by Tessa Hadley
Carrie had found the stupid letter that she’d thought was lost, tucked into the pocket of a cardigan put away in her drawer. She had dived on it with a little private cry of pain, then torn it up quickly without reading it, burying the fragments in her wastepaper bin. Of course she was relieved; certain scenes at her piano teacher’s house could now be wiped clean of the taint of her teacher’s knowledge. Yet her relief was trivial, because the problem of the lost letter had been displaced by something quite incommensurate with it. Resolutely, Carrie refused to let thoughts of the Smiths into the foreground of her attention. At least Dom was gone now, and she could begin to forget about him; the time they’d spent in the house together shamed her.
Her mother had tried to persuade Dom to come back for the dinner party, and he’d promised to think about it, but she’d said afterwards that she was sure he wouldn’t come – it would be unbearable under the circumstances for him to mix with strangers, or people he hardly knew. Carrie couldn’t tell from her mother’s voice whether she was glad that Dom wouldn’t come, or sorry. But surely he would have ruined things – what could they have laughed at, if he’d brought his weight of sadness in among them? His visit had disrupted her mother’s plans, but still she had got everything ready on time, working under pressure with a severe, set face: the table had been laid beautifully with its blue-and-brown-checked cloth and red-stemmed glasses and red paper napkins; the glazed vol-au-vents were filled and ready for the oven; the chocolate pudding was set in its palisade of sponge fingers, piped with whipped cream; the candles were on the table with their box of matches.
In the half-dark now, feeling the evening air against her nakedness under her nightdress, Carrie fingered the objects on her mother’s dressing table, so well known they seemed like parts of her own self: the amber necklace with its knotted waxy thread, the prickly dried sea horse someone had brought from Greece, a cylinder needle case of polished wood, a bottle of the Basic Dew that her mother used on her face. The coral brooch, with its fine gold safety chain and extra pin, had belonged to her mother’s own mother; a black lacquer box was painted with forget-me-nots and had a poem pasted inside the lid. This bedroom was never as perfectly tidy as the rooms downstairs. There were stray halfpennies and dressmaker’s pins in the dust on the dressing table, neglected letters in manila envelopes were propped against the mirror, and one of Paul’s football boots was wrapped in a plastic bag, waiting to be repaired. Some meaning was hidden in these mute things Carrie touched: twisting the top off the needle case, she tested the blunt ends of a few rusty needles, pressing hard and then harder, until the needles made white dents in her fingertips.
Then, when she looked out of the window again to check on the party, she saw to her horror that Dom Smith was standing out on the balcony below, with his back to her. So he had turned up after all. It was Dom, she realised now, who had been playing table tennis with her father, yelling and cursing and shouting with glee, throwing himself about the room as if the only thing he cared about was winning. Now he was alone, leaning hunchbacked over the railing in the shadows between the two lit windows, his shoulders broad in his checked shirt, whose sleeves were rolled up, businesslike, to the elbows. While she watched, he threw his cigarette down into the street. Carrie’s mother stepped out onto the balcony through one of the windows; the noise of the party carried on in the room behind her. Carrie saw that her mother didn’t really know Dom well, and was uncertain whether she ought to approach him. Her sleeveless white dress, which she had made herself, gleamed in the twilight. She must have kicked off her white shoes in the lounge; it was one of the things she did when she was tipsy. Hesitant, she moved towards him, and he turned his head to look at her.
— Dom, I don’t know what to say. Poor, lovely Helen. It’s too awful.
Where they were standing, between the two windows, they weren’t visible from inside the lounge, but Carrie saw what happened next. Dom grabbed hold of her mother – not suavely and sexily, like one of those flirty men who were always grabbing at her, but clumsily, half smothering her. The top of her head only just came up to his chin, but he squeezed her tightly and nuzzled under her ear, as if he wanted to burrow down into her. Her mother was taken by surprise; she staggered backwards under Dom’s weight and at the same time patted his shoulder as if she were comforting him. He was speaking but the words were muffled, because his face was buried in her neck.
— You’ve had too much to drink, she said tenderly. — You’re not making any sense.
For a while the two of them clung together, circling slowly on the creaky planks of the balcony as if they were dancing. He was pressing the huge palm of his hand against her head, stroking her tousled hair, clasping her head against his chest, kissing the top of it, kissing her ear. Carrie felt as if she weren’t really present at the scene; she was disembodied. She believed that, even if they’d looked up to where she was craning out of the window above them, they wouldn’t have been able to see her. Then her mother, with her hand flat on Dom’s chest, was pushing him away in the teasing, charming way she pushed away the other men. — I’m so sorry, she said. — I’m so sorry, Dom, but I can’t. Quietly Carrie stepped away from the window and went upstairs. She pictured herself making a joke at breakfast the next day about her mother dancing on the balcony with Dom Smith, and then she knew she mustn’t, and grew hot with the memory of the rude letter, her wrong judgement of what was funny and what was shaming.
Paul was still sitting up in bed in the room next to hers. He snapped his notebook shut when she came in. — Get out, he said. — I’m doing something.
Carrie ignored him and stretched out her leg, pulling up her nightdress to her knees, pointing her toes and practising ballet moves in the narrow space between Paul’s bed and his collection of empty cereal boxes stacked against the wall. She had given up her ballet lessons; she wasn’t really any better at ballet than at the piano. An insect flew in through the open window and landed on the cover of Paul’s book. — I can see his eyes, he said, peering closely. — They’re like little blobs of ink, gold ink. He’s looking right back at me.
Then their mother, barefoot, was standing in the doorway. — What are you up to? she said crossly. — You two are supposed to be in bed.
But she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to her guests. She began picking up the clothes that Paul had dropped on the floor and folding them. Carrie kept very still, with one foot pointing and her arms curved in an arabesque above her head. It occurred to her that her mother was afraid of Dom Smith, too. She didn’t want to return downstairs, where he was waiting with his loss and his hunger for consolation.
— Look, Mummy, Paul said. — Come and look at this.
The three of them bent together over the insect, whose frail folded wings were transparent and dark-veined. Its long green body curled and uncurled lasciviously. — What an extraordinary creature, their mother said. Pressing close against her, Carrie breathed in her perfume, and the wine and smoke on her hot skin; the white dress smelled of ironing. Paul blew gently at the insect, which swayed on its threads of legs. Their happiness in that moment was almost too much – its precariousness squeezed Carrie’s chest like a tight band. A breeze stirred in the horse chestnut trees beyond the casement windows, and a street lamp glowing through the foliage was a glassy lozenge, like a sucked barley sugar. Already Carrie hardly knew if she’d actually seen Dom dancing on the balcony with her mother, or if that had only happened in her imagination, a vision of what consolation might be – something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children.
Experience
When my marriage fell apart one summer, I had to get out of the little flat in Kentish Town, where I had been first happy and then sad. I arranged to live for a few months in another woman’s house; she let me stay there rent-free, because she was going to America and wanted someone to keep an eye on things. I didn’t know Hana very well; she was a friend of a friend. I found her intimidating – she was tall and big-
boned and gushing, with a high forehead and a curvaceous strong jaw, a mass of chestnut-coloured curls. But I liked the idea of having her three-storey red-brick London town house all to myself.
She was generous when we met to sort out arrangements, telling me to make myself at home, entertain my friends, use her iMac and her Wi-Fi, help myself to anything I needed in the kitchen, and sleep in her bed. (— The bed’s wonderfully comfortable, she said.) A woman would come in twice a week to clean, and I didn’t have to pay for that either. We sat at the counter in Hana’s kitchen, drinking coffee and eating baklava from a cardboard box – left over from a dinner party the night before along with the remains of a salad wilting in its dressing, glasses with dregs of red wine by the sink, the taint of cigarette smoke. Hana had just showered, and her damp hair was twisted in a clip on top of her head; her heated skin gave off the strong smell of her perfume or her shower gel. A crumb of baklava stuck to her mouth. I guessed that she was in her early forties: the flesh was puffy under her eyes and at the corners of her lips; she might have had work done on her nose. I was twenty-eight, and she made me feel inexperienced, although I had been married for six years. She wore a bright yellow kimono embroidered with a dragon, and a heavy ivory bangle on her wrist. — I know, she said guiltily, grimacing and twisting it on her arm when she thought I was staring at it. — I shouldn’t wear it; it’s a sin. But it’s an antique. I tell myself that these elephants would be long dead anyway.
There were no curtains on the windows of that house, not even in the bedrooms. At first, I found this unbearable. I undressed for bed in the bathroom; I got into bed in the dark. But after a while I began to get used to it. This was how Hana lived her life – flamboyantly on display, careless of who might be watching. I didn’t flatter myself that anyone was watching me. Or if they were watching, they thought I was something I was not, so it didn’t matter. They thought I was the owner of that house, with its big, bare rooms and wood floors and rugs and few, distinctive items of furniture: a retro armchair in tubular steel and black leather, a long glass-topped dining table, two antique mirrors framed with gilded Cupids bearing rose garlands. I’ve never had that kind of money, or anything like it. I think Hana made her money by dealing in art – there were paintings on all the walls – though some of the phone calls that came for her seemed to be related to the film business.
I moved in with a couple of boxes of things I’d salvaged from my marriage. What I’d really wanted was to walk out of the flat with nothing, shedding it all behind me as cleanly as a skin. The little collection of totems that I took with me everywhere – pebbles from a certain beach, some framed photographs, my dead mother’s empty perfume bottle – looked like rubbish when I spread them out in Hana’s bedroom, so I hid them away again. I told myself that this house was a good place for me, temporarily: this nowhere where I was nobody. When the woman came in to clean, I went out and walked around on Primrose Hill or went to a museum, if it was raining – it rained a lot that summer. My husband had given me some money in exchange for my share of the things we’d bought together (fridge, television, sofa, bed), and I was trying to make it last as long as possible. Hana had told me to help myself to what was in the freezer, so I ate through the odds and ends of food she had in there, including things I’d never tasted before – veal saltimbocca, shrimp in teriyaki sauce and jerk chicken. When the money runs out, I thought, I’ll start looking for work.
On rainy days I wandered from room to room in that big house, cocooned by the rushing, persistent sound of the rain sluicing across the slate roof, overflowing in the gutters and downpipes. At midday the light outside was blue, and the panes in the tall windows seemed liquefied; I switched on all the lamps. I made myself coffee and carried it with me to the window, so that the steam from my mug misted the glass; the television flickered and capered, but I couldn’t distract myself from the rain’s urgency, as if it were something happening. I had thought that I would forget about Hana once she was out of the house, but moving around inside the shapes of her life, I found myself more powerfully impressed by her than I had been when she was present. The wardrobes full of her clothes stood in for her: velvet trousers and brocade jackets, an evening dress of pleated chiffon with a sequinned bodice – everything padded and sculpted, each outfit a performance in itself.
There were attic rooms at the top of the house and one of these was locked. Hana had emptied out drawers and cupboards to make space for me, so I guessed that she had tidied everything personal away into this room. I came across the key accidentally, in a kitchen drawer beside some tea towels; those attic rooms had the original door fittings and this was a long iron key, like something in a novel or a pantomime. At the time, I hardly registered seeing it. Then it began to weigh on my mind, and one afternoon when I had nothing better to do, I took it upstairs to try it in the lock. I feel ashamed of this now, needless to say. I think I felt that because I was nobody, my slipping inside Hana’s privacy wouldn’t count as a real intrusion. And she’d left the key lying around, hadn’t she? Anyway, I only meant to take a quick look.
The room was heaped surprisingly high with stuff, as if she’d been using it for storage for a long time. There were the clothes and shoes and bags filled with accessories and old make-up that I’d expected. There were also paintings – speculations that hadn’t paid off, perhaps? – propped, sometimes two- or three-deep, against the walls, their faces turned away as if in disgrace. Two new mattresses were still in their polythene. Art objects – ceramics and ethnic souvenirs and bits of sculpted wood – were muddled on the floor with a food processor and china dinner plates, a steam cleaner and a broken chandelier with tangled crystals. Suitcases were piled on top of hi-fi speakers and an old computer; a black wetsuit was flung dramatically in a corner over surfboards and camping gear. There were boxes filled with DVDs and those big glossy books – biographies and cookbooks – that people give as presents and no one reads. I stepped inside the room. The air was thick with the heat that had collected under the roof and loud with the noise of the rain running down the far side of the sloping ceiling. It was like stepping into a cave. I felt as if I’d found my way into the inner workings of the house, or of Hana.
Boxes and plastic bags were crammed with papers: letters and postcards and notebooks, photographs, nothing in any kind of order – yellowing letters stuffed in with recent bank statements. I just poked around at first; I wasn’t really reading anything. There were a lot of business papers, anyway, which didn’t mean much to me, though the sums of money were startling. Even without touching the DVDs I could see that they were porn and the kind of hard-core horror films I couldn’t watch: she had left the art films and romcoms downstairs for me. I picked up a heart-shaped box covered in padded red satin. Inside, nestled under a wad of black tissue, were scraps of scarlet lace underwear, furry handcuffs, fishnets, and a vibrator, as bald and blatant as a medical appliance; I put the lid back on hastily. But this stuff was ordinary, wasn’t it? Everybody did it. What was the matter with me that I didn’t take it for granted, that my heart beat stickily, as if the little sex kit had somehow made a fool of me? Kneeling on the bare boards, I started reading my way through the contents of a plastic bag.
One of the expensive leather-bound notebooks was a kind of diary. It began and broke off abruptly, without dates. Hana had become involved with a man named Julian. She wrote about him in a big, looping hand that filled up two ruled lines at a time, dotting her ‘i’s with circles, using a lot of asterisks and private code words and exclamation marks. Everything was ‘amazing’ or ‘terrible’. ‘I knew this was going to happen,’ she wrote, ‘from the first moment he walked into the party that night.’ Julian told her that he couldn’t get enough of her, that he was desperate for her, that he wanted her all over again as soon as he’d had her. They were at some dinner where they had to pretend not to know each other, ended up having sex in the bathroom. A line of dots, and then more exclamation marks. ‘He hurts me and frightens me, but it’s
the best s*x ever.’ Along with the sex, there was some lengthy analysis of Julian’s personality. The two of them were very alike, Hana thought. They ‘both had this ambition burning them up’ and ‘a lot of imagination’; also they ‘needed to be free’. But a few pages on she was ‘starting to see through him’ – how moody he was, how he always had to be the centre of attention. ‘Of course it’s terrible about the children,’ she wrote. They’d had a blissful weekend away together and swum naked in the sea, f****d in the shower. ‘Now he’s gone back to S and I feel like shit.’ Hana made scenes, crawled to him on her knees, begged him to stay. ‘J came round at three in the morning and I let him in, couldn’t help myself. Then X and you know what. Crazy with love all over again. He makes me so happy.’ These were the last words in the notebook.
I’ve never lived, I thought, as I knelt there, reading with my legs cramped underneath me, aware of the rain as if it were drumming on my skin. I’ve never lived: the words ran in my head. Life was garish and ruthless and exaggerated, and I’d never really had it – I was like one of those child brides in history whose marriage was annulled by the Pope because it wasn’t consummated. Of course, mine had been consummated in the ordinary sense. But even when my husband told me that he wanted us to separate, even when he told me that he wasn’t in love with me any more, and that he’d better keep the flat because I wouldn’t be able to afford the rent by myself, I hadn’t ranted or thrown pans at him. (Hana had thrown a pan full of boiling pasta at Julian once. She’d missed, but the water had splashed his leg and scalded him, and then he’d hit her, and then they’d XXX: ‘I’m covered in bruises this morning and feel fantastic, though I know it’s crazy.’)
