Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  She went back to cutting up spring onions in the kitchen, focusing intently on chopping off the ends and then slitting them shallowly down one side to slip off the outer coarser layer. She put them white end down in a glass on the table so that everything was pretty, and then rapped the shells of the boiled eggs under the tap in the sink and peeled them and distributed the cut halves with blobs of mayonnaise from a jar around the plates beside the tomatoes. When the others came in with wet hair and loud relishing complaints about the coldness of the water it seemed soothing and consoling that what was happening to her was quite invisible to them. She was even grateful to them for their safe insensibility and glad she hadn’t betrayed them by making fun of them to Helly. She listened with real absorption to Genny explaining to Coco and Lily about how you could tell from the spinal bones of a horse whether or not it had been ridden, and about how she was working with an archaeologist to establish the period in which horses were first domesticated.

  Rose started spattering her tomato with the back of a spoon and Tinsley smartly took away her plate. Possibly this meant Tinsley was finding the children annoying—or finding Rose annoying, anyway—and that she disapproved of how Clare and Bram indulged them. But Clare felt protected from her usual sensitivity to such criticism by the thick wadding of her private thoughts.

  * * *

  TINSLEY—THE DRY HUMORIST of the family—was tall, with wolfish lean sexiness and blond-streaked hair she pushed out of her way behind her ears or stuffed in a rubber band; she dressed in yellow waterproofs and yellow and blue and red clothes that always looked, even the dresses, as if they were bought in a shop selling mountaineering equipment. No one knew much about Tinsley’s love life; she was spending months at a time cooped up in a research station in the arctic where they were drilling long cores of ice from deep below the surface for the geological record, and she was sometimes the only woman alone with ten or fifteen men. Occasionally she turned up at home with some snow-tanned expert man in tow—once a bearded fat boozing American mineralogist whom Clare suspected just because he was so improbable—but she never offered any elucidation of their relationship and Genny never asked.

  Opie was smaller and darker and plumper than Tinsley and Bram, with her dark hair cropped short; she was neat and watchful and devoted to her boyfriend. She was a secret smoker; it was not so much, she told Clare, that she didn’t dare tell her family as that she wouldn’t in a million years have been able to enjoy smoking in front of them anyway. So several times a day she absented herself discreetly and hid herself to smoke in a little den she had found, tucked behind a ruined wall above where the river flowed out of the lake and toward the mill. She even started keeping her tin of rolling tobacco and papers and lighter behind a loose stone in the wall. It was just what Swallows and Amazons would have done if they’d taken up smoking, Clare thought.

  That evening when the children were finally asleep, Clare went out and sat in the den with her. It was late; the sun was setting behind the plantation of trees in a sky like a sea all brilliant with orange and mauve, one dark navy cloud sailing in it like a boat. The lake was dim. The den on its little mound was in a last pocket of light and warmth above the shadows.

  —Good lookout point, said Opie. She trickled tobacco along a paper, refusing Clare’s bought cigarettes.

  —I telephoned a friend this afternoon, said Clare, but she wasn’t in. I wonder if one-four-seven-one works from Ireland?

  —Golly, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so.

  —Just wondering whether she’ll know I’ve called. It doesn’t matter.

  —No, but I know what you mean. I hate that. Sometimes you have an impulse to talk to somebody and they’re not in and then the impulse passes and you really hope they don’t do one-four-seven-one and get your number, because the point of your calling them is completely finished. Once I had a row with Jamie, before we lived together, and I phoned him to make friends and he wasn’t in, and about half an hour later I was furious because I’d completely changed my mind about forgiving him, but I knew he’d know I’d called.

  —I can’t imagine you rowing with Jamie.

  —Oh can’t you! Laughing, she blew out smoke and contemplated an inner happy place. We’re both so stubborn. And then we’re always both utterly miserable until we make friends again.

  —But not real rows. Not like me and Bram.

  Clare didn’t know why she’d said this; she and Bram very rarely argued, and she certainly had no desire to try to tell anyone in his family what was happening between them that summer, unspoken, quite unacknowledged.

  —Oh, dear, said Opie, surprised. Is there something the matter between you two? Not you two.

  —Not in the least. Not really. But you know what Bram’s like. I mean, he’s wonderful. He does so much with the children, he’s so patient. He’s so fair about my studying, he makes time for me to get on with it in the evenings, even when he’s been at work all day, he puts the children to bed for me, washes the dishes.…

  —But?

  —But nothing, really. He really is good. He makes me feel like a lower form of life sometimes.

  Opie was dabbling in the leaf mold, making a shallow hole.

  —I remember once, she said, when we were teenagers, I had deliberately broken something, a china bird Mum had brought me back from one of her trips. I broke it because she wouldn’t let me go out to a club for a friend’s birthday. Then I felt terrible. I had the broken pieces wrapped up in a T-shirt at the back of my drawer; I was hoping she wouldn’t notice. One day when I came home from school Bram was gluing it on the kitchen table. And Mum was all nice about it, thinking it had been an accident. And I was so angry with them both. How dare they look in my private drawers? How dare they touch my things? They were never ever to go in my room again without permission, and so on. It was just the way he sat there fixing it for me.

  She put the nub end of her cigarette in the hole and palmed leaf mold across it, burying it.

  —So I do see what you mean.

  * * *

  SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED between Bram and Clare that summer. Or rather—that sounds too much as if it had happened to both of them impartially—there was something she had done to him, although neither of them could have named it. She had an image; it was as if with fiendish cunning she had contrived to lower around him, out of the clear blue sky, without his once being able to be sure she was doing it, an invisible all-smothering deadly force field of antagonism. It was like a dome of glass, cutting him off from her completely—but quite transparent. She knew there wasn’t a word he could say to complain of her. She was punctiliously generous and cheerful. She not only entered into but initiated holiday enthusiasms. She overflowed with just the right measure of affectionate names and touches, not overdoing it. Only a flaw in the quality of their eye contact could possibly give her away—she felt it on her side almost like a momentary ugly squint, that when she looked at him her glance didn’t reach his eyes straight but slipped off him, off the falsity of the bright reflective surface between them. Then, for a moment, anyone might see revealed the rictus of her hostility. So she didn’t look directly at him very often.

  The only place that what was happening was even half acknowledged was in bed. Under the green satin bedspread, inside the bleak box of that stained orange wallpaper, they were cast out of the cocoon of their familiar things; they confronted one another alertly across a raw terrain. Clare simply dispensed with the whole years-long accumulation of their intimate habits and signs and code words.

  —Let’s pretend, she whispered to him, when the light was still on and he was still reading, that I’m English and you’re Irish. I own the house; you’re my tenant. You’re a republican and I’m a unionist.

  They had never spoken before of their fantasies. Bram, the first time, smiled in bewilderment at her. It was as if his face was shallow—not like hers, hers was deep, opaque—and she saw running across it like shadows across water his efforts to follow her mean
ing. She was seized with a brief spasm of sympathetic understanding for him. But the words she had used could not be taken back. They drew her on, she was escaping up through them into an open new heady space.

  —You hate me. You would like to burn my house down; probably, one day, you will. You’ve been taught to hold my luxury in contempt. But at the same time you can’t resist my things. The sheets I lie in. My expensive silk underwear. My perfume. My soft skin. I hire you to carry furniture around the house. But in the bedroom I stand before the open door carelessly so that you have to squeeze past me, sweating, struggling with something heavy. I have on a thin summer’s dress, with nothing underneath. You feel my heat.

  —Don’t, said Bram, smiling. What are you doing?

  —Play, she said. Play with me.

  —I don’t want to. I don’t hate you.

  —When you first kiss me—you smell of peat smoke and animals—you think of your mother, who already looks like an old woman because of her life of hard labor. You want to refuse me, you pull your mouth away. But I touch you—like this …

  Bram never spoke a single word that she could seize as token that he had lent himself to her games. But he couldn’t close his ears; she cheated her way—that was how she thought of it—inside his desires, contaminating them. And if he was sullen and reluctant and half-disgusted, he only played the part she had devised for him.

  It wasn’t only unionist and republican. She did Miss Julie and her servant; the society beauty tempting the hermit in his hut; the young trade union leader and the spoiled factory owner’s wife. She did Bertha Mason and Mr. Rochester. “He used to visit her, you know, in the attic. Even when Jane was sleeping under the same roof.” They were all costume dramas and period pieces. She detailed the furniture of the rooms, and the clothes that came off or half off, the complicated olden-times knots and hooks and buttons that had to be fumbled with hasty, sweating hands.

  She was disgusted with herself; she winced with shame the next day, remembering. There had been months at a time in her life when if she caught sight of the suckings of mouths or the slithering of oiled bodies on someone’s television she only felt ennui and numbness. Now her obsession was a burden to her, heavy and distorting. Just before they came away on holiday she had been to the optician’s for a routine test, checking the prescription for her reading glasses. The examination was carried out by a young man she had not seen before, rather shy, with a mop of dark fluffy hair and Wallace and Gromit socks. It was all perfectly straightforward. And yet when he turned the lights off, her heart had pounded with excitement.

  —Which looks brighter, red or green?

  —Is it clearer with this one? Or this one? Clearer now? His woolly hair brushed her cheek, he was breathing close to her face, he held up for her to follow his little torch with a lit bulb the size of a seed pearl. She thought, Now, now, he’ll touch me. But all the time she actually had on her face those grotesque test frames full of lenses, or he’d been instructing her to look left, look up, look down, peering into the red of her peeled up lids or pulled-down rims. How could she have thought of sex? What was this sickness that made the whole world reach her through its prism, suffused in its slippery drugged rainbow excitements?

  This rainbow revelation that then like a light went out?

  Eventually, Bram refused her.

  —Pretend I’m a senior figure in the KGB, she whispered. You’re a dissident, a young physics lecturer who’s also written a book on Dostoevski. You’re brought to my room, for interrogation—

  —Oh, for Christ’s sake, he said. Don’t you think that’s a bit off?

  —A bit off? Her laugh was meant to convey insouciance, amusement at his priggishness. But she also felt a wince of exposure, the same as when she turned off the ignition in the car and the throb of supporting music died. What d’you mean by a bit off?

  For some long minutes he didn’t answer. Her perky smile hung in the dark like the Cheshire cat’s.

  —If you don’t know, he said, then I can’t tell you.

  She sat up in bed. It was cold in the room, the nights were cold because the days were so clear. She felt the chill strike her bare shoulders; she took it like a punishment. It was hours before dawn.

  —OK, she said into the dark, perkily, bleakly.

  * * *

  BRAM AND TINSLEY showed the children how to build a dam (a “barrage,” the children called it, because they all knew about the one that was being built at home). Tinsley in cut-off jeans stood with the water riding against her knees in the deepest part of the river and assumed command. The children, who had been prized unwillingly from in front of the Discovery channel and turned out into the sunshine blinking and wincing, were soon organized into an eager workforce.

  Clare watched from her vantage point in Opie’s den, where she had taken her book.

  —We need big ones! shouted Tinsley. Big ones to make a strong base.

  Bram helped Coco with an overambitious huge rock that came away from its bed like a tooth from a socket; he solemnly accepted the handfuls of wet grit Rose brought.

  —Too small! said Tinsley.

  —No, this is fine for filling in, said Bram equably. Good girl, Rose.

  —How deep is it going to get? Coco asked Tinsley; he pushed his glasses up on his nose and stood with his hands on his hips surveying the work. Clare feared he was more like her than like his father, whose every gesture he slavishly copied (except the one with the glasses, which Bram didn’t need).

  —How deep d’you want it?

  —Deep enough to sail the inflatable dinghy? Coco shrugged his skinny shoulders.

  —Put your back into it then.

  Clare had thought the children would lose interest after fifteen minutes, but an hour later Coco and Lily were still doggedly, silently working, lost in the task, all their awareness focused on supplying the steady line of stones advancing across the burbling evasive water. Rose was filtering dirt through her fingers at the river’s edge, imagining she was part of the project because she was in its orbit. Conversation had narrowed to a soothing transactional minimum.

  —We need a good one to go in here.

  —Alert! Alert! We have a collapse.

  —Pass me that one, quick.

  —Help me with this, Daddy?

  Clare thought, They will remember this, when they think about why they love their father.

  It was what she had loved him for too: his quiet competence, a remote unassailable presumption of the one way to do things, a right way. She watched his hands, placing stones, helping Lily pick her way in the current, pushing back his tangled hair from his hot forehead. He had that kind of fine fair hair that separates naturally into curling strands, like a Renaissance painting. He let it grow too long because he didn’t care about it; she wished he would have it clipped fashionably close. His hands were like his father’s, brown and small and firm. In the evenings these hands moved chess pieces patiently, teaching Coco or losing to Tinsley (she played in the station in the arctic); or they chose cards in family games of solo whist where the Vereys could not completely disguise their relief that Clare didn’t want to make an awkward fifth player (Opie didn’t play either). Of course Bram was talking to the children all the time as well; he probably talked to them more than she did, explaining how things worked, explaining why it was better to do things in a certain way, explaining to them what was dangerous. He sometimes told Clare off, for driving with her tire pressures crazily low, or using a vacuum with a broken plug whose live wires were exposed.

  She couldn’t think how to complain of him. She ought to have a complaint, oughtn’t she, for an alibi? He was uncommunicative sometimes. And he didn’t like many people, much; he was always friendly and polite, but in private he was unforgiving if he found out anyone’s vanity or pretension. He knew things but he didn’t invent things. Those didn’t sound like accusations; they sounded like goodness.

  When the dam was built there was a little lip of captured water behind
it, and they did just manage to skull the play dinghy across it amid shrieks of triumph; the children splashed and scooped the water with large exaggerated gestures as if the pool they had made were deeper and more miraculous than it actually was. After tea there was consternation because Lily found three little dark fishes swimming up and down in it. She was dismayed at the idea of the bewilderment of the little fish and she haunted the bank, coaxing them with chirruping calls to a place where they could swim over; eventually Bram (who might even in his calm way have also been concerned for the fish) broke down the dam and made a channel for them to escape through. Coco and Tinsley disapproved, and the evening ended on a sour note. The fish stayed swimming around in the pool anyway, although they were gone by morning.

  * * *

  THE SISTER of the woman who ran the mini-market was married to the man who owned the garage, and it was from her that they had collected the key to the house at the beginning of the holiday. The owner lived in London and rarely visited; his wife had asthma and couldn’t manage the house’s dampness. Mrs. Tierney was also supposed to come on their last day, a Friday, to read the electricity meter; they were leaving very early on Saturday morning to catch their ferry. For some reason she turned up with a carful of friends in the middle of Thursday night. Into the deep seclusion of their sleep there burst the roar of an engine with a squealing fan belt, the slushy bite of tires in the gravel, the ill-suppressed sounds of partying from the car. A car door banged; there was incomprehensible calling, a scream of laughter abruptly broken off. Then someone pounded on the great front door knocker.