by Tessa Hadley
David went on sitting there. He knew as if he could see it that Kate waited for him inside the house: she walked around between the rooms, she put all the lights on. One by one windows sprang into brilliance behind the thrashing trees, first downstairs, then upstairs: stained glass flickered like cartoon jewels through agitated foliage. He fantasised that he heard snatches of Kate’s violin. Once he had an idea that she came to the front door and looked out for him; even took steps down the drive to where she could see him, stood there hugging her arms in something wrapped round her shoulders, thin dress blowing. But the garden was dark and he couldn’t be sure. He heard the wind groaning along the lake, and then at some point an eruption of honking geese, wings cracking like shots, splashing noisily into the invisible water: as if this was David’s signal, he started the engine.
On his way home something happened. Naturally he wasn’t attending as conscientiously as usual to his driving. There was traffic, it was the winter evening rush hour. The streets were strung already with Christmas lights, and bright shopfronts swam in a blur of the rain that began to be spattered in angry fistfuls across the windscreen. For minutes he peered stupidly, forgetting that he could turn on his wipers. It took him half an hour to get through the thick crawl of cars, woven with crossing pedestrians, on the main roads: released at last into residential streets, he perhaps pressed down his foot too hard on the accelerator, leaping forwards. At the same moment, in a sudden squall of the weather, a white shape in violent movement broke out in front of him from nowhere, or from between two parked cars. He stamped on his brake and swerved, and the car slewed screeching sideways; but surely too late. He must have struck something: the blow seemed to resonate in the bodywork, his heart thumped out of his chest as if he’d been hit himself. He had, in an immense effort, not been thinking of anything: into that willed blankness had burst his fate. He seemed to recognise it, as he threw himself out of the car door to see what he had done, ready for the worst: his fate, that had waited for him in hiding, but whose familiar form he at once knew.
He found nothing. Only an empty street panted, reeled, recovered, closed over what it had shown him. Whatever had seemed white and alive, did not exist; perhaps the sheet of sodden filthy newspaper under his wheels had been his phantom, inflated by the wind into a moment’s lifelikeness. He felt so sick that he had to pull in at the side of the road and rest his head against his arms on the steering wheel. For some time he couldn’t drive on.
When at last he let himself in at the side door, his children were sitting painting at the kitchen table. Their tranquillity seemed uncanny after the storm outside: their absorbed breathing, the stroke of their marks on big sheets of sugar paper, the chink of their brushes in jamjars of clouding water. The tip of Hannah’s tongue stuck out in concentration; unnoticing, Joel sucked his brush, so that his lips were blue. Gazing, to take it truly in, at the china dish piled with tangerines – Suzie must have put it out for them to paint – they seemed themselves deliberate as a composition.
—Is Mummy here?
They blinked at him, surfacing reluctantly.
—Having a shower, Joel frowned.
He took the stairs two at a time. Suzie had begun to tidy up; the mess that had waited on the landing to be sorted into different bedrooms had been put away. She was not showering: she had run herself a bath perfumed with something, she was floating in it by candlelight, her body showing vaguely pink through the foamy water, her knees an island. Little candles on saucers were burning at intervals all round the edges of the tub and on the windowsill. David put down the lid of the toilet seat, for somewhere to sit; Suzie hardly stirred the water, only turning her head to look at him.
—Are you going to be cross?
—Cross?
—About the candles. Aren’t they dangerous?
He sighed. —Am I so dreary?
—That wasn’t what I meant. I’m sure they really are dangerous, only I’m being very careful. But I just wanted to relax. I want to have a nice weekend at home, with you and the kids. David? Are you all right?
—Is Jamie back?
—Back, and gone again, with a bag. He said he was going to Granny Bell’s. I didn’t know they had anything arranged. You two haven’t had a row? David, you’re not all right, are you?
He felt himself unreal, as if there were no words for what had happened to him. —I nearly crashed the car on the way home: I thought I saw something.
Suzie stood up in the bath then, water sluicing off her breasts and her thighs; they were still pointed plump girl-breasts, even after two children. She pulled a towel off the heated rail and stepped out; rubbing at her hair to dry it she stood carelessly naked in front of him.
—I’m not really all right, he said.
—I knew another woman had been in the bathroom, said Suzie. —Not in this one, in the en suite. I could smell her perfume: and she’d used my soap. But it’s OK. I don’t want you to tell me anything about it. We’ll leave it like that, shall we? I won’t tell you anything either, about me. We won’t tell. It’ll be better for us, really.
She bent down over him where he sat, wrapping the towel round both of them for a moment, squeezing him in tightly, printing her heated body wetly against his clothes.
Twelve
CLIMBING THE ZIGZAG path from the road beside the lake, Carol paused at the top not because she was out of breath – she could still tramp twenty miles in the Beacons without noticing it – but to take the place in, because it might be for a last time. In the wintry gardens and the park beyond, the vitality of shrubs and trees was sunk to the root; stiff twigs were silvered, dark clods of earth veneered, in cold sunlight. Footsteps – schoolchildren not dawdling home, the walkers of dogs in little dog-coats – rang iron-hard on the pavements. They had been promised a hard winter; now something in the collective mood, Carol imagined, embraced its austerities. Kate was selling Firenze; she had had an offer already and although it was well below the asking price – the estate agents urged her to wait until after Christmas when the market would improve – she seemed in an unholy hurry to close the deal and be rid of it. Carol was burdened with strong attachments to places as well as people. Robustly pragmatic in her working life, she quailed at the idea of the loss of this fantastical silly house. The purchaser would of course – whatever else to do with it? – convert it into luxury flats: that had happened already to other big houses nearby. (In her professional self, she ought to have wanted to move in several homeless families.) The precious past slipped away in solidities: individual deaths were less visible than the disappearances of fringed blinds at windows, of evening glimpses into rooms where paintings were hung from a picture rail, of summer striped awnings to protect front doors. Firenze had been a last link, not only to her own past.
Kate was supposed to be clearing out, but when Carol came round to help, nothing ever seemed to have moved on: there were a few boxes in the hall, but those were mostly the things Kate had brought down from London anyway, a year ago. Sometimes Carol found her in one of the rooms they hadn’t used for decades: the breakfast room, or the room Billie had always called the office, or one of the spare bedrooms. These were dismal with neglect, even if Buckets and Mops had occasionally dusted: in damp corners, papers rotted; woodworm had eaten out of the furniture into the floorboards; carpets smelled where the roof had leaked upstairs. Kate pulled things out from cupboards and drawers, she lost herself in them – roused with a shudder at Carol’s arrival, once, from a cache of her parents’ letters – then recoiled or grew bored, and left everything heaped on a bed or in the middle of the floor: china tea-sets, tarnished silver cutlery and a menorah, armfuls of damp sheet music, tomes in Hebrew with pages tissue-paper thin and frontispiece lithographs of venerable rabbinical scholars, certificates from the 1920’s thanking Kate’s grandmother for her donations to Zionist causes, white damask tablecloths spotted with rust, her father’s violin with all its gut strings snapped and waving.
—It’s a treasure t
rove, said Carol. —You need to have it all valued; you need an antique dealer to give you an idea what it’s worth. You need to sort out the things you want for yourself, to keep.
—I know, Kate said. —You’re so sensible. But I can’t be bothered.
—The folk museum might be interested in the haberdashery stuff. If you didn’t want to sell it.
The rooms in the turret had been locked since Kate could remember: a pantomime-sized key that had hung for ever on a hook in the kitchen, labelled mysteriously ‘store’, had fitted the lock when Carol tried it. Inside, in two circular rooms joined by a spiral stair, ill-lit through tiny windows whose frames were so rusted they wouldn’t open, was all the overflow of Sam Lebowicz’s business: in good condition, compared with most of the contents of the house, perhaps because the rooms had been shut up so airlessly tight. There were piles of flat boxes of sample stockings in cotton lisle and silk, one of each kind, all shades of brown and beige, folded weightlessly between sheets of tissuepaper: there were also two pink plaster feet for modelling them, pointing toes fused together. There were busts, too, their blank faces painted and over-painted in the styles of different decades; and suspender belts, knickers, corsets, brassieres, camisoles, liberty bodices, knitting patterns, brown-paper packs of balls of wool, a flutter of invoices. It all smelled of old lavender. For a couple of hours Kate had wondered over all this, exclaiming with delight at the workmanship, the virgin appeal of items untouched, the seductive feminine idea behind this underwear in baby pinks and creams and satins and with tiny buttons, threaded ribbons: in such contrast, surely, to the flawed and bloodied bodies to be stuffed inside them? She lifted up wisps of embroidered silk nightdresses, petticoats: who bought these things? When you thought of what the miners earned, in those days. Dreaming betrothed girls, perhaps; spinster schoolteachers. Then she lost interest and locked the door on it all again.
Carol this time found her dozing on the sofa in the drawing room, wrapped in an eiderdown, with the gas fire full on as well as the central heating. Books – contemporary paperbacks, not old books – were opened face down all around her on the floor.
—How many, Kate? I’m only clever enough to read one book at a time.
—Nothing written now has enough in it. I have to swap about, as soon as I get the hang of what they’re up to; they’re only ever up to one thing at a time.
—You’re full of prejudice. I’ve read some brilliant new novels recently. Carol, unwinding from her scarf, fighting out of a jumper, pressed notes on the piano. She sighed. —I can’t believe Billie isn’t going to play it ever again. Without her, the piano’s dead too. It used to have such sweet songs in it.
—I miss her body heat, Kate admitted. —Even her old body helped: the two of us kept warmer together than I can get by myself now.
—It’s sweltering in here. There must be something wrong with you.
—Everything’s wrong with me.
Hot-faced, quelling impulses to fling windows open, Carol frowned down at her. —You don’t get enough exercise. It’s a good thing that you’re leaving here, you know.
—You’re so unfeeling. You want to be rid of me.
—It breaks my heart, in fact: you’ll never know what this place – the two of you in it – has meant for me. I’ve so loved having you at home this year. But it isn’t good for you. I’m glad you’re getting out, now there’s nothing to keep you. Only I wish I felt confident that you knew what you were going back to in London. Will they give you your old job again? Those people are still in your flat, aren’t they?
—There’s always Max’s. Kate was vague.
—You are joking? You can’t go and live at Max’s! Not with Sherie there.
—Or there’s America.
—America? said Carol. —That’s new. Which probably means it’s serious. Oh, Kate: America’s a long way off!
—Is it? Kate said doubtfully. —I wonder if it’s far enough.
—Do you still have your old friends there?
—You mean my lovesick professor? We haven’t spoken in fifteen years: but I may look him up again. Perhaps I’ve found myself thinking yearningly of him, recently. I might get in touch.
—But wasn’t he nuts? Hadn’t he taken too much LSD?
Kate’s look was sententious. —Time’s a great healer.
—Not of blasted synapses. Anyway, he’ll be ancient now, he’ll be worrying about his pension. If he can still add up.
—Me too, I’m worrying about mine. I ought to settle down, really.
—I suppose you might, sometime. Why do I always expect you to surprise me with the next thing?
—I can’t keep the surprises up, you know, just for your entertainment.
—And what will you do with Sim?
—I wanted to ask you about that.
David only saw Kate Flynn once more before she left Cardiff. He knew that she was selling Firenze and leaving, because Carol told him so. When he came with his mother to see The Marriage of Figaro at the Millennium Centre he did wonder if Kate would be there: he wouldn’t have bought tickets, just in case, but Betty bought them, and then he thought, it’s a huge place, the odds are against Kate’s coming, but even if she does, we’ll miss one another. He tried not to think about Kate at all: it was as if he kept a heavy door shut against what he knew, against what had happened. Whatever he had imagined, sitting outside Firenze that night in his car, he must keep at bay. It was the kind of mess that women like Kate made: better not to know too much, better that the boy had gone to his grandmother’s for a while. Apparently Jane was helping him make his university applications. Probably Jamie had had a crush on Kate; they must have met through Carol. David was lucky to have got out of such a tangle. He remembered sitting there in the car, and Kate coming out into the garden, in the dark, in the wind, to look for him; and he had been determined not to make a move, not if she wouldn’t come over to him, to explain, to make everything all right again. He tried not to see it all, what an idiot he must have looked, what a puritan, stuck like a dummy in the driver’s seat, weltering in his judgement against her. But he couldn’t change what he was. He was lucky, really, that it had all come to nothing. His life with Suzie had resumed, they were companionable again, she had moved back into their double bed; he was relieved and grateful.
Betty loved going to the opera with her son. (Bryn couldn’t manage opera: too highbrow for him, he said, made him fidgety.) She was dressed up in a new green silk dress, with her best Welsh wool stole; at the first interval they met people they knew and chatted, exchanged Christmas plans. How could his mother actually sound excited about Christmas after so many repetitions, getting the decorations down from the upstairs cupboard, putting them away again? She had her little line about The Marriage of Figaro, how pleased she was that they were doing it in proper eighteenth-century costumes; she knew she was old-fashioned, but she hated it when they messed around with the clothes. David went to look for the interval drinks he’d ordered. As he claimed their tray, he looked down over the balcony, behind the great front of the building with its carved-out lines of poetry, to the level below, and saw Kate with a gang of friends, all laughing and noisily declamatory. He recognised the blond American he’d seen at Kate’s party, and Ann the viola player. None of them looked up to see him.
David was shocked: he’d somehow pictured Kate as left behind, sad and alone in the old house, mourning. When he’d worried about bumping into her at the opera, he’d imagined her here by herself; instead, she was sitting while the others stood round her, as if she was holding court; she threw back her head at someone’s joke and clasped her hands round her knee where her legs were crossed in some kind of dramatic silver-and-black skirt. Light flashed off her angular modern jewellery, her bony shoulders were bare. They were all drinking beer from bottles; relaxed, they made the place their party, so that everyone outside it seemed stiffly polite. One of the crowd sang: exuberantly, badly. Kate sang back; more laughter; then the blond man demonstrated
something musical, marking great swoops and patting tiny tensions in the air with his hands. If they irritated David, he couldn’t tell himself it was because they were uncultured, or too self-admiringly fashionable; if anything, from his angle on the balcony above, they were collectively interestingly ugly. Kate had had her hair cut, she’d had something else done to it that David didn’t like, although he could see that it worked, it was striking: more streaks were added among the dark hairs to her authentic white ones, so that their effect was lost, or multiplied.
This must all do him good, David thought. He had been deluded, imagining he could have ever had any place in this life of Kate’s. Her friends were the clever, stylish kind of people he couldn’t possibly have kept up with, didn’t even like. Fortified, he carried back his mother’s sherry and his orange juice (he was driving) to where Betty, queen in her own circle, had meanwhile beckoned across an old friend of his father’s, a retired gynae consultant who’d worked for years up at the Heath. David and he stood talking shop until the bell went. These men of his father’s generation had so recently ridden the great system under their planted feet, breasting hospital corridors as if waves parted for them: now they were out of the thick of things and all their perspectives had slipped off the point. Their prevailing note, retired, needless to say, was triumphant gloom at every change. (Also: ‘public health is nobody’s favourite’, the consultant said jocularly.) Protective of the man’s dignity, David conceded concerns as far as he could without telling any untruth; he was glad when he could subside again beside Betty into the expectancy of the tuning up. He thought the story of The Marriage of Figaro was silly, an inferior pretext for the sublime music; often he shut his eyes while he was listening. As soon as he shut them, images of Kate and her friends intruded.
