Sunstroke and Other Stories

by Hadley, Tessa

  No, not ‘never again’.

  Surely not.

  Not ‘never’, not yet, not quite.

  A CARD TRICK

  IT WAS 1974: not a good year, clothes-wise, if you were an eighteen-year-old girl, tall and overweight, with thick curling hair and glasses. Gina liked best to wear a duffel coat, underneath which she imagined that she hid herself. But this was summer, she was on holiday, and she had had reluctantly to leave the duffel coat at home. She mostly wore a Laura Ashley dress in blue sprigged cotton. It was meant to look as if it had been faded by haymaking in meadows of wild flowers; but its buttons gaped across her bust, it was tight around her hips, and she knew its effect on her was not rustic but hulking and penitentiary. Sometimes while she walked along bitter tears stung her eyes, at the idea of the sheer affront of her ugliness. At other times she was more hopeful.

  Today at least the sun was not shining. When it shone – and it had shone every day since she arrived – it made things worse; it seemed such an insult to nature and beauty not to want to peel off one’s clothes and run around on the beach, not to be happy. But today the sky was a soft grey which kept dissolving into warm rain, and everybody was more or less muffled under waterproofs. Because it was raining, Mamie had driven inland with her from the house on the coast, to visit Wing Lodge. Mamie was her mother’s friend, and Gina was staying with her and her family for a fortnight; although to call her a friend did not quite explain the whole thing, as Mamie was also a client, for whom her mother made clothes.

  Mamie told it as a great joke that she was an Honourable because her father had had some sort of title; Princess Margaret had once come to tea with her family. She was small and very pretty, with sloping shoulders and ash-blonde hair and a face that was always screwing up with laughter; her tan was the kind you can only get in the South of France (they had a house there too). Her clothes seemed effortless – today, for example, a Liberty print blouse under a cream linen pinafore – but Gina had seen some of these things in the making and knew how much effort actually went into them, the serious scrutiny of pinned-up hemlines in front of the mirror, the bringing things back ruefully, apologetically, after a week or two, with a nagging suspicion that a sleeve was set in too high, or an inspiration that the seams would look wonderful with two rows of over-stitching. She was being very kind – very encouraging – to Gina. She had not made any mention of the Laura Ashley dress, nor the hairslide that had seemed an appealing idea when Gina brushed her hair that morning but was now bobbing against her cheek, having slipped to a wrong and ridiculous place.

  On their way to Wing Lodge they stopped off at a cottage café by the side of the country road; they were the only customers in a small room crowded with little toppling chairs and glass-topped wicker tables, smelling of damp and cake.

  —It’ll probably be instant coffee, whispered Mamie with conspiratorial amusement. (Gina only ever had instant at home.) —But I don’t care: do you? Or we could risk the tea. And you’ve got to have a Danish pastry or something, to keep you going.

  Mamie was probably making reference to the fact that Gina oughtn’t to be eating pastries of any kind. Her diet, which alternated during this period of her life between punishing obedience and frantic transgression, had been thrown into such chaos since she’d been staying at Mamie’s – on the one hand, she was too shy to refuse the things that were pressed upon her, on the other, she didn’t dare to raid the fridge or the cupboards in between meals – that she didn’t even know whether she was being good or not. She agreed to the pastry.

  Gina had just had her A-level results – three As and two grade one S levels – and she was preparing for her Cambridge Entrance Examinations in November. Mamie professed an exaggerated awe of her cleverness.

  —You really make me so ashamed, she said, when she had finished charming the elderly waitress and giving very exact instructions as to how she liked her tea (‘pathetically weak, no milk, just pour it the very instant the water’s on the leaves, I’m so sorry to be such a frightful nuisance’). —We’re such duffers in my family. We’ve hardly got an O level between us: and that’s after spending an absolute fortune on the children’s education. Josh refused to go back to Bedales to do retakes. Becky left the day she was sixteen, she never even sat any exams. How I’d love for one of them to have your brains.

  —I’m not that special, Gina lied, muffled through damp pastry flakes.

  Somewhere in the deepest recesses of herself, Gina pitied Mamie and her children precisely along the lines Mamie suggested. The children – three older boys and a girl Gina’s age – certainly weren’t clever in the way she was. She’d never seen them reading a book, they hadn’t known the other day at breakfast who Walter Gropius was, she was sure they were sublimely ignorant about all the things that seemed to her to matter most: literature and painting and the history of ideas. But Becky and Josh and Tom and Gabriel had every advantage on the surface in the here and now, in envy of which Gina was horribly ready to abase herself. Mamie was surely disingenuous in praising up her brains. She was just being kind, she wouldn’t have exchanged brains, really, for the easy personable charm that all her children had, not if brains meant awkward bodies and thick glasses.

  Mamie’s children might not be clever, but they didn’t actually say stupid things, as Gina did, tongue-tied with bookish awkwardness. On the contrary, they were funny and chatty and informed about practical matters. They were indifferent to politics, but sincerely charming and generous with the lady who came to clean and cook and iron for them every day, whereas Gina didn’t know how to talk to her. They were masters of arts that Gina knew she could never be competent in, however hard she tried: tennis, for example, and motorbiking, and snorkling. She couldn’t even ride a pushbike. They had tried to persuade her to put on a wetsuit to swim in; her resistance must have seemed fanatical. All the boys could sail, and had the use of their father’s boat; Gabriel and Josh were preparing to take it to the Bahamas in September.

  Gabriel, the oldest, had a darkroom and developed his own photographs. Becky posed for him unembarrassed, arranging her face to look its best. If ever Gabriel turned the camera on Gina she swivelled away, protesting and sulking; so he soon stopped trying. The house was filled with vivid laughing photographs in which the lives of this family seemed poignant and enchanting even beyond anything you could grasp in everyday contact with them. Gina studied the photographs with the same yearning she felt looking at fashion pictures in magazines: trying to learn how one might possess oneself with such certainty, know so confidently how to live.

  They were all beautiful. Gabriel and Becky looked like Mamie, small with pretty puppy-dog faces, turned-up noses and huge eyes. The others looked like their father, who was in France with friends. (This separation seemed strange to Gina, whose parents did everything together: her mother had hinted, out of confidences given her when she was crawling round a hemline with her mouth full of pins, that all was not well in Mamie’s marriage. Dickie’s absence was a relief, anyway. Gina had seen him once or twice when he came to pick up Mamie after a fitting: tanned with white teeth, savagely impatient.) Tom and Josh – Josh was the nearest boy to Gina in age – were tall, with slim brown bodies, fine skin taut over light strong bones, long sensitive-knuckled hands and feet. She got used to their near-nakedness on the beach, in swimming trunks, or bare-chested in cut-off jeans. It was 1974:they wore their sun-bleached hair long and they walked barefoot everywhere.

  The spare bedroom Gina stayed in was on the ground floor and opened on to the hall, whose dark parquet was always dusted with a layer of fine sand blown in from the beach. Sometimes when she peeped out of her door to see if the coast was clear to visit the bathroom (she was ‘working’, she told them, at the little table Mamie had set up for her), she saw prints of the boys’ bare feet in the sand, crossing the hall to the kitchen or to the stairs. For some reason this moved her, and her heart clenched in an excitement more breathlessly sexual than if she’d actually seen the boys
themselves.

  The visit to Wing Lodge had been part of the pretext for Gina coming to visit Mamie in the first place. It was the house where her favourite novelist had lived, and she had wanted to make a pilgrimage there; but she was beginning to wish that she could have come on her own. She was burdened by her sense of Mamie’s kindness: Mamie had clearly never read any of Morrison’s books, so she could have no good reason, surely, to want to see his house. Gina worried over the things that Mamie would probably rather have done, and in more congenial company. They arrived in the little town and found Wing Lodge in one of the oldest streets, behind the church, in a walled front garden which even in the rain was lovely: pale roses bowed and dripping with water, a crumbling sundial, a path of old paving stones set into the grass, wandering to a bench under a gnarled apple tree.

  —Isn’t it just charming? Mamie exclaimed, pausing in the porch to shake off the umbrella which she had gallantly insisted in sharing with Gina, so that they were now both wet.—This is such a treat. Thank you so much for bringing me here. I can’t imagine why I’ve never been before.

  Gina had thought that at last, at Wing Lodge, she would be on home ground. She knew so much about this writer: a friend of Conrad and Ford, given a complimentary mention by Henry James in ‘The New Novelists’. She had written the long essay for her English A level on his use of complex time schemes. She loved the spare texture of his difficult sad books, and felt that she was exceptionally equipped to understand them. Faced with his most obscure passages (he wasn’t elaborate like James but compressed and allusive) she trusted herself to intuit his right meaning, even if she couldn’t quite disentangle it yet, syntactically. But as she followed Mamie through the front door into the low-ceilinged hall, she realised that she was not entering one of Morrison’s books, where she could feel confident; she was entering his house, where she might not. Two middle-aged ladies presided at a table over leaflets and a cash box and tickets; wood panelling polished to a glow as deep and savoury as conkers reflected the yellow light from a couple of lamps; tall vases of flowers stood against the wall on the uneven stone-flagged floor. Gina stepped flinchingly around a Persian rug that opened like a well of colour under her feet.

  —This is Gina, Mamie said to the ladies while she got out her purse to pay. —She’s the daughter of a very gifted and creative friend of mine. We’re here today because she loves this writer’s books so much and has written her A-level essay about him. She’s very, very bright, and is taking her Cambridge Entrance in the autumn.

  Their smiles at Gina were coldly unenthusiastic. They advised the visitors to start in the room on the right and make their way around to the study, which was arranged as it had been in the writer’s lifetime. If they went upstairs at the end of the tour they would find an exhibition of editions of the works. —Which might interest you, one of them suggested sceptically.

  The house was furnished – sparely, exquisitely – with a mixture of antiques and curiosities and modern things: a venerably worn Indian tapestry thrown across an old chaise longue, an elm art deco rocking chair, drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was dark everywhere and the lamps were switched on in the middle of the day: the low, deeply recessed casement windows were running with rain and plastered with wet leaves. Mamie moved through the rooms in a kind of hushed rapture.

  —So sweet! she whispered emphatically.—What a darling place. What treasures.

  Gina thought perplexedly of the letters Morrison had written from Wing Lodge: full of damp walls and leaking roofs and smoking chimneys and penetrating cold, as well as self-deprecating confessions of untidiness and neglect. The writer had never made much money: she hadn’t imagined that his house would be like this. How could he have afforded these kind of possessions? The rooms were like Mamie’s rooms: glossy with value and distinction, a kind of patina of initiated good taste.

  —Do they live here? she asked. —Those ladies.

  —Oh, I should think so, wouldn’t you? It feels very much a home rather than a musem. The widow stayed on here, apparently, until she died a few years ago. So I suppose they’ve just kept a few of the rooms as she left them. It’s only open a couple of afternoons a week.

  There was a photograph of Anne, the American wife and widow, on the plain writing table in the study: young, with a Katherine Mansfield fringe and bobbed hair and a necklace of beads the size of cherries. Morrison had been a world-wanderer, with a Scottish father and a Norwegian mother (you could feel the influence of a certain Scandinavian neurasthenia in his novels). He had settled down at last to marriage here in the south of England, and written his best books here, and died here, in his fifties, in 1942.

  —Can’t you just imagine being able to write, at this desk? said Mamie encouragingly.

  Gina looked at her dumbly across the charming room with its waxed floor slanting quaintly to the window, its framed woodcuts on the walls. It seemed unlikely to her that anyone could ever write anything worth reading in a place like this. She thought of art as a concealed ferocity; writers were like the Spartan boy carrying the fox under his shirt. What could one do, set up in the too-complete loveliness of this room: write cookery books perhaps, or a nostalgic memoir? At the same time she was filled with doubt, in case she was deluded, in case it turned out after all that art and the understanding of art was a closed club she would never be able to enter, she who had never owned one thing as beautiful as the least object here.

  Sometimes Gina came out victorious from her struggle with Mamie’s pressing hospitalities, and succeeded in staying at home when everyone else went to the beach. (The sea was only a few minutes’ walk from the front door across the dunes, but the beach they liked best for swimming and surfing was a short drive away.) She heard and winced at the little crack of impatience in Mamie’s voice – ‘I suppose it’s awfully good of you, to want to have your head buried in a book all day’ – but that was worth incurring, in exchange for the freedom of having the house to herself for hours on end.

  She didn’t really spend all that time studying. She drifted from her books to the windows to the cupboards in the kitchen, eating whatever Mamie had left for her almost at once, and then spooning things out of expensive jars from the delicatessen (only enough so that no one could ever tell) and ferreting out the forgotten ends of packets of cakes and biscuits and nuts. She made herself comfortable with her bare legs up over the back of the collapsed chintz sofa, hanging her head down to the floor to read Becky’s copies of Honey and 19. She took possession of the lovely weather-washed old house with a lordly offhandedness she never felt when the others were around. She ran herself copious baths perfumed with borrowed Badedas in the old claw-foot tub with its thundering taps. She tried on Mamie’s lipstick and Becky’s clothes. She browsed through the boys’ bedrooms with their drawn curtains and heaps of salty sandy beach gear and frowsty sock-smells; she experimented with their cigarettes and once for an hour lost herself over a magazine of dizzyingly explicit sexual photographs she found stuffed down between one bed and the wall (she didn’t know whose bed it was, and the next time she felt for the magazine it had gone). She sat in a deckchair on the sagging picturesque veranda whose wood was rain-washed to a silvered grey, drinking Campari in a cocktail glass with a cherry from a bottle and a dusty paper umbrella she found in a drawer: afterwards she cleaned her teeth frantically and chewed what she hoped were herbs from the garden, so no one would smell alcohol on her breath.

  Once, after about an hour of this kind of desultory occupation of the place, she happened to glance up through the open French windows from her dangling position on the sofa and was stricken with horror: she had been sure they had all gone to the beach (except Gabriel, who was back in London), but there was Tom, stripped to the waist, cutting the meadow of long grass behind the house with a scythe, working absorbedly and steadily with his back to her. Tom was particularly frightening: moody like his father, dissenting and difficult enough even to have required at some point consultations with psych
ologists (this from more confidences over the pins and pattern-cutting). Actually, he was the one Gina chose most often for her fantasies, precisely because he was difficult: she imagined herself distracting, astonishing, taming him.

  Appalled to think what he might have seen of her in her rake’s progress around his mother’s house, she scuttled to her bedroom, where she spent the rest of the long day in a state of siege, not knowing whether he knew she was there or not, paralysed with self-consciousness, avoiding crossing in front of her own bedroom window, unable to bring herself to venture out from her room even when she was starving or desperate to pee. Tom came inside – perhaps for lunch or perhaps because he’d finished scything – and played his Derek and the Dominoes album loudly as though he believed he had the house to himself. Gina lay curled in a foetal position on the bed. She dreaded that he might open the door and find her, but dreaded too that if he didn’t find her, and then learned that they had shared the house for the whole afternoon without her even once appearing, he would think her – whom he mostly scarcely noticed – something grotesque, insane, something that deserved to live under a stone.

  She wept silently into her pillow, wishing he’d go, and even at the same time mourning this opportunity slipping away, this long afternoon alone in the house together that was after all the very stuff of her tireless invention. They might have conversed intelligently over coffee on the veranda; she might have accepted one of his cigarettes and smoked it with offhanded sophistication; surprised at her thoughtfulness and quiet insight, he might have held his hand out to her on impulse to take her walking with him down among the dunes. And so on, and so on, down to the crashing inevitable too-much-imagined end.