by Tessa Hadley
—He ought to be happy.
—Yes. Though possibly happiness is not his strong suit: he’s rather in earnest, isn’t he?
Bringing their coffees, Jamie asked his grandmother if she had ever seen Kate’s house: she didn’t think so. Kate guessed he was at a loss quite what to do with his two women now he’d brought them together; he must when he planned it have wanted to test his secret, by having it touch something in his other life. Fatally, he couldn’t stop himself describing the rooms of the house, so that scenes that had taken place in there seemed to float horribly between them at the table: to deflect him Kate talked about her grandparents, the migration from the East, the haberdashery shops, the house built for a dynasty.
—We have a turret even. I always feel, for lookout: my grandfather couldn’t believe he’d really got away.
—Did you know your grandparents?
Kate shook her head. —We’re hardly a family at all. We’ve heard distant rumours of one another. I’ve seen photographs. My father died young, so I never knew him. There’s only Billie and me: not enough to count, really. We’re just two individuals powerfully attached. What about your family?
—God, they procreate, they’re a tribe: awful in its own way. I have seven grandchildren. But you should go back, visit Vilnius. Such an interesting place.
—Oh: have you been there? I’m not sure there would be much left for me to connect with.
—She’s been everywhere, Jamie said.
—I think Jamie ought to travel, Jane said. —Don’t you? Only now mysteriously he wants to stay on here. I know he’s busy writing something.
—There’s a lot going for Cardiff, Kate said in a hurry. —Asian immigration mixing with the descendants of the coal miners. You can walk out to a concert. Everywhere, living in these provincial cities, you meet people you know; there’s one good café in town everybody goes to. In the suburbs, the last vestiges of the old tranquillised routine.
—Not provincial strictly, Jamie said. —It’s a capital.
—Time for a change is all I meant, said Jane.
They walked afterwards through the park, because Jane suggested it, to see Kate’s house from the outside. Kate didn’t know what desperate defence she might have mounted, if Jane had proposed coming in; but really Jane wanted her grandson to herself for the time she had left, and pretended to consult regretfully the big man’s watch, on an expandable metal bracelet, that she kept in her jeans. Jamie didn’t walk between them, carried ahead by his irrepressible young stride, looking back, walking backwards sometimes, hands in pockets, uneasy now he’d brought them together, until they were apart again. Faced with Firenze – looking in the soft late-summer light reflected off the water more like a clumsy memory of Venice – Jane seemed struck enough, after all, to want to linger for last minutes. She suggested ice cream; after a moment’s flicker when Jamie, knowing Kate too well, expected her to refuse (on the grounds of whale-oil), he went obligingly off to wait in the queue at the van. Jane and Kate side by side at the railings looked out over the lake to the dreamy blue prospect: two men in a flat boat were busy forking up into heaps, off the surface of the water, the algae that grew in grotesque abundance now because of the phosphates in washing powder (Jamie had told Kate this). A miniature rattling conveyor belt carried the green heaps to the other end of the boat where the stuff was piled high.
Jane turned to look at her. —He’s rather smitten with you, she said. —I think it’s you he’s staying for.
Kate in one second’s plummeting dismay under her scrutiny had time to calculate that Jane hadn’t guessed everything.
She smiled back. —It makes me feel ancient. If flattered.
—I wondered if you’d noticed.
—Noticing is what one’s supposed to be good at, by forty-three. Of course it all makes me rather wish I was eighteen again.
—And what will you do?
—Do? Nothing. I mean, I’ll encourage him if you like to go away, to travel or to go to university or something. That’s what should happen: but it’s not my business.
—We mustn’t hurry him, into whatever it is he’s going to be. I trust him, don’t you? That it will be something good.
—I don’t want to interfere.
—You don’t want him to know that you’ve noticed. But be kind, anyway, letting him down. I think you’ve been good for him. His father and Suzie are kind people, but I wonder if they recognise what they’ve got.
—I’ll be very careful. Don’t worry. He really is a special boy. And I’m very fond of his father. We’ve known one another since we were children.
—Here he comes, warned Jane. —I suppose we’ll have to eat these horrible things.
—She liked you, reassured Jamie later, in the evening of that same day.
Billie was at the piano: her Schubert Impromptus covered his talk with Kate, where they stood stiffly opposed, sideways on to their reflections in the tall mirror over the black marble fireplace, as if in an uneasy crowd. The sweetness of the music, though, made Kate furious; she had grown careless recently over what her mother witnessed, thinking it made no difference. She wanted to shake Jamie, except that she wouldn’t touch him; her voice was intimately incensed.
—I’ve only allowed you to come in because I am so angry with you. It’s for the last time. This is over. You’ve gone too far. What did you think you were up to?
She saw what a difference she had made to him already, in their few weeks; he didn’t flinch, he resisted like a rock under her onslaught, casting his eyes down to lick the rim of his cigarette paper (he could roll up between his fingers, with no surface to lean on: she’d loved boys for less than that, when she was eighteen).
—It didn’t matter, he said steadily. —She wasn’t going to guess: but even if she had. She’s broad-minded, she’s open to all sorts of things.
—Broad-minded! Do you have any idea? If you’d been a man, if she’d been your wife, I’d have faced it out: but your grandmother!
—She’s not a grandmother, really. She’s somebody.
—Worse! And, she did guess half of it: only your stupid infatuation, thank God.
—You’re being quite conventional. I thought you weren’t afraid of anything.
—What kind of idiot do you take me for?
He cast around for a lighter.
—Jamie! To force his attention she slapped him hard, smartly, on the cheek, knocking him off balance; Billie at the piano faltered. She raised her arm to smack him again harder, so he caught her by both wrists, frowning, hurting her slightly; her red handprint dawned on his skin.
—Carry on playing, Mummy! Jamie’s going in a minute anyway.
Creakily, Schubert restarted.
—Don’t, don’t, he encouraged Kate tenderly in an undertone, close to her ear, coaxing her, talking round a child in a tantrum. —Don’t fight. Don’t let’s fight. I’m sorry, if I was wrong.
When he surrounded her she couldn’t see him whole, and the music after all, with her eyes hidden, imposed itself: its pleasures intricate as honeycomb.
—I rolled this one for you, he softly said.
She yielded but lit it – the lighter turned up in his pocket – drawing off and staring away from him nonetheless, in case he thought he’d won. He rolled up for himself, too, and smoked: they watched each other’s reflections smoking in the mirror.
—And what is this writing she says you’re doing? What kind of writing?
He hesitated for the first time. —I wished she hadn’t mentioned that.
—You see? What trouble we’re in? Where anything ordinary we do is dangerous. You can’t write about this, I forbid you to. Is it a novel?
—No. At least, I don’t think so. Do you want to read it? I don’t know whether I’m ready to show you.
—Absolutely not. Never. I want you to destroy it, because I’m so afraid someone will find it. What if you died, say? Anyway it will be the most awful rubbish, you know, when you come back to look at it
later.
That last idea was too much for him, he deeply inhaled. —Was that the real kind of never, or the other kind?
—I don’t ever read anything, as it happens, written after 1930.
He took that in as well. —Well, I won’t be like you.
—God forbid.
—Let me stay, he said, subtly, so that Billie couldn’t hear.
—No. You’re joking. I said it’s finished between us.
In the lamplight his completed adult face – long full cheeks under hard knots of bone, luxuriant mouth, eyes hooded – could seem sealed powerfully over his childhood; she had to be careful not to show how he impressed her, how relieved she was when his naivety spilled out, making his features mobile with feeling again.
—Billie, anyway, is going to be awake all night; she slept for hours this afternoon, on my bed.
—I’ll wait all night. I don’t care however long.
—Not tonight. Come on Friday, perhaps.
—Friday? he sighed. —That’s too far off.
—Friday, perhaps.
David gathered himself in a great effort of concentration upon the children, his younger children. Suzie in those weeks came and went: she wouldn’t talk to him beyond practicalities, and wasn’t very interested in those. She slept, when she slept at home, downstairs. He thought sometimes she seemed intoxicated: short of breath, incoherent, hectic, looking at the children as if she couldn’t see them; he couldn’t tell if this effect was psychological, or whether her new friends were plying her with magic mushrooms or cactus or pills. She seemed to manage, most days, Ladysmith; he presumed that she talked for long hours with Giulia afterwards because when he met Giulia he felt her pregnant with sympathetic knowledge of him, which he held off. What happened to Suzie only touched him remotely now; it had begun to seem improbable that they had lived close together for all those years. He judged her coldly. Their arrangement, living apart in the same house, ought to have felt eccentric; robustly they adapted and got used to it.
One evening, leaving Jamie to babysit, they drove over together to walk in the nearby parkland, open to the public; David had said they ought to discuss things. The old house had burned down in a fire years ago, there was nothing left of it but a shell with blind windows, but the rhododendrons flowered every spring, frogs and fish bred in a weedy pond. David and Suzie sat side by side on the grass at the top of a long sloping field where at the weekend families picnicked and played cricket and flew kites; midweek, they had it to themselves. David kept an eye on his watch, afraid they would miss the locking of the gates. Even as he worried about this, he was carried away by a rage that seemed to blow into him from nowhere across the open space. He began shouting loudly at Suzie, that what made him angry about what had happened was that she was making a stupid person’s mistake, confusing some silly sex fantasy or whatever it was, for a real thing. He wouldn’t have minded if she had fallen in love, or was going through any sort of crisis: but only if she could talk about it to him, like a grown-up. Like intelligent people do. This came out so clearly formulated that David realised he must have been working it all out to himself at home, over and over. His whole body shook with passion as the words flooded out of him. Suzie lay back on the grass.
—You hate me, she said. —You really hate me. Underneath it all. How can you say those things? ‘You wouldn’t have minded’. Is that what you really mean? It’s you who’s stupid. You don’t understand anything. You’re suffocating me.
—You’re the one who’s caused all of this mess, showing off, making a fool of yourself. How dare you blame me?
She rolled over so that her face was buried against the ground and her voice was muffled.
—You don’t know what it’s like, she said. —You don’t know what I feel.
She was wearing some kind of thin print skirt: he could see through it to her curved buttocks and brief knickers. Without knowing he was going to do it, he lifted her skirt and smacked her hard with the full weight of his hand across the back of her thighs; astonished, she scrambled to her knees and pounded with her fists at his shoulders and chest. For a few strange minutes they scuffled together viciously: at one point she tangled her fingers in his hair as tightly as she could and tugged hard at it; he slapped her again, on the face this time, she scratched his neck. A dog-walker emerged from the trees at the bottom of the field and looked up towards them, then retreated; he might have thought they were making love, but in fact their fighting instinct for those minutes seemed pure and unsexual. As soon as David realised Suzie was crying he stopped in dismay. They got to their feet and brushed themselves off shamefacedly; she found a tissue in her bag for both their tears. On the way back to the car Suzie hugged her arms round herself, clenching her shoulders tightly; once or twice he touched her on the elbow to steer her onto the right path. Afterwards, because they never talked about it, he found it hard to believe that this scene had actually taken place. It didn’t seem to make any difference to the way they lived together.
David tried firmly to re-establish the children’s routines: mealtimes, Hannah’s piano lessons, Joel’s pottery on Saturday mornings, bedtimes, baths, tooth brushing. Joel didn’t like his new Year Two class teacher. Hannah feuded, sprouted hot tears, crossed out and rewrote names on the list she actually kept, in a notebook, of her best friends; then ousted friends joined forces against her, cruelties proliferated, and she wilted, overcome by what she’d started. David even had to negotiate truces with the mothers of the other girls, at collection time in the playground. He took for granted that all these difficulties were both real and also manifestations of their distress over the situation at home. Because Suzie had asked him not to, he didn’t say anything to them about a separation: he told them their mother was overtired, that she had problems at work. Jamie was invaluable; guiltily David postponed worrying about him. His eighteenth birthday came and went without anyone suggesting any celebration, though Suzie bought him a card, and they gave him money: his grandmother came down to see him, bringing him books. Jamie had even begun cooking tea sometimes for the children when he picked them up from school, washing up after them, putting their clothes in the machine.
One weekend Suzie took the children away to the chalet in the Gower peninsula; Evie and her daughter Cara were going too (David didn’t ask who else). When they’d gone he climbed into his car in the morning sunshine to get out some work papers from the back seat, and then felt that he couldn’t bear to go back inside the empty house (Jamie comatose in his attic, having come in at God knows what time, didn’t count). He drove off; went up the Wye valley, stopped at Ross, filled the car with petrol, walked around the little town without seeing it. He wouldn’t even have known afterwards that he had bought coffee somewhere, except that he could taste it at the back of his mouth, brown and bitter, something to focus on. Eventually, as if it was where he had been meaning to go all along, he drove in the early afternoon back into Cardiff and to Kate Flynn’s house. Standing waiting at the door he heard music; he was afraid she might not let him in if she was rehearsing with her quartet. At last there were footsteps crossing the empty hall, and Billie came slowly to peer at him through the queerly distorting coloured panes.
—Oh, it’s you, she said, with her capaciously accepting smile, when she opened the door; he wondered whom she thought she recognised. She seemed a pressed flower, faded and weightless, lilac colour in ivory cheeks; but her hand grabbing his arm for her return journey bore heavily down on him, claw-like, a real old lady’s. He thought she looked less well than when he’d first seen her in the winter.
The gas fire burned hotly in the drawing room, blotting out the mild weather outside; the curtains were half drawn against the slanting sunlight. Kate, standing with a blonde woman he didn’t recognise, poised to play, signalled with her bow for him to sit out of the way on the sofa opposite.
—From thirty-two? She collected the others in a glance, the viola player turned her pages back, Billie resumed at the piano stoo
l; then Kate dropped her head decisively, starting them. They were playing Haydn’s ‘Gypsy Rondo’ Trio. Kate was wearing extraordinary shoes, impossibly high, pink with black suede flowers: they made her almost tall, swaying in her dark-rose-coloured dress which was cut somehow so that it fitted tight around her breasts and tiny waist and hips, flared out and swung around her knees. David shut his eyes to listen, judged their playing pleasantly adequate, heard them stumble and restart once or twice (usually Billie with cold fingers), knew they flaked out in the finale, had to stop and go at half speed. For all their clumsiness, even mysteriously because of it, he seemed to penetrate deeper and deeper into the truth of the elusive enchantment.
Then Kate stood over him; he was looking up at the underside of her black tea tray. —How flattering. You fell asleep. I’ve made you coffee.
—The music was in my dreams, he apologised, and it was true: they had been illuminated by an idea of the eighteenth century, glass and rococo gold, stone nymphs in garden recesses.
—Best dreamed, said the viola player (Ann, he’d heard Kate call her), compact, neat jaw jutting just enough to make whatever she said sound resolute. —We’re crap at the finale.
—I’m not sleeping well at night, he said, wondering how crumpled he was, whether he’d dribbled onto the sofa cushions. —Then I fatally relaxed. Also it’s hot in here.
—It’s all right, Ann said. —We forgive you.
He gave in to remaining slumped down in the sofa corner under their scrutiny: after a moment he even shut his eyes again.
—Who is he? Ann asked.
—He’s David Roberts: Carol’s brother.
She was doubtful. —He doesn’t look like her.
—More like his mother. He felt Kate’s fingers rest for an instant coolly at his temple, recognising them by the hard bristle of her rings: as if she was demonstrating some trick of his appearance, to which Ann guardedly assented.