was two unexplained hours late: ‘I thought you'd had an accident. I was worried.’ And he had stared at her and said not unkindly but positively, ‘Frances, if you are going to be like that we shall be no good to each other. You mustn't try always to control everything.’

  There is what you intend to happen, and there is what happens. Events slip from the grasp; people, above all, evade. They set out as one thing, and become another.

  The quiet, clever, successful but companionable young man you married becomes a person harnessed to a larger world, wanted for this and that, the property of telephones and unknown voices, present but subtly absent. ‘Duckie,’ says Zoe, ‘this was always going to happen, you know. Didn't you realize? I did. And he's faithful, I can tell you that. It might have been other women.’ ‘But I never know, from day to day, what to expect.’ ‘Be thankful,’ says Zoe.

  Zoe, too, is snatched up by the course of events. She, too, is in the world of telegrams and not anger but irresistible forces. She cannot come for the weekend because the paper is sending her to cover a party conference; she must dash off on Boxing Day, sorry, because there's a chance to interview this visiting celebrity in London. Be my still calm centre, Frances love, she says, God knows I need one. And, in a different still calm centre, there she forever is, in the head, unreachable and unchanging.

  … Sitting cross-legged on a mottled green carpet that is balding and pitted in places with cigarette burns, squinting in a bar of sunlight and saying, ‘Stay and meet my brother Steven, my brother what I told you about, him that's just got a first the clever sod. He's all right, though, he's not like other people's brothers. You haven't got one, have you, duckie? Share mine.’ And she pours tea from a flowery Victorian pot that will one day stand on the mantelpiece of an office in Fleet Street, a home for Kleenex and rubber bands, one of the mindless things that travel with us through our lives: objects and places…

  Places, above all, are minefields. This, the grieving learn. Cambridge, now, has been braved, thought Frances. Cambridge, where last year Steven came with me to take Tabitha's stuff up for her and we quarrelled because I thought he was coming home after and in fact he was going to Manchester for a meeting and he said as it was he hadn't really the time for this… Not a happy day, no, but one that nevertheless made a minefield of Cambridge, which has now been gingerly trodden.

  Happiness, of course, is forever bound to place, to the physical world. We are never happy now, only then. Walking then on a Dorset hill, wind lifting the hair, and a hand, suddenly, on one's back… Sunlight sifting down through the apple tree in the garden at Pulborough, lying like coins among the daisies of the lawn. Happiness is out there, back there, in association with those sights and sounds, and to retrieve it is to retrieve them also, to bring them crowding into the dark bedroom at three in the morning: mocking. Perfect happiness, past perfect, pluperfect.

  Unhappiness, now so intimately known, is a very different matter. Unhappiness is now, not then at all. Unhappiness is like being in love: it occupies every moment of every day. It will not be put aside and like love it isolates; grief is never contagious.

  Loss clamped her every morning as she woke; it sat its grinding weight on her and rode her, like the old man of the sea. It roared in her ears when people talked to her so that frequently she did not hear what they said. It interrupted her when she spoke, so that she faltered in mid-sentence, lost track. A little less, now; remissions came and went. The days stalked by, taking her with them.

  On the first day, on the morning of the first day, the day after Steven was found dead from a heart-attack in his car in the car park of the BBC Television Centre she had woken in a world that had no right to be as it was, from which Steven had gone and in which all should be numbed with her. Instead of which birds sang beyond the window and sunshine lay in hazy blobs on the bedspread. She had lain fuddled still from the sleeping pills that Zoe, Tabitha, someone, had made her take and had fretted, absurdly and irrelevantly, because she did not even know for the recording of what programme he had gone there. He was often on television. The known and loved face talked to her, bizarrely, from beyond the glass as though she were a roomful of strangers.

  The sunshine lay on the bed and beyond the closed door was the day, into which she had to go. And the next day, and the next.

  And this one, eight months two weeks one day on, in which she drove now into the gathering traffic of outer London and eventually into the driveway of the house.

  The house which was not hers, in which she had lived by courtesy of Steven's office and from which, now, she would willingly move. It belonged to the college and they had inhabited it with reluctance. The tied cottage, Steven had called it, with deliberate irony: it shone anachronistically in a street of late-Victorian villas – a pillared and stuccoed building belonging to another time, that must once have stood in isolation amid fields and lanes. A graceful house, but impersonal in all the years she had lived there: an official home. The appointment of Steven's successor would not take effect for several months yet and the college administration had urged her to stay on if she wished, but she was anxious to go. She felt as though she were there on sufferance, as though the building itself waited politely for her departure. She had bought a house in another part of London, to which she would soon be able to move.

  She unlocked the door and picked up the post from the doormat. Letters still came for Steven; there was one now, a circular from a publisher. She walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle. The house stretched emptily around her in the same silence that once, in the days of young children, she would have greedily savoured. Solitude is enjoyed only by those who are not alone; the lonely feel differently about it.

  Frances had ceased, nowadays, to weep. There was a time when she was always crying. Tears came out of her in an unstoppable flow as though she bled from inexhaustible arteries. She could not see what she was doing, shuttered off by her tears, moving through a world that swam and shimmered, dripping into the kitchen sink, on to the wheel of the car, over the papers on the desk. Now, except for the occasional lapse, she was dry-eyed.
>
  She drank a cup of tea and read a letter from the lawyer about the purchase of the new house. There was a letter also from Harry, spending his months between school and college on the continent. The stamps were Italian but he wrote, apparently, from Yugoslavia. There was no date. She wondered why she did not worry more about this.

  The last letter was from the editor of a journal to whom she had written applying for a job. She had worked, on and off, as an editorial assistant: intermittently when the children were small, afterwards for a considerable length of time on a particular journal. When that job had come to an end a couple of years ago she had not sought another, relishing a period at home. She read the letter, which was polite but regretful: no assistance needed, either now or in the foreseeable future. It was Zoe who was urging her to look for something.

  ‘You've got to. Essential therapy.’

  ‘If it's just therapy, I can't be bothered. Anyway, a somewhat rusty forty-nine-year-old is not all that employable.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Zoe angrily. ‘And you cannot sit here pining. Thinking. Whatever you're doing. What the hell do you think Steven would have said?’

  ‘Oh, I know the sort of thing Steven would have said.’

  Steven gone has more controllable responses than Steven present. Yes, Steven would have said when a situation is irreversible you have got to see what can be done with it as it is. Not making the best of things – Steven never did that – investigating them. Steven never knew anything like this, of course, but if he had he would have coped. If it had been the other way round he would have mourned me, and looked ahead. Which is not callous but reasonable. And Steven was a man governed by reason.

  Not by passion. ‘I think,’ she said to Zoe, on the fifth day after Steven's death, ‘I always loved him more than he loved me.’ And Zoe, piling suits and shirts from the wardrobe, replied, ‘You are a person who does a lot of loving. Steven had his limitations, that way. He was driven by other things. But he loved you more than he ever loved anyone. And don't mull,’ she suddenly snapped, ‘I know you can't help it dammit but don't stew things over. Promise me. Here, fold this shirt.’