by Tessa Hadley
Their drunkenness ought to have ended in some shame or disaster – Ray had drunk as much as the rest of them, and he was driving them home – but it didn’t. They didn’t break any of the lovely glasses etched with vine leaves; no one threw up or said anything unforgivable; no one was killed. They didn’t even feel too bad the next day. Ray delivered the girls decorously back, eventually, to the doorsteps of their respective houses in Fishponds and Stoke Bishop. On the way home, Kit said what a sweetheart Blaise was – and what a fabulous place, imagine landing that! Didn’t Ann just wish she’d got to him first, before Nola Higgins? Then Ann, with her drunken special insight, said that Blaise wasn’t really what he seemed. He wasn’t actually very easy. He’d seen right through them and he didn’t like them very much. He saw how they condescended to Nola, even if Nola didn’t see it. Kit said indignantly that she’d never condescended to anybody in her life.
They had not, after all, gone back inside Thwaite House to look in the cedarwood presses. No one had had any appetite, in the intensity of their present, for the past. When they had parted finally, because the medics were on night duty and had to get back, they had all made passionate promises to return. The next time they came, Blaise said, he would show them everything. They couldn’t wait, they told him. Soon. That was in 1953.
WHEN SALLY ROSS was sixteen, in 1972, her mother, Ann, made her a jacket out of an old length of silk brocade, embroidered with flowers. The white brocade had been around since Sally could remember, folded in a cupboard along with all the other pieces of fabric that might be used sometime, for something or other. Now they decided to dye it purple. This was the same summer that Sally’s father, the doctor, had moved out to live with another woman. Ann had sold all his jazz records and chopped his ties into bits with her dressmaking scissors, then burned them in the garden. Of course, Sally and her sisters and brother were on their mother’s side. Still, they were shocked by something so vengeful and flaunting which they’d never before imagined as part of her character. Her gestures seemed drawn from a different life to the one they’d had so far, where things had been mostly funny and full of irony.
Sally and her mother were absorbed together that summer in projects of transformation, changing their clothes or their rooms or themselves. Sally stood over the soup of murky cold-dye in the old washing-up bowl, watching for the blisters of fabric to erupt above the surface, prodding them down with the stained handle of a wooden spoon, feeling hopeful in spite of everything. She wasn’t beautiful like her mother, but Ann made her feel that there was a way round that. Ann always had a plan – and Sally yielded to the gifted, forceful hands that came plucking at her eyebrows or twisting up her hair, whipping the tape measure around her waistline. The jacket was a success: Sally wore it a lot, unbuttoned over T-shirts and jeans. They both dieted, and her mother lost a stone; she’d never looked so lovely. Ann got a babysitter and went out to parties with spare knickers and a toothbrush in her handbag, but came home alone. At the end of the summer their father moved back in again.
Sally had always known that the white brocade had belonged to a lady who died before her wedding. The man she was meant to marry had owned a stately home with a deer park, and the twist in the story was that she’d been a nurse, had saved his life when he was ill. Ann and Kit Seaton – who was Sally’s godmother – had picnicked with them once in the deer park. Then the nurse had caught diphtheria from one of her patients and was dead within a week. Her fiancé had written to them, returning their designs and saying that he would not need their services after all ‘for the saddest of reasons’. They hadn’t known what to do with the fabric, Ann said. They couldn’t just post it to him. They hadn’t even sent a note – they couldn’t think what words to use, they were too young. Ann hadn’t kept his letter or her designs; she regretted now that she’d hardly kept anything when she got married and she and Kit gave up the business. There were only a few woven Gallagher and Seaton labels, tangled in a snarled mass of thread and bias binding and rickrack braid in her work basket. She and Kit had never even thought to take photographs of all the clothes they’d made.
ONE WEEKEND THAT summer Sally found herself at the very scene of her mother’s stories, Thwaite Park, which was now used as a teacher-training college. Sally’s boyfriend was an art student, and he worked part-time for a company that did the catering for conferences and receptions; she helped out when they needed extra staff. She wore her jacket to Thwaite deliberately, and hung it up on a hook in the kitchen. Her job that day was mostly behind the scenes, washing plates and cups and cutlery in a deep Belfast sink, while the hot-water urn wheezed and gurgled through its cycles. The kitchen was as dark as a cave, its cream-painted walls greenish with age, erupting in mineral crusts.
After the conference lunch, in a lull while the teachers drank coffee outside in the sunshine, Sally wandered upstairs to look around. Although the rooms of the house had been converted into teaching spaces, with bookshelves and blackboards and overhead projectors, you could see that it had been a home once. One of the rooms was papered with Chinese wallpaper, pale blue, patterned with birds and bamboo leaves. In another room, polished wood cupboards were built in from floor to ceiling; these were full of stationery supplies and art materials. Someone from the catering staff – not her boyfriend but another boy who worked with them, better-looking and more dangerous – had followed Sally upstairs, and she found herself explaining the whole situation to him – about her parents separating and the jacket and her mother’s sad association with the house. Sally was trying her power out on this boy; she shed tears of self-pity, until he put his arms around her and kissed her. And then, amid all the complications and adjustments that ensued, she forgot to collect her jacket when they left, though she didn’t confess this to her mother until months later. A jacket hardly mattered, in the scheme of things.
Acknowledgements
‘An Abduction,’ ‘The Stain,’ ‘One Saturday Morning,’ ‘Experience,’ ‘Bad Dreams,’ ‘Under the Sign of the Moon,’ and ‘Silk Brocade’ all first appeared in the New Yorker. ‘Deeds Not Words’ was written for BBC Radio broadcast, ‘Flight’ first appeared in Prospect magazine, and ‘Her Share of Sorrow’ in the Guardian magazine.
Many thanks to Deborah Treisman, Jennifer Barth, Dan Franklin, Joy Harris, and Caroline Dawnay.
About the Author
TESSA HADLEY is the award-winning author of six critically acclaimed novels, including The London Train, Clever Girl, and The Past. In 2016 she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize. She is also the author of two short story collections, both of which were New York Times Notable Books. She lives in London.
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Also by Tessa Hadley
Accidents in the Home
Everything Will Be All Right
Sunstroke and Other Stories
The Master Bedroom
The London Train
Married Love
Clever Girl
The Past
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2017 by Tessa Hadley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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p; Originally published in Great Britain in 2017 by Jonathan Cape.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
EPub Edition May 2017 ISBN 9780062476685
ISBN: 978-0-06-247666-1
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