by Tessa Hadley
— Poor old Max, last one left, whispered Lydia’s mother Pam. Pam had had any number of operations and complained of pains everywhere, but was still handsome; she had her hair done with bronze highlights and wore good hats. — Lucky Zach’s parents didn’t live to know they’d lost him, she added with sententiousness. — I wonder if you ever appreciated, Lydia, what a lovely man you had.
Lydia smiled constrainedly, patted her mother’s hand. — You know me, she said. — Famously unappreciative.
— How can you joke at such a time? You heartless creature.
— Heartless? Now who might I get that from?
Tibs and Pam had worn set faces through the Japanese dancing, but at least understood the requirement for poetry at funerals. Dapper faded Tibs sat beside Grace and held her hand in his, out of his depth but kind. When Grace was little she had bloomed amid the hectic sociability of their pub-life, she’d been a great hit with their regulars, dancing for them uninhibitedly to the Spice Girls, gyrating her hips and pouting, sticking out her bottom. — It’s unsettling, Ma, Zachary had mildly protested to Pam, laughing and loving it.
Everything overran, despite Hannah’s best efforts: the hearse arrived and the undertakers had to wait, discreetly and sympathetically consulting their watches. Then Max and Alex and Sandy and a couple of Zachary’s cousins carried out the coffin, strained and tense with the difficulty of it; family and a few close friends followed the hearse to the crematorium, where there was a brief last ceremony. Christine was grateful for this displacement onto alien territory, with its exhausted neutral sanctimony, limp from use. Pink silky curtains, jerking along their rail, reminded her of a cinema. She could abstract herself at last, be absent, think about nothing.
Afterwards Grace had hardly any recollection of the day.
— But I wanted to keep it all up here, she cried in dismay to Isobel in her bedroom, putting her hands to her temples. — Now I wish I’d videoed it. I should have.
— You’ll have your photographs, Isobel reassured her. — Anyway, it will come back to you. For now, your poor mind is overloaded. It needs rest.
— I do remember Sandy’s instrumental. Wasn’t he great?
— He was great.
— Do you think he’ll take me more seriously, now that I’m grieving? Not that I’m looking for a sympathy fuck or anything. Though perhaps I am. I wouldn’t mind.
— Lie down now. Stop thinking.
They were to spend one last night in the chapel rooms before Lydia came to stay with Christine and Alex, and Grace went to Isobel’s. Grace didn’t know if she’d go back to Glasgow for her fourth year. She couldn’t imagine what would happen next, couldn’t imagine her life resuming where it had left off. All the women went to bed in the late afternoon and slept deeply, then woke to a honey-coloured evening light, emptiness in the rooms, syrupy birdsong. They were at a loss now that the funeral was over, which had been an end point in their imagination. Its burden was lifted and they were weightless; Hannah’s team had tidied the gallery, closed it for a week. Alex was out, who knew where? He sometimes walked for miles around the city streets. Christine cut some ham and put it out on the kitchen table with pickles and tomato salad, she boiled new potatoes and put butter on them, picked parsley in the yard where Zachary had grown herbs in all the pots. Lydia had held up wonderfully, everyone said, she had smiled graciously and talked to all the friends who came. She swallowed one of the pills the doctor had prescribed.
When they’d eaten Lydia turned on the television and found the soap opera they all watched because Juliet was in it. Christine rarely saw Juliet in person these days, now there was no need for contact over Sandy; she couldn’t come to the funeral because she was away filming somewhere in Europe. Christine and Lydia kept up with her religiously on the telly though, taking a huge interest in her character, a harassed middle-aged doctor in a country practice. Lydia said she was beginning to forget which bits were the real Juliet and which belonged to the part she played. What about the dodgy accent? Wasn’t that fake? But perhaps if you were a bad enough actor even your own voice sounded as if you were putting it on. She was still slight and energetic, but it was difficult to recognise the gypsy looks of the young Juliet behind the doctor with her stony features and pragmatic short haircut, her repertoire of exasperated expressions, through fraught to grimly resentful. Apparently she had a following of younger fans, because of Sandy.
The living area was arranged over two levels. In the dusky light later, looking for the telephone – she ought to call her mother, and Alex’s mother too, who didn’t come to funerals because of her feet – Christine climbed the steps into the mezzanine, which was lined with bookshelves. One volume caught her eye, pulled out slightly from the shelf or pushed back incompletely, gleaming white in the dimness, claiming her, familiar. More than familiar: it was the collection of Alex’s poems, published long ago, before they were together. The edges of its pages were yellowed and the book had lost its freshness; the cover, whose plainness had been austerely striking at the time, seemed of its period now, its curly purple lettering dated. She felt towards Alex’s book a complex reflex of protective tenderness mixed with faint derision. Because she had just been watching her on the television, she remembered that there were poems about Juliet in this book – not exactly love poems, although some of them were sexual. Hesitating, Christine almost pulled it out to look inside it, as she hadn’t done for years; then she pushed it back into its place instead. All that was over with, she felt impatiently. She got on better with Alex these days because so much was smoothed off between them, the surfaces of their lives sliding fairly effortlessly together. Anyway, there wasn’t enough light for reading, and she was reluctant to turn on any lamps. The dimness was restful.
Who could have taken his book down from the shelf? Alex himself would never look at it. Could Zachary have been reading Alex’s poems in the days before he died? Perhaps that would touch Alex if he was aware of it. But Christine knew she wouldn’t try to tell him: he’d only be exasperated by what he’d see as her clumsy efforts to comfort him, and by her even mentioning those poems. She pushed the book back into its place, where it was inconspicuous among so many others. She and Alex hadn’t spoken now for years about his writing, or his having given it up. Once or twice long ago, when they were first together, she’d urged him to set aside time for more poetry, thinking this would make him happier. He’d turned on her in irritation: what could she possibly understand about his writing, or not writing?
Christine didn’t tell Alex that she’d invited Lydia to live with them for as long as she liked. But he was uncomplaining when after the funeral she closed up her own home with obvious relief and came to set up camp again in their spare room. This time Lydia unpacked her bags, putting her clothes away in the drawers which Christine had emptied for her, or hanging them in the space she’d made in the wardrobe. Her sumptuous, interesting dresses and skirts and jackets made Christine’s clothes look dowdy and worn-out. Lydia tried to give her things, told her to help herself to anything she liked, and Christine was tempted by the heavy, silky fabrics, the fine sewing and good designs. Her mother loved Lydia’s clothes, she was always hinting to Christine that she ought to wear something more colourful and striking. — To show off your wonderful figure darling, she said.
Christine reproached her mother, they didn’t have the Samuels’ kind of money. But it wasn’t only the money, she’d have made a fool of herself if she tried to carry off Lydia’s style. Now Lydia set out her brushes and mirror and all the apparatus of her make-up and skin care on top of the chest of drawers: pots and tubes of cream, lipsticks and eyeshadows spilling from bags that were pretty curiosities in themselves, embroidered and patterned zip-bags, or pouches with tasselled silk drawstrings. She draped the mirror and the chair backs with her jewellery and scarves, and the room began to smell of her perfume. Soon all the surfaces and the floor space were cluttered. Lydia had always been untidy, and was used to having cleaners.
In the mornings she didn’t get up until long after Alex had left for school. When Christine took coffee into her room she would be lying reading her thrillers under the duvet, with the tabby cat sprawled across her legs or curled up beside her. Christine would have been up and dressed by this time for hours already, busy with housework, tidying or washing dishes, filling the washing machine or hanging the washing out, popping out for milk from the corner shop, cakes from the Algerian bakery, mint and mangoes from the chaotic greengrocer where customers haggled over the price of a yam or a handful of chilies. In the evenings she cooked elaborate meals, trying out new recipes. She knew that she was using Lydia’s presence in their house to justify these wasted, absorbed, peculiar days when she never once let herself think about entering her locked studio. She still carried its key around with her, hidden in the back pocket of her handbag. Alex was annoyed that he couldn’t get at certain books in the studio, but stubbornly she avoided his questioning about the lost key.
The gallery had opened its doors again, Hannah was working with Jane Ogden on the assumption that her exhibition was still going ahead. But perhaps she ought to be looking around for another job? Lydia fended Alex off when he asked what her plans were, she put her hands over her ears, asking him not to torment her. She was so sorry, she knew she was behaving badly, but she wasn’t ready to talk yet about what happened next. He said he would help her any time she liked, to sort out Zachary’s things, but she couldn’t bear to think about that either, and eventually he did it with Grace and Isobel. Grace came in with a black bag full of Zachary’s suits and shirts and ties, emptied them in a heap on the floor in Christine’s sitting room, suggested that they should cut them up and make a quilt out of them, with Zachary’s name sewn into it to commemorate him. At first Christine hated watching Grace attack the precious clothes with her sharp scissors. But the sewing gave them all something to do. Christine was good with that kind of dainty work, she had made patchwork when she was a girl; Lydia didn’t have the patience, she gave up quickly. The quilt grew under Grace’s direction, a spiral in brilliant orange and scarlet burgeoning from its centre, against a more sombre background cut from the dark suits.
One afternoon Grace brought round her photographs of Zachary, packaged up in brown paper, and handed them to her mother with a stricken face. — Actually I haven’t looked at them. I can’t unwrap them. Gilby was so nice about helping me, I’m ashamed to tell him that I haven’t seen them yet. He says they’re beautiful, but I’ve lost my nerve. I had my nerve, but now I’ve lost it.
Lydia pushed the parcel away in horror. — Grace, I can’t. I told you, darling, I don’t want to see them. You don’t have to look at them either. We could just put them away somewhere and forget about them.
Grace cried bitterly that this was just so typical of her mother. She offered the photographs to Christine, who only shook her head and bent lower over her sewing. Alex came home from school to find them all in tears. He was as calmly tactful with Grace as if she had been a child upset in his classroom, taking her into his study and sitting with his arm around her while with trepidation she unwrapped the parcel so carefully padded with bubble wrap, lifted out the frames. In the interval since the images had been made, it was as if Zachary had finally taken leave from the face they saw. They didn’t know him any longer, his living personality had withdrawn from behind the darkened, shapely lids which were closed with such stern finality. Grace wrapped the photographs up and gave them to Alex to hide, said she didn’t want to look at them again for a long time. — He frightens me, she said. — He isn’t funny any more, is he?
Alex watched his wife from over the top of his book as she undressed in their bedroom. The straight brows which met above the bridge of her nose were still dark, and her veiled, quick, oblique glance was the same as when she was young, but her light-brown hair, cut in its short bob, was full of grey. You could hardly tell, apart from the little slack round belly, that Christine had ever given birth to Isobel: she was still girlish, but an ageing girl. Her un-made-up worn face and thin naked body made him think of the austerity and angularity of farmers’ wives in photographs of the Dust Bowl, with their sculptural raw cheekbones and hip bones – although those women were probably twenty years younger than Chris, aged by work and poverty. In repose and in animation his wife could seem two different characters. Alone with him, absorbed in her thoughts – her long dark mouth, with its deep recess under the lower lip, closed as if on a reservation or hesitation, holding something back – she was appealing, unfathomable. But in company with other people she talked too eagerly and waved her hands about with that gracelessness of educated Englishwomen of her class and her generation. She had been fighting him ever since Zachary died, Alex thought, flinching if he touched her on the breast or her waist, turning her face from his kisses. Now, she put on her boyish pyjamas and tied the cord decisively. — Don’t watch me, Alex, she protested. — It makes me uncomfortable.
— How long is Lydia staying here? he asked sternly. — Because I’m not sure that it’s working out. She needs to start up some kind of a life again.
— But what life?
— Be resolved, take responsibility.
— Those are such cold, hard words though. You’re only using them as a punishment against her. Can you imagine her managing all alone in Garret’s Lane? What would she do all day?
— Well, what’s she doing here?
— She’s waiting. She’s not ready yet. We can’t abandon her.
— But she’s stopping you from working.
Christine shied away from any discussion of her work. — Oh no, it isn’t Lydia. She’d prefer it if I was working: I think she even feels the need to entertain me. Look, she’s painted my nails.
Alex only glanced at her crimson fingernails, frowning. Everywhere she touched, Lydia left her mark. He was full of pity for her but avoided being alone with her in a room – she was too potently present, with her blue-white skin and mask of beauty, in her eternal place in the corner of his sofa. Her play-acting made him think of some ancient dreadful tragic art. She was adrift without Zachary, lost in chaos, and Alex thought he must protect himself from chaos. When Christine put down her book and fell asleep at his side, with her back turned and her knees drawn up to her chest like a child, snoring lightly, he imagined that in their spare room Lydia too was lying awake, and that she was aware of his wakefulness reciprocally, panic and confusion alive in both of them, a muffled violence inside the darkness of their bodies lying still.
Grace threw herself into partying, she drank too much and confided in strangers, telling them all her sorrows, spilling over with noisy grief, bringing men home with her to the spare bed in Isobel’s flat.
— I have to live life to the full, she said. — That’s what Dad did.
Isobel found this difficult. She couldn’t sleep and her work was suffering, because she was always listening out to make sure Grace came home – or trying not to listen, when Grace did. When she had to go through her sitting room in the mornings, visiting the bathroom, she tried not to look at the sleeping forms on her sofa bed. She didn’t want to share this problem with Lydia or her own mother, who were already dazed with sadness and hardly thinking straight. She didn’t trust either of them, anyway, to be sympathetic to Grace. Instead she confided in her grandmother Margita: called Czech Granny to distinguish her from the English one. Margita had bloated ankles and Alex’s beautiful eyes; thick pink foundation was creased into her wrinkles, her dry stiffly lacquered hair was her own but looked like a cheap wig, and the heaps of her half-smoked cigarettes in an ashtray were stained with lipstick. Her eyes were so clear that they were almost glassy; it was a surprise when she had to put on spectacles for her crosswords – she did the Telegraph cryptic every day, although her English was thickly accented still, false in her mouth like her too-white false teeth. Margita’s vases of silk flowers on crocheted doilies, and her greasy bottles of alcohol on their painted tin tray, labelled in an unknown lang
uage, had always stood for Isobel as signs of foreignness and otherness.
— Poor little Grace, Margita said. — Let her get it out of her system.
— Some of these men are awful, Granny. I can’t be sure they are, of course, as I don’t meet them. But I hear them, they sound awful. I think there’ve been three different ones, or maybe one of them was there twice. But you know, I only have a tiny flat.
Her grandmother shrugged. — As long as she doesn’t get pregnant, or infectious diseases. It takes her mind off.
— But is it right?
— Who cares? She’s crazy because she loved her dad. Mine was a bastard, I was dancing when I heard he died, maybe it’s the better way.
In her attitudes Margita was surprisingly free of prejudice and up to date. She watched television for hours on end, but despised the credulity of anyone taken in by it. Once, in another life in Bratislava, she had been a teacher of literature, but all she ever did with her dead husband’s books these days was dust them, and not very frequently. Isobel always imagined that her grandmother’s life under Communism – which might as well have been a mythic era in Isobel’s perspective, for she was born the year it more or less ended – had purged her of every superstition and sentimentality. She was fairly lonely: had never made friends among the English, and liked the dwindled, doomed community of exiles even less. Her husband had taken up so much space in her attention: with his ambition first, then with his disappointment and his affairs, then his absence.