by Tessa Hadley
— Je-sus, Hilda said.
It was a relief to have told her. That would teach her not to ask. Ally watched the wipers push the water about in fan shapes on the windscreen.
— I can’t just drop you off on the side of the road after you’ve told me that. Can’t I come in? Won’t you come home with me? I’ve got dinner for two. We could talk.
— I have to go. My mum’s waiting. I promised I’d make the tea. And I don’t need to talk.
— OK, understood. But listen. Will you give me your phone number? I’d love to call. May I? We’ll fix up something. Come and meet the dog.
Only to be free of her, Ally wrote the number on an envelope that Hilda found in her bag. That’ll be the last I hear from her, she thought.
— Your name’s Ally, right? Hilda checked, leaning across the front seat after her.
Ally read novels, wrapped up in her duvet beside the radiator in her bedroom, borrowing them from the centre and the public library, sometimes finishing one and starting another without even changing her position or getting up to make coffee, like an addict. She knew that this wasn’t the right kind of reading. Studying for her literature degree, she had learned how to analyse the words and the themes, she had worked dutifully on her essay style, imitating academic articles. She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she’d seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they belonged to someone else.
It was around this time that Ally’s mum started wearing Ryan’s shirts under her clothes. The first time Ally caught her doing it, she arrived home early one lunchtime and when she came in the back door Mum looked up with a guilty face from washing dishes at the sink. Through all those weeks, their house had never lapsed from its perfect tidiness and order. Last thing at night, her parents still rinsed out the coffee cups, plumped up the cushions on the sofa, unplugged the television. Her mother picked up threads from the carpet and put them in the waste-paper basket. Ally knew right away when she came into the kitchen that something was wrong in her mother’s shape, something bulky and distorting, when usually she was petite and trim. Ryan hadn’t been enormous for an eighteen-year-old but on his mother his checked lumber-jack shirt was swamping, enveloping. Her thin neck looked scrawny, poking out through the top of it; her neat faded face without its make-up seemed scoured clean. She hadn’t pulled the collar of the shirt out over the neck of her sweatshirt, as if she were hoping that no one would notice it, but it stuck up anyway.
— What are you doing wearing that thing?
She shouldn’t have said anything, but she couldn’t help it. Swapping clothes was the kind of thing that Ryan had done with his girlfriend Yvonne. Yvonne would come downstairs after the two of them had been shut up for hours in his bedroom, pink-faced, wearing one of Ryan’s tops, pulling the too-long sleeves down over her hands, flaunting to the world this outward sign of her feminine smallness snuggled against his bulk. When Mum bought Ryan a perfectly good pair of black Thinsulate gloves, he exchanged them for some silly cheap spangly ones of Yvonne’s. No one in the family had exactly objected to this at the time, but there was no doubt that they’d thought it soppy. They’d teased Ryan for being sentimental – he was like their dad, still moony over Mum after all these years. Mum in particular didn’t have much time for Yvonne. Now she was wearing his shirt herself, and it was a sign of how far she had been broken down.
— It makes me feel better if I can smell him.
Ally wrapped her arms around her from behind. She pressed her face into her neck, sniffing the shirt collar. Her mum held herself stiffly apart inside the embrace.
— It doesn’t smell of anything except fabric softener.
— Underneath it I can smell him.
Ally willed herself to remember real things about her brother, neutral things, uncontaminated by the new aura, like worship and dread, that was attached to the idea of him. She remembered that after he’d finished his A2 exams in the summer, for example, when he was supposed to be looking for a job, he had played his Nintendo Wii in the afternoons, downstairs in the sitting room in the boxers and T-shirt and socks he had slept in, Ally protesting at the sight of his thickly hairy legs. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted to wrap herself in the smell of him then. Ally longed to climb back inside the safety of that time, when none of them wanted too much of one another.
There had been some tormented to-and-fro between the two families, Ryan’s and Yvonne’s, telephone calls and visits, breakdowns and comfortings, an evening when Yvonne’s mother called Ally’s mum, begging her to talk to Yvonne because she was threatening to do what Ryan had done ‘since everyone blamed her for it anyway’. Yvonne was one of those miniature girls teenage boys love: their smallness seems to promise that they will be sweetly malleable. She had a mass of curls the colour of ripe wheat, tight golden skin, a child’s body so pliant that she could still do cartwheels and backflips. She wrote all over her hard tiny hands with ballpoint pen: telephone numbers, silly faces that changed their expression when she moved her fingers. But actually Yvonne wasn’t malleable – she was steely. She’d had Ryan running around after her whims as if she were a princess. — She might as well enjoy it, Ally’s mum had said back then. — She’ll be a dowdy little cow by the time she’s thirty.
The awful intimacy between the two families subsided after the first weeks. They drew apart; they couldn’t speak to one another any more. In those sessions they had dragged too deep, dredging up some rotten taste from the bottom of their lives which tainted all their interactions afterwards. Then Yvonne began texting Ally, and lying in wait for James on his way home from school. Even James knew not to tell Mum about this. Yvonne claimed that she only wanted advice on what she should do with the stuff that Ryan had given her; she made James take a plastic bag full of his CDs. — Chuck it all out, Ally texted back. — If you don’t want it.
At the inquest it all came out about the letter that Ryan had left, with messages for Yvonne – how amazing she was, how his life wasn’t worth living without her. In the context these seemed less like loving compliments than like punishments. Ally could imagine how it must feel to have these ideas stuck to you, impossible to clean off. But she couldn’t make herself like Yvonne any better.
Hilda rang her.
— Ally? Is that Ally? Remember me? I was the bitch in the supermarket. You’re having a hell of a time. Why don’t you come out here and yell about it?
Ally felt remote from anyone who talked like this. But her mum encouraged her to get out, make a new friend. Most of the girls Ally had known at school had moved away from home, to go to university or to find jobs. She’d had a boyfriend in Manchester, but that relationship had melted away in the fierce assault of the first days of crisis. She hadn’t wanted him anywhere near it.
— She’s not exactly a friend, Mum. She’s older than you.
— Well, someone you can talk to. It’s not good for you, being stuck here all the time with us. At least James has got school.
— I don’t know why everyone thinks I need to talk.
She called in at Hilda’s one afternoon, after she had finished work at the centre. The cottage wasn’t where she’d thought it was. She had to drive around for a while before she found it, at the top of a hill a mile outside Kirby, with a stand of woods beyond it. Hilda in her red down jacket came out with the dog as she parked: it was a short-haired terrier, alert and intelligent, white with a brown patch over one eye. Hilda proposed that they take a walk right away, before it got dark. Ally hadn’t imagined them walking. She was wearing her pink trainers, and had to borrow wellingtons from Hilda. They followed a path invisible under the snow, down towards the
woods along the side of a big L-shaped field, the dog scouting ahead of them, racing back on her tracks to herd her humans together, straining her ears yearningly at the perturbed, watchful sheep. The afternoon was still and soundless, frozen. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before, and the fences and trees stood out black against it. Already the moon had risen, a flake of waxy alabaster in a blue sky thin with light.
Hilda complained about the farmer whose land they were walking on. She said that she had contacted the RSPCA because he didn’t treat the foot rot in his sheep, and that he’d tried to stop her walking there although it was a public right of way. It was true that quite a few of the sheep seemed to be hobbling on three legs, or half kneeling, their front legs bent at the joint. Ally worried that the farmer would come out to confront them. She didn’t want to have to take sides. As she tramped beside Hilda on the way back, the day draining out of the sky seemed to empty her, too, leaving her weightless. When they arrived back at the cottage they could still see each other clearly, but the light was at its moment of transition, and as soon as they went inside the night outside the windows appeared perfectly dark. In the cottage downstairs there was only one room, with a kitchen at one end and a sitting room at the other, a flagged floor and a wood fire smouldering in a wide stone hearth, one wall stripped back to the naked stone. Hilda put logs on the fire and switched on a couple of lamps.
The room was uncluttered, considering how small it was, but everything in it was striking and eccentric: the faded rugs, the pictures on the walls, a wool blanket woven in bright colours flung over the back of the sofa, collections of stones and twisted weathered deadwood from the moors. The effect seemed spontaneous, but Ally knew that it must have taken a huge effort to get it to this state, removing all the layers of paint and wallpaper and carpeting and cosiness. There were photographs of Hilda’s three grown children, two daughters and a son. Hilda said that she had divorced her husband twenty years ago and had mostly brought up the children by herself. He was an Englishman. The only good thing he’d ever done for her was introduce her to this part of the country. She’d lived in Leeds for years, had moved out to the cottage when her younger daughter left home. Then she’d saved and bought herself a whole year off work, to get on with her novel. When she abandoned the novel and the money ran out, she’d decided to get a local job, part time.
— I can manage, she said. — Cut the consumer crap. We don’t need half as much as they want to persuade us to buy. How long I’ll stay at the health centre I don’t know. The staff aren’t friendly.
Ally couldn’t imagine Hilda fitting in around here. People would think she was too full of herself: her neat frame seemed packed up tight with personality and experience. Her self-sufficiency made Ally feel unformed. She hung on to the mean little nugget of knowledge: that the writers on the course had said Hilda was too intense, had no sense of humour. There was no sign of a television anywhere in the cottage, only shelves of books.
— Didn’t you ever want to go home to Canada?
— England’s home. I’ve lived here longer now than I lived there. Anyway, two of my children live in London, and one’s in Dundee. I couldn’t live thousands of miles away from them.
Hilda told Ally to wrap herself in the blanket in front of the fire: she explained that it was a button blanket, made by a Tlingit artist. Then she brought her tea and a slab of apple cake she’d made herself, without eggs or dairy.
— I want to ask you how you are, she said, sitting on a cushion on the hearthrug. — Real question, not the polite version. You can tell me it’s none of my business. We hardly know each other.
— I’m OK.
— You honoured me with your confidence the other day.
— I’m really OK. Why don’t you tell me about your novel instead? You said you had been waiting all your life to write it.
She thought that Hilda flinched. — Outside the shop? Did I say that?
— Something like that.
Hilda considered carefully. — You’re angry because I talked about it so seriously, as if my novel were a disaster in the real world. But of course it can’t be weighed in that world. Against the life of one of my children, say, it isn’t a feather. Or against the life of anyone’s child.
— It mattered to you, though.
Ally wasn’t interested in the novel itself. She wanted to dig down to the raw shame of this failure in Hilda, this thing inside her poisoning everything, cut off and spoiled and shrivelled up.
Hilda told her the story of the Guitar Player. In the late sixties, when Hilda was fifteen, her mother had had an affair with a singer-songwriter. It had happened in a big house on a lake in north-western Ontario, where Hilda’s mother was employed as a live-in cook and cleaner. The house had belonged to a Toronto music producer, who brought his friends out to party in the summer. Even while the affair was happening, Hilda’s mother had gone on cleaning and washing up and cooking. She said she’d rather be busy than hang around doing nothing. She refused to take any money beyond her wages. She really was the kind of woman that folk singers sang about in those days, or she made herself into that kind of woman: good at growing things and cooking and healing and comforting. That summer, Hilda’s mother had gone around barefoot and worn long dresses, with her hair down to her waist, and the guests had treated her as if she were a kind of child of nature because she lived out by the lake all year round. All of them had been a bit in love with her, especially after the Guitar Player had chosen her. She hadn’t tried to explain to these guests the complications of her real life on the lake.
At the end of the summer, the Guitar Player had moved on and Hilda’s mother had never seen him again, but he’d had a success with a song that she always believed was about her: ‘She’s the One’, a hymn to beauty that could also be interpreted as a message of farewell or apology. Hilda’s mother had bought the album and learned all the words. And after she married Hilda’s stepfather, whenever they had rows she would retreat to her den and play it over and over, singing along. By that time she’d cut her hair and was working as a receptionist at one of the lake hotels. But Hilda knew that the song wasn’t really about her mother, although she had never told her so. She knew this because those words – ‘She’s the one’ – were what the Guitar Player had said to Hilda when he came looking for her for the first time. She’d slept in the attic of the big house: at night she used to stand on a chair, craning her head out of the skylight to watch the grown-ups drinking and partying in the garden below or undressing to go skinny-dipping in the lake. When the Guitar Player had come into Hilda’s room and lifted the sheet on her bed, he’d said not ‘You’re the one’ but ‘She’s the one’, as if he were describing her to somebody else, some objective judge watching.
She had been afraid, of course, but not sorry, not at the time. He was as moody and skinny as a boy, but he had a power that drew all the yearning in the place towards him, including hers. He’d hardly spoken to her before that, but he must have noticed her watching him. His real presence in her room had seemed a kind of miracle, refracted and thickened through everyone’s adulation of him, through his pictures in magazines and on album covers. He’d been pretty high that night, exalted and weird; there were a lot of drugs around that summer. He’d said all kinds of strange things – Hilda was surprised that he could remember any of it afterwards, but quite a lot of it had found its way into the song.
Hilda told her the real name of the singer-songwriter and Ally didn’t recognise it. A crumb of apple cake had stuck to Hilda’s cheek as she talked. She was at that tipping point in middle age. Mostly she was animated, buoyant, and flexible, her skin was good, and in spite of her white hair she seemed to belong to the world of choice and strength. Then in some trick of the light, or because she sagged her chin into her wrinkling neck, or her too-short trousers rode up above her ankle socks as she was sitting cross-legged, Ally saw for a moment the old woman she would become, vulnerable and stubborn, cut adrift. Ally knew about th
e sixties – hippies and psychedelia and free love – but they seemed actually less real to her than Victorian times. If Hilda had said that she’d seen Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost tapping at the window, it would have had more of a thrill of possibility.
— It was a kind of rape. It was child abuse. But that wasn’t how I saw it at the time. Later, in the seventies, I got very angry about it.
— What d’you think about it now?
— When I was trying to write the novel, I made such an effort to remember it exactly. I played all the old music. Of course, it can’t mean anything to you. How could I convey the power of those people? That was it, that was my failure – I couldn’t convey it. But it was real. It happened. It was almost a physical thing – you couldn’t separate out the music and the giftedness and the youth. There was like a hum of sex in the air all the time.
Ally made an effort to imagine Hilda as a fifteen-year-old, but even the room they were in made this difficult. Its uncompromising style conveyed the whole long adult effort of putting a life together. Hilda said that, in her twenties, the story of what had happened had blocked her; for years she hadn’t been able to get past the cheat or the promise of it. She hadn’t told anyone about it, certainly not her mother, not even her husband. She’d saved it up. She’d told herself that one day she would put it in a book, not to make a scandal – as if anyone would care! – but just to be finally free of it. And once she’d begun to think of it as a story it had stopped troubling her; the idea of writing it had even come to be a comfort to her in bad times, a resource stored inside her, opening possibilities in the future.
— But it was a dud, she said. — It was a wrong idea. I couldn’t do it. What I wanted to say died on me. It died inside.
Hilda gave Ally a key to the cottage.
— You can come here any time, if you need space. Make yourself a fire if I’m not here. Grab what you like to eat. Tilly will love to see you – she hates to be locked up in the house alone.