by Tessa Hadley
Turning his collar up against the rain, he made his way back to where he’d parked the car; then lifting his head as he felt for the keys in his pocket he saw Kate and her mother crossing the road from the park, Kate holding up over them both a huge black umbrella. Mrs Flynn looked more frail out in the open, wrapped up in a brown crocheted beret and scarf; she walked with a stick, head down, her mouth slack from her efforts. Kate in her black-and-white checked wool coat was not fussily solicitous but had adjusted her pace to her mother’s slow advance, looking around with that high gaze of hers which although she was short seemed to glance across the tops of things, trees, roofs, passing cars. David was suddenly shy. He thought he could read the succession of expressions on Kate’s face when she recognised him – blankness, surprise, faint irritation – and he was reminded of weekends when he was eleven or twelve and Carol and Kate, reluctant, had been detailed to ‘keep an eye on him’ when his parents went away; he had known with indignation at the time that he was more safe and sensible than they ever were.
—This is a bad moment, he explained himself. —I was only bringing your book back. I’ll come another time.
—Oh, don’t go, Kate said. —We need company. Perhaps you could get Mummy in. I’ll put the kettle on.
Mrs Flynn gave no sign that she recognised David, but submitted to his care. They made their way together up the side path to the door; the asphalt was worn into treacherous pits or upreared over tree roots, and the old lady gripped David’s arm with her free hand. The cold breath of the house, sour milk and damp towels, came to meet them from where the door stood open onto the entrance hall. He could hear Kate running water in the far-off kitchen. In the hall he asked Mrs Flynn if she would like to take her coat off, and obediently she began to unwind the scarf from her neck. Now that she was no longer in forward motion, a rusty old habit of deprecating charm started up in her.
—The park was glorious, she said. —They keep it up so well.
—Don’t take anything off, called Kate. —That dreadful man still hasn’t fixed the boiler.
—We love our park, Kate and I. It’s such a joy. We’ve always been so lucky, having it on our doorstep.
—I think it’s funereal, said Kate, still in her coat, carrying cups into the drawing room on a tray. —It’s like a cemetery. All the new trees, and every bench you sit on, in memory of someone whose favourite place it was. I began to think I’d find one with my name. We had to go into the glasshouse to keep warm. Full of sparrows zinging about, drunk with relief, thinking it’s summer.
—The borders were magnificent! murmured Mrs Flynn, although she obediently kept her coat on.
Kate frowned at her as if she had a headache. —Don’t be silly, Mummy. It isn’t even properly spring yet. Everything that had grown up had lain down again under that snow we had, we were dejected, our feet were cold, and then it began to rain. We clung to David when we saw him because without him we might sink into bottomless despondency.
She found matches to light the gas fire, and brought in the teapot in a dirty knitted cosy; outside it seemed to grow dark very early, partly because of the dead creeper that hung in a matted blanket from the veranda, sagging as the rain soaked into it. They sat in the gas-fire light; Kate on a cushion on the floor made no move to switch on the lamps, nursing her teacup for warmth, a mess of bangles clashing on her thin wrists. The cups were bone china, tiny, rosebud-patterned, and David had swallowed down his tea in half a minute.
—You gave me a book I couldn’t read, he said, holding it out to her.
—Oh? Kate looked vague. —Which one was it?
—I don’t mean it was too difficult. I mean it’s in some language I can’t read. Polish, I think? Did you realise you were doing that? What did you mean?
Kate opened it quickly and then snapped it shut with her loud laugh, that he flinched from sometimes.
—I remember now. You were very importunate. I couldn’t think why it was you wanted me to choose your reading for you, so I just picked up the nearest thing. I did have a suspicion, afterwards. But I’m so sorry. It was awful of me, wasn’t it? Can you forgive me? It is Polish. I’ll find you something else. If you haven’t gone off the whole idea.
—I don’t know where to begin, that’s all.
—It’s rather touching, in your middle age, that you’re ready to ‘begin’. Like one of those adult baptisms: grocers and insurance clerks in white sheets, dunked in midwinter ponds.
David was disconcerted that she thought him middle-aged.
—Aren’t we? Aren’t you forty? Isn’t that in the middle somewhere? I never really know how old I feel. Sometimes I think it’s all hardly started; sometimes I feel jaded as some mummified immortal. You’re much better balanced, aren’t you? You seem to know who you are.
David turned his empty teacup upside down, frowning, interrogating himself. —I suppose that outwardly . . .
—Outwardly’s good. Don’t hesitate, don’t tell me that you’re not balanced, not yet. I’m liking to think of you as terribly steady. Billie, don’t eat more biscuits, they’re not good for you.
—I’m hungry, dear. What is for dinner?
—Hungry again already? Surely we’ve only just had lunch? Let me get you out of your coat now it’s warmed up in here.
The old lady stood up and let herself be pulled about; unwound from her bulky outer layers, she seemed doll-sized. Underneath she was dressed in something lemon-yellow.
—Kate’s looking after me so wonderfully. You know she’s a brilliant girl? Her professor – I forget which one – said to me at her graduation: ‘Do you know what we’ve got here, Mrs Flynn? She’s something special.’ We have to take great, great care of her, he said.
—Shut up, Mummy. Really, shut up. That professor’s died since; and nothing came of all my youthful promise. It’s too sad.
—It’s her temperament, Mrs Flynn whispered confidentially to David. —She has it from her father. He was Irish. He was a brilliant man, too: a violinist.
—Billie’s an absolute believer, when it comes to brilliance. She believes in other lovely things too, like civilisation and progress.
—As far as it goes, David said, —I’m a believer in progress. Is that so ridiculous?
—I suppose you’d have to be, in your line of work.
—Sewage and inoculations and sanitary housing: aren’t these good things?
—I know what: you should read Madame Bovary, that can be your first assignment. For the purest contempt ever for the idea of progress. Only I’ll think less of you if you’re not at least half persuaded. One mustn’t read like a prig, you know.
David wondered if Kate thought he was a prig.
—And you have to buy your own copy, I won’t lend you one. You can get it for three-and-sixpence, anywhere. If you can’t read French the translations are all equally bad.
He found himself somehow telling her, although he hadn’t meant to go into so much detail, about John Snow and his researches into cholera at the Broad Street pump, and the beginnings of a scientific epidemiology; Mrs Flynn followed smilingly with every indication of deep interest. He wanted to communicate to Kate his passion for a certain tradition of pragmatic progressivism: gradual unromantic improvements in people’s daily lives.
—I don’t know how to live in this house, Kate said to him earnestly, suddenly. —Doesn’t that sound strange? I lived here for all my childhood, I’ve come back almost every other weekend for years. But I don’t know how to make my mark on it. It’s as if all the years I’ve been away haven’t happened.
David looked around the room, trying to be helpful. —Why don’t you move in more of your own stuff?
—I’m not complaining. In a way I’m quite enjoying the sensation. One gets so tired, of one’s own mark; hearing oneself work through the same old performance. It’s nice – for instance – to meet you again, for a change. You’re very restful, after some of my friends.
She felt for a cigarette in a packet on
the mantelpiece, scrutinising herself frankly, frowning, in the rectangular gilt mirror. —Where did I put the matches? People buy me those kind of sexy silver lighters that I love, but I lose them infallibly.
He stood up and found the matches; he didn’t think to gallantly light her cigarette for her until it was too late.
—I ought to go, he said, addressing her in the mirror. Tarnish blotched it like a black lichen spreading from its corners. Her reflection, unsmiling, was more tentative than she was in the real air. —You find my enthusiasm boring.
She reassured him, shaking her earrings, tilting her head to blow her smoke away from him. —Not boring: it’s romantic. We sceptics only long to be contradicted.
—Oh well. Perhaps we enthusiasts long for that too.
—I hadn’t thought of that.
—Oh no. Oh no! Kate groaned aloud to herself as soon as she’d shut the front door behind David. —Oh no, not this.
She stood with her back to the door, gripping the cold metal doorknob in one clenched hand, pressing herself painfully against where the letter box was fixed inside with two protruding screws.
—Not this, I can’t bear it.
—Kate? What’s the matter? came her mother’s voice from where she was sitting in the drawing room, obediently where Kate had left her.
—Nothing! Stay there!
She had watched David make his way down the path to the gate, hunching his shoulders under his coat against the rain. If she made an effort she could still just imagine seeing him impartially, casually: good-looking enough, absorbed in himself in a way that didn’t promise well, limited, earnest. He didn’t turn round to wave at the gate. Probably in a crisis, confronted with raw emotion, with anything improper, he would react with caution: he would show a superficial kindness and underneath it deep distaste. There were bolts of killing disapproval locked up under the thick pelt of his hair, and in the brown steady gaze that followed her conversation with only the slightest hint of lumbering. He was dangerous to her. She must use all her experience to guard herself against him, against the cold look of disassociation he was capable of turning on her at any time.
—Kate? What are you doing?
Sometimes this intimacy of shared life made it seem as if her mother lived and moved inside her skull. The creakings of Firenze were familiar as a childhood language; she heard Billie getting up from her chair.
—I’m doing nothing. I’m just standing here.
She hurried upstairs and locked the bathroom door behind her, then sat down on the closed toilet lid, doubled over, holding her stomach. How had this happened? At what moment precisely had she allowed this longing inside to devour her? She saw David’s face, wide and heart-shaped; his skin that in middle age had grown thick and resilient, with tough beard-growth kept cleanly shaved. She could still smell his soap, and the warmth that flowed from him, reassuring as toast; the idea of his serious conservatism melted her, made her weak. From behind his expression cloudy with self-preoccupation, his smile flashed unexpectedly crooked: he was more responsive than he knew, he was capable of intensities he hadn’t tasted.
—I’m too old for this, she said aloud.—It will kill me this time.
—Kate? Her mother rattled the doorknob: she had pulled herself all the way up the stairs, guessing at a crisis even in her confusion. —What are you doing in there? What’s going on?
—Go away. Leave me alone.
She ought to be back at work, she ought be keeping herself busy, keeping herself stupid and numb. This was what had always happened to women when they had too much time to think: they made themselves conduits to all the passions in the universe, they dreamed open all the possibilities that sane hard-working people kept shut away. She lay down on her back on the floor, on the ancient lino whose pattern of black lines and pink and white rhomboids was worn almost to whiteness in places. She knew she had done this sometime before, in the far-off past, in the thick of her teenage excesses. Her mother had been outside the door then, too, rattling the handle, begging to come in, pleading to know what was happening.
Kate’s head was between the pedestal of the sink and the side of the old huge bath, still the same bath as in her childhood, old-fashioned even then, with claw feet, hideously stained inside. It was so old-fashioned that people were having these baths put back in now, their popularity had come around again. If she was going to live in this house, really come back to live here, then she must have the bathroom done up; have a shower put in, have everything made new, and modernised, and bearable. From this angle she could see horrors underneath the bath where the lino ended and Buckets and Mops gave up: shadowy shapes of hair and dust and lost things, an old tub of some extinct brand of scouring powder rolled on its side and forgotten. She could smell urine down here, for all the cleaning it had had: decades of drops and spills of urine, soaked into the lino, into the boards beneath.
At this point, Kate knew, she could stand up from the bathroom floor, dust herself down, run her wrists under the cold tap, think of this momentary collapse with lifesaving irony; walking out of the bathroom she could glance at her mother’s anxiety with blank impatience. ‘I have no idea what you’re fussing about. Aren’t I even allowed to use the toilet in peace?’ Even when she was a teenager she’d always known that this thing, this falling in to a new obsession, was something you did to yourself. You chose to abandon yourself to it. Always, given that choice, Kate had gone in deeper and deeper still, as if the disorder was life itself.
Four
THROUGH HIS CLOSED eyelids David knew that his father was struggling into his bathing trunks under a towel tucked round his waist in the same routine he had held to for forty years; probably for fifty, sixty years, since whenever Bryn Roberts had grown out of being the lithe little boy who swam naked on this same Pembrokeshire beach with his gang of friends every summer holiday, when he came from Cardiff with his parents. These days the waist was expanded into a high assertive dome; they had a photo of him belly-to-belly with Suzie when she was pregnant with Joel. Bryn grunted with the difficulty of hopping on one leg while he changed, and although he still had broad muscled shoulders, the flesh had sunk on his breast, where the grey hair that used to sprout like wire grew soft and long: nonetheless, he insisted on swimming every day of their holiday if it wasn’t actually raining, even at Easter, when the sea’s cold was an iron blow. David didn’t open his eyes for the triumphal roar when the towel was whipped away, or the strong old man’s run into the sea, powering out and throwing himself dauntlessly upon the waves. The paddling children screamed at his splashing past; the women – his wife, his daughter, his daughter-in-law – applauded in mixed irony and admiration, the lifelong female accompaniment to his performance.
David’s awareness was buried in the dark behind his glowing lids, deeply absorbed in the sea’s rhythmic crash and drag: he was dozing and at the same time vividly awake to his situation. He dug his fingers into the secret cold of the sand with its grit of shell fragments, heard the tickling of tiny creatures moving at his ear, smelled the salty rot of weed on the rocks as the tide fell. The gulls’ calls seemed closer than the women’s talk, which was only another murmur like the shingle rolling against itself: Carol preoccupied with the barbecue improvised out of a baking tin and wire grill where she was cooking sausages for lunch, his mother watching the children over the top of her book, Suzie rubbing in suncream, rolling down the straps of her top, positioning herself to tan in the sudden unexpected spring sunshine. David sometimes felt he was coming awake for the first time, now he was forty: as if all the time that had been supposed to be his youth had passed in a muddled dream. He was surprised in those moments to find himself still connected to this collection of other people who filled the surface of his life and insisted that they knew him.
The children carried sloshing buckets of water up from the sea and Hannah marked out with her spade on the small horseshoe of sand that the falling tide exposed an overambitious square for a sandcastle. She began throw
ing up ramparts in a burst of energy; Joel, impressed, followed scooping and patting obediently in her wake. They squatted to repair the slipping walls, then lay on their bellies kicking their feet, reaching their skinny arms to make two tunnels that would meet underneath: David remembered the slightly sinister success, meeting eventually other fingers under the surface, alive as your own, grappling abrasively. After lunch he swam, surprising himself, tiring himself, far out, farther than Bryn had gone. He turned and bobbed in the rocking sea to look back at the small shingly beach, scooped out of black rocks crusty with barnacles and limpets, where he could only just make out his family; behind it was the square austere stone house on the Parrog, with its roof of thick old purple-blue slates, and its sloping front garden where tough seagrasses grew behind the walls built of some rough cement-like mix of shells and pebbles. It had been Betty’s parents’ home once, and now Bryn and Betty kept it on for holidays, for the family, for the grandchildren.
Only Jamie wasn’t with them; he had stayed in Cardiff, saying he had work to do. David was relieved to be free of his adolescent son’s presence, his long lope, his silences, the signs of his corrosive boredom. In the middle of a conversation or a family joke he would sometimes get up and walk away, leaving them to the spoiled end of it. It would be easier for them all when he went away to university next year.
Carol could imagine how insufferably solid the phalanx of their family might seem, concentrated in belonging in the old house. In Suzie’s face that seemed at first sight so frankly open – its pale full mouth, the faint freckles that came right to the edges of her lips, the sandy-lashed blue eyes resting steadily on whoever was talking – there were if you watched for them signs of an unexpected wincing awareness. Bryn, who had been a general practitioner for forty years, had not lost in his retirement the habit of confident benevolence; Suzie blinked and smiled, caught in the bright stream of it, withholding her own thoughts as if she hung onto stones in her pockets. She was more carefully tactful, Carol decided, than Betty – who had been tactful all her life – ever quite noticed; Suzie deferred subtly to her mother-in-law when they cooked together in the inconvenient old kitchen, whose Rayburn stove had to be coaxed and propitiated by an expert. Sometimes when Suzie was in the room Betty spoke to Carol in Welsh; Carol would only answer her in English.
