by Tessa Hadley
Riches, heart-twisting riches: but not for her.
Seven
SUZIE’S SISTER (A few years older) arrived to stay with them, it wasn’t clear for how long. The first they knew about it was when the doorbell rang, on an evening when the sun had so blazed all day, raising a miasma of shimmering pollution above the city, that their house had seemed too flimsily paper-slight to offer any respite. They had looked longingly over at the dense trees of the old estate, but it was too hot to walk there and no one could bear to get inside a car again if they didn’t have to, once they were back from school and work. No sooner had the bell rung than Evie was inside the house, humping her large suitcase – pale blue, battered, decorated with pink hearts – over the threshold, the tail end of a taxi turning the corner of the cul-de-sac; Jamie arriving home at the same moment had opened the door for her. Evie immediately, urgently, stripped off the cardigan and mac she’d worn for ease of carrying; the extra layers must have been a torture. Her face – like Suzie’s, foxily cinnamon-coloured, freckled – was splotched with pink, and the dark roots of her short spiky blonde hair were wet.
—So what’s Jamie up to? she asked, effortfully cheerful. —Are you off to college?
—Perhaps, Jamie said. —I might take a year out. I’m thinking about it.
—You know the fees go up next year, said David, insisting on a point he’d already made several times over, as he came out from the living room where he had been helping Hannah with her homework. —Make sure you’ve secured your place before you defer, don’t leave it too late.
His son gave him a look whose mask-like tragic contempt was surely disproportionate to the offence.
—And you ought to wear your cycling helmet.
—Hiya, David, said Evie.
Jamie took the stairs two at a time, they heard the crash of the attic ladder pulled down, then pulled up after him. Later he’d come foraging in the kitchen, after they’d cleared up supper.
David kissed Evie absent-mindedly. —Did Suzie know you were coming? She didn’t say anything.
—Isn’t she here?
—Out.
—She’s always out, said Hannah. —She’s gone mad, about her new friends.
—Actually I didn’t tell her, Evie said. —It was on an impulse.
Suzie and Evie had that disconcerting sibling resemblance, alike enough – in height and shape and the rough idea of the face – to be mistaken for one another in anyone’s peripheral vision: so that David would walk into a room and think Suzie was standing there until Evie moved (or spoke: her voice was throatier). There was always an instant of shock before adjustment: everything about Evie seemed more exposed, the eyes bigger and more startled, the lines deeper-incised, the mouth fuller (Suzie said Botoxed). They dressed in the same casual clothes: only Evie’s things were skimpier, tighter, lower cut (also, she had a ring in her navel). One night David walked into the bathroom and didn’t see for a long minute, while he searched for Calpol for Joel in the medicine cupboard, that it was Evie soaking, with only her head – fortunately for their embarrassment – visible above the mass of foam.
—There isn’t any lock, she apologised.
—It’s so the children can’t lock themselves in.
—No worries.
—I can’t believe I didn’t look: sorry.
—Don’t be silly. Find whatever it was you wanted.
That surprise seemed to bring about a new intimacy between the two of them: easy-familial and not sexual. No one asked how long Evie was staying. Whenever she came she had an air of escaping just ahead of some damage or danger on her tail, men or money. She and her daughter Cara, the same age as Jamie, had stayed for weeks at a time during various catastrophes; Suzie was seen by her family as the one who had lifted herself out of their patterns of bad luck. This time Evie told David evasive stories about a job she had left, an insurance office and a boss she’d been involved with; and about Cara, who had gone to live with her father recently after some row whose outlines were unclear.
Evie must have seen Suzie’s bed made up in the study, she was bound to notice that Suzie was out almost every evening (‘doing yoga’, she explained perfunctorily, or ‘with her singing group’). Menna and Neil had got the use of some chalet in the Gower Peninsula for the summer, and Suzie was there almost every weekend, on her own or with the children. The children loved the chalet and the beach and the sea: they were uneasy that David didn’t come with them. They nagged him, they tried to bribe him with odorous carriers full of seaweed and crab-bits and stones which had been special when they were wet; he told them he had too much work to do.
—Why don’t you go? Evie asked, scrupulously casually, not to be seen to be prying.
—I really have been busy.
—And they’re not your kind of crowd?
—Perhaps not.
Evie went out with Suzie’s new friends a couple of times, but she confided to David that they made her feel a hundred years old, and she couldn’t join in the singing: she said she hadn’t known that Suzie had such a lovely voice. He didn’t ask for more details. At home Evie slipped into a domestic role, shopping for the family and cooking (she was a better cook than Suzie). She even cleaned the house, not badly, although she didn’t have Suzie’s perfectionism; the rooms were heaped with piles of ironing, the vacuum cleaner was left wherever she’d last used it. Suzie couldn’t complain, she’d stopped doing anything in the house herself. Suzie always kept Evie at a sceptical, brittle distance when she visited. Sometimes when Evie and David found themselves watching the news companionably, he suffered from an eerie hallucination that Suzie had left a surrogate to keep him quiet while she went wandering, like shape-changing trickery in a fairy story. He didn’t know whether Evie had asked Suzie what was going on in her marriage, or whether if she had Suzie would have confessed to her, or put her off.
One weekend when Suzie was away he took Hannah and Joel to call on Kate Flynn. Marshalling the children up the zigzag path, he thought that bringing them would make a difference in his relationship with Kate, and was shyly proud of their unflawed transparent skin, of the plaits he’d made – not very well – in Hannah’s hair, of their awed demeanour in the shadow of the big house, with its turret like something from a children’s picture book. He thought that Kate was bound to like them; meeting them, she would know him more completely. When no one answered the bell even after David rang three or four times (they put their ears to the flaking paint and heard it sound improbably far off), Joel was visibly relieved not to have to believe his father had friends who lived in such a place.
Hannah spotted the play park with swings and slides and an ice-cream van, madly crowded in the summer heat. For an hour he pushed Joel on the swings and watched while they slid. They kicked around a football on the grass, then flopped in the shade under one of the great trees; David, on his back with his eyes closed, felt the earth turn and his life passing. It struck him that he was always vulnerable, lying down: he needed to meet life on his feet, upright. They tried Firenze again before they got into the car to drive home, but this time he didn’t really expect an answer. The children anyway by now were overheated, and sulking because he wouldn’t buy them soft drinks from the van (they’d had ice cream).
—Mummy lets us have Coke, Hannah complained, easily indignant. —She says, what harm can it do, in the long run?
Kate wasn’t sleeping. She had to go to the doctor for more pills, performing competent and un-addicted in order to be rewarded with a prescription. The ones she got in Billie’s name, from a different doctor – not for Billie, who didn’t need them, who slept like a baby – were much easier. The doctor said she must try to establish regular times for going to bed and getting up: she thought he was right. She found light bulbs in an under-stairs cupboard, got out the stepladders, and replaced all the ones that weren’t working, even in the rooms they didn’t use: if the lights exposed stained wallpaper and furniture jumbled meaninglessly together, she turned them off q
uickly and went on finding her way in the dimness, with the blinds drawn down. She washed the hall floor with a mop and hot soapy water; the whisky smell, however, persisted, she couldn’t get rid of it, it made her sick for days. She tried for a while getting up at seven and cooking porridge for Billie (she couldn’t eat anything herself at that hour). Billie slept on her back, her eyes were never screwed up or squinting in sleep; her huge lids swung wide open when Kate shook her, and showed the flash of her dreams escaping. She clung onto the bedclothes, and had to be coaxed into putting on her dressing-gown with promises of syrup on her porridge.
—You know, dear, Billie said thoughtfully after a few days, —it’s very hot for porridge.
Kate had hardly noticed the blazing weather. Carol said how lucky Kate was at least in Billie’s good nature, that senility usually brought changes of personality, resentment and aggression. Sometimes Kate could hardly remember what her mother had been when she was adult and in command: she had to focus on particular moments, Billie waiting with her neat little shopping basket at the school gates, Billie giving herself into the hands of the hairdressers while Kate stood looking on, having her hair coloured, brown honey, for all those years before she gave in to white. She had been compliant always; but with an inward resistance like a stubborn sweetness, a secret of superiority, that made her gently deplore other people’s lives not led in the same light of beauty and taste as hers. This princess-air used to drive Kate to distraction. Now the reality of that resistance was dissolved away, leaving only its shape behind; Billie watched all kinds of awful programmes on the television, and particularly loved the advertisements.
Kate bought batteries for the clocks; she sorted her bookshelves, she tried to work on her translation. She hammered nails into her walls to hang pictures; she spent all day in her pyjamas without getting dressed and didn’t wash her hair. The balance of her attention always swung like this between her self and her surroundings: when she was at her physical best, dressing well, she could live in a mess; when she despaired of herself and her clothes, she lavished care on her room and her possessions, paid bills and took broken objects in for repair. At least the sleeping pills made a fog in her head so that she didn’t have to feel anything very sharply. She didn’t answer the front-door bell. She told herself that if she and Jamie never saw one another again, then what had happened wouldn’t exist, she could prevent it from having existed, it needn’t ruin everything. Sometimes Billie answered the door; twice she let Jamie in. Kate heard his voice while she was upstairs in her room puzzling in leaden doubt between different ways of expressing the nuances of mastery and subservience in Tsarist Russia. Awareness of him in the rooms below was only physical, like a cramp; she refused to think differently about him because of one moment’s stupid error of judgement. Billie, labouring, climbed up the stairs.
—That boy is here, she said. —What is his name?
—Ask him what he wants, said Kate. —Tell him I won’t come down, I’m busy with this.
—Oh, we mustn’t interrupt your work, darling. Has he come for his lesson?
—Mummy: how can I concentrate?
Billie stood hesitating, then tiptoed down again. After a while Kate heard Jamie at the piano, playing his scales, trying and failing, stumbling, going back to the beginning and starting all over again. While she was listening to this she couldn’t do a thing, she couldn’t think, she sat with her stomach muscles painfully squeezed (she hadn’t eaten anything much for days, apart from crackers and apples and tea), pressing her hands over her face until her rings left marks. It was a kind of torture, waiting for him to play a wrong note and then hearing it: but it wouldn’t drag her downstairs, she would endure. After all, she was the grown-up, she was the one on guard against blunders happening. At last Billie let him go, or he wandered of his own accord into the hall: she guessed that he stood longing to come and find her but also dreading it. She kept still, afraid that if he heard her make any ordinary movement he’d be somehow encouraged, and come up. Apart from anything else, her hair was scraped back in an elastic band, she was wearing her glasses and old ghastly stretch pyjamas, her face looked bruised and sallow as it always did when she was in one of her states, when she wasn’t eating. She owed it to Jamie at least that he shouldn’t see he’d embraced a death’s head, an old woman. Eventually she heard him give up and go.
The second time he came, Kate locked her bedroom door. He knocked at it, and called her name twice; she stayed motionless on her bed, not answering, hugging her knees tightly. Then she knew that if she stayed living like this something would break; so she took Billie to London. They went to the Bloomsbury hotel where they used to stay in the old days, before Kate left home, when they had tickets for London concerts or theatre; she was surprised when she telephoned to find it still existed. On the train she wore dark glasses, with a scarf wrapped round her hair and her summer mac buttoned up: luckily the hot weather had broken.
—Wouldn’t Mother have loved this? said Billie, looking eagerly out from the train window at the countryside cut across by swathes of rain, watery gleams.
—I wouldn’t know, said Kate. —I didn’t know Mother.
—She spoke five languages. Her French was exquisite. They meant her for a high school teacher.
—We could always go back, if you liked: I mean Lithuania. We could look for our roots: people do these days.
—Oh dear, I don’t think so. She touched Kate’s hand consolingly as if Kate might not know what had happened there. —I don’t think there’d be anything left for us. I never liked the children’s books my aunts and uncles sent, the pictures were too frightening, I thought of it as a primitive place. But Mother loved the books, she pined for it. After they came here, she never had her health.
—That’s because old Sam was strong as an ox, wouldn’t leave her alone.
When Kate talked like that, Billie pretended not to hear.
They had to make a fuss at the hotel, to change their room to one on the first floor, so that Billie didn’t have to climb too many stairs. Kate told herself she’d done the right thing, getting away from the old house, leaving behind her disasters. She began to calculate how long their money would last if they led a hotel life here as people did in old novels, blessedly irresponsible, not having to worry about leaks in the roof or throwing out sour milk; they weren’t very solid calculations, she wasn’t really sure how much money was left, she had never quite got round to searching through Billie’s papers and making the necessary calls to find out exactly. Their room was plain and high, painted white, with an austere handsome marble fireplace, a window overlooking the street where taxis splashed past in the wet, and a framed photograph of lions in the Serengeti; partitioned from next door, the elaborate plaster coving sliced through abruptly. The television was small and black-and-white, with a twisted coat-hanger stuck in for an aerial. It rained all that first day, so that they couldn’t go anywhere until the evening, when they found an Italian restaurant round the corner; Kate ate a third of a plate of pasta and then smoked, Billie polished off three courses, finishing with a glass of something sticky and yellow. Back at their room Kate telephoned Max, while Billie, with every appearance of deep interest, watched through a fog of interference a police drama already halfway through.
—Max, I’ve run away, I’m here in London.
—Katie? Whereabouts: ‘here’?
—Something dreadful has happened.
—I thought everything was going so well.
—Because you’ve no idea.
—Where are you? What’s happened? D’you want to come round?
—I can’t tell you now: I’m not alone.
—Oh, Katie: I hope you haven’t made a terrible mistake.
—We’re too tired to come tonight. We’re in our pyjamas already. We’ll come tomorrow evening.
—I’m not at all convinced it’s the best thing, us meeting him.
—Not him, silly: it’s Billie I’m here with.
—A
h. That’s OK, I think: I’ll just check with Sherie.
—Anyway, I have made a terrible mistake, she confessed. —Only not that one. I’ll tell you tomorrow.
She and Billie visited the Wallace Collection the next day; they drank tea and Billie ate cake (Bakewell tart with lavender sauce) in the glassed-in central courtyard. In all the rooms Kate met herself reflected in the rococo slender-framed Louis Quinze mirrors, a dark spirit haunting among the blissful nymphs of the paintings: tarnished, concentrated, bitter. She bought a postcard, a girl in a pink satin dress, roses at her waist and in the round bosom pushed high by her corsets, watched by her lapdog, carving her lover’s initials on a tree: it filled Kate with desolation. Billie talked to all the attendants, a charming old lady made happy by art. They took taxis everywhere, Kate was rich with cash, she paid out notes off a fat wad in her purse. To go out to Max’s that evening she dressed severely all in black, pinned back her hair tight to her head, only painted her mouth red, left her face bleak, wore her dark glasses again; if Sherie had to see her in this state, then she owed it to herself at least to make a drama out of it. When they arrived in Max’s Highbury flat, the tall windows were open to the refreshed summer night, Jill Scott was on the Bang & Olufsen, and there were the usual heaps of new novels and journals on the coffee table whose top was glass an inch thick, semi-clear like Glacier Mints, the base a precious twisted piece of an old elm. In the States before he moved to England Max had worked on two lucrative contracts on Madison Avenue.
Sherie, coming out from the kitchen in a pretty apron, flinched visibly at how ferocious Kate looked. Kate was sorry, and tried to be nice to her, exclaiming at the delicious food even if she couldn’t eat much of it, asking how her writing was going, making an effort not to gossip with Max about friends Sherie didn’t know.