Perfect Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page B

she had little or nothing useful to offer, but people had been insistent. People she did not know, or hardly knew. Voices and names from Steven's external life; voices to whom, over the years, she had said sorry, I'm afraid he's not back yet… can you just hold on, I'll write that down… Names at the foot of letters, scrawled on memo pads.
    Well, go with him, says Zoe, years back, counselling, calming… Go to the bloody conference with him, leave the kids with your mum, go and swan around Stockholm or wherever it is for a few days. And so, suddenly, there she had been in this glassed and carpeted hotel in which milled people docketed with their names and occupations and where Steven, similarly docketed, underwent before her eyes a strange metamorphosis. He became someone else. She saw him on the far side of rooms, on platforms, hurrying down corridors, and she saw him as a different person. His expression and his gestures lost the significance of intimacy and became those of an acquaintance. The response of others fed this process; she caught snatches of conversation – ‘Brooklyn of course has a personal axe to grind’, ‘I want to get Steven on the sub-committee’, ‘Steven Brooklyn could be sounded out on that’. At night, in bed, she searched his face and found in it the shadow of this stranger. She told him that she felt, here, distanced from him, and they quarrelled, in that alien room, with light from passing cars washing across the linen-weave curtains. He said, ‘Frances, sometimes you are possessive’, and the words, for years – still, today – stayed in her ears. She wanted to ask him if he loved her, and did not do so. The next day, she sat with a hundred others in a lecture hall and stared at Steven as he spoke: the way the light flashed on his glasses, the tiny scar on his cheek from when he fell off his bike as a boy, the bit of hair that flopped down on to his forehead, the shirt that she had washed. They had been married now for seven years and she thought of this man for much of every day; his moods and his requirements dominated her life not by reason of selfishness or arrogance but because she wished it so. He was her centre. Sitting here, in this strange city, among strangers, her own obsession seemed both misplaced and irrelevant. After the lecture people had gathered round him. She saw him locked in conversations, jotting something on a pad, turning to those who loitered for a word. A man she recognized, a colleague of Steven's from home, said, ‘Busy fellow nowadays, your husband, you'll have to wait your turn.’ She flushed, for herself and at his ineptitude. After that, she seldom accompanied Steven on such occasions. There were tracts of his life of which she knew little, alien jungles whose allure she resented but to which she was resigned. Despising herself, she envied the safely paired lives of neighbouring women. She paid bills and attended school speech days alone and read Steven's name in newspapers, often in contexts of which she knew nothing. If she asked him questions he answered patiently. If I don't tell you about things, he said, it's because I assume you wouldn't find them particularly interesting. I spent all morning with the Roland Committee. I had lunch with someone from the BBC. In the afternoon I gave a lecture at the Institute and then was nobbled by a rather tiresome woman called somebody Geering who wants me to contribute to a journal she edits. He looks across the room, smiling; in a bowl, blue hyacinths lurch on fleshy stalks and beyond the window Tabitha and Harry whoop on the garden swing.
    The Institute was in a part of London she did not know. Stopping on a corner, she studied the A to Z . The street, in fact, was in a state of frenzied transition. One one side, a terrace of nineteenth century houses was decked with builders' signs and ‘For Sale’ notices; raw new windows gaped glassless, the pavement was littered with hillocks of yellow sand. Here and