by Tessa Hadley
–Clover Close, he said merrily. – Grassymead Lane. Oak Grove. Hazelbush Way. You’d think you were in the Forest of Arden if you closed your eyes. Except that real country addresses never sound anything like that. The test is if the name is as plain as possible, then you know it’s the real thing. The ruling classes live in places called Old Hall. Stone House. Long End. The Rectory.
Sheila’s home was called the Rectory and it was in the country, but nowhere like the Forest of Arden. It was in a bleak, poor village in East Anglia, where the red-brick rectory was the grandest building after the church. Neil had said once that his dad, who was a tool setter at Lucas Engineering, probably earned more than hers; she had no idea if he was right.
Neil’s dad, Dennis, stood waiting for them in his shirtsleeves and braces at the front door, which was on the side of the house, opening onto the kitchen. He was compact and smiling, with a round face and thick peachy skin, rosy where the blood vessels were broken across his cheeks; his springy grey-black hair was slicked back with Brylcreem. He had the air of a man used to performing a comical role, pleasant and placating. When Neil’s mother, May, came crowding behind him in the doorway, wiping her hands on a tea towel, Sheila saw that she was small, too; Neil overtopped them both. Sheila was going to be the tallest person in the house.
–All right, son? Neil’s father grinned at him. – You can still find your way back home, then? Which bus did you get?
He held out a disproportionately huge hand to shake Sheila’s, and although he touched her with scrupulous gentleness she felt the strength in his grip. When Neil explained which bus they’d taken and how it had wound slowly around another estate for forty minutes, his father shook his head in disbelief: the eccentricity of the buses was clearly an old, comfortable joke. In Bristol, Neil would have scorned such small talk. May, hanging back, kept her hands wrapped in the tea towel, nodding and smiling shyly; she had a miniature figure like a doll’s, with skinny little-girl legs, gauche under her short skirt. Sandwiches made from sliced white bread, cut into perfect triangles, were set out on a counter on two plates, covered with paper torn from bread wrappers.
–I said not to make a fuss, Neil said to his mother, helping himself to a sandwich; May, in a darting movement, slapped at his hand, scolding him. – It’s all right, he reassured her. – Sheila hasn’t got any manners, either.
May blushed and couldn’t look at Sheila. – Don’t take any notice of him, she said apologetically. – I don’t.
Sheila heard now that Neil’s Birmingham accent, which she had thought so strong, was softened and compromised compared with the way his parents spoke.
–She’ll have cooked us a meal, too, Neil warned. – This is just to tide us over.
–I thought after your journey you’d want something. Shall I put the kettle on for tea?
The kitchen was too small to sit down in so Neil and Sheila drank their tea on a sofa in the living room, in front of the gas fire turned up high. Sheila was so eager to please that she ate all the sandwiches on her plate, though she didn’t know how she was going to manage anything else. The shoe-box-shaped room was a little gem of neatness. There were antimacassars along the back of the sofa and on the back of every chair, a glass-fronted cabinet full of ornaments, framed photographs on the tiled mantelpiece of Neil and his sister, Chris, of Chris’s wedding. Neil had told Sheila that every Friday after his mother came back from her job at the bakery she stacked the furniture and rolled up all the carpets to wash the floor underneath.
–Are you at the college with our Neil, then, Sheila? his father asked.
Sheila was surprised that Neil hadn’t told them more about her. She didn’t talk to her parents much, but she was sure that they knew at least where Neil came from and what subject he was reading.
She explained that she was reading classics, Latin and Greek.
–Very interesting, Dennis said. – Veni, vidi, vici.
–All that stuff. It’s the Greeks that I love. Revenge and passion, the war between the sexes, justice on earth. Of course, it’ll be no use to anyone after I’ve finished, but I don’t care. My dad read classics, too, so it’s in the family, I suppose.
–It’s brewing that’s in mine, Neil’s mother said with a quick laugh. Sheila knew that May’s uncle and brothers worked at Davenports the brewers; they had got Neil a job there over the summer.
Neil ate only a couple of sandwiches, then he got out his cigarettes.
–Go on, have one of mine, son, his mother said, pushing a pack of Embassy Regals at him. – Do you smoke, Sheila?
Sheila didn’t. But she saw the moment of closeness it made between mother and son, heads bent together over the lighter, eyes narrowed and cheeks hollowed in inhalation. May had a little chrome-and-Formica smoking table at her end of the sofa, with an ashtray fixed in the centre on a metal stalk. Although Neil’s face was round like his father’s, the wary sharpness in it made him resemble his mother more. Like Neil, May glanced evasively sideways at whomever she was speaking to. In his teenage years, Sheila knew, Neil’s mother had been his confidante, talking late into the night with him and his friends when he brought them home. She seemed more assured with the cigarette in her hand; a social manner descended on her, mildly rakish and teasing.
–I tried to get him to put something decent on, because you were coming. May nodded at her husband. – But he goes his own way.
–She’s not bothered, Dennis said. – Are you, Sheila?
–I’m so glad you didn’t. Sheila smiled at them. – Look at us. We’re a real mess. We don’t want you to do anything different from what you do usually. Please.
She wondered what they thought of her clothes, a long crimson Indian skirt with braid around the hem and a crushed-velvet top embroidered with mirrors: these might be their idea of disgraceful rags. She hoped that her looks worked for her, though: her pale skin and long, curling, red-brown hair. She knew that Dennis was paying her subtle, harmless attentions because of them, without even knowing that he was doing it: spooning sugar into her tea and smoothing the creases out of her coat when he hung it up.
–You’re right about Neil. He is a right mess. What about that hair? What does he think he looks like? Dennis broke out suddenly.
–Oh, leave him alone, May said. – Why shouldn’t he have it how he wants? That’s how they all wear it now.
Neil smiled to himself: that private irrepressible smile of his, as if he couldn’t help being delighted at some comedy he was watching. Dennis didn’t seem to mean his complaint to offend anyone. He was a joker, an entertainer. You could see that he was the one to confront the public world, sheltering May, who had been brought up in an orphanage after her mother died and her father abandoned the family. Dennis took care to mention this more than once, as if the injustice of it still rankled him.
–Sheila lives in a rectory, Neil offered. – Her dad’s a vicar in Suffolk.
–That’s nice, May said.
Sheila wanted to tell them about the rectory: how it was actually cold and bare and full of worn, scuffed furniture, not nearly as comfortable as this cosy room. But she didn’t because she was afraid they wouldn’t believe her, and would think that she was patronizing them, trying to put them at ease because she found their home so poor.
May and Dennis got out photographs from a coach trip they had taken to Scotland. Before university, Neil had gone with them on these trips. He had explained to Sheila how, now that so many holidaymakers were going abroad, the big old country hotels that had once been exclusively for the wealthy had begun to cater to working-class coach parties. She tried to imagine Neil spending his days with a coachload of middle-aged Brummies, set apart by his youth and education, flirted with by the older women, thinking his own thoughts, taking an informed interest in all the places they visited. She found the idea seductive. He had certainly travelled more widely in Britain than she ever had, and knew more about its history.
In the photographs Dennis was usually at the centre,
posed against some monument or other. Sheila was surprised that he and May relished so uncritically the grand style of their holiday: the food, the thick carpets, the ballrooms, the chandeliers, the free whisky at the distillery tour, the free soap in the bathrooms. She had expected that they would despise the luxuries of the rich, as she and Neil did. She felt a mixture of relief and deflation, as if she’d been cheated of something she’d braced herself to take on: some intensity of engagement, both scorching and testing. This is going to be easy, she thought. After all, they’re just easy, sweet people.
They put Sheila in Chris’s old bedroom, in a bed made up with nylon sheets and the same rough old army blankets her mother had at home. There wasn’t much evidence of Chris left in the room: a framed embroidered picture of a squirrel, a hollow soapstone swan with a couple of hair grips in it on the dressing table. May assured Sheila that there was plenty of hot water because the immersion heater had been on all evening, but although Sheila rather longed for a bath, she didn’t want to keep everybody waiting for the bathroom. She cleaned her teeth quickly. Everything in here was scoured spotless. The only difference between May’s cheap, thin towels and bathmat and the ones at home was that these had been cherished and ironed.
Sheila undressed and slithered down between cold sheets, then lay awake listening to the life of the house subside—low-voiced exchanges of practicalities, the sound of a bolt being shot to. She imagined that she was hearing what Neil had heard all his life before he came to Bristol. She was in that phase of the relationship where everything associated with Neil seemed to her charged with excitement, even the smell of the clothes he took off and left lying on the floor, even his favourite tracks on albums that she would never have chosen for herself: the Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart. She couldn’t sleep. After a while, when everything was quiet, she pushed back the sheets and knelt on the bed in her nightdress, looking out of the window at the orange sodium lights and a flare of fire somewhere, perhaps from a factory chimney. She could make out the silhouetted dome of the lunatic asylum nearby, which Neil had pointed out when he showed her the room—built in the nineteenth century in what had then been countryside. The air was chilly on her shoulders. The little house seemed to drop very quickly into cold once the gas fire was out, as if the walls were only a thin skin between the night and the lives inside.
She pressed down the handle on the bedroom door very carefully, then crept along the landing, trying not to make any sound on the lino with her bare feet. She knew which room was Neil’s; she had looked into it earlier and seen his few books on a shelf, the only books in the house, and the old card table where he had done his homework for all those years. She slipped inside and soundlessly closed the door behind her. Neil reared up in bed; in the light from the street lamps she could see the mound of the blankets around his shoulders. Sheila cuddled quickly in beside him. She had let herself get thoroughly chilled, sitting looking out the window; now the heat of his body against hers under the blankets was like a flood. To her surprise he was wearing pyjamas, which he never did in Bristol; they smelled of his mother’s washing.
He hissed a protest at her frozen feet. – What are you doing? he whispered in perplexity, grasping her by the shoulder. – We can’t do that here.
–I can’t sleep, she complained. – I miss you.
She pressed herself close against the length of him, kissing his neck and his ears, trying to undo his pyjama buttons. He pushed her off.
–Shh. You can hear everything in this house. They’ll know.
–We could be so quiet.
–No.
–Then just let me sleep here. I’ll go back in the morning.
–They’ll know. Honestly. Believe me.
–OK. Let me stay for ten minutes.
To show that he was sorry, he kissed her then, but warily, not wanting to be carried away into anything. Their mouths tasted of meat from May’s casserole, which Sheila had eaten even though she was a vegetarian. With her lips she felt the growth of beard on Neil’s jawbone, not bristling but silky; he was giving out his kisses one by one, sceptically, like a bird pecking. This tension of thwarted longing—even when they were on their own and could do whatever they liked—was somehow the whole character of their relationship. Sheila was always frantic for the next thing she didn’t have from Neil; the sensation was as painful as wire spooled taut in her chest. She wondered sometimes what would become of them if the spool gave way and the tension slackened. After a while he stopped kissing her, and she knew that he really wasn’t going to let her stay.
On the landing on the way back to her room, she heard May and Dennis talking in their bedroom. That was good; it meant that they weren’t lying awake listening to her move about. She took a couple of cautious steps and stood where she might be able to catch what they were saying. She had never had any compunction about eavesdropping, or reading other people’s letters or diaries; at home, with so many brothers and sisters, a certain level of surveillance had been almost necessary for survival; unless you sneaked, you never learned what was going on. Anyway, she trusted herself to understand whatever she found out.
She couldn’t really hear May and Dennis. May was angry about something; Dennis was soothing her: he rumbled, reasonable, sympathetic. They were both suppressing their voices, naturally, in this house of thin walls. May’s tone was different from the one she’d used all evening: hard and final. Sheila knew at once that this must be her real voice, the one she used with people she was comfortable with.
–How can I talk to her? Sheila heard May say then, quavering, suddenly louder. – With that accent like a mouthful of cut glass?
Sheila’s heart heaved: the thud was so strong she even imagined that Dennis and May had heard it, until he rumbled again and she knew she was safe. It serves you right, she told herself immediately, not knowing quite what it was that she had deserved, or what for.
Back in bed, she lay huddled with her knees pulled up inside her nightdress, the taste of the casserole meat rising from her stomach. She was going over the work that she had to do for the following week: a Latin prose translation, an essay on Medea. But just as she fell into sleep she recognized that May had muddled two quite separate expressions. How stupid, Sheila thought. It has to be either “talking through a mouthful of plums” or “an accent like cut glass.” Not “a mouthful of cut glass.” She’s made nonsense of it.
For a moment, however, she could imagine the sensation of chewing politely and sufferingly on a mouthful of broken crystal, tasting salty blood.
Neil came to the rectory for a few days after Christmas. Sheila never quite got over the surprise of his being there, where he didn’t belong, among the left-behind scenes of her childhood. She knew that she was reacting badly to the situation—as if she were blinking into a light that distracted her from seeing him fairly. She was irritated when he seemed to get along with her parents. At supper the first night, he talked with her father about the Knox family; Sheila’s family—the Culverts—was distantly related to them. A Culvert had been one of the first Evangelical bishops to be ordained in the Church of England: the old sober kind of Evangelical, not the new guitar-playing excitable kind. Neil knew about the Ronald Knox translation of the Bible because his mother had been brought up a Catholic, and because he knew about so many things. Reverend Culvert told him about the Roman earthenware found in the scrubland close to the river that the villagers called the Ditch, and about the carved flints that lay about in the fields for picking up. He sputtered mashed potato and gesticulated with pleasure at having someone informed to talk to. His own children kept their intellectual interests strictly apart from family mealtimes; they were embarrassed if their father ever veered from his habitual ironic distance. He was a tall, thin man, whose head with its long earlobes was austere in repose, as if it were carved out of hard, ancient wood; to see him so boyishly eager was compromising, like watching a tortoise bob its skinny neck out from the decency of its shell.
Sheila w
as aware of how gratifying it was to her father that someone like Neil, who came from a working-class background, should be doing so well. The Reverend, despite the disappointments he was daily faced with—the sullen village boys, their cursing, their fatalism—kept up, in the solitude of his study at least, a whole set of hopeful ideals that had to do with justice and progress. Sheila winced when he gleamed with pleased surprise at Neil’s intelligent comments. She and her siblings had grown up with a horror that their father might sometime make a sermon out of the things that they did, or that happened to them. Sheila’s mother, peculiar and ravaged, was simply grateful that the conversation didn’t require her dutiful bolstering; she bowed her head low over her plate to eat while the children exchanged veiled glances. The boys were horrible mimics: they would be mentally rehearsing Neil’s accent. The gammon was too salty and the parsley sauce had been made from a packet; Sheila only ate the mash and the Brussels sprouts. Her mother’s cooking was loveless and institutional. An old book of fine recipes in French—a wedding present—sat unopened on a shelf above the kitchen stove, its pages gummed together by the steam from hundreds of pans of boiling potatoes.
–How can you not see how awful they are? Sheila hissed to Neil the next day when she took him on a walk to get away from the house. They set out along the flank of the wide, shallow valley, into a freezing wind that rippled the slate-coloured water standing on the clay in the valley bottom, where the Ditch had overflowed.
–They’re so dried up, so false. Nothing they say is ever real.
He shrugged. – At least your parents don’t make remarks about West Indians being too lazy to work and wanting to sit all day with a string tied round their big toe, fishing in the creek.