by Tessa Hadley
— What a shame I didn’t bring my costume, she remarked conversationally, looking at the pool, which Nigel was supposed to skim of its flotsam of twigs and leaves and dead insects every day, but hadn’t.
— What costume, Bo Peep? Nigel said. — This isn’t a fancy-dress party.
He’d become waspish at the sight of the awful mess in the house, torn between bravado and responsibility (he thought about his mother); toying with the idea of washing dishes, he put it aside for later.
— My swimming costume, Jane explained.
Transplanted out of her familiar world, she seemed to find it easier to be dignified, as if she were moving inside a different skin, sleeker. Perhaps it was partly the barley wine. She was able to penetrate, too, into the others’ motives and relations – grown-up insight seemed to come not through gradual accretion but all at once. Daniel had power over the other two, she saw, just as he had power over her, though not through any conscious exertion of his will. They tracked his movements and his moods: if he was at ease, then they could be, too. And yet he wasn’t tyrannical, was only either pleasant or absent; if he was abstracted, you felt the curse of your failure to interest him. (Paddy, who picked up a book to read as soon as he sat down on the terrace, didn’t care as much as she and Nigel did. Because he was cleverer he was more detached, with reserves of irony.) Now Daniel suggested coffee and sandwiches, as if this were a summer lunch party and not the tail end of an all-nighter. The idea made everyone carefree; they discovered they were starving. Nigel hunted in the fridge for butter. If Jane had been older, she might have taken the opportunity to parade her femininity in the kitchen, but it didn’t occur to her. Daniel and Nigel made tuna-and-salad-cream sandwiches; she waited with an air of calm entitlement for hers to be brought to her.
While they ate, they catechised her on her opinions, and were delighted to find that she believed in God and expected to vote Conservative when she was twenty-one. (—Not just because my parents do, she insisted. — I shall read the newspapers and make up my own mind.) They were sitting on the terrace in Nigel’s mother’s striking wicker chairs; Jane’s was a shallow cone set in a cast-iron frame. Daniel was cross-legged on the terrace beside her. She said that it was only fair for everyone to do a day’s hard work, and that people who criticised England all the time should try going to live somewhere else, and that she hated cruelty to animals. All the time she was talking, Daniel was doing something to her feet, which dangled from the rim of the wicker cone: tickling them with a grass seed head, pulling the grass backwards and forwards between her toes where they were calloused from the thong on her flip-flops. Jane was suffused with a sensation that was mingled ecstasy and shame: shame because she hated her feet, prosaic flat slabs that took an extra-wide fitting. Daniel’s feet (he had been barefoot even when he was driving and in the shop – the shopkeeper had stared) were brown and finely complex, high-arched with wire-taut tendons, curling dark hairs tufting each toe.
— D’you think we’re layabouts and social parasites? Paddy asked her.
— I thought that perhaps you were students, she said shyly. — I sort of know the type, because my brother’s trying for Oxford.
Daniel said that he’d rather not talk about Oxford. — His career there hangs in the balance between brilliance and disaster, Paddy explained on his behalf. (Daniel’s senior tutor had warned that after certain brushes with the drug squad he might not be allowed to sit his finals.) — And he doesn’t know whether he cares.
— I think we should swim, Daniel suggested. — It’s just too fucking hot.
Jane blushed: his word was so forbidden that she hardly knew how she knew it – the girls never used it at school. It was an entrance, glowering with darkness, into the cave of things unknown to her.
— But I haven’t got a costume, she said.
— Bo Peep’s lost her sheep, Nigel mocked.
— Swim nude, Daniel suggested. — No one can see – except us, and we like you.
She looked around at them all to see if they were joking, then drew her breath in testingly as you did on the brink of plunging into water. Inspired (and she had been sipping barley wine again, with her sandwich), just then she was capable of anything. Tipping herself out of the cone chair, she took hold of the hem of her dress, to pull it up over her head while the boys watched. (It was as easy as playing with Robin in the old days, she thought, in the garden with the paddling pool.) She was aware uninhibitedly of her young body beneath the dress, in its knickers and bra (she would keep those on, perhaps). But at that very moment another girl appeared from inside the house, astonishing them all: she came through the sliding doors, carrying a glass of fizzing drink ceremoniously, stirring the ice cubes and sucking at it through a plastic bendy straw. Slender and disdainful, with a long narrow nose and slightly squinting eyes, she was wrapped in a sarong. Her chestnut-dark hair fell well below her waist in symmetrical waves, as if it had been tied in plaits and then undone.
— She can borrow my old swimsuit if she wants, the girl said, with an air of unmasking male proceedings beneath her dignity.
Nigel had leaped out of his chair, a suspended wicker basket, which went swinging wildly. — Fiona! When did you get here? How did you get in? What on earth are you drinking?
— Vodka, Fiona said. — And I got in while you were out, because you actually failed to lock anything up behind you, you idiot. I mean, God, Nige, what if I’d been a burglar or something? Then I was fast asleep, until you lot started banging around down here. And this pool’s a disgusting swamp – weren’t you supposed to do something about it? Hi, Daniel and Paddy. Hi, what’s-your-name. My cozzy’s in a drawer in the chest in my bedroom, if you want it.
Fiona was Nigel’s younger sister, aged eighteen and returned by herself from the South of France on her way to drama school. She chose to sit with her drink under an orange umbrella at the far end of the terrace, as if she were semi-detached from her brother and his friends. But Jane, with her new intuitiveness, guessed that she sat there because it meant that she was in Daniel’s sightlines the whole time she was yawning and stretching and pretending to sunbathe, showing off her legs through the slit in her sarong.
JANE BORROWED FIONA’S swimming costume (which was tight on her) and powered up and down the short pool with her strong crawl, face turning into the water then out to breathe, as she’d been taught, all the accumulated rubbish (leathery wet leaves, sodden drowned butterflies and daddy-long-legs, an empty cigarette pack) bobbing against her breasts and lips and knees as she swam. No one joined her in the pool. Jane had hardly expected them to; she had accepted immediately the justice of her defeat – right at the moment that she’d had all the boys’ eyes on her – by the older, prettier, more sophisticated girl. (Still, the word ‘woebegone’ nudged at her, from a poem she’d read at school.) When she got out, she would ask Paddy to drive her to a bus stop, then to lend her the money for her bus fare home. She would ask for his address, so that she could repay him: out of her pocket money, because she could never tell her parents where she’d been.
Heaving herself out at the side of the pool, she stood streaming water, too shy to ask for a towel. The others were planning a visit to the pub in the nearest village. Jane had never been inside a pub in her life, but she thought there was bound to be a bus stop somewhere in the village.
— Come on, let’s go, Fiona said impatiently. There was only half an hour until afternoon closing time.
— We can’t all get in the car, Nigel said, worrying.
— We can if we hold on tight. It’ll be a scream. Paddy, come on.
Obediently Paddy stood up, stuffing his book into his back pocket. (It was Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.) He went to look for shoes. Fiona was aware suddenly of Jane. — Oh, God, she’s still got that costume on. Can’t you just put your dress on over the top?
Jane looked down mutely at herself, still dripping.
Daniel hadn’t moved from where he was spreadeagled now in a deckchair. He’d
been watching Jane’s steady stroke in the pool, how she submitted to the rhythm of it and forgot herself, forgot to wonder whether they were looking at her or not. He had felt, while he watched, that he was seeing deeply into her raw sensibility: fatalistic, acutely responsive, open to anything. He was aware all the time, of course, of Fiona’s manoeuvring to make him notice her – there was a bit of past history between them, which he was wary of reviving, not wanting her to get it into her head that she had any rights of possession over him. Anyway, her blasé, bossy voice was grating on him this afternoon. Her displays of sophistication seemed childish, and he was unmoved by the skinny brown stomach flashing at him so insistently from above the sarong.
— You go ahead, he said. — Jane has to change. I’ll wait and walk down with her. We’ll catch up.
Fiona couldn’t hide the sour disappointment in her face, but she had staked too much, too noisily, on her desperate need for the pub to back down now. Jane looked anxiously from one to the other. — I don’t mind, she said. — You don’t have to wait for me.
— What are you up to, Daniel? Fiona laughed ungraciously.
Daniel kept his eyes closed against the sun while the others quarrelled, getting ready; Jane went inside to change. When he heard the car receding on the road, he followed her in, confused at first in the interior patchwork of light and shadows, after the glare outdoors. He stood listening at the bottom of the open-tread staircase, his breath barely stirring the bright dust motes in their circling. The house was as perfectly quiet as if it were empty, yet he was aware of the girl standing somewhere upstairs, equally still, listening for him. The moment seemed eloquent, as he put his foot on the bottom step and started up, breaking into the peace.
He found Jane in Fiona’s room, where she’d left her dress; she was still in the wet costume, although she’d pulled down the blind out of modesty, so that he saw her waiting in a pink half-light. (She’d been afraid, suddenly, to be naked, in case he came looking for her.) His mouth when he kissed her (her first-ever kiss) seemed scalding, because her mouth was cold from the water and from fear. She was cold and clammy all over. When Daniel tried to peel off the sodden swimming costume it knotted itself around her in a rubbery clinging rope and she had to help, rolling it and dragging at it. They left it where it lay when she kicked it off, and its wetness soaked into Fiona’s red rug.
FIONA FOUND THE wet patch on her rug later and guessed immediately (she had intuitions, too) the story behind it; she thought for one outraged moment that they’d actually done it on her bed. But her bed was intact – thank God for that, at least. Daniel must have taken Jane into the spare room, where he and Paddy were staying. By now it was late afternoon, and Jane was in a phone box in the village, ringing home. (Nigel didn’t want them using the phone at the house, in case his parents complained about the bill.) Daniel waited for her, not interested in her difficulties over what to say. He was smoking, leaning back against the phone box, head tilted to look up at the sky, which was still immaculately blue, just beginning to pale. Even while Jane spoke to her mother in the ordinary words that seemed to flow convincingly, as if from her old self, her new self pressed her free palm on the rectangle of thick glass against which, on the other side, Daniel in his blue shirt was also miraculously pressed, oblivious of her touch. (And she knew now the long brown nakedness of his back under the shirt, with its ripple of vertebrae.) Forever afterwards, the smell inside one of those old red phone boxes – dank and mushroomy and faintly urinous – could turn Jane’s heart over in erotic excitement.
Her mother’s mild voice was in her ear, incurious: they had begun to wonder where she was. — I told Daddy you’d probably gone off to play ping-pong somewhere.
— I’m at Alison’s, Jane said. — Alison Lefanu. You remember, from Junior Orchestra? French horn. Can I stay the night? It doesn’t matter about toothbrush and pyjamas. Her mum says I can borrow them.
Mrs Allsop, blessedly vague, sent her love to Mrs Lefanu. — The Lefanus live out at Headley, don’t they? You didn’t walk all that way?
— I was on my way down to the village, and they drove past. I just got in.
Jane was thinking, Will I ever see my home again? It seemed unlikely.
— Don’t be a nuisance, her mother said. — Eat whatever they put in front of you, even if it’s cauliflower.
NOW THEY ALL sat talking on the terrace in an evening light as thick as syrup; clouds of insects swarmed above the Japanese water features, swallows slipped close along the earth, a blackbird sang. They were drinking Jane’s shoplifted wine and her whisky; then the boys started messing around with a needle and little glass vials of methedrine, which Paddy fetched from his room. — Don’t look, it’s not for nice girls, Daniel said to Jane, and so, obediently, she closed her eyes. The boys’ huddle over this ceremony – so intimate, taken so seriously – frightened Fiona and made her even more furious than the wet patch on her rug. She went inside and crashed around the house, effecting a transformation: washing dishes, scrubbing the stove and the kitchen floor, throwing the windows wide open, emptying ashtrays with a clang of the dustbin lid. She shook out the mats from the sitting room, cracking them like whips over the boys’ heads on the terrace. Gradually, as she worked, the resentment slipped out of her and her mood changed. She began to enjoy her own strength and to feel serenely indifferent to the others. If her brother’s friends wanted to get doped up, why should she care? She started to think about drama school. Later, she warmed up some tinned soup, and brought out cheese and crackers for them all. By this time it was dark and the only light came from the lamps she’d turned on inside.
Daniel was trying to explain the idea of the soul as it was understood in the Hindu Vedanta. His words were punctuated by the clonk of the bamboo shishi-odoshi in the garden, which filled up with water then tipped and emptied, falling back against its rock. What he wanted to describe was how the soul’s origins were in wholeness and light, but on its entry into the world it took on the filth of violence and corruption. The soul trapped in the individual forgot its home and despaired; but despair was only another illusion to be stripped away. He wanted to say that revolution was a kind of cleansing that conferred its own immortality in a perpetual present. Art had to be revolutionary or it would die in time. He believed as he spoke that he was brilliantly eloquent, but in truth he was rambling incoherently.
Paddy, getting the gist of it, quoted poetry in an ironic voice: — ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’
— Signor Keats, I do believe, Nigel said.
— Oh, that’s the poet, Jane said. — We have his bust at home, on the piano.
Cross-legged on a cushion at Daniel’s feet, she was leaning lightly against him, as if she could ground the tension quivering in his right foot, which was balanced across his left knee. His intelligence seemed as ceaseless as an engine working. She felt exceptionally attuned to the boys’ voices rising through earnestness to mockery and back again, although she hardly heard their words, only what ran underneath: a current of strain, a jostling of contest and display. She saw how Nigel tried to match the other two and failed, and how he suffered, yearning for Daniel’s approval. Meanwhile her own new knowledge filled her up, not in the form of thoughts but as sensations, overwhelming. Her experience in the strange bed that afternoon hadn’t been joyous: there’d been some swooning, obliterating pleasure in the preliminaries, but then too much anxiety in the clumsy arrangements which she had known (from her biology lessons) would follow. Remembering it all now, though, she was sick with desire and longed for the time to come when Daniel would touch her again.
WHEN THEY DID go to bed, however, Daniel was suddenly exhausted; stoop-backed, he crawled between the sheets in his underpants, turning away from Jane, towards the window. — Watch over me, was the last thing he mumbled.
And so she kept vigil faithfully for hours in the quiet of the night, presiding over the mystery of her changed life, adjusting her body against the peremptory
curve of his turned back and legs in the narrow single bed. But at last she couldn’t help it – she fell asleep herself. And when she awoke in the morning Daniel was gone. After a while, when he didn’t come back, she put on her underclothes and her dress, and set off around the house in search of him. Downstairs, she smelled Paddy’s sweat and saw the tousled mess of his hair poking from the top of a sleeping bag on the sofa in the lounge. Nigel was making a racket outside with the sliding door of the garage, in search of the net for the swimming pool. Jane climbed upstairs again. Nigel’s parents’ bedroom was at the front of the house, opening off the landing ahead of her; the door was ajar, and Jane stepped soundlessly inside.
It was a beautiful room, like nothing she’d ever seen before, with a pale wood floor and plain white walls, creamy sheepskin rugs. Fresh sunlight, pouring through windows all along its length, was reflected in the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobes; the curtains, in some kind of rough white translucent linen, were cut too long for the windows, and the cloth fell in heaps on the floor. A huge bed seemed to be all white sheets and no blankets. (Jane had never seen a duvet before.) In the bed, with the duvet kicked to their feet, Daniel and Fiona lay naked and asleep, facing away from each other, their slim tanned legs tangled together. Jane, who had done the Greeks in history, thought that they looked like young warriors in a classical scene, fallen in the place where they had been wrestling. She withdrew from the room without waking them, as quietly as she had come in.