by Tessa Hadley
—I chose you, without knowing what I was doing.
—That wasn’t what I thought, she said. I thought you’d hate me!
—Hate you! If you only knew!
She covered her face with her fingers. He couldn’t see if she was smiling or distraught at him.
—Whatever will my family think?
She was only a child. He needed to remember that. He must treat her with absolute tenderness. The idea of how young she was pricked his eyes with tears.
—I don’t care, he said. I had to tell you. I don’t care what they think.
They reached the top of the hill and set off across the heath for the water tower with its ring of trees, then down into the lumpy secretive craters where the bombs were supposed to have fallen. It was a dull afternoon. He took her hand—warm, small, strong—and pulled to try and slow her down. She let her hand stay in his. In here it seemed possible for him to try to kiss her. If they emerged from the craters to the level grass again he’d have lost his chance.
—You don’t know me well enough to be in love with me, she said.
—I don’t need to know you. Not in the way you mean.
—But I’m not like you. I’m not brilliant or an important artist or anything.
—That’s exactly it. I don’t want you to be those things. You’re real. It’s so real. You’re not trying to be something else.
The path became too narrow for them to walk side by side. She went first and he followed, frowning, tripping over the bramble roots that grew across the dirt, not daring to reach out for her. He stared at her body moving under her clothes. Surely she had modeled for him once or twice; he tried to remember the detail of how her buttocks curved generously from her narrow waist, how her wide thighs slanted down into her knees. He couldn’t believe that he had not loved her then, when he was drawing her.
The idea of Iris was stuck in his mind, of course, quivering and sore like a dark poisoned splinter. Iris had strange moods; there were hours at a time she would sit staring at nothing or with her face wet with tears. When she was like this everything he said was wrong; he crept around the flat guiltily or escaped to meet his friends. Involuntarily he pictured her sitting like this now, numbly absorbed in the idea of his treachery, although she couldn’t actually know about it yet.
—You have a lovely nature, he said, stumbling after Joyce. Mine is so stupid and so ugly. You don’t know me. If you knew me, you wouldn’t want me.
—I know your paintings, she said.
—It’s true. You know my paintings. That’s all you need to know. You see? You understand everything, without even trying.
She stopped still on the path ahead of him.
—All right, she said softly.
He wasn’t sure at first if he had heard her properly. He couldn’t see her face.
—All right, then.
He came up behind her and put his arms around her, reaching inside her jacket so that her breasts were in his hands, springy and jutting in the stiff brassiere she wore under her wool sweater; he kissed her neck on the nape and behind her ears, with the soft tail of her hair in his face. She smelled of bacon and syrup with traces of perfume from last night, wholesome and good. He stood kissing her for long minutes like that, pressing her breasts with his palms, before she turned round in his arms and kissed him back full on his mouth, with a boldness that must mean she had some experience in such things (which after all was probably a relief). Now he couldn’t believe that last night they had lain side by side and he had let her send him back to sleep with Iris.
A man walking his dog had to step into the long grass to avoid them where they blocked the path, grumbling at them disapprovingly.
—We can’t ever go to your flat, Joyce said matter-of-factly in his ear. And you’ve seen mine. We won’t ever be able to be alone, you know.
He suggested something hesitantly, fearful she might be offended.
—I’ve got keys to my parents’ house. They’re away at Torquay with my sister for a week’s holiday. I’m looking after the cat.
She put up no fight at all. He felt her give way; she sagged heavily against him.
—When? she said. When can we go there?
—I don’t know. What about your mother?
—She’ll be all right. Is it far?
—The other side of Benteaston, in St. Peter’s. About forty minutes’ walk.
—Do you have the key on you?
—Yes, he said, feeling in his jacket pocket. Oh, God. And some scraps for the cat.
He pulled out the greasy package done up in waxed bread wrappings that Iris had given him to take.
—I’d forgotten all about these.
—You won’t ever be able to talk again about my lovely nature, Joyce said, with her face pressed against his shoulder. Don’t think I don’t know what I’m doing, deceiving Iris. Don’t think I don’t know it’s wrong.
—We aren’t going to deceive her, Ray said. I’m going to tell her. In the next few days I’m going to tell her. You’re the one. I’m going to marry you.
He hadn’t known this was true until the words were out.
He was full of fear of Iris—the idea of her and of what was going to have to happen to her seemed wrapped in thick and ugly shadows. He was also angry at her, because she made what he had to do so difficult.
—Don’t be silly, Joyce said, without lifting her head from his shoulder to see his face, laughing muffledly, happily. Don’t be so silly. It can’t be true.
* * *
Joyce hadn’t thought at all about his parents’ house while they were on their way there. It had been merely their destination, aimed at blindly as they hurried with their burning purpose along the quiet Sunday streets. (Really, she pictured them burning with it, the suburban pavements along which they passed scorched and flaming behind them.) She had imagined how they would turn to each other once they were alone at last, but she had not imagined any particular setting for this clinching encounter, no furniture or rooms. She knew things about his family that should have prepared her for just the kind of place it was: his father working for the Co-op, his mother with her whist drives, his sister at secretarial college. He had dropped her hand as they approached; of course, the neighbors knew him and would know his wife. A tall tabby hailed him in a hoarse accusing meow from where it waited on the doorstep beyond a little green-painted gate, and he spoke back to it, apologizing for being late. The house was on a corner in a quiet avenue of similar houses, fringed fawn blinds at its windows, a striped sun awning rolled up above the front door, two apple trees and an Anderson shelter in the back garden. If it had been a slum, with cracks in the walls and damp running down and crusts of bread on the floor, Joyce would have taken it in her stride. But she stopped short in the entrance hall when they had shut the front door behind them, disconcerted because it was so ordinary.
The hall was dim, the blinds were drawn; spilled drops of sapphire and ruby glowed on the tiled floor where light came through the stained glass in the porch. With Timmy the cat winding under his feet, Ray led her through a dining room with a tall wooden over-mantel and a ticking clock and brass fire irons; pools of pale light were collected on the high-polished table and sideboard. There were dark squares and rectangles of paintings hung by chains from the picture rail, but Joyce knew without looking that they weren’t Ray’s or anything remotely like Ray’s; they were cows wading in brooks rusty with sunset light or yearning shepherdesses on the moors. It wasn’t quite like anywhere that Joyce herself had ever lived: more—much more—comfortably furnished and prosperous than anything Lil had ever been able to afford; not as eccentric and distinguished and ramshackle as the old house in the estuary; more old-fashioned than Aunt Vera’s bright flat with its pale blue Formica kitchen. She watched Ray hunting in a cupboard in the breakfast room for a plate to put the cat’s scraps on. He was still mysterious, the artist with the gift of knowledge. But he was also, after all, just the boy who had grown up in this house, and
played with his sister under the shelter, and knew where the forks were kept and where the matches were, and had been given, like her own brother, a printing set or a penknife for Christmas. (He showed her afterward where he had in fact tried out his new penknife, years before, on the arm of his mother’s leather-covered chair.) This vision of his familiarity, like a vision of their closeness to come, was more shocking to her, more absolutely a revolution in her apprehension of everything, than even the flame of excitement as she waited for him to take her upstairs and make love to her.
—I do know you, she said into his neck, wrapping herself about him from behind while he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. I do know who you are.
—I know you do, said Ray, that’s why I’ve chosen you.
—Sometimes you’ll wish I didn’t. You’ll wish I was someone more remote and lofty minded.
—At this moment, he said, I can’t contemplate it. Not with you pressed up against me like that.
He brought sheets, and they lay down under a green silk eiderdown in his old room, which was papered with a pattern of green trellis hung with baskets of flowers. Joyce said she would launder the sheets and iron them before his mother came back. Probably it was strange for him, this bringing her here to his childhood bedroom; he was more shy and self-doubting than she had imagined, after all his talk. They didn’t put on any lights or draw the curtains, in case the neighbors saw. Ray brought in a portable enamel paraffin stove; as the hours passed and it grew dark outside, an image of the pattern of diamonds cut in the top of the stove was cast tremblingly onto the slanting ceiling.
* * *
Joyce changed her mind, later, about iris’s paintings. years later she bought one of Iris’s small oils that she saw in an exhibition of local artists. This was when all the turmoil was behind them, all the shouting and weeping and shamed relatives and clumsy ugly self-justification; they had arrived by then at a point where she and Iris could even occasionally meet at the same parties, although they ignored each other. Iris was painting under her maiden name, Iris Neave, although she did remarry (she never had children). She must have recovered from the crisis of confidence in her work that she had once spoken of to Joyce.
The painting was of a little cream jug and a spoon on a white tray cloth edged with lace. It was curious how Iris, who was no good with real food or hospitality (Joyce was the one who turned out to be good at these things), should choose so consistently to paint domestic objects: fruit and cakes and labeled jars of jam; teapots and sugar tongs and plates of nuts and cheese.
—Dainty, said Ray, so dainty it makes me want to smash something. How can she still want to paint as if the world hasn’t changed? Tray cloth indeed! Who uses a tray cloth these days? It’s too pretty; don’t you think it’s saccharine and mendacious? (It was he who seemed to have clung on longer to the need to justify himself: he wasn’t ever very nice about Iris.)
But Joyce didn’t think so, although she didn’t try to explain and didn’t really even examine for herself what it was she liked about the picture. If she happened to glance at it, it was a soothing still point in her busy days. She liked the careful continence of the brushstrokes. She liked its irony (Iris surely knew the tray cloth was old-fashioned?). She liked the idea that the cream was held there inside the jug and never poured.
Four
It had been going to be such a lovely Saturday.
Full, and busy, but Joyce didn’t mind that. In the morning, while Daniel had his nap and Zoe played, she made the chocolate cream pudding from a Len Deighton recipe cut out from the newspaper: cream, eggs, sugar, butter, brandy, chocolate. The family had been eating meanly for a week—beans on toast, tomatoes on toast, plates of cheese and lettuce for her—so that she could splash out on this dinner party. She stuck sponge finger biscuits like a palisade all around the cut glass bowl Lil had given her, then poured the chocolate mixture into the middle and put it in the fridge to set. She impressed herself by resisting the temptation to taste any or scrape out the bowl and as a consequence felt gratifyingly hollowly thin.
When she had washed up the cooking things, she had time to sit down at the table and drink a black instant coffee while Zoe had squash and biscuits. Zoe—a steady shy four-year-old, with light brown hair cut short like a boy’s—was taking advantage of Daniel’s being out of the way to fill in her magic coloring book; you brushed the drawings with plain water and like a miracle colors sprang out from the page. She worked painstakingly and neatly, her tongue stuck out in concentration, on a panting dog with its head cocked winningly sideways, boys playing ball in a suburban garden, a little girl in a maid’s apron and cap. Ray had groaned in real pain when Zoe first brought the coloring book home (his mother had bought it for her); he threatened to throw it out, but Joyce understood the appeal of these happy obedient pictures and had signaled frowningly to him not to make a fuss. Anyway, Ray had soon forgotten about the book’s existence.
Yesterday Joyce had dusted and vacuumed and washed floors until she was sweating and gritty with dirt. Today, for the first time in weeks, the sun shone into their basement flat: a weak sweet early spring sunshine that fingered its exposure into some forgotten corners and found out cobwebs, so that she had to get her duster out again. She didn’t mind the excuse for gazing critically around her. The rooms awaited company like a stage set: centered on the distinction and seriousness of Ray’s paintings, glowing with the careful thought and tending she had put into all that surrounded the paintings, the tasteful and original furniture and ornaments. She was full (it had turned out) of ingenuity and practical resourcefulness: she knew how to make their flat look modern and stylish even on Ray’s meager income (he was only working part-time at the college and hadn’t sold much work this past couple of years). She had rescued some dainty kitchen chairs someone had put out for a Guy Fawkes night bonfire and painted them with black enamel. She had had flat squares of foam cut and covered them in thick colored cottons, orange and olive green and mustard yellow, then piled them up in a block. She spread tall grasses and flower heads out to dry on newspapers above the immersion heater in the airing cupboard and arranged them in two old earthenware tobacco jars she had bought in a junk shop for a shilling. The look she went for was contemporary Scandinavian, earth colors and clean shapes: a black wrought-iron candelabrum, stainless steel cutlery, coarse-woven linen place mats.
The plan was that when Daniel woke up she would take him and Zoe round to her mother’s. Lil still lived at the same flat in Benteaston, along with Martin, who was studying for his doctorate in chemistry and working as a laborer building the new bypass. There Aunt Vera would look after them until Lil finished work at the cake shop. Aunt Vera did have grandchildren of her own, but they were in America, so she yearned for a share in Joyce’s. She was not exactly a natural with small children. Daniel and Zoe preferred Grandma Lil, who would greet them with bags of leftover cakes and arms open wide, shouting, “Who’s my bestest bestest girl (or boy) in all the world, then?” But they tolerated Vera and her shy stiff efforts to be strict with them and to encourage Zoe’s reading and get Daniel to talk. (She reproached Lil for using baby language with him, insisting that this would “hold him up”; Lil took no notice.)
When she had left the children, Joyce had an appointment at the hairdresser’s; after that she would come back to the flat by herself and get on with cooking the fiddly beef olives she was doing for the main course. The little packages of thinly sliced beef spread with mushroom stuffing had to be tied with threads individually before they were sautéed. She had made the chicken liver terrine for the first course the night before. Ray would pick the children up on his way back from the college, and there would be plenty of time to get them into bed and asleep before the guests arrived. Joyce already knew what she was going to wear: she had made herself a new low-cut dress from a piece of gray slubbed silk left over from the days of the dressmaking business she had before the children came along. It had a difficult deep cowl neckline, three-quarter-lengt
h sleeves, and a peg skirt: she had bought a narrow black patent belt to wear with it. It was hanging now against the wardrobe in the bedroom, with a piece of tissue paper round the neck to protect it from dust, ready to put on after her quick last-minute bath. She could already imagine herself, moving suavely in the sexy top-heavy way forced by the shape of the skirt, wafting perfume, welcoming the guests into the rooms, enticingly lit by well-placed lamps and rich with the smells of the food cooking. Miles Davis would be weaving his spell from the record player.
Of course it would be up to Ray what record he put on. Sometimes he didn’t choose the kind of thing that Joyce wanted; if he was in a certain mood he might put on very far-out noisy fast jazz that nobody else really liked. But there was no point in worrying now about what his mood would be, at a point when there was nothing she could do about it.
* * *
The first thing that went wrong was that when she had got together a bag with all the things the children might need in the afternoon and was just about to put their coats on and fasten Daniel in the push chair, the front doorbell rang and Ann was standing there with a girlfriend.
Ann hadn’t really settled to anything since she finished at the university (she hadn’t done well in her exams; she had had a wild time instead and been the first person in town—by her own account—to wear black slacks so tight-fitting that they had to be zipped up the inside leg). At twenty-six she had been engaged twice and twice broken it off: one had been unsuitably too nice and one unthinkably too nasty (not that that would have stopped her in itself, but it turned out he had been living, all the time they were engaged, with some woman who even had a child by him). She had worked in a shoe shop, and as a nanny for some “ghastly” children, and currently had a job as a waitress at the cafeteria in the zoo. Her latest boyfriend had made Joyce’s heart stop cold in her chest when he was first introduced: he was a gray-faced ratty little man who wore a Teddy-boy draped suit and worked at a bookie’s. Luckily he didn’t seem to be as keen as Ann, and she made all the running, lurking about waiting to catch him as he came out of work, traipsing round the pubs to find where he might be drinking.