by Tessa Hadley
She should go back to Bram.
Standing watching the door in that ugly and hostile pink room (it was a pink that tried for roses but instead hit something medical, like adhesive dressings) she was visited by a vision of herself going back. The vision was vague but sweet, involving some highly improbable gestures such as her kneeling and pressing Bram’s hand to her cheek, his touching her head with his hand in a kind of absolution, her burying her face in his shirt as he drew her to him so that she didn’t have to meet his eyes (that last one was from literature somewhere). In the vision as in reality she was wearing the blue tulip nightdress.
—Forgive me, she imagined herself saying to Bram. I didn’t know what I was doing.
The vision was highly ridiculous. Not only had she never in reality dreamed of asking Bram to forgive her, it had never occurred to her that there was anything she needed to be forgiven for. Everything the breakup had actually been like—the impossible convoluted ferreting out of blames and causations, the twisting of their old knowledge of one another to use in hostilities, the sheer meanness of their unleashed dislike of one another—all that was cleared aside in this vision as if it were finished with, when of course it wasn’t.
But then ridiculous was just what one ought to expect revelation to be; that was the whole point. By definition it couldn’t show you anything you could deduce or arrive at by yourself. It didn’t follow on from anything that had come before, and it changed everything.
She could really do this. Perhaps not in the tulip nightdress, and perhaps not actually kneeling, but she could go to Bram and offer herself, and—even though he might turn her down, even though it might turn out he already loved Helly instead—to do it might be in itself a kind of solution, a blissful simplification, whatever happened. It would be restful to submit to its outcome. Clare already felt a strange bliss in her limbs as she went around the room, picking up the last clothes from the floor, covering the children with their duvets, kissing their sleeping faces. Everything that had been rigid and willed in her movements was now suddenly free and fluid, she thought.
Rose was wrapped up in her bottom sheet like a cocoon and had to be unwound from it, protesting sleepily. In her eagerness not to be a nuisance, Clare had taken all single sheets from the man, too small to tuck in on the double bed: she and Rose spent the night with the sheets wrapped sweatily around their arms and legs or wrinkled in clumps underneath them. All night long in light uneasy sleep, Clare dreamed she was driving. The road wound down a forlorn hillside muffled in a sort of thick gray rain, which then became shrubby furry wet undergrowth and was somehow inside as well as outside the car. Or she was driving on a causeway across an inlet with shallow tepid saltwater full of seaweed washing about to either side of her, suddenly realizing she’d forgotten to check the safe times for crossing.
* * *
THE FIRST THOUGHT her mind reoccupied as she came to consciousness in the morning was this plan for her reconciliation with Bram. It seemed to her instantly factitious and false, sickening: a scene out of a novel, not out of her real life. She felt ashamed at her capacity for this kind of fantasy and at the danger she was always in of acting upon her fantasies and living by them. In contrast, what she felt that morning, waking before any of the children in the strange room, was the welcome abrasiveness of the real. It was bright outside. Pools and glimmers of pink light came and went on the walls. Under her bare feet the carpet was hairy and greasy; all their clothes on the radiators were still soaked, as the central heating had never been turned on. She wet one of the little hand towels in the bathroom to wash herself, then pulled on stiff wet socks, cold pants, heavy jeans, relishing the resistance the clothes offered to her wincing warm flesh. Of course she was not going back, of course not. This was what she had left for, to have adventures in strange houses, to wake up by herself in rooms that weren’t snugly and safely molded to her shape, ugly rooms like dead shells inside which she would know herself more sharply alive.
—I was hopeless last night, she confessed to her mother later. I didn’t know what to do. I got the children out on the road in the dark, and in all that rain. Rose ran in front of a car, it was Coco who grabbed her.
—I’m sure you did the right thing, said Marian, surprised. You took them where they could be dry and warm, in a house where you could phone.
—But what if there hadn’t been a house? Or if the man had been dangerous or something?
—Well, there was a house. And the man seemed perfectly pleasant.
—What if Rose…?
—But she didn’t. Good for Jacob. I’ll have to give him a special lifesaving medal.
* * *
THEY FOUND the garage and picked up Clare’s bags and arranged for her to collect the car later in the week, then drove on to the cottage. Clare was making up beds and Marian was cooking supper when the phone rang. Clare thought it must be Bram. She’d left him her number; perhaps he’d found out somehow about the car. She began to run downstairs but Marian got there first. There was a low crooked window on the landing where she paused to see if the call was indeed for her; she had to drop onto her knees to see through the distorting old panes thick as bottles to where the children were playing in the garden on some parallel bars and a swing. Coco was walking along the top of the bars with his nose screwed up to hold his glasses and his arms outstretched either side for balance, like wings. He was pale because he wasn’t a natural, but he moved in a swift true line because he believed he could do it. Lily was mothering Rose, wrapping her arms around her to hold her safely on the swing; there was a protesting scowl on Rose’s blunt little face and she was pulling busily at Lily’s hands to dig herself out from under the embrace.
—Someone for you, called Marian, grimacing to communicate she didn’t recognize the voice. American? she added in an undertone.
Clare saw air bubbles in the greenish glass between her and the happy scene outside, as if the glass were suddenly more opaque; as if she were looking through it at something that had in those seconds already changed.
So Tony had phoned her.
Had bothered to phone her, in fact, twice: he must have tried her at home or at Marian’s first and got the cottage number from Bram or from Tamsin. He would be phoning to give her the name of that book. But she also knew, with a flash of that passional intuition nineteenth-century writers make so much of, that by the end of the conversation he would casually suggest that they should meet for a drink sometime. She would of course say yes. And that would be the beginning of something between them. This was a thrill, a bliss, flattering her, opening up infinite new possibilities, shoring her up. There was never any chance of her refusing it.
But in the split seconds before she stood up and ran down the stairs to talk to him—they were like those elastic seconds that are supposed to be given to the drowning, to review their lives—she was sorry. Was this all the freedom she had meant, pulling on her wet jeans that morning? Love, again? All those emotional entanglements poised ready to fall into place: the jubilations and the raptures, the tugs and rendings and abasements, all quite outside the jurisdiction of her suspicious separate self. It would be good to refuse, to choose instead, like George Sand retiring to Nohant-Vicq after all those lovers, the sounder happiness of gardening, cooking, children, books. It would be good to set out on the road like the old Tolstoy trying to leave the fraudulent fantasies of lust behind. Not going back to Bram, but not changing him for another man either.
But that would have to wait, she thought. After all, she was only twenty-nine.
Absurd, anyway, absurd. Probably he was only phoning to give her the name of the book.
She picked up the phone, spoke warily as if to the unknown.
—Yes?
GRAHAM MET his third wife, Linda, at a party.
He hadn’t even wanted to go to the party, he was too old for parties. It had been Naomi, his second wife, who wanted to go, and because he worried sometimes that his middle age must weigh inhibitingly on
her youthful need for a social life (she was twenty years younger), he braced himself to accompany her uncomplainingly. Then, in the afternoon of the day of the party, Naomi started to get a sore throat and a headache. He could remember standing in their kitchen while she made herself a drink of lemon and honey and dithered, with genuine disappointment, over whether she felt well enough to go.
—The one time I manage to get a baby-sitter on a Saturday!
The kitchen door stood open onto the brick-paved herb garden, and from outside came something—at this distance in time he’d lost the specificity of what it was; it might have been a trill of birdsong, or a finger of breeze that slipped under his shirt, or a smell of green things—something that as he ran his eye down the Radio Times to see if there was anything to watch on television instead made him make up his mind, to his own surprise, to go to the party anyway, whether she was sick or not. Naomi was surprised at him too, and of course he registered (although he studiously pretended not to) the little hard gleam of anxious jealousy that kindled instantly in her stare.
—Of course I don’t mind. I just didn’t think you were that keen. You hardly know them …
But he was suddenly subject to an unexpected stir of that restless ennui he thought he had forgotten.
He took it for granted that he would be disappointed; that his ennui would be just as ennuyé out as it might have been at home. He had found himself at parties recently taking on the role of someone avuncular who stood back and watched and considered and approved (or, worse, disapproved). It went with his height and his curling gray beard and—most of all, he supposed—with his age, his fifty-plus years; but it had happened without his intending it or liking it. One said and did the same things as one always had, and they were taken differently; the stream had flowed past him and was leaving him behind. Of course some people usually knew he was “the potter” (he had always eschewed the phony professionalism of “ceramicist”—which probably also dated him). That helped out with the problematic dignity of the avuncular role. But these days he had to mount careful guard against a pleased vanity when he was recognized and shyly admired or loudly lionized. There had been a time he’d hated to talk about his work; now he was afraid he liked talking about it too much.
He didn’t, indeed, know many people at the party that night, and they were mostly much younger than he was. If Naomi had been with him these things might have been the source of a patiently controlled irritation; as it was, alone, he found himself rather enjoying his alcohol-fueled prowl around the rooms, the fragments of vivid irresponsible contact with strangers, the cat-pee thin trace of pot woven in and out of an air thick with spiced food and incense. His hosts were the couple who owned the shop Naomi worked in, businesslike ex-hippies who traveled in India and North Africa and the Far East buying goods to sell; she had hennaed hair cut to hang across her eyes, and he had skin so tanned it looked smoked, a dark stubble like ink dots, and finely incised laughter lines. When hippies made money they didn’t exactly change their look, but it acquired a deeper tone and a glossy finish. The inside of their stolid Victorian house was rich with curiosities, hangings and paintings and dishes and glassware, much better things than ever went into the shop. It was a fine night: the windows and doors of the house were thrown open as far as they would go, the party had spilled out into the garden, and clumps of guests drew close together talking as the dark came down, louder and more animated and warmly intimate as they lost the precision of one another’s faces. Their host lit big torches stuck into the earth of the flower beds; they burned smokily with colored flames, illuminating shocked-pale bushes of rose and clematis.
From the room where people were dancing to what sounded like South African township music (so the craze for that had come round again, had it?) there came a crash, a scream, voices raised in laughter, consternation, reassurance. Graham was in the garden talking to a young colleague from the College of Art he’d bumped into unexpectedly. Mark Elstree was a painter whose work Graham particularly disliked. He had been holding forth only the other day to someone about the defeat for visual meaning in an art that depended upon explanations in words and about a generation of painters who couldn’t draw; so it was strange that meeting him at the party Graham had been pleased to see him and to be seen there. Mark stood out rather stylishly against the background of ethnic dresses and collarless shirts; he had his hair shaved close to his well-shaped skull (because it was receding, Graham suspected) and was dressed in a suit with narrow lapels and a tie whose knot he had pulled half undone. Tentatively he offered Graham a share of his joint.
—I don’t know if you’re interested in this.…
Graham, inhaling under the night sky, could smell—mingled with the pot and the smoking torches—green things again, earth.
—So how do you know the Marshalls?
—My wife works for them, as a matter of fact.
—But she’s not here?
—No, she didn’t feel well this afternoon; she seems to be developing a sore throat.
—They’ve got some incredible stuff. Not exactly my style, though.
—Not exactly my style either. For all their impeccable political correctness, there’s an unmistakable aura of heaped-up booty, isn’t there?
Mark laughed delightedly at the sky. Plunder.
He seemed genuinely respectfully interested in what Graham thought; although it was perfectly possible that out of earshot in another conversation he might have condemned him as an old dinosaur or lightly dismissed his work as catering for the craft-fair end of the market.
—Caftans and Cabernet Sauvignon.…
A woman in a white dress and bare feet stepped out through the French doors and came toward them, carrying something with concentration in her hands. Graham guessed she was drunk from how she stepped out across the gravelly path and the flower bed as unfalteringly as if they were carpet. A few people crowded in the door behind her. He thought she must be coming for Mark, and he moved himself just very slightly out of her trajectory, smiling the avuncular smile.
She didn’t smile.
She was dressed to attract attention: her white dress was unbuttoned down to between her breasts and slit up to her thighs, pinched in at the waist with a wide elastic belt. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a tangled bird’s nest of curls; it was too dark to see its color, which was bright orange. But other things he could see—skin of that slightly blemished luminous paleness, long complicated ears, bony boyish shoulders and big hands—suggested the type and the orange hair along with it. He could see even in the dark that she wasn’t exactly beautiful. She wasn’t curvaceous enough, really, for the revealing dress; but on the other hand she carried it off with confidence; she walked in it as though she were a priestess involved in a rite or had a part in a play. She was actually—this is probably what Graham thought, that first look—scary, formidable. He would probably have avoided her if she hadn’t been heading straight for him: not for Mark, it turned out, but for him.
She held out to him whatever it was she had in her hands.
—Apparently I’ve broken one of your bowls. They tell me it was yours.
Her voice was drunken, too: not slurred but challenging.
She was carefully carrying a pile of five or six huge jagged pieces of thin pale glazed pot. Graham felt Mark glance quickly at him, perhaps to see how he took the loss of his work. He didn’t recognize the broken pieces in the slightest, had had no idea the Marshalls owned anything of his. (Should he have been more polite about their taste?) He took the pieces from her in dismay.
—Never mind about the bowl. You shouldn’t be carrying these nasty things around. You’ll cut your hands to ribbons.
—I’m an idiot. Forgive me. It was nice. You won’t believe me, but really I had looked at it and thought, There’s one real, good, pure, true thing. You’ll think I made that up, though.
—Thank you. Thank you retrospectively for the bowl that’s gone. And believe me, I had forgotten it existe
d, until you put an end to it. Let’s see your hands.
He was pulling out his handkerchief to wipe her hands if she was bleeding: suitably avuncular, he thought (she was his wife’s age). She sank to her knees on the grass in front of him and embraced his legs, resting her face against his thigh so that he was looking down into the bird’s nest of hair.
—I’ve come to do penance, she said. What can I give you to make up for what I’ve done?
There were cheers from the people crowded in the French windows. Mark laughed, pushing his hands boyishly in his trouser pockets with the unmistakable slight excitement and bravado of sexual envy. I don’t get women breaking my pictures, he said.
—This is the one great advantage of ceramics, said Graham.
—Now he tells me.
—I could sleep with you tonight, she said. I’ve had a row with my husband anyway. He’s gone home to his mother. That’s the kind of marriage we have.
—Well, said Graham, looking down at her bemusedly. It was only one bowl. Though I’d have to say, it looks as though it might have been a good one. I’m sure we could come to an arrangement.
An idea that he would like to see that tangle of hair nestled against his thigh under different circumstances stirred in some deep chamber of his thoughts.
—Or I could dance with you, she said muffledly. For starters. I’m Linda, by the way.
—Don’t mind me, old man, said Mark. I’d hate to get between you and a lady’s penance.
Graham flattered himself he did a passable township jive. He helped Linda up and wiped her hands, which were indeed bloody from one long but shallow cut across the ball of her left thumb, which he tried to tie with his handkerchief (afterward he found her blood on his trousers where she had embraced him, and he tried to soak them, which was how Naomi got suspicious and the whole thing came out). He followed her into the room where people were dancing, slightly apprehensive that he might be expected to jump around a lot, but she hung herself languorously around his neck so that they moved in a slow waltzlike counterpoint to the poignant happy-time music.