by Tessa Hadley
—Good God, said David. —Why didn’t you call me?
Suzie shrugged. —I was OK. There was no need.
But he knew as she turned round that she wasn’t OK. Usually Suzie was sturdy and steady; she had a wholesome closed muzzle of a face that made him think of a fox, with its sandy colouring and the fine fair down that showed in a certain light. She was tall and lean and big-boned, her broad shoulders set defiantly against challenge; only now something was jangled loose in her as if she’d touched a live wire, and her hair had dried in a dark mat that clung to her head. It frightened him to see her blue eyes startled open.
—Actually, Suzie said, busy cutting up Joel’s pizza, —I called Giulia.
Giulia was Suzie’s headmistress at Ladysmith School, and her friend.
—It was easier for her to come out from the school and bring me home, once I’d given my statement to the police. Then she insisted on taking me for a check-up at the hospital. Jamie was picking the kids up anyway, because I’d thought I might be late. And I was fine, they said. Just a bit shaken up.
—I wish you’d called me.
She tried to smile at him. When she put Joel’s plate down on the table he saw that her hands were shaking. —Never mind, she said. —It doesn’t matter now.
David made her describe to him exactly where the accident took place; he wanted to understand why this lorry had pulled out so carelessly, so outrageously into the traffic. Suzie couldn’t remember things precisely. She said it had all happened very fast. He imagined the chaos, the rain, the scorch of horror that had brushed close.
—Where’s Jamie? he said angrily. —Why isn’t he helping?
Jamie was David’s seventeen-year-old son from his first marriage.
—Call him. Ask him if he wants pizza.
—You shouldn’t be standing here doing all this. Why don’t you go and lie down? I’ll take over. I’ll bring you a cup of tea, or a drink.
—I’d rather be busy, really.
Jamie was in his bedroom in the attic space. He lay on his back on the bed, smoking, and he didn’t even turn his head as David lifted the trapdoor and climbed through; the room was thick with the rank smell of dope. A familiar sensation of impotence seized David; he didn’t know how to talk to this boy, or how to know what his thoughts were, or how to forbid what ought to be forbidden him. Jamie didn’t rage or fight, he simply ignored whatever they told him: don’t pull the ladders up into the attic after you, don’t smoke, don’t smoke in the house, don’t stay out at night without letting us know where you are. When they tried to be outraged he smiled as though he was embarrassed for them. David opened the skylight to let out the smell.
—Suzie asks, do you want pizza?
—Is she OK now? Jamie said. —I’m sorry about the swan.
—What swan?
—Hasn’t she told you? The one that came down on her car.
—On her car? What are you talking about?
He thought the boy might be befuddled with dope.
Jamie sat up on his elbow. He was wearing some sort of torn vest; he shook back the thick copper-brown hair that he chopped off with scissors himself at shoulder-length. Something in the wide face, with its faint adolescent rash over the thickening cheekbones, distinctive thick creases under the eyes, and black brows like quick pencil strokes, stirred and pained David, who was not used to thinking of men as beautiful; the boy was like his mother (which was not reassuring). Jamie’s brown feet at the end of the bed were bare and huge, with dirty soles and coarse sinewy knobbled toes; they had transformed out of soft child-feet in some instant while David wasn’t looking.
—A swan came down and hit her car, made her swerve into the fast lane.
—She didn’t tell me it was a swan. Perhaps she didn’t want to upset the children.
—It must have hit power lines. Then it bounced against the side of a lorry and onto the bonnet of her car.
The picture was vivid to David for a moment: melodramatic, not Suzie’s kind of thing at all. —Knowing what Hannah’s like, he said. —She’d be more upset about a swan than if people had been hurt.
—They rang home from the hospital. Giulia was with her.
David was flooded with irritation again. Sometimes recently when he and Suzie disagreed – over whether they should consider sending Hannah to Howells, the private girls’ school, for instance – Suzie quoted at him Giulia’s opinions, Giulia’s wisdom; she didn’t know she was doing it, or that he minded. Giulia was against private education, she involved herself headlong in all the ragbag of social problems the pupils at her school presented, she paid out of her own pocket the taxi fare for a family of Roma children who travelled to the school every day from across the city. David liked her but he thought she acted impulsively, with a dangerous idealism. Sometimes when he came home he found the house empty and all of them round at Giulia’s. Or Giulia and Suzie would be sitting drinking wine at his kitchen table, talking animatedly and rashly, the way women did, so that he felt shut out from their fun.
The children reacted in the aftermath of the accident. Hannah thumped through her keyboard practice with hot cheeks and swelled with surplus emotion, weeping extravagantly when Suzie told her off for tickling Joel, who hated it. Joel lay mute and still in his bath, then shivered in his Spiderman pyjamas and refused to get into bed, because he caught sight of the moon through his bedroom window. He had been afraid of the moon when he was a baby. When David came downstairs after reading their stories he found Suzie standing in the kitchen over a sink full of winter branches she had cut in the garden to take into school for her January table: bedraggled yellow jasmine and gnarled apple tree and silver birch thickening and reddening already with buds. Her hair was wet again and she seemed to give out into the centrally heated air the cold breath of the rain-soaked garden. She pretended to be busy, tying up the branches with twine. Her hands were big and unbeautiful: skilled at cutting out with infant scissors, tying laces, rubbing magic cream into grazed knees.
—You shouldn’t be going into school tomorrow.
—I want to, she said heavily without looking at him. —I’m really all right.
—I’ll give you a lift in, then.
—There’s no need. Menna’s picking me up. The new teacher, covering our maternity leave.
He expected her to tell him then what had really happened on the motorway, but she didn’t speak. They went to bed after David had watched Newsnight; he lay trying to pick up the threads in the article on veterinary medicine he was supposed to be reading, listening to where water was sluicing noisily somewhere outside from a gutter blocked with leaves. Suzie was sorting piles of clean washing and putting them away. She was tidy and house-proud: the children had clean clothes every day, the airing cupboard was piled high with ironed sheets and towels. Even though the house when they bought it four years ago had been newly decorated, Suzie had redone every room since then. Her little touches were everywhere: curtain tie-backs, friezes pasted on the wallpaper, bowls of potpourri, carved acorn light-pulls, dishes of glass pebbles, thriving house plants. The children’s toys were tidied away each evening into labelled storage boxes. The only place Suzie hadn’t reached was Jamie’s attic: Jamie had said calmly once that he would leave home if ever she touched anything in there, and Suzie had agreed that if he wanted to live in a pit then who was she to interfere. All the transactions between these two had used to flare with violence, even though Suzie had looked after Jamie since he was small: things had been better recently. So the attic was bare and painted white without rugs or a blind on the skylight, and Jamie stacked his books in piles against the walls and kept his clothes in heaps and slept in dirty sheets he changed himself every few months.
Suzie finished putting things away and began to undress for her shower; she fumbled out of her clothes with her shoulder blades hunched as if she was uncomfortably aware of being watched. Usually she was blithely indifferent; the readiness with which she stripped had shocked him when they first slept
together.
—Why didn’t you tell me about the swan? he asked, looking at her over the top of his reading glasses while she was smothered inside her T-shirt. When she pulled off the shirt, her hair still stiff with rain stuck up in a ruff around her face, as if she was roused against him.
—How did you know?
—You told Jamie.
—Did I? I don’t remember.
She sat down in her underwear on the end of the bed, hugging her arms around her chest, her long back bent, her near-nakedness private as a child’s.
—I’m sorry, he said. —I don’t mean to make you talk about it if it upsets you. All that matters is that you’re not hurt.
—You won’t like it, Suzie said.
—What won’t I like?
—What I felt I saw.
—Tell me. How could I mind?
She lifted her eyes; her face was cloudy with the effort of thought.
—When this thing came hurtling down out of the sky at me I thought it was Francesca.
—Oh, for God’s sake.
Francesca was David’s first wife, Jamie’s mother; Suzie had never known her. She had killed herself by jumping out of a window when Jamie was three, after leaving David and going to live on the ninth floor in a high-rise council block.
—I hadn’t been thinking about her. I never think about her. Then: thump, on my bonnet. Intuitively I just knew, it was her.
—That’s ridiculous.
—You see: I knew you’d hate it.
David took off his reading glasses and folded them. —I don’t feel anything about it except that it doesn’t mean anything. The mind throws up all kinds of rubbish when you’re in shock.
—She wasn’t rubbish.
He was patient, turning his eyes away. —I didn’t mean her, needless to say. I just meant, your making any kind of association between that and what happened to you today.
—We never talk about her.
He shrugged. —Why would we? What could there be to say, after all this time?
—You can’t imagine the force of the blow when it hit me, how heavily it fell: the whole car leaped, it leaped. Surely too heavy for a swan. And then everything went dark. I hadn’t time to think of any rational explanation.
—But now you know what the rational explanation was.
—Yes, I suppose so.
Irritation squeezed David like a fist: he had chosen Suzie just because she was sensible.
—You know so, he said absolutely.
—Yes. Suzie stood up, to go into the bathroom and take her shower.
—Did you talk about any of this stuff to Giulia?
She shook her head. —No, not to anyone.
And then, when she had showered and they had put out the bedside lights, Suzie fell easily asleep in spite of everything: on her side with her back to him and her knees drawn up, breathing lightly through her nose, radiating clean heat scented with whatever shampoo she’d used. David lay aridly awake. Long afterwards he heard Jamie dropping down from his trapdoor like a cat, prowling the house, helping himself to food in the kitchen, letting himself out at the front door with his bike; he cycled for hours at night and then slept half the day, probably missing classes at college. David tried to imagine how it would feel, to sleep and wake when you wanted to, to choose your life without thinking of anybody else, not to be broken in to the hard frame of adult necessity.
David and Suzie had first met in Regent’s Park. Neither of them had ever been there before or after that day, so it remained a bright free space in their imagination: sunlit stately walks, vistas down aisles of tall flowers, fountains splashing. David, who was working at that time at Guy’s, had had a free morning: he was wheeling Jamie in his pushchair. Suzie was in the second year of her teacher training at Goldsmiths, she was skipping lectures. Jamie was really too old for the pushchair, but he refused to walk anywhere: he would sit in it with his knees up almost to his chin, leaning keenly forward, weaving his old rag of yellow blanket into its ritual knot between his fingers, sucking its corner wrapped around his thumb, frowning out at the world from behind its safety. That morning in the park he hurt himself – probably he trailed his foot and David ran over it, that was always happening. Suzie was a tall fair girl in a sleeveless flowered dress, passing: David had only resented at first that she was witness to his shame, his helplessness, the screaming child. That year after Francesca’s death was the worst year of his life.
Suzie was eating an ice cream. She hesitated and looked at Jamie.
—Would he like some?
David had lifted him out of the pushchair and put him on a park bench to look at his foot (which was only bruised); Suzie sat down on the bench and held the ice-cream cone tentatively out.
—If you want it, she said, —you have to stop crying and come onto my knee.
Jamie had looked at her suspiciously, but then to David’s surprise climbed onto her lap; he wasn’t a child who cuddled easily, but he allowed himself to be hugged against her chest in return for licks of ice cream; his sobs subsided. Suzie’s freckled arms around him were awkward as if she wasn’t used to little children.
—I’m afraid he’ll make you sticky.
—I don’t care. This is only an old thing.
When David said then that her dress was pretty he was only politely anxious for it, he didn’t take much notice of women’s clothes; but Suzie misinterpreted. She’d only stopped in the first place, she told him afterwards, because she thought he was attractive.
—Where’s his mum? she asked, appraising David frankly.
That little scene, the child calmed and surrendered on her lap, hadn’t really been at all representative of what was to follow. Suzie had found mothering Jamie fraught and difficult, Jamie had not easily allowed her close. But in that decisive hour, Suzie’s uncomplicated openness had seemed to David like a door out of the dark maze of his troubles.
Two
CAROL ROBERTS CALLED one morning to see how Kate was getting on. She and Kate had been to school together, and then to University College London; that was all long ago. Out of the gang that had been friends together then, perhaps Carol had changed least: she was still shy in personal relations, brusque, graceless, generous; she still had her coarse straw-yellow curls, although they were darkening and silvering, which suited her strong square physique and red complexion better. Carol had been working back in Wales for years, for one of the big housing associations, of which she was now the Director. She would be borrowing the time to see Kate out of her unimaginably busy life, in which she was no doubt resourceful and formidable, and about which she never complained, though occasionally she groaned and lay flat on her back on the floor with sheer weariness, or told hooting outraged stories about Assembly Members, or pleaded for huge slugs of gin in her tonic.
She parked her car by the lake, then walked up the steep zigzag path through the rockery as she always did, for old times’ sake, because once she and Kate had played here, pretending to be in the French Resistance, or revolutionaries escaping from the state police. They had not made friends until they were thirteen or fourteen, but Kate was a fantasist, prolonging imaginary games long after they were supposed be left behind. At the top of the zigzag she peered through windows into the empty dining room, then pushed round the side of the house through the overgrown laurels and escallonia, waiting at the front door without ringing the bell; music floated from indoors. Carol was practical but also afflicted with strong sentiment. A violin and a piano were playing something nineteenth century, written to be haunting in its sweet slightness, and to suggest the lost past. Carol had been coming to this house for ever. These last few years Kate had come home often for weekends, and when she did Carol had always visited; she had visited when Billie was alone here, too, insisting that she didn’t do it out of kindness but because she genuinely liked her friend’s mother. She said she thought of Billie as a character out of the sort of novel she wasn’t subtle enough to read (Carol had done Sociology at uni
versity; Kate had done Slavic Languages). Kate said the novel was getting to be Finnegans Wake.
—God, you’re in tears, Kate exclaimed when she opened the door; the music had finished and Carol had pressed the bell, which chimed rustily a long way off (for the attention of the maids there hadn’t been for fifty years).
—Aren’t I an idiot? Carol said. —It was hearing you play.
—Were we that bad? Billie, do you hear? We were so awful we made Carol cry. You look smart: I suppose those are your work clothes. I’m rather in awe of you in a suit. There’s a touch of alderman about it on you, you know. Or dowager. Dowager alderman.
—Are you all right? Is it really the truth that you’ve given up your job and let your flat? Max phoned me.
—I’ll tell you what: I’m almost crying with cold. The central heating’s playing up and the man says naturally that we need a new boiler, and I refuse to believe there isn’t something he could do to fix this one. So we’re at an impasse. Keep your coat on, I would.
Billie was sitting at the baby grand in the drawing room at the back of the house, in a dress patterned with blue cornflowers and a white cardigan. The gas fire was turned up high and the room seemed impossibly hot to Carol.
—Mummy; it’s Carol.
—Oh, how nice, said Billie, smiling serenely, turning round from the piano with her hands still poised over the notes; her pink skin hadn’t wrinkled but had turned matte and soft with age. She had taught piano to Carol once long ago and very little of it had stayed except that the hands above the keys must be shaped as though holding oranges. —Dear Carol. It’s such a long time since we’ve seen Carol. Isn’t it?
Carol kissed Billie, peeled off her mac and her jacket. Her face flared up with heat; she resigned herself to feeling, in the presence of these two diminutive tiny-boned women, as she always had, as if she was made of some coarser grade of flesh than theirs; Kate’s face with its shadowed sculpted hollows and long Nefertiti eyes seemed finely complicated where Carol’s was straightforward. Kate was dressed in her usual bemusing layers, maroon and green and cream, suggesting the kind of London shops Carol wouldn’t dare go into, although she wasn’t afraid of any other kind of authority; the cuffs of Kate’s black lacy cardigan were pulled over her hands as if she was cold and the tip of her nose was red. Carol dropped onto the chair that was as far from the fire as possible; the panes of the French windows that ran the length of the room were actually steaming up. The winter-dead wisteria that fell like a curtain from the roof of the open veranda at the back of the house blocked out the light, so that they needed the lamps switched on in the middle of the day.