by Tessa Hadley
—Do you have a lot of men calling in to fall asleep here?
—He’s unique.
—Does he really want coffee?
—We’ll let him sleep.
David, though, struggled repentantly upright.
—Things are hard at home, he spilled out, to his own surprise. —Hence the tiredness.
—Really? Ann was mildly interested. —What kind of things?
—My wife I think is leaving me.
—You do collect them, Ann said to Kate.
She was pouring coffee. —Meaning?
—Ben. Cello Ben.
—Well, I’ve certainly never collected Ben. David, do you like sugar? Cream?
—Do you have whisky? Ann said, looking about. — If it’s really cream, we could make Irish coffees: you know, the kind where you pour it in over the back of a spoon.
—In that cupboard: but I don’t know how to.
—I’ll do it!
Ann stirred sugar and whisky in the coffee, then, concentrating, made the cream float on top; intently they watched. —Would Billie like one? Where’s she gone?
—She likes everything sweet. Do one for me, too.
David remembered he hadn’t eaten anything since he got up.
—It’ll be nourishing, Ann reassured him.
—Is Suzie really leaving you? Kate asked.
—I think so.
—Aren’t the coffees delicious? Ann was triumphant. —So, do you blame yourself?
The cream left moustaches on their upper lips: David’s probably made him ridiculous as he turned to answer her, dutiful as if he was under oath.
—I expect she thinks I’m too careful. Dull. I haven’t lived: I’ve never taken any risks.
—Risks! Kate was wildly disparaging. —Anyone can take those! And anyway, what about Francesca, to begin with? Didn’t you take a risk with her?
He was scrupulous. —I suppose strictly speaking Francesca took me, and not the other way round. There wasn’t much volition on my part: I was just chosen. Strange as that may seem.
—She didn’t deserve you.
—So which is his wife? Suzie or Francesca?
—That will be a question at the resurrection, Kate said.
—Both, said David, and was about to explain when Billie came absorbedly into the room from wherever she’d wandered, perhaps to find cake.
—Oh Kate. She held out her forearm for them to see: on the loose pale flesh inside, a long red weal.
—You’ve burned yourself! Kate started up, pushing her coffee cup clatteringly on the tray, slopping coffee. —For God’s sake! What on?
—We need to put it in cold water right away. David was practical.
—I’m so silly. I thought I had to light the grill for something, then I tried to put it out and burned myself.
—Perhaps we ought to check the gas, he said.
Ann ran.
They hurried Billie to the downstairs cloakroom and David, supporting her, held her arm awkwardly under the tap in the small basin, cupping the water in his hand to bathe the injury.
—I’m making a bit of a mess in here.
There was water all over the floor; they jostled together in the cramped space, Kate pressed up behind him, peering over his shoulder —Is it bad? Casualty?
—No, I don’t think so. But the trick is to go on cooling it even after it feels all right.
Billie complained the cold water hurt, and tried to pull her arm away.
—Just a little longer, Mummy. He knows what he’s doing.
—Do you have cling film? That’s good for putting on a burn.
—I don’t keep it.
—Then a clean soft cloth will do. Don’t worry if it blisters. But perhaps I ought to come back and see how it is in the morning.
He could feel, even as he concentrated on Billie’s arm, the forceful pressure of Kate’s body against him, through her dress and his clothes. The sensation was unexpectedly fiery; he had thought that she would be cold, underneath all her layers. He turned his head to look in her face, so close at his shoulder that he could taste the coffee on her breath.
—Should I call by in the morning? It would be no trouble.
Agitatedly she stared back at him, as if she was recognising something.
—Oh: no, she said. —Thank you. There’s no need, you’d better not. She’ll be all right. Actually, I’ll ask our doctor to pop in: he’s been our family doctor for years, such a nice chap, he always tells me he’ll come out for Billie for the least thing, he doesn’t mind. He’s got a bit of a thing about you, hasn’t he, Mummy?
David felt rebuffed. —Would you try to find a couple of dry towels? Nothing fluffy, preferably, which could stick: something smooth like linen would be best.
Kate went gratefully to look.
She gave Jamie a ring for his birthday present, fishing it out for him from an old shirt box full of bits of the apparatus men once used: cufflinks and collar studs and tiepins, a buttonhook, a shoehorn, a gold pocket watch, a cut-throat razor, a hairbrush with yellowed bristles.
—We’ve been burgled once or twice – not recently – but they only took stupid things, toasters and television sets, money. They looked for jewellery, but not thoroughly enough: there’s a secret panel, would you believe, in one of the drawers in the wardrobe. Perfectly obvious, I’d have thought, to anyone not out of their mind on drugs. I don’t even know: were these things my father’s or my grandfather’s? They look too antique for my father. I suppose Billie put them away in here, because she couldn’t bear to throw them out. She nursed the three of them, you know. She’s not such a delicate flower, really.
—The three of who?
—My grandparents, then my father. One heart (I think my grandmother didn’t come downstairs for years), one cancer (my grandfather, who went first), one tuberculosis of the spine. They did have servants, of course. For my father, she paid a nurse: she told me, the woman used to tiptoe down into the kitchen at night to eat. Billie used to try to feed her more at mealtimes, she pretended not to want it, left stuff on her plate like a fine lady. Here, have this to remember me by.
Warily he looked at the plain gold band.
—Should I take it?
—Of course you’re not to wear it, not on your finger. No one must see.
—Then what should I do with it?
—Haven’t you any romance? Wear it on a chain around your neck, next to your heart. Sell it, if you like, and drink the proceeds. Anyway, I expect my grandfather had hands like bear paws: the ring would never fit.
In fact, it fitted Jamie’s fourth finger perfectly: Kate would have to adjust her idea of Sam Lebowicz.
—I don’t want to remember you, Jamie said, putting the ring away in his pocket. —I mean, I want to have you now, in the present.
After the day when David fell asleep on her sofa, Kate clung to his son with more ferocity. All the time she was telling him that they had to stop, they couldn’t go on like this; she told him that he would never have any idea what she had given up for him.
—What kind of thing? he asked miserably.
—Possibilities.
She accused him of boasting about his conquest to his friends. He was pale with dismay that she could imagine such a thing was true; she knew he wasn’t capable of it, but couldn’t stop the flow of her fury. Physically, at the same time, her surrender to him was extravagant, complete. Pictures and the aftershock of sensations from their love-making intruded all the time into her thoughts while he wasn’t there. He was set impenetrably apart from her by his youth, however close they came. She wondered if this was how men felt, making love to very beautiful women: like pressing up against a simulacrum of the desired object, battering at a trick of flesh in desperation for it to yield possession. Thwarted, she hunted shamelessly in Jamie for signs of his father, the taut cords in the neck, the delicate ears, the fine flickering purple of eyelids; who knew, perhaps the swirls of body hair too, perhaps his long feet, the taste of sweat on his stomach
? Sometimes his youth was tedious and she punished it.
—There are so many things I can’t tell you, she said.
—Go on. I’d rather hear them.
—I don’t mean I mustn’t tell you, or I shouldn’t. I mean, even if I said them in words you couldn’t hear them, they can’t pass through the distance between us.
He stared intently. —You can tell me. Try. It’s what I want to know.
—There’s no point.
She wouldn’t make love to him anywhere but in the master bedroom; he liked her own room with her things around them, but she couldn’t let it happen there. One night when they were together in the big bed, the door opened; no doubt they had forgotten to bite down their noise. They scrabbled for the bedclothes to pull over their nakedness, and Kate struggled up; Jamie hid his face in the pillows. Billie in her nightdress stood against the light from the landing behind, her silvery hair spread on her shoulders.
—Go away, Kate yelled. —What are you doing in here?
—Mama?
Billie took uncertain steps towards them, unsteady, blinking. She never came into this room, she was afraid of it.
—Leave us alone, Billie! Go back to sleep!
—Mutti? Tremulously, not able to believe her eyes, she peered at them. She spoke in Yiddish, which she always pretended not to understand. —Are you here? Is it you?
Ten
CAROL HAD A phone call from Kate.
—You were right, she said. —I am finding Billie difficult. I think she’s getting worse. She follows me round all over the place. She talks about the marks I got for my O levels. Sometimes I think it’s me that’s losing my mind: I begin to wonder which century exactly I’m in, I start to think I’ve come back from the dead. I’d like to be alone, just for a day or two.
—Do you really want to be alone? Carol said.
—To collect my thoughts.
—I know somewhere you could go.
In the end it was arranged: Carol would move in with Billie for a few days while Kate went down to the Parrog in Pembrokeshire. Betty and Bryn were pleased to have the place warmed up and aired. Betty sent her love, she knew how hard it was, she had thought Kate was so brave, moving in to live with her mother, she was happy to do anything she could to help. There were clean sheets in the airing cupboard; Carol, who would drive her down, could show her how the Rayburn worked. (Carol worried, but to herself, over whether Kate would manage the temperamental stove.)
Kate stared through the windscreen and gave nothing away. Spats of autumnal rain forced Carol to put the wipers on and they squeaked awfully, so that it was impossible to talk; she always had old cars, and never bothered to fix the bits and pieces that went wrong. When it wasn’t raining Carol spoke about work, about pressure the Housing Association was under to sell off valuable property in Cardiff city centre and build cheaply further out. The trees were still thickly leaved but at their tips they were turning colour; long grass at the side of the motorway was bleached silvery beige, lying in swathes where it had been blown. They drove through the bruised industrial aftermath along the South Wales coast: once-blighted bare brown hillsides, pressing close down on Port Talbot, were austerely resurgent; on the flat coastal plain there was still enough business for smoking chimneys, desolate proliferations of pipes, functional yards bleakly unpeopled. Sun flashed briefly, wetly, on the windows of the decent houses on the hillside that had been the steelworkers’ (the pay hadn’t been bad, in the last decades); now you couldn’t get any kind of a price for them. Kate snuggled deeper into her black-and-white checked coat, not because she hated it but because it didn’t interest her. Carol had always felt differently. She had suffered as a child, conscientiously, when they wound up the car windows against the smell, driving through here to the Parrog for family holidays. She had been taken once, aged eight or nine, to the steelworks in Cardiff her grandfather had part-owned and managed; the molten fire tipping, the sweating intent dirty men, had impressed themselves with indelible power, a high mark of importance life might never reach again.
They struck off north and climbed into green hills: there was a lull in the need for the wipers. Kate, looking about her more curiously, said she hadn’t been to the countryside for years, and that it was just what she needed; she was looking forward to dedicating herself to her work. —Such a simplification: this clean space with nothing in it.
—There isn’t nothing in it, Kate. It’s a little seaside town: a mix of locals, with their austere old codes, and incoming spiritual types. Sacred sites and all that are clustered pretty thickly round about. The two species cross paths at the butcher’s, who’s very good, Welsh-speaking: organic meat. Our house is at the edge of town, on the quay.
—I shan’t be going to the butcher, anyway.
—You haven’t turned vegetarian? You don’t eat enough as it is.
—Just queasy: I’ve gone off it. My life at home is such a mess, I think it’s made me sick: no wonder I can’t get down to anything. Here, I will be able to pretend I’m in old Russia, Russia before Napoleon.
—It’s not quite that archaic down here, you know.
—I’m working on a part where he describes the old landowner’s rages. He’s a lovable good-hearted old man, but when he’s angry with one of his daughters he beats them all with a stick, pulls his wife across the floor by her hair, they have to run out into the woods and stay there in the cold overnight.
—Doesn’t sound all that lovable.
—Autres temps, autres moeurs.
—You can telephone me any time you’ve had enough and need rescuing.
—I only long, you know, to be pulled round by my hair.
By the time they drew up outside the house, conversation had been swamped again with the shriek of the infernal wipers: through veils of rain it looked uncompromisingly a square stone box. For some time, climbing down to the west coast, having driven up from the south and cut off the corner of Wales, they’d had their sight of the sea: for Carol the first glimpse always commanded a reflex of childish worship. Today it was grey and crawled dirtily with white-capped waves. When the engine had died and Carol had wrestled with her recalcitrant handbrake, they unbent themselves stiffly into the downpour. The front door swung open on an unwelcoming cold, as if the place slipped out of possession between visits. They dripped in the hall.
—You mustn’t be disappointed. In a minute, when I’ve got the stove lit and the kettle on, you’ll see.
Kate shivered and stood uselessly while Carol busied round, making the place come to life, slipping naturally inside her mother’s routines. When they drank tea Kate was still in her coat, she wouldn’t take it off.
—I would write at this table, Carol suggested. —If I were you. It’s the warmest place. I used to do my school work on it.
The wood of the big table was worn to velvety whiteness with scrubbing and bleaching.
—I remember you coming here, in your holidays.
—Every holiday. Or if not, we pined. Our grandparents, Mum’s parents, were still alive then. We thrived on it: in fact it was a kind of passion with us. And now there are David’s children.
—Show me round. Tell me what you do in all the different rooms: where everyone sleeps.
Carol had not expected Kate to be so interested in the beloved old place, but took her willingly up and down stairs, the pink roses almost faded from her grandmother’s grey carpet, into the bare high rooms with their disproportionately generous windows. It was like a dolls’ house in its spare symmetry; you half expected the whole front to swing away on hinges. In her own bedroom at the back – it had been Betty’s when she was a girl, and looked out onto a little ferny black cliff – she noticed, looking freshly through Kate’s eyes, the picture she had made thirty years ago, out of shells from the seashore pressed into Polyfilla.
—Billie had no idea, Kate commented, —what to do for family holidays. Do you remember that she used to take me to Nice? Because her own parents had taken her there. We st
ayed in a hotel, up until I was fourteen, fifteen: the other guests were ancient, mummified with wealth. I used to read myself into a stupor. I never met any other children; not that I would have wanted to.
—Your going there seemed to me glamorously strange, at the time.
—Strange, it was.
They crossed the landing to the front of the house.
—Mum and Dad sleep in here if they come: or Suzie and David.
Rain obliterated light at the window, pictures were pits of deeper darkness on the pale walls, the double bed loomed; the room’s emptiness was filled with the rushing noise of water, cocooning them inside. —Imagine being married, Kate said.
—Married? That’s an old-fashioned thought.
—Without it though, won’t we be insubstantial?
—Speak for yourself. With it, anyone could be, anyway. And you’ve been a couple, over and over: Max and Tommy and Fergus and what’s-his-name, in Chicago. It’s me that ought to be insubstantial. Look at me! Substance!
—But being a couple over and over isn’t the same thing. I’d like to have been broken up and remade, by something bigger than me. An institution, not a person. Changed out of what I am.
—That’s rubbish. You’d have hated it.
—Anyway, now it’s too late.
—Kate: you talk as if we’re a hundred! Who knows what could happen?
—Too late for me. I can imagine you in one of those enlightened marriages of middle age, taking up t’ai chi together, barge holidays in the Norfolk Broads.
Carol, used to her, hardly flinched, was only mildly reproachful. —How did you manage to make that sound so dreary? For all you know it might be the height of what I long for.
Kate wrote by hand in a notebook, in her gloves, sitting in the living room at the desk where Carol said Betty’s mother had paid her bills and written letters to her old school friends. Betty’s father had been an auctioneer and a farm agent. Kate wrapped herself in her coat and in blankets; she made hot-water bottles for her feet. She had forgotten to put coke in the Rayburn the first night, after Carol left: it went out while she was asleep and in the morning she couldn’t relight it. She brought the electric heaters downstairs from the bedrooms and put them all on. At night – she slept in Carol’s room – she made more hot-water bottles and wore all her clothes; she heaped up duvets borrowed from the other beds. She couldn’t take a bath; she boiled water in the kettle for her wash in the morning. The cold did strange things to her mind, sharpening it sometimes almost to the point of delirium, so that she seemed to be able to see through the Russian words to the writer on the other side, as if the page was only a glass between them; sensuously she disinterred lanky, jointed English sentences from out of the compacted density of Russian.