Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  — Alex, that’s such a bore for you, said Lydia sympathetically. — Can’t it wait?

  — Well, no, actually. There’s a deadline.

  — Because of course, Christine said, — Alex always has to be doing something more important than everyone else.

  But her comment wasn’t fair, because the grant application really did need to go in: she had reassured him, when they were still in England, that he would be able to submit it from here. She regretted at once, when Alex directed at her a glance of pure dislike, the antagonism she’d unleashed – and the others looked at her in surprise. This was her blunder sometimes, mediating Alex’s difficulty for others when actually they didn’t mind it, or hadn’t even registered it. But she couldn’t take back her words, so she might as well unfurl the whole flag of her resentment. — You’ve noticed how he bestows his presence on us, as if he really ought to be elsewhere, she said, pretending to be teasing. In response Alex was coldly vicious, implacable. — Chris is always trying to enlist me in her latest scheme for enjoyment. I’m never supposed to enjoy myself in my own way.

  — But Alex, do you know how to enjoy yourself? You’re always so angry.

  Because they had an audience, the temptation of denunciations won out. She said Alex spoiled occasions, like a child, to assert his own power; he said she smothered everyone, fussing over them, subduing them to her good intentions. When they all separated at the end of a soured evening, it was particularly awful because Christine and Alex had twin beds, so had to nurse their outrage separately, lying stiff and inert under the sheets; accidental collisions in a double bed could have helped to heal their breach. Neither could face the deliberate act of crossing the floor between the beds, risking rejection: they didn’t want to make friends anyway, they didn’t care for each other. In the early morning Christine woke to a bleakness like cold poison: she thought that she hated holidays, hated this ruined place with its beauty tied around its neck like a doom. Heroically, however, in bare feet she crossed the cold space of marble floor and climbed in behind Alex, putting her arms around his chest and pressing against his warm back where she liked to make herself comfortable, suffused in the pungent, sleepy heat of his skin. She did this partly in pragmatic spirit, to save the holiday. Although Alex didn’t say anything, he didn’t adjust his position away from her, and when they got up they spoke as if nothing had happened. Their antagonism passed. Alex even seemed, from that point onwards, to make efforts to be more sociable.

  Nathan was innocently dismayed by his friends’ quarrelling. He knew that married happiness wasn’t perfect, but only because he’d learned this from films and plays, where its breakdowns were entertaining. Their performance was all the more shaming because Zachary and Lydia were always so pleasant together. Christine knocked sometimes, with puzzled curiosity, upon the smooth surface of the secret of her friends’ marriage, trying to test it, find out what it was made of. Who’d ever have thought, considering how selfish Lydia was supposed to be, and how capricious, that she’d make such a compliant and affectionate wife?

  Alex and Nathan went off in the morning in search of the internet, and the three of them left behind ate dolci ebraici with their coffee on the balcony. The little cakes were disappointing but their vantage point couldn’t fail – crisp light, perfumed jasmine, mildly odorous breath of the water slopping across stone steps. Nuns in grey habits and schoolchildren erupted into the quiet, rising and falling over the pure arc of a bridge then passing on the fondamenta below. One nun pushed dog’s mess into the canal with the point of her grey umbrella. Zachary, who picked up languages so easily – as if they simply all lay dormant in him, rousing in response to suggestion – tried to translate for Lydia and Christine, catching the conversations in snatches.

  — Something about a letter, a mother, a kitten, some homework . . .

  He must be making it up, they exclaimed, it was too perfectly nun-like. Or it was like a passage from a novel by Colette.

  — No, really, that’s what they’re saying, listen!

  Zachary had the gift of taking his difficult work lightly, shedding it when he came away, putting himself entirely at the disposal of his friends. Alex would say it wasn’t a gift, it was Hannah, who would take care of Zachary’s emails for him, manage the gallery in his absence like his second self. Still, there was a kind of genius in how thoroughly, between bursts of his gargantuan energy, Zachary could fall back into relaxation. His presence now, lounging in sunglasses and T-shirt and frayed straw hat on a sagging canvas chair between Lydia and Christine, only shallowly absorbed in one of the novels Lydia had cast off, was palpably whole, not thinned by any lapses of concentration or twinges from elsewhere. Yet in a week or so he would pick up his tasks of networking and negotiation with unflagging enthusiasm. Christine wondered what it meant, to belong so wholeheartedly to the world as Zachary did, have it cast its net of possession so far across yourself, trawling so deep. It must be a virtuous thing: someone had to run the world, and save it. But she couldn’t imagine it for herself, couldn’t imagine not wanting to keep everything back from the net, or almost everything. Was Zachary cheapened, allowing himself to be made instrumental?

  She had her sketchbook out and was drawing him: not Venice, that was impossible, what was there left to see? But she was trying to capture this aspect of her friend, his eagerness to please, in the bold strokes of her charcoal: black scribble of beard, swell of paunch, long lines of the arms flung back in abandon, book half fallen from a lifeless hand. The Art Dealer. Christine had been drawn recently to the work of certain figure-painters of the twenties and thirties – James Cowie, Felice Casorati: they had influenced what she was doing. Not everyone understood or liked her new pictures, narrative art was still suspect. Alex said that they were too explicit – although if she pressed him to explain what he thought they meant, then he couldn’t do it, or wouldn’t. She had hoped that over the years her works would get bigger – it seemed to be a prerequisite for a career of matching size. But instead they’d shrunk. Not many of them, now, were much larger than a modest TV set.

  Lydia looked around with faint irritability at her husband dozing and her friend absorbed in drawing: their absences bored her. She was too alertly vigilant, herself, ever to fall asleep during the day. Because Zachary’s consciousness was withdrawn from between them for a moment – he snored, and his mouth fell open – Christine grew to feel something interrogative in how Lydia waited. — I know you think I was horrible to Alex last night, Christine apologised. Only the way Lydia held her head, poised on her neck swan-like, as if she were holding it up above dirty water, expressed any criticism. — You know what he’s like, though! He can be so – inexorable.

  Lydia blinked thoughtfully, her eyelids painted with blue shadow. — I don’t mind him when he’s inexorable.

  — Well I do. I hated him for it last night. He hated me too, so it was only fair. I can’t love him every minute of every day.

  — But isn’t that what you’re meant to do? Lydia said.

  — Our married relationships are very different, yours and mine. It’s easy to be nice to Zach.

  — That’s true.

  — Isn’t it impossible, though, anyway, to love someone all the time? That’s why marriage is a contract. Those awful vows people invent for themselves now: ‘I promise to always love the way you rub your nose’, or ‘I promise that your singing will always make me happy’. But sometimes the way he rubs his nose will make you want to kill him! You stay with him because it’s in your contract, it’s the deal you agreed. ‘In sickness and in health’. That gets you over the tough spot. He stays with you for the same reason. It’s more decent.

  Lydia didn’t laugh, she was in an odd mood: almost reproachful. — But you are happy, aren’t you?

  — Well, of course I am. I’m so lucky. Christine pressed the end of the charcoal on her page, bending over it, breaking it accidentally, making a jagged mark, seeing her drawing through a blur of emotion. — But how ridiculous,
Lydia. You’ve made me cry. Only it’s not about what you think: not Alex. It’s Isobel.

  — What’s wrong with Isobel? Lydia asked patiently, but less interested.

  — Nothing’s wrong with her. It’s only me. I can’t bear to imagine our home without her in it, when she goes off to university. Her absence haunts the place already, before she’s even gone. When she plays the piano – not very well, I know – I can only think how empty the rooms will be without her music in them. It’s sentimental, I’m well aware! But if there’s anyone I passionately and irrationally love, in the way you mean, it’s my child. Isn’t that strange?

  — But she’ll come back for holidays.

  — Something’s over, though. I didn’t think it would be over so quickly. It felt so monumental and permanent, when it began. You’d think this was something a woman would feel, wouldn’t you, who had no life of her own and had invested too much in her children. But there it is.

  Alex suggested to Zachary that they go out and walk. The women were washing up after a supper the men had cooked; Nathan was writing on his laptop. Zachary felt the old exhilaration of their friendship, hurrying to keep up with Alex’s stride – he walked fast and purposefully, hands thrust in his pockets, even if the purpose were only to lose himself. Diving down narrow passageways, choosing without consultation to cross one bridge rather than another, he hardly seemed to take anything in, never lingering or hesitating. When they crossed a square still restless with knots of visitors – erupting in noisy bursts of partying, made bold by darkness and drink – Alex’s glance across the haunting, haunted dusky façades was perfunctory, almost over-familiar. He never let himself be caught out in admiring wonder, which was parochial. If you only marvelled at where you were, you remained apart from it. Rather, it must become a background to your thought, a stage set for it. He was laying out for Zachary’s appreciation examples of the absurdities he was up against at school: pulling his hands out of his pockets to wave them expressively, he turned and walked backwards ahead of him, carried away with explaining, with exasperation.

  It was a long time since Zachary had seen his friend so animated, so unguarded. Some balance between them was restored, because Alex was caught up in his new role and borne along by it, putting his whole thought to use. When they were at school together, and at university, and for a while afterwards, it had seemed a form of good taste, almost, for Alex to hold back from choosing some work to give his life to: as if he were waiting for the right way to begin, while others chose wrong ones. Then there was the publication of his book. But he had begun to seem behindhand, eventually, in not acting further, in turning in upon himself. It had taken such efforts of tact, in those years, not to draw attention to Alex’s not doing anything that mattered; Zachary had had to suppress, to a certain extent, news from his own life. Then he had been disappointed at first when his friend chose teaching, had thought he was walling himself up from the world in a prideful gesture. And had been quite wrong.

  They stopped in a small bar in a side street in Dorsoduro – crowded with voluble Venetians, the glass counters heaped with salumi, mozzarella, crostini, pickles – for a caffè stretto: took their drinks outside to stand on the pavement in the warm air. Bats flickered across the canal in knots of darkness. They talked about Sandy, who had dropped out of studying for his degree for the second time; Alex was disappointed in his son. He had waited impatiently for Sandy to enter into an adult understanding of the world and now couldn’t bear his ignorance of history, his lack of interest in books. His life was infantile, Alex said. — Lying in bed until the middle of the afternoon, absenting himself from conversation on his headphones, indifferent to ideas. He has no clue that there could be any other kind of life. There’s a scene I keep remembering, from one of my father’s novels – actually I’m translating this novel at the moment, I work on it at night when I can’t sleep. The scene might be from his experience, I don’t know, I never asked. I wish I had asked him more things. In this scene a boy watches his own father, a farmworker like my grandfather, given instructions in a heavy downpour of rain by his master who stands dry under an umbrella: his father’s face is blind with the rain.

  — Sandy has his music, Zachary insisted. — He’s really talented.

  — So you keep telling me. But he’s lazy.

  — You should trust him. Wait and see.

  — And I hate that music he plays.

  In all honesty, Zachary said, Alex’s liking it was not what mattered. Liking it was for the young. Anyway, he liked it.

  — But then, you’re eternally young.

  — And you hate too many things, Zachary said affectionately.

  They leaned on a stone parapet which gave back to their touch the heat of the day; the night air was balmy with warmth and wine and the water’s undertow of rot. Camouflaged among voices raised in Italian, their English speech drew them closer. — I suppose I do, Alex conceded. — I’ve always felt that was my task: to be vigilant against liking the wrong things. But it’s a mistake, perhaps. I suppose it’s what’s stopped me writing.

  — Do you think? asked Zachary cautiously. Alex never spoke about not writing.

  — The heavy hand of the critical law on the scribbler’s hunched shoulder. Thou shalt not! Also, this impression that I was living in an aftermath, in the bland time after the real things have happened and the real books have been written. The age of commentary follows the age of making.

  — You could have done with a catastrophe, to write about.

  — I don’t care anyway. I vastly prefer what I do now. It’s such a relief to feel myself acting impersonally. And I hadn’t expected the classroom’s warmth. How interested I am in all of them.

  — And now you’re translating your dad’s books. That’s a lovely thing too.

  — Well, they’re not lovely books. They’re brutal. I don’t know if there are readers for them in our soft age.

  Leaping ahead in his thoughts, Zachary jiggled his tiny coffee cup of thick china, though there was nothing left in it. — Do you think it’s a male thing?

  — Brutality? History would probably gently nudge us towards that conclusion.

  — No, no: that inhibition you talked about, feeling you lived in the aftermath, with nothing left to say. Because in the visual arts, you know, it’s occurred to me that women have been exempted from certain forms of self-doubt, which might be gendered.

  Alex looked at him vaguely. — Gendered? That’s an ugly word.

  — Because the pen has been in the male hand and all that, for so long. Now that women have picked up the pen – for writing, for painting, for everything – they may feel all kinds of doubt but not that one. Because they’re not belated. As women they’re still near the beginning.

  — But we all live in the same belated world, we men and women.

  Zachary could tell that Alex wasn’t interested in his idea. He seemed sometimes to tolerate Zachary’s conscientious politics as if they were an occupational hazard, or a temperamental weakness. — Chris’s work for instance, Zachary persisted, wanting to persuade his friend in this moment of openness between them. He wanted to open it wider: embrace the women inside their intimacy. — How has she been able to make her art so freely? It’s poured out of her, hasn’t it? Why hasn’t she felt the heavy hand on her shoulder?

  Alex looked startled, before a shutter fell across his expression, across some secret. It took him aback, Zachary saw, to have Christine’s work invoked in the same scale as anything he, Alex, might have done. Zachary was startled too. He hadn’t known that Alex didn’t take his wife’s work quite seriously: didn’t, in their horrible old schoolboy phrase, really rate it. He must have only been kind, and condescending, and keeping a domestic peace, when he had acquiesced for all these years in seeming to rate it. The implications of Alex’s mistake – Zachary was sure it was a mistake – seemed for a moment fairly tragic. And the night’s happy mutuality deflated, each man was disappointed in the other. — As you say, Alex
said drily, but with finality, as if it were the end of any discussion he wanted to have. — It pours out of her.

  They all five went on the boat to Torcello, and had lunch in a garden-restaurant beside the path to the cathedral, in the shade of an awning that flapped in a breeze so that patches of brilliance went darting across the white tablecloth. Nightingales sang in the undergrowth in the hot light of day, red wine poured from a glass jug fizzed against the tongue. It was all like Keats on antibiotics, Nathan said.

  — So here we are, Lydia said thoughtfully. — Where are we?

  — You’re going to love this cathedral, Zachary promised. — It’s all so simple, so anciently, divinely lucid. In its great fresco: the damned on one side and the saved on the other.

  — The trouble with the saved, Christine said, — is that they can’t help looking smug. How good are the good, really, if on the Day of Judgement they’re enjoying being saved while all their dear sinful friends and relations are shovelled into the burning pit?

  — Oh, I’d enjoy it, Lydia said. — Plucking away on my harp, feeling beatified.

  — But Lydia, don’t disappoint me! Christine said. — Aren’t you going to hell? That’s where I’m going, because I thought you were!

  All wounds seemed grown over in the present moment of pleasure as they talked and ate their pasta and grilled fish. They were flattered by the thick light under the awning, which burnished away marks of ageing in their faces, and they felt themselves significant – as if they were arranged around the table for a photograph, although they forgot to actually take one. The men were concentrations of darker mass, Alex holding something back, Zachary overspilling his place, jumping up and down to order more food, confer with the cook. Even Nathan in his shorts, knees spread wide, wolfing his food, was striking as if he might be famous, or very clever. The women in their summer dresses, Lydia’s white and Christine’s splashed with blue flowers, were the bright accents in the composition – Christine milky-pale under her sun hat, which flecked her with dancing points of light. And Lydia really did look like one of the blessed, with her long oval face and her hair bleached by the sun, knotted demurely at her neck.