by Tessa Hadley
In the present, too, Susan was the first to go. Chris walked out with her to her taxi when it came. They kissed clumsily; he went for two cheeks when she meant to only do one.
–We ought to meet like this again, he said.
–That would be nice.
Susan was insincere, one hand already on the door of her liberating taxi. Her counterreaction after opening up came faster and more violently as she aged: she longed to be alone with herself.
–Mandy’s right, Chris pursued. – The past’s important.
A chill made Susan pull her cardigan tighter; Chris seemed to feel it, too, when his eager look tipped down too far into her strained eyes. Embarrassed, indifferent to him, she burrowed away inside the taxi; its driver, elbow out of the wound-down window, summing Chris up dismissively, put the car in gear. She asked for the station.
Returning inside, Chris wondered aloud to Amanda, who crouched twiddling the knobs of a television with a bulbous green screen, what Susan had thought of him in the old days: it seemed to matter suddenly.
–Wasn’t she mad keen on you at one time? In my memory, she as good as told you so. You probably weren’t listening. Weren’t interested, anyway.
–You’re joking.
–It was serious. In as far as they’re ever serious, those kiddie crushes.
Chris took this new knowledge in, past the usual apparatus of his ideas and ironies, crowded as a junkyard.
–She did seem haunted. Disappointed. You don’t think there’d be any point in me . . . ?
–Shouldn’t think so. That was a million years ago. It wouldn’t be you, haunting her now.
He accepted this, resigned.
But the vibration of passion had been introduced into the darkened room: they both felt it, taken by surprise. They talked about other things: Amanda queried whether books on the shelves, first editions by forgotten novelists, might be worth something; Chris said he doubted it. Meanwhile, he was uncovering more detail in the memory of what had happened between him and Mandy in the den. Not the dream thing they had all three wanted under the beeches but a twosome more greedily down-to-earth, his hand pushed under her bra, hers into his unzipped jeans, actually a first for him. Though he hadn’t cared for Mandy much, his gratitude had been overwhelming; it had dissolved him. (“Do you like me? Do you like me?” she had kept asking.)
He woke up, for once, to the blossoming of the present moment.
He couldn’t make love to Amanda now, in this decomposing house. Could he? They were too old to do it in the garden. Perhaps it didn’t matter that she wasn’t his type. Anyway, what type was he?
–Aren’t you glad I arranged for us to meet? Amanda said, still wanting praise, making her old face of pouting, flirting dissatisfaction.
Susan in her taxi, dusty hatbox on the seat beside her, fingered the ivory masks in her handbag, out of sight: a man and a woman with broad, composed, stylized faces, lowered eyes. She didn’t remember them from her childhood. They were meant not for wearing but to hang on a wall, beautiful, carved into the curve of the tusk. She was sure they weren’t trash made for tourists. Her smoothing thumb took pleasure in the long cheeks, bulging eyelids, jutting mouths, the ridges of the brows and hair, the woman’s earrings and her comb.
She’s the One
The winter after her brother killed himself, Ally got a job at a writers’ centre near her parents’ house, helping out with admin in the office. It wasn’t a satisfactory job, only part-time and not well paid. She was twenty-two. She had just finished her degree in English literature and should have been building toward some sort of career; she had planned to move to Manchester where she had been at university. But everything like that had had to be put on hold while at home her family melted down into a kind of madness. It was a relief just to leave the madness behind and drive across the moors four mornings a week to the centre several miles away. She had the use of a car because for the moment her mum wasn’t going to work.
The moors that winter were often under a crust of snow—not enough to blanket them in white but a mean, dirty frosting on the hard earth and wilted shrubs. Ally didn’t mind the bitter weather. Her guilt at getting out even for a few hours would fall away as she drove, leaving the town behind. Sometimes when she parked at the centre, crunching into the gravelled space between the kitchen and the high black garden wall, where the stones were mossy and ferns grew in the cracks, she was really all right for a moment. I’m really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.
The centre was in a big, bleak house built in the early nineteenth century, isolated in a dip in the middle of the moors beside a river. It had been modernised to suit its new function. A couple of outbuildings along from the kitchen had been converted into a studio for writing workshops and an office, homely with the comfortable ticking of computers and photocopier and fax machine. Fluorescent Post-it notes were stuck to the office shelves, reminding the staff of the things that needed doing, the set procedures for each group of students that came and went. Ally quickly mastered these; she was capable and sensible. The organizers of the centre, Kit and Sam, were pleased to have her helping out. Also, because Ally had always loved reading, the idea was that she would enjoy meeting the writers who taught there: there would be something in it for her, too.
Ally had got the job through the woman her mum had worked for as a secretary, when she was still at work. This woman was a barrister in employment law, and she was on the board of trustees for the centre. In some people, the family’s disaster had produced this phenomenon—a crazy energy of organization on their behalf. Ally was grateful for the job, but it made her mother angry: “As usual, she comes barging in, thinking she knows best.” Mum was also angry, on the other hand, at their neighbours in the close of ex-council houses, some of whom had been her friends for years but now crept in and out trying to avoid meeting her. Ally appreciated their difficulty. What were they supposed to say, after the first few heartfelt encounters? All ordinary transactions were contaminated: “How are you?” and “How’s it going?” and “Nice day.” Even “Bloody awful day,” which it usually was, would seem to imply an ordinary scale of gloom that her family was far removed from and couldn’t possibly yet find a way back to.
Hilda came to the centre for a week-long fiction-writing course. She was one of those students you learned to pick out at the first encounter as a potential flash point, someone who might easily be offended, or offend others; you treated such students with special consideration but kept them at arm’s length. She was Canadian, probably in her midfifties, small, with thick, perfectly white hair chopped off in a crisp line at her shoulders; she was a vegan, and had requested special dietary arrangements in advance. When everyone gathered around the wood stove in the drawing room of the old house for introductions, Hilda chose to sit cross-legged and straight-backed on the floor, her slight neat body supple like a child’s. Although she wasn’t unfriendly, Ally noticed that she didn’t join in with the others’ self-deprecation: a touch of impatience snapped in her expression. Yet she obviously suffered when she had to read out her own work. She must have been good looking when she was younger, with Scandinavian features, wide mouth and hard cheekbones, something raw in her eyes, their hazel irises flecked with darker brown. She fixed the tutors while they were talking with a steady, critical, attentive gaze.
Although Ally loved books, she had realized since she began working at the centre that she didn’t have much interest in knowing how they were written—how characters were developed or plots structured or any of the other things the teachers held forth about and the students soaked up so avidly. All of them, writers and would-be writers, were consumed with a sort of fever over this process of writing and being published; some of the would-bes seemed to hope that by rubbing up close enough against the published ones they might
catch something. That week, it was her turn to take the tutors into town for the midcourse lunch. Ann said that she liked Hilda: she’d had an interesting life. But Frank, who was from Glasgow, tall and loose-bodied with a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, complained that she was wearing him down with her persistence.
–She’s stuck to my elbow whenever I look down, asking whether I’ve read her rewrites yet, or what I think of Robertson Davies. She’s so intense.
–Intense isn’t a bad thing.
–What’s her novel about? Ally asked.
–In the sixties, she hung around with arty types in some sort of commune. The central character has an affair with a rock star. It ought to be more interesting. How many Canadian rock stars do you know?
They could think of only Robbie Robertson. They decided that it wasn’t him; the character was a singer-songwriter.
–She does this awful folksy thing: he’s called the Guitar Player. “The Guitar Player did this.” “The Guitar Player did that, stuck a spliff under his strings, sent out his lonely song into the night, across the lake.” Imagine writing about a crowd of egomaniacal hippies doing drugs and it’s not funny? Also, there’s too much nature in it. One tree will do, as far as I’m concerned. Symbolism. One tree can stand in for the whole caboodle.
Some of the writers who came to tutor the courses were nice, but not all of them were. Some were funny about the students, especially the crazies, the ones who brought the two thousand handwritten pages of their novel in a plastic bag, or wrote from the perspective of a donkey abused by its owner. These eccentrics might turn out to be geniuses but usually didn’t. Ally wasn’t disappointed in the writers: she hadn’t expected anything from them in the first place; it hadn’t occurred to her to be interested in writers as individuals beyond their work. To her relief no one whose books she’d read ever came to the centre, although sometimes she had to pretend to have read the writers who did. The writers could be fairly crazy, too; you had to be vigilant not to trip up over their vanity and anxiety. Luckily, most of her favourites were dead.
At the end of the course, on her evaluation sheet, Hilda made a number of points about how it could have been better organized. Under the question “What was the most important thing you learned in your time here?” she left the space empty. A few weeks later Ally stood behind her in a queue at the supermarket. She hadn’t realized that Hilda lived nearby but she couldn’t have mistaken her, with her crisp white hair, in stretch leggings and trainers and a red down jacket. Ally wasn’t working that afternoon. She had told her mum to go to bed and promised to cook tea. In her wire basket she had sausages and eggs and tins of baked beans and a plastic pack of four jam doughnuts, one each (she had another brother, James, fourteen). She’d put on weight since she’d been home: not much, but enough to make her aware of some new soft fat around her waistline and cushioning her chin. Outside it was already dark at four o’clock, a sleety rain was driving across the supermarket car park. In Hilda’s basket there was olive oil, a tin of cannellini beans, fresh pasta, a lemon, a bottle of white wine.
Hilda had not noticed Ally waiting behind her, so Ally could easily not have said anything. Seeing the selection of things in Hilda’s basket, though—her brave indifference to her surroundings—Ally didn’t want her to go off into the night without acknowledgment.
–Hello Hilda, she said. – How’s the novel going?
Usually it was the one question that couldn’t fail with course-goers. But Hilda turned from the checkout with a face of pure resentment: staring and challenging.
–Who are you? Were you in that course? I don’t remember you.
People looked at them. Ally felt exposed, as if she were pretending to be something she wasn’t. Almost certainly some of the people looking would know what had happened to her family: it was a small town, and usually she was careful to make herself inconspicuous. Her mother complained that she hid behind her long hair. While Ally explained, admitting that it was unlikely that Hilda would remember her—she’d mostly been in the office, present only once in the evening—Hilda was packing her shopping into the canvas bag she’d brought, deliberately, as if she had a system. She paid with a card, querying something on her bill.
–I thought the olive oil was one-eighty-nine?
–That’s only if you buy two bottles, the girl at the till said with flat indifference, not looking up from where she was staring at the slot that would spew the receipt. – If you only buy one, it’s two nineteen. It’s a special offer.
–That isn’t made very clear on the labelling on the shelf.
Ally was aware that everything about Hilda, especially her ringing, reasonable, confident Canadian voice, was making the till girl resent and despise her.
–I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, Hilda said to Ally, but not warmly, when she was finished. She hiked the canvas bag onto her shoulder. – I’m in a hurry, anyway. I have to go.
–It’s OK; don’t worry.
The till girl extended the same hostility to Ally: she had been outed now as belonging to Hilda’s type, cooking with olive oil, betraying themselves in oblivious loud voices. Even the most minor setbacks, in those months, could throw Ally completely. When she left the supermarket, Hilda was waiting for her where the positive neon universe of shopping bordered on the smudged antimatter outside, cars splashing out of the car park through the wet.
–Shit, that was rude of me, Hilda said. – What’s your name?
–Ally. No, really, it’s all right.
–Hey, you’re upset. I wasn’t that bad, was I? I think I owe you an explanation.
–There’s other stuff. It’s just been a bad day.
–You asked about my novel; that’s the thing. I’d waited a lot of years to write that novel. But, if you want to know, my novel died.
Ally wiped her face on her coat sleeve. – I’m sorry. Perhaps it isn’t really that bad. Maybe if you put it away for a few weeks and looked at it again you’d feel differently about it. I’ve heard writers at the centre say that.
–No, really, take it from me: the novel died. What other stuff? What kind of bad day? Can I share? Can I give you a lift somewhere?
Share? Ally thought. No, I don’t think so.
She said that she lived only ten minutes’ walk away, but Hilda insisted on driving her there—it was on her way—and it was easier to accept than to resist. The car was tiny, Continental looking, green coloured with a lighter-green leaf stencilled on the door, as distinctively alien in the car park as Hilda had been among the shoppers inside. The interior smelled of dog, although there wasn’t one: Hilda explained that she had been at work all afternoon—she was a part-time receptionist at the health centre—and she’d had to leave her dog at home.
–Drop me here, please, Ally said. – This is the end of my street. There’s no point in turning up into it; you’d only get stuck in the one-way.
Hilda pulled out of the stream of traffic onto the pavement. It was home time; there were queues at the lights going out of town. Ally’s parents’ house was on an estate at the town’s edge; ahead, she could just make out the black slopes of the moors. In the car it was stuffy and slightly disgustingly cosy, the wipers going, the windows steaming up.
–So what was the other stuff? Hilda asked with the engine still running.
Ally, with her hand on the lever, about to open the car door, was thinking that nothing on earth was strong enough to pull this ugly secret out of her, least of all a woman who thought it mattered if her stupid novel had died. She was clenched up with the same resentment as the till girl, at Hilda’s ready wisdom shining about like a searchlight, the clean straight-backed way she sat at the steering wheel, her bag full of food for the wrong climate. The next moment, without even knowing that she’d changed her mind, she spilled over with her story—not the full version with all the details, but enough—surprising herself, as if she’d opened her mouth for something quite different.
–Je-sus, Hilda said.
&nb
sp; It was a relief to have told her. That would teach her not to ask. Ally watched the wipers push the water about in fan shapes on the windscreen.
–I can’t just drop you off on the side of the road after you’ve told me that. Can’t I come in? Won’t you come home with me? I’ve got dinner for two. We could talk.
–I have to go. My mum’s waiting. I promised I’d make the tea. And I don’t need to talk.
–OK, understood. But listen. Will you give me your phone number? I’d love to call. May I? We’ll fix up something. Come and meet the dog.
Only to be free of her, Ally wrote the number on an envelope that Hilda found in her bag. That’ll be the last I hear from her, she thought.
–Your name’s Ally, right? Hilda checked, leaning across the front seat after her.
Ally read novels, wrapped up in her duvet beside the central-heating radiator in her bedroom, borrowing them from the centre and the public library, sometimes finishing one and starting another without even changing her position or getting up to make coffee, like an addict. She knew that this wasn’t the right kind of reading. Studying for her literature degree, she had learned how to analyse the words and the themes; she had worked dutifully on her essay style, imitating academic articles. She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she’d seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else.
It was around this time that Ally’s mum started wearing Ryan’s shirts under her clothes. The first time Ally caught her doing it, she arrived home early one lunchtime and when she came in the back door Mum looked up with a guilty face from washing dishes at the sink. Through all those weeks, their house had never lapsed from its perfect tidiness and order. Last thing at night, her parents still rinsed out the coffee cups, plumped up the cushions on the sofa, unplugged the television. Her mother picked up threads from the carpet and put them in the wastepaper basket. Ally knew right away when she came into the kitchen that something was wrong in her mother’s shape, something bulky and distorting, when usually she was petite and trim. Ryan hadn’t been enormous for an eighteen-year-old but on his mother his checked lumberjack shirt was swamping, enveloping. Her thin neck looked scrawny, poking out through the top of it; her neat, faded face without its makeup seemed scoured clean. She hadn’t pulled the collar of the shirt out over the neck of her sweatshirt, as if she were hoping that no one would notice it, but it stuck up anyway.