Read Online Perfect Happiness by Penelope Lively - Free Book Online

the physical world, they had the sharpness of accessories in dreams; she was acutely aware of sight and sound. The world seemed to glow and roar around her. ‘For lunch, you mean?’
    ‘Frances,’ said Ruth Bowers. ‘It's past four o'clock in the afternoon now. Look, dear, I don't want to pry, but are you sure you're all right at the moment. I passed you in the piazza this morning and you seemed kind of dazed.’
    ‘I'm fine,’ said Frances. ‘Truly.’ She achieved, from somewhere, a smile, a brisk reassuring smile. ‘Enjoying the sights. Harry's getting on well, they say. Do let's meet up tomorrow.’ And smiling still she left Ruth Bowers, who watched her go, seeing a woman with unkempt hair, dark pouches under her eyes and a crumpled skirt.
    At some point that evening, when Frances was sitting at a café in one of the smaller and more hidden squares, she knew that she had been here before, on this precise spot. She looked up at the floodlit façade of a church and knew that that same arrangement of pink and apricot light was lodged within her head, the accompaniment to Steven's voice asking if she would like to go to a concert. She is wearing a pink striped dress; they have eaten a delicious meal; from time to time, with tranquil pleasure, she wonders if she is pregnant. She looks up at this glowing floating church and Steven asks if she would like to go to a concert. And the whiff of all this hung still in the square as she had known it would if only she searched long enough. The public place became private, hers alone, and she sat there until the peace that she had won tipped suddenly back into restless uncertainty. The waiter, his eye on the solitary woman who had sat so long with a single drink, saw her rise in sudden agitation and watched her hurry away, one drab foreign tourist among many.
    She telephoned, and again Zoe was not there. She left a message, a bleak sentence delivered with painful urgency: ‘What colour were Steven's eyes?’
    On the morning of the fourth day Ruth Bowers began to follow Frances through the streets of Venice. She trotted some twenty or thirty paces behind, weaving deftly through the crowds, and at the points when she thought Frances might turn and see her she would stop to stare in a shop window, or study the details of a building. In fact, these ruses were quite unnecessary, as she suspected: Frances was seeing nothing.
    In London, Zoe, returning to her flat, pressed the switch of her answering machine before pouring two glasses of whisky, one for herself and one for Eric Sadler. When Frances's voice came through, first once and then – after another message from someone else – again, Zoe put down her glass and stood staring at the machine. She listened once more to the messages. She said, ‘I knew I should have gone with her.’
    She looked at Eric and said, ‘I have this blasted assignment in Edinburgh tomorrow’, and Eric, a big man with grizzled hair and the sagging belly of the desk-bound scowled for a moment in thought and then said, ‘Hang on, lovey, didn't you say that pal of yours – what's-his-name, the musical guy – didn't you say he was in Venice?’
    ‘Morris!’ cried Zoe, ‘You clever sod. Dead right – he was going there to lecture to something or other.’
    There was something she should do, but she could not think what it was. Some obligation that tugged like the reality lying beyond the compulsive world of a dream. She walked out into the morning knowing that there was some person she should visit, with whom she was concerned. Standing in the drumming heat of the piazza she knew suddenly that it was Harry, that she was here in Venice with Harry, but she no longer remembered why, or where he might be. She was in a condition of juddering nervousness. The calm grey state of grief had gone and in its place had come a jagged anxiety bordering on panic; her legs felt weak and she found herself constantly holding on to things – balustrades, the backs