by Tessa Hadley
—You must be working out, Kate said to her. —You look so fit! I’m so unfit. I don’t do any exercise. What will become of me? It’ll be such a tragic waste, I’ll die young. Or is it already too late for me to die young?
Sherie sat stiffly and was not seduced, her round face pale with unbelief. Unfortunately Billie, enjoying herself, chose to be garrulous on the subject of Kate’s unusual giftedness: if Max and Kate had been on their own with her, this would have seemed simply funny. Nervously Kate got out her cigarettes; the others hadn’t finished their crème brûlée.
—Actually, would you mind smoking on the balcony? Sherie said.
—All by myself? Kate made a mouth of mock sorrow.
Max was gallant, wan, propitiatory. —I’ll come out with you. Shall I?
—You go, said Sherie, stacking up the plates briskly without scraping them. —I’ll stay and look after Billie.
Outside Kate and Max leaned on the wrought iron side by side, looking through the moonless dark at stately trees flirting their leaves in yellow patches of illumination from the street lamps; the rain had raised rank smells from the pavement. The warm thick night was full of movement, her cigarette smoke blowing heavily around them.
—I wish you’d be nicer, he said. —I wish you and Sherie could get on.
—As a matter of interest, I really was trying my best this evening. Obviously not good enough. You’ve forgotten that I’m really not very nice.
He sighed. —Well, I’m enough of an idiot, then, to like you.
She remembered what it had been like to yield to Max and have him look after her, she smelled his two-showers-a-day cleanness, his Acqua di Parma aftershave, his lawn shirt: invitations to peace, to pleasantness, to play.
—Oh Max: I’ve made such an awful mistake.
—It must be awful, for you to think it is. Is it to do with the good doctor?
—Yes. No. Yes.
—Tell me about it.
She opened her mouth obediently to tell him: and then shut it again.
—But maybe not. I can’t.
He turned his blurred face to her – they stood outside the broad panes of light that fell from the windows – whistling low and admiringly. —Uh-oh. Katie’s actually done something she’s too ashamed to tell. Are we talking wrong side of the law here? Penal sentence?
—Don’t make fun of me, Max. I’m feeling bad enough.
—Katie? He was apologetic: offered himself, patient and neutral, bending down his tall height to extinguish the difference between them. —You can tell me anything, you know that. If you need to talk. You don’t look well. You look awful.
—I know I can. She touched her hand, the last end of cigarette a stump between her fingers, lightly on the back of his. —But, maybe this one ought to be my secret: I’m not sure I can find the words. Anyway, perhaps I quite like the idea of having a secret from you. From everybody.
—I’m sure you’ve got so many.
—No: no. She weighed judiciously. —Actually this is the first one for a long time. Not all that much happens to me these days, you know.
—I’m devoured by curiosity, about the secret.
—Don’t be. I think it has no consequences, it doesn’t count: don’t think about it.
—Like the white bear.
—Hmm?
—You know: if someone says, don’t think about the white bear. Then every time you try not to, you do. Isn’t that Tolstoy?
—This isn’t even a full-grown bear, she said. —It’s just a cub.
The next day Kate left Billie with Max at his office (‘she won’t be any trouble’) and went shopping in all her old favourite places. Max had said – she reminded him – that she looked awful; he must support her then, in recovering herself. She promised she would eat lunch, and did. She pleaded with her hairdresser, begged him to fit in an appointment to cut her hair: she paid him extra on top of how expensive he already was. She didn’t think about the white bear. She watched herself emerge out of bleakly bedraggled beginnings in the salon mirror, gossiping with Antony: she hadn’t been beautiful ever, but perhaps she was not too bad yet. The dramatic hollows and sharp points, crowded in the narrow face, could still be intriguing and seductive, hadn’t yet absolutely failed. She bought new shoes, although she’d told herself they were the one thing she really didn’t need. When she had thought she was finished and was looking out for a taxi, laden already with bags, they claimed her incontrovertibly from a shop window: dark pink soft leather trimmed in black, decorated with a black suede rose, impossibly totteringly high.
David awoke sweating from nightmares. They weren’t about avian flu or terrorist attacks or any of the things he was supposed to worry about at work. He was in a group of people conversing intently, whose words were somehow not audible to him except as blunt needles jabbing under his skin; or he was submerged in complex and frantic plots, carrying messages between people he’d never heard of.
—Are you leaving me? he had asked Suzie one evening, confronting her in the study where she was undressing for bed. —Is this marriage breaking up? Are you having a relationship with someone else?
—Please don’t come near me, she said, pulling her nightdress over her head with hasty hands, hiding herself: it didn’t seem to mean anything between them now that he’d seen her naked in her extremity, giving birth to their children.
—You have to talk to me, for Christ’s sake. Tell me what’s happening.
She wouldn’t look at him, she shrank away. —Please, she said. —Wait. I don’t know. I can’t talk about it yet. Don’t shout: the others will hear.
—Do you think they don’t know?
David hated it particularly that Jamie was a witness to the collapse in his marriage: he couldn’t meet the boy’s eyes, he winced at his physical presence in a room, as if Jamie had absorbed and was contemptuous of every twist in his father’s humiliation. When David lay awake in the small hours, Jamie’s quiet movements around the house agitated him as if they were his own fears, preventing him from sleeping; when he heard Jamie leave on one of his night bike rides to God knows where, he had to get out of bed and come downstairs to check he hadn’t left the house perilously wide open behind him. In fact the doors were always safely closed, Jamie was perfectly sensible about these things, even if he did leave his dirty dishes heaped in the sink. Evie asked David if he didn’t think there was something wrong with Jamie. He spent such long hours shut up alone in his room, not even playing his music. Surely, whatever he said, he couldn’t be reading books for all that time?
—He’s smoking, said David. —I think he smokes himself into a stupor sometimes. Don’t think there’s anything you can do about it: short of chucking him out altogether. There’s nothing we haven’t tried. He goes his own way, he doesn’t listen to us.
—I wasn’t criticising him, said Evie, startled. —He’s lovely. Isn’t he lovely with the kids? I just thought he might be unhappy.
It was true that Jamie was good with the children; they adored him. He had picked up a board game for a pound in a charity shop: Hero’s Quest, with tiny metallic warriors and orcs and wizards. He invented missions and wrote them on pieces of paper for Hannah and Joel to follow – The Masters of Morion have to recover the Red Stone of Zelton from the Chest of Azeriac – then sat with them cross-legged for hours on the floor of Hannah’s bedroom, seeming as wrapped up in the stories as they were, earnestly explaining why they couldn’t cross the threshold of Morion without the right counters. It was surely better than the children watching endless soaps on the television.
One evening when David came home the house was full of people. At first sight he might have thought they were Jamie’s friends, if they had ever visited: sprawling over the furniture in their bright-coloured play-clothes, communicating in noisy call-and-response like a bird-flock, they seemed younger than he could remember ever being. They jiggled to music as if they might break out into dancing; something folky was playing on the CD player in the study
(Suzie had taken over his study, he had moved his computer into the living room). He looked around at first in vain for anyone he knew, foolishly displaced, still hanging on to his briefcase, as if he’d put his key in the door to the wrong house: then he saw Giulia and Larry in the kitchen cutting up pizza, and Menna with her stark china-doll’s face and upright dancer’s posture on the sofa. Anywhere she sat, she made a little court and was queen: staring unsmiling, she stiffened under his proprietorial survey. Two girls on the floor at her feet chattered, comparing their bare dirty soles, not seeing him.
The French windows were open; on the patio, among Suzie’s bright-blooming pots and hanging baskets, male heads he didn’t recognise at first – then he identified Neil, Menna’s boyfriend – were bent in consultation over the barbecue. It hadn’t been used this year: the charcoal surely would be damp, after its winter in the garage? Hannah and Joel held their breath as they did for him when he lit it; Evie, animated, hunkered flexibly down on her heels with her back to the patio wall, was gesticulating with her roll-up at someone he didn’t know. Her sociability, he was reminded, was rash and overexposing: the marijuana smell (would the neighbours notice?) mingled foully with the smell of the fuel they were using to start the barbecue. David didn’t like to see the children being around so many people smoking, he turned back into the hall. Suzie, running downstairs, stopped as abruptly at the sight of him as if he’d put out a hand.
—It’s my birthday, she explained on the spot, out of breath, a few feet higher than he stood on the ground.
At a blow dignified wronged restraint was knocked away. —Oh: love, I’m sorry. Of course it is. How could I have forgotten?
—No, it’s all right. I really don’t care.
—I can’t believe I didn’t think. I’ve been writing the date over and over all day.
—Don’t worry.
If her eyes glittered it wasn’t from hurt tears: she was exalted, brimming with some glee closed to him; he was sure that until she saw him she had forgotten even to expect his coming home. Giulia brought him wine from the kitchen. —Come and eat pizza: from the Dolce Vita, where Larry’s cousin’s the chef.
Humbled (and anyway hungry), he went with her. — Did Suzie tell you I forgot?
—Oh don’t worry! Larry never remembers my birthday.
—She didn’t say anything about a party.
—It was impromptu, Giulia said. —We decided today at school, when she told us she wasn’t doing anything. We phoned around.
—Let them get on with it, Dave, Larry said. —Take it from me: when the girls get it into their heads to enjoy themselves, there’s nothing for it but to light the blue touchpaper and retire.
Larry’s big handsome Italian head was marked with inherited strong lines that looked like sorrow, but he was jovial, tied into Suzie’s apron, serving pizza; afterwards he lapsed into the Telegraph with a glass of David’s whisky. David poured himself some too. He made his way round the party after he’d eaten, fuelling himself with the whisky, and found out that Suzie’s friends were care-workers, actors, shop assistants; one worked on a council play scheme, one made furniture. Perhaps she preferred them because they were funnier; the more he drank, the more he was aware of his earnestness weighing him down like a clumsy coat. Neil had triumphed with the barbecue. His tanned skin was taut against his small fine-shaped skull, puckered in crinkles beside hazy eyes; there was a dope smoker’s considering delay between his thought and his speech. David knew he ought to be more resentful of the man than of the girl, but it was Menna somehow whose self-possession goaded and exasperated him.
—Someone likes their music, Neil said, admiring David’s CDs, shelf upon shelf, carefully ordered by composer and chronology.
—David only listens to classical, said Suzie. —Way over my head. When I went with him to a concert, all I could think about was that I was afraid I was going to cough, because I hadn’t brought any cough sweets. I didn’t even have a cold or anything; but I began to feel this little tickle, rising in my throat; I could picture how all those disapproving faces would look round at me, if I spoiled everything. So I kept saving up little bits of saliva and swallowing them down, to stop my throat being dry. It was all I could think about, I didn’t hear a note.
A girl asked if David was a musician.
—He doesn’t play anything, Suzie answered. —He’s in public health. He works out which ones of us will get into the bunker. Or who to vaccinate if the flu epidemic comes.
David had an idea that he stood swaying his head like a dumb ox between them as they talked. —Is that really what you imagine I do?
She shrugged. —What do you do then? You work with death and disaster all day, don’t you? Sometimes I imagine you bring it home with you on your hands.
—But David’s working to prevent all these awful things, said Evie. —Somebody has to.
—It’s a kind of power, Suzie said. —Don’t try to tell me he doesn’t enjoy it.
David was confusedly nauseated, he closed his eyes, leaned back against the wall, and felt the room dip drunkenly under him. Later Suzie pushed the furniture recklessly back for dancing and the children came squealing and jumping into the new space. They wanted to make peace between their parents, they tugged at David where he sat slumped with his back to the wall on the floor in the study (Suzie had tidied her bed away out of sight of the guests); but he wouldn’t, couldn’t, move.
Kate and Billie arrived home on a Saturday evening. As the train rolled into the station, past the end of St Mary’s Street, they saw that the centre of town was given over to milling seething crowds of young people, the girls almost undressed in the hot summer weather, the males in the white shirtsleeves that were the minimum required by club dress codes. The swaying pale mass, moving sluggishly perhaps between venues or simply possessing the outdoors, seemed mysterious as restless spirits in a vision. Their taxi took them the back way, and still had to nudge at first through flesh that wouldn’t yield to traffic: faces leered in at the windows, one boy dropped a pie on the road in front of the taxi and, lordly, waved them to a halt while he recovered and bit into it. Billie laughed, captivated; as they got away to the suburb and the lakeside, the restored empty quiet was both a balm and a diminishment. Sim (Carol had been feeding him) greeted them inside the house in angry ecstasy, butting his hard head affrontedly at their stroking hands. Kate took Billie up to bed.
She fell asleep herself, eventually, in her clothes, on the chaise longue: and woke to find Jamie standing a few feet away in the lamplight.
—The front door was open, he said.
—Was it?
—So I came in, although I hadn’t meant to. Are you still angry?
She didn’t lift her head to adjust her new apprehension of him, which had fear in it for the first time: he wasn’t exactly as she had been imagining him, or refusing to imagine. Even in the interval since she’d last seen him – was that two weeks ago? three weeks? – his presence had gathered density: he loomed, to her sideways perspective, her head still snuggled on the cushion, differently deliberate, taller, his hair pushed behind his ears as if for concentration, hands in his pockets, his roundish boyish face newly sharpened and marked, the creases under his eyes more deeply squeezed. She hardly knew him: he wasn’t what she remembered, he was more important. Of course if he was worth anything, he would be changed by what had happened.
—No, not angry. Careless of me, leaving the door open.
—I wanted to ask if we could go back to how we were before: me calling round, not too often; us just talking. Would that be possible?
—Is that what we did? She sat up, stretching with her arms above her head; she was wearing one of her new dresses, maroon, slippery, tight across her breasts. —Is that what you want?
He brought his hands out of his pockets and opened them. —Anyone could have come in, you know.
—You mean: and forced themselves upon me? That’s already happened once, hasn’t it?
He stared at
the floor.
—It’s all right. She put out her hand towards his. Forgiven. You didn’t exactly force.
—I thought you’d be angry: you said never to come again.
He wouldn’t touch even her hand.
—Did I say never? Well, I didn’t mean ‘never’; not actually ‘not ever’.
—Oh. Humbly he nodded. —I didn’t know.
—You did: you see, you’re here. Anyway, perhaps I did mean never, when I said it.
—It’s been terrible, he confessed. —Thinking you meant it, and that I’d completely fucked up.
—So, is that what you want then, to be just friends?
—I don’t want to lose that.
—We weren’t very good friends, really. Not my idea of good friends. You’re too young to be my friend, exactly.
He exhaled noisily. Kate stood up – shoelessly short again, like last time – and fitted herself closely against his boy’s warm shape, inside his arms that closed around her raggedly, timidly; she pretended to herself that the difference in their mass – his overwhelming hers, making her tiny – blotted out other asymmetries. She pushed away his hair from his forehead with both her hands to smile up at him, framing his face; his eyes under their curved hooding bluish lids stared back, unreadable. Out of her adult experience, she was in command; she mustn’t let him know how powerful his reserves of youth were. She took him upstairs into the master bedroom; Billie wouldn’t come looking for them, she superstitiously never went in there. Kate had thought of that bed beforehand, but hadn’t made it up with sheets in case she tempted bad luck, so they made love tangled in damp dusty scratchy blankets and a silk counterpane, naked on the old sour-smelling striped flock mattress. Under reaching fingers at some point Kate found unexpectedly the polished hard convexities of the carved headboard, its cornucopia of spilled fruit. She had pulled up the blinds, and their shoulders and his long back were silvered sometimes by moonlight: the moon was huge, full, operatic, reflected in the lake. Jamie was somewhat better at it all this time, with her help, although so shy, and making touching efforts of concentration; she gratified him with little noises of pleasure. Her own naked, sexual self surprised her, exposed again; it had been buried recently under such rubble of complications.