Perfect Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page A

stuffed into a black plastic bag the contents of those ransacked drawers – the old calendars and Christmas cards and engagement diaries. The black plastic bag would be received into the churning maw of the council lorry and the shredded remains consigned to some smouldering rubbish tip. Or so one supposed. The diary with its dead days would become pulp or ash and the days themselves would survive only in the head, a random selection. Most would be extinguished, unless they happened to include the assassination of Kennedy, or more personal circumstances whose echoes inescapably persist.
    The wedding day, preserved in the photographer's album gently requested by Steven's parents (and indulgently despised by hers, people of a different caste of mind). Glossy faces smiling (or not) amid flowers and hats and the draperies of some public room. The album must be kept, though what it shows is neither what happened nor what was rehearsed, at least by Frances. Mostly, what did not happen is eclipsed by what did, but those dreaming rehearsals, curiously, survived yet, the anticipatory time during which she went to work and rode in London buses and controlled in the head the processes of that day. Held conversations and constructed scenes, considered and arranged and re-arranged. Presided over the fraternization of her parents and the Brooklyns, hopefully joined together Zoe and her friend Henry Winters, drove away with Steven into – well, no, not into the sunset but at least a rose-tinted plane to Venice. All this lingers still, but is overlaid by the sharper image of her mother and father, smiling benignly but uncomprehendingly at the Brooklyns who are enduring the day, and can be seen to be doing so. And Henry Winters was unable in the event to come and did not care for Zoe when eventually he did meet her. And the plane was tiresomely delayed so that what remains is irritability at the airport born of tiredness and subsiding elation. And Steven's briefcase, stuffed with work which surely could have been laid aside for a few days. And Zoe, later, fondly scoffing: ‘Your parents, love, and our mum and dad, will send each other Christmas cards for five years and be thankful never to set eyes on one another again. Our mum and dad are alarmed by yours, and yours are made uncomfortable by ours. So what? Why should everybody love each other?’ – and, reading Frances's thoughts – ‘Oh yes, of course they like Steven, your dad can spot a young man who's going to go far, and don't think I'm being snide, he's not a headmaster of a famous school for nothing, he knows a high-flier when he sees one. So Steven gets the British Housemaster seal of approval. And don't look like that, you silly girl, my mum and dad don't want dinner invitations and weekend parties; they want to sit tight where they feel safe and no-one's going to expect them to put themselves out.’
    Thus, the wedding day. Crystallized now, but susceptible of course to the revisions of what is yet to be.
    Making love, at last, in the Venetian hotel, in the small hours of the morning, exhausted and with waning desire but mutual compunction. Frances dazed suddenly with the realization that it is true, it has happened, she is married to Steven. Standing beside the bed pulling off her clothes, with the new nightdress laid out ready and Steven saying I shouldn't bother to put that on, darling. Are you sure you want… she says, seeing for an instant his tired face, and he answers firmly that of course he does, why, don't you? Have you…? says Steven delicately, and she says just a minute, I'll pop in the bathroom, and once there she takes the diaphragm from her toilet bag and looks at it and puts it back again with guilt and abandon knowing that he would be cross but she can always say it was an accident, everyone knows they're not a hundred per cent reliable. And oh please God may I have a baby. Lying beside Steven in the morning, holding his hand, water slapping the sides of a