by Tessa Hadley
A tiny window of perfect weather had opened for them, between too hot and too wet; the freshest and best of the summer was past but David liked the lush, fagged, despoiled late season. The hedgerows, machine-cut, showed a coarse stubble of broken stalks; the cruder flowers thrived, escapes of rapeseed blazed from the hillside, frothy rank slews of rosebay willowherb or Himalayan balsam flourished on waste ground or in mud. A small red deer scrambled, ungainly in its fear, up a steep bank; a fox glanced back in contempt over a gingery-fierce shoulder; they swerved, hitting the stink before they saw it, round a rotting badger corpse. With sagging wings and drooping undercarriage a hawk uplifted from a post so that its updraught seemed to cut David’s cheek; plunging from dry heights into the hollow beside a river, submersion in its cool ripe dung smell was ecstatic.
David prudently, luckily, whatever the others had advised, had booked them in advance into pubs where they could eat and sleep; these turned out to be packed full and turning away holidaymakers, who cast regretful desiring looks around the calculatedly enticing oaky nooks, flagged floors, red-shaded lamps, wall-displays of old farming implements; the cooking aromas were more likely to be boeuf bourgignon or Thai chicken than lobscouse. After their physical exertions they succumbed in the evenings to an exhaustion that felt to David sensually velvety, unlike the parched one that came from long days in the office; they ate and drank greedily. David didn’t know what, if they’d been alone, he and Jamie would have found to talk about for all those hours. Bryn – replete, expansive, delighted to be out of the house, triumphant at his proved cycling potency – ranged round a roomy, archaic masculinity, in his accent resonant as a bell: they talked rugby, politics, medicine until they were felled by sleep. Bryn was moderate Old Labour with Plaid sympathies; David was cautiously Liberal Democrat. Jamie said he didn’t know what his politics were: smiling evasively, with his hair hanging into his face, he drew signs on the table in the beer that he had slopped. Bryn courted his wayward grandson more assiduously than he had ever made up to the steady son who picked his way in Bryn’s oversize footsteps.
—At your age shouldn’t you be wanting to change the world?
—I’d be useless at it.
—We never stopped to ask if we’d be any good at it, we just wanted to defeat capitalism.
—I don’t like capitalism all that much.
—But it looks as if it’s here to stay, said David.
Theatrically Bryn put his head in his hands. —We’ll have to start the revolution, then, without you two.
Suzie (who had been all in favour of the holiday) had told David not to go on about what Jamie was going to do next; Bryn enquired so tenderly that Jamie didn’t mind it, in that best flirtatious manner he had reserved for the lady patients who adored him, looking coyly over the top of his glasses brought out for reading the menu.
—I can’t make up my mind whether to go to university.
—Whether to go? said David, dismayed. —I thought you just weren’t sure which subject to take.
—He doesn’t care for our kind of hard empirical knowledge. He’s going to be a poet, don’t you think? ‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’?
—Who says ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’?
—Don’t they teach you anything at school these days? It’s Shelley. He’s probably gone out of fashion, like revolution.
—Anyway, I’ve never written any poetry.
—I used to write poetry, said Bryn.
—What kind of poetry, Grandpa?
—Lugubrious, probably.
—Jamie, are you seriously thinking that you might not go?
—It’s different in arts subjects. I could take out a year or two – you know, just messing about – and still get back in if I wanted to.
—Messing about?
—He means, supplied Bryn, —messing about the world. That’s what they all do.
—Or here. I could get a job.
David was taken aback. —I thought you were so eager to get away from here. What kind of job? You’d soon be bored.
—I might not be.
—Results come out next week, said Bryn, who couldn’t resist being interested in the competition. —He’ll do well, I suppose?
—I don’t know, said Jamie. —I can hardly remember what I wrote. It seems like I did them in another life.
The window draped in net curtains was cut into the two-foot thickness of wall (the place must be very old); beyond it the light descended through a scale of brilliant blues. A restless force radiated off the boy that was not merely the stored heat of the day; every so often he jumped up to go outside without explanation. No doubt he was smoking (his clothes smelled of it when he came back in), or he might have been trying to get a signal on his mobile, to make a call out from the obliterating folds of the valley. They understood that he was consumed by the exulting moment of his youth, driving him up the hills in those exertions where he couldn’t tell himself apart from his labouring body. How could he care, what happened next?
On their last evening they all drank too much; Bryn waxed confessional about his marriage, tempestuously monogamous for forty-five years, still – David wasn’t sure he wanted to know this – sexual. David clammed up about his two, both failures he felt sure now, disasters: although even as he gave them mentally up he thought how much he liked women, how he preferred their company, yearned for it, missed it. He remembered also how when he’d first brought Francesca home to meet his parents she’d come climbing (still in her besotted phase) into his bed in the middle of the night, and he’d been made quite impotent by the idea of his father on the other side of the wall. Bryn was buying them all whiskies as well as beer. Jamie wouldn’t be drawn by his grandfather’s teasing, he wouldn’t say if he had a girlfriend; then somehow those two ended up at the pool table, Jamie winning easily, loser buying the next round. After the whisky David had to be sick (for the second time in a few weeks: he’d been sick on Suzie’s birthday too, he who never drank too much); he sat on his bed in the strange room with his head in his hands. Jamie brought him a pint glass of water.
—Drink this, Dad. You’ll feel better for it in the morning.
He touched him on the shoulder. David felt the strong warmth of his son’s hand through his shirt and his skin’s clammy reaction to the alcohol; it was so comforting that he was embarrassed to feel tears pricking into his eyes, although Jamie couldn’t see them. They shared a room; Jamie still slept as he always had done, on his belly with his arms flung out, his head pushed half under his pillow.
Jamie and Kate took Billie walking in the park, in all the crowds. The flower beds had been planted up with blocks of astonishing shocking-pink, lemon-yellow, vermilion; the lake was jammed with boats; there were wilting queues in the play area for the slides and the swings; rapacious garden enthusiasts carried nail scissors surreptitiously in their pockets, for cuttings.
—Fair-weather park lovers, Kate said. —They should be here when we are, when it’s miserable and wet leaves are blowing about, and everything growing has died or gone underground.
Billie in her pretty cornflower dress looked around her surprised, but ready to be enchanted. —We do live here, darling, don’t we? she said doubtfully. —This is our park?
—Mummy: you’ve never lived anywhere else.
Kate wouldn’t buy Billie ice creams from the van, she said they were made of whale-oil. A gaggle of Muslim girls photographing each other in a triangle of shade between three trees – some in headscarves, some without, one in a baseball cap – gave off almost a hum, like bees, of steady energetic pleasant chatter; one, hurrying away, checked her face hastily (perfect) in a tiny mirror. Billie wanted to sit down to rest: as they entered the rose garden to find a bench, a girl coming out had a creamy-orange rose against her hair, above her ear.
—Of course you looked at her, Kate said, as soon as they were as alone as was possible, keeping Billie in sight, inspecting the beds where the bare soil was grim b
etween the grizzled old leggy rose-bushes, for all their blooming.
Jamie was amiably blank. —At who?
—Whom. The girl with the rose.
—Oh: I suppose she’d picked it here. She shouldn’t have, do you mean?
—People will think you’re my son, Kate said. —Or my nephew. I might be your mother’s sister, keeping an eye on you, childless myself, slightly forbidding. Do you mind?
—I have got an aunt on my mother’s side, he said. —But she’s nothing like you. Why do you care what people think?
—You’re such a nice boy. Temporarily, I suppose you’re my fate. But you’ve no idea of the trouble you’ve made for me.
—Temporarily?
—Of course. Do you picture yourself pushing my bath chair?
—What’s a bath chair? He was looking among ruby-dark tea roses with an air of choosing.
—Don’t pick one for me now, after we’ve seen her: it’s too late. Anyway, I don’t like roses.
—Being young isn’t like what people think it is, Jamie said to Kate that night. She had plugged in beside the bed her steel lamp from London with two creamy glass globes, like little moons, so they could see one another. —Before I knew you, it was like looking at real life – people actually feeling things and being things – through a closed window.
—The people on the other side of the window, of course, were looking back enviously at you.
—I was afraid of never getting to be actually real. Having Dad and Suzie’s life: driving round picking the kids up from things, or dropping them off, booking two weeks’ holiday a year, machines at home to do everything, that nobody uses. It’s like a picture of a life. Only in here is real, because it doesn’t pretend to be. That’s a paradox.
—You’re so clever, aren’t you?
Propped on her elbow, she traced the effort of thought on his face with her finger.
—You know how to do things, he said. —Everything you touch, you know how to do it. As if there’s a hidden pattern.
—If only you knew. Everything I touch, I spoil: apart from Billie. What would decent people think, of what we do? You ought to be afraid of me.
—I don’t care about decent people.
Carol called at Firenze to invite Kate to supper.
—Get a Billie-sitter, she said. —Ask Alison. It would be good for you.
—Do I look as if I need good doing me? Kate, measuring out tea from the caddy in the kitchen, turned herself full-frontally for her friend’s appraisal. Kate had recently had her hair cut; her badger-stripe was swept strikingly back from her face and her head seemed lighter, freed from the thick bob.
—I had a bit of colour put in, she confessed, approving herself in the little skewed mirror over the sink. —On the hairline where there was some grey.
—As a matter of fact, you do look well. Carol ducked to peer in as well. —My whole wretched mane is grey, she complained, flattening it brusquely. —Not true grey; just as if the blonde had gradually leached out. Actually it’s not you I’m worried about: I’m worried about the other person I want to ask. But, seriously, how are things?
—I have my music, Kate said, imitating her mother. —All my life, I’ve been consoled by art. Oh, and also in the evenings we’ve started backgammon: a different Billie steps out from behind the confused one, ruthlessly competitive, sharp as nails. We keep a book: I’m losing. And I hate the idea of work, I’m ashamed that I didn’t liberate myself long ago. Everybody should try it.
—Not everybody of course could afford to, murmured Carol conscientiously.
—I’m sleeping like a baby. Aren’t you amazed by that? Who is this other worrying person you want to ask to supper?
—My brother. You do like him, don’t you? I know you used to think him a bit of a prig. Only I’ve got a feeling something’s going wrong with him and his wife: she’s away, again, with the children, he’s all on his own, working too hard. I thought we could try and cheer him up.
Kate poured boiling water into the teapot from an impressive height. —I don’t know, she said. —I’m awfully busy.
—You could talk to him about music. In the evenings on his own I think that’s all he does: plays CDs from his collection.
—Surely no one uses that word these days: prig? It’s out of an Edwardian children’s book.
Kate came late to the supper party, so that they had started eating without her. Carol had invited a couple of other friends: someone who worked for the Refugee Council and a publisher from one of the subsided Welsh presses. The first-floor flat, bright and jolly, opened off a bleak common stairwell with timed light switches; as soon as the door swung open Kate knew she was in the wrong mood. She was hot and she had chosen to wear a tight-fitting black dress; Carol and the other woman, Angharad, were in T-shirts and trousers. Kate explained that the taxi driver had been late bringing her sitter.
—Have you left children? Angharad the publisher asked sympathetically.
—No: senile old person.
Kate stalked on loud heels into the kitchen to find gin. David half got up out of his chair to greet her, but when she sat down she made sure she didn’t sit by him; she knew her discomfort settled on the conversation like a cloud, despite the wide-open windows and cheerful dishes of salads and vegetarian curries. Picking over chickpeas on her plate with a fork, she turned her attention onto Colin, who was nervous in the strong light of it, mentioning his absent wife sooner than was strictly necessary. Because he seemed to want to, Kate let him believe that her parents had come as refugees from Hitler’s Germany: his professional respect struck in.
—You know why we Jews play the violin so well? she explained loudly. —So that we can pack our livelihood in one small case and get out at a moment’s notice. Don’t I play the violin well, David?
David with his mouth full was at a disadvantage; he had been applying himself earnestly and silently to his plate. He nodded his head with obliging eagerness, putting the back of his hand over his mouth, swallowing hard.
—Although, he added, scrupulously honest, when his mouth was clear, —I don’t suppose it’s that easy to earn a living, playing the violin. I mean, unless one has a professional training.
—Don’t be so literal, dear, said Carol. —Kate only wants you to flatter her. She isn’t really calculating for a fascist takeover.
—Sorry, said David. —Of course not. She’s a very good amateur player.
—Colin will have to flatter me, Kate said. —David’s the truth-teller. He never will.
Colin, uneasily in thrall to her tragic past, prevaricated: said he had never heard her play. She invited him to the next concert given by her quartet; he said his wife had played the cello when she was a girl; Kate yawned. The conversation, limping, took refuge in politics, the number of women AMs in the Assembly. Carol brought out hazelnut and chocolate torte (home-made: she was good); they all eyed it embarrassingly keenly, because their minds weren’t elsewhere. Only Kate refused it.
—I don’t like women politicians, she said.
Angharad was steely. —That’s a ridiculous statement, in the twenty-first century.
—Are we in the twenty-first century? I’m always forgetting, aren’t you?
—No one’s having that argument any more. Even the reactionaries are only quarrelling over the methods of achieving parity.
Kate shrugged. —I used to be a feminist, of course. Everyone goes through a phase. But now I’m glad men rule the world. Who wants to, anyway? What a bore.
—Take no notice, Carol said, cutting big slices in compensation. —She’s only being provocative.
—Women are too weak, too far-seeing, too deeply drawn by emotional tides. Too pessimistic. If there were only women, we’d still be living in caves, prophesying through our genitals. Civilisation’s such a foolish optimism, really: it takes men.
David laughed inappropriately.
—You are just being provocative, Angharad said, smiling as if she wasn’t amused.
—Oh, I know. Women are so duplicitous. When men make houses, we’re very glad to scurry inside them, to keep warm.
When Carol retired to the kitchen to make the required assortment of coffees and herb teas, the arrangement around the table broke up in relief; Colin and Angharad sank into the sofa at the other end of the room and the sounds of their mild conversation rose over its back. Carol turned up the music (Elvis Costello still, unbelievably, after all these years). Only Kate and David stayed in their places, separated by the ruins of the meal: collapsed cake, smeared plates, empty glasses.
—All those centuries of struggle, he said reproachfully. —Women campaigning for their rights. To vote, for instance.
—Well, I don’t vote, said Kate. —It was wasted on me.
—You’re not serious?
—Haven’t ever. Never even registered. Darling Billie does, for all she’s seriously senile. God knows who she votes for: Natural Law Party, perhaps? Or Plaid Cymru. Something from fairyland.
