by Tessa Hadley
—You know what Dostoevski says? “What is given on earth is not final.” Do you believe that? Of course not. But he says it. “What is given on earth is not final.” Who are we to disagree? And so …
He waved irritatedly with his free hand at Marian to leave him alone.
She listened outside the door. Lucia Popp singing Strauss’s “Last Songs.”
* * *
BEFORE SHE MARRIED, Marian had been writing a PhD thesis on women in the mob in the French Revolution. She had been in Paris in 1968; George Rudé, who was on sabbatical leave from Montreal researching a new book, had agreed to meet her and discuss her ideas. She had sat in the window of a cheap hotel near Saint-Sulpice writing up her notes from the interview with Rudé and listening to the sounds of rioting in the streets that reached her like a kind of mournful weather carried on the air. It was weirdly like eavesdropping on the groans and protests and outrages of lovemaking. (She had had unwillingly to do this through the plasterboard partitions of her room in residence in her last undergraduate year.)
Then the day after she got back to London she met Graham Menges at a party and something happened that overturned all the plans she had had for her life. She found out for herself all about the groans and protests of lovemaking; involved in that was a whole seismic change of perspective, or so it seemed at the time. Not only the body instead of the mind; also art instead of academic study. Graham’s ceramics, whorled and lush with glaze or dragged into brittle lace, represented the wisdom of hands instead of words. Marian thought out quite consciously an analogy between Graham’s hands on her shadowy strange-to-herself body under the blankets and his hands turning pots on his wheel. When she thought of herself as whirling wet clay turning under his hands she forgot herself enough to have orgasms. She neglected the writing up of the PhD; it seemed to her to have been overtaken, buried by a great culture quake, after which one could not be sure that any of the same things would matter anymore.
It was a time of believing in such overturnings. It was the time when respectable BBC presenters unlearned received pronounciation and tried to say “yeah” and “groovy” and talked about pot and psychedelia: all of this wince-making and hilarious in retrospect, but nonetheless a change forever, the end of the imperturbable authority of class and hierarchy. It was the time when the generation of the fathers unbuttoned and undid themselves.
It was a time of much misinformation for women, Marian thought now. Because of all that pounding writhing music that purported to be the product of anguished sexual desire—”Foxy lady,” “Baby let me light your fire,” “She belongs to me”—it was easy to make the mistake of thinking yourself empowered as the object of that desire. Easy not to notice that the object was more or less interchangeable, and that it was to other men and not to women that those beautiful young geniuses looked for critical approval when the music was over. Sometimes being the object of that desire was no more empowering than suttee. After Jimi Hendrix died, young girls he’d never known went to his flat and tried to jump out the window.
Marian and Graham left London and moved back to live in the provincial city where she had grown up; he got some teaching at the art college, she got pregnant and had babies, and then Graham left her for one of his young students. She had two daughters ages five and three and never considered completing the abandoned PhD. She trained to be a schoolteacher instead, and her second job was at the school where she was now head of history and in charge of the (small) sixth form. The school buildings were old-fashioned, 1930s red brick, with wood- and glass-paneled corridors, white-tiled science labs, and a hall with a stage and draped curtains and a rather skimpily filled honors board. Half the children at the school were from Muslim families, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and (toughest) Somalis; the other half were from the local white working-class community. It was a reasonably cheerful place, not horribly deprived or troubled. Examination results weren’t very good. But Marian wouldn’t have wanted to teach in any less challenging type of school.
A flight of cement stairs for staff use only climbed from the reception foyer to the main corridor; there was a smell there of cleaning fluid, or a trick of the watery light from a high window overlooking the park at the back, which for some reason always, even after twenty years, triggered a gust of sensation in Marian whenever she happened to go that way. Perhaps it had been a sensation of pleasurable pride once, but now it was just like a sudden strong self-awareness in the midst of all her daily preoccupations: this is me, she thought; I am here; I have done this all by myself; this is my place.
* * *
ANOTHER TWO HUNDRED POUNDS disappeared. Marian telephoned her brother in Toronto.
—It has to be the housekeeper, he said. What’s her name?
—Elaine. How can you say that, Francis? You don’t even know her.
—Are we moving on to one of our “you’re not here doing your share” conversations? Will it help if I’m just abject in advance and we skip that bit?
—And even if it was Elaine, you see, she’s so invaluable, I need her so desperately, if she goes I’ll have to face up to the idea of a home, and I quake when I try to imagine that. So even if she is taking money, I just can’t afford to mention it.
—You’re suggesting we just allow her to pay herself a cool extra couple of hundred every week?
—I notice it’s suddenly “we” when it comes to money.
—Our inheritance.
—Oh, Francis, don’t. It disgusts me that you think of it like that.
—You’re such an old romantic. An old hippie.
—Better than a materialistic vulture. I’m sure it’s not Elaine, anyway.
She only phoned to bother him, really, not because she thought he would be able to help. She wanted to spill over some small poisonous surplus of her anxieties and put him off his blithe evasive stroke for a couple of hours.
—It’s been such an awful week. He’s been on the phone to me every night with some new outrage she’s committed. She refused to bathe him, or that’s what he said; she said he wouldn’t let her. It was all about this aqueous cream she wants him to use in the water for his eczema. He was sure he’d slip. They’re both so stubborn. I thought I was going to have to bathe him myself.
—Oh, Marian. Bad for your Oedipus complex.
—You have to pumice the soles of his feet and dry between his toes. Let alone other bits.
—God.
—You couldn’t.
—I couldn’t.
—Actually you could, perfectly well. Anyone can do anything if they have to.
—You say so.
Francis was an academic like Euan, another literary critic. The women in the family had feared for him in the rivalry with his father—bright and beautiful, slight and fair like his mother—but they needn’t have. He had decisively pronounced himself un-great and unoriginal and taken himself off into safe exile across the Atlantic, specializing in scholarly work in the Henry James archives, taking on a tinge of critical theory when it got fashionable. Euan looked at all his things and wrote him nice notes, complacently. Euan couldn’t read James.
—Do you know what Daddy’s got taped to the inside of his porch door?
—Go on, surprise me. “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.” “Go forth gently into the whatever-it-is.” “Home sweet home.”
—Shipwreck. Just the word shipwreck. It turns out to be the code word he’s given to the gas company and so on, when they send people round. It’s a service for old people, so they don’t let con men in.
—Sensible.
—But why shipwreck? He’s never even been in a ship, not that kind of ship. D’you know what I think? It’s what he thinks about old age. Not peaceful or resigned at all. Shipwreck. Black night, a catastrophe that tips you into deep cold water, an undignified dreadful struggle for your life, in vain. No rescue.
—It doesn’t have to be like that.
—Oh, no? But what if it is?
Marian
took the money out from under the floorboards in the airing cupboard and hid it in its biscuit tin at the bottom of an old trunk full of papers and toys in her own home, dreading that she would be burgled. She wrote a note to her father and put it in the space under the floorboards in case he went looking, explaining that she had put the money somewhere it would be completely safe. She didn’t seal it. She left it open for the thief to read.
* * *
TAMSIN AND MARK sat reading to Euan. Marian was dealing with letters and bills at Euan’s desk.
Marian paid Tamsin to read to her grandfather a couple of evenings a week, to save his eyes for his day work. Euan didn’t know she was paid. Marian’s older daughter, Clare, was supposed to help too, but she had young children and moods and didn’t regularly manage it; she was in that baffled lean wolfish phase of young motherhood Marian dimly remembered, when you feel you may have been cheated of too many pleasures in exchange for the burden of loved children you can’t unwish. When Clare read Herzen to Euan she pounced on a remark about “the summer lightning of personal happiness.”
—Don’t be such a glum, Tamsin had said. Herzen was sixty.
Tonight they were reading from a translation of some Russian book on Swedenborg. Tamsin read in a high flat skeptical voice, smothering yawns; she was more dressed up than she usually bothered to be for her grandfather, in a green silk top that showed her bra straps and stretch trousers cut off just below the knee: Marian presumed this was for Mark’s benefit, even though she had hardly spoken to him since they arrived. She was growing her dark hair, she had it pushed behind her ears, so fine it was like the fall of something liquid. When Mark took over reading she curled up with her head on a cushion on the sofa where they sat together, sucking her thumb, eyes closed.
—This stuff is completely cuckoo, Grandpa, she complained, muffledly. It was the most she ever said about any of the material she read for him; in the same way she never commented on the Bach or Handel or Janáček she rehearsed with the choral society for weeks on end, except to remark on the awful polo necks the conductor wore or the irritating overweight woman next to her whose elbows impinged on her space. (She determinedly got herself moved away from the woman with the elbows.)
Marian noticed that Tamsin’s bare feet with purple-painted toenails were curled only a fraction of an inch from Mark’s thigh, for all she treated him with such disdain. She couldn’t tell if Mark was aware of Tamsin’s toes so suggestively close. He read with his characteristic half-blush, half-frown, steadily. His blond hair was cut in a long fringe that hung across his eyes, fashionable with the boys at school (Tamsin had commented—her only comment on him—on its dreary “naffness”); his skin was reddened over the newly heavy cheekbones and on the jaw where the beard was coming in. The toes crept imperceptibly across the sofa until they were pushed up against where Mark sat. It could have been mere unconsciousness on Tamsin’s part; she could simply have been obliviously making herself comfortable in the space.
Marian felt a pang of regret for the limited, heartwarming, slightly sentimental relationship she had had with Mark, her best pupil, a sweet good nice-looking boy. But such relationships were only possible in school, where things were simpler.
Euan was slumped in his chair. He gave off complex wheezing noises.
He often lost concentration and dozed, seeming to wash in and out of awareness of the reading; if they stopped he woke up and complained. But this time the noises grew worse: a grunting whistling sound, seeming to come not from his mouth but his torso, shaking and tearing it. At the same time—over a period of, say, five minutes while Mark read and Marian wrote checks—something dreadful began to spread in the room, a smell, a foul stink. It was impossible to ignore, as substantial in the air as a pelt or a thick cloth. Suddenly it was at the forefront of all their attention. Mark stopped reading, Marian put down her pen, Tam-sin snapped upright, wide eyes on her grandfather.
—Mum! she commanded furiously.
Marian pushed back her chair. She thought the worst.
—Go and make tea, she told them. Grandpa’s gone to sleep.
They fled, Tamsin with a little involuntary whimper of release, pulling the door shut fumblingly behind her. Marian stood for a couple of moments listening, breathing; the stink was as strong as a wall across her path.
Distinctly she thought to herself, It’s now, it’s now.
She was swept under a glistening, prickling, exultant wave of shame, as if some new intimacy had been broached that could never be gone back on. She crossed to her father and bent down her face to the racked torso, the seamed purple chalky neck, and the old yellowed collar of his shirt. She supposed he had had a stroke or a seizure, and in a moment she would have to unleash the whole drama of doctors and emergency and last things; she breathed in deep to find what she was sure she would discover, that he had soiled himself and that they were delivered over to one another, through that ultimate lapse, at a new level of close bondage.
His warmth was against her face; all she breathed in was a sweet, old, felty smell, redolent of her childhood, reminding her of the inside of the gramophone cabinet. Whatever the stink was, it didn’t come from Euan.
And then he woke up; with a snort and start, finding her head nestled in his neck. Surprisingly, in that moment of confusion he wasn’t angry with her; for a second his big hand actually came up and pressed her head clumsily, affectionately, into his shoulder. She was never clear whether he had exactly meant the tenderness of that gesture for her; it was more like a reflex, as if he was not quite awake enough to be clear exactly which needy woman required his reassurance. But he didn’t repudiate it either, or query her waking him. While she began to search under bookshelves and in corners for the source of the terrible smell, he was uncharacteristically subdued and circumspect, making tentative grateful suggestions and remarks.
One of his beloved cats had been shut in that afternoon (Elaine remembered its making its getaway when she came in) and had left its little souvenir under a curtain. The smell must have developed as the central heating warmed it up. When Marian went to get newspaper and hot water and disinfectant from the kitchen, she rather relished Mark’s and Tamsin’s excruciated faces and Tamsin’s unconvincing preparations for a pot of tea she had thought would never be poured.
* * *
FRANCIS HAD RECENTLY told Marian over the telephone things about their mother that she hadn’t known: that in the years before her death Jean had left Euan on several occasions and gone twice to live with Francis in his flat in London for months on end, actually once even renting a flat of her own. This last time she was already sick, she had had the mastectomy; there were already signs of the secondary cancer she would die of.
—But she wasn’t off her head, said Francis. She knew what she wanted.
These were all stories from more than twenty years ago.
Marian’s first reaction was characteristic of her relationship with Francis: annoyance at his wrong-footing her, at his having saved up all this time the advantage of this information.
—So what’s new? She was always walking out on him. He was impossible. Tell me about it.
—But she never let you know the half of it. This was when you were going through the mill with Graham, remember? And then afterward you were doing your teacher training.… We didn’t want to add to all your problems.
Marian tried to recover a picture of her mother at that time; but all the pictures from the different ages had been shuffled together since she died, like a fan of cards closed onto itself. The ones that tended to come up when she summoned were of a woman in her early forties, rat-tatting commandingly on high heels the way women did then, blond hair pinned back in a French braid neat and glossy as a loaf, and manicured nails with the half-moon cuticles she had tried to show Marian how to do. This was the mother—public, charming—who had come to prize-givings at school; Marian in those days would willingly have exchanged all her distinctions and special prizes for adeptness at those more
formidable feminine mysteries.
But afterward, after all, her life had fallen into patterns more like her mother’s; there were always babies to restore the common ground among women. It had been a relief to both of them that they could, eventually, talk with equal interest about decorating and washing and shopping: Marian remembered this, from when she had taken her little girls to visit at the old house. And she remembered how her father, if he was home from the University, would descend from his study to greet her, as if when he crossed the hall he crossed a frontier line between domains of life, between the one where women sat and gossiped in a kitchen and the one where he struggled with his books; she remembered how she was slightly disconcerted but not altogether displeased to find herself on the kitchen side of that frontier. Clare and Tamsin had had to be kept quiet so that he could work just as she and Francis had been kept quiet.
Marian had imagined without thinking about it that in caring for her father in his extreme old age she was somehow filling her mother’s empty place. It was disconcerting to think of her mother absconding from that place herself, repeatedly delinquent.
—She only went back because he pleaded with her, said Francis. And the last time she was determined not to, but then of course she got too ill, she couldn’t look after herself, she gave up, it was too late.…
—I’m sure you’re exaggerating. I’d have remembered, if she’d ever been away for so long; don’t forget I was living a fifteen-minute walk away for some of that time. I know she used to come and stay with you sometimes.…
—You didn’t visit them for weeks on end. You had other things on your mind.
—Was it sex, do you think? she asked him warily.
—On your mind?
—No, be serious, on Mummy and Daddy’s.
—Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Marian tried to imagine Francis’s response when his mother turned up—”in a state,” he said—on his doorstep. He was a young bachelor then, teaching at University College, with a white-painted “pad” in Islington full of books and paintings by contemporary artists who had not gone on to be famous. (He had really once called it a pad; just as they had really once called him a bachelor, until he moved to the States and was suddenly and all-illuminatingly gay.)