Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  She couldn’t forgive herself for her innocence, which seemed wilful in retrospect; she remembered how the old man had courted and flattered her. As soon as she’d heard the things that Anthony listed, she had no doubt that some of them were true – enough of them for it not to matter which. They must have been written on the old man’s surface, she thought, but she’d been too ignorant to read them. Gary asked wasn’t she going to work today? Marina didn’t want to, but she didn’t want to explain to Gary, either, so she dressed and took Liam to school, then went into the churchyard. Clouds blew across the patchy sunshine. A new grave was littered with dead flowers still wrapped in cellophane, sodden ribbons, a child’s paper windmill. Already the old man would be missing her. He was probably telephoning right now, to find out where she was. She kept her mobile switched off. Should she go up to the house? Was that her duty? She had thought she might go into the church to pray for guidance, but as soon as she sat down in the churchyard that idea sickened her, too, as another fake.

  Instead, she set out for Wendy’s, wanting to talk to her. It was along the way that Anthony had driven the night before; less than ten minutes by car, but quite a walk. Wendy’s house, rectangular and substantial, newly painted cream, was set back from the road; when Marina was halfway up the gravelled drive she caught sight of Wendy standing at one of the upstairs windows as if she were looking out for her, expecting her. Wendy waved urgently; moments later, she appeared at the front door in a white towelling bathrobe and flip-flops, her hair scraped back from her forehead under a stretch band. She hurried up to Marina, seizing her hands. Naked of its make-up, greasy with cleanser, her face looked dazzled and bewildered.

  — Is he gone?

  — I don’t know, Marina said, thinking she must mean Anthony.

  — What’s extraordinary, Wendy hurried on, not in her usual mocking, drawling voice but exalted and excited, — is that I’ve always dreamed of it happening just like this. In the dream, it’s always morning and overcast, I’m running a bath in the en suite and I get undressed, the tap’s still running, everything’s steamy. Then in the dream I get this premonition that it’s going to happen, right now – and that’s when the phone rings and it’s my useless brother, ringing to tell me that Dad’s dead. But the dream’s changed since Dad came to live here. Now it’s always you instead, bringing the news. You’re always coming up the drive, wearing your pink jacket – I see your red hair. While I was running my bath this morning, I looked out and saw you, and it was exactly like it was in the dream, so I just knew.

  Marina calmed her down and explained that she hadn’t seen the old man yet this morning, that as far as she knew he was fine. Although Wendy seemed to listen, she was still agitated. She asked Marina to wait while she dressed. Then they drove down into the village together, to check on him. Wendy never asked why Marina had come to see her, and her explanation was overtaken by events. The old man had died peacefully in his sleep. Almost peacefully. There was some evidence of a struggle with the bedclothes. He had fallen halfway out of the bed when they found him, with his head on the floor.

  HE DID LEAVE Marina the house in his will – he’d changed it only a few weeks before his death – but she wouldn’t take it. The solicitors said that her refusal was unusual but not unprecedented; she had to sign a disclaimer in order to give the house back. Eventually, Wendy got builders into it, renovating from top to bottom, doing it up beautifully. Then she moved in herself and put her other place on the market. She tried to give Marina some money instead of the house, but Marina wouldn’t touch a penny. It caused trouble between her and Gary. Gary didn’t see why she shouldn’t have something, and Marina’s mother agreed: they could put it aside, in case Liam wanted to go to college later. But once Marina got an idea into her head there was no changing it. Gary knew that better than anyone. In the end, he went along with what she wanted.

  Deeds Not Words

  All the girls at St Clements loved Miss Mulhouse. Quite a few of them had loved her even before she broke windows in a shop in Oxford Street and was arrested as a suffragette. She was graceful and earnest and angularly thin, with a lot of very soft hair and large interesting pale eyes, the lids languidly heavy. Her intensity was of the smouldering and not the flaring kind, and she read Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the girls in her lessons. I have been here before, / But when or how I cannot tell: / I know the grass beyond the door, / The sweet keen smell . . .

  After the news of her arrest had spread – someone’s father had found her name in the newspapers – loving Miss Mulhouse became a kind of cult in the school and no one dared not belong. The girls decorated their desks in WSPU colours, purple and green and white, and stuck pictures of the Pankhursts inside their desk lids. They found out their teacher’s first name, Laura – perhaps it had been in the list in the newspaper – and passed it around in hushed voices, like an initiation into occult knowledge. Fervently some of them began mugging up on suffragist politics; one of the day girls had a brother with a printing set, and they composed angry pamphlets with ‘Believe and You Will Conquer’ in big letters set crookedly on the front page, or ‘Liberty and No Surrender.’ All through prayers one morning, one of these pamphlets was drawing-pinned at the very centre of the honours board, where the names of distinguished alumnae were picked out in gold. Afterwards discussion surged around the groups of girls: had the teachers and the headmistress really not noticed their pamphlet? Or had they seen it and chosen to leave it there? Some of them were known to be sympathisers.

  Edith Carew taught Latin, and approved in principle – of course – of votes for women, but was too sceptical to be an enthusiast for any political cause. Laura Mulhouse had always seemed vaguely comical to her, drifting through the corridors with her arms full of poetry books and her air of high-minded regret. Laura had such reserves of indignation over so many outrages, and seemed freshly astonished every day by the world’s wickedness – though she could be petty over borrowed teacups in the staffroom. Edith thought that Laura played up to certain susceptible girls, too, encouraging them to worship her. Edith and the French teacher, Mr Briers, had called Laura privately the Lady of Shalott – it was Mr Briers’s first shared joke with Edith, though they gave it up later when Laura was in prison. By that time, anyway, Edith wasn’t giving Laura Mulhouse much thought. Her mind was all absorbed in lower things: she was drowning in her love affair with Fitzsimmon Briers.

  Edith was thirty-four and lively and not bad-looking and had always expected to get married, but humiliatingly she had to own up to Fitz that this was her first experience of love – certainly of what she shyly called ‘intimate relations’. Fitz was the most intelligent man Edith had ever got anywhere close to; his dry humour and his good taste, and his appreciation of her, changed her life as drastically as if she found footprints on an island where she’d been beginning to believe she was alone!. Sometimes she felt this alteration so intensely that she imagined he must be leaving actual marks on her body, and looked for them after they’d spent time together. Fitz was heavy and shambolic, with black hair and a beard, and silky black hair on his chest. Edith was trim with a neat figure; she had dreaded that this body would bloom and fade under her clothes without any man ever knowing it. Unfortunately, and it was just her luck – the only thing to do with her luck, Edith thought, was to laugh at it – Fitz was married, with a child. He wouldn’t talk about his wife, just said she was an invalid and didn’t go out much. Edith had never seen her. People said she’d had a nervous collapse.

  St Clements had moved recently into an eighteenth-century gentleman’s residence built on the hillside above a seaside town on the south coast; the classrooms were wood-panelled and poky, and all the headmistress’s energies were bent on raising funds for a modern science block. Every afternoon after the end of school, when she wasn’t on duty and Fitz could get away, Edith climbed the back staircase in Old Court to the French office, hardly more than a cupboard under the roof, where French grammar books were ke
pt along with spare chairs and editions of Racine and Victor Hugo. This staircase was forbidden to the girls. Fitz would be waiting for her, he would hurry her over the threshold, nuzzling her hands and her arms as if he was too hungry to delay. Then he’d lock the door behind them and lay out on the floorboards the blankets he’d brought from home, which smelled of mothballs. Sometimes rain drummed on the sloping roof, enclosing them, sometimes the sun baked down on it and their skins were slick with sweat. Edith could hardly believe that this French cupboard which had been so prosaically ordinary could transform itself into the scene of such revelations. After their intimacies, while she lay curled in the crook of his arm, he read to her out of Phèdre or Mme de Staël. He had a beautiful accent and got carried away with the sound of the words, Edith had to whisper to him to keep quiet. She was haunted by the perils of their situation, though she’d never been fearful in her life before. They might be found out, and she would be disgraced, they would both lose their jobs. Or she might conceive a child – though Fitz assured her that he ‘knew what he was doing’.

  Meanwhile word went round that Miss Mulhouse was on hunger strike in prison, and being force-fed: passion for the movement blew up fervidly among the girls. They asked permission to hold meetings in the common room. In the end the headmistress agreed, though not all her teachers supported her – and the meetings were so well attended they had to be moved into the refectory. Certain members of staff went along too. Crazes had swept the school before, Edith remembered – for automatic writing, or the novels of Marie Corelli; last winter half the girls were wearing crosses hidden under their blouses, and swapping scent bottles supposed to be filled with holy water. Fitz agreed with Edith that the force-feeding was barbaric, but he said that Laura Mulhouse had gone to Oxford Street intent on suffering: in another era she’d have been a Christian martyr. Police brutality only encouraged hysterical behaviour. Then two senior girls were suspended – there was a rumour they’d been planning to invade the local racecourse. Someone set fire to a pillar box in the high street, though probably this had nothing to do with the school.

  At the end of one afternoon, when Edith and Fitz climbed the stairs to the French cupboard, its door was daubed with slogans in white paint. ‘End this outrage now!’ ‘Stop the torture of women!’

  In her shock Edith was confused for a moment. — Do they know about us?

  —Don’t be silly. It’s nothing to do with us. It’s those blasted suffragettes.

  Fitz was right of course – it turned out the slogans were all over the place, the work of the girls who’d been suspended, and who’d crept back with a bucket of whitewash while the school was in afternoon lessons. He said Edith better not stay, there was bound to be uproar. Sick with her disappointment, she made her way downstairs. All that was left for her now was to return to her lodgings, heat up her supper of leftover meat and vegetables and rice pudding over the paraffin lamp, prepare her lessons for the next day. I might as well be dead, she thought, crossing the school garden. The evening was tenderly sunlit and warm, and a little breeze turned the leaves of the young beech trees pale side out – but all its loveliness was wasted. She was waylaid by a fourth-former, a big-bosomed gushing girl called Ursula Smythe with a WSPU badge pinned to her lapel. Ursula was carrying a petition clipped to a board.

  — Miss Carew, do you support votes for women? Will you sign the petition for our poor Miss Mulhouse?

  Bad-temperedly Edith pushed the petition away. — For goodness’ sake, Ursula, I’ve got tests to mark. I can’t help what Miss Mulhouse chooses to do with her spare time. I suppose she knew what she was letting herself in for.

  What good would it do anyone, Edith thought, for a dolt like Ursula Smythe to have the vote? What would she vote for? Hadn’t she been one of the champions at automatic writing, filling whole exercise books with her nonsense?

  AFTER THE INCIDENT with the whitewash, the school governors suspended the headmistress and certain teachers. The girls had worked themselves up by this time into such a state that when this news got around there were riots in the classrooms and it was impossible to impose any kind of discipline, or carry on with normal lessons. The boarders tore up sheets to make sashes painted with the WSPU slogan, ‘Deeds Not Words’. They called themselves ‘irregulars’ and barricaded themselves in the dormitories, threatening to jump out of the windows; on one occasion the police had to be called in. Parents who got wind of the disturbances came to carry their daughters off to safety. All this lasted for several weeks and it was hard to see where it would end – until the school holidays arrived, and then in August war was declared, and the WSPU announced from Pankhurst headquarters in Paris that it was abandoning its campaign for the duration.

  One evening in September Miss Carew and Mr Briers met in the school grounds. They couldn’t use the French cupboard any longer, because Mr Briers had resigned from his position at the school and been awarded a commission in the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment. All the furore of the summer had died down; girls in their white blouses paraded calmly, arm in arm, or chased one another squealing round the great cedar on the lawn. Some were already knitting socks for soldiers. Edith and Fitz were on a bench at a turn in the path, tucked behind some holly bushes; when Edith raised her voice Fitz warned her that the girls were watching, but she hardly cared. He had his back half turned, with his shoulder in its ghastly khaki hunched against her, as if he were only enduring their conversation. His black hair, which had been carelessly unkempt in the days when he read Racine to her, was now shorn close; where his ears stuck out from his scalp the skin was reddened and raw.

  — How can you give yourself to this beastly war? she raged. — I can’t believe you don’t see through it all as I do. You never had these militarist opinions before. Isn’t it all so foul? Don’t you hate the idea of all this death and pain?

  With heavy patience he tried to explain. — Whatever my opinions are, how can I stay at home teaching French to little girls, when other men are giving their lives out there?

  She thought that if only she could touch him, she could win him back.

  — What does your wife think?

  He turned his hooded eyes on her, gleaming in righteous anger. — Don’t speak about my wife.

  Then Edith guessed that he had a picture in his mind like a sentimental postcard, of his wife standing waving farewell to him as he went off to war, hidden half out of sight behind a curtain at a window, perhaps with the child in her arms – whatever it was, girl or boy. Of course Edith had no place in this sacred scene, contaminating it. She jumped up from the bench as if she had to save herself from his new patriotic stupidity. But no matter how she saw through his condemnation, she couldn’t escape it: he had power over her, because of what had happened in the French cupboard. It was another sentimental postcard: she was unchaste, she had forfeited the white flower of a blameless life, she wasn’t the kind of woman a man would go to war for. Fitz was allowed to think this if he liked. She walked away from him through the garden without looking back once, and went inside the school to collect her books – she had ten minutes, thankfully, before classes started. She needed to sit for a moment in the classroom, to collect herself, because her legs were shaking.

  And on her way up the back stairs she met Laura Mulhouse coming down. Laura had spent the summer at home with her mother, recovering from her ordeal in prison; now she’d quietly resumed her teaching. The girls hadn’t made any great fuss over her. The headmistress and all the other teachers had been reinstated, no one spoke now about the madness of last term. Edith stopped to let her pass on the narrow staircase. Laura didn’t look as intense as she used to: she was oddly stooped and her hair lay dead flat and her complexion was lustreless and clammy. Edith remembered what she’d read about force-feeding: the India-rubber tube pushed up the women’s noses, the indignity and dreadful pain and the choking and vomiting. Both of them were broken, Edith thought. In their shame, they could hardly bear to look at each other.

&nb
sp; One Saturday Morning

  Carrie was alone in the house. It was a Saturday in the mid-1960s, and her parents were out shopping: she was ten years old, and doing her piano practice. She had borrowed her parents’ alarm clock and put it on top of the piano to time herself – she had so many twenty-minute practices to make up, it seemed as though she’d have to sit there forever. Sometimes she just stared at the clock stonily, letting her fingers wander at random around the notes. Her younger brother, Paul, had a game of cricket going outside with his gang of friends, on the stretch of worn grass enclosed by railings that was a kind of garden for the whole terrace, although only the children used it. The chock of the ball against the bat and the boys’ voices calling to one another sounded dreamy at this distance, travelling across the road through the summer heat. Every so often a boy appealed – ’Owzat! – with sudden violence. Carrie shuddered; it was still cool indoors and she wished she had her cardigan on. This room at the front of the house was always dark, because of the horse chestnut tree outside the window. They called it the dining room, though they used it for dining only on special occasions, or when her mother had a dinner party; mostly, they watched television in here. A dinner party was planned, in fact, for that night, and the room seemed braced in anticipation: the notes Carrie played fell into an alert silence.

  The television was in a corner, opposite a low couch covered in olive-green cotton; Carrie’s mother had made the couch covers and also the floor-length curtains and the pelmet at the window, in mustard-yellow velvet. All of the ground floor – the dining room and the kitchen and the hall – was laid with black-and-white Vinolay tiles, stuck to sheets of hardboard nailed over the old wood floor. Carrie’s parents had done this themselves, in the evenings and at weekends, when her father wasn’t at work – he taught in a secondary modern school. Not many people in those days were keen to live in these dilapidated Georgian terraced houses, so a schoolteacher and his wife could afford one, if they had imagination and were able to do it up themselves. Carrie’s mother had a vision of the house she wanted, elegant and arty. A bulb in a Japanese white-paper globe was suspended on a long flex from the high ceiling. Carrie had turned on this light when she came downstairs to do her practice, and in the daylight it glowed weakly and inhospitably.