Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  The grey light in the room was diffuse and hesitant. Even on sunny days, these rooms at the front of the flat weren’t bright. She had been happy in this flat at first, in the new freedom of her married life, but now she resented the neighbours always brooding overhead and was impatient to move to a place they could have all to themselves. But that would have to wait until he finished his degree. She eased out from under the warmth of the blankets. Now that she was thoroughly awake she needed to pee before she tried to sleep again. As she got out of bed, her reflection stood up indefatigably to meet her in the gilt-framed mirror that was one of her junk-shop finds, mounted in an alcove beside the window, with a trailing philodendron trained around it. The phantom in the baby-doll nightdress was enough like Monica Vitti (everyone said she looked like Monica Vitti) to make her straighten her back in self-respect; and she was aware of yesterday’s L’Air du Temps in the sleepy heat of her skin.

  In the hall, she listened at the door of the children’s room, which stood ajar – nothing. The lavatory was chilly: its tiny high window made it feel like a prison cell, but a blackbird sang liquidly outside in the yard. On the way back to bed, she looked into the kitchen, where everything was as she’d left it – he hadn’t even made his cocoa or eaten the sandwich she’d put out for him before he came to bed. His refraining made her tense her jaw, as if he had repudiated her and preferred his work. She should have been a painter, she thought in a flash of anger, not a housewife and a dressmaker. But at art college she’d been overawed by the fine arts students, who were mostly experienced grown men, newly returned from doing their national service in India and Malaya. Still, her orderly kitchen reassured her: the scene of her daily activity, poised and quiescent now, awaiting the morning, when she’d pick it up again with renewed energy. Perhaps he’d like bacon for his breakfast – she had saved up her housekeeping to buy him some. His mother had cooked bacon for him every morning.

  When she glanced into the lounge, her shock at the sight of the chairs thrown about was as extreme as a hand clapped over her mouth from behind. The violence was worse because it was frozen in silence – had lain in wait, gloating, while she suspected nothing. Someone had broken in. She was too afraid in the first moments to call out to her husband. She waited in the doorway, holding her breath, for the movement that would give the intruder away; it was awful to think that a few minutes ago she had gone unprotected all the way down the lonely passageway to the lavatory. Then, as her panic subsided, she took in the odd specificity of the chaos. Only the chairs were overturned, at the centre of the room; nothing else had been touched, nothing pulled off the shelves and thrown on the floor, nothing smashed. The lounge windows were tightly closed – just as the back door had surely been closed in the kitchen. Nothing had been taken. Had it? The wireless was intact on its shelf. Rousing out of her stupor, she crossed to the desk and opened the drawer where her husband kept his band earnings. The money was safe: three pound ten in notes and some loose change, along with his pipe and pipe cleaners and dirty tobacco pouch, the smell of which stayed on her fingers when she closed the drawer.

  Instead of waking her husband, she tried the window catches, then went around checking the other rooms of the flat. The kitchen door and the front door were both securely bolted, and no one could have climbed in through the tiny window in the lavatory. Soundless on her bare feet, she entered the children’s bedroom and stood listening to their breathing. Her little boy stirred in his sleep but didn’t cry; her daughter was spreadeagled awkwardly amid the menagerie of her stuffed toys and dolls. Their window, too, was fastened shut. There was no intruder in the flat, and only one explanation for the crazy scene in the front room: her imagination danced with affront and dismay. Chilled, she returned to stand staring in the lounge. Her husband was moody, and she’d always known that he had anger buried in him. But he’d never done anything like this before – nothing so naked and outrageous. She supposed he must have got frustrated with his studies before he came to bed. Or was the disorder a derisory message meant for her, because he despised her homemaking, her domestication of the free life he’d once had? Perhaps the mess was even supposed to be some kind of brutal joke. She couldn’t imagine how she had slept through the outburst.

  This time, for once, she was clearly in the right, wasn’t she? He had been childish, giving way to his frustration – as if she didn’t feel fed up sometimes. And he criticised her for her bad temper! He had such high standards for everyone else! From now on, she would hold on to this new insight into him, no matter how reasonable he seemed. Her disdain hurt her, like a bruise to the chest; she was more used to admiring him. But it was also exhilarating: she seemed to see the future with great clarity, looking forward through a long tunnel of antagonism, in which her husband was her enemy. This awful truth appeared to be something she had always known, though in the past it had been clouded in uncertainty and now she saw it starkly. Calmly and quietly she picked up each chair, put back the cushions which had tumbled onto the carpet, straightened the goatskin rug. The room looked as serene as if nothing had ever happened in it. The joke of its serenity erupted inside her like bubbles of soundless laughter. Nothing – nothing – would ever make her acknowledge what he’d done, or the message he’d left for her, although when he saw the room restored to its rightful order, he would know that she knew. She would wait for him to be the first to acknowledge in words the passage of this silent violence between them.

  In the bedroom, she lay down beside her husband with her back turned; her awareness of her situation seemed pure and brilliant, and she expected to lie awake, burning at his nearness. There was less than an hour to wait before she had to get up again; she’d got back into bed only because her feet were cold and it was too early to switch on the electric fire in the kitchen. But almost at once she dropped into a deep sleep – particularly blissful, as if she were falling down through syrupy darkness, her limbs unbound and bathing in warmth. When she woke again – this time her little boy really was calling out to her – she remembered immediately what had happened in the night, but she also felt refreshed and blessed.

  A YOUNG WIFE fried bacon for her husband: the smell of it filled the flat. Her son was eating cereal at the table. Her husband was preoccupied, packing exercise books into his worn briefcase, opening the drawer in his desk where he kept his pipe and tobacco, dropping these into the pocket of his tweed jacket. But he came at some point to stand behind his wife at the stove and put his arms around her, nuzzling her neck, kissing her behind her ear, and she leaned back into his kiss, as she always did, tilting her head to give herself to him.

  When the bacon was ready, she served it up on a plate with fried bread and a tomato and poured his tea, then went to find out why their daughter was dawdling in the bedroom. The girl was sitting on the edge of her brother’s bunk, trying to pull on her knee-length socks with one hand while she held a book open in front of her eyes with the other. Her thin freckled face was nothing like her mother’s. One white sock was twisted around her leg with its dirty heel sticking out at the front, and the book was surely the same one she had already read several times. The child was insistent, though, that she needed to start reading it all over again, from the beginning. Her mother took the book away and chivvied her along.

  Flight

  Claire had to fly over from Philadelphia to the UK for a business meeting. The night before the night she flew, she made a stupid mistake, drank too much and went to bed with a man she didn’t know very well, didn’t even like all that much. Her plane left at six the following evening, flying away from the setting sun. The alcohol was still toxic in her system, she wasn’t a great drinker and wasn’t used to it, hadn’t done anything stupid like that for a while. She didn’t want to eat anything and could only drink tonic water. When she took the fizzing glass she saw that her hand shook, and felt humiliated though no one else could have noticed. One of the flight attendants in business class, an Englishwoman with an eager, bony face, too elaborately mad
e up, probably in her early forties – Claire’s own age – wanted to make a fuss of her, admiring her coat, gushing over her handbag while she stowed it for her in the overhead locker. She offered up that comedy of a greed for material things, designer goods, which was a currency between women. But Claire wasn’t in the mood for female solidarity, she cut her short and the attendant treated her after that with careful respect, no hint of resentment. Even this little display of her own power struck Claire bitterly, like a foretaste of England. If ever she was stand-offish at work her American colleagues held it against her, putting it down to British snootiness, probably believing she came from the British privileged classes.

  After they’d served the meal, which she refused, the flight attendants tried to get everyone asleep for the short, false night. As the talk ceased and silence fell, they were all more aware of the plane forging forwards with such force, shuddering with the violence of its effort. Bodies were shrouded in their pale cotton quilts. A few passengers were reading, in cones of subdued light from overhead or the ghost-light from laptops or tablets. Claire could have been going through the background material on her new clients, but the thought of the dullness of those files stirred up traces of nausea, like silt in a pond. She could still feel the lovemaking in her body, not in a pleasant way but as a bruised, raw fatigue, as if her skin had been ground against her bones. As the time passed more detail came back to her, but she didn’t get used to what she’d done, it seemed more inexplicable and disastrously mistaken. Luckily she had put aside a whole day in London for shopping or sightseeing, before she began her meetings. As soon as she got to her hotel in the morning, she could run a hot bath, then block out the light and sleep, hibernating while the last toxins leached out of her. Her whole existence seemed only aimed at those hours ahead, of oblivion and privacy.

  WAKING IN HER hotel room in the afternoon, she felt much better. Bright light was pricking round the edges of the heavy curtains, and when she first opened her eyes she thought that there must be brilliant sunshine outside, a perfect day – though in fact the sun wasn’t shining, the city was only suffused in its familiar soft autumn light, pink and pearly grey. Even through the sealed windows the muffled noise of the perpetual traffic reached her, a clangour of building sites, the chiming of steel against steel. Her room was on the seventh floor, with a view of a busy small park and trees down below – she had chosen a hotel near Liverpool Street Station because she needed to be in Chingford first thing in the morning. She showered again, then put on some of the clean clothes she had unpacked before she collapsed into bed, did her face quickly and skilfully at the dressing table. You had to dress right down in London, the classic good taste which worked in America looked dated here.

  She had made up her mind about something while she slept. Her niece Amy, her sister Susan’s daughter, had a new baby and she ought to see it. This wasn’t straightforward because Claire and Susan had quarrelled, they hadn’t spoken for several years. This quarrel shadowed all Claire’s relations with her family at home: it was time now to dispel the shadows. She had to spend all day tomorrow in Chingford, and on Wednesday and Thursday she would be running training sessions in Northampton, for the technicians in the UK service office of the American company she worked for. But her return flight wasn’t till Saturday and when she was free on Thursday evening she would catch a train north, go home and surprise them. She didn’t let herself think beyond this initial impulse, knowing how easy it would be to talk herself out of going. She’d made approaches to Susan before and been rebuffed; any efforts at reconciliation had always come from her side.

  Instead she went out in search of presents for the baby – a boy, Calum. She always liked her first hours in England, slipping in unnoticed in the crowd, at home in her own tribe, submerged among the English voices, southern ones and northern ones – and the foreign voices which were part of it. As the autumn day thickened into dusky evening, the white light from the shop windows seemed more seductive – the lovely things laid out so subtly, not blatantly, to tempt you inside. There was so much money in London now, everything was glossy with money and expensive taste. Streets had been pedestrianised and planted with young trees, their twiggy silhouettes strung with more white lights; a busker was playing classical music on the violin. The shoppers dawdled purposefully, with a subdued excitement. Eventually Claire chose a shawl for the baby, in very fine cream wool, as light as cobwebs: it cost a fortune but she couldn’t resist it, enjoyed watching the girl wrap it so deftly in tissue paper, securing it with pretty stickers, tying it with blue ribbon.

  She bought perfume for Amy and a T-shirt for Ben, Amy’s boyfriend, the baby’s father – whom Claire hadn’t met. She remembered to buy a T-shirt for Ryan too, Susan’s youngest, who was still at home: they were all of them living piled in together somehow, in the old three-bedroomed terrace house where Claire and Susan had grown up. Then Claire spent a long time looking for a silk scarf for Susan, picking up one after another, wondering about colours, testing the liquid fall of silk against her hand – as if this choice were the problem, rather than anything between them in the past. In the end she went for a very full square in a tan and leaf-green paisley pattern, slightly retro – this would surely look nice in Leeds as well as in London. For herself she bought a little false fur tippet backed in yellow satin; it was colder here than in Philadelphia, and the tippet had just the touch of stylish irony she’d been in search of. Her face was piquant, framed in the soft fur in the shop mirror. She wasn’t too bad for her age – petite, very thin, very fine-boned, with a sharp nose and good jawline, deep-set hooded grey eyes. But she looked quickly away from her reflection, remembering the other night.

  CLAIRE DIDN’T CALL or text to let anyone know she was coming. She’d finished in Northampton by lunchtime on Thursday and arrived in Leeds around five, when it was beginning to get dark. Tactfully she left her suitcase at the station, and all she brought with her in the taxi was the carrier full of presents, as well as a few overnight things and a change of clothes in a shoulder bag, in case she was invited to stay. She told the driver to drop her at the end of her old street, which stretched out of sight in the gloom under the street lights; this was one of a succession of red-brick Victorian working-class terraces running roughly parallel to one another, all built in a hurry at the end of the nineteenth century. There were no trees or front gardens and the front doors opened directly onto the pavement; the only variety was in the different colours of the doors, or if some house-fronts were rendered or pebble-dashed. The street was empty and Claire’s footsteps sounded eerily loud, the click-clack of her heels bouncing off the brick fronts. Uneasily she felt as though this moment of approaching her home could belong to any time in the past, it was so saturated with familiarity and the place was so unaltered – she might be coming home from school, or visiting from London when her parents were still alive.

  But the present flooded back, as soon as Amy opened the front door to her. Behind the street’s facade, each house was its own burst of noise and colour, done up or not done up in its own style: the woodchip paper in Claire’s old hall had been painted over with a shocking pink – that was probably Amy’s idea, not Susan’s. Nothing was the same. Unfamiliar coats were laden on unfamiliar coat hooks, the narrow hallway was almost impassable with heaps of trainers and shoes and a buggy. A television was on in the back room; Amy was yelling something over her shoulder, then she turned to peer out doubtfully into the dusk. It was years since she had seen her aunt in person, though they were often in contact on Facebook or by Skype – anyway, Claire was supposed to be in America. — Auntie Claire! Is that you? What are you doing here?

  She sounded hostile, but Claire knew not to read too much into it. Submerging in the voices and manner from her old home – so wary and flattening and grudging – was always a shock at first, before she got used to it again. That old way of being gripped her with mingled nostalgia and dread. — I’ve come to see the baby, haven’t I? Can I come in? Is Susan
here?

  — She’s not back from work yet. I thought it was her when the bell went.

  Claire knew from the pictures on Facebook that Amy had put on a lot of weight in her pregnancy, but she still had her sulky, sexy prettiness. Her blonde hair, dark at the roots, was scraped back tightly in a scrunchy and yesterday’s make-up was sooty under her eyes; there was a silver ring in her nose. She was wearing stretch tracksuit bottoms and socks, and under her T-shirt her breasts were swollen and shapeless.

  — I’ve brought a bottle of bubbly, I thought we could wet the baby’s head.

  — The baby’s driving me nuts, Auntie Claire. He’s a nightmare, he doesn’t sleep. You can keep him if you like. Take him back to America with you.

  Following Amy down the hallway and into the back room, Claire thought she could smell that sweat of new motherhood she’d smelled on other women before – not quite unpleasant, milky and salty and frowsty. In spite of Amy’s complaining, she actually seemed complacent in her slouchy, sloppy physical collapse – as if the baby had solved some problem about who she ought to be. Claire had last seen her niece when she was sixteen, mouthy and edgy and sprightly, very clever at school; then Susan had been so disappointed when she wouldn’t try for university. Instead she’d ended up working in Topshop – and now this.

  The back room was hot, and entirely taken over by baby things: a Moses basket and a plastic changing mat and packs of disposable nappies, a bag full of changing kit, blankets and muslin cloths draped everywhere, a clothes dryer laden with baby clothes, one of those low-slung bouncy chairs. A big good-looking boy with dyed fair hair sprawled on the sofa, watching Family Guy on the huge television set, laughing loudly at it: this must be Ben. He too was wearing tracksuit bottoms and thick woolly slipper-socks – and no doubt the tomcat marijuana-note emanated from him. Claire got the impression that the young parents were passing their days quite happily in this cocoon of animal warmth and smells: as if they were playing house, everything changed and simplified, revolving around the new life. A tiny baby in a blue Babygro was asleep against his father’s naked, muscled brown chest, curled with his head down like a comma.