Married Love

by Tessa Hadley

  One Saturday in Blue while I was folding a pile of cord trousers Roxanne came in at the shop door: I recognised her instantly although she was very changed. She looked impressive, she had exactly the air of initiated mysterious suffering that we were all aiming for. Her hair was hennaed a startling orange-red, not long but longer than I remembered ever seeing it, curling on her neck. Around her eyes and mouth her face was marked, as if it was bruised or strained; but this didn’t make her ugly, it was somehow beautiful. She had grown into the painful expressivity of her features, which had been too much on a child. Her loose white cheesecloth dress was cinched around her tiny waist with a thick belt, pulling the cloth taut across her breasts, which weren’t much bigger than when we’d fed our dolls together. Without looking at any of us she pulled a selection of size 8 jeans from the shelves and took them into one of the changing cubicles. I stood around wondering whether to speak to her. I thought she hadn’t recognised me, perhaps because she was high on something: her eyes were very wide open and she lifted her feet as if she had to pull them up because the floor was sticky. Or perhaps she had just moved away into such a different life that she had blanked all memory of our friendship from her awareness.

  After a long time she came out again from the cubicle, and it was obvious to me at once that she was wearing a couple of the pairs of jeans under her dress. She walked without any special haste straight to the shop door. Probably even if I hadn’t known her I wouldn’t have dared say anything: I was too shy to undergo the awful exposure of accusing anyone, incurring their contempt. Then as Roxanne walked out of the door she gave me one quick straight look, boldly into my face, and flashed her smile at me, like a flare of light illuminating the whole place, melting me. And I thought: I will always be the tame one, watching while she risks everything.

  I believed then that this meant I would be safe, at least.

  Post-production

  ALBERT ARNO, THE FILM director, dropped dead at his home in the middle of a sentence. It was early evening and his wife Lynne was lifting a dish of potato gratin out of the oven. Albert came out of the downstairs shower room, one striped towel wrapped round his waist, rubbing his neck with another: a fit man in his mid-sixties, not tall, with a thick white torso and a shock of silvering hair.

  — Oh good, he said, seeing her lift out the dish in padded oven gloves. — I’m hungry, I …

  Then he dropped to the floor as dramatically as if he’d been felled by a blow from behind. While she dashed down the gratin dish on the kitchen surface, Lynne thought that was what must have happened, though she couldn’t see what had hit him; he hadn’t shouted or given out any noise except an abrupt exhalation of surprise, as if the breath was knocked out of him. When his weight hit the floor the noise was awful. A wooden stool went flying with a clatter. Lynne ran over thinking she was going to help him up; when she touched his chest, she knew that it was empty.

  Albert was still warm, he was still unmistakably himself, as he had been in the fullness of his energetic towelling a few seconds ago. Lynne couldn’t take in that it wasn’t possible to re-enter those seconds and pull things back into their real, familiar order. He had fallen awkwardly, on his back but twisted to one side, legs splayed; the towel round his waist had untwisted and she pulled it across to cover his suddenly vulnerable penis, exposed limp in its nest of hair. She couldn’t possibly lift him; yet she could feel the cold coming up through these old slates, laid directly on the earth. Even as she snatched at the phone, dialling 999, she was running through into the boiler room behind the kitchen. She could use the old picnic blankets, kept folded on a shelf. The boiler was ticking over comfortably, privately, as if everything were going on as usual.

  Albert’s eyes were open. That was the worst thing, Lynne thought. There was some shame involved in his blind stare: he was caught out, or she was caught out, seeing him see nothing. Trying to tuck the blankets in around him, she wasn’t aware that she was making some kind of hiccuping noise, low-level crying, until she tried to talk at the same time to the emergency services. Then she consciously calmed herself down. She must take charge. They told her the ambulance would be with her within twenty to thirty minutes. The house was at the back of beyond, in rural Dorset.

  — I’m going to call my husband’s brother, she said. — He knows first aid.

  At the idea of calling Ben, Albert’s producer and business partner, the squeezing around Lynne’s heart eased somewhat. Ben almost lived with them, they saw him every day; Lynne imagined the phone breaking in on the peace of his little cottage, ten minutes’ walk away. Now, he would be turning down the classical music he was listening to, or putting down his book. She felt dread and regret at the news she had to pour out for him, curdling everything.

  — I’m on my way, he said. — Hold on.

  Lynne’s son Tom, Albert’s stepson, was asleep in his room upstairs. She had thought Tom would come running when he heard the crash; but the fall – and her cry, she must have cried out – might not have woken him, the house had thick old walls. Tom had been sleeping a lot since he’d been home (he was depressed, he was threatening that he wouldn’t go back to finish his degree at Oxford). Lynne couldn’t worry about him, at this moment. It was using up all of her work, sitting beside her husband’s body, holding on to his unresponsive hand.

  — Ben’s on his way, she reassured him.

  Those minutes, when she had the house all to herself, were mysteriously rich. Whatever was coming had not broken yet, in the adrenalin rush of the moment, over her head. Would it be grief? What would that be like? She stood up once and crossed the kitchen to open the back door, to listen for Ben. Outside, the moon stood in a blurry ring of bronze light. Hail that had fallen earlier was scattered in its tiny perfect spheres on the grass and the paths and the roofs of the outhouses which were workshops and studios, making them luminous. The sculptures – a stone nymph and garlanded boy, a warrior made from scrap metal – seemed alive, caught mid-movement. It was so quiet. Albert had a big voice; if he was talking on the telephone, you couldn’t carry on your own conversation, you weren’t meant to. Even in his taciturn moods he was always on the move, banging doors, running the bath or the shower, playing loud music or the radio.

  Ben arrived in the Lamborghini, tyres crunched on the frozen gravel, the luxuriating engine cut. Then he was with her in the kitchen, kneeling beside Albert, feeling for a pulse. Ben didn’t look anything like his brother. Albert’s hair had been jet black when she first knew him, his beard grew strongly, his mouth was red and wet; Ben had pale hair, a long, mournful intelligent face. Albert looked like their Jewish mother.

  — He’s gone, sweetheart, Ben said; and he reached over and closed Albert’s eyes.

  — Isn’t there anything we ought to try?

  — No. Leave him in his peace.

  Tears were rolling down Ben’s cheeks, although he was quite calm; Lynne was surprised at herself, that she wasn’t crying. He clasped her against him, she felt waves of weeping shuddering through her brother-in-law’s diaphragm. After a minute or two, however, when he put her gently away from him, he didn’t look in the least ravaged or out of control. He arranged Albert’s body so that he was lying on his back, covered neatly with the blankets. Then he turned off the oven and began cleaning up the mess, with bowls of soapy water: where Lynne had slammed down the potato gratin on the ceramic-tiled kitchen surface, she had cracked the dish, and the creamy fatty juices were trickling down the front of the cupboards and into a pool on the floor. She hadn’t even noticed this, all the time she was sitting there alone with Albert.

  — You go with him, Ben said when the ambulance came. — I’ll take care of Tom. I’ll tell him what’s happened. I’ll drive to the hospital as soon as I’ve done that. I’ll come and get you.

  Lynne assumed that without Albert, the whole film enterprise that had been their lives would grind to a halt for ever. Albert had been the genius, the rest of them had simply gone along with him. When she’d met and
married him, eighteen years ago (Tom was just two years old), the machinery of Albert’s importance and career had already been in place; she’d never known him when he wasn’t a famous man. She had worked on films before she met him, but only in a production office, she wasn’t creative. In the days following the funeral Lynne recovered all the old worshipping love she’d felt for Albert when they were first together. Sleep was the worst, because she had to wake up to the loss all over again.

  She began to understand that Elective Affinities could not be abandoned. The completion guarantee would fund them to bring in another director – only Ros apparently wanted to finish it without outside help. Ros was Albert’s indispensable editor, his partner in vision (he had called her that). Diminutive and fiery, she had come to the funeral in dark glasses, face ugly from weeping, her long mass of dyed bright-auburn curls tied back in a black scarf. Ben said she had all Albert’s notes, she’d been at his side every moment of filming.

  Lynne doubted. — How can we know for sure what was in Albert’s mind?

  Ben made her understand that they had to go ahead, in any case, whoever took over. Anyway, how could they not finish it? The film was in the can, it was going to be something beautiful.

  Later she stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom she had shared with Albert, wearing her long silk ecru nightdress trimmed in chocolate lace – now he was gone, she saw she was too old for it, in her fifties. Her skin was chalky, her cheekbones jutted, her hair was dry as straw. When she heard Ben’s key turn in the front door, she called to him to come upstairs. He had been in and out of the house all day, there was always business to transact from the office. Lynne felt self-conscious in her nightdress; Ben was in his camel overcoat, his long cheeks pink from his walk up from the cottage. The bedroom must seem stiflingly hot to anyone coming in from outside. He said he was worried he’d been overbearing when he quashed her doubts about going ahead with the film. — It’s your call, you ought to have the last word. It doesn’t matter what Ros thinks. Maybe you’d rather we brought in another director? Take time to think about it.

  She didn’t need time. They must have Ros, to do justice to the film.

  She knew Ben, how under his controlled surface his conscience laboured subtly and was always in turmoil. Now that Albert was dead, she had become part of what he had to worry over.

  Tom flung himself full length on the bed, face down, voice muffled in the pillows.

  — What’s Ben sniffing round after?

  Lynne was taking off her make-up at the dressing table. — Ben’s so loyal, looking out for us.

  — There’s nothing old Uncle Ben can do for me.

  As Albert would have pointed out if he’d been there, Tom was behaving as usual as if the whole disaster had only happened to him. Albert had sometimes held his stepson off with cold disdain, at other times reeled him in, talking to him late into the night: especially once it was clear that Tom was clever. He was good-looking too, with raw unfinished cheekbones, small blue-black eyes set in deep sockets. With his white skin and dark hair he could easily have been taken for Albert’s son, although he was languid and tall instead of blocky and stolid.

  — Ben’s just a businessman, Tom said. — If it wasn’t for Dad, he’d be a used-car salesman.

  — You’re a ghastly snob.

  — And he’s homophobic.

  — Rubbish.

  Lynne explained the discussion she’d had with Ben, over Ros’s taking over the direction of Affinities; Tom had always adored Ros, he had toddled round after her when he was a finicky baby with a cuddle blanket.

  — You’re not thinking about what Dad’s death means for me, he said, — my future as an actor.

  — I didn’t even know you wanted to be an actor.

  — All the doors he could have opened for me. I’m finished now.

  Lynne put her hand on Tom’s high white forehead. — It’s not you that’s finished, sweetheart. You’re not finished yet.

  — And I’m not convinced Ben is so family minded. Unless you’re talking really Old Testament. Uncle Ben’s on your scent, Ma. He’s after you.

  — Go to bed, Tom, please, if you can’t be sensible. I want to be by myself.

  He burst into loud tears.

  — I know I’m behaving like a cunt. I just can’t bear it that he’s gone.

  She put her arms around him, lying down on the bed beside him.

  — I can’t bear it either, darling. But we have to.

  He went eventually, reluctantly, carrying away one of her pillows.

  Tom used to try all sorts of tricks when he was a little boy, to get to stay in Lynne’s bed at night and fall asleep with her. When Albert came in later (he always came to bed very late), he would carry the sleeping boy in his pyjamas back to his own room. For a moment this ritual, so tender and intent, was vividly real to Lynne, more substantial and lasting than anything in the present: as if she could hear Albert’s step, careful with his burden, on the landing.

  The post-production team worked to be faithful to every last detail of what Albert had imagined for Elective Affinities. Excitement buoyed them up eerily and sadly. Lynne was glad that all of this unfolded around her in her home. Jacquie visited, his queenly agent, terribly upset and kind. The Italian distributors tried to pull out. Ros’s personality emerged with a new definiteness, in Albert’s absence: forthright, reckless in her personal relations, with a scalding flaring humour. She quarrelled with the indispensable Leo, Ben’s assistant. With Lynne she was guarded, they didn’t talk much, though scrupulously she invited Lynne to look at the cut sequences as they came together. Lynne said she’d rather wait and see the whole thing. Two little furrows of misery had settled in the golden skin of Ros’s face, beside the brightly red-lipsticked mouth; she often wore her dark glasses, which looked affected in the middle of winter. In February she turned forty. — Don’t dare say one word, anyone! she warned one Monday morning, unwinding her scarf from round her head in the kitchen, shaking heavy silver earrings. She had had all her mass of orange curls shorn off over the weekend. Free of its headdress of hair, the queer long handsome face was bleakly naked, spectacular. Tom, who was wearing Albert’s old pyjamas, making his breakfast coffee at the stove (his tutor at Oxford had advised him to take a year out), bent ceremoniously and kissed the gingery stubble.

  Lynne and Ben often ate alone together, if the team went down to the pub for supper and Tom went with them. Sometimes Ben cooked for her in the cottage. Their relations were easy, as they grieved together. When Lynne went up to London to see the lawyers, Ben took her out to dinner. Lynne pretended to take no notice of the things Tom said about Ben: but the truth was, his insinuations slipped under her skin, shaming her, changing her awareness of how her brother-in-law helped her into her coat, rested his arm across her shoulders, was unfailingly considerate of her feelings and well-being. He was her dear old friend, nothing of the sort had ever come up between them in the past; he might be appalled if he knew what Tom had planted in her thoughts. Nonetheless, Lynne was ambushed by excitements she had thought written off for ever when her hormones changed.

  — He’s after your money, Ma, Tom said. — He wants total control of the business.

  He surely didn’t believe any of this.

  — You’ve loved being the wife of an important artist. The kudos, the creativity, the parties. Don’t make a mistake and settle for a mediocrity.

  Surprising herself, Lynne slapped her son hard, leaving a pink mark on his cheek.

  Leo organised a screening of Ros’s cut in their little cinema: an intimate occasion, for the post-production team and a few friends – Jacquie came down, John Hay who was writing the music, Deborah Jones who played Ottilie and had been close to Albert. Tom was sweetly sympathetic when he found Lynne turning out her wardrobe in tears, convinced she had nothing to wear; they chose black crêpe trousers and a green silk Nicole Farhi jacket.

  The film began with the married couple in a garden. It was Lynn
e who had first suggested that Albert should take a look at this novel, which she had studied at university. His screenplay wasn’t anything like the story she remembered: to begin with, he had translated it into the present day. But in any case, she could hardly concentrate on what was supposed to be happening between the four characters – all she was conscious of was Albert, present in every shot as if he’d returned from the dead. She could only see back into the camera’s eye, and into what lay behind the eye. At one point of heightened emotion between the film lovers, Lynne was so painfully carried outside herself that she twisted round in her seat as if she might try getting out over the back of it. It had been a mistake to accept a seat in the front row, where she couldn’t escape without disrupting everyone. Ben restrained her and put his hand on her knee to comfort her. In the few months since he died, Lynne thought, she had already begun smoothing Albert out, making a doll of him. His cold will had often used to grate against her, sometimes he had bored her; it was a relief to be delivered out of his orbit. But now everything was lost: all the scattered effect of a real person, complicated beyond counting.

  After the screening they gathered in the house for a party which was a kind of wake. Everyone got drunk very quickly. It was still cool enough in May for a wood fire in the cavernous stone hearth; when they drank to Albert, they threw their glasses to smash in the back of the fireplace. Jacquie wept, and Deborah – who was sensible and funny, beautiful in jeans and baggy jumper. People made speeches about Albert’s rare vision of people, tender and penetrating. Lynne circulated round her old friends, she thrust the memory of the film behind her. Everyone said it was a masterpiece. Lynne thought Ros looked strained and ill, but that might just have been her different hair.

  When Lynne said goodnight, hours later, the young ones were dancing in a back room. Climbing the stairs, she had to hang on to the banister rail, she was so tired. When she opened the door of her bedroom, she wasn’t sure straight away what it was she was seeing, or who it was, on top of her duvet: she had never seen sex before, in real life, from this angle, from outside: legs splayed, feet waving in the air, buttocks pumping in a motion that made her think of insects. It was as if someone was taken ill. Her heart lunged: the exposure was hers, from having witnessed this. She shut the door hastily, hoping they hadn’t heard her, sitting down to think about it on the stairs. Then again, she hoped they had heard her. She had drunk quite a lot.