by Tessa Hadley
—It’s a good scythe, Jamie said to Billie, the rosebud teacup improbable in his fingers swollen hot and red from the work. He had already swallowed a pint of water at the kitchen sink.
—My father bought it. Although he was a businessman, he knew about the importance of working with good tools, he would only ever buy the best. Once, our property here stretched all the way up the hill, you know. When Kate was a child she used to play in our own little wood. All the trees are gone now except for our apple trees and that great beech behind the flats.
—Billie thinks sometimes she’s a White Russian exile. A princess probably; there were so many princesses. I’m sure she blames the Bolsheviks for our reduced circumstances.
—I don’t think anything of the sort, Kate.
—I taught with a few White Russians when I first started – the last of them, they must have been in their nineties at least – and they were much, much, madder than Billie. But we do have to remind ourselves sometimes that our money came from haberdashery. Stockings for the miners’ wives.
—What’s haberdashery? Jamie asked. —What’s a White Russian?
—Oh, said Kate. —Don’t you know anything? I thought you were supposed to be a clever boy. Anyway, I’m regretting letting you cut the lawn now. I think it looked better with the grass long. That grass was beautiful, it blew in the wind, it was blond like hair, the sound it made was like the sea. Now what does it look like? Stubbled and ugly, a poor cropped head.
Jamie was crestfallen until Kate laughed at him and gave him a cigarette.
—Don’t take any notice of my daughter, dear, said Billie. —She’s such a tease.
She asked Kate again later, —Who is he? How do we know him?
Kate would only tell her his name was Jamie: she didn’t want to risk some connection sparking suddenly, and Billie spilling out to David, if he ever came, with admiration for his handsome son. Jamie squatted with his back to the veranda, squinting at his labours, and smoked at least with proper grown-up insouciance. It was the first thing you ever learned to do like a grown-up: Kate could remember practising in her bedroom, in front of the mirror.
The next time Jamie turned up he took them for a row on the lake. Kate was busy, she didn’t want to come out, she had a paper to write for a conference she’d been invited to; Jamie insisted that Billie had told him she longed to go. It was a nightmare getting Billie into the boat, anyway: she hesitated in brittle indecision on the brink, prodding with her stick and grappling Kate’s arm, until the boat-hire man and Jamie lifted and swung her in between them. There was only one other boat out: it was a Tuesday afternoon. The sunlight was hazy yellow and the water white-pale; the dipping oars puckered a milky skin then dripped with light; bread bobbed in the thick unrolling of their wake near the shore, where people overfed the ducks. Jamie rounded the clock tower and then they moved to the sound of the small splash of the oars down the lake to where the islands at the other end were cut off by orange floats on a nylon rope.
—Shouldn’t you be at school? Kate said.
—It’s exam time. We don’t have normal lessons.
—Then you should be revising.
He smiled at her, heaving backwards.
—Isn’t this heavenly? said Billie, sitting very upright, gripping the side of the boat, looking round with that expression of hers as though she was witnessing wonders. —You used to be able to row around these islands. And we got off and picnicked. We made a fire once and picnicked at night. Someone brought a guitar and we sang.
—Do you want to go around them now? Lift up the rope and I’ll slip under.
—Do you think we might? What fun!
—Don’t be silly, Jamie, said Kate. —There’d be a scene with the hire-man shouting at us: and outside our own front door. You forget we’re elderly and respectable.
—You’re not.
—Don’t you think we’re respectable?
—Not elderly.
But obediently he pulled with one oar to turn the boat, then rowed back to the other end again, gliding so lightly that his passengers felt themselves suspended in the silver light reflected from the water.
—How do you get on with your stepmother? Kate asked.
—All right, now. We used to have a hard time.
—That’s traditional, with stepmothers. Leaving you in the woods to starve, throwing you down wells. It’s all in the literature. You were the cunning child, dropping little stones so that you could always find your way back home.
—She really wasn’t wicked. I was awful, I think. I woke up ten times a night asking for drinks, and I only ate crackers and tinned tomato soup. We quite like each other now.
—Where does she come from? How did she and David meet?
—She has an insane family. Her parents do a magic show for children, they’re working in Spain at the moment, for the expats: hopeless with money, Suzie’s always having to bail them out. There’s a brother who’s done time for credit-card fraud and a sister who chooses the wrong sort of men and turns up at our house with bruises and black eyes. God knows how they met. We don’t talk about real things at home.
Jamie with panache made the boat skim through the narrow channel between the clock tower with its tiny locked red door and the steep stone bank under the promenade, where passers-by leaned over to be made serene by the vista of lake and blue-distant wooded hills; their passage set rocking the surface mess of duck feathers and bread and ice-lolly wrappers. Kate asked Jamie as they disembarked – Billie locked rigid from sitting – if he knew anything about computers. He said he only knew the usual stuff, but Kate thought that was bound to be more than she did: when they got back to the house and while Billie was unbending in the heat of the gas fire burning pale in the bright daylight, she took him upstairs to show him where the iMac Max had bought with her still sat in its chaos of wires on the table in her bedroom.
—Could you make this work?
—You mean, just put it together and plug it in?
—Exactly.
He laughed because it was so easy.
—Is this your bedroom? he asked, when she came up ten minutes later to see how he was getting on, and found the screen humming. —It isn’t like an ordinary bedroom.
—It’s an idiotic room. It’s a child’s bedroom, made for the charming kind of child I never was. I haven’t made up my mind yet how to live here as myself. What is an ordinary bedroom like, anyway?
—Oh, you know, fitted wardrobes and carpet and all that.
—Fitted wardrobes. They sound awful. Do you have those?
—I kept them out. Suzie tried to force them on me but I wouldn’t let her.
—You know I was born in this house, Kate said. — Not in this room. I’ll show you where. It’s probably the opposite kind of room to fitted wardrobes.
She sat Sim on her shoulders: he was jealous of Jamie, and wouldn’t leave her alone with him. Mostly the door to the master bedroom was kept shut; occasionally she sent Buckets and Mops in with a duster. It was shaded as it always had been with the old blinds pulled down: they were so moth-eaten that this afternoon the gloom was peppered with tiny beams and pricks of sunlight. Mirrors glinted like dark pools, over the dressing table which stood with its back to a side window, and in the door of the frowning massive carved-mahogany wardrobe, all naiads and fruit and sheaves to match the bed with its spilled cornucopia. Maids had once cleaned the mahogany, or so Billie reminisced, with rags wrung out in vinegar and boiling water. Kate couldn’t remember anyone ever sleeping in here: her grandparents had been dead for years before she was born. Always the same smells – mothballs and wool carpets, and something sweet like old-fashioned face powder – had hung unchanging in the close air, only fading and mingling over decades, and yielding now to a sour damp; the rain must be coming in somewhere here, too. The room ran almost the whole length of the house; one end was arranged as a sort of boudoir, with a sofa covered in red silk faded to pink, and a writing desk.
Jamie
took a few shy steps inside.
—What an amazing room.
—What was my grandfather Sam thinking of? How many tribes of children did he dream of engendering in that bed? What had he seen in Vilnius that made him want this: don’t you think, it’s a poor little Jewish boy putting down his barrow on a winter’s night and peering through lit windows? He really did have a barrow, I believe, although it sounds like poetic licence.
—Are you Jewish? he said.
—Not really. Not really Jewish, not really Welsh, not really Irish (that’s my father). Not at all English.
Kate crossed to the windows and pulled at the blinds; the mechanisms jerked and choked and gave out puffs of dust as they rolled up. Outside the three floor-length windows was a long enclosed wrought-iron balcony overlooking the lake, whose silver had healed itself seamlessly behind their intrusion: there were no more boats out, the swans were in possession. This was the best room in Firenze. When Kate imagined doing the whole house up, modernising it, making it a place where she could have a real life, she always planned to turn this room into her own bedroom and sitting room. The day after she made her plans, though, the labour and banality of actually carrying them out would fill her with ennui. And perhaps there wasn’t the money for it anyway.
—Poor grandfather Sam. Actually there wasn’t much engendering. For all the dynastic fantasy of that bed head, it’s been a thin little, weak little female line, trickling to a halt with me, running away into the ground for ever. They only had Billie. My grandmother had miscarriages; Billie was a late miracle, after they’d given up hope. Doesn’t she look slightly unearthly, against nature? She was born in this room, we both were. She only ever had me: I was late as well. I suppose we were conceived in this bed, both of us. And my grandparents both died in here, not knowing that there would be any grandchildren. My father also died in here: the interloper. Better they never knew about him. So we’ve shut it up: too much momentousness, too cumbersome for daily use.
They stood squinting slightly at one another in the low late-afternoon light, filtered and made pearly through windows that hadn’t been cleaned for years; with the blinds thrown up, the room behind them leaped into bleaker distinctness, made more strange by the invasive present: the wallpaper torn, the carpet stained, great hulks of furniture marooned.
—I love it that you’ve left it, said Jamie. —No one else would do that. Granny Bell has an old house but she’s always changing it, it’s always up to date.
—I haven’t lived in this house for twenty-five years. When I was a teenager it made me sick: I used to nag Billie to change everything, to buy everything new. Now I haven’t got the energy, though it still makes me sick sometimes.
—Why do you have that white lock in your hair?
—Sorrow, of course. For my wasted life.
—Really?
He put out a hand to touch: Sim batted at him with a paw, claws unretracted.
—No, silly, it’s heredity. There’s another one at the back, growing on the nape. I have them from my father apparently, though they don’t show in any of his photographs. I suppose mine are going to be lost, now, as the rest turns to white as well.
Kate pulled her head away from clumsy boy fingers, although later when Billie asked Jamie to play the piano she saw that the fingers weren’t so bad, despite what the scything and the rowing might have seemed to mean: the hands were long and fluent, with good movement, and he had the broad-stubbed finger-ends that promise intelligence of execution rather than elegance. He played appallingly, though: his style was execrable and he stumbled, blushing, through the easy pieces he professed to know. He hadn’t ever got very far, he said, he had given up years ago. He had only very reluctantly – shoulders hunched in expectation of humiliation – agreed to play for them, because Billie persisted beyond what was quite sane in pleading with him, and Kate, wanting to get on with her book, couldn’t be bothered to intervene. He could have left, couldn’t he, if he hadn’t wanted to make a fool of himself? Jamie confessed that he hadn’t ever had a real piano to practise on, only one of those electric keyboards. Kate watched pity and purpose light up in her mother like lamps; patiently Billie propped herself behind Jamie, crooked as she was, working his shoulders until they dropped and his arms fell into the right line.
—Put your hands over the keys. Not like that: imagine you are holding oranges: curved, curved. Now play: just this simplest little exercise, listen. ‘Climbing a Stair’. Keep those fingers curved. Weight down, drop your wrists, on the first note; lift off, lift the wrists – only lift, not staccato – on the third. Curved. All the way up. There: now do you hear? That’s better, isn’t it? Try this one: ‘Opening the Door’.
After this, whenever Jamie called, Billie made him work with her at the piano for at least an hour, teaching him through little games as if he was seven or eight years old. Billie’s old competence roused from murky depths when she was teaching him, she was incisive and exacting; even if she thought he was a child, she insisted he play his easy pieces and exercises to the highest standard, as she had done in the old days when she gave lessons and ran her Suzuki classes. Kate listened to Jamie stumbling, stalling, trying in vain for the same simple thing over and over. She thought it was good for him to struggle and fail: he had the sleepy indolence of clever boys for whom everything has been too easy. He read a lot – he’d read already much more than his father – but unsystematically, with huge gaps in his knowledge which he imagined he could supply with guessing and intuition.
Jamie’s presence in the house began to bother Kate obscurely. Sometimes she turned him away when he called; but then Billie asked where he was, the lessons made her so happy.
—Why aren’t you with your friends? Kate frowned. —Don’t you have friends?
—I do have friends, Jamie reassured her, —but I’d rather be here.
—Why?
—Everything here is different. You’re not like anybody else.
—How would you know? You don’t know anybody.
He went cycling out to the countryside at Cefn Onn, behind the new estate where he lived with his family, and brought back for Kate a great bouquet of wild flowers stuffed under his sweatshirt; when he pushed them at her they were half wilted, and she scratched herself on something, drawing blood.
—Isn’t it May blossom? she said. —Don’t you know not to bring that in the house? It means bad luck. Take it away. I don’t want it in here.
The first weekend Suzie went camping with Menna, the weather wasn’t very good. A fortnight later, the forecast was better, and she told David they were going again, to the same place, a site in a meadow beside a river beyond the Hay Bluff. David was surprised to find himself indifferent this time. He was busy; he hardly looked up from his computer when he heard the old Bedford van arrive on Saturday morning (its puttering filthy exhaust more polluting, surely, than anything they could make up for with their puritanical veganism). Suzie stood in the door of his study to say goodbye, hesitant as if he might want an explanation for her defection again, so soon; but he didn’t, he had work to do, he kissed her quickly.
He had spent most of his week out of Cardiff, coming home very late; he was monitoring an outbreak of meningitis in one of the valleys towns where a fifteen-year-old girl had died and a couple of others were ill. It was difficult to trace all the friends the dead girl had had close contact with: the night before she was taken into hospital, she had been driven around, up and down the mountains in the dark from one house to another, in the crowded back of someone’s beat-up car; they had been drinking and taking amphetamines, she had complained of feeling ill. David tried to imagine this teenage life, this careless jumbled contact, like fox cubs nuzzling and tussling together in a den; when he was their age he had kept himself scrupulously apart. He didn’t know what Jamie did when he went out at night. He telephoned Kate Flynn and asked if she wanted to come with him to see a film at Chapter Arts Centre. There was a Bergman season on; he wasn’t sure it was his k
ind of thing, but he thought it might be hers.
Virgin Spring rocked him with its violence. He disguised his shock from Kate as they made their way out with the seven or eight other members of the audience from the small studio cinema; nothing could surprise her, she had seen everything before. He avoided someone he knew from the hospital, not wanting to have to talk shop. They stopped in Chapter bar to have a beer, and David drank something heavy and cold and sweet that Kate recommended.
—My wife’s taken our children and gone off with the hippies, he told her, —in a van painted with psychedelic flowers. Probably they’re drawing up their astral charts at this very moment, somewhere in the Black Mountains.
Kate leaned her chin on her hand bristling with rings to listen. —Just like that: without warning?
—The signs have been there for a while. The dream catcher over the bed, candles everywhere, marijuana in an old tobacco tin, a copy of Kahlil Gibran in the toilet.
—That’s bad, sighed Kate. —Kahlil Gibran in the toilet. Sometimes it’s the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It can lead to the Desiderata beside the front door.
The beer went straight to his head. He told her about his meningitis outbreak.
—You have the power of life and death, she said, as if she was reading it in his face.
—I’m afraid not.
—No, no, you do. Isn’t that an extraordinary thing? Because of what you decide, individuals live or die.
—It’s a system; I apply it. Nothing in the least heroic, although the system’s very admirable.
—It makes what I’ve done seem a kind of dream, a mistake. A life lost in books. What an abyss of difference, between your usefulness and mine. How did I choose it: this play-life? I should have been a nurse. We carelessly make one choice after another and our lives pile up.
He laughed at her. —I don’t think you’d have made a good nurse, I’m afraid to say.
—You mean I’d have been useless. Too selfish, indolent, disobedient.