by Tessa Hadley
—We’re only playing to keep warm, said Kate. —We have to go out soon. Buckets and Mops are coming and if we’re lazing around the place doing nothing while they clean our lavatories and wash our floors it might foment revolutionary discontent. We walk in the park and then we drive down to have coffee and do our shopping. I swore I wouldn’t ever drive after I came home, so Billie does it for me, it’s a treat for her. And when we come back our lavatories are clean, and B and M have taken their money and left us enigmatic little notes. Don’t you think it’s the life?
—Billie’s never passed a test. Does she have a licence? Billie, you mustn’t let Kate make you drive.
—Darling, it’s easy-peasy, Billie reassured her. —It’s great fun. We don’t go on any big roads.
—Carol has to fuss. There’s a tradition of public service in her family. Don’t take any notice. Shall we play it again? Only you’re not to criticise. We’re both very rusty. Or to cry. That’s just as off-putting.
Carol gave herself up to admiration. Her own fingers in the old days of holding oranges over the piano had only ever seemed, for all Billie’s patience, too thick and too fumbling. Kate, swaying in time, with her violin tucked under her chin at the music stand, her thick bob of black hair thrown back, was a figure of romantic higher discipline and finer sensibility. And Billie showed no signs yet of forgetting how to play. Carol herself had said to Kate that it must be good for her mother to keep practising the skills she had, stretching to her capacity. The music moved Carol deeply but she didn’t discriminate, couldn’t remember a tune the minute after it was over, couldn’t tell Haydn from Schubert or Mahler from Debussy. In weak moments when she was alone she was likely to find herself humming some awful scrap of a pop song as if it meant everything to her.
When they had finished – glamorous the flourish of accomplishment with which musicians re-entered the lesser atmosphere – Kate took Carol upstairs, to talk to her while she put on her coat.
—Do your wee-wee, Mummy, she called over her shoulder on the way up. —Otherwise you’re bound to need one while we’re out.
Billie cheerfully agreed.
Kate’s bedroom was the same long one she had had always; at one end a little panelled bay with a window seat hung over the back garden, and diamond-paned casement windows suggested captive maidens looking out for rescue. The room had last been decorated when Kate was a domineering teenager given a free hand, so the walls were faded purple, scarred with Blu Tak and the shapes of old posters: all around the room, above the picture rail, the ghosts of a nursery frieze showed through the paint, the Pied Piper and Rumpelstiltskin and princes slashing through thickets of thorn. Now it was newly crowded with Kate’s accumulations brought from London: books spilling out of the bookshelves and piled against the wall, clothes hanging from the knobs of the wardrobe and on the back of the door, her computer not set up yet on the big ink-stained desk where she had once worked for her A levels, a vast brightly coloured Chinese paper kite, a steel standard lamp with white glass globes. Framed prints from a Paula Rego exhibition and of Kertesz photographs and a Rachel Whiteread house were propped against a wall along with other art Carol recognised from the London flat.
—I’m trying to introduce elements of the twenty-first century, Kate said, —but this house chews up my post-modernisms and spits them out as Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
—This isn’t half of your stuff. What have you done with it? You haven’t just left it for your tenants to destroy?
Putting on red lipstick at the long cheval glass, Kate blotted her lips together and shook her head. —I loaded everything I could into the car, put the rest in the small spare room, and locked it.
—When we rented that house in Kilburn in our third year, we broke into the locked room. We read their letters and went through their things and invented lives for them and wore their clothes.
—We were awful. I’d never have let my flat to anyone like us. I asked for very boring; judging by our one short meeting, I think I got it.
—What are you going to do all day here? How will you stand it? Have you got a project, something you’re working on?
—A project. What an uncharming idea. You sound like my Head of Department. Kate changed her shoes, swapping high heels for very high ones, square-toed, black and green with green leather bows, chosen from jumbled rows of astonishing shoes inside a cupboard. —By the way, I hate your conspiracy with Max. Don’t you dare talk to him about me.
Carol took no notice. —This is going to be very hard work, you know. Billie’s going to get worse.
—Don’t lecture me. There’s money. I’ll pay for help.
—And you should have stuck with Max. He’s such a lovely chap.
—As if you didn’t understand that that’s precisely why I haven’t ‘stuck with him’. Stuck with him! Weren’t you a feminist once?
—But now you’re sorry. Don’t try to pretend to me that you’re not sometimes panicky, having burned your boats: and all of them. Not only Max, now. The job and the flat and London.
Kate wrapped herself in her big black-and-white coat, which went on like a cape, fastening with huge black buttons diagonally. —It’s quite a conflagration, my boats.
—Don’t be clever. It’s not a metaphor. You talked about having children with him at one point.
—That was rubbish. I was off my head.
—Soon it will be too late.
—Good God, Carol. Are you actually broody on my behalf? How indecent! Have your own bloody babies. Soon it will be too late for you, too.
—Oh, I’m an old workhorse. I’ll die in harness.
—Even workhorses have reproductive parts, you know. While we’re belabouring these figures of speech.
Carol lay down abruptly on her back on Kate’s bed in her smart suit that was already wrinkled; her feet in their flat brown shoes stuck out over the end. The Habitat silky bronze bedcover was double-bed sized; its excess tumbled across the floor.
—And now you’re sulking. Kate frowned down at her.
—Truly I’m not. I just suddenly thought how delicious it would be to close my eyes. I’ll only be a moment.
Kate moved round the room as quietly as she could in those shoes, picking up her bag, finding her keys, spraying perfume. Carol had always been able to do this. She had fallen asleep often at school, once lying along the wooden lockers where they kept their gym kit; she had slept in a train luggage rack when they were Inter-railing; she had gone out at Kate’s dinner parties, or beside her in the theatre. She would only be absent for a few minutes; then her rather pale blue eyes would pop wide open again, and behind them immediately whatever was vigilant and responsible would resume its watch. Freezing even in her thick coat, Kate picked up a corner of the silky bedcover and dropped it tenderly across her friend.
David walked down from where he worked for the Department of Public Health, in Cathays Park, to the Millennium Centre in the Bay; the evening’s cold was iron hard, moonless and still. Muffled in his camel overcoat and scarf, he strode out in a tension that was partly protective of his core of heat and partly excited expectation of the music he was going to hear: the WNO were doing Handel’s Jephtha. He only knew it from recordings; he was looking forward with a leap of pleasure to hearing it in the dignity of live performance. White lights were strung in the tracery of winter trees in front of the museum with its pillared portico; the pale mass of buildings in the civic centre – museum, law courts, university, the Welsh Office, the central police station – was the only place that ever made him feel in the least colonised, because he thought that the old administrative buildings in Delhi or Ottawa must look like these did at night, dreaming in melancholy hauteur. Beside the long road that linked the city centre and the Bay, not meant for pedestrians, black water winked in Alexandra Dock, so that the city seemed suddenly afloat on a black sea, unmoored from its daytime self. He didn’t care what people thought about the new Millennium Centre in the Bay, all the arguments
about its architecture, its curved armadillo-back; he knew he was rather easily impressed visually, not caring enough, impatient to get to what was inside. He imagined his love of music sometimes as caverns underground in him, immense and studded with crystal and inaccessible from the surface.
Suzie was meeting him in the foyer; she was bringing her car – the new one they’d had to buy after her accident – so they could drive back together. He always bought two tickets for the opera or for concerts, but usually he took his mother or his sister; Suzie had never wanted to come before. He stopped inside the doors to look for her in the current of sociability, people coming in from the cold, leaving their things at the cloakroom, buying programmes; he saw her with her back turned, looking for him, her rough honey-blonde hair caught inside the collar of her black coat, her hands pushed down – out of nervousness he guessed, knowing her – into its pockets. When she felt out of place she stood with her shoulders hunched and awkward, and her head tilted defiantly; she challenged the crowd who took no notice of her, flowing around where she waited, or only sending in her direction the ordinary interested glances because she was young and attractive. Catching sight of her, he remembered to wonder why, after all the years of her being cheerfully not in the least interested in his music, Suzie had wanted to come to this. There had been a little distance between them, these past few weeks; perhaps this was her gesture of conciliation.
When he touched her arm from behind Suzie turned on him in relief and accusation. —It lasts three hours, she exclaimed. —I overheard someone saying so. You didn’t warn me.
—You didn’t ask.
He kissed her cheek; she had put on make-up, pink stuff on her skin, and perfume.
—This really isn’t my kind of thing.
—You haven’t heard it yet!
—I mean all this, she said, looking around her, smiling edgily.
David tried to see what Suzie saw in the opera crowd. It was surely all innocently pleasantly provincial enough, the noisy greetings and the stuffy dressing-up; it was hardly Covent Garden. There were funny old wrinkled couples with bags of sweets, and students from the Welsh College of Music and Drama. But Suzie took offence easily, if she ever imagined she scented pretension.
—Let’s put our coats in the cloakroom. Then we can go and order drinks for the intervals.
—Three hours! Suzie said. —I’m going to need a drink.
—I’m glad you came, he said encouragingly, in the queue for programmes. —I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
—I thought I ought to see what you got up to. If it’s so marvellous.
—It is marvellous.
—I’ve never been to an opera in my life.
—Strictly speaking, of course, this isn’t one. It’s an oratorio.
—And what’s that when it’s at home?
All day long David had been aware of Handel waiting for him at the end of it, spacious, public, subtle music; now he began to fear that anxiety over Suzie was going to distract him from his precious opportunity. When they had ordered their drinks for the interval, they stood over a first gin in the bar, behind one of the giant letters cut out of the facade that curved like a ship’s prow, spelling on the outside in Welsh and English some lines of poetry he couldn’t remember. She was wearing her white trouser suit and a silky blue top; searching for something to talk about, they resorted to the children, rehearsing the parts of a cheerfully married couple for the benefit of anyone watching. Suzie was more animated when she remembered to tell him about the new teacher they had at work, filling in for a maternity leave.
—It’s eerie, Suzie said. —She says she has second sight. She was sitting beside me in the staffroom, we were having coffee, she gripped my arm and said, ‘I’m sorry but I can just see this so intensely, I have to tell you.’ She seemed to know all these things about me that she couldn’t possibly have found out. She knew about my mother losing my grandmother’s ring in the sand, all those years ago. I’ve never told anyone about that at school. She knew what my mother was like. She said, ‘That’s the sort of thing she always does, she’s careless with precious things. Careless with you and your sister, too.’ I mean, how did she know I had a sister?
—They have tricks, David said. —They draw these things out of you, without you noticing. It’s all fakery, of course.
—She knew about that accident. Not exactly. But about me being afraid of something like a white bird, falling.
—You probably talked to Giulia about it. I’m not sure I’d want someone who believed all that stuff teaching my children.
—Oh, don’t be so solemn. What harm could it do?
—So what did she see in your future?
She was vague then, as if she didn’t want to tell him. —I don’t know, the useful stuff. Change.
They quarrelled at the second interval. David found the tray with their numbered ticket on it, two more gins and a bottle of tonic.
—I hate it, Suzie said, loud enough to twitch a few backs nearby. A swell of the crowd coming out from the auditorium washed them too close up against one another. —It’s horrible.
He poured out the tonic, distributing it carefully between the two glasses.
—I’m sorry you’re not enjoying it.
—It’s not the music.
—How can it be ‘not the music’? The music is what it is.
—For all I can tell, the music may be very brilliant.
—I’m sorry you can’t tell. It really is.
—But you’re all sitting there, enjoying yourselves – yes, mmm, very interesting, very nice orchestration there, very effective counterpoint – listening to a man who’s taking seriously a God who asks him to kill his daughter. I mean I’m sorry. Am I the only one who thinks this is pretty sick? We have kids coming to school covered with bruises and so on. Isn’t it the same thing?
The blue silky stuff of her top settled around her breasts, the light on it changing as she breathed fast; David straightened his back in his determination not to care that everyone around them was listening. If she didn’t know the answer, then there was no point.
—And we’re supposed to sympathise with his dilemma! ‘A father’s bleeding heart’! It’s disgusting. If this is high civilisation and all that.
She took a gulp of her gin very fast and some of it trickled down her chin.
—You’re bringing some very twenty-first-century assumptions to bear on an eighteenth-century work.
—I’m afraid I’m a very twenty-first-century kind of person. Don’t think I don’t know how it’s going to end. I don’t even need to look in the programme. He’s going to decide to go ahead with the sacrifice and then angels are going to appear from heaven at the last moment and make everything all right.
—That’s about the sum of it.
—I don’t think I can bear to sit through that. I’ve had enough.
He was cold with disappointment in her. —OK.
—How will you get home, if I take the car?
—Walk. Or taxi. It isn’t a problem.
—Kate Flynn’s here, did you see? Carol’s friend.
—I didn’t see.
—Sitting a few rows ahead of us. She might give you a lift. Or I’ll stay if you want me to.
—Absolutely not.
They stood awkwardly while she finished her drink; he fished in his jacket pocket for her cloakroom tag.
—Why did you come? he asked. —What did you want it to be?
She shook her head as if he couldn’t understand. — Something else. I really did want to like it, honestly. Something uplifting and different. But I should have known.
He thought he might feel relieved when she was gone; but his heart was dancing with rage, and he only felt conspicuous. He might as well have left too; there was no chance of enjoying the rest of the oratorio after what had happened. He went back before the bell to sit inside. Just before the lights dimmed for the third act he did catch sight of Kate Flynn, in the stalls five or six rows ahead
of him, reading her programme. He hadn’t seen her for a while – a year or more, perhaps. He was surprised how immediately recognisable she was even from behind, without seeing her face: the head as straight and alert on its long neck as if it was held up by a wire; big earrings dangling from under the short bob of her hair. He remembered that Kate had always, even in her teens, had two pure white locks in her thick black hair, one growing from her temple and one on her nape, she used to be teased for it; he wasn’t sure he could see them from this distance. Kate was two or three years older than him: his sister Carol’s age.
She seemed to be sitting alone; there was an empty seat beside her but no one came to fill it. That idea soothed him as the lights went down. It was the best way: it was fallacious to imagine that these experiences could be shared. All through the last act, through Jephtha’s visionary aria, ‘Waft her, angels’, this sense of himself and others in the audience listening together but in their separateness sustained him. Actually it didn’t matter that Suzie had gone home, that she didn’t care for the things he cared for. It freed him up. It would have been worse, say, if she had enthused over Jephtha and then come back the next week and said she liked Madame Butterfly or La Bohème just as much. Suzie was wrong, she was surely wrong. The music, pushing open the almost abstract words, did not express the complacency of authority but its effort and its pain.
