Sunstroke and Other Stories

by Hadley, Tessa

  —I hate him, Helen said adamantly at some point that evening. —He hates me. We’re killing each other. It’s horrible. But I’ve seen through the whole thing, now. I couldn’t ever put myself back inside it.

  She was pacing about the room then with her old important restlessness, that still irritated her mother sometimes. She stopped to light another cigarette; the ashtray was already full, they were both smoking. Helen sucked on the cigarettes as if she was drinking the smoke down thirstily.

  —Love is such a lie, she said. —In marriage, it’s a lie. You kiss each other goodbye in the morning but actually inside you’re both burning up with anger at things the other one’s done or not done, and relief at getting rid of them for a few hours. I don’t love him any more. I see right through him. All he cares about is his music and actually I agree with him: why shouldn’t he?

  —You gave up your dancing.

  Helen looked at her in surprise.—I wasn’t very good. Not good enough. I wouldn’t want Phil to give up his music. That’s not the point.

  —I thought you were very good.

  (In fact she had exerted her utmost powers to dissuade Helen from a career in dance.)

  —All those jazz standards about love and women, Helen went on, indifferent for the moment to the long-ago story of her dancing. —But actually they’re only interested in each other, they’re not genuinely interested in women at all. I mean, not once they’ve got what they want. All they’re thinking about when they play all those songs about the women they can’t bear to live without, the beautiful women they’ve lost, is actually what other men think. Am I playing it as well as him? What does he think of the way I did that solo? Is he impressed?

  —He does care about you.

  —No, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m his enemy. He wants to be free.

  —It will seem different tomorrow morning.

  —It won’t. Or if it does, then it won’t be the truth. I will be lying to myself again.

  Nia woke up very early. She knew at once where she was, from the way a vague light was swelling behind her nana’s lilac-coloured silky curtains. Even though Nia didn’t go to school yet – she only went three afternoons a week to a little nursery where in fine weather they lay on mats in the playground to nap – that lilac-toned light already meant to her a precious freedom from routine. Usually the accompaniment to the lilac light at Nana’s was the sound of car engines starting up in the street outside and then droning deliciously away into the distance; but it was too early even for that to have begun.

  Helen was in the bed with her. She had forgotten to wonder where her mother would sleep. Once or twice at home Nia had been put into bed with her when she was ill, but it was a rare, strange treat. Helen had her back turned and her head buried down in the pillows. She was wearing her blue seersucker pyjamas, and snoring slightly; she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair still had some of its backcombed stiffness from the day, only matted and flattened; Nia reached out her fingers and felt it sticky with hairspray. She lifted herself carefully on one elbow, to survey her mother from this unaccustomed advantage of consciousness; everyone was asleep in the flat apart from her. Helen hadn’t taken her make-up off before she came to bed: some of it was smeared on Nana’s pillowcase. She radiated heat, and gave off her usual beloved complicated smell, like face powder and fruit cake. Shut up and inactive behind her closed eyes, frowning in her sleep, she seemed more and not less mysterious. Nia settled down again, pressing up cautiously behind her mother so as not to wake her. Through the puckery material of the pyjamas she could feel against her face the skin of her mother’s warm back; she breathed in and out with her mouth open, tasting her. She wondered if their lives had changed, and if she would be able to sleep with her mother every night from now on. Anything seemed possible.

  Some time later she was wakened again by a sound of knocking, then of Jennifer (who wasn’t really Jennifer but Patsy) opening the salon door and speaking crossly to someone with a man’s voice: her daddy. Then the doorbell rang up in the flat. Helen sat bolt upright in bed, as though she came from sleep to full consciousness in one movement; she slithered her legs over the side of the bed and dashed into the sitting room, where she collided with Phil who had just dashed upstairs. She gave out a little moan: of subsidence, remorse, relief. Nia snuggled into the warm space her mother left behind. She could hear Jennifer moving about downstairs, tidying up and running water. She knew that soon the bell on the salon door would begin to tinkle as the staff arrived, and then the customers. If she was lucky she would be allowed down later. The hairdryers were only harmless and comical during the day; she would sit out of the way and play with the perm papers.

  Forty years later, only Nia can remember any of this. Sophie was too young to remember. Nana Allen is long dead; and Nia’s father is dead too, in his fifties, of a heart attack. When Nia tells the story to her mother, Helen simply flatly denies it; and Nia is sure she isn’t pretending, that she’s genuinely forgotten. In her late sixties Helen is still elegant and striking-looking, with suffering deep-set eyes and beautiful skin (‘Never use soap on your face, Nia’). She complains about her hairdresser, but he’s good: she has her hair dyed a dark honey colour with silver streaks, cut to fall loose and straight in a boyish look she calls ‘gamine’. People who meet Helen think she must have been something important, a broadcaster or a designer, although actually what she has mostly done in her life is that old-fashioned thing: being an attractive and interesting woman. She has had two significant relationships with men since Phil died, but she wouldn’t marry either of them, although (she says, and Nia believes) they begged her. One of these men died too, and the other went back to his wife. The way she tells it now, the relationship with Phil Cerruti was the true love of her life, because Phil was a true artist. Nia isn’t meaning to challenge this, either, when she brings up the subject of the time they ran away to Nana Allen’s.

  —I won’t deny we did fight, Helen says.—We were both pretty passionate people. But no, I would remember it if I’d ever actually left him. I don’t think the possibility would have crossed my mind. By the standards of today, of course I should have left. Everything in our family life had to be fitted around his music; you can’t domesticate a real musician. But I was happy. The women of your generation wouldn’t stand for it, darling, I know. But we’d been brought up to believe you stuck by your husband and that was it. You took the rough with the smooth.

  On the other hand, Helen does now sometimes talk about her dancing. It has become part of her story, that she could have had a career as a dancer and she gave it up because that’s how it was in those days, if you married and had children; the way she tells it, you can’t tell whether she thinks the sacrifice was a shame or a splendid thing. Helen and Nia get on reasonably well most of the time these days. When Nia was in her twenties she went through (as she sees it now) a drearily dogmatic feminist phase. She lived for a while as a lesbian, and camped at Greenham Common. She gave herself a new name because she didn’t want to use her father’s, and then when Phil died (suddenly, so that she never said goodbye to him) she went into a depression for two years, and only came out of it with the help of therapy. Now she works as a therapist herself, and has a steady relationship with a man, Paul, although they don’t live together and don’t have any children. (Sophie has two boys and a girl, so Helen isn’t cheated of grandchildren.)

  Nia suggested to her mother last Christmas that in the spring the two of them should fly together to New York, to see the exhibition of Rubens drawings at the Met. The teacher at Helen’s art classes had said how wonderful they were; and Helen had never been to America. It should have been one of those brilliant late-night inspirations that crumble to nothing in the light of practicalities, but somehow they really went ahead with this and booked their flights and their hotel. Then it was too late to change their minds, although in the week before they left Nia was consumed with doubt and dismay, imagining every kind of disaster. Her mother who suffered fro
m angina wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere; she would be taken ill, and Nia would have to deal with the American medical system. Or they would quarrel over something and not be able to escape from one another. On the flight over, Nia sat in the window seat and looked down at the unpopulated earth below, wherever it was, Greenland or Canada: for hundreds of miles, nothing but the black whorls and coils of rock, snow and winding rivers and frozen lakes. There was no cloud layer; there must be unbroken cold sunshine down there. She calmed herself by imagining she was translated down into that landscape; though not of course in her hopeless human body, which would only know how to stumble around in it and die.

  They arrived in New York in torrential rain. The hotel in Greenwich Village, where Nia had stayed once before with Paul, looked rougher than she remembered. It was the kind of place she and Paul enjoyed, full of atmosphere and the traces of an older New York which they knew from films, with a marble-faced dado and huge gilt mirrors in the hallway, little metal mailboxes for the permanent residents, a lift painted around inside with acanthus blooms, oddly assorted books on the shelves in every room. Now she could only see it through her mother’s eyes. The furniture was cheap, made from split cane. They had to use a bathroom out on the corridor, and the first time Nia went in there she found a dirty sticking plaster on the floor. The breakfasts were awful, in a basement where a fierce Hispanic woman presided over Thermoses full of coffee and hot water. Mother and daughter were both shy, transplanted out of the worlds they knew. Nia was often anxious, worrying about how to get from place to place, and where to eat, and whether Helen was tired; probably Helen was worrying too.

  They were also always aware, however, that they would think about the things they were doing as wonders, afterwards, when they got home. Their shared bedroom had a view on to the street of elegant and wealthy brownstones, where the trees were just coming into leaf. While Helen did her face and hair at the dressing table in the mornings, Nia (who only showered and towelled her short hair dry) watched out of the window, exclaiming at the New York dogs: extravagantly big or small or pampered, sometimes being exercised in gangs of five or six by bored professional walkers. They gave up the hotel basement and found a place round the corner which did breakfasts of rough peasant bread and seed bread with real fruit jam and café au lait in bowls; they made friends with the waiter. And on their second day the sun came out and was even hot; they took a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty and the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island; they marvelled at the Manhattan skyline. Helen persuaded Nia to let her pay for some oatmeal cotton trousers and a long moss-green cardigan; Nia in the expensive Fifth Avenue shops felt cornered and oversized and fraudulent. She longed for the new clothes to transform her, to prove that her mother’s old instincts hadn’t lapsed or fallen out of date.

  After they had seen the Rubens drawings they had tea in the American Wing café in the Met, and watched through the glass wall a gang of workers in Central Park, pulling the ivy out of the bare winter trees. They tied ropes around it and heaved together until the ivy came away in heavy masses, which the men then fed on a conveyor belt into a shredder. Helen that day was wearing a grey suit and a silk scarf decorated with blue and yellow birds; the scarf had got somehow skewed sideways so that it stuck up rakishly behind one ear and made her look as if she was drunk or slightly dotty. Nia could see, too, where her lipstick was bleeding into the fine wrinkles at the edges of her lips. She talked about the mistakes Sophie was making with her children, in a tone of tactful light regret which Nia knew Sophie found particularly maddening. After tea when Helen came out from the Ladies, where she would have checked herself in the mirror, the scarf was tidied into its usual casual elegance. She looked tired, though, and had to use her angina spray when they were walking from the museum to find a taxi.

  —Don’t those exquisite drawings simply make everything worthwhile? she said when they were back in their hotel room, groaning and easing her feet out of her shoes.

  —Are you all right? Nia stood over her, surly because she was worried.

  —Don’t fuss, said Helen. —I’m an old woman.

  She undressed down to her petticoat, so as not to rumple her suit, and lay on her back on her twin bed, her head propped on the pillows in the careful way Nia recognised as protecting her hairdo. The room was bright with evening sunshine. They had made its seediness homely with their clothes hung about, their scarves and beads and books mingled together, their flannels and bottles and sponge bags on the sink.

  —Where would you like to go to eat tonight?

  Helen sighed. —I’m so comfortable here.

  —We don’t have to go out, said Nia, full of doubt. — But won’t you get hungry?

  —I’m not worried about me. But what about you, darling? You’ll need something.

  Nia went to find the delicatessen they had noticed a few blocks away, to buy food they could eat in their room. It was the first time she had been out alone, and it was a relief to be able to use her long stride instead of continually adjusting her pace to her mother’s. She felt as if she was really part of New York at last, choosing cold meat and bread and olives, and fruit juice. She bought yogurts, too, forgetting that they didn’t have spoons; it was Helen who suggested that they could scoop these up with the wrong ends of their toothbrushes. While they ate their picnic they became deeply involved in a real-life courtoom drama on the television, debating it passionately. When that was finished they undressed and climbed under the bedcovers and fell asleep, even though it was very early.

  Some time in the night Nia half woke and was confused, not knowing where she was. Outside on the street a car started up, and then the drone of its engine faded into the distance. She lifted her head off her pillow in the incomplete dark, and knew from the smell of face powder and cake and the light snoring that her mother was somewhere close by. She seemed to feel the radiation of her heat; and she remembered the seersucker pyjamas, dotted with little blue rosebuds.

  —I’m still here, Nia thought, reassured and happy, falling back easily into her sleep.—She’s still here.

  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.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446499924

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2008

  Copyright © Tessa Hadley 2007

  Tessa Hadley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  ‘Sunstroke’, ‘Mother’s Son’, ‘The Surrogate’, and ‘A Card Trick’ were originally published in The New Yorker; ‘Buckets of Blood’, ‘The Enemy’ and ‘Matrilineal’ in Granta; ‘Phosphorescence’ in the Guardian, and ‘Exchanges’ in You magazine

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Jonathan Cape

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099499251

 

 

 
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