Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  Nigel, rather the worse for wear, in his pyjama bottoms, was smoking and skimming the pool, dumping the rubbish in a soaking heap beside him. He watched when Jane came to stand at the pool’s brink; she stared in with dry, hot eyes.

  — So now you know, he said.

  But she repudiated his offer of companionship in her unrequited love. Her experience was not like anyone else’s. She asked only if he would drive her back, and he said he’d get the car out as soon as he’d finished with the pool.

  — I’d like to go now, she said crisply, sounding like her mother. — If you don’t mind.

  On the way they hardly spoke, except when Nigel asked for directions as they drew near her home. Jane forgot, in her absorption, to notice the way they’d come, so that she never afterwards knew where Nigel’s house was. And she never saw it again, or any of the boys (Fiona once, perhaps, at a party).

  He dropped her off at the bottom of the drive. It was still quite early in the morning – only nine o’clock. Jane stared around her as if she’d never seen the place before, as if it were more mysterious than anywhere she’d been – the scuffed dirt at the edge of the road, the old mossy gateposts, blackbirds flitting in the dead leaves at the bottom of the hedge, the hard lime-yellow fruits in the hedge apple tree, her own footprints from the day before intact in the dust, the Jokari paddle left where she had dropped it.

  HER MOTHER DIDN’T seem surprised to see her so early.

  — Did you have a nice time, dear?

  Jane said that she’d had fun. But that afternoon she suffered with pain in her stomach and bloating (— What exactly did you eat at the Lefanus’?). And the next day her period came rather copiously and early – which ought to have been a relief but wasn’t, because it hadn’t occurred to her until then (despite the biology lessons) that she could be pregnant. The weather changed, too. So it was all right for her to curl up under her eiderdown, hugging a hot-water bottle to her stomach, reading her Chalet School books and looking up from time to time at the rain running down the window. Her mother brought her tea with two sugars, and aspirin.

  Jane never told anyone what had happened to her (not even, years later, the boyfriend who became her husband, and who might have wondered). And in a way she never assimilated the experience, though she didn’t forget it, either. As an adult, she took on board all the usual Tory disapproval towards drugs and juvenile delinquency and underage sex, and never saw any implications for her own case. She was fearful for her own daughters, as normal mothers were, without connecting her fears to anything that had happened to her. Her early initiation stayed in a sealed compartment in her thoughts and seemed to have no effects, no consequences.

  Jane and her husband divorced in their mid-fifties, and her friends advised her to have counselling. The counsellor was a nice, intelligent woman. (Actually, she couldn’t help feeling exasperated by Jane and her heavy, patient sorrows: her expensive clothes, her lack of imagination, the silk scarf thrown girlishly over one shoulder. Of course, she was much too professional to let this show.) Jane confessed that she had always felt as if she were on the wrong side of a barrier, cutting her off from the real life she was meant to be living.

  — What’s it like, then, real life on the other side?

  Haltingly, Jane described a summer day beside a swimming pool. A long sunlit room with white walls and a white bed. A breeze is blowing; long white curtains are dragged sluggishly backwards and forwards on a pale wood floor. (These women’s fantasies, the counsellor thought, have more to do with interior decor than with repressed desires.) Then Jane got into her stride, and the narrative became more interesting. — A boy and a girl, she said, — are naked, asleep in the bed. I am curled on a rug on the floor beside them. The boy turns over in his sleep, flings out his arm, and his hand dangles to the floor. I think he’s seeking out the cool, down there under the bed. I move carefully on my rug, so as not to wake him. I move so that his hand is touching me.

  That’s more like it, the counsellor thought. That’s something.

  AS FOR DANIEL, well, he trained as a lawyer after he’d finished his literature degree. He got out of the drink and the drugs not long after university. (Paddy never did; he died.) Daniel lives in Geneva now, with his second wife, whom he loves very much, and occasionally, when he’s bored with his respectable Swiss friends and wants to shock them, he tells stories about his wild youth. He is in international human-rights law; he’s a force for good. He’s a good husband and father, too (more dedicated, because of the wildness in his past). Of course, he’s ambitious and likes power.

  He can just about remember Nigel, and Nigel’s parents’ house that summer, and Fiona (they were together off and on for a few months afterwards). But he has no memory at all of Jane. Even if by some miracle he ever met her, and she recognised him and told him the whole story (which she would never do), it wouldn’t bring anything back. It isn’t only that the drink and the drugs made him forget. He’s had too much happiness in his life since, too much experience; he’s lost that fine-tuning that could hold on to the smell of the ham in the off-licence, the wetness of the swimming costume, the girl’s cold skin and her naivety, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve, the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light. It’s all just gone.

  The Stain

  The old man’s daughter made enquiries in the village, looking for someone to go there every weekday and keep an eye on him, to clean the place and cook something for his lunch and tea. He wasn’t incapacitated, but he wasn’t used to looking after himself. Marina needed the money. So every morning, after she dropped Liam off at school, she made her way up through the churchyard and across the park to the square stone house on the corner where the old man lived. Rooks squawked, scattered out of the beech trees by the wind; unkempt grass blew around the molehills; swallows were dark scratches on the light. Marina was tall and athletic-looking, in black leggings and trainers and a pink Puffa jacket, with a freckled face and a ponytail of tangled curling auburn hair. She walked with a long stride, swinging her shopping bag, bent forward as if she were oblivious or shy, although she was well known in the village. She’d had plenty of little jobs doing housework, and had worked in the dry-cleaner’s before she was married. Reliable and thoughtful, an oddball who kept herself apart from the other mothers, she was just the right choice for handling a difficult old man.

  She told him that she had been looking at this house all her life – she’d passed it every day when she was a child herself, walking to school – but she’d never been inside before. She didn’t volunteer this right away; she waited first to see whether he wanted her to talk. Her husband Gary had warned her that the old man and his daughter would be used to having black servants waiting on them hand and foot, but it wasn’t really like that. Wendy had left South Africa and come to live in England before Marina was even born, and she said that she never wanted to go back – there was so much violence there now. And the old man didn’t seem to be any kind of slave-driver. He liked to sit and watch Marina work sometimes, but he always asked her courteously first whether she minded.

  — So what d’you think of the house, now you’re inside it? he asked.

  — You’ve got a nice lot of space, she said, sitting back on her haunches, wiping her hot face on her arm. She was scouring the linoleum on the kitchen floor, on her hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and a bucket, because of the stubborn greasy dirt. She told him that you could fit her whole house in his drawing room. When she was a child, this house from the outside, with its tall facade and many blind-looking windows, had seemed to stand for all the grandeur and beauty she could imagine. In reality, inside it was dingy and half furnished and needed a coat of paint. The kitchen and the bathrooms hadn’t been altered in thirty years; in the kitchen she had to manage with a single stainless-steel sink and no dishwasher. The previous owners had left some furniture in the upstairs rooms, but the upholstery was worn and grubby; the old man hadn’t brought much from South Afri
ca. They had plenty of money: Wendy’s own place was as luxurious inside as pictures in a magazine. It was the old man’s choice, his obstinacy, to live in the house without renovating it.

  He missed the sun, sitting with a blanket over his knees even in warm weather. Although he was eighty-nine, he didn’t look that old. He was thickset with broad shoulders, his white hair sprouting up stiffly, his small eyes, lost under baggy eyelids, set far back above his flattened cheekbones. His face was expressive and ravaged, like an actor’s. Marina imagined how hard it was for a man who must once have been so vigorous to accept this diminished life, using a cane to get around, with no one to command except her. He’d had to give up driving because of his glaucoma; anyway, he had no friends to visit in this country, apart from his daughter. Because he talked about the vines he’d tended in South Africa, and because he was so deeply tanned, his skin like tough yellow leather, Marina thought he must have been a farmer and spent his days outdoors.

  THE VACUUM CLEANER died on Marina one morning while she was doing the stairs, and he told her to bring it to where he was sitting, in the room he called the office, poring over bank statements and bills. (He had business interests, he told her, though he wasn’t a businessman.) He took the thing to pieces with a screwdriver on top of the desk, painstakingly, with trembling fingers, peering at it through his magnifying glass. When he was concentrating, he stuck out the tip of his tongue at one corner of his mouth, just as Liam did. He got the vacuum going again and that cheered him up. Marina noticed that at lunch that day he ate more hungrily. He said that he liked meat, meat more than anything, and he complimented her gravy (everybody liked her gravy), but usually he managed only a few mouthfuls, pushing whatever vegetables she’d cooked for him to one side of the plate. She had to tuck a napkin under his chin, to keep him from dropping food on his shirtfront.

  The next day she brought an Airfix model in her shopping bag, a Spitfire that someone had given Liam for Christmas; it was too difficult for Liam, and she wondered if the old man would enjoy putting it together. She worried that she was overstepping the mark, insulting him with a child’s toy, but he seemed pleased; he told her that he’d had a pilot’s licence for years, flying small planes. His hands weren’t steady enough, though, to control the tiny pieces of the model – you needed tweezers to put the pilot and the propellers in place, and the glue got everywhere, the pieces stuck to his fingers. Marina had to help him paint it and put the stickers on, according to the instructions. He was discouraged and disappointed in himself; he blamed his eyes.

  — You could write your memoirs, she suggested. — That’s what my grandpa did, because he was in the war. He dictated them into a recorder, and my auntie typed them up. You could pay someone to do it.

  The old man laughed sourly, tapping his forehead. — Better not. Better to keep it all in here where it’s safe.

  She got him to talk about the weather in South Africa, the landscape and the wild animals. He said that the fruit and vegetables over here tasted of nothing, so she picked peas and broad beans from his own vegetable patch, which Wendy tended, and got him to shell them for her, sitting in his garden, saucepan on his lap, colander at his side for the empty pods. If you asked him in the right way, as though you needed his help, then he didn’t mind being put to work. When he’d shelled them himself, he would sometimes eat them with his lunch.

  She saw that he was depressed because he was bored. She could tell as soon as she arrived in the morning if he was in a mood. He sulked; he pretended not to hear her come in the back door, calling out to him; he knocked things over deliberately; he snarled into the phone. (He was always on the telephone, fussing over his investments.) When he was pleased with himself, he was emotional, jovial. He snatched Marina’s hand and squeezed it, said that she was like another daughter to him. There were real tears in his eyes. He wanted to know all about Gary and Liam and her parents and her childhood. He liked to hear the story of her walking past his house when she was a girl. — I wish I’d lived here then, he said. — I’d have invited you inside. You could have played in the garden.

  But once he pushed her hand away in irritation when she brought him a cup of hot coffee, so that it spilled all down her front, and then he was in an agony of contrition – he tried to get down on his knees to ask forgiveness. — Don’t be so silly, Marina said calmly. — I’m not scalded. And it’s only an old apron.

  — Can I buy you a new washing machine? he said. — I mean for your own home. To make up for it. I’m a horrible old man.

  She laughed. — Listen to you. What are you on about? I’ve got a perfectly good washing machine.

  WENDY CALLED AT the house most days, in her four-by-four with tinted windows and the two dogs in the back – to drop off her father’s shopping, or to work in his garden, or take him to his medical appointments (he had prostate problems and diabetes). She wasn’t known for her tact; she was always managing to upset the women who worked for her in her fancy gift shop (which was only a hobby – her divorce had left her with more than enough money). But Marina didn’t take offence when Wendy tried ordering her around, finding fault. Wendy was a dumpy little woman, nervous and punctilious, with the same wide-apart eyes and flattened cheekbones as the old man, her hair dyed black and cut in a shape like a pixie’s cap. Apparently she had a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes that she couldn’t get into any more. You could hardly hear her South African accent, though you could cut her father’s with a knife.

  After all those years apart, father and daughter were almost strangers to each other; Wendy was embarrassed if he had to lean on her for support when they went out together, for drinks or to a concert in the village. He was forceful and charming, and made a point of winning over Wendy’s friends, but she was awkward in his company. She knew how to show affection only to her dogs. She’d wanted her father to come over, but now that she’d got him here she didn’t know what to do with him. People said that there was a brother still in South Africa, but the family had lost touch with him; he’d had mental-health problems, or he’d spent time in prison for cheating pensioners out of their money.

  Marina was settling in at the big house. When she went up to dust the bedrooms on the second floor, which were never used, she liked to stand dreaming, looking down from the windows on her old life in the street below. She persuaded the old man to come to church with her on Sundays. And she took Liam to play in the garden after school, thinking that it would be good for the old man. He’d hardly known his grandchildren, Wendy’s three sons, when they were small, and they didn’t seem eager to make contact with him now. One was an architect and one was in banking; Anthony, the youngest, still lived at home, and was supposed to be setting up some sort of business on the Internet. Glancing out from the kitchen, where she was fixing something that the old man could heat up for his tea later, Marina saw his white head and Liam’s round fair head bent intently over something or other that Liam had dug up out of the earth – a snail shell or a broken bit of china. The flame of her love for her child lapped for that moment around the lonely old man, too: the baggy, age-spotted hands cupping the child’s tiny, unspoiled, tender ones.

  Wendy came into the kitchen with a basket full of courgettes and lettuce, wanting to wash her hands in the sink, clicking her tongue impatiently when she saw it was full of peelings. Holding her hands under the running water, she stared out of the window at her father playing with Liam. — He was never like that with us, she said, not as if she were complaining, just passing on information. Sometimes when she’d been working in the garden her usual stiffness unwound. — He’s growing garrulous in his old age. Child-friendly. Religious. What a turn-up.

  — You grew up on a farm, didn’t you?

  — Is that what he told you?

  — He talked about growing things.

  — There was a farm in the Cape. It was my grandparents’, but we always kept it up. And Dad made a go of it again after he retired. Just something to keep him busy.

  Mos
tly Wendy kept herself carefully closed off from Marina behind a preoccupied, worldly surface, always hurrying somewhere, flashing her car keys about like an insignia. In the back of the four-by-four, along with the dogs, there were boxes full of the retro stuff she sold for so much money in her shop: enamel watering cans artfully rusted, worn old trowels tied up with hairy twine, bits of slate to use as plant labels, rickety iron garden chairs, carbolic soap. These were for people who played at gardening, Marina thought. But Wendy herself was an expert, gifted gardener. As well as growing vegetables in her father’s garden, she was clearing the little paths edged with lavender around an old sundial, and replanting the herbaceous border in front of the yew hedge with delphinium, verbascum and phlox.

  IN CHURCH, MARINA only half listened to the words of the service; she went into a kind of trance. She sometimes thought she might fall asleep while she had her head in her hands and was meant to be praying. The important thing was her immersion in the subdued light and the pocket of damp, different air inside the church walls. Afterwards, she and Liam walked the old man back across the park; he leaned on her, stumbling on the tussocky grass, making her feel his dead weight. His force hadn’t drained away altogether, but it was uncoordinated, outside his control. He wore dark glasses in the sunshine to protect his eyes. At the house, she would pour him a brandy and settle him to wait for Wendy, who came to fetch him for Sunday lunch. He didn’t want the television on – he said he couldn’t see it, didn’t care for it anyway.

  — Watch out for him, Gary said. — Old men get some funny ideas.

  But nothing ever happened that was wrong. He kissed her on the cheek with his wet mouth every day when she arrived and when she left; if he got the chance he tried to put his arm around her shoulders or her waist. Once or twice he touched her legs, not lewdly, but she reproached him and he was abashed; he retreated into gloom, wouldn’t speak for hours. Marina didn’t tell Gary about any of this. She thought how hard it must be, at the end of your life, to be deprived forever of physical contact. Her own body felt luxuriantly wrapped in touching – Gary’s and Liam’s. She hardly knew where her body stopped and her little boy’s started. Couldn’t she spare the old man a little out of her surplus?