by Tessa Hadley
— Christ, Juliet, Alex said. — You’re humiliating yourself.
— I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, said Christine, astonished – though not without some twinge of unease, thinking of that night they’d rummaged through Juliet’s cupboards and read her letters. Then Juliet lunged and slapped her very hard, knocking her head sideways. Scuffling with his wife, Alex grabbed at her flailing wrists and swore at her. Wedding guests began to look over at them. Juliet kicked at her husband’s shins with her heels and tried to kick Christine, who jumped back out of range. Someone who knew Juliet took her by the arm, persuaded her to sit down inside the house. — That’s not the end of it, she shouted across her shoulder. Christine put her hand to her face; tears sprang into her eyes for the shock and stinging pain, and for how virtuous she was, and how wronged. — I can’t believe she just did that, Alex said, appalled. — She was drunk, I can’t believe her stupidity. Did she hurt you? I’m so sorry. Did she leave marks? Let me see.
He touched her face gently with his fingers, tilting it up towards him, scrutinising it tenderly and close up, frowning; she proffered herself for his attention acceptingly. Then he put his cool palm on the hot marks on her cheek.
For such a long time, when Alex declared his feelings for her, Christine couldn’t allow herself to believe in them. She was in no hurry to introduce him to her parents.
— Why have you chosen me? Why would you choose someone like me?
She was reluctant to be overwhelmed, afraid of his completeness, the force of his manner, his knowledge and inexorable critical judgement. He said things which bewildered or upset her: that England was run by grown-up clever public-school boys in thrall to their nanny, as if life was a sport. — I can’t forgive their furtive, stunted sexuality. And how they’re so serenely oblivious.
— But I’m English.
— You’re different.
— My brothers are English and they’re not like that.
Yet she felt the glow too, the golden good fortune of being chosen. At first she liked him best when he was with other people, and she could steal looks at him shyly and obliquely, as if she didn’t know him. When she tried to tease him and deflect him, which was what she did with her brothers, he wouldn’t let her, he was too serious. Christine agonised over whether Lydia would feel betrayed. — It doesn’t matter what Lydia thinks, he said. — She’s too young, she sleeps until four in the afternoon. She’s silly, she’s still a child.
Christine stared at him. — Then that’s what I am too, she said. — We’re the same. You don’t know me.
— You don’t know yourself, he said.
When he made love to her eventually – she was still afraid of him, but didn’t like to seem a prude – his nicotine-stained scalding fingers, stripping away layer upon layer in the dark, seemed to expose her as if to a stranger; she wanted to keep up her guard at first, didn’t want him to know if she was carried away. She found herself thinking of his old study in Kensal Rise, with its heavy typewriter and broken blind, its shelves full of books in unknown languages.
Three
THEY DECIDED TO BRING ZACHARY’S body to lie in the Garret’s Lane gallery which had been his life work. This was Grace’s idea. — It’s always been a sacred place, she said. The art gallery was a conversion of an eighteenth-century chapel, and had won prizes for the architect: the airy purity of the original interior had been preserved, the maze-like display spaces were composed of a sequence of white folding walls, which could be arranged in different combinations. Zachary had died in the light-filled office with its walls of pink brick, modernist furniture and arched window looking out onto an acacia tree in the courtyard garden. In the week before the funeral, artists associated with the gallery came and went, bringing in pieces on loan for the unique occasion: some of the big names who’d begun with Zachary or been with him from the beginning – Jane Ogden, Hari Rostami, Martin Shield – along with others more modestly successful whose work he’d championed, and those young artists out from art school who’d won the coveted Garret’s Lane Trust apprenticeships, and had studios in the outbuildings. The Trust was Zachary’s characteristic invention. He’d decided that some of his old friends in art were making too much money and needed to be relieved of the burden of it. As well as the apprenticeships, the Trust helped to fund the gallery’s work in taking art into local schools and bringing schoolchildren into the gallery, and the art projects with refugees and victims of torture. Two of the current apprentices had come through from the refugee group.
It was Grace’s idea to bring her father’s body home to the gallery but it was effective, judicious Hannah – compact and heavy-bosomed, dyed red hair swinging in her eyes – who made the arrangements, cajoling and forceful on her phone, always seeing the shortest way through any problem. They closed the gallery to the public though they kept the cafe-bookshop open. The team that had worked with Zachary and Hannah came in at all hours, they hardly seemed to take a break, helping to store away the exhibition which had been in progress, hanging and re-hanging according to what turned up, solving the problem of display for those fragile pieces which might be in danger in a crowd. Zachary had always had one of Christine’s paintings in his office, opposite the desk where he worked – one of the series of self-portraits she’d done when she was pregnant with Isobel. This was carried downstairs for the occasion, to hang among the others.
Lydia and Grace moved back into their home adjacent to the gallery; Alex and Christine and Isobel came to keep them company, at least for these first nights. Alex and Christine took the big front bedroom because Lydia said she wasn’t ready to sleep in there, not yet. Isobel put a mattress on the floor beside the bed where Grace slept naked on her front, with her arm hanging down, hand curled as if she was half-holding something. Isobel slipped her own fingers inside her friend’s, found nothing there. She didn’t know if Grace could feel her, in her sleep; perhaps her hand tightened on Isobel’s – but that might have only been a spasm of the thrumming, manic, overheated engine Isobel could feel driving Grace along, never letting up its effort onwards into this grief. At least she had let go the idea of the death mask. Now instead she was obsessing about photographing her father in his coffin. She’d made up her mind that the picture itself must represent the emotional difficulty of its taking, and she was working with a family friend, a photographer who used the wet-plate collodion process. He would prepare the glass plates for her and make a temporary darkroom in the gallery, because they must be processed immediately. Grace spent hours researching, calling Isobel over to her laptop to admire the mournful old photographs with their depth of light and hair-fine detail, mossy darkness eating away at their edges.
Christine stripped the bed where Zachary and Lydia had last slept, then put the linen in the washing machine. She opened the window wide, snapping the clean sheets in the air as she spread them, raising dust, trying to exorcise the significance of the scene. Sitting down on Zachary’s side of the bed she picked up his things one by one, glad to be alone with them: the book with its marker a third of the way through, the stale glass of water, its sides furred with bubbles, the Fitbit he had neglected to wear – he couldn’t resist a gadget. Morocco-leather slippers, backs trodden sloppily down, lay where they’d fallen when he last kicked them off, holding the shape of his feet, darkened with his sweat; picking them up tenderly, she arranged them side by side. He had liked to prowl around at home in his slippers, heavy-footed and at ease, unbuttoned, domesticated, leaving a trail behind him of half-drunk cups of strong black coffee. All these objects ought to compose him – they promised solidity and permanence, she was incredulous that he could have slipped away between them. Opening his book to the place his marker kept for him, she stared at the page – were these the last words Zachary had read? It was about criminal justice in Baltimore: Christine remembered him full of outrage, declaiming statistics about young black men in the US prison system. But the book was dusty, his bookmark was only a third of the wa
y through, he didn’t finish things. She couldn’t find any message from him in the words.
Lydia’s hair was dishevelled, she hadn’t put on any make-up for days, her long face was blotched and naked. The room where she was sleeping seemed rank with her distress, like a den with an animal ranging around in it; the duvet was kicked into a heap on the bed and the bottom sheet was pulled out wildly from its moorings, snaking in a thick rope across the bare mattress.
— Oh, you’re reading, said Christine in surprise, picking up a paperback book, a Scandi thriller, from where it lay face down on a pillow, its spine cracked.
— Is that awful? Lydia said. — I mean, I should be reading Tolstoy or Keats or something.
— You need to lose yourself, that’s natural.
— I know Alex thinks I’m a coward. But really I’ve never pretended to be anything else – have I?
— Nobody thinks you’re a coward.
— How am I supposed to get through the hours, Chris? Everyone’s dreaming up beautiful and dignified things to do for Zachary; the funeral will be a work of art in itself. But I’m really quite ordinary without him, I haven’t got any talent for anything. I’m not like you.
— I don’t feel very talented right now. I feel useless.
Lydia marvelled at herself. — I’m the useless one. I never even did my own housework or learned to cook – and I had a nanny when Grace was little. Now I don’t know how I’m going to fill my days! I can’t go on with what we did before. What would I do in all those exciting places, meeting those wonderful people, on my own, without Zach’s unstoppable enthusiasm? His enthusiasm always seemed so risky to me, as if he was setting himself up for disappointment – though he never was disappointed. The world went on supplying him with beautiful people making their beautiful gestures: good things came into being, to fulfil his expectations. They won’t come into being for me, that’s for sure.
— Something will come into being for you. I know that as surely as I know anything.
— I can’t be here. I can’t stay in these rooms.
— You don’t have to be here. You can come back and stay with us, for as long as you like.
The heavy coffin was carried in as if some singular and controversial work were arriving for exhibition. Quite a crowd was gathered in the gallery: family and friends and helpers hung back around the edges of the space. It was Isobel who bravely went up first to look at Zachary, when the undertakers had gone: she did it for Grace. She had had this magnanimous ideal of duty since she was a little girl, befriending all the doomed, lonely children in her class. — Oh, it’s not too bad, she reported with relief. — It’s sort of like him but not like him.
— I’m so glad to see his face again, Grace said when she went over to look. — It makes me feel better.
The two girls stood holding onto each other, Grace weeping into Isobel’s shoulder, Isobel stroking her shorn head. Hannah carried flowers down from the office, vases full with tall white foxgloves and delphiniums and hollyhocks, fat peonies. But the sight of Zachary’s body was a horror to Christine, the darkness in the nostrils, his closed face. He looked like a stuffed doll, with his stubby-fingered hand laid in rhetorical gesture across his heart, wedding ring on ostentatious display. Lydia had given the undertakers one of the lightweight wool suits he’d had made in Hong Kong – a clownish tobacco-brown check.
They heard Lydia’s steps then, resonant in high heels, on the staircase which linked the living quarters with the gallery, through the office on the mezzanine. When she appeared in the office doorway above them it was clear that she had dressed up for the occasion – in a vermilion satin dress fitting her figure tightly, with a patterned scarf wrapped around her hair like a turban. Stepping down with assurance in her teetering high shoes, in the silence that had fallen with her arrival, she was as striking as a visiting queen, or a tropical bird alighting in the room. Her smile was faintly defiant – she had smiled like that, Christine thought, when she was scolded once at school for forgetting her homework. Their geography teacher had hated Lydia, spitting with loathing, shaking her violently by the shoulders so that her plaits flew: Lydia – Smith – you – nasty – little – piece – of – work. Now Lydia looked into the coffin, gripping its wooden side tightly. Then she said a few words, thanking people for their help, for rallying around the family. Her small, dry voice was lonely in the absence of Zachary’s loud informality, his booming, commanding bass.
Grace embarked on taking her photograph. The cranky ancient camera was specially adapted to hold a glass plate. Its broken imperfection, Gilby the photographer said, made for the beauty of the end result; glue peeling off between the layers of the lens meant that when the light struck, it diffused to beautiful effect. Because they couldn’t zoom, and the camera needed to be held steady for thirty seconds’ exposure, they had to set up a platform of sorts – two planks balanced across between two sets of steps – where Grace could crouch under her black cloth, looking down on where her father lay. A whiff of ether floated from the storage cupboard which was their temporary darkroom, and the syrupy collodion mixture dripped from the camera onto the floor. Lydia wouldn’t watch what was going on. Grace kept her hand clamped across the lens, pulled it away, counted to thirty, covered the aperture again. They went through the whole process with two separate plates, in case anything went wrong with the first one. No one could look at the pictures yet. They had to be varnished, the backs of the plates had to be painted over and the whole thing sealed inside a protective frame.
Alex sat up all night with Zachary. They set up steel spotlights at either end of the coffin and switched off all the other lights; briefly the chapel burned with the sunset, and the high pink walls seemed transparent as shells. Spotlit in gold, the coffin seemed unreal as a tableau, or a kitsch artwork. Christine went upstairs early with Lydia, to see her into bed; Grace was determined to stay, and sat in a plastic chair pulled up close beside her father, hugging her jack-knifed long legs in her arms, her chin on her knees, staring bleakly. Then she fell awkwardly asleep, and Alex signed to Isobel to take her up to her own room. Roused, Grace opened her eyes wide on her friend in incomprehension, wondering where she was, like a child who’d fallen asleep at an adult party: she submitted to being led away. Hannah in her stocking-feet took round the teapot and the whisky bottle among those mourners left; then her wife Jenny took her home to rest.
Alex must have fallen asleep because when he woke up his mouth was full of bile, as if he’d drunk something disgusting. When he looked at Zachary’s dead face he thought that it was doughy and flaccid. Had he really grown so fat? Alex hadn’t noticed it when he was still alive. As a boy at school Zachary had been so keenly hopeful, with his fresh pink cheeks and irrepressible laughter, bubbling up even as it got him into trouble and he was ducking to avoid blows, sobbing and laughing at the same time, snotty and blubbing and giggling because the punishment was ridiculous too. And now he was extinguished, easily as putting out a candle.
Zachary’s send-off in the gallery was beautiful, everybody said so. The undertakers came in the morning to close the coffin. There wasn’t enough room for everyone, people were standing outside in the bookshop and cafe, lapsing into the tradition of so many other convivial occasions in this same space, in much the same company, with the same wine and flowers and interesting things to look at on the walls. The artworks were their own strong statements: an angry Jane Ogden glowered over the gathering, debris erupting through a crust of filthy paint. Children threaded tactfully through the adults’ solemnity; patches of sunshine bloomed and withdrew on the floor tiles like tentative reassurances. Then a squall of rain blew against the windows and latecomers hurried in apologetically, shaking their umbrellas. So many friends brought flowers, which they heaped up on top of the coffin. A huge wreath spelled out Goodbye, in acid yellow against vivid red: no one knew who’d sent it. Another gallery with a grudge, Hannah suggested.
Friends and family stood up at the lectern one after anothe
r. Gina Brennan played a sarabande from a Bach suite on her cello, Alex read a poem, Nathan Kearney read extracts from a satirical mag he and Zachary had edited when they were undergraduates. Kids from the Art Club played steel pans, then Tomo Okamoto danced as a warrior re-enacting the scene of his own death, in full Noh costume and mask. Hannah in her tight black dress, with her slash of brilliant lipstick, couldn’t finish reading out what she’d written, Jenny had to do it for her; Martin Shield made everyone laugh. Christine sat with her mother and Isobel and Sandy, struggling against weeping, pressing her knees together in her blue dress, gripping her screwed-up wet tissue in her fist. She envied her mother’s poised, dry face, so carefully made-up, with its sad little smile of regret lifted towards the lectern or the dancing – when you were eighty you were more used to funerals. Scowling into her lap, she tried to hold off every real thought of Zachary, rehearsing trivialities. She would need new keys cut if Lydia was going to stay with them. Had she remembered to arrange for the cat sitter to come in today? Fixing her gaze on a painting hung on a side wall, she was furious with its daubed hieroglyphs, its stupid posturing. Dislike was a relief, it dried her eyes. Some of the art Zachary had liked was awful.
Sandy had come alone, because he was between girlfriends. He was pale – but then Sandy was always pale, as if he didn’t often see daylight. Unexpectedly he’d turned up in a suit, which was sweet, and of course he looked gorgeous in it, with his dishevelled beauty. And he played something on the guitar too, with that simplicity he only ever had when he performed: a little instrumental he’d written years ago for Zachary, who’d first encouraged him to play. It was very touching. Max had told Hannah that he didn’t want to say anything, but at the last moment he stood up abruptly to recite the prayer for Kaddish, stumbling and forgetting half of it, then ripped his cotton jacket down noisily, from the lapels. Lydia and Grace exchanged quick glances, sitting straight-backed side by side at the centre of the front row of chairs. It was so like Max, they both thought, who hadn’t been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah, to confound them all today with a dramatic gesture. Was it his best jacket, or had he worn an old one specially? Seen together from the front, Grace and Lydia were so unlike that no one could have guessed they were mother and daughter: one small and self-possessed and fair, one tall and dark, athletic and careless as a boy. From behind, though, a likeness was visible in their tensed shoulders. Both were rigidly attentive to the tributes playing out in front of them, holding their heads stiffly as if they expected further blows.