by Tessa Hadley
— Actually, it’s giving me the creeps, too, Chris said, looking nervously from one woman to the other. — I could use a cab – if you don’t mind sharing, Susan?
— Oh, no! Amanda wailed. — You pigs! You can’t leave me here on my own. It’s not fair!
Chris and Susan stared at this overflowing stranger, claiming them. Both felt an inappropriate anxiety that she might howl with tears, and they might be held unjustly to blame for it.
— Please, she said, softening. — We can do the stickers later. We could go out in the garden; we could find a local pub. But we can’t just let one another go as easily as that, as if none of it meant anything. Can we?
Chris was bewildered. — None of what?
It wasn’t anything sinister or criminal. Every few months, year after year, Vivien’s daddy, who was tiny, bulky-shouldered, ill-tempered, with a burnished, age-spotted bald pate, had picked them up in his car from their respective houses and driven them to Everdene Walk in a grim silence that was almost hieratic, as if they were sacrifices heaped up for his daughter visiting from London, where she worked as a PA to a succession of managers at ITN and Granada. From his driver’s seat, Daddy had emanated the distaste of a serious man for the frivolity of children, and an alarm that they might somehow damage his beige leather upholstery. But Vivien had been lovely to them, in her way. She had no children of her own: this was what their parents had always said when handing them over, as though they were being sent to soak up some surplus of mothering that childless women couldn’t help secreting. But Vivien wasn’t mother-like at all. She had not married, and Amanda and Susan learned only later – Chris never knew about it, because he wasn’t interested – of her lifelong love affair with a married man in London. By the time of the children’s visits, whatever friendship had originally made each set of parents choose Vivien as a godmother had melted away: Vivien was too bossy, she was a snob, she belonged to a world of musty charm and optimism that their parents were leaving behind in the 1960s. The parents had been apologetic, actually, when Daddy’s car came, for sending their children as their proxies, when they were too bored to go themselves. But the children hadn’t minded, and not only because of the treats.
— None of what? Chris asked, afraid that he’d missed something.
— Us! Amanda swept her arm to indicate the three of them, the sleeve of her poncho catching in a wicker-work pagoda on a side table. — We were really close, weren’t we? We were three odd solitary kids and we didn’t make friends easily, but here we met without any baggage, and we got on. It meant a lot to me.
Sometimes Amanda reread old volumes of her diary; she still wrote in it too, filling pages copiously when things weren’t going well.
The others were accusing. — You weren’t solitary.
— I was the most solitary of all: at least you both had brothers and sisters.
— You were awfully spoiled, Susan said, — with your ballet lessons and your deportment lessons and your tennis.
— I didn’t ever have deportment lessons. Look, are you two going to stay? Don’t let me down!
Susan stood hesitating. It depended on her: the others saw her power, which they hadn’t noticed in the old days. Her face was haggard, cheekbones jutting above hollows: if it was beautiful, there was also something naked in it, shocking. The unblemished skin was textured like soft parchment. What Amanda remembered was glasses, a flat chest, hand-me-down bobbled jumpers (Amanda had refused to wear hers, once the wool went like that), a reputation for good marks at the school where she had a scholarship (not the school that Amanda’s parents paid for), and a stubborn, sulking resistance to Amanda, who – used to capitulation – had been intrigued.
— There’s a lot of Chinese stuff here, Chris said, disentangling the pagoda from the poncho.
— They lived in Singapore when she was little, and then Paris. That’s where they got their international flavour. You’d have thought they were jet-setters, from the way they talked. But Daddy was only in insurance.
Warily Susan dropped her mobile back in her bag, yielding as if she didn’t do it often.
— All right then, she said. — I’ll stay for a bit. For old times’ sake.
In the decaying room, the three of them were linked in heady intimacy for a moment, though they were also strangers.
— I’ll stay as well, Chris said.
But the women had taken this for granted.
They found their old den. The others had forgotten it, but Amanda remembered and led them to it – bearing bottles raided from the kitchen – though the way through the garden was unrecognisable. This garden had once been Daddy’s pride: amoeba-shaped flower beds mounded with colour, crazy-paving paths set in close-clipped lawns. There had been a swinging lounge seat with a striped awning, and every summer’s day had revolved around the necessity of taking this awning in if rain threatened. Now the neighbours in the Walk must have been despairing at the incursion of wilderness into their sanctuary: rusty dock and nettle stood waist high, bramble was advancing in the tall grass. Rubbish had been thrown in here, split bags bulging with rot, a spillage of broken things from the house, a plastic clotheshorse, a smashed china bread crock. In the heat, it all smelled potently of rank growth, baked earth, dog shit. The den was lifted up above the chaos, a raised space of hard mud on a bank among trees at the far end of the garden, opposite Vivien’s bedroom window, backing on to a little copse where the locals walked their dogs.
Susan had brought a blanket from the house for them to sit on, and Amanda had chocolate in her handbag. They examined more closely the bottles they’d liberated: Johnnie Walker, Tia Maria, Cinzano, amontillado sherry. The bottles were filthy, sticky, greasy, but Amanda was adamant that the alcohol was safe. She wiped around the tops with tissues soaked in whisky, and was the first to swig, choosing the sherry. — My favourite, she said. — Goes straight to your head. Wow!
— Out here I feel more relaxed, said Susan. Lying back on the blanket, she looked up at the blue sky through the spreading fans of leaves in a silver birch, wafting in the merest movement of air. The urgent onward flow of her days ceased abruptly; the sensation was as if something – her soul – had floated to the front of her forehead, while she sank down, breathing differently, vastly. — That’s what used to happen, in the old days. We used to get away from the house, out here.
— But not at first. At first we loved it all.
Vivien used to have tea ready for them when they came: Twiglets, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, cream cakes, ice cream, jelly. If they visited her in London, she took them to the opera at Covent Garden, the Natural History Museum, the Mermaid Theatre, Chez Solange – where a waiter picked extra strawberries off a gateau for Amanda.
Chris played it safe with the Johnnie Walker. Susan tried Cinzano, in memory of Vivien. She reported that it was hideous.
— I danced for you all in this garden, Amanda said.
Chris seemed to see her, in a leotard and some sort of scanty, fancy-painted yellow nylon thing, fastened to elastic on her wrists, which she waved about like wings. He remembered registering both her absurd self-importance and self-exposure (the dancing wasn’t very good) and the breath-stopping effect of her bare creamy legs and bouncing pyramids of breast.
They had all shown off. Vivien had encouraged them to do it. Mandy had been a beauty, Chris a genius – he had held forth on existentialism, on the problem with Communism, which was human nature. They tried to think what Susan had been: Susan had had personality and depth, they remembered. She had read Dickens when she was eleven. Licensed, leaving shame behind them in the real world, they had expanded into the place Vivien made for them, reinventing themselves, becoming in the free space of the Walk exceptional. They had talked together, even in front of Vivien, as they talked to none of their friends, confessing their aspirations and their real thoughts.
Invited into Vivien’s bedroom, the girls had watched her change with skilful minimal movements into something pretty, tip
ping a bottle, dabbing perfume on pressure points, fixing earrings, skewering her feet into high heels. She had had a neat, miniature figure, had been quick and lithe and always on the move, talking and organising. She had lent them novels – Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith – and showed them photographs of Paris. Sweet as cake with them, she’d shown herself flinty towards anything she didn’t approve of. She couldn’t bear the hordes of tourists overtaking her old favourite places in France; she couldn’t bear the greed of the trade unions, or sloppy language – split infinitives or Bristol accents. The children hardly spoke to their parents about what went on at Vivien’s, fearing the chill of a different judgement than hers, a condemnation of her fakery.
— I didn’t need deportment classes, Amanda said. — I had natural deportment – don’t you remember Vivien saying that? Natural deportment. And look what’s become of me!
— What has become of you?
— Two shops selling ethnic jewellery: Weymouth and Bridport. What about you?
— I’m in family law. I work on contract to social services.
Vivien had been right about Chris, though, Amanda said. She’d looked him up on his university website: he was a professor of Early Modern Studies, whatever those were; he’d written books. With ready irony (this was a sensitive subject), he explained that at his university ‘professor’ was only an honorary title; it didn’t mean what it did at the old universities – no promotion, no extra salary. Not even much honour, really. Also, nobody read his books.
— Did she ever mention God? Susan said lazily, not sitting up. — After all, we were her godchildren.
— She gave me a little white Testament when I was confirmed, Amanda said. — I still have it, but I’ve never read it.
When they were drunk enough, they returned to the house. It seemed even chillier and dirtier inside, after their soak in the afternoon light. The kitchen hadn’t been altered in decades: there was an old gas stove, an enamel sink, little gingham curtains in place of cupboard doors. Bone-china tea sets had been pulled out of the cupboards and piled on the table with colander, grater, mincer, wooden spoons anciently dark, Breton bowls painted with names, not theirs. They felt as if they’d come upon the scene of a desecrating burglary.
— We might as well take this stuff, Amanda said, pressing her stickers defiantly on to a few items – jugs and serving dishes – and piling them apart from the rest. — You know they’ll only get the clearance people in.
— I liked this house so much, Susan said. — I liked it better than my own house, though I knew I shouldn’t. I didn’t like modern things. I liked the thick pink carpet and the embroidered tablecloths – they were like something out of books. I imagined having flowers on the breakfast table and a maid to turn back your bed. Not that Vivien had maids. But in those days I thought I’d want to live like that. In my head, I lived like that.
— Have a tablecloth. Here’s a whole pile of them.
— Now it all looks dismal.
— Did you go and see her, when she was ill?
None of them had. To be fair, they had not known how ill she was. Amanda and Susan had spoken to her on the phone, in the last year; Vivien, who had never allowed herself to be ill for a day – as if it were a lapse in taste – had complained in angry spurts, between deploring her weakness for doing so, about her legs and her eyes. They had never been in touch with the niece or the nephew, so had not known that anything was serious, or terminal. They had known from Vivien’s voice, however, that she was changed, desperate, and they had not done anything about it. The married man – news trickled through to their parents, always months late – had also been very ill, then died. — It’s our punishment, Susan said. — To be here.
Chris tripped over a pile of saucepans, Susan caught him, and after this they made their way around the house together, Chris hanging on to Susan’s arm, Susan and Amanda holding hands, unclasping to sticker anything they wanted. None of them were in the habit of touching other people. All of them – even Amanda, who had lovers – were rather fastidiously inhibited in their ordinary lives. Amanda was prodigal with red stickers. Chris put a yellow one on a Pembroke table that he might use to write on. Susan succumbed to a 1930s Parisian hatbox and a pair of Chinese ivory masks.
— Those masks are nice, Amanda said, jealous. — Clever you, I didn’t notice them.
Smitten momentarily with cupidity, Susan wouldn’t give them up; she put them in her bag, saving her pleasure in them for exploring later. At the door to Vivien’s bedroom, Amanda halted and the others crowded against her, breathing in one another’s heat and freshness, aftershave and wool, shampoo: they were middle-aged, but still clean and competent, at least. Here too, everything had been pulled out of drawers and cupboards. All their eyes were drawn to where, beside the single bed with crumpled sheets, no one had cleared away a last cigarette, crushed out slovenly in a jam-jar top. None of them mentioned it. It might have belonged to whoever had made the inventory, but it might also have been Vivien’s.
— Do you two have children? Amanda said. — I don’t.
Susan’s boy and girl were in their twenties; Chris was keen to tell them all about Thea – nine – though he didn’t see her often. None of the three, it turned out, currently had a partner.
— I have boyfriends, Amanda explained. — But I live alone, out of choice.
— What’s the matter with us? Chris wondered. — None of us have been good at making relationships. Do you think it damaged us, coming here?
Amanda was defensive. — I like my own company.
— Or perhaps we were like that in the first place, and that’s why we kept coming.
— Do you remember when we spied on her? Susan said.
— I don’t remember spying, said Amanda.
— You must. Isn’t it in your diary?
— How do you know about my diary?
— You used to bring it, and read bits out loud to us. You used to write in it while we were watching, telling us you were writing about us, then slamming the book shut if we tried to read it.
Amanda made a false face of contrition. — Did I?
— I took everything too much to heart. That was my problem.
When they were sixteen, seventeen, Vivien still made them tea, and they still ate it, but Mandy was always dieting and Chris and Susan were ravenous, triangles of sandwich making only one mouthful in the new scale of their lives. Torn out of the child bodies that had fitted them purely and exactly, they looked with resentful eyes at Everdene Walk because they couldn’t love it again with the same glee. When Vivien enthused over their prospects – university for Chris, modelling for Mandy, for Susan some deep personal adventure – they longed to believe her, but didn’t trust that she really knew anything. So they were rude or silent, and knew they disappointed her.
Also, they looked at one another differently. They had never met outside the Walk: now they were afraid that they might cross paths in the street or at a disco, and know too much about one another, blowing open the public persona that each so scrupulously controlled. And yet, when Vivien left them alone together, they couldn’t resist the luxury of freedom within their exceptional little tribe. Even Susan, in one of her gouts of inhibited awkward eloquence, confessed that there was ‘someone’ she liked. Mandy told the others what she’d done with boys at parties. She worked to perturb Chris, yet didn’t notice when she achieved this. He was delicious at that age, unknown to himself: skinny and jumpy, shadowed lashes dipping on his freckled cheeks, mouth twisted sardonically, a light of wit and nerves playing in his expression. Thirty-five years later, he didn’t look so very different, only his qualities, by persisting, had worn out their promise. He was more boyish in his fifties than he had been as a boy.
One summer night, they had told Vivien that they would walk home together; they didn’t need a lift. Daddy was old – he hated getting the car out in the evening – and they reassured Vivien that their parents wouldn’t worry. Their way was across the Downs,
a miles-wide stretch of open grass in the middle of the city, dividing the suburbs from the centre. There was hardly anyone else about. The heady spaces of warm night above and around them made them behave as if they were drunk, swaying and falling into one another, laughing and inventing stories. In the dark, they were unafraid. Mandy seized the others’ hands; self-conscious but grateful, they allowed her to tug them close, and swing their arms. It even seemed possible for a moment, as they walked under the shelter of a copse of tall beeches where the grass wasn’t cut, that they might do something extraordinary, lie down all three of them in the grass and roll together, kiss together, press together, achieve some kind of inter-penetration that all of them were yearning for, though none of them had come anywhere near it (not even Mandy).
Then one of them suggested that they go back and watch Vivien’s house. It might have been Susan, because she knew how to get into the den from the public path without going through the Walk; perhaps they all thought that they would be better concealed in the den, for whatever was going to happen next, than under the beeches out in the open. It took a while to get back, and longer to discover which of the dark gardens belonged to No. 33; when eventually they’d struggled over the fence and settled into the little space, they were crowded intimately close together, breathing hard, and their mood changed from the floating blissful playfulness of the Downs to something more intent. The two girls were on either side of Chris, tight against him. They didn’t really think they would see anything. They imagined that, after they left, the house was shut up for the night.
A light went on in Vivien’s bedroom. The room had French windows and a little balcony, which was not wide enough to sit on but had a continental chic. From the den, they could see right into it. Opening the windows, Vivien leaned her arms on the wrought-iron balustrade, looking out into the night like a heroine in a film. She was wearing a turquoise nightdress under a filmy lacy matching knee-length peignoir: the girls knew that she called it this. With the light behind her, she didn’t look bad. Mandy put two fingers in her mouth and wolf-whistled. They expected Vivien to be shocked, to shut the windows hastily. But she only smiled, as if something were amusing, and straightened her back. Then they understood that her moments at the window had been a performance, projected at an imaginary watcher: the whistle had only made him unexpectedly real.