by Tessa Hadley
On an impulse, she paused beside his table. — Do you mind if I sit here?
He leaped to pull out a chair for her. — Be my guest.
This time, Greta allowed him to buy her a coffee, a cappuccino; he went to queue for it at the counter inside. Actually, she was grateful; she needed to sit down. She wasn’t in pain, exactly: there was only the deep ache where her womb once was, and a familiar draining sensation as if her blood were waves, dragging at the gravel on a shore. There was no need to hold herself so carefully apart from this stranger, she thought, just because he was needy and lonely. She was needy, too. They might as well keep each other company.
HE WAS KEEN to talk about himself, when Greta encouraged him. He had come to Liverpool to visit relatives who lived in Blundellsands, but they wouldn’t be home from work yet so he was in no hurry; he would have a little look around before he caught the bus. He had only a small suitcase with him, she saw, along with the briefcase. These relatives weren’t his own age; they were his mother’s cousins. Greta began to guess that he was one of those people who spent their youth involved with an older generation, until they themselves became elderly by association – and didn’t mind it in the least or try to escape. This would explain his clothes, and something quaint and dated in his manner. She could imagine him as the cherished boy in a strong, extended family, which for no particular reason hadn’t produced many children. Such a good, obedient boy, and so nice-looking: they would be bemused by the fact that he didn’t have more friends his own age, or a girlfriend. Greta enquired about girlfriends and he reddened, said he was afraid not, not at present. He might be gay: she had already wondered about that.
He worked for his uncle, who managed a small wholesaler’s in Brentford, supplying foil containers and other utensils to the food trade. The Liverpool relatives had invited him to stay because he needed a change of scene: he was still getting over the shock of his mother’s death, six months ago. He and his mother had been very close, he said; he had lived at home to keep her company after his father died. It was easy to assume that families like this didn’t exist anymore: submissive, frugal, unpolitical, tribal. Greta knew for certain, as though she’d seen it, that last night he had laid out his clothes for the journey, along with his train ticket, just as his mother would have done for him when she was alive, and that he had checked several times to be sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. This was the world of Greta’s childhood, which she had rejected so absolutely. She knew that the tragic story of his mother’s visits to the GP, her misdiagnosis and her falling down unconscious in the street while she was shopping must have been recounted many times: it was as well worn as the track of footsteps around an old carpet. You could feel the reality collapsing into the familiar safe phrases, becoming part of a routine, becoming myth: — The nurses in the hospital were very kind. They did everything they could. She looked very peaceful when they laid her out.
Then Greta lifted her head and saw Kate in the distance.
— Ah, here’s my daughter! she cried, triumphant, interrupting him, half standing up from the table to wave to Kate. She knew it was unseemly of her to abandon him like that mid-sentence: he was telling her something so intimate and so important to him, and she had encouraged him to tell her these things, had skilfully probed for them. Kate was wearing silky loose trousers, a cropped top tight across her breasts, showing her bare midriff, and some kind of military-style coat with yellow frogging, hanging open. She was the very opposite type to Greta’s new friend, not in the least meek or old-fashioned. The long rope of her hair, worn in a ponytail high on her head, was red by nature, dyed with streaks of a wilder red. Catching sight of Greta, she strode across the concourse towards her, impatient as if she weren’t the one who was late. — I don’t have the car, she announced, only glancing disparagingly at her mother’s companion. — Boyd needed it today. We have to get a taxi.
Kate always had an air of submitting to her mother’s kisses, rather than returning them: her quickly proffered cheek tasted of moisturiser, the skin so clear. There was hardly time for Greta to say goodbye to the young man, and they parted as if it were the merest accident that they’d been sitting at the same table. She hadn’t properly looked at him again, once she’d seen Kate. And yet, while she was smiling proudly, watching Kate make her way towards them, he had said something fairly astonishing – so quickly, and with such an air of its being an acceptable and reasonable suggestion, that Greta wasn’t sure at first that she’d heard correctly. Then she didn’t have time to respond before Kate was there, taking charge. He’d said that he would be at the Palm House in Sefton Park on Thursday afternoon at two o’clock. If she wanted, she could meet him there.
WHEN GRETA LIVED in Liverpool, in the seventies, with her first husband, before Kate was born – in fact the very summer Kate was conceived – she wasn’t called Greta. Her name then was Margaret: Maggie. And Ian, Kate’s father, wasn’t strictly Greta’s husband, either, not by law. It was while they were staying with friends in that squat in Liverpool that they had devised their own marriage ceremony. Under the sign of the moon and the eye of the goddess, it began. With my body I thee worship. It was difficult to know, with Ian, just how much irony there was in this. He could be pretty mocking about phoney mysticism. He knew about the real pagans, he said: he had read classics at York University, which was where he and Greta had met, though Ian had dropped out halfway through their second year. And he had a way of inciting other people to behave extravagantly, then looking on with gleeful amusement, as if he couldn’t believe how biddable they were.
Ian and Greta made little cuts on their thumbs in front of their friends in the squat, and mingled bloods, and ate their food from the same dish. He was smaller than she was, very skinny and lithe and excitable, always jumping about like a kid, with a silky beard and very pale skin and the same silky auburn hair as Kate’s. Sometimes he was exquisitely kind to Greta – especially in sex, but not only then. He loved it when she absorbed herself in his crazes, for planting things or baking bread or Hungarian folk music; they had talked seriously about moving to Wales together, to try subsistence farming. She had learned never to relax her guard, though. He could snatch his favour away from one moment to the next, retreating into a dark mood, leaving her bereft.
Ian dropped acid for the first time on their wedding day, along with a gang of their friends. Greta was too afraid to try it, but said she would stay with the others to watch out for them. They went wandering around the streets at night, exclaiming over all the ordinary sights: telephone boxes and cars and garden shrubs. All natural things were beautiful; everything man-made seemed monstrous. Ian announced that he could see into the atomic structure of the paving stones under their feet, which was like a fluorescent grid of energy: he could have sunk through it if he’d wanted, but he consented to the laws of physics, allowing it to hold him up. They climbed over a fence into a park – it might have been Sefton Park – and headed for the open grassy slopes, where they lay on their backs looking up at the sky. Some of the boys built a fire out of fallen branches and stood talking to it. — Brother fire, we won’t hurt you, they said. They found it funny and profound when someone asked whether the fire was heating them or they were heating the fire.
Then Ian wanted Greta to consummate the marriage with him there on the grass, in honour of the moon goddess: except that there wasn’t a moon, the night was cloudy and the grass was wet. Obviously they had had sex many times before – but he insisted that this time was sacred. Greta said that she couldn’t, because of the others being there.
— Don’t be afraid, he said, coaxing her, lying half on top of her, rubbing her breast with his palm, covering her neck with little nibbling kisses. — Trust me: Margaret, Maggie, Marguerite. It will be different, because we’re man and wife. It will be amazing. Don’t be uptight, don’t be bourgeois.
He often teased her for being bourgeois. His own family was far nastier than Greta’s – his father was a bully who worked for th
e BBC, and his mother was an actress and an alcoholic. But perhaps it was worse to be safe and dull. Their lovemaking would be beautiful for everyone to see, he told her. — Knock knock, open up.
— How come your title doesn’t change, Greta said, — and mine does? You’re still man, but I’m wife? Why don’t you call yourself husband?
Her feminism in those days consisted mostly of these niggling technicalities. Usually Ian tolerated them, as if they were of no importance. Now he stopped kissing her but stayed on top of her, his hand still on her breast; his breath on her cheek smelled sour. He was looking through the dark into her face – not at it but into it. Up to that point she had wondered whether the tab of acid was really having any effect on him, because he had sounded too much like himself, putting on what he imagined tripping ought to be like.
— I can see into your thoughts, he said. — I can see them pulsing. I can see the little petty, sulky worms of your thoughts, eating you up because you’re dead. Poor little Maggie, everyone. So pretty, isn’t she? But I found out she’s dead.
For a moment, Greta seemed to see what Ian saw, as if she were looking down at herself. The whole sum of her being had a kind of corpse-luminescence in the darkness: stiff and mechanical, inhibited. Because of her background, or perhaps just because of her intrinsic nature, there were certain levels of experience she would never be able to attain; she would never break out of the bounds of her reasonable self. Then she pushed him away and sat up and was upset and angry, and he ignored her, cutting her out of conversations as if she weren’t there.
The others all seemed by now to have passed into a world she couldn’t enter. Eventually she left them to it and made her way back to the squat; she spent her wedding night alone, sobbing and desolate, worrying that something terrible would happen because she’d abandoned them. Nothing terrible did happen – although the police turned up in the park, because of the fire, and chased them out. And she did find out, weeks later, that after she left Ian had made love on the grass anyway, with a girl called Carol, whom they hardly knew: a friend of a friend, passing through the squat. Greta had wondered why Carol left so precipitously the next day. When she confronted Ian, he asked if she thought she owned his body, just because she was married to him. — We’re not going to do any of that crap, he said. — And by the way, that trippy sex was amazing – like fucking the universe, for eternity. You should try it sometime. Honestly.
Greta sometimes told stories about Ian to her second husband – the real one, Graham, who came later. Reliably, Graham would be outraged by Ian’s arrogance and swaggering selfishness. Whenever the two men crossed paths – Ian would take a fancy, every so often, to being involved in his daughter’s upbringing – Ian could be counted on to turn up hours late, to feed Kate the sweets that made her hyper, and to keep her up long past her bedtime, so that she had a sick headache the next day. He condescended with amusement to Greta and Graham’s domestic routines. Greta, by this time, was an English teacher at a comprehensive school, and Graham worked with disaffected teenagers. Ian never settled down to anything so steady; for a while he had a business buying old pine furniture and stripping it. It didn’t help that when Kate was little she adored her father, who forgot about her for months at a time: it was Graham who pushed her on the swings in the playground, packed her little bag for nursery school, got up with her at night when she had bad dreams.
There was something not quite honest, Greta knew, in the way she prodded Graham to say those dismissive and loathing things about Ian. Partly, it smoothed out certain tricky passages in their relationship, made Graham her defender. Otherwise, he might have wondered how much she still yearned, treacherously, for Ian – because there were aspects of the stories about Ian that she withheld. When he told her, for instance, about the ‘trippy sex’, Greta had actually laughed, because she knew that he had chosen the word ‘trippy’ deliberately to flaunt at her, with its plastic, blaring garishness, calculated to make her curl up. Fucking the universe for eternity, really? He couldn’t mean it, not in those preposterous words. And when she’d laughed, Ian had laughed too, and their quarrel had finished as usual in vengeful, untender lovemaking, the two of them gripping hard, staring shamelessly, right to the bitter end, or almost to the end. — Look at you, Ian had said with amazement. — Just look at you.
IAN DIED WHEN Kate was nine, knocked off his bike by a lorry in London. And these days she didn’t want to hear anything about him; she called Graham ‘Dad’, which she had refused to do when she was a child. In the taxi from the station she chattered insistently, and Greta knew that it was because she was afraid of hearing about her mother’s illness. Greta would find that they’d made a few changes in the flat, Kate said. They’d bought a new sofa, and because they couldn’t afford a new kitchen they’d painted the cupboard doors a different colour. Greta guessed that Kate was vaguely aggrieved about the new kitchen – her sense of her entitlement to material things was somehow not greedy, just part of her natural force. She and Boyd were doing well at the university: the department had won an important research grant, which would fund their fellowships for at least three more years. Boyd and Kate both worked in Ocean Sciences, Boyd on the carbon cycle, Kate on fish stocks.
Greta sat forward to look out of the taxi window, trying to spot landmarks from the seventies. — I remember once it was dusk, she said, — and we were in a car. I don’t know whose car – Ian didn’t own one. And the road ran round in front of a great circle of Victorian buildings, so tall they blocked out the sky – so many windows. Huge hotels, perhaps, railway hotels. Then we realised these buildings were empty shells, half ruined – you could see right through them in places. Like being in ancient Rome after the fall of the empire.
The whole idea of her mother’s past made Kate uneasy. — Who was that creepy guy you were with at the station? she asked suspiciously. — You were chatting merrily away together.
Greta was practised at presenting a face wiped clean of knowledge. — Just someone who was sitting there when I sat down, she said. — There weren’t any empty tables.
— Yes, there were.
It wasn’t until Greta’s suitcase had been unloaded onto the pavement in front of Kate’s flat that Kate asked about her health, hastily, as if in passing. The flat was a recent conversion, in a detached house in a wide street planted with hornbeams, where a few houses were still crazily derelict.
— So what do the doctors say? Are they pleased with you?
Greta was paying the driver. She didn’t mind that Kate always asked like this, appealing above her head to the doctors, as if her mother couldn’t be trusted to understand her own disease; it was only Kate’s way of channelling her emotions. Greta said she thought the doctors were pleased: they didn’t want to see her for three months. This was the truth, although she pronounced it with an air of blessed reprieve that wasn’t exactly what she felt. Her expectations lately were so muffled and diminished, and there was too much that could happen in three months.
Inside the flat, Kate solicitously made Greta comfortable on the new sofa, put the kettle on for tea; she had bought almond cakes from an organic place Boyd approved of. Kate could forgive her mother for being ill, now that she was allowed not to dread the worst – she could even forgive her for not wanting cake. — You have to eat, you know, Kate said. — You’re horribly thin. It doesn’t suit you.
Greta closed her eyes, giving herself up to the kettle’s roaring undertow, the thud and rattle of the fridge door closing, the chiming of a spoon against china mugs, Kate’s low humming to herself, the central-heating radiators coming to life, clicking and easing. Her awareness of her daughter’s coming and going was like a thick thread of feeling, connecting them materially. In these past months, her mind would quite often submerge like this in her surroundings. This is all there is, she’d think – being alive, just here, right now. It wasn’t a reductive or depressing insight; it was almost a form of happiness, the kind of apprehension religious people strove for.
AWAY FROM BOYD, Greta could find herself resenting him; you might have thought he was a tyrant, from Kate’s anxious attention to his opinions and judgements. He wouldn’t touch alcohol; he only liked European jazz; because of climate change, he refused to fly. But Greta and Graham had scrutinised him with deep suspicion and had to conclude that it was Kate who made the tyranny, for her own purposes – she who had never submitted to anyone before. And if it was tyranny, then she was thriving on it, blooming and softened and eager in his presence.
Boyd arrived home, the first evening of Greta’s stay, laden with bags full of meat and vegetables from the farmers’ market he’d visited in the morning; he cooked a stir-fry, which was just the thing to appeal to Greta’s appetite. And as soon as he was actually present, Greta remembered how much she liked him: fair and trim and rosy, light on his feet, with a neat round head and a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure. His fleecy clothes in primary colours were no doubt scientifically designed to keep him warm, or cool, or whatever it was he wanted. He was much better than Kate at asking sensibly how Greta was, and then not making a big deal of it but drawing her into more general conversation, doing her the courtesy of presuming that she was still interested. Boyd was definitely the kind of man who knew things. He had strong opinions, but they were always worth listening to. When Kate held forth about the degradation of the oceans she was indignant, as if it were everyone’s fault but hers; Boyd was more measured and realistic. Sometimes Greta even thought he colluded with her in amusement – which Kate didn’t notice – at Kate’s passionate partisanship. And no doubt his responses to Greta, when she didn’t know things or muddled her ideas, were tinged with the same, not ungenerous humour.
The life Kate and Boyd led wasn’t anything like Greta’s life had been, when she was in her thirties. For instance, Greta and Graham would have chosen to live on this street precisely because of its mixture of renovated houses with derelict ones. They’d liked to feel that they were living on the edge of something ‘real’, not retreating too far inside the safety of privilege; whereas Boyd explained to Greta, unapologetically, that he and Kate saw this flat as a transitional step on their way to buying a house in a nicer area. And yet this younger couple were more likely to effect radical change in the world, for the good, through their work, than she and Graham ever had been. Their certainty and their energy warmed her – even if she couldn’t quite suppress her habit of critical observation. Boyd was comical, sorting the recycling with such earnest pedantry. And Greta enjoyed noticing that he had a weakness for sweet things. After he’d eaten his own almond cake, he finished the one that she had hardly touched.