Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  — It sounds like one of those puzzles, Blaise said ineptly. — You know: ‘who is my father’s brother’s mother’s husband’s grandson’, that kind of thing.

  Isobel didn’t know whether she ought to break up their evening early, to go to her mother; she stood agonising in her flowered dress, hugging her bare arms tightly in a chill from the open window; their plates were still on the table, smeared with the remains of Thai noodles. She wasn’t a good cook: Blaise’s meal, which she hadn’t been able to eat, had been much more impressive. This story of their family misfortune, she thought, must seem like a final clinching stroke of the bad news she brought. — Actually you remind me of him a little bit, she ploughed on. — I mean, you’re not really alike at all: he was Jewish and arty and extrovert. And much older, of course. But I suppose he was sane and solid, and you are.

  Blaise found he didn’t even mind being sane and solid. He saw Isobel’s responsible anxiety for her mother, and also her frank disappointment, cheated of what she wanted: which, surprisingly, was him. Her eyes were strange as he looked into them in decent concern, with their short dense black lashes and concentrated gaze, a taut crease under the lower lids. When he remembered that her father was Czech her rather thick calves and ankles seemed romantic, and the downy hair on her arms. He understood for the first time then how she was desirable and exceptional, not at all ordinary. He never told anyone afterwards that to begin with he’d thought Isobel was ordinary. For everyday, she wore her disguise as a nice girl.

  Lydia brought Alex coffee in bed like a handmaiden – she who was more accustomed to being the princess. She knelt in her silk nightdress on the bed beside him, watching him drink. — I’ve always loved you, Alex, she said, in that intensely serious voice it was impossible to distinguish from her mock-serious one. — You do know that? From the moment I first set eyes on you in the French class. I’ve never wavered.

  — These are fairy stories, he said, not unkindly. — No one believes in them any more. You should have lived in the nineteenth century for all that: true love, the one and only. It helped when everyone died young. If this had happened twenty years ago you’d be disenchanted by now, I can assure you.

  She shook her head. — I won’t be disenchanted, ever. Don’t misunderstand me though: you’ll never know how nice I was to Zachary. You never believed I was good enough for him: but I was. And I swear he never had any inkling of what I felt about you. I knew how lucky I was to be married to him. I made him happy. He saved me when my heart was broken because I knew I couldn’t have you.

  Alex marvelled at her. — You’re wilful. You invented a romantic story and you’ve stuck to it in your wilful heart. It’s an act of will.

  Lydia thought about that. — But how else does anyone live?

  When Alex first returned inside his own home, he felt how everything was changed by what he’d done. He wanted to say to Christine that nothing need be different between them just because he’d slept with Lydia, but he didn’t actually feel that this was true. Even the rooms as he moved around in them felt different. Christine had let him in eventually, after he’d come back to the house for the third or fourth time and tried to use his key in the door to the flat: she’d had the locks changed, she told him. Waiting outside on the landing Alex could hear her on the other side of the door, fumbling with the bolt and a new mortice lock like some elderly pensioner afraid of callers. — That’s crazy, he said, trying to speak loud enough for her to hear him, and at the same time keep his voice steady and somehow open. He must be whatever Christine wanted, make himself instrumental to her needs in some way not yet defined – it was up to her to define it.

  She looked so altered, when eventually she opened the door: he saw her almost as if he didn’t know her – stooping and thin, with bent shoulders. Walking ahead of him into the sitting room, she was careful like someone who has been ill for a long time. — You didn’t need to change the locks, he went on gently. — I could have given you my keys.

  — I didn’t want you coming in and out without my knowledge.

  — Chris, what did you think I would try to do?

  — Something’s over. I’m getting used to the idea. I’ve packed your stuff into suitcases, you can take all the CDs, or most of them. The books are more complicated.

  — So you want me to move out?

  — Isn’t that what you want? Aren’t you going to move in with her?

  — I don’t know. What do you want me to do?

  For a long time Christine wouldn’t look at him directly. They went back and forth over the same ground. She’d waited up for him so anxiously that night, she’d been so worried. Had Lydia called him, while he was driving from Glasgow, invited him to come to Garret’s Lane? No, of course not. He’d gone in there to check the place as usual, never expecting to find her. And Lydia couldn’t have expected him. — I suppose she was frightened, Christine imagined, — when she heard you come in. You comforted her.

  — Something like that, he said.

  How could they come back from this to what they’d been before, the three of them? He said he didn’t know. — And when you arrived, where was she exactly – downstairs or up in the bedroom? What did she say, when she saw you? What was she wearing? Was it because she was so attractive that you made love to her, or was it more like affection for an old friend?

  — I can’t tell you those things.

  — But tell me, she urged him feverishly. — And I’ll tell you things too. There are things I’ve never told you.

  Alex couldn’t expose to her his relation with Lydia: that was his only way to keep faith with it, to try and balance keeping faith with both of them. Christine said that in that case she didn’t want her name in his mouth, even, when he spoke to Lydia. — You’re not to talk to her about me. Don’t tell her how I am, or one word that I’ve said or anything I’ve done.

  And as if this was perfectly reasonable he agreed to it, and tried to keep his promise. Lydia’s face was shocked, as if she’d been slapped, when he explained why he couldn’t tell her how Christine was taking things. In the awful days that followed he had the odd sensation sometimes that his vital function was as a live wire connecting the two women in their extreme estrangement. He went over to be with Christine as often as was bearable, as often as she allowed – told himself she mustn’t feel abandoned. Once Isobel was in the flat when he turned up, but she wouldn’t speak to him or look at him, wouldn’t stay while he was there. Her face was blotched and red from crying; she flung her arms around her mother, threw on her coat and went out, slamming the door. He had wronged all his daughter’s hopes, her belief in him. Christine was gratified and dry-eyed, when Isobel had gone. — They’re more puritanical than us, she said, — this generation of our children. She can’t open her mind to it.

  When Alex made himself coffee in the kitchen, he noticed that Christine was keeping things in different places already, the teaspoons in a pottery jug, cafétière beside the stove. At first she didn’t want coffee, then she changed her mind; her hands were shaking when she took the cup from him. He wanted to tell himself this was a lot of fuss to make over nothing, yet he knew it wasn’t nothing, this change was absolute. No, he said, he hadn’t moved into Garret’s Lane, though he was seeing Lydia. Lisa the Class Five teacher had a spare room in her flat in Gospel Oak, he was sleeping there for the moment. No, he wasn’t sleeping with Lisa. Christine wept and said that she’d lost everyone. — First Zachary, and now both of you.

  — I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  — But do you wish it hadn’t happened?

  He searched in his heart and told her the truth. Strangely, that was one of the moments when they drew closest. They comforted each other. Pressing Christine closely to him, he was back inside the lifelong familiarity of the smell of her skin and her hair, her warmth, her whole character – its wholesomeness and clumsiness, her honesty and her guarded, prickly private self. For a few days then he moved back in, sleeping in the spare room, but that was
worse. That was when they quarrelled most violently, said the most awful things. He was dismayed with guilt. Christine demanded again to know what Alex wanted and he said he didn’t know, he didn’t know what was possible.

  Isobel met Sandy in a bleakly cavernous pub where he thought no one would recognise him; he arrived in dark glasses, with his collar turned up. For hours they drank shots together, working up their indignation against their father and Lydia, Isobel melting into tears. All her life she’d been making efforts of sympathetic imagination – but she couldn’t surely, in all fairness, be required to sympathise with this. — I dreamed once when I was little, she said, — that Dad was touching Lydia, inside her dress. And I never liked Lydia because of it – though I told myself it wasn’t fair, to dislike somebody because of your own dream.

  Sandy didn’t want to think about his father’s sex life, but held forth on the defects in his character, his arrogance. He said Alex was a hypocrite, he was so selfish. Sandy’s usual wary, wandering attention was transformed into tense belligerence; squeamish, he wouldn’t repeat what Juliet had remarked when she heard. The barmaid meanwhile stared over at him, and was muffled but excitable on her phone.

  Grace took it more easily than anyone else in the two families. When they rang her in Glasgow at the end of the evening, out of solidarity and fairly drunk, she said she didn’t really care that much. — To be honest, if it helps them to feel better then good luck to them. It’s life, isn’t it? I mean, at least they’re still alive. I’m only sorry if it’s made Christine unhappy.

  — But wouldn’t Zachary have cared? Doesn’t it dishonour his memory?

  Grace sighed. — Iz, are you serious? What does that mean?

  The next morning Isobel was nauseous from the drink. — I can’t bear to tell you what’s happened with my parents, she said to Blaise. They had actually sent each other this time, to make sure, the map coordinates for a Caffè Nero in the Haymarket. — I’ll never be able to convince you that up until now, my life’s been so straightforward. Almost too straightforward. I wish you’d known me in the past, just so that you’d believe me, how boring I used to be.

  Blaise only smiled fondly; he had brought her as a present a leather-bound Victorian anthology of poetry – inevitably she lost it almost at once on the Tube. She asked if nothing awful ever happened to him. — I was in a helicopter last year in Pakistan, he offered helpfully. — And my ear protectors blew off in a backdraught. I was too embarrassed to say anything, you know, civil servant among all those military types. But I couldn’t hear properly afterwards for months.

  Isobel laughed, touched his hand across the table. They still hadn’t had their chance to sleep together, or do much more than exchange friendly kisses in greeting, like old chums – she was afraid that their moment would pass without them. She had gone to her mother’s alone, eventually, that evening of the Thai noodles when she was summoned, and found her on her knees in the kitchen, weeping and scrubbing the floor. Apparently Christine had spent all that day without speaking to anyone, spring-cleaning the house from top to bottom, pulling all Alex’s clothes out of the drawers and wardrobes. Isobel had persuaded her to undress and get into a hot bath, then couldn’t forget the sight of the pale knobs of her mother’s bent spine in the bathroom steam; she’d hugged her knees while she told Isobel what had happened, her nakedness vulnerable as a child’s or an old woman’s.

  One afternoon, Christine was at her mother’s house with Isobel. The sash windows overlooking the garden were pushed up high, a slanting dusty light slicked Barbara’s antiques in honey colour, faded tasteful curtains scuffed in the breeze along the floor. Christine couldn’t help bringing all their conversation round to a discussion of her situation with Alex; patiently, feeling the strain, her mother and her daughter heard her out, went over and over the same ground with her. They wondered if Alex had told Margita yet. — She thinks her son’s so marvellous of course, said Barbara.

  — She has no illusions, she’s convinced all men are like that, Christine said. — After Tomas.

  Isobel put her hands over her ears. — Don’t tell me about him too!

  — Do you really not know about Tomas?

  — No, I do know. I just don’t want to hear it all again, not now.

  In Isobel’s idea of her paternal grandfather, dead before she was born, his unreadable bleak books and his adulteries had the same affronting texture: chunks of Central European gristle you were supposed to swallow and couldn’t. She knew, because her father had told her, that Tomas had also cut out storybook characters from paper and made animal shadows on the wall with his hands, but these accomplishments seemed improbable, folkloric.

  Alex rang Christine’s mobile and asked if he could see her.

  — Isobel is here too, Christine said warily into her phone.

  — Does she object to me coming?

  Isobel shrugged when Christine asked. — I can’t stop him. Tell him I won’t ever forgive him, though.

  — Poor Alex, he hates having your bad opinion, Christine said after he’d rung off. — But of course you’ll forgive him eventually. Anyway, there’s nothing to forgive. I never owned your father, I don’t possess him.

  — How could he abandon everything he had, Mum? Isn’t it grotesque, at his age?

  — It’s Lydia I can’t forgive, said Barbara. — When I think of her scheming to get Alex. She always wanted him, she was always jealous of Christine.

  — Mum, don’t be absurd, Christine said. — You’ve never thought any of those things. You’ve always loved Lydia.

  — But I never trusted her. You are too trusting.

  — She was lonely without Zachary. She’s no good on her own.

  Isobel demanded to know what Lydia actually did all day; Christine speculated disingenuously. — Well, I suppose she lives for Alex, now.

  The three women looked at one another: for a moment it was funny. — I didn’t think anyone did that any more, Barbara said, almost wistfully. — Aren’t men ridiculous?

  Isobel, softening, said she couldn’t imagine how bad Lydia must be feeling. Christine could imagine it. She knew Lydia better than Alex ever would or could, she thought; Lydia would always be performing for him. — She tells herself it was fated, it was bound to happen. And also that passion is always selfish and amoral, but can’t be resisted, only submitted to. She thinks what a selfish person she is, but thinks it luxuriantly.

  — Lets herself off the hook, you mean.

  — Twists on the hook, not trying to escape.

  Christine seemed calm enough, but Isobel had found pages and pages of her mother’s writing that morning, stuffed into a wastepaper basket, scrawled in black ink on lined file paper in her spiky italic hand, the same letter begun again, over and over. Dear Alex, I feel so Dear Alex, I can’t get over . . . I feel crushed. Alex, I know that I haven’t been . . . I’m so angry Dear Alex, How could you, what did you think I’d . . . Words were scored into the page and underlined five or six times. Dear Lydia, I feel so, I can’t . . . although Why did you have to . . . Isobel hadn’t been able to stop herself reading what she could see, but she wouldn’t pick the letters up out of the basket, she was afraid of them. She was more used to her mother’s writing on shopping lists or birthday cards, or in contained, funny little postcard messages from holidays abroad. It was excruciating for her to see this turmoil exposed, garrulous and banally confessional as a teenager’s: like a mature person falling down in the street, all their accumulated self-possession turned to heaviness.

  As he entered the room where the women waited, Alex’s face was keen with consciousness of their condemnation; uneasily he defied it. Barbara sat smiling ruefully on the sofa, hostess-like out of long habit; Isobel had her back turned, looking out of the window. He most of all wants Isobel to look round, Christine thought. — Oh Alex, Barbara said, putting up the parchment-skin of her cheek for his kiss. — What have you done?

  He took both his mother-in-law’s hands in his, kissed them too
, then sank into the armchair opposite her, sighing: as if of all things he’d only called in for their usual prickly, wary chat. For a moment Christine didn’t recognise the clothes he was wearing, and thought in her craziness that Lydia was buying him things already. Then she realised it wasn’t his clothes that were different: he came flaunting his satisfaction at them, he was vivid and sleek with sex. How horrible! Whatever had been loosening and fading in him was drawn tighter now and brightened; whereas Christine hadn’t washed her hair in days, it was lank and she was wearing an old top like a rag. Barbara kept telling her this was no way to win her husband’s interest back. She had said she didn’t want to win it back but now she felt obliterated because he didn’t approach or touch her. — This is such a mess, Alex, said Barbara severely. — What are you going to do?

  He spread his hands, helpless.

  Apparently he hadn’t moved in with Lydia yet, and he’d begun paying rent for his room in Gospel Oak. Barbara seemed to think this was a good sign. There was no need to rush into anything, she cautioned anxiously. Nothing wrong with Alex finding a place to stay, in the interim. — What interim? Christine asked.

  — While you all recover from what’s happened, Barbara said brightly. — He won’t give up your marriage on a whim.

  Christine pointed out that people gave up marriages all the time, on whims. — I don’t think it’s a good sign. I think the reason he hasn’t moved in with Lydia is because he’s still hoping he can have both of us. He’s hovering in between. Hoping he can have his old life and his new life, both at once.

  — Now there’s Lydia, Alex said. — What’s done can’t be undone.

  Barbara tried to help out sanely. — He was consoling her. They’re both so unhappy, they hardly knew what they were doing.

  — Oh, consoling! Christine scoffed.

  Yet the word stuck to her: perhaps that was what Lydia had done. She had consoled Alex for everything, and Christine had failed to.