All This by Chance Read online

  It was a guarded but satisfying life, hectic with travelling each day in the Tube, the bustle and excitement of the laboratories and lecture rooms, the quiet spells in the library, or alone at the microscope. She enjoyed what she supposed was the rhythm of it, the easy casual friendships through the days, the haven of the sober house in Drayton Gardens, the effortless and welcome privacy as she managed to keep up with both. She shared a kitchen with two other girls, one a reserved Iranian economist at the LSE, the other a chatty Canadian who worked on the cosmetic counter at John Lewis’s, who sometimes passed on to her fellow tenants samples she had been given, until she realised neither showed interest in using them. The Canadian was seldom at home. She went to a sports club several evenings a week and saved each year for Wimbledon, when she took her annual leave. The Iranian girl surprised Lisa on a day that she said had significance for her by giving her a gold-rimmed ceramic vase. Then one day the girl was suddenly not there. It was mid-term, so she could not have finished her course. The landlady advertised and a week later a much older woman moved into the room, a librarian they seldom saw. ‘A strange one that,’ as the Canadian defined her. Like so much else over here, if you wanted her honest opinion.

  Dad was good at writing regularly from home, letters he always signed ‘from Eva’ as well. He kept her up with what he called ‘essential news’, which was mostly about the family, the trials of Miss McGovern’s visits, before Babcia died, details about elections and natural disasters, and what he picked up about ‘life over there on your side’. Gossip she might like to hear from back there too. That Doctor Satyanand’s boy had won a scholarship to Stanford. That the Sheridan girl, the one who had given her family such a runaround, Lisa would remember that all right, was now living with an Italian, which her mother took as a sign of settling down.

  She tried to make her own letters cheery and interesting, knowing they would be read aloud in the sitting room. Occasionally, there would be a letter written from the shop, when Stephen spoke more frankly of David’s moods and marriage and simmerings, and Eva’s depression, which seemed a little harder to shake off each time a spell came back to her. The specialist changed her medication rather too often, that was his own opinion, and other than doing well in his job David had little interest apart from young Esther and reading about the Shoah, until Stephen had asked him not to talk of it when visiting home. ‘His argument of course is that nothing comes from concealing things, although I tell him, and his mother too, not speaking of something is not at all the same thing as to conceal.’ Then making the kind of joke his son would never forgive him for, ‘He’s angry at times I think because people are so nice to him!’

  At least Lisa could write back about her courses, which Stephen liked to hear in detail, and the new medicines some of her colleagues were working on, and a paper she and one of her professors were publishing in the Lancet. ‘I feel I’m not showing off too much to blow a trumpet about that! In any case, not a lot has been done on the area so we’re scarcely scooping the pool.’

  She sent him cards to the shop as well. The Wren churches she had taken a liking to, how cold their grandeur could seem, but consoling too in some odd way. ‘I remember that phrase Mum used, about “letting the silence take you”. She also went to galleries and envied people who were touched by paintings as she was not. But how true it was, and she knew Dad would understand exactly, the deepening satisfaction as she followed the details of a disease and the strategies for its defeat. ‘Your mother was amused that you were disappointed when your yellow-fever suspect turned out to be something quite run of the mill.’ Frail enough jokes to pass between them. And as her father told her again, the pleasure Eva took in hearing her letters read aloud. The simple details that caught her interest, and she liked repeating, when so much else in her life she seemed indifferent to. ‘I liked hearing that.’ Her mother was glad it was no more than ten minutes’ walk from the station at Gloucester Road to where she lived, the big red house with its tree outside her window. ‘I think I remember where that street is. Close to where my English mother had a friend and I was taken there as a child. She gave us seed cake for afternoon tea and I hated it. What people go through in other places, my mother said, we are lucky to have cake at all.’

  Once Stephen had folded each of Lisa’s letters he placed it with others in a drawer in the sideboard, from which in those first few months Lisa was away, and towards the end of her own life, Babcia would sometimes take them, not to read, but to smooth her good hand across, to turn and raise to get whatever hint might be in their papery smell that she imagined took her for that moment closer to the girl she missed. Whose hair was too frizzy to brush.

  The trail, as Lisa jokingly called it, though only for Stephen’s ears, ‘the trail’ of what so bothered her brother and she herself accepted, was there one way or another, so important to other people once they thought they were onto it. As David of course so insisted that it was. But I refuse, Lisa thought, to be defined by what they imagine a Jew to be. Even the nicest of her friends coming at it, kind enough as they were. A shy Scottish boy called Alex, who worked close to her in the lab, who was mostly silent in the wards but cleverer than most of them, offered her an ‘opening’, she supposed that is what he intended. ‘We outsiders,’ he said once, after one of the senior consultants had spoken for several minutes to a confident, sporty young student, the only one of any of their year who drove a car, an Austin-Healey he dismissed as a ‘rust bucket, never mind what they’re cracked up to be’. And once he had left, the consultant becoming awkward, not knowing quite the tone to take to the quiet students also in the room.

  ‘Outsiders?’ Lisa repeated. ‘You mean our accents?’ Knowing that was not what her friend had meant.

  ‘Well. Different,’ Alex said.

  ‘As we all are.’

  ‘Some people are loners and some aren’t,’ Alex persisted. ‘Background and stuff. You must know that.’

  ‘Good try!’ she laughed with him. She said she wouldn’t have a pint after work but a coffee, yes, she was always on for a coffee. ‘Outsider’ got it right, was close enough as far as it went. But she was liked because she was generous and smart, among the quickest of them to pick up unlikely symptoms when they made their rounds of the wards. And as Alex was the first to admit, she’s a bit too canny, that lass, for the likes of Aberdeen.

  She knew Alex was hoping to put a label on her, that harmless enough assumption she sometimes found with others too, that if she admitted to the word they waited for, then presto, all mysteries were solved! She was more cautious with Harry Morris, the only one of their intake who spoke as a genuine Londoner, every word announcing, Look, I’m the scholarship boy who worked his way up. He was not, like Alex, drawn to her as a possible girlfriend—she was older than most of them, didn’t that deter them? And whose mother, as he joked, would want her boy bringing home an older wife?

  Lisa knew he watched her with a different kind of attention. He said to her one afternoon, as they shared a microscope and jotted notes, ‘With my eyesight I’m likely to be wrong about the next person comes through that door, but I could have sworn I saw you Finchley way last weekend? You got people there?’

  She was not to be drawn so clumsily. It would have been truthful enough, simple enough, to say her father had worked up that way just after the war, she was curious to see what it was like, if the shop was still there. Instead, ‘I was looking for Keats’s house,’ she said. ‘To send a card to my father.’

  ‘You were well out then,’ Harry said. ‘That’s right up the Heath end.’

  ‘So I found out.’

  ‘He’s a teacher is he, your father?’

  ‘A pharmacist. The way Keats was.’

  ‘He wasn’t, was he? The poet?’

  ‘Halfway to being a doctor.’

  ‘News to me,’ Harry said.

  ‘My dad hates scenes of London buses and the Royal Family. I thought I’d give him a surprise.’

  Harry withdrew
the slide they had shared, carefully read the label on another, and placed it beneath the glass. ‘Must have been a walk,’ he said. ‘More Golders Green way, I thought I spotted you.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She smiled as he moved aside for her to take her turn at the eyepiece. ‘I don’t know London the way you do, Harry. I was out by a few stops.’

  ‘A long way from Keats then,’ he said. They kept up the light tone between them. She told him, ‘You’ve put that slide upside down.’ Then she laughed, and looked at him directly, and was glad she had cornered him. ‘You don’t need to be so crafty, Harry,’ she informed him. ‘So gunif. Why not just ask me straight out?’ It surprised her, how the word came to her. She would have liked to write about that to Dad, how she had dredged up this word that he used himself, that Sam Abrams so liked to use, and it amused him. She wanted to tell him. But Dad would have had to read it out, and Eva would not quite get the joke, and David would know it was one but not know why, and take offence.

  Nor did she mention Murray to them, which would take more explaining. After the time with Fergus she feared how easily mistakes are made. Not that Murray was one. But the fear there too of closing doors, of delivering herself to how others then define. When David had first discovered Sartre he was on about such things until she told him, Wait until you’ve lived, can you, before stressing about that one? Authenticity and the rest of it. Too big a word to be shackled to, she had said to him, the kind of teasing he expected from her. But knew it was real.

  Murray, the reserved but entertaining Australian who worked in the School’s medical library, who made a fuss of her. ‘You mustn’t take it as condescending,’ he said, ‘the fact that I am taller than you and reach the volumes down for you.’ But politely distant too, as if biding his time. Then one morning he sat with her, as he sometimes did in the cafeteria, and laid his copy of the New Statesman on the table between them. He declared, ‘Librarians and doctors, you might have noticed, are equally inept at social skills. I thought this leading story about Soviet policy might make us both feel at ease.’

  ‘Murray, as if your Queensland charm isn’t enough.’

  He looked about him to the other tables. ‘A club of two surrounded by natives,’ he said. ‘We need each other, Lisa.’

  She knew he watched out for her. He tried to time it so there were only the two of them together. Murray stirring two sugars into his black tea, as Lisa held her coffee with both hands.

  ‘Bad manners but comforting,’ she said.

  ‘It’s that scent of formaldehyde that gets me,’ he said. ‘Librarians are too conservative to wear anything so arousing.’

  ‘Female librarians?’

  ‘Don’t get me started,’ he advised her. ‘Harpic. Sheep drench. The men can be impossible too.’

  Then some weeks later he mentioned Paris in the mid-term break.

  ‘Paris? It’s a sweet life for some.’

  ‘We could make it Berlin. Blackpool. You’re the one to say.’

  He expected her to say no, to keep up their easy banter. It was fun to see how an acceptance seemed to disconcert him. ‘You’re not accepting, are you?’ His hand ruffling the side of his head.

  They were four days as none other had been, she knew that for both of them. Their predictable enough strolling about the city neither had visited before, the things all tourists must do, the wine late at night with the swathes of light from the bateaux mouches shining out across the river, the trees and cafés on the quays catching the passing flare, the shadows again deepening as they passed.

  ‘I’ve seen all this before,’ Murray said. ‘I’ve known this movie since I was fifteen.’

  And the hours they spent in bed. They were hungry for the chance they had, they knew there would not be another time like this. ‘But realists as we are,’ Lisa said, insisting they get out early, back to their game of seeing what they could of the city. Murray telling her, ‘But we can be tourists for the rest of our lives. All I want to be now is an antipodean sensualist. Camus would have understood me. He was a light and sand person the way we are.’

  Lisa said, ‘Isn’t that a drink?’ And an hour later he kissed her again, drawing her towards him on the bench where they sat in the garden behind Notre-Dame. She said, ‘The whole world kisses here.’

  ‘It’ll do me,’ Murray said. ‘Bugger the rest of them.’

  Then Lisa surprising him, and herself as well, by the quietness of how she spoke as much as the words that came to her. ‘The biggest gift of all, Murray, saying “love” without forever coming into it.’ Then that night, back in the hotel window that looked down on where they had eaten at a bistro called Le Buci, they held hands for a long time without needing to speak, and were sentimental, which they knew was the thing to be, that was part of what made it perfect. Then her standing behind him, her hands around his waist, feeling for the buckle of his belt, her head against the warmth of his back. Those at the tables on the corner beneath might almost have seen them standing naked had they looked up to the half-closed shutters. Her breasts pressed against his warmth, her tongue across his vertebrae. ‘Christ, Lisa, I don’t know if I can take much of that! How many bones are we supposed to have?’

  ‘Takes a long time to count,’ she said, ‘even if one’s trained.’ And her knowing, as Murray did too, that their eroticism had become something lovely, something rare, the better for not being solemn. They then lay and talked half the night, so it seemed.

  ‘How my sister in Toowomba, the one who doesn’t believe in God so much, I think, as in sin with a big S, would envy us, don’t you reckon, if she had an inkling of how nice it is?’

  ‘That’s what some of us miss out on,’ Lisa said. ‘Brought up without sin. It’s getting things for free.’

  She told him how hard her father had worked for them not to be swamped by the past. ‘That’s the word he used because you’ve no idea how he loved my mother, I think, in those early days. When he didn’t want the past to own her in any way. And nor did she. Crossing the world back to where he came from, he really believed you can get away from the rotten things that happen, that want to define us. He tried to bring us up without being ruled by a word like transgress.’

  ‘I like the sound of him.’

  ‘It was a fairy tale,’ Lisa said. ‘Everyone thinks they’ve got a better one than the other person, that you can make up your own.’

  A plate—or several plates—broke on the pavement of the restaurant beneath them. That long second of silence, and then the sound of talk coming up to them again, even louder, and laughter.

  ‘Hope he’s not out of a job,’ Murray said.

  Lisa said, ‘How can so many people want to sit out late when they can be home doing this?’ Murray’s hand raised to the tangle of her hair, her neck, his lips at her shoulder, drawing her to lie across him.

  She locked her arms behind his head. To make love. She had never thought of it like this, something we construct, and cannot assume, and does not exist without our knowing that. The freedom to decide that is what it meant. Her fingers playing across his back. Her exulting in the luck of it. But her thinking, even now, her palms pressing down on his chest, why is it so hard to say anything and get it right?

  The day was dull and scoured as they crossed the Channel, then the rain came in broad veiling sweeps across the countryside before the train reached London. Murray tapped the window at the diminishing colour, the sombre late afternoon light. ‘See what I mean about Queensland?’ he said. ‘Why it ruins you forever?’

  ‘The surfie librarian,’ Lisa called him, looking at him against the late sky, now a drab rag.

  ‘My female Schweitzer,’ he came back at her. His hand rested quietly on her leg. Two older people opposite dozed against the padded headrest. An irritable-looking young man in the corner near the sliding door turned the pages of a magazine, slapping at each one as he decided he had read enough. They were again in the suburbs, the long uniform rows of houses ticking past, the streetlights hazed with
rain. Then the moment when people stand to reach things down from the racks, and the rhythm on the rails slackens. When something ends and something else is about to begin. They were quiet as they walked the long platform, and held each other before Murray left the station to take a number 10. Lisa descended to the Tube.

  It was dark once she left the station and passed the brick wall out into the night. Already, the time away refining down to the few images she knew would stay with her, so matter of fact, so special. Why is one memory so favoured, rather than another? A boy in a small restaurant, more a family room than the grander ones near their hotel, a young boy showing them a photograph of his brother holding a black goat between his knees. Her looking only yesterday morning, and yet already so much further than that, at a grey stone figure in the famous church, a woman with a child on her arm, the elegant curve of her body making Lisa think, absurd as it was, of the way tornadoes she had seen in news reports kink as they moved so gracefully towards one. She supposed the statue must have particular significance, the way people stopped at it, and some knelt in front of it. Or on the wooden bridge walking back the night before, and the buildings to either side rising against a sky that had the glow of distant fires. And now as she walked past the tall English houses into her own street, into the stillness of the shrubs and trees that spread their aura of calm, she knew that however fine the time with Murray had been, this sudden swelling sense of privacy, of total return to herself, was the central fact of her life. A thought that might have saddened her, and yet did not. Not what she had chosen, but what she was. She fitted her key to the front door’s Yale lock. There is a limit, she told herself, to how useful introspection might be. You can love someone and yet think this as well.

  The other women on the middle floor were not yet back from their break. Nor was there the light she expected to see from beneath the door to Mrs Beardsley’s sitting room. The big house for the time being was her own. Now that she was back she knew how tired she was. Tired and contented. How her brother would have loathed the sloppiness, as he would call it, of how loosely you lot think, you scientists! Contented! It sounded like children settling down after a nice party. She supposed it was something like that in any case, home from a nice indulgent party with Murray. The nicest man she had known.