by Tessa Hadley
He was very discreet. These were his wife’s friends. He made his courteous farewells and left the party early, but Linda followed him out twenty minutes later as he had suggested she should and he drove her to her home, where they had sex in her marital bed under a reproduction of a Robert Doisneau photograph of adolescents kissing beside the Seine. (He had had in the years since then—discreetly, again, discreetly—to gradually filter out the worst of the pictures and things she brought to the house they moved into together.)
He remembered distinctly the twenty minutes he waited for her in his car. He nearly drove off without waiting; he was sure anyway she wouldn’t come. He sobered up in the presence of so many reminders of his real life: the petrol smell from the leak in the fuel pipe he had to take in for mending tomorrow; Naomi’s incorrigible clutter of tissues and beads and apple core and headache pills on the dashboard; the girls’ perfumes still lingering from when he’d given them and their friends a lift into town earlier (all dressed up, as he had put it to them, like a parcel of whores); the dried mud lozenges fallen off Toby’s football boots. His middle age was rich and flavorsome and sustaining as a mulch; he couldn’t quite believe in himself sitting there still hoping for this quite other thing that ought to belong to youth: dicey, raw, stupid, intoxicating. He felt as if he had just discovered in himself—after all the reassurance of the sober years—an addiction dangerous as gambling or alcohol.
After the sex, when he was trying out for the first time the orange of her hair against the muddy skin of his arm and noting the incipient vulnerable sore at the edge of the lips he had sucked on, he asked Linda what she did for a living. She told him she was headmistress of the adolescent unit at the psychiatric hospital. At every turn she was powerful, more powerful than he would ever have chosen for himself; she was not the sort of woman he would ever have approached. Again he was scared and felt he was in deep water.
* * *
AND HE WAS. She was deeper water than he had ever entered, and she closed over his head. Now, when they had been together for years and looked as settled as any other married couple (their oldest child was ten), he was still in a state of perpetual exhilarated anxiety about her. He feared so many things.
He feared of course that she would go off with another man. She was not really beautiful. Filled out by a lesser spirit, her face and figure could have been merely freckled and worthy and worn and proletarian: she sometimes made him think of Walker Evans’s photographs of farmers’ wives in the American dustbowl. She was knobbly and skinny rather than smooth; the end of her nose was prone to redness and soreness; she was one of those women who can look spectacular or can look dreadful, if they put on the wrong clothes (and her taste was not infallible, nor did she much care what she wore). But men (some men, enough men for him to fear) liked her. Leggy and gangling, black mascara on gingery lashes, the first signs of aging (she was forty-five now) naked on her face, she held court: at work or at home, where there were always visitors, usually male visitors. She said she liked women, but she didn’t have many women friends.
He didn’t know quite how consciously she held out to her admirers her promise of something they thirsted for, some heady mix of mothering and bossing and sex; standing at the kitchen table with her old faded apron tied around her, serving out like beneficent Ceres to guests and to the children the casserole Graham had cooked and the vegetables he had prepared; sitting up late into the night talking over the problems of some young colleague whose marriage was falling apart until Graham came downstairs in his pajamas to check on them; dressed in her black suit (which did look good on her) with her battered briefcase stuffed full of disordered papers for a case conference to decide the destiny of one of her forlorn or desperate adolescents. He didn’t actually think she liked sex all that much: he believed he had caught fleeting and quickly concealed expressions of disgust on her face at certain crucial moments (which didn’t stop his liking sex terribly, needily, with her: in fact her disgust came to be almost, disturbingly, part of what he liked). It was not sex Linda liked but the intoxicating aura of sex and its power to change things; how could he be sure it would not come into her head one day to kneel down before one of these admiring men and offer herself, just to see what happened?
He feared, more absurdly but perhaps even more powerfully, that she would go into a convent. She had been brought up by a mother who was superstitiously Catholic (and criminally irresponsible, Graham thought, when he heard tales of Linda and her sisters with one particular lascivious uncle in their teenage years). Although she had gone through the inevitable revolt and now talked the languages of social services and psychotherapy rather than theology, he feared that some deep-laid child-absorbed dream of cold floors and sore knees and wood-faced Madonnas weeping real tears waited concealed, and would break out and recapture her just as Graham thought himself safe from the other men (surely he’d be safe from them when she was fifty? fifty-five?). She had only spoken about going into a convent once, when she asked him how it worked—Can you be chaste again? Can you be married and everything and go through all that and then just be given a clean slate?—but ever since then he had been watchful for a certain look, a rapt look of absorbed and even complacent spirituality, like the expression on the face of the Virgin in a Murillo ascension as she is levitated decorously out of reach of mere mortals. He imagined himself left desperately behind, one of the crowd who gape upward, grabbing uselessly for a last swirl of drapery.
At this moment particularly he feared she might die. She had had two replacement valves in her heart since she was twenty-six (her first husband was the Sikh surgeon who had done the operation), and took Warfarin to keep her blood from coagulating; she had a little machine that looked like a briefcase to do her own blood tests every day, so she could regulate the levels of the drug herself. (Graham nursed a continuous dull ache of accusation against the doctor who trusted her to do this, taken in by her appearance of exceptional and imperturbable competence, blind to the casual extravagance she actually lived by.) Her health in general was not good; she worked too hard and was prone to stress and infections, although she had surprising reserves of energy. For several weeks now she had been looking ill; her translucent skin was greenish-white and dull, her hair was lank, her eyes could hardly lift themselves to meet his. He had tried to come into the bathroom once and been sure before she slammed the door on him that she was vomiting into the toilet, although she denied it afterward and shouted at him to stop hassling her. The trouble was that all this was exactly the behavior he would expect of her if there was something seriously wrong.
But he did try to stop hassling her. His lifework was to keep his fears concealed, and he flattered himself that he did a very good job. She would never know the lengths he went to in order to make her happy: not only by looking after the children so she could work, and taking care of the housework because it bored her, but also how he tried to spare her the burden of his absorption in her. He even—hardest of all—worked at his pots sometimes, even pretended to be crusty at being interrupted, even booked extra afternoons for Daniel to go to nursery so he could get on with some commission, even left the door of his studio open in the house so she could be reassured that he was busy and had forgotten her by the cold mineral smell of the clay that had once been so sweet and stimulating to him. With her complete lack of taste in art, she couldn’t see what to him was self-evident: that his familiar, his talent, that slim young gift he had once possessed to conjure still shapes out of the motion of the air, had left him, slipped out one dark midnight without any fanfare. Or a whole crowd of familiars: ambition, contest, pride in his work, hunger for praise, the aspiration toward the next and finest piece. That whole noisy party had quietly decamped and left nothing but their rubbish around a dead fire. He didn’t care: so be it. He only cared that Linda shouldn’t know.
He didn’t think she knew. Anna, their ten-year-old daughter, knew, or knew something: perhaps not all that grown-up stuff about fame and talent,
but knew at least like him that if one loved Linda one had better hide it. Anna, who was dark and dainty, used to sew her mother presents and leave little notes about the house: Linda laughed at them and left them carelessly lying where she found them. It was little stout imperturbable red-haired Katie that Linda took her pleasure in: Anna’s lugubriousness (she had called it that to Graham) exasperated her. So Anna stopped following Linda around, into the kitchen, into her bedroom, into the bathroom. (“For goodness’ sake! Is there something you want?”) She took on a transparent bright concentrated look that reminded Graham of the little mermaid who walks on knives in the Hans Christian Andersen story: it made him especially careful to be kind to her and treat her with a kind of grave respect, as between equals. She was rewarded for her concentration: now Linda patted her hair and called her “my big girl.” But recently he and Anna had exchanged involuntary quick glances, when they heard the lock pushed across on the bathroom door, or when Linda left most of her supper pushed to the side of her plate, or when she put Daniel hastily and disgustedly down on the floor for pulling her hair with sticky fingers, which she used to love.
* * *
IT WAS MAY, a windless gray morning with brightness straining to break through the cloud; airplanes passed invisibly overhead like smothered thunder. Graham came back from taking Katie to school and Daniel to nursery: Anna was staying at home, she had a cold. He expected to find Linda waiting with her jacket on, drinking black coffee standing up, ready to go as soon as he was through the door. But she was sitting opening letters, smiling, at the table, wrapped in her voluminous ancient maroon dressing gown that had ink stains on its pockets where pens had leaked and traces of old pale baby’s spit-up still on its shoulders. Anna in her pajamas was at the table beside her, looking at him with conscious eyes over the tipped-up rim of one of the café-au-lait bowls they had brought back from their holiday in Brittany.
—Croissants in the oven and real coffee, said Linda. I’ve decided I’m not going in today. So it’s treats. Would you like some?
—I’d love some, he said carefully. Why? Aren’t you feeling well?
—Yes and no, she said. There’s something I should tell you. That’s why I wanted to stay here this morning. You two should be the first to know.
—Know what? he said, trying to sound casual. Did you phone in?
—Yes, she said. Wait. Wait till the croissants are done. D’you want milky coffee?
She poured him coffee and doled out croissants and put butter and jam on the table: she was drinking peppermint tea, she didn’t do any croissants for herself. He was swamped with shame at the thought that he could not survive his grief if he lost her. He thought this was just how she would arrange to tell them she was dying.
—I’m having a baby, she said.
—A baby?
—Oh, Mummy! Anna slid from her chair into her mother’s arms and dissolved into tears.
—You funny thing! Linda laughed at her. Isn’t it good news?
—You can’t be! said Graham.
—That’s what I thought. At my age. I couldn’t believe it. But I have it on oath from Dr. Donald.
—But he won’t let you. He’ll forbid it. You can’t possibly go through that again.
—He says he’s not worried, as long as I take it easy.
—My God! The man’s a criminal! What does he think he’s playing at?
—Graham.… Linda slid her hand across his where it was clenched on the table and smiled at him significantly with her head tilted onto one shoulder, as if she were trying to reach a difficult patient. Don’t spoil it. I’m so happy. Don’t make it difficult for me. You should be pleased for us. You know I love babies. Eat your croissants.
She did love babies. She adored the whole apparatus of that period of early babyhood and had never looked quite so completed and triumphant as when she bore home from hospital the latest squalling mite in its white shawls.
Obediently, Graham and Anna began to eat.
—Anna will have to start thinking of names. What shall we have, Annie, a boy or a girl?
—I don’t mind, said Anna stoutly, though tears still stood in her eyes. I love both. I’m so glad it’s a baby.
—But it’s out of the question, Graham insisted. Apart from all the medical implications, we don’t have the space.
—Don’t be silly. Remember, I grew up with my three sisters in one tiny bedroom.
—Exactly. Exactly my point.
When he thought about what he feared in Linda he often thought about that room. He’d seen it—Linda’s mother still lived in the same house—and it was unimaginably too small for the four grown women he knew, all of them nearly six feet tall, domineering, voluble, two redheads, two brunettes. Fighting when they were teenagers for the space to dress and undress, do their homework, manage their periods, daydream, they seemed to have developed a kind of generous fever-heated ruthlessness toward one another with which they proceeded once they were out of the room to manage the other people in their lives.
—Anyway, said Linda, I don’t know why you’re talking as if there’s any question. It’s not a question. It’s a fait accompli.
* * *
IT SURPRISED HIM afterward just how long it took for the penny to drop. He must have gone around for several hours that day simply worrying about Linda and rehearsing practicalities: he went shopping, he remembered, to buy bread and things for supper and cough mixture for Anna, and the sun still hadn’t broken through the dirty-gray cotton-wool sky. The single thought when it finally arrived—he was bent down unpacking vegetables into the salad compartment in the fridge—dropped like a coin into its slot and instantly set in motion all its consequences in his mind, coarse and farcical as one of those pier-end automated peep shows of his childhood.
He and Linda hadn’t had sex for weeks.
Weeks and weeks: how many? Certainly not since she had been feeling ill—morning sickness, of course (how could he have missed it?). But before that, for how many weeks? Months, even? He remembered specifics from the last time, little agitating shots and glimpses, he always remembered: but he couldn’t place it in relation to anything else that would give him an exact day or a weekend. Until it came to him that he had opened his drawer to look for clean pajamas afterward and had been pleased at the sight of the Christmas present he’d bought her, a fine gray wool pash-mina shawl, still in its plastic carrier, waiting to be wrapped.
—So when’s your delivery date? he casually asked her.
—Oh, Dr. Donald’s not sure, because my periods have been so funny recently. He said to wait for the scan.
Graham wanted to ask, How many periods have you missed, exactly? But he bit his lip.
—So when’s the scan?
—God, darling, I don’t know. Don’t fuss. Two or three weeks or something.
Was he sure, was he absolutely sure that that was the last time, that time before Christmas?
He was almost sure.
The excitement of this almost-certainty, the presence inside him of this might-not-be momentous secret, was bizarre, breathtaking. At moments he almost wanted to catch Linda’s eye and giggle with her at this game that they surely could not sustain: as if she had done something naughty which of course because they were grown-ups she was going to own up to sooner or later. But she didn’t give any sign of a desire to own up to anything whatsoever; and meanwhile ordinary life rearranged itself impeccably and convincingly around their new circumstances.
—You should be proud of yourself, she said in the dark one night, snuggled against him, pressing her toes on his. Fathering a child in your sixties. Doesn’t it make you feel patriarchal? Like Picasso?
He was almost too distracted to answer. He was puzzling perplexedly over whether she would have the audacity to say this to him if she knew he hadn’t fathered it at all; then he thought of how inventively and inveterately those girls in that little bedroom must have had to lie in order to protect their secret lives from one another.
He could have asked her, in the dark, Is it mine?
But the words would not quite form themselves into real sounds in the air between them. And anyway, he never felt sure any longer that anything was his, definitely his.
* * *
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT depended upon an extraordinary coincidence. Graham had a problem with the car; the engine was missing and dying at traffic lights. Stan, who had fixed his cars for him for thirty years, had moved location recently; or, rather, he had semiretired and now was just doing a few jobs as favors for old customers in the garage at the back of his house. Graham arranged to take the car out there one morning at eleven for Stan to have a look. Stan lived in Stoke Upton, which although it must have been part of the city for a hundred years somehow clung on to a few signs of rusticity: a scrubby patch of grass like a village green in front of a row of failing-looking shops, a field with horses in it beside the Texaco garage, and—between the fifties council housing and the modern estates—a few little old streets that meandered lazily according to some other logic than town planning. It was a place people came out to walk with their dogs by the river on Sundays: dog shit everywhere.
Graham discussed this very subject with Stan while he was revving the engine and Stan was looking under the bonnet.
—I stand there and watch them, said Stan. I say to them, This is my front garden, you know. But they’ve got no shame. I’ve taken to carrying a plastic bag in my pocket. I offer it to them, to take it home with them or put it into one of those bins. Some do. But some of them just look right through you, as if they weren’t even connected to the bloody dog at the other end of the leash they’re holding.