Married Love

by Tessa Hadley

  Ally took the key, but couldn’t imagine that she’d ever need it. Then one afternoon when things were bad at home – trouble was blowing up around James’s refusing to go to school – she drove to the cottage and let herself in. She told her mother that she was walking Hilda’s dog, as a favour. She did take Tilly out, and then when they got back she made a fire and wrapped herself in the blanket and picked out one of the books from Hilda’s shelves, losing herself in it so completely and deeply that when Hilda came back from work, pushing open the door, Ally looked up startled and didn’t know for a moment where she was. After that, she started calling in at the cottage once or twice a week; sometimes Hilda was home and sometimes Ally was alone there. When Hilda went to Dundee for the weekend, to stay with her daughter who had cats, Ally slept at the cottage overnight, keeping Tilly company.

  One evening when she and Hilda were sharing a bottle of red wine, she explained what Ryan had done to kill himself, hanging himself on the stairs using a length of spare washing line. She’d never had to tell anyone this before: either they knew already or they didn’t like to ask, but Hilda had come straight out with it. They were sitting staring at each other from opposite ends of the sofa, with their legs tucked under them; the dog in her basket was panting with pleasure in the warmth of the fire.

  — Mum would have found him, Ally said. — Usually she gets home twenty minutes before my dad, except that day on an impulse she went the roundabout way to buy vegetables at the farm shop. I was away in Manchester. My other brother had football after school. It wouldn’t have made any difference to what happened – there was no chance of stopping him or anything. He had died already, hours before. But it meant that Mum didn’t have to find him. Dad found him instead. Dad said that that was the only saving grace in the whole thing, her buying those vegetables.

  The wine made little waves in her glass, in time with the pounding of her heart. Hilda reached over to pull the blanket up around Ally’s shoulders.

  — Did you have any idea that he was so depressed?

  — Now when we go over the music he was playing, and what he put on Facebook, everything suggests it. At the time we just thought he was going through a phase. In fact he was just going through a phase. Only, stupid moron, he didn’t leave himself any chance to come out of it.

  — It’s a terrible thing for his girlfriend, Hilda sighed. — It really fucks her up.

  Ally couldn’t bear the idea that Hilda would imagine Yvonne as something she wasn’t, some kind of tragic heroine. — They were always splitting up and getting back together again, working themselves up into a lather of feeling, one way or another. It didn’t mean anything.

  — But that’s what you think love’s all about when you’re a kid.

  — That kind of love makes me sick. It’s such a fake.

  When Hilda came back from Dundee she brought Ally a stone she’d picked up on a beach there, oval and flat and black, striped with pinkish crystal. — Pounded by the North Sea, she said. In Hilda’s house it was a beautiful thing, but it only looked odd among the ornaments on her bedroom shelf at home, as if a piece of outdoors had got indoors by mistake.

  One morning when Ally was at the writing centre, double-checking the details of next year’s programme of courses before they sent it off to press, Yvonne turned up, hovering outside the office door. Ally recognised her through the glass before she saw Ally inside: it was a fine day, brilliantly cold, so that blue sky was patched in the frame of the door behind Yvonne’s yellow hair and short white bomber jacket. Her shoulders were hunched with the cold, her skinny midriff bare, hardly bulging over the top of tight jeans. She put her face up close to the glass, peering in. Ally felt like a fish in a bowl, helpless to escape being seen.

  — I have to talk to you, Yvonne said once she’d got the door open, looking around suspiciously and showing no sign of wanting to cross the threshold of the office.

  No ‘please’ or ‘if you’re not busy’.

  Ally took down her coat and suggested they walk along the river. She left a note on the desk for Kit. It was the second day of a short-story course, and all the students were on the loose outdoors with notebooks and pens. They must have been given some writing exercise. Everywhere you looked, one of them seemed to be staring at nothing, drinking it in, transfixed: a dead stalk of dock weed or the blank corner of a stone wall or an icicle dribbled from the lip of a gutter. Dedicatedly they scribbled in their notebooks, squinting at the nothing from all angles.

  — Shit a brick, muttered Yvonne, keeping her eyes on the ground. — What are they supposed to be doing?

  Ally felt bound to apologise for the centre. She said that they were practising observational skills.

  — Observing my arse, Yvonne said.

  Her thin little face which had used to look creamy, was peaky, blue around the lips. Ally had always guessed that underneath Yvonne’s neat sweetness – plucked straight brows, small nose, pink ears – something ferrety was waiting to appear. Yvonne walked rolling on her heels with her arms wrapped across her chest, hands tucked up into her jacket sleeves for warmth. The path dropped to the river and she looked around her, not enthusiastically, as if she didn’t often find herself in the country. Bare alders and ash and blackthorn made a twiggy haze against the sun, which was already close to dropping behind the steep side of the river valley; the cold tea-brown water coiled thickly in its bed. Ally felt better once they were past the last of the writers.

  — Everybody hates me, Yvonne said. — I suppose that’s what he wanted.

  — We’ve been over all this, said Ally. — Nobody hates you.

  Yvonne fished for something in her tight jeans pocket, thrust it out closed in her fist. — I wanted to give you this back.

  Ally put her hands behind her. — I don’t want it. What is it?

  — A stupid ring Ryan gave me.

  — I don’t want it.

  In a spasm of temper Yvonne swung around and opened her hand, flinging away into the river something tiny that gave out one glint of light before it was swallowed without a splash, the water healing instantly behind it. The moment she’d done it she shrieked, pressing her hands across her mouth, and said that she hadn’t meant to let it go, it was an accident.

  — Ally, help me get it back!

  — Don’t be silly. The water’s too deep. You couldn’t find it in a million years. It doesn’t matter.

  Yvonne went on shrieking and pleading. Crouching on the path she started untying her trainers, dragging and clawing at the laces as if she were going to wade in. On an impulse, because the whole scene disgusted her, Ally found herself calmly stepping into the river with her trainers still on, wading across the large flat submerged stones at its edge. At first she hardly felt the cold, only the pull of the moving water as if something were clamped around her ankles. Then she stepped down into a deeper channel, among the smaller toffee-coloured pebbles of the river bed; the water here was halfway up to her calves, then up to her knees, soaking her trousers, wrapping them against her legs, snatching her breath away with the shock of the cold. The force of the current where the river ran faster almost knocked her off balance, though it looked lazy on the surface. She steadied herself by hanging on to a slippery boulder sticking up midstream and wondered if she should go any farther. Her jaw was clenched. It was difficult to remember how to move her feet in the trainers that began to feel numbingly huge and heavy.

  She didn’t care about the ring: she had stepped into the water only to make a point against the hysterical performance on the riverbank, to show it up in some way that was deliberate and disdainful. When she turned to look back at Yvonne, she was surprised at how far she had come: Yvonne on the path seemed distant, hugging her elbows, shouting directions that Ally couldn’t hear over the water rushing past. It seemed a different universe out here in the river. The whole scene, the sad story that had brought them together, was framed for her for a moment as if from some far-off future perspective, and her rage against Yvo
nne washed out of her. Wanting only to be kind, she began hunting for the ring in all seriousness, peering at the river bed, fishing for gleams in the water, her hands aching from the cold as if the flesh were being dragged off her bones. She realised that Yvonne was shouting from the bank for her to come back, please come back. It didn’t matter, Yvonne shouted. It was only a ring.

  At that moment Ally saw it, caught just underwater in a crevice in a jagged chunk of shale, its gold picked out where a beam of the late light slanted at an angle from the water’s surface. She put out her hand to take it. And when she had it safe in her clenched fingers, she waded with some difficulty back to where Yvonne was reaching out for her. (—You stupid mad fuck, Yvonne stormed. — What did you think you were doing?) She didn’t drown.

  In the Cave

  AFTER THE SEX, he fell asleep. That wasn’t what Linda had expected. Cheated – returned too soon into her own possession – she lay pinned for a while under his flung arm, looking into the corners of the high ceiling where purple shadows bloomed and a flossy strand of cobweb kept time in a draught she couldn’t feel. She liked his flat, what she’d seen of it, better than her own. Books were piled everywhere on the floor, a tide of curiosities was flooded through the rooms in disorder: bird skulls, netsuke, fossils, Christmas cracker jokes pinned on a noticeboard, little animated toys his children had made (he was divorced with two teenage boys), postcard Hammershoi, a marimba, an original nineteenth-century tin zoetrope – an early machine for making moving pictures. (He’d shown her how it worked, she’d been afraid then in case they were carried past the moment when something other than companionable chat was possible.) Photographs of cave paintings everywhere. Her own home was too poky and timid and smothered with tending. And where did he have the money from, to rent a flat in Bloomsbury? (She was in Tottenham.)

  But she wasn’t in love, though she had been ready to be. Love sank down gently from where it had been swollen in expectation – she imagined a red balloon deflating to a foolish remnant. Lightly, he snored. He was jet-lagged, he’d flown back only yesterday from South Africa. Politely, she eased from underneath his weight. There was only this substantial moment really, for all the sticky trickle on her thighs, and their bodies’ forms and smells imprinted recently and urgently upon each other: of mutually uncomprehending encounter. She didn’t dislike his body, although she had been two inches taller than he was when they were standing up. He was compact, commanding, energetic; careless of his appearance, balding, with a remainder of fine auburn hair. His spirit was in his blue prominent eyes; now they were closed, lids flickering with dream-life, she was released to perceive him with detachment.

  What was she doing here? Mockery sprang up savagely again from where she had suppressed it after they met and got on so well (first time Ozu at the BFI, second time dinner at a French place in Hornsea High Street, third time lucky) – at herself, for having advertised, which she’d never thought she’d do. Now she drowned in shame at the idea of the sprightly words she’d used in her own description, so wincingly anxiously calculated to lead to just this moment.

  Oh well never mind.

  The sheet was twisted into a rope underneath her – that clean sheet badly tucked in, and the clean duvet and pillowcases, had let her know he too had been planning, when he suggested she come round for early supper at his place. He had advertised too. Now, careful not to wake him, she got up out of bed, wrapping herself in his cotton throw although she wasn’t really afraid of his seeing her. Her body was all right, still straight and slender; it was in your face and hands that your age showed first, and you couldn’t hide those away. Still, she was out of practice; it might be rash to parade around naked as if she thought she was twenty. The bathroom light wasn’t consoling, when she shut the door behind her and turned it on. She avoided her own eyes, and used his flannel – why not? since he’d been in there – to wash between her legs.

  When she came out again he hadn’t moved from where he lay face down in the bed. She couldn’t help feeling sidelined; as if this oblivion was what he’d desired and she’d been merely the passage through to it. Her clothes were dropped on the floor where he and she had stood fumbling together, taking them off; recovering them, Linda carried them through into the living room where they had eaten (something nice but faintly risky, indigestible, squid-ink pasta with mussels and cream), sitting side by side on the sagging chaise longue because the table was impossibly heaped up with iMac and papers. It was dark now – it must be almost ten o’clock. She put on the sequence of garments chosen in such anticipation for taking off, comical as running a wedding video backwards. At first while she was dressing, she thought that she would let herself right away out of the flat, take the Tube home, leave him a note. They might meet up again, or they might not. Her heart wouldn’t break, she was safe, its muscle toughened after the years of accumulations from two long relationships, one short marriage (no children).

  When they removed to the bedroom they had left IKEA lamps switched on behind them; by their light now Linda, lingering, dressed but in bare feet so that she made no noise, sandals looped across a finger, bag on her shoulder, moved about his room in his absence as if she was moving inside the shape of his mind. She found on the shelves books that he’d written, quite a few, with decent academic publishers. So, he must be fairly successful in his field; though she knew, because he’d told her, that he worked to some extent in the shadow of one of the big innovative thinkers, following up the Professor’s hunches with his meticulous research. Perhaps he got serious grants for his fieldwork studying North American and Australian rock art. Perhaps the Bloomsbury flat was part of some fellowship deal.

  He had talked a lot about his work; but he had seemed to be interested in hers, too – she was an art therapist, working with clients with mental health problems. They had seemed, over the dinner in Hornsea six weeks ago, to have so much in common. She had built up a whole tall, hopeful, dreamy, precarious edifice out of their common ground while he was away, in defiance of her usual fatalism; she had invented some convenient simulacrum of him, as it seemed to her now – a twin for herself, to fit her need. Luckily, out of some good instinct of self-preservation, she hadn’t announced her happiness to anyone among her friends.

  It wasn’t the sex that had spoiled it.

  Something had happened – a drop in her hopes – just before she made the move that saved them from the zoetrope; he had spun its tin drum for her, so that the tiny horses circled in their endless wave of movement, legs clenching and then releasing, kicked back behind. Now, afterwards, while he slept and she was left alone, there was time to think. She fingered through the recollections for whatever was concealed at their centre, little nub of ice. Cold, getting colder, coldest – there!

  Was that all? Such a slight thing, in passing.

  She had been so moved, thinking of his life’s work. In the restaurant the rich smells of meat and wine had seemed to suffuse what he described; visionary animals looming out of torchlit darkness. He had been lucky, he said, getting special permission to have his twenty permitted minutes in the caves at Lascaux; they were closed to visitors now, after the discovery of micro-organisms growing in there, caused by the presence of too many people. He had told her that the latest thinking, based partly on the practices of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, was that the paintings may have been the product of induced shamanistic hallucinations, projected on to the rock and marked out there. And he had said that for the people who painted Lascaux, the rock face may have seemed only a skin stretched between them and another order of reality. For all those weeks he was absent in South Africa, these possibilities had seemed to have some kind of promise for her. She had spoken about the cave paintings to the clients she worked with in her art classes; some of them were susceptible to visions. Sharing his ideas around, she felt the same secret excitement as when she was a teenager, weaving certain names into her conversation.

  And then this evening, as she crouched in front of th
e zoetrope, peeking through its slot while he spun it for her, he’d explained its trick. His voice had had a giggle in it, of boyish pleasure at debunking sentimentalities.

  — It’s like the hallucinations the cave painters saw. You can reproduce those visions in laboratory conditions. It’s just neurons firing, telling you something’s happening when it isn’t. I’m not a neurobiologist, but it’s something to do with the causal operator, interconnections between the frontal and inferior parietal lobes. Makes you feel you’re in the presence of something other: the ineffable. When you aren’t. There is no ineffable. It’s just a trick of your own mind, deluding itself.

  Linda hadn’t protested — but isn’t there another order of reality? What was the point? Who wanted to appear sentimental?

  How small. Just that. One of those tiny twitches in conversation that, unbeknownst to the speaker, tear fissures in the moment, out of which power and pleasure drain. How disappointing. She had seen then that he had his trouser belt pulled tight at a point too high up on his waist, as middle-aged men do; it made her vulnerable, noticing. The bones dried out, the sinews hardened. He had told her in the restaurant that after they closed Lascaux they’d built a replica of parts of the original cave for visitors to enjoy; imagining a plaster rock face, electric torchlight, ersatz exclamations, she had said she’d rather not see it at all. When she was younger, she had not been vain, but had trusted her appearance to be quietly itself, not beautiful: narrow face, coffee-coloured skin, bushy black hair (some Malay in there somewhere, some Portuguese). Nowadays, in the mirror at the centre of the familiar surround of her own dressing-table – pots and bottles, souvenirs, draped scarves and beads – only her face was not unchanging. Mostly she accepted the changes. Occasionally they anguished her, seemed abysmally sad, irrevocable as if a bottle had slipped out of her hand to smash.