by Tessa Hadley
— I want to talk like you, she said. — I love your voice. I cannae do that. I want to belong to something, somewhere.
He said that talking was easy, in fact it was the only thing he’d ever done well at school. — You see, you’re funny, she said. — I want to be funny again, but I’ve lost my sense of humour. My dad died recently, that’s the thing. He was the funny one. We were very close. How would you say that? We were gey close. He was a guid man. We’ll no see his like again.
He said he knew what she was going through, his dad had died too, when he was a boy. — It’s common, I know that, Grace said. — Nothing to make a fuss about. But come home with me, won’t you? I’m afraid to be alone, I’m too sad.
Politely regretful, he said that he had to change buses now, he was going all the way to Motherwell. Grace nodded and raised a white-gloved hand in farewell when he got off, exchanging a deep look with the black glass of the window trailed across with silver raindrops. She was too robust, she thought, to think of the river: she wasn’t the sort. The bus ran along their street and past the house, the stop was just beyond it. And from the bus window as she passed she saw someone crumpled into their doorway where it was recessed beside the shop, sunk onto the step with his hood pulled over his face – which was turned away out of the rain, against the grubby white PVC of the door. One of the local winos they sometimes invited in and fed? Hurrying back along the street, hunting for her key in her bag, she was glad in any case of the distraction. And when she saw that it was Sandy, asleep, or with his eyes closed at least in some long martyred forbearance, beautiful as a saint, she was weak for a moment with her sense of the blessing she’d have forfeited if she hadn’t come home early, or if she’d drowned herself, or brought back the boy from the bus. She hardly dared speak to him, to rouse him.
— Sandy?
The long grey eyes flicked open. — Christ, Gracie, where’ve you been? This is a shithole. I’ve been here for fucking hours, since the pubs closed. And the pub was a shithole too.
She helped him up, supporting him as anxiously as if he were lame, unlocking the door and easing him over the threshold: leaning on her heavily on their way upstairs, he stank of beer and whisky. — My darling I’m so sorry, she mourned, pushing the hair back from his fine temple, kissing it. — I forgot to charge my phone, I thought it didn’t matter. But what are you doing here?
He groaned. — I needed you.
— If only I’d known! If only you’d told me!
— I have to talk to you. Good god, Grace, what do you look like?
She turned full circle for him on the stained carpet in the sitting room. — Aren’t I queenly?
Sandy only flicked his glance once around the room’s squalor – sleeping bags, tea mugs, trainers, the landlord’s orange furniture, foil trays of half-eaten takeaway: beneath his notice, though his nostrils tightened at the smell. — Drag queenly, maybe.
— Wife at a Masonic Ladies’ Night who’s had a few too many?
— And fallen into the fishpond. You’re soaking, really. Did you swim?
— I can’t swim, remember? Grace’s laughing face was fresh and pink and blotched with cold, rain was caught in the frizz of her hair. Cheerfully she wrung out a handful of her skirt. — This is just Glasgow, it rains here. I am soaked, aren’t I? And so are you. We’d better change out of our wet things; you’re shivering. Come into my room, it’s nicer. Well, not much nicer.
She kicked off her heels and, as she preceded him down a dank passage, reached up behind her, between her shoulder blades, for her zip; crossing the threshold of her room, switching on a light, she stepped out of the wet dress in one movement, trampling it underfoot, and was naked underneath – her nakedness as frank and unselfconscious, without mystique, as when she and Sandy were children paddling together at the seaside. Only now she wasn’t a child – with her lean young breasts like an athlete’s, strong goosefleshed haunches, scribble of wiry pubic hair. Visibly Sandy winced.
— Just let’s talk, he said. — I want to talk.
— But let’s talk in bed, darling. Let’s get warm. It’s all right: we’re like cousins, aren’t we? We don’t have to do anything.
He hesitated, but the room was disgusting, there was nowhere else for him to sleep. With slow fastidiousness and unsteady fingers, Sandy unbuttoned his shirt, hair hanging forward across his frown, delicately conscious of his exposure as Grace hadn’t been of hers. Clutching the pillow, she drank in the glamorous sight of him: he was a god fallen into her room, turning away to tug at his belt, unzip, step out of his trousers, keep on his underpants. He put the lamp out and then they faced each other under the duvet, not touching, in a darkness smudged with light from the street. She asked him lovingly what he wanted to talk about. — Christ knows, Sandy said gloomily. — I can’t remember now. Just everything. The band. Fucking Alex messing up.
— I know, Grace said soothingly. — Everyone’s upset.
— I mean, how crass is he? After what happened — how could he do this to you? And Izzy and Christine. He never thinks of anyone else.
— Well, he hasn’t strictly speaking done it to me. Because I don’t mind.
Grace knew Sandy’s eternal resentment of his father: touching his cheekbone with her fingertips, she willed her own calm insight to pass into him, with its capacious forgiveness. — My mum’s always carried a bit of a torch for Alex.
— But it’s too awful, at their age.
— When we’re that age, we’ll probably still want things.
She guessed that Sandy didn’t think much about growing old. — You’re the wonder, she said. — What you are is so amazing.
— He’s never once listened to my music.
— It doesn’t matter.
— I’m miserably drunk, Gracie, he said. — But at least I’m warm. I thought it was the end of the world, waiting outside. I needed you. I can always talk to you. You’re sweet. You’re a good girl.
— You’re safe now.
Making some involuntary grunting, assenting noise, he turned his back on her eventually and fell asleep; fascinated, Grace kept watch over his absence. Hours passed while rain washed against the window, cleansing and purifying. Sandy’s intricate, difficult self was in abeyance, his beautiful body left behind was like her hostage. When the grey dawn came round, she leaned over his sleeping form to view him in its sober light, and saw through him for the first time: her enchantment had passed, the sexual spell she’d been in thrall to since before she knew what sex was. That god had slipped away without any fanfare, out of the mortal guise he’d taken. When Sandy made love to her in the morning – rather perfunctorily and shamefacedly, as if he owed it to her – although Grace was eagerly pleased, it didn’t make much difference to anything.
Six
THEY WERE ALL IN VENICE, but not for the Biennale. Zachary and Lydia would stay on for that, Christine had preferred to come a couple of weeks before it opened – which coincided anyway with the school holidays, for Alex. She’d rather look at the old art, she said, her heart was there. Her feelings about the Biennale were complex: critical, competitive, hostile, excluded. Anyway she wasn’t that kind of artist, she worked on a more intimate scale. Nathan Kearney was with them too, for fun, and they had left the girls at home – Isobel was revising for her A levels and being paid to look after Grace, who was fourteen and had refused to join them. Grace was going through a phase of despising all art galleries and museums: she said she was an anarchist, and was contemptuous of the rituals of high culture she’d been brought up on, a cloying diet of too many private views, first nights, award ceremonies. Her critique delighted Zachary and amused Lydia; only Christine felt bruised, though she was also ashamed of this. Grace was only a child, what could her opinion matter? But she felt the danger of Grace’s contempt, how it shrivelled her work’s meaning. Grace in her crazy clothes was audacious and stylish, dismissive of tradition and nuance: she might be the future.
In the Campo Ghetto Nuovo the five
of them sat drinking Campari in the last warmth of a May evening – the spring’s heat was still tentative, hadn’t consolidated yet into summer. The women pulled light scarves around their shoulders. The rosy, dusky air was filled with the effervescent spritzing of darting swallows; yeshiva scholars with sidelocks came in and out of lit rooms belonging to some American foundation. Too many tourists drifted through the square, breaking up the picture, disproportionate to the substratum of local life, which nonetheless maintained its steady purposefulness, pretending to be oblivious of them – men heading home swinging briefcases, old ladies gossiping indignantly on the bridges, children’s high musical voices glancing in rapid flight, like the swallows, against the water and along the walls of pinkish brick and stucco. A cake shop was open, selling dolci ebraici, thin rolls of pastry stuffed with almond paste. They felt the guilt of being tourists, of Venice unravelling at its edges – and for so many decades and centuries now – into something frayed and spoiled. But it was also all exquisite and exalting: they had come from the Madonna dell’Orto full of Tintorettos, and this was the second Campari. Where could one go in the whole world, seriously, and not feel guilty?
— Stay at home, Alex said severely.
The others protested, he was such a puritan. — How can you, Alex? We wouldn’t have seen what we’ve seen, we wouldn’t have had today!
Alex said that from the perspective of another age, we would one day understand that tourism had been as despoiling as the oil industry, or cutting down rainforests.
— Don’t preach, Christine complained. — This isn’t an assembly.
Nathan argued in favour of mass tourism, small blue eyes animated in his craggy face. — Don’t you think it’s pious, all this cult of the unspoiled? When was anywhere ever not spoiled, when was anything authentic? In a century’s time they’ll be writing PhD theses about the sad decline of the traditional British stag party trip to Prague.
— What nonsense you talk, Lydia said to him indulgently. — You just say the opposite of what everyone else thinks. Is that why people think you’re so clever?
— I’ve no interest myself, incidentally, he said, — in travel. Don’t see the point of moving from one place to another, seeing things. I’m only here for the drink and because of you nice folk.
Balding, Nathan still wore long what hair he had left, tucked it behind his ears. He had grown bulky over the years, across the shoulders and in the thighs, and now was scoffing more than his share of the potato crisps, dabbing greasy-fingered in the bowl with the oblivious appetite of one who mostly eats alone. Guileless and voluble, transparent in his moods, sometimes he sank deep in himself and needed to be alone for a few hours. And he had turned out unexpectedly in shorts from the first day, as if he’d been informed this was the dress code for holidays – though they were hardly necessary in the mild weather. They’d never seen his shapeless pale knees before. Lydia said she thought things were better when travel was restricted to the upper classes. — At least they had taste and good manners. And there weren’t so many of them.
— Now who’s being contrary for the sake of it? Christine said.
— It’s the downside to the Shelley thing, said Nathan. — Ye are Many, they are Few. Whoops!
— The tourism genie’s out of the bottle, said Zachary amiably. — You can’t put it back in. We have to make the best of it. I’m the cynical one, I’m finding that reasonably easy, right here and now. Are we going to eat out, or shall we go home to cook veal scaloppini?
Christine protested that she didn’t want to move, she was inside the magic of the hour. — I don’t ever want to move from here, from this moment right now. All of us here together. I’m so perfectly happy.
— Another Campari all round, in that case?
— Then I’d be inside the magic of alcohol instead. You’d have to carry me home.
— I’m willing.
But Alex was restless and stood up from the table. — You all stay here, he said. — I’m going to walk.
He reproached their inertia, broke up the party. It didn’t matter if they changed places anyway, because home was temporarily a rented flat in a palazzo in Cannaregio opposite a convent, overlooking a quiet canal – its rooms furnished in that Continental-archaic style so exotic to British sensibility, antiques mingled with modern horrors, embroidered lace-edged curtains, narrow beds with bolsters, tall locked linen cupboards, austerely functional tiled kitchen and bathrooms. Leaning on the stone balustrade of the balcony grown over with pink jasmine, they could watch green water chop against the canal walls, its reflections liquid on the stucco, or listen out for the gondolas approaching through the warm peace of the afternoon or evening, or the motor boats carrying cement mixers or crates of bottled water or someone’s new fridge. The gondoliers’ ritual call, stogando io, warning as they neared the corner, was like a message from another age: the past flickered at the edge of vision, as if for an instant a portal opened through to it. Gondoliers stood up in the stern like centaurs, their labour half magnificent – superbly difficult, and ancient, and strange – and half absurd, because of the tourists stuffed self-consciously inside the boat going nowhere, taking photographs of each other.
Eighteen months ago, Alex had been made headmaster at his school. Not many men went into primary education, and those who did rose quickly to positions of power. This new role of his at the school seemed like his reconciliation with the world: his friends realised that he was surprised he was good at it, and relieved. It turned out that Alex wasn’t only visionary, he was competent: knew how to get money out of the local authority or the Department of Education or high-minded charities, to pay for extra music services, one-to-one support for troubled children, painting the walls of the playground with lines of poetry in fifteen languages. If he couldn’t play games with the conditions, then who could? The school would be rated outstanding in inspections; he would get the children to perform well in their SATs. And meanwhile he would also read to them from the Odyssey in the school hall every morning, and they would turn its stories into paintings, music, plays for shadow puppets.
Alex and Christine quarrelled that evening in Venice, and with uncharacteristic rancour. At worst, usually, they were a little acerbic in front of other people. The quarrel began with nothing: began in fact, though she would never know it, with Lydia, because she was irritating Alex, and Christine sensed it, and felt defensive on behalf of her friend. Zachary and Christine had dipped the escalopes of veal in egg and breadcrumbs and fried them in olive oil with sage leaves, while Lydia read some crime novel and smoked, stretched out on a spindly sofa upholstered in pink and gold stripes. Nathan and Alex played Scrabble – they were well matched, and too good at it for the others to ever beat them, so that they’d given up trying. These two were locked in vicious competition for the whole holiday, playing game after game whenever they got the chance, bent with ferocity upon victory: although Alex never acknowledged by any look or shout of triumph or defeat that he cared either way. Nathan was less contained. On this occasion, in fact, Alex lost: Nathan got city on a triple, and then later added toxi in front of it, which reached another triple.
At the table, squeezing lemon on her veal, Lydia said she’d had enough of beauty, she thought she might need a rest from it, tomorrow. — I need to contemplate a tower block or a Jack Vettriano or a Burger King or something, she said. Christine knew that Alex was chafing, too, at the round of churches and art galleries and idle pauses. He looked at the paintings absorbedly, and remembered them as exactly afterwards as Christine did, as well as having a better grasp of the political and social history behind them; when he turned away from looking, though, it was as if he closed a book and didn’t want to speak about it. Speaking was crass and everyone’s responses were predictable, he winced at them, and despised the guides with their unstoppable bland flow of knowing. Abruptly he’d have seen enough: he’d leave the others to it and wait for them downstairs, or in a cafe. His patience, at the time they took, was osten
tatious.
Now he looked at Lydia moodily across the supper table, resenting her voicing what he felt. — You have a lemon pip beside your lip, he said. Lydia dabbed at her face with the kitchen paper they had in lieu of napkins; Alex had dropped his attention to his plate; it was Christine who reassured her that the pip was gone. — What’s everyone’s plan for tomorrow? Christine said with steely cheerfulness.
Alex objected without looking up. — Do we have to have plans?
— Let’s not have plans, Lydia said. — I hate plans. I might just stay here and be lazy.
— Well why don’t you? Christine said. — Laziness feels like the right response to Venice. I can always go and soak up more paintings by myself, play the indefatigable tourist.
— Zachary’ll go with you, he’s indefatigable too.
— I need to get online, Alex said. — I have work to do.
The promised internet connection in the palazzo was a disappointment – or, Christine insisted, a relief. Alex had a deadline for making a grant application; Nathan, who wrote reviews, was sending off copy which was already late. He stayed up writing it after the others went to bed; they heard the furtive clacking of his keyboard, pausing and resuming, forging his opinion, which occasionally he chuckled at audibly, or groaned over. He and Alex had found a grubby and cramped little internet cafe.