by Tessa Hadley
Valerie phoned Lottie a week or so after the wedding to ask whether she knew that Edgar had tried the same thing the year before with the student who had sung at the reception, a tall beautiful black girl with a career ahead of her: she’d had the sense to tell him where to go. – To fuck off, Valerie enjoyed enunciating precisely, as if she hadn’t often used that word. Everyone knew about this because Valerie had also telephoned Hattie. When Hattie asked Lottie about it, Lottie only made one of her horrible new gestures, folding her hands together and letting her head droop, smiling secretively into her lap. – It’s all right, Mum, she said. – He tells me everything. We don’t have secrets. Soraya is an exceptional, gifted young woman. I love her, too.
Hattie hated the way every opinion Lottie offered now seemed to come from both of them: we like this, we always do that, we don’t like this. They didn’t like supermarkets; they didn’t like Muzak in restaurants; they didn’t like television costume dramas. As Duncan put it, they generally found that the modern world came out disappointingly below their expectations. Hattie said that she wasn’t ready to have Edgar in her house yet.
The university agreed that it was acceptable for Lottie to continue with her studies, as long as she didn’t take any of Edgar’s classes; but of course he carried on working with her on her violin playing. Her old energy seemed to be directed inward now; she glowed with the promise of her future. She grew paler than ever, and wore her hair loose, and bought silky indeterminate dresses at charity shops. Hattie saw her unexpectedly from behind once and thought for a moment that her own daughter was a stranger, a stumpy little child playing on the streets in clothes from a dressing-up box. Edgar and Lottie were renting a flat not far from Hattie and Duncan: tiny, with an awful galley kitchen and the landlord’s furniture, but filled with music. Edgar had to pay about half his salary to Valerie to cover his share of the mortgage on the house and the part of Harold’s schooling that wasn’t paid for by the scholarship, so he and Lottie were pretty hard up. But at first they carried this off, too, as if it were a sign of something rare and fine.
–God knows what they eat, Hattie said. – Lottie doesn’t know how to boil an egg. Probably Edgar doesn’t know how to boil one, either. I’ll bet he’s had women running round him all his life.
Noah reported that they often had Chinese takeaway.
Then Lottie began to have babies. Familiarity had just started to silt up around the whole improbable idea of her and Edgar as a couple—high-minded, humourless, poignant in their unworldliness—when everything jolted onto this new track. Three diminutive girls arrived in quick succession, and life at Lottie and Edgar’s, which had seemed to drift with eighteenth-century underwater slowness, snapped into noisy, earthy, and chaotic contemporaneity. Lottie in pregnancy was as swollen as a beach ball; afterward she never recovered her neat, boxy little figure, or that dreamily submissive phase of her personality. She became bossy, busy, cross; she abandoned her degree. She chopped off her hair with her own scissors, and mostly wore baggy tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts. Their tiny flat was submerged under packs of disposable nappies, cots, toys, washing, nursing bras and breast pads, a playpen, books on babies, books for babies. The tenant below them left in disgust, and they moved downstairs for the sake of the extra bedroom. As soon as the girls could toddle, they trashed Edgar’s expensive audio equipment. He had to spend more and more time in his room at the university, anyway; he couldn’t afford to turn down any commissions. Now Lottie spoke with emotion only about her children and about money.
The girls were all christened, but Lottie was more managerial than rapt during the ceremonies: Had everyone turned up who had promised (Rufus wouldn’t)? Was Noah capturing the important moments on his video camera? Why was Harold in a mood? With the fervour of a convert to practicality, she planned her days and steered through them. Duncan taught her to drive and she bought a battered old Ford Granada, unsubtle as a tank, and fitted it with child seats, ferrying the girls around from nursery to swimming to birthday parties to baby gym. She was impatient if anyone tried to turn the conversation around to art or music, unless it was Tiny Tots Ballet. She seemed to be carrying around, under the surface of her intolerant contempt for idleness, a burning unexpressed message about her used-up youth, her put-aside talent.
–She ought to be abashed, Hattie said once. – We warned her. Instead, she seems to be angry with us.
Hattie had been longing for early retirement but she decided against it, fearing that the empty days might only fill up with grandchildren. She believed that in the mirror she could see the signs in her face—like threads drawn tight—of the strain of those extra years of teaching she had not wanted.
–Poor old Lottie, Duncan said.
–Lottie isn’t old. Poor Edgar.
At weekends, Duncan sometimes came home to find Edgar taking refuge at his kitchen table, drinking tea while the children made scones or collages with Hattie. Edgar didn’t do badly with them, considering, but it could take him three-quarters of an hour to get all three little girls stuffed into coats and mittens and boots and pushchairs, ready to go. Physically, he was rather meticulous and pedantic. If Lottie were with him, she would push his fine long fingers brusquely aside and take over the zipping and buttoning. – Here, let me do it, she’d snap. To his credit, Edgar didn’t seem to resent the intrusion of the babies into his life, or even to be wiped out by them, exactly: he gave himself over to their existence with a kind of bemused wonder. He drew himself down to their level, noticing everything they noticed, becoming involved in their childish chatter and speculation as Lottie didn’t have time to be. They adored him; they ran to cling to his legs whenever their mummy was cross. Edgar’s appearance was diminished, though, from what it had once been: his white hair had thinned and was cut shorter and lay down more tamely on his head; his clothes were the ordinary dull things anyone could buy in a supermarket. Hattie realized with surprise that it must have been Valerie who was behind the charcoal-grey linen shirts, the silk suits, the whole production of Edgar as exceptional and distinguished.
When Emily got pregnant with her first child, Lottie’s youngest was nine months old and Charis, her eldest, was five. Lottie dumped black bags of used baby things on Emily one evening without warning. – Chuck them out if you don’t want them, she said. – I’ve got no more use for them. I’ve had my tubes tied.
After he finished his degree, Noah went to London and found work intermittently as an assistant cameraman on small film projects. He dropped in at Lottie’s whenever he came home, and they fell easily into their old companionable closeness. She fed him whatever awful mush she had cooked for tea. He was useful for swinging his nieces about and throwing them in the air, all the rough play that Edgar had to be careful of. Often, Edgar wasn’t there; Noah assumed that he was working in his room at the university.
One summer evening, Noah was lying on his back on the floor in Lottie’s front room. Two floor-length sash windows opened from this room onto a wrought-iron balcony; Lottie had made Edgar fix bars across, to stop the girls from getting out there. A warm incense of balsam poplar mingled with petrol fumes breathed from the street. They had drunk the bottle of wine that Noah had brought with their teatime mush; while they were giving the girls a bath, Lottie had produced triumphantly from the back of a cupboard a sticky bottle half full of Bacardi that nobody liked, and now they were drinking that, mixed with black-currant cordial because that was all she had. – We’ll be horribly, pinkly sick, Lottie predicted. The girls were asleep at last. While Noah lay supine, Lottie crawled round him on her hands and knees, grunting with the effort, putting away in primary-coloured plastic boxes the primary-coloured toys that were strewn like strange manna all around the carpet.
–I’m grey, she complained. – My life’s so grey.
–When does Edgar get back from work?
–Don’t be thick, Noah. Ed’s retired. The university couldn’t keep on employing him forever. He’s seventy-two this year. Why d’you thi
nk I’ve been going on to you about how hard up we are?
–Where is he, then?
–At Valerie’s, I expect.
Noah opened his eyes in surprise, angling his head up from the floor to get a look at her. – Oh!
–That’s where he usually is.
–Is that all right?
–Why shouldn’t he? When we’ve been paying half the mortgage for all these years; at least that’s finished at last, thank Christ. There’s a room there where he can work; it’s impossible here. And we don’t have space for a piano. He still likes to write at a piano, before he puts it on the computer.
–So they get on OK, him and Valerie?
–She brings him coffee and plates of sandwiches while he’s working. She unplugs the phone in the hall, in case it disturbs him. He plays things to her. I expect that sometimes while he’s in the throes of composition he forgets he doesn’t live there anymore, in that quiet house.
–Mum said the house was old-fashioned.
–It is old-fashioned. Full of antiques from Valerie’s mother, but Valerie wouldn’t know how to show them off. Valerie doesn’t have a showing-off bone in her body. She’s all complications. She’s a gifted cellist, apparently, but she can’t play in public.
–I suppose you’ve got to know her.
Lottie aimed bricks at a box. – Not in the face-to-face sense. Occasionally she and I do have to talk, about Harold’s allowance or whatever.
–He doesn’t still have an allowance?
–Not after we had the talk. On my wedding night, I tell you, it was like Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.” My metaphorical wedding night—I don’t actually mean that one night in particular. Behind the first door, the torture chamber, behind the second door, a lake of tears, and so on. Behind the last door were his other wives, alive and well. Well, the first one isn’t exactly alive, but I could tell you all about her.
–I’d forgotten there was a first one.
–Danish, actress, had problems with her abusive father, drank.
–He goes on about them?
–Not really. They’re just his life; they crop up, as you can imagine. There’s a lot of life behind him to crop up. Don’t forget, once Valerie was the one he ran away with.
–I’d never thought of it like that.
–Were the babies my revenge? Poor Ed, I’ve nearly killed him.
Lottie lay down on the floor, head to toe with Noah, holding her glass on the soft mound of her stomach, tilting the viscous red drink backward and forward as she breathed.
–Do you know what I did the other week? I was so angry about something—can’t remember what—that I drove up to the recycling depot with the babies in the back of the car to throw my violin into the skip for miscellaneous household waste.
Noah sat upright. – The one Mum and Dad bought for you? Didn’t that cost loads of money? Thousands?
–I didn’t actually do it. I looked down into the skip and got the violin out of the case to throw, and then I put it away again. Apart from anything else, I told myself, I could always sell it. And it’s possible I might want to start again, when this is over. But probably I won’t, ever.
–Is Edgar any good? Noah demanded drunkenly, suddenly aggressive. – I mean, is his music really, actually any good?
–Noah, how can you ask that? You’re not allowed to ask that.
Although Lottie protested, the question seemed intimately known to her, as if she had thrown herself too often against its closed door. – How can I judge? I can’t tell. I think he’s good. He’s writing something at the moment, for strings. It’ll get a premiere at the Festival. It’s something new, different. Actually, I think it might be lovely.
Just then they heard Edgar’s deliberate slow step on the stairs, his key in the door to the flat.
–He pretends this new piece is for me. But I know it’s not about me.
Edgar stood squinting at them from the doorway, getting used to the light; his khaki hooded waterproof and stooped shoulders gave him, incongruously, the toughened, bemused aura of an explorer returned. Noah imagined how infantile he and Lottie must look, lying on the floor among the toys with their bright-red drinks, and how uninteresting youth must sometimes seem.
–We’re finishing up that Bacardi, Ed, Lottie said, enunciating too carefully. – Do you want some?
Edgar’s eyes these days had retreated behind his jutting cheekbones and sprouting eyebrows; something suave had gone out of his manner. He said that he would rather have a hot drink. Forgetfully he waited, as if he expected Lottie to jump up and make it for him. When he remembered after a moment, and went into the kitchen to do it himself, he didn’t imply the least reproach; he was merely absorbed, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. Noah saw how hungrily from where she lay Lottie followed the ordinary kitchen music—the crescendo of the kettle, the chatter of crockery, the punctuation of cupboard doors, the chiming of the spoon in the cup—as if she might hear in it something that was meant for her.
Friendly Fire
Shelley was helping out her friend Pam. Pam had her own cleaning business, but her employees were so unreliable that she ended up doing half the work herself. She’d been hired to do a scrub-off—meaning a thorough cleaning, right down to basics—at an industrial warehouse somewhere at the edge of the city. Shelley had agreed to go along; it was a few weeks before Christmas, and she could do with the extra money. When she went outside to wait for Pam it was still night, the stars showing in the sky like flecks of broken glass. Pam was late as usual, but Shelley hadn’t wanted to wait inside in case the doorbell woke the others: her daughter and baby granddaughter were asleep upstairs. She felt herself growing heavy and thick with cold. You forgot about the cold; the house had central heating, and winters weren’t like they used to be. When Shelley was a child, she’d wrapped her scarf around her head and mouth on the way to school, trying to trap the warmth of her breath inside; these days, you hardly needed a scarf. The phase of life Shelley was in now, anyway, the heat of her body came and went in blasts, and she had a horror of being caught out in tight clothes.
She could have stamped her feet or flung her arms around, but it was too early in the morning; instead, she let the cold creep into her as if she were made of stone. When the car pulled up at last, she could barely even move toward it, though she could see Pam lit up inside, peering out through the window, looking for her. Pam always drove with the interior light on. She treated her car like just another room in her house; while she was driving, she’d fiddle around with piles of paper and bits of crocheted blanket and boxes of tissues on the passenger seat, hanging on to the steering wheel with her other hand. She was a danger on the road, but Shelley didn’t drive. For a moment, before she headed over to the car, Shelley imagined herself as Pam was seeing her—just another pillar of dark, like the hedge and the phone box and the pebble-dashed end wall of the kitchen extension. She and her husband, Roy, lived on what had been a council estate, although they had been buying their house for years now.
Pam was fat like a limp, saggy cushion, and very short, with permed yellow curls that were growing out grey; her face was crumpled like an ancient baby’s. Roy said that Pam and Shelley side by side looked like Little and Large, because Shelley was tall and thin. She had never been one to eat too much. Her only weakness was tea with sugar; she drank a lot of that—couldn’t give it up. Her daughter, Kerry, said her insides must be black.
–Hiya, Shell.
Pam leaned over to open the door, and then began throwing stuff into the back seat. – I’ve had a letter off the hospital about my gallstones.
All Pam’s conversations began as if you hadn’t stopped talking since you last saw her; they were as cluttered as her car. The heater was on high, belting out a stinging warmth that smelled of the little cardboard pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
–What gallstones?
–Well, they may not be. I’ve got to go in on the fifteenth. Typical—that’s t
he day John wants the car to go and see his sister in Tamworth. I said to him, “You’ll have to fix another day.” He says he doesn’t want to mess her around. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got a lot of time for his sister.
Pam’s husband, John, was meant to do the books for the cleaning business, but as far as Shelley could see he sat in front of the telly and did nothing, while Pam went driving about all over the place like a mad thing—and the car was forever breaking down. John used to be a plasterer. He was supposed to have damaged his leg years ago, falling from a scaffold, but Shelley had seen him limp with a different leg on different days. Pam was a good worker, though. Once she got into a job, she stuck at it until the sweat was running off her; she wouldn’t give up. Shelley was like that, too. They didn’t make a bad team.
They crossed the river. It was at low tide, sunk to a twisting channel between flanks of mud glinting with moonlight. A notice outside the red brick warehouse, which was not much more than a two-story shed, warned that it was patrolled by security dogs, but there was no sign of them. Pam parked in the empty lot, and they got out some of their kit from the boot; the employers were supposed to provide equipment, but sometimes they left out broken old mops or brooms so heavy you could hardly lift them.
Shelley switched her mobile off before she started working; otherwise, she couldn’t concentrate. Her son, Anthony, was in Afghanistan. Roy said that statistically Anthony would be in more danger if he were still playing with his rugby club, but Shelley was always waiting for some dreadful kind of message. There was a big operation under way. Anthony had told them that he’d had his leave cancelled, but Roy was sure he’d volunteered to stay. It wasn’t only that her son might be killed or injured; Shelley pushed those possibilities right down in her mind until they weren’t any more than shapes in the dark. She never watched the news; she only listened in from the kitchen while the others watched it. But when there was that fuss about the friendly fire incident with the Danish soldiers, she fixated on the idea that Anthony had been involved in it, even though Roy insisted that he’d been nowhere near where it had happened. – Why d’you have to make up trouble? he said. – As if there wasn’t enough of the real thing?