Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  — Alex is en route, Christine announced to Lydia, yawning and then rousing herself, wifely. She ought to cook something, get some milk in, tidy up. Lydia said vaguely then, only half meaning it, that she should go back to Garret’s Lane. Alex had had enough of her, she should leave them alone, couldn’t really spend the rest of her life battening on to her friends’ domestic arrangements. The two women had lapsed, in Alex’s absence, into slow hours of reading and desultory talk, not quite intimate, amidst a debris of dirty coffee cups and wine glasses, plates of crumbs.

  — Don’t go!

  Christine protested, but in that same moment was aware that there might be something stale in their conversation, if it continued any longer. They were falling back on old patterns inherited from their past, and might be wearing out their shared present. Now it was as if Alex’s impending arrival tolled a bell; blinking, they looked around them, surprised by the time. He gave a form to their formlessness, punctuated it with necessity. Lydia insisted, her idea taking hold. — Seriously, I’m in the mood. Alex will be exhausted after all that driving. He won’t want me in the way. I’ll call Grace up and talk to her for company.

  — In the way of what? Don’t be silly. But just for one night perhaps. Your home is always here, if you want it. Don’t be afraid or sad, will you, in that place on your own?

  — I will be sad, Lydia said. — But I’d better get used to it.

  She called a cab and packed a bag, the two women embraced quickly at the door. They said affectionate things, but under the surface of their parting Christine was aware of haste, as if each of them suddenly, urgently, needed to be free of the other’s company. When Lydia had gone she felt full of energy, throwing the windows up high, looking out onto the wide sleepy street, the semi-detached brick villas with their white-painted fretwork porches, some smartened up and some with flaking paintwork and torn curtains, steeped in the yellow light of the summer evening. The plane trees cast their blue shadows; parakeets sliced across the stillness, shrieking with derision. She stacked glasses and plates in the dishwasher, and dusted and vacuumed the front room, changed the sheets on their bed upstairs, put clean towels and fresh scented soap in the bathroom. It would be late by the time Alex got home, he wouldn’t want a heavy meal. So she went out to the Co-op to buy eggs and peppers for a frittata, which would be just as nice cold; when that was cooked, and sprinkled with sea salt and lemon on a plate in the kitchen, she showered and washed her hair, changed into her navy dress, sprayed on perfume, poured herself a glass of wine, then sat down with her book under a single lamp switched on in the front room, to wait.

  Her perception was a skin stretched taut, prickling with response to each change in the light outside as it ran through the drama of its sunset performance at the end of the street, in a mass of gilded pink cloud. When eventually the copper beech was only a silhouette cut out against the blue of the last light, Christine pulled down the blinds, put on all the lamps, turned her awareness inwards. From half past ten she began to think she heard Alex’s car draw up outside: each time, she braced herself. The more a homecoming was anticipated, the more disconcerting the actuality was prone to be, she knew that: the arriving one walked into a shape prepared for him, not actually his own. Just because she was relieved to be free of Lydia and looking forward to seeing Alex, the reality of him would be an affront: he wouldn’t fit into her preparations or even notice them, would arrive burdened with purposes of his own, breaking into the tension of her waiting. Men didn’t care anyway about clean sheets or scented soap. It would be better, really, if she watched telly and forgot she was waiting.

  But in the summer night the spell of her expectation was too strong. She lost herself inside short passages of her novel, then couldn’t proceed because they affected her too much – she dropped the book and looked about her restlessly, filled up her glass again. It was only once midnight had come and gone that panic lifted up in Christine’s chest like a great bird, between one moment of its not occurring to her to worry, and the next when she was certain something must have happened. He’d said he might be home by ten o’clock, hadn’t he? No doubt the traffic was bad. And he wouldn’t have called to let her know because Alex never used his phone while he was driving – also, he despised that whole infantile obsession with calling, needing to be in touch at every moment. Yet her imagination, working outside her control, began to conjure disasters that were more awful for being indefinite. The poised perfection of her scene was spoiled, a mockery: and yet she couldn’t possibly go to bed, sleeplessness there would be worse. Anyway he would surely arrive any minute, and there wouldn’t have been anything to be afraid of after all. When he did arrive she would never forgive him, she thought, for putting her through this.

  In interludes of respite she forced her awareness down into her novel, then awoke from its dream in palpitations of dread. She hadn’t eaten anything since cake at lunchtime, she’d waited to have something with Alex, so the white wine she’d been drinking had given her a headache. There was nothing to think about except the worst. For a long time she wouldn’t let herself call his phone, then she tried it, and found it was switched off. Her helpless fear was a paralysis, hollowing her out, and yet was probably absurd: she kept hearing a car whose drone seemed familiar, which then droned past. Or a car would park in the street outside, a car door slam, her heart would lift in a paroxysm of relief – but Alex didn’t come. She thought of calling Grace, to make sure he’d left when he said he would. But wouldn’t that be unforgivable, burdening the poor burdened girl with her stupid worry? There was no point in frightening Isobel either. This madness of anxiety was her own to bear; and at any moment Alex would turn up, it would have all been for nothing. She remembered Mary Shelley going from house to house, the night Shelley went missing on the lake. Ha visto Shelley?

  By two o’clock she couldn’t help herself, she rang Lydia. She told herself Lydia often stayed awake late, reading – and indeed, she picked up the phone almost at once, spoke into it warily. Christine knew there was a handset on the bedside table at Garret’s Lane. She poured out her distress, so glad to talk to someone. — Lyd, I’m so really, really sorry to call at this time of night. I know it’s completely selfish of me, but I’m so stuck, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who else to call. I don’t want to bother the children. It’s Alex. He’s not back yet, I don’t know where he is, he said he’d be back by ten and he isn’t here, and his phone’s turned off. I’ve got myself worked up into a state, imagining every kind of disaster. D’you think he’s had an accident?

  Lydia’s voice was hesitant, but not as if she’d been woken from sleep. — Oh Chris, she said. — Don’t worry, he’s all right.

  — I know it’s stupid, he’ll be fine. But I am worrying.

  — Don’t worry though, really. Alex is here.

  She could hardly take in what she heard, at first. — What d’you mean he’s there? What’s he doing there? Why hasn’t he rung me?

  — I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to tell you.

  It was as if dark forms crowded suddenly into the room around Christine, recognition was so violent; one stark and ghastly white face showed in the mirror – she didn’t know her own self for a moment. Lydia ploughed on, as if bemused by wonders. — Everything’s so strange, Chris. I’m so sorry.

  Alex had reached the outskirts of London at about eleven, and although he was exhausted from driving he hadn’t wanted to go straight home. He’d got into the habit of calling in at Garret’s Lane, telling himself he was just checking that the premises were secure, everything was OK. The place was a solace to him, it soothed his restlessness to be in there, browsing among Zachary’s books or just sitting. If he went home, he’d only be breaking in on Christine’s days-long conversation with Lydia. The air would be thick with their confidences; he knew just how they’d turn to look at him as he entered, faces replete with interpretation as if they knew him.

  He kept the Garret’s Lane keys on his key r
ing. When he pulled up in the gallery’s cobbled parking space – beside Zach’s old plum-coloured Jaguar which Lydia didn’t want because she hated driving – his body was chilly from air conditioning, numb from his long journey; it was a relief breathing in the warm night outside the car, meaty and beery and tainted with traffic fumes. Taking the stone steps two at a time he turned his key in the lock, anticipating the peace of the empty rooms, where a faint veil of dust would have had time to settle on the designer furniture between the cleaner’s visits. The nothingness in him needed silence and stillness. Yet even before he pushed open the door he was aware of an assault of music, incomprehensible and outraging: Beethoven, Fischer-Dieskau singing ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, one of Zachary’s perennials, played on the sound system at top volume. Zachary had used to sing along to it in his enormous, tuneless voice, so delighted with himself and so stirred, his eyes and his heart full, big beard wagging, waving his arms around, conducting encouragingly towards his imaginary accompanist, missing every note.

  Alex was almost vengeful; it didn’t occur to him to deduce logically that it must have been Lydia who put the music on and had every right to, in her own home. He didn’t deduce anything, only came striding aggrievedly, bewildered, from the hall through the sitting room and study into the kitchen, flinging the open doors noisily back against the walls. Then he set out up the stairs, in pursuit of his explanation. The music couldn’t be playing by itself. And Lydia in her bathrobe at her dressing table in the bedroom, warm from her shower, didn’t deduce anything logically either: only heard the front door slammed shut, and then the doors of the downstairs rooms banging open, someone advancing heavily upstairs. She seemed to be hunted down. When Alex stood in her bedroom doorway she was as shocked as he was, sitting staring in her bathrobe with her hairdryer turned off, raised in one hand, her other hand over her heart. Her iPod – or more likely Zachary’s, because he was always spending money on new devices to play his music – was in its socket on a chest of drawers, puny bland origin of so much magnificent tender drama. Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend/ In das blaue Nebelland. Alex took a step inside the room and when Lydia stood up an antique ebony hand mirror fell out of her lap and cracked on the wood floor.

  — Christ, Alex, she said: quavering, tearful. — I didn’t know who you were.

  At first he took her into his arms because he was sorry for frightening her. They were only reassuring each other, at first; each meant to restore the other’s equanimity. Then their reassuring altered into something else, Alex’s blindsided up against the surprise – which was not a surprise after all, more like something long guessed at, anticipated – of Lydia’s warm nakedness under her unfastened robe, and then her quickened breathing, her eager trembling offer of herself, pressing herself against him, pulling him in deeper, confounding him and swallowing him up. Alex hardly took the trouble to make any bargain with his fate: that whatever was happening might be sealed inside its moment, without consequences. It was as if he wasn’t himself, the bargaining man he knew, but a different man who was capable of this. And afterwards – when they lay still, beached and naked in the chaos of white linen on the bed, the enormity of their act having crashed over them and left behind its significance, like a wave withdrawing – Christine telephoned, and Lydia spoke to her, and it was too late.

  Four

  GRACE WAS THREE YEARS OLD when Zachary and Lydia came back from New York to live in London, in the mid-nineties. Of course the two couples had visited each other in the years between, they had holidayed together, Isobel had already found her role as Grace’s protector and interpreter. Grace had been a difficult baby: she cried, she wouldn’t breastfeed, she didn’t sleep, she was a fussy eater. When Isobel stayed in the Manhattan apartment, she and Zachary together had devoted long hours to encouraging the fiercely scowling little girl to walk and talk and be happy. Isobel taught her to fit the pieces of her puzzle into the right holes, the square into the square hole, the triangle into the triangle. — Why couldn’t I have had a sweet one like yours? Lydia complained to Christine. She employed a succession of nannies, none of whom were satisfactory. Privately, self-righteously, Christine disapproved. Surely it was the nannies who made Grace difficult?

  Zachary’s parents had died, his mother first and then his father, within the space of a few months. He had needed to come to London often when they were ill – he loved them dearly and grieved for them hugely – and then afterwards to arrange the family affairs with Max. The family affairs were on a large scale, there was a lot of money. Zachary sat up late one night with Alex and Christine, drinking vodka and discussing what he ought to do with his inheritance. Their ideas got wilder and wilder – buy a Picasso, buy an orchestra, set up a foundation to promote renewable energy. — But you don’t know anything about renewable energy, Alex reasonably pointed out. Christine thought he ought to spend it on a crumbling palazzo in Italy where they could all live together like aristocrats, growing grapes and keeping goats, making their own wine and cheese. Zachary loved the Italian idea. Or perhaps he should just change it all into cash and throw it into the wind off Tower Bridge.

  — Buy a premises in the East End, Alex suggested. — Come back to live in London. Start an art gallery.

  — What does Lydia think? Christine asked. — What does she want?

  Between Zachary and Christine there was quite a tradition of analysing Lydia. He loved to talk about his wife, combing his fingers excitedly through the lustrous black beard which he had newly grown, idiosyncratic in those days before all the young men in art had beards. It suited him and added point to his soft face; even Lydia was resigned to it.

  — You’d think she was materialistic, he said musingly. — I mean, she is materialistic. She’s awfully lazy, and she loves nice things. But I think that the idea of real money bores her. I mean, the kind that you have to do something with. It’s too much like hard work. She’d like to go on just the way we are, really, with me working at the Gagosian, the nice parties, the shopping.

  — She’s quite an ascetic sort of materialist, you’re saying.

  — D’you know, she is, Zachary agreed. — I really don’t think she’s interested in the power that money brings. Or any kind of power. She’s actually quite unworldly, though she doesn’t look it. The world’s only unworldly materialist.

  — And are you interested, Zach, in the power that money brings?

  — Aha! I’m terrified of it. But it’s exciting, isn’t it?

  Alex wouldn’t discuss being part of any commune in Italy, not even playfully. At this point he was working part-time as a postman as well as tutoring in English as a foreign language; he and Christine were living in a tiny cramped place in Streatham, behind Brixton prison, and between them they hardly made enough to cover their rent and bills and food. Christine had a job helping in a school office three days a week; it wasn’t the same school as Isobel’s, and at the end of those afternoons there was always an awful hiatus, worst in the rain, when she had to dash like mad on her bike to be in time to pick Isobel up. On the other two days Christine painted – or drew, or scratched – in her box-room studio at the end of the landing. Zachary had to sleep among her paints when he stayed, and said he felt the beneficence of her art sifting down upon him in the dark, doing him good. When Zachary tried to give them money to help out, Alex walked out of the house in a cold rage without saying a word, and Christine with Zachary’s arm around her sobbed into his broad accommodating chest, his soft good shirt.

  — Why couldn’t he just have refused your generous, loving offer in kind words, like any normal person? He’s so horrible, Zach!

  — Or accepted it.

  — No, of course we do refuse it: although thank you, you’re lovely, you’re so kind.

  This was another tradition: that she accused Alex of intransigence and intolerance, of having impossible lofty standards, and Zachary – perplexed and upset on her behalf – managed to comfort her without giving away his friend. — I was tactless and he
’s fine-tuned, he said, furious with himself. — I’m an oaf, I should think before I speak.

  Christine sat up and mopped at her eyes with a tissue, blew her nose. — Why does everyone have to tiptoe round Alex’s moods? I’m never, ever supposed to criticise him in any way. I have to tread so carefully, taking care not to say the wrong thing, because it’s too tedious, frankly, if we get into another fight, and then he’s sulking and doesn’t speak to me for days, so that eventually I have to make the effort and coax him round, and he doesn’t even know that he’s been coaxed. I want to make everything nice, Zach, I want us to have a happy home. Why shouldn’t it be happy? Isn’t it better to live pleasantly? You and Lydia aren’t like this!

  Zachary considered carefully. — Alex must feel as though we’re always all watching him. That must be awful. Waiting to see him do what he ought to do. Wondering why he’s expending all that brilliance of his on things that are too small for him. He must know we’re all asking why he isn’t writing.

  Christine felt negligent then, wondering if she cared that Alex wasn’t writing. She didn’t think about it much. People did seem to like his poems. Although they hadn’t been much reviewed at first, in the years since they were published they’d acquired a certain cult following. Anyway, he had seemed stubbornly perverse to her, taking on seasonal work at the post office on top of his language classes, getting up in the freezing flat at an hour when it was still dark, when it wasn’t even conceivably morning. Why didn’t he try to find a job he liked? There was something self-dramatising in his sacrifices, though stoically he never uttered one word of complaint.