Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  She was working through the exercises in a book called A Dozen a Day. The twelfth and last exercise in each section was ‘Fit as a Fiddle and Ready to Go’, but Carrie had worn out all the hopefulness she’d felt when she first started piano lessons. She knew that she wasn’t particularly good, and that piano wasn’t the answer she’d hoped for, to what was unsolved in herself. There was something slapdash in the way her mind connected with the sounds that her fingers were making. Also, an uncomfortable thing had happened recently in relation to her piano teacher, who was kind and sensible, with a bosom that quivered in stretch polo necks. A few weeks ago Carrie had lost a letter that she had written to her best friend, Susan, and she was afraid that she’d dropped it at her piano teacher’s house, though she wasn’t sure. Her teacher hadn’t said anything about it, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t found it.

  The letter was a joke, one in a series that Carrie and Susan had been writing to each other, full of rude words and innuendo, half learned from the playground and half invented. In the letters they addressed each other as Dug-less and Fanny, and traded insults. Dear Fanny, Guess what? P.A. told me that you asked him to show you his thingy. He said you really liked it, and wanted to touch it! Then you cried when he wouldn’t let you. Boo-hoo! Outwardly, Carrie and Susan were not at all like the clowning raucous characters in the letters: they were quiet girls, shy and hard-working. The boy in their jokes was always the same one: a fat boy in their class, who was their enemy. He banged down their desk lids on their heads, pretended to waft away their bad smells, asked if they were wearing itchy knickers. The letters had seemed richly and mysteriously funny, until the joy was tainted by Carrie’s having to imagine her piano teacher reading one.

  Bitterly she addressed herself, frown lines cut deep between her eyes, to one of Bartók’s children’s pieces, breaking it down as she was supposed to, practising the left hand first, over and over. There was a relief in pounding the repeated chords, which were neither contented nor plangent. Her right hand lay curled in her lap, palm upward, a useless and discarded thing, and she swung her legs under the piano stool as she concentrated: a sharp-faced little scrap of a girl, blotted with freckles, straight hair pushed out of the way behind sticking-out ears. She looked like her father’s side of the family – thin and strong-boned – and not like her mother, who was opulently attractive: shapely, with wide hazel eyes and a full mouth. It was Paul who looked like their mother.

  Above the dining-room fireplace was a gilt-framed mirror that their mother had found in a junk shop and repaired; she had also made lamps out of old glass demijohns and pottery bottles, with her own silk shades. The grate in the fireplace was filled all year round with dried flowers and a gold paper fan: no one wanted real fires when you could have central heating. In photographs now, those arty sixties rooms look unexpectedly austere; their effects seem sparse and rickety, amateurish, in comparison with the fat tide of spending and decorating that came later. But that innocence is appealing, and not incongruous with the high-ceilinged Georgian rooms, always painted white.

  THE DOORBELL RANG, tearing into Carrie’s solitude. She felt herself reprieved – she had done almost an hour’s practice, and there was still tomorrow. It might be her parents, back already from Sainsbury’s, or Paul, coming in from across the road to look for another ball or to get a drink of water. When he ran in from his games he sometimes drank straight from the tap in the kitchen, making a great show of his wild heat and thirst, cocking his head under the flow, letting the water soak his hair, his eyes rolling back as if he were delirious with physical effort. Carrie caught sight of her reflection in another mirror, above the Pembroke table in the hall, with its bowl of unmatched gloves left over from winter and its jug filled with silvery dried honesty. The outer front door stood open, as it always did in the daytime; the inner door was made of rippled glass. A man was leaning against the glass on the other side, his bulk blocking the light. He was peering inside through his cupped hands to see if anyone was at home.

  Carrie dreaded any encounter with a stranger and wished she hadn’t let herself be seen. Suffering, she fumbled with the lock, as the man stepped back. When she swung the door open, she discovered that he wasn’t a stranger after all but someone who didn’t come to the house often enough for her to have recognised his outline. Dom Smith was a friend of her parents’ who had moved to another city some time ago, to a new job at a university. Her parents would be so disappointed to miss Dom. He was a favourite of theirs, clever and handsome, an anthropologist, with a young family. Carrie’s mother talked about him in the cherishing tone that she reserved for certain people she admired, mostly men, mostly just out of reach on the margins of their acquaintance; she liked the idea of Dom’s life, with its aura of bohemianism and its promise of good conversation. She liked his wife, Helen, too, but they’d seen less of her. Once, Helen had lived with Dom among the tribal peoples in Assam. Now, when he came visiting friends, she often stayed at home with her babies.

  Dom puzzled down at Carrie, perhaps only vaguely remembering her existence, certainly not her name. In his shabby reefer jacket, he seemed too warmly dressed for the summer day; she could smell his sweat. If only her parents had been at home, she could have tagged on behind their welcome, basking invisibly at the edge of all the talk. Her father enjoyed their noisy quarrels over music (Dom liked classical, her father liked jazz), in which neither of them gave an inch. Dom had the kind of physique that makes a man seem fearless – he was huge and rumpled, with untidy black curls and a beard, a big affable voice. You could easily imagine him living in a hut in Assam, with people who kept the bones of their ancestors under the floor. Actually, he was fairly diffident and awkward. He told Carrie that he was in town for a couple of days, looking up old friends. Were her parents anywhere around?

  — They’re out at the shops, she said. You could come in and wait.

  He hesitated and cast a look back into the street, almost as if he were being pursued.

  — How long d’you think they’ll be?

  They would be back very soon, Carrie reassured him, eager to coax him inside. Yet as soon as he stepped across the threshold into the dim interior, she felt how inadequate she was to entertain him. Her parents’ friends might play significant roles in her imagination, but left alone with them she had nothing to offer. Dom’s towering presence was confounding; he stood with his back to the hall mirror, obliterating her reflection and surveying the place, as if to remind himself where he was. They both seemed at a loss.

  — Were you playing the piano? he asked politely. — Why don’t you go ahead?

  It would be unbearable to play while he was listening. Carrie gabbled something about reading her book and fled upstairs; her cowardice was crucifying. But as soon as her parents came back from the shops the tide of their pleased sociability would lift her with it; she’d be all right. Skulking behind the open door of the playroom, she listened to Dom moving around downstairs. They called this room the playroom because there was a table-tennis table in it, which her father had rescued when the school was throwing it out. Her mother kept her sewing machine there, too, and the table was spread with the cut-out and pinned pieces of a dress she was making for one of the ladies she sewed for. Dom went into the kitchen and must have sat still for a bit because she couldn’t hear him. Then he pushed back a chair and began pacing again, in and out of the dining room, back to the kitchen; Carrie felt guiltily responsible for his restlessness.

  She took off her sandals so that she wouldn’t make a sound; he mustn’t know that she was wandering upstairs, prickling with consciousness of his wanderings below. Several times she tiptoed to the windows in the lounge, to see whether her parents’ car was pulling up; its continuing absence was a physical pain. After a while she got out her shoebox full of the collectible cards that came free with packets of tea, then sat down at the table-tennis table and began doggedly pasting these into their places in her albums. She was saving British Butterflies and Great Engineer
s. Dom meandered into the dining room again. It was strange that a grown man could be reduced to the listlessness of a child, waiting for something that didn’t come.

  He sat down at the piano and began to play. The piece was much too advanced to be in any of the books she had, so it must have been something he knew by heart. Carrie put down her pot of paste and crept out of the playroom, sitting at the top of the stairs to listen, hugging her stomach, feeling the music for once as if it were inside her. It was the tiny scope of her Bartók piece, she saw now, that made it suitable for children. This different music rolled and rippled up and down the notes, joyous and mournful, lingering and delaying, holding back with painful sweetness. Carrie was in awe of Dom Smith’s adult competence, so rich in understanding; she couldn’t imagine attaining it in any lifetime.

  Then he broke off abruptly in the middle of the piece, pushing back the piano stool as if he were angry with it and striding out into the hall, where he hesitated before calling upstairs. — Hello?

  He was going to go; she should never have tried to keep him there in the first place – the only surprise was his even remembering that she was in the house. When he called, she didn’t answer right away, not wanting him to know that she’d been listening from the stairs. And at that very moment her parents arrived home from the supermarket: she heard their voices first, then a key in the lock and the noise rolling in from the street. Her mother exclaimed in shock at finding Dom Smith in her hall, on the point of leaving.

  — Dom! What a lovely surprise! Did Carrie let you in?

  — I was just about to give up on you, he said.

  Carrie bounded downstairs, to be present at the happy greetings. She knew that her mother would be quickly calculating, standing among the plastic carriers from the supermarket, rearranging her plans to make room for Dom, running through what preparation was still needed for the dinner party. Her timetable leading up to these events was tightly organised, and she worked through it with fierce energy and efficiency, but she could make lightning adjustments, too. All this time she was showing Dom her brightly delighted face. She was genuinely pleased that he had come.

  — I told him to wait, Carrie said, hanging on to her mother’s arm and stretching out her feet in the new ballet moves that Susan had taught her. She was performing for him now that she was safe. — I knew you wouldn’t be long.

  — I’m down for a few days, Dom said. — I came for a rugby game and I thought I’d catch up with people.

  He stood awkwardly in their way in his thick dark coat; it was hard to believe that such marvellous music had poured out of him only a few minutes earlier. Carrie’s father, his extreme thinness and height making him look martyred under the weight of more shopping bags, was thankful for male company after a morning at the supermarket. Paul ran in from across the road and began hunting through the carriers for a packet of crisps, glancing only once at their visitor, then hurrying out again, fairly oblivious of his family’s social life. Carrie’s father asked about the rugby, while her mother turned on the coffee percolator and unpacked the perishables into the fridge. The grown-ups sat down around the kitchen table to drink their coffee, and Carrie pulled up a stool to sit beside her mother, delighted with Dom’s presence now, as if it were her own achievement. Her mother tore open a packet of chocolate truffles in his honour, but he shook his head. Carrie was allowed just one. No doubt they’d been intended for the dinner party.

  — So how are things? her father cheerfully asked.

  — I have to tell you straight away, Dom said.

  HELEN, HIS WIFE, had died suddenly of meningitis in the spring. She had gone to bed one night complaining of backache, Dom had called an ambulance the next morning, and she had died at the hospital the following day. Now Helen’s mother was helping Dom look after the children, because he had to work. Carrie’s family hadn’t heard anything about this. In those days, news didn’t travel so fast; lots of people didn’t even have telephones. And her parents didn’t really have many friends in common with the Smiths. In fact, after this one momentous visit when he brought his news, Carrie’s family didn’t see Dom again for a long time.

  He stayed that day for hours, sitting with Carrie’s parents at the kitchen table. Carrie crept upstairs, to be where she couldn’t hear them talking in their stricken, changed voices, but she couldn’t get rid of the terrible knowledge that Dom had brought; it seemed to be stuck inside her, in her stomach or her throat. Her bedroom was high up in the attic, under the roof baking in the sun, hot even with the windows wide open; in summer the weedy, sour smell of the rush matting on the floor was overpowering. She knelt on it, punishing herself, until its corded pattern was printed as red welts in the flesh of her bare knees. If only she hadn’t let Dom Smith into the house. She tried not to remember him announcing his news, in those oddly hearty, premeditated sentences; his words cut across the bright air of her bedroom in stark flashes, darkening it. Her parents’ jolly hospitality had been stalled mid-gesture; Carrie saw her mother holding the percolator at a slant but not pouring, surprising tears brimming into her hazel eyes, as if they had been waiting for this moment, close beneath the surface. Her father, in his role as the man of the house, was the first to struggle, heroically clumsy, to say something. Her mother had just let out a cry, as if it were she who was wounded.

  Carrie took everything to heart. She was earnest and susceptible, suffering easily. But it wasn’t exactly pity for Helen Smith or her husband or children that overwhelmed her as she knelt in her bedroom; it was something more selfish and self-protective. She wished fiercely that she’d never learned about Helen’s death. Helen didn’t seem the right person to be singled out. She had been tiny and plump and hopeful, with soft brown hair and a pleasant ringing voice. But now the idea of death closed on her in Carrie’s imagination, like a trap. Her image and her name had been transformed by Dom’s announcement, and were framed with sorrow, could never be dissociated from it. Helen’s children had still been small when the Smiths moved away; Carrie had hardly known them. Before the Smiths left, the two families had gone for a walk together in some woods, and Carrie remembered that Dom had carried his younger daughter in a backpack, which wasn’t common then. The thong had broken on one of Helen’s sandals and she’d had to keep bending down to adjust it. After the walk, they had gone back to the Smiths’ flat for tea, and Helen had fried Scotch pancakes, which they ate hot with butter. The flat was on a steep hill, overlooking the river and the docks below; it was shabby and comfortable, untidy with books and baby apparatus. Carrie’s mother had said on the way home that the flat could have been made very nice, but Helen Smith wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. She’d said this defensively, as if Helen had actually reproached her for her frivolous concern with appearances.

  This morning, the memory of that walk had been jumbled carelessly among all Carrie’s other memories; now it had to be separated from the rest, darkened with foreboding. She felt relieved that those smitten children lived in another city, far away. The sensations of her long vigil alone with Dom Smith in the house were vividly present still; she was shrivelled and humiliated by the foolish excitement she had felt at keeping him waiting, then offering her family to him like a bright gift. Peering in through the glass door, then blundering around in the shadows downstairs, Dom was turned into a figure of dread by what had happened to him. He was set apart, just as his wife had been set apart – except that it was worse with Dom, because he persisted, discomforting in all his living bulk, putting himself in the way of Carrie’s thoughts when she tried to be rid of him. She longed to hear the door shut behind him and for the dinner-party preparations to be resumed, however belatedly – for the whole ordinary process of living to start into motion again, downstairs in the kitchen.

  IT WAS A lovely evening, very still. The house filled up with the smell of meat stewing slowly in wine. Slanting yellow light, thick with dancing midges, pooled under the horse chestnuts outside. The floor-length sash windows were thrown up
in the lounge, and after the guests had finished eating they came upstairs to sit there in the twilight, smoking and drinking. Two men started a game of table tennis in the playroom, slamming the ball down hard, exploding with shouts of triumph or defeat. There was jazz music on the gramophone in the lounge, and a blackbird competed in a tree outside; some of the guests came out to smoke on the white-painted wrought-iron balcony, where Carrie’s mother grew nicotiana and petunias and white lobelia, in pots and in the halves of a barrel sawn in two. Cigarette smoke and the smell of flowers, together with the uninterpretable mingled voices and laughter from inside the room, floated up to where Carrie watched, unseen, from the open window in her parents’ bedroom on the floor above.

  She and her brother were supposed to be asleep in their rooms in the attic. But Carrie was spying on the dinner party and Paul was sitting up in bed in his thin cotton pyjamas, his skin darkly tanned from the days outdoors, his hair bleached a striking yellow gold. Carrie knew that he was writing his weather report in a notebook – sunny, some high cumulus, 68°F, no precipitation – and flipping back through its pages to where things got more interesting: his record-low temperature for the year, heaviest rainfall, days of hail or thunder. He would be murmuring certain favourite words over to himself, incantatory: the leaden sky promised an early fall of snow.