by Tessa Hadley
Alex’s looks were emphatic and un-English, slightly marked or damaged as an actor’s might be, or a dancer’s. He had his hair cut shorter than the others, as if he’d belonged in a different decade, and there was something light and cat-like in his movements, a tremor in his nicotine-stained fingers when he rolled a cigarette. Under the tight wool jumper his boxy narrow ribcage rose and fell with his asthmatic breathing. Christine was afraid of him, of his judgement. But she liked Zachary at once. He wasn’t attractive as Alex was: he was the only one, however, who really listened to what she and Lydia said, for its own sake. He had the gift of attending to other people with his whole awareness – alert not simply to the words they spoke, but to their palpable entire selves. Moving restlessly in his seat, shifting his whole body eagerly towards her, he sat on his hands because otherwise they flew into the air, gesticulating – he had been teased for that at school, and had done his best to suppress it because Alex said he gave too much away.
— Lydia’s told us about you, he said to Christine. — You’re writing about your namesake, Christina Rossetti. Isn’t that exciting? Won’t those women writers turn out to be the most interesting thing about nineteenth-century poetry after all? The sexy secret undergrowth around all those boring lofty male intellects.
Christine was startled because what he’d said reminded her of her pictures, which she had thought of somehow as an undergrowth. — I think so, she said. — But I’m not sure my supervisor agrees.
— Oh, he doesn’t matter!
— Well, he’s rather important to me, as I am embarked on this wretched PhD.
She couldn’t bear her own voice sounding clipped and prim in her ears, like an Oxbridge bluestocking. But Zachary was sympathetic at once. — Oh dear, is it wretched? That’s what I worried, when I was toying feebly with the idea of doing one.
— I mean I’m having a wonderful time, being paid to write about the poetry I love. I’m very happy really.
— Goodness knows what I’d have written about anyway, he said — I don’t seem to have turned out as any kind of expert on anything. I just liked the idea of the lonely endeavour. I wouldn’t actually have been any good at loneliness. I fall in love with an idea: you know, the dedicated scholar, the lamplight late at night in the little carrel (don’t you love that word, carrel, whatever it means?), the piles of books, the flash of transforming insight at two in the morning. And then I stumble into the trap of thinking I could actually be one of those scholars, instead of just imagining them. But the truth is I’m a generalist, I’m just a butterfly. My mind won’t sit still on one subject. I’m not like Alex, he’s the real thing.
— Alex frightens me a bit, Christine confessed.
Zachary considered this carefully. — To be honest, he frightens me a little bit too.
But he didn’t start talking about Alex as she expected. Instead he asked Christine all about herself – and she didn’t feel any of her usual anxiety, that whoever she was in conversation with would prefer someone more interesting. They discovered they’d grown up only half a mile apart, in Hampstead; they had their childhood terrain in common. They’d both been taken, for treats, to tea at the Louis Patisserie. Zachary seemed exaggeratedly delighted by this coincidence. Perhaps Lydia was right, Christine thought, and he was the perfect man for her. In his presence she felt at ease, and open; though she wasn’t exactly drawn to him physically, not in the usual way. Yet she liked it when he touched her – which he often did, for emphasis while they were talking, and kissing her hand when they parted. Somehow he didn’t remind you of sex, as some men did, at every moment. There was no hidden suggestion in their conversation – and this was mostly a relief.
Zachary was one of those men who seem only provisionally young, their youth a mere passing phase on the way to the maturity where they will be more at home. His head was too big for youth, or his features were too strongly stamped with his personality – wet red mouth, mass of frizzy black hair; no beard in those days, and a daintily cleft chin which his friends forgot in the years afterwards, when it was covered up. His vividly pink and white complexion flushed quickly with enthusiasm. There was already something bear-like in his gestures and loud deep voice and laughter, though he wasn’t bulky yet, only plump. Leaning across the table, he noisily marshalled the next round; he knew all about the different beers and guzzled down pints and pints of them, pretending to discriminate between them, more voluble and insistent as he got drunker.
Christine was scraping away at another picture in her room one evening: piles of books on her desk drawn from a low angle, their chunky solidity exaggerated, the stem of her Anglepoise desk lamp snaking sinisterly behind them, one book open to show a poem magically twisting and disassembling on its page. When Lydia burst into the room excitedly, she pushed the scraperboard away under her papers and pretended to be making notes. Lydia’s face was heated from the bar, her hair was sticking to her damp forehead, she reeked of cigarette smoke. Someone had told her that Alex was splitting up with Juliet, he was moving out of the house in Kensal Rise and was going to get a flat with Zachary. — It’s my chance, isn’t it?
— I suppose so. I’m still not sure about him.
— At least he looks at me, these days: but I can’t read what he’s feeling. What will I do, Chris, if I can’t make him love me? I won’t be able to bear it!
Christine felt a spasm of irritation. She said she expected that Lydia would be able to bear it after all. People bore worse things. — You’re annoyed with me, Lydia said sadly. She sat on the side of Christine’s bed, hugging her arms around her chest as if she was cold, although she was still wearing her coat and her fur collar. — I don’t blame you. I’ve become one of those dull people droning on about their feelings. You think I’m making all this up. But it’s real, it hurts so much. If I can’t have Alex I’m not complete.
— You’ve just fixated on him because you can’t have him.
— But it’s not something inside my head. It’s the reality of his separate existence, his body and his mind, all the details of his life and history. I need to know what he thinks before I know what to think myself. I’ve allowed those things to get inside me and now I can’t close them off again. I’ve never done this with anyone before, you know that. I’ve always liked men but they’ve come after me, I’ve never gone in pursuit of anyone.
Lydia’s expression was set and desperate. She was aware of the tranquillity of Christine’s room, which she had broken into with her turbulent emotion: the desk was piled up with volumes from the library, Christine had one of them open in front of her, she had hardly lifted her head from where she had paused with her biro still on the page. Lydia envied this little scene of dedicated work, which seemed in that moment unattainable to her. — Unless Alex wants me I’m not real, she said. — I’m just a shadow.
Christine put down her biro, she made an effort. — I don’t think I’ve ever felt that about anyone.
— Don’t hate me, Chris. It’s all right for you. You’re going to be so happy with Zachary. Imagine how easy your life is going to be. He’ll adore you and look after you, and you’ll have so much money that everything will be made easy, you won’t ever have to work unless you want to. You’ll be able to buy all the beautiful clothes you want, and live in a beautiful house.
— Don’t be ridiculous, Lydia. I hardly know him.
Christine was surprised by the violence she felt, being wrenched out of her concentration on her picture. Usually, if she was working on her thesis, she looked forward to being interrupted at this time of the evening. She was uneasily aware of her growing preoccupation with her drawings: as if what began as a small black inkblot at the centre of her vision was spreading, eating up the attention she was supposed to be devoting to criticism, sapping her intellectual rigour. She borrowed art books from home without asking her mother, kept them under her bed and pored over them secretly, joyously: the flame-orange hair of Degas’s women, the ferocity of his black lines, the sublime modern
ity of his figures cropped inside the frame, the jagged angles of their elbows, his compositions cut across with empty space. It was wrenching, humiliating, to go back from these to her own stupid efforts. And yet the noise of the nib as she scratched at the black wax felt intimate as breathing, filling up the room. She was back inside the irresponsible absorption of her childhood, when she had drawn lying on her stomach on the floor in her bedroom, inventing a whole alternative universe, an island with mountains and a city and its own history and fragments of language. She could still remember letters from her secret alphabet.
Zachary knew how Alex was humiliated by the failure of his marriage: they had thought they were so thoroughly adult, embarked on the true shape of their lives at almost thirty. It wouldn’t have occurred to Zachary not to like any woman Alex chose, and he had opened his affections to take in Juliet; he enjoyed her brittle banter, she had babied him. And Sandy was the first child he’d given his heart to, as well as any number of extravagant presents; he’d spent so much time at their house, it had seemed his second home. But of course his allegiance was to Alex. He understood how his friend resented his new role as an estranged father, picking up and dropping off his child according to a fixed timetable. Manoeuvring subtly, Zachary nudged him into compliance, and Juliet was grateful. It was Zachary who built shelves at the new flat for Sandy’s books and toys. Together he and Alex took Sandy to the park to play football, and at home Zachary dug out with a knife the mud from between the studs of Sandy’s football boots; by this time he had started full-time school. Later Zachary bought him his first guitar.
Painstakingly Alex began building a new relation with the boy – bought him a working miniature steam engine for Christmas, made models with him, helped him collect stamps and look up all the different countries in an atlas. He was never spontaneously very warm with Sandy, though; his strong feelings for his son were always tamped down behind the defences of that period of the end of his first marriage. Alex ought to have enjoyed himself in his new life: he could drink and smoke and entertain his friends without offending anyone, stay up talking or reading until the small hours – it was a relief not to be crowded up against Juliet’s hostility at every turn, and found perpetually wanting. And yet he chafed in his freedom and wasn’t quite at home in it. Zachary liked the same music and kept the same hours, his sanity was a balm, but their shared cohabitation was too frictionless. It almost reminded Alex of school, only without the antagonism of teachers. It was puerile like school.
They were domesticated in that cautious way of heterosexual men living together, hedging their housework about with mockery, as if it were a performance they could leave off at any moment: they painted the walls of the flat, made numberless pots of tea, washed up when the sink was full. Zachary cooked pans of curry and chili, Alex baked fish in foil in the oven with herbs and olive oil. When they smoked they found their conversations very penetrating or very funny, couldn’t remember in the morning what they’d laughed at. They were carefully tactful: neither asked after the other’s well-being, even when they were stoned – least of all then. Male tact was an iron law; without the tactless interventions of women, Alex thought, men would never tell each other anything. Grown men ought to live with women, he believed that. That was what his maleness was for, to be balanced against women’s unlikeness, their opposition.
Lydia persuaded Alex to bring Sandy on a visit to the house she and Christine shared with other students; Alex was mildly curious, wondering how these girls lived, imagining some kind of hippie home with jam-making and patchwork. But the dirty student house, which the girls thought so romantic, shocked him to the core. It was a detached half-timbered mock-Tudor villa, tucked away behind ceaseless traffic on the Edgware Road, in a garden so wildly overgrown it was like its own little wood. Lydia took them up to her big room on the first floor; Christine was out at a meeting with her PhD supervisor. The house smelled of mothballs and decaying carpets, and even the light coming through the windows seemed brown with damp. The girls found the old rose-garlanded wallpaper – which hung off the wall in places, in wet sheets – quaintly nostalgic; it oppressed Alex with a memory from his early childhood he hadn’t known he’d kept, of visiting his grandmother, his mother’s mother, in a cottage in the country. No, not cottage, not country: those words were too irretrievably English. Alex had visited his grandmother in a hovel, that was more like it, amidst a terrain of relentless sodden flatness, muddy fields without hedgerows, beige-coloured in his memory.
He couldn’t know that Lydia – not good with housework – had spent the morning tidying up and spraying the furniture vaguely with polish in preparation for his visit; she had even picked flowers for a vase from the garden. To her the room looked unprecedentedly ordered and elegant. And she had put out fancy cakes, with coloured icing, on a pink-and-gold painted plate: Zachary tucked into them enthusiastically. Alex never ate cake. Sandy climbed under the sheets in Lydia’s bed, and she and Zachary teased him together, covering him up and asking, where’s Sandy gone? Then they ripped the blankets off to expose him again, which was surely a game for babies; each time they flapped the blankets the asthmatic constriction in Alex’s chest thickened. Lydia flashed glimpses of her creamy breasts from the neck of her blouse, and her belt was fastened so tightly across her velvet skirt that it must be marking the flesh of her stomach: nice English girls flaunted themselves with no fear of the consequences. He set off downstairs in search of fresh air, trying several doors: a boy eating chips doused in ketchup at the kitchen table was presumably one of the housemates, and didn’t look in the least surprised at this intrusion by a stranger. Did they let just anyone in off the street, to wander around their home? He was glad he had outgrown this improvised, slumming phase of his own youth.
Pushing at another door, he found himself in a bedroom, austerely tidy and half-dark even in the daylight, because its French windows opened onto a conservatory overgrown with tall weeds, watered presumably by rain coming in through broken panes of glass. He guessed, from the sombre books piled high on the desk, that this was Christine’s room, and cast his eye down the spines of the books, to see what she was reading. Her passion for the musty Victorians with their virginal frissons was a mistake. But what he also saw on her desk was more piquant – drawings in soft pencil on thick paper: one of an empty chair; one of a bed when someone had got out of it, the tangled sheets as sculptural as marble; and one of clothes on a hanger, half composing the shape of the human who would wear them. He liked the solidity of their forms and their enigma, their air of proposing a visual puzzle, defining a shape by its absence. Then Christine, returned from her supervision, was in her coat in the doorway behind him, hugging more books and a folder to her chest.
— Don’t look at those, she said agitatedly, pushing past him and sweeping the pictures up, shoving them out of sight into a drawer. — They’re awful things. I’m only messing around.
— They’re good, Alex encouraged her. — They’re interesting. You should show them to Zach, he knows about this stuff. He knows people who buy art.
— I don’t want to show them to anyone.
— I like their emptiness, the absences in them.
— That’s only because I can’t do people yet. I’m going to learn how to do them. I’ve signed up for life-drawing classes.
— Don’t put people in them. People only spoil things.
— Oh! So that’s why your poems are all about furniture.
Alex laughed. He hadn’t known that she had read his poems. He took this girl in properly for the first time: her stiffness and thinness, her evasive look, her dark-blooded lips in their asymmetrical smile so wary and withholding. He forgave her for preferring the kind of poetry that rhymes.
Lydia bumped into Alex accidentally on Malet Street, on her way to work in the dusk one winter evening. The foggy air was tarry with fumes, cars sloughed past on the wet road monotonously, eighteenth-century house fronts loomed against the last light. Because Lydia was always im
agining Alex, it was confounding to have him suddenly substantial in front of her, hunched against the cold in his greatcoat and long scarf, blocking her path. She sounded almost accusing. — What are you doing here?
He was on his way from teaching, with books and student work in the worn briefcase which had been his father’s. Because he didn’t want to go home – on these dark evenings he missed the old domesticity with his wife and child – he asked her to come for a coffee. He liked Lydia better without her playfulness, her flirting; she was flustered because their meeting had taken her by surprise. They went into a student place, found a table in the corner. Lydia had never been alone with Alex before, and almost wished they hadn’t met, worrying that she hadn’t washed her hair, didn’t look her best. Yet this was the kind of opportunity she dreamed of in her fantasies.
Alex was full of talk left over from his teaching session. He had been given some first year undergraduate literature courses now, as well as the French language class. While he spoke about nineteenth-century French novels he allowed himself to notice Lydia’s blonde hair picking up glints in the electric light, and the fineness of her jaw when she lit a cigarette; she had unbuttoned her coat and the shape of her breasts was outlined under her sweater. He thought that the white flesh of her face was bruised and dented with fatigue. — Are you working too hard? he kindly asked.
Lydia opened her eyes wide at him. — To tell you the awful truth, Alex, I’ve only just got out of bed, I’m still half asleep. Don’t you know that I’m horribly lazy?
He was shocked. — But it’s dark already! You slept away the whole day.
— Did I miss anything? The day doesn’t look that good.