by Tessa Hadley
Of course: Albert had been fucking Ros. No wonder Ros was broken-hearted.
But it didn’t really matter.
Ben came out into the hall below, not seeing her, folding his scarf neatly round his neck for the walk home. She leaned over the banister, drawing his attention in an exaggerated whisper.
— I can’t go in the bedroom, she said, making a game of it.
— What?
Taking off her shoes, she tiptoed down with her finger to her lips. The party was still audible at the other end of the house. She held the lapels of his camel-hair coat, to explain in his ear that Tom and Ros were in her bedroom. Making love, she said.
— You’ve got to be kidding. Anyway, I thought that Tom liked boys?
— Well, he does. Though he was going at it fairly energetically. I suppose he’s got this thing about his dad. About Albert. I expect that’s why they’re doing it on my bed. Because they both had a thing about Albert.
— D’you want me to go and bawl them out about it?
— Certainly not. How awful would that be? Only I don’t know where to lay my head, tonight. Do you think I could come and stay at the cottage?
Ben was holding on to her, puzzling into her face. He wasn’t good-looking, not the kind of man she’d ever have gone for when she was younger and could have her pick. But now she felt the glamour in his steady courtesy and calm, his competence.
— As long as you know, Ben said.
— Know what?
— That it’ll be hard for me. Having you at such close quarters, and not taking advantage.
She laid her cheek against the expensive softness of his coat.
The four of them gathered together on the anniversary of Albert’s death, at the bottom of the slump between Christmas and New Year: Lynne and Ben, Tom and Ros. Ros was in the last trimester of her pregnancy, which sat high on her tiny frame like a football. Ben had moved up into the house, Tom and Ros had taken over the cottage. There must have been some delicious gossip. Ros had mostly been away, working on a new project for a director in the US, then promoting Affinities; now she had scheduled herself a break for a few months. She was working on a screenplay, hoping to direct a feature of her own.
Ros wanted to go for a walk, but Tom was too lazy, sprawled smoking beside the fire with his socks almost in the ashes, reading through all the sections of the paper. Although he was supposed to have moved down to the cottage, he still spent most of every day in the big house. Lynne came in her striped apron from the kitchen, where she was stuffing a joint of pork for later. Ben was sending emails in the office. Ros stood impatiently in her bright blue coat, its buttons strained across her bump. Her hair had grown, she was dyeing it orange again, she had it wrapped in a vermilion knitted scarf.
— You’re such a slob. You ought to be disgusted with yourself.
— Aren’t I a slob? Tom commiserated complacently, waggling his toes.
Untying her apron, Lynne volunteered. — I’ll go with you. I’d like a walk.
Ros had to appear to be grateful: but it was probably the last thing she wanted. The two women were so unlike, bound together in such convoluted circumstances; Lynne guessed that Ros found this unbearable sometimes, though their mutual politeness had never faltered. Lynne had never said a word, to accuse Ros. Beside Ros, she felt herself bleached of colour, old and ordinary; yet she found herself making these clumsy efforts to get closer to the younger woman. They drove to the Iron Age fort a few miles down the road; an unkempt oval mound rearing austerely out of the farmed landscape. It was a few degrees colder up there than at the house – every leaf and blade of grass was outlined in frost crystals, and frozen mud crackled under their walking boots, though the sun was on their backs.
Ros waddled in her top-heavy roll along the path around the fort’s perimeter, hands in her pockets, telling bright funny stories about her experiences in the US. Although she was laughing, there was something dogged and bitter in how she threw herself along faster than she needed to, shoulders hunched defensively. They avoided the subject of Elective Affinities, which opened in a few weeks. Where the path narrowed and they had to walk in single file, Ros stopped short suddenly in pain, crouching over. She reassured Lynne breathlessly that these were only Braxton-Hicks contractions, she was having them most days, her doctor said they were nothing to worry about, he didn’t know why they were so painful.
— What a mess, this whole thing.
Lynne embraced her, awkwardly through the thickness of their winter wrappings, trying to rub where it hurt: Ros grabbed her hand and pushed it into the right place, under the blue coat. The rubbing seemed to help. It was the first time Lynne had touched this pregnancy; these days everyone wanted to put their hands on someone’s bump, for luck, or marvelling. In other periods, it had been a thing to keep hidden. Something seemed to convulse in the hard hot mound under her hand.
— I didn’t think I’d ever have a grandchild, Lynne said. — So I’m happy.
Ros looked wanly. — I’m glad someone’s happy. I suppose I’ll get used to it. But you do know Tom and I aren’t a real couple? He doesn’t really want to sleep with girls. This is only temporary. It was a kind of accident.
Lynne said of course she knew, it didn’t matter.
Walking on, Ros spilled over with her fears, deferring to Lynne as an expert. They were still in single file; Lynne, coming behind, had to strain to catch everything she said. She had never heard Ros sound like this before: unsure of herself, and even querulous. She said she was dreading that she would be a bad mother; Lynne reassured her she would muddle along like everyone did. Wasn’t it irresponsible to conceive a child outside a stable relationship? Lynne told her about Tom’s father, who used to hit her and then blame her for provoking him. The last sloes were withered on the blackthorn bushes. Usually Lynne came to the fort to pick them in the autumn. She and Albert had picked sloes here in the October before he died; they had meant to drink the sloe gin on her birthday in February, but when that time came she naturally hadn’t given it a thought. It must be waiting still, in its Kilner jar on the shelf in the boiler room. When she got home, she would look to see if it wasn’t spoiled.
— Isn’t it strange? Ros said in a tearful excitable voice. — How we’re all four still held together here? As if we can’t escape from the pattern Albert made out of our lives, connecting us, even now he’s gone.
Lynne said blandly that she didn’t think about it like that.
She didn’t care if people imagined she was only with Ben for convenience; she liked to shield their relationship from prying eyes. When she took him his coffee in the office, she pulled the door shut behind her so that they could be alone together for five minutes; then she might only sit holding his hand. As a lover, he was decorous and shy. They were only beginning to get to know each other.
Lynne cried off from attending the premiere of Elective Affinities, though Ben tried to persuade her to go. There were wonderful reviews. Weeks afterwards, when she was staying with her sister in Faversham, she went to see the film by herself one afternoon, telling her sister she was going shopping, paying for a ticket and slipping into the back of the cinema, where there were only five or six other people, most of them solitaries like her. She could hardly connect what she saw now to her experience of the film at the private screening. Every scene then had seemed charged with terrible revelation; she must have been slightly mad, at that point in her mourning. Because the film was really only a comedy, a love story, or a grown-up succession of love stories, tracing the intricate shifts of affection and desire around a set of close friends. Lynne didn’t weep once as she watched, she was very calm; although she also felt herself laid open to the film, the scenes washing through and through her, with their beautiful imagery: winter trees, light and dark reflections on water, Deborah’s character’s green dress flitting past the windows of a house, her aunt’s lover watching surreptitiously from inside.
Lynne gave herself up to the dream Albert had broug
ht into being, hardly conscious this time of his controlling presence. When it was finished, she caught a bus back to where her sister lived, outside the town. It was the end of a wet afternoon, the waterproofs of shoppers were slick with wet, they were tired, laden with carrier bags. Lynne felt the power of the film pooled inside her, glimmering and grey, something to live by. Meanwhile she gave herself over to the ordinary dirty traffic, the labouring stop–start of her bus journey, the smells of wet wool and hair and trainers, and the motley collection of passengers, mostly not talking to one another, only into their mobiles.
Acknowledgements
‘Married Love’, ‘Friendly Fire’, ‘A Mouthful of Cut Glass’, ‘The Trojan Prince’, ‘The Godchildren’ and ‘She’s the One’ were originally published in the New Yorker. ‘In the Country’ was originally published in Granta; ‘Because the Night’ and ‘In the Cave’ in the Guardian; ‘Post-production’ in Ploughshares; ‘Journey Home’ in the New Statesman; and ‘Pretending’ in The Asham Award Short Story Collection.
Many thanks, for wisdom, advice and stories, to Deborah Triesman, Dan Franklin, Jennifer Barth, Caroline Dawnay, Joy Harris, Tom Nichols, Shelagh Weeks, Simon Relph, and always Eric.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446496435
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Jonathan Cape 2012
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Tessa Hadley 2012
Tessa Hadley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Jonathan Cape
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224096423