Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  — But I don’t care about the Williamses, Ruby said.

  Dalia closed her eyes and after a pause the jelly shoes stomped indoors again.

  Then things went rather quiet inside the house. Dalia fell asleep in the healing warmth, under the shade of the faded striped umbrella, and when she woke up an hour later and everything was still quiet she felt afraid. Stepping indoors, where the shutters were barred against the blazing day, she was blind at first in the shadows. Ruby wasn’t anywhere to be found downstairs, or on the first floor. Dalia climbed the steep uncarpeted steps to the attic, which the Williamses only used to store old junk; the heat up here under the roof was feral, dizzy-making. Some furtive noise from behind the closed attic door, a small scratching or rustling, made her hesitate outside it.

  — Ruby, are you in there? Are you all right?

  — I’m fine, thank you.

  There was something peculiar about Ruby’s voice, prim and slippery and secretive; for all her professional openness to things sexual, Dalia shied away from opening the door, afraid of what might be on the other side. — All right, darling, just so long as you’re OK.

  Ruby spent all day in the attic, with only a break for baguette, and appeared downstairs chastely enough, though hot-faced, at supper time; she ate without commenting on the food and as soon as the meal was finished slipped upstairs again. — I’m just doing something, she said, avoiding eye contact. The three left behind in peace, to play chess or read or make music – there was a passable piano for Adrian, and Nico had brought his cello – looked at one another in amused perplexity.

  — You know what she’s doing, don’t you? Adrian said later, coming down from visiting the bathroom.

  — Do I want to know?

  — She’s just reading.

  — Reading? Really?

  — I opened the door a crack and peeked inside and she didn’t even hear me. Just sitting there sucking her hair, completely lost inside her book, although it’s still boiling up there under the roof.

  — What book? She didn’t bring any books.

  At ten o’clock they had to call Ruby down to go to bed; when she was asleep they tried the attic door, but found that she had locked it and hidden the key. The next day after breakfast she slipped inconspicuously upstairs again. Nico followed her up to the attic – though finely sensitive, he was not above teasing his exasperating sister – and found this time she’d locked the door on the inside. Dalia did feel vaguely guilty. Who knew what books Ruby had stumbled upon? They might be pornography; or sinister old medical textbooks. The Williamses were rather awful. But the peace in the quiet house was blissful, and she was soon addicted to her quiet hours alone in the walled garden.

  BEHIND THE LOCKED door Ruby was already three-quarters of the way through East Lynne. This was only one volume in a promisingly tall pile of Treasury Classics – The Woman in White, The Cloister and the Hearth, Ivanhoe, Lady Audley’s Secret – uniformly bound in red with gold lettering. The younger generation of Williamses had moved them up here to make room on their shelves for something slightly less dated; they bought the Booker shortlist every year, and the backlist was overspilling their London home. When Ruby first strayed into the attic, she had opened the volume on the top of the pile in a spirit of despairing mockery, because she’d never in the least liked books before. The ones she’d been given as presents, or been forced to read in class, had seemed too drearily like her own real-life childish routines of home and school and family. She hadn’t had any idea that books could transport you like this – into something better.

  At night, falling asleep, she snuffed up the fragrance of damp-spotted old pages on her fingers; in the mornings she hurried through her chocolate milk and croissant, hungry to get back to her story. Much of East Lynne, in truth, was fairly incomprehensible; she stumbled among strange facts in a thick fog. The prohibitions that weighed so heavily on Lady Isabel Vane and Sir Francis Levison – what had they done wrong exactly? – were all the more compelling for their obscurity; some grandeur in the language intoxicated her. She was astonished when little William died. Children always got better in books, didn’t they? ‘I have seen the flowers we shall see in Heaven,’ he said, ‘ten times brighter than our flowers here. When God takes a little child there it is because he loves him.’ The audacity of it took Ruby’s breath away, as if something raw and wild had been dragged from where it was concealed, into the daylight. Tears flooded into her eyes; what was inside her seemed poured out onto the page.

  ‘I have had more than my share of sorrow,’ Madame Vine said. ‘Sometimes I think that I cannot support it.’ When day faded in the attic Ruby went on reading by torchlight, and when at last she had to go to bed, she placed her silken bookmark with trembling fingers. She staggered up dazedly from the world of her story, as if the one she returned to were the insubstantial fiction.

  BY THE END of their holiday she had read East Lynne and The Heir of Redclyffe, and was a good way into Lady Audley’s Secret. Now she would never find out what the secret was. Although it was searing to be torn away from her book, Ruby never dreamed of carrying it off with her; it would have been a desecration, to steal one volume from where it belonged among its fellows. Anyway, she liked to think of it left behind in the attic empty without her, somnolent in the sunshine, lizards basking on the stone windowsill outside, motionless as stone itself. At home in Crouch End it didn’t occur to her – she wasn’t resourceful – that she could have got hold of Lady Audley easily enough, in a library or online. She couldn’t ask her parents or her brother for help because she was afraid of letting them in on her reading discoveries in case they somehow appropriated them, turning out to know already all about the Williamses’ wonderful books. Ruby clung on to an indistinct idea, in fact, that the copy of Lady Audley she’d read was the only copy, the single exemplar, unique in the world. Fatalistically she accepted its loss, and her days were bitter with the flavour of exile from her whole self.

  There were two weeks of holiday left before she returned to school; she went on play-dates with friends, was taken to see Shaun the Sheep, and went back to quarrelling with Dalia: but all this listlessly, as if her heart wasn’t in it. Then during one dull rainy afternoon, while her mother had sessions with clients and Nico was supposed to be looking after her, but was browsing his laptop on the sofa, Ruby was filled from one moment to the next with a vision of possibility. All its elements – the possession of the right virgin notebook, a picture of her own head bowed in rapt concentration over her page, the shape of her story – came together in a single lightning-strike of inspiration.

  — Where are you off to, Pud? Nico said without looking up. – No going anywhere near Mama, you know that.

  — Just had a thought, said Ruby innocently.

  — A thought? You’re kidding me.

  HER PARENTS WERE delighted with whatever was keeping Ruby quiet in her bedroom; they supposed she had resumed the reading she’d begun in France. In fact she’d only glanced briefly inside the old unloved books on her shelf at home, whose ordinary reality was flavourless as ever. But she’d found something to do that matched or even outdid the thrill of her French books – and one evening her joy in her day’s creation overflowed her caution. She announced to her family that she was writing a novel.

  — Darling, that’s wonderful! said Dalia with real warmth. — How interesting!

  Adrian, beaming, said that he’d always thought she might have a novelist in her.

  — You could show it to your new class teacher, Dalia said. — What’s it about?

  Already Ruby was regretting telling them. — Things, she said insouciantly.

  They couldn’t have been more enthusiastic; Adrian promised that when she was finished he’d show it to a friend who was a publisher. Yet oddly even in their enthusiasm there was something tainting and disappointing – perhaps because no amount of it could ever match the power and importance Ruby felt when she was making things up. Sucking her hair, biro squeezed in h
er clutching fat fingers, joining up her letters laboriously, she transcribed the scenes unfolding in her mind’s eye; her whole body, kneeling up on her chair, hunched over her notebook, seemed shaken by their intensity. Sometimes she spoke the words she wrote aloud, or acted them out with a scowl or disdainful toss of her head.

  Her family professed great interest in reading her novel but she held back, with uncharacteristic restraint; something delicate in her story needed her protection. Carefully, whenever she finished writing, she stowed her notebook away under the mattress on her bed. But one late afternoon, in a careless moment between chapters, she left it lying on her desk while she foraged in the stash of biscuits in her wardrobe. Nico, peering in from the room next door, where he was marking time uneasily before Balliol, swooped on it.

  Ruby ran screaming downstairs after him, to where their parents were making salad in the kitchen. — Dad, he’s got my novel! He’s stolen it!

  — Nico, that’s not on.

  — No, no, really, it’s brilliant, Nico said, laughing, holding it out of Ruby’s way where she was jumping up at him, trying to snatch at it.

  — It’s unforgivable, Nico, Dalia said, pausing sternly with an organic tomato in one hand and a knife in the other. — Give it back to her right now.

  — Listen, let me read you some of this. You won’t believe it. Lady Carole, her cheek pale as a dove’s wing, swept from the ballroom with a flash of her exquisite eyes, dragging her long amber curls behind her. Do you think she’s taken off her wig? Meanwhile Frederick Fillet gazed into the dying coals – coals spelled c-o-l-e-s – of the fire.

  — I like the sound of Frederick Fillet, Adrian said. — Is he our hero?

  Ruby knew this was all a disaster and yet, succumbing to a writer’s vanity, she couldn’t help half wanting to hear her words take on their own life in the world. Her eyes were fixed on Nico, pleading but also with a greedy curiosity. What did she sound like, really? Wouldn’t they be amazed? Wouldn’t the words forged in such passion stupefy her audience, making them at last see what she saw? She mouthed over silently what Nico was reading out loud.

  — ‘But,’ stuttered Lady Carole, dread seeping into her. ‘Surely you are not the one who once betrayed me and ran off with another woman?’ The cords of her life were snapping. ‘It cannot be.’ Frederick sobbed, laying his rugged head upon her breasts. ‘Forgive me, you are much more beautiful than she is.’

  — Upon her breasts, Adrian said. — My word.

  — ‘I do not reproach you,’ Lady Carole said. ‘Because really she is quite nice.’

  Ruby spun round on her parents, riven suddenly with suspicion. Adrian was grinning helplessly; the back of Dalia’s hand, still clutching the vegetable knife, was pressed against her mouth, and her eyes behind her glasses seemed to be staring in distress – for a moment Ruby believed her mother was ravaged by the emotion in the story. Then she saw that her shoulders were shaking.

  — What are you all laughing at? she shouted furiously. — Why is it funny?

  SHE STAYED BARRICADED and inconsolable in her room that evening, though they all came humbly with apologies, and left propitiatory presents, even chocolate. — I’m very, very angry with Nico, Dalia communicated through the closed door. — It was very wrong of him. We didn’t really think your story was funny, darling. We were just laughing with . . .

  Ruby heard her search for the right word.

  — With delight, that’s all.

  Ruby had her notebook back and was writing in it again. At first she worked bitterly and without conviction. They had hollowed out the best thing she’d ever done: she would finish the stupid story any old how, just to prove they were right, and what an idiot she was. As time passed, however, the work regained its hold over her – and the plot altered unexpectedly from her original idea. Outside her bedroom window it grew dark, and the ordinary landscape of smart back gardens and pergolas and trampolines receded; an extraordinary huge moon, the colour of yellow cream, rose into the turquoise sky and seemed to be dissolving into an aureole of light around its rim. A mysterious wasting fever struck down all the members of Lady Carole’s family and also Frederick Fillet, one by one. Lady Carole never slept, but moved between their bedsides holding up a lamp, putting precious drops of water to their lips and wiping their brows with paper tissues. All in vain. ‘Oh, but it is hard to part,’ they murmured. By the time Ruby had finished – on the last line of the last page in her notebook, as she’d always planned – they had all passed beyond that river from whose bourne there is no known return, and Lady Carole was left alone. Ruby dropped tears on her page for her dear family. Her heart was swollen with love, and writerly triumph.

  Silk Brocade

  Ann Gallagher was listening to the wireless, cutting out a boxy short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves, in a pale lilac wool flecked with navy. She had cut the pattern from her own design – there was a matching knee-length pencil skirt – then pinned the paper shapes onto the length of cloth, arranging and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle to make them fit with minimum waste. Now her scissors bit in with finality, growling against the wood surface of the table, the cloth falling away cleanly from the blades. These scissors were sacrosanct and deadly, never to be used on anything that might blunt them. Ann and her friend Kit Seaton were renting the back basement of a big house in a residential area of Bristol for their dressmaking business; because the house was built on a hill, their rooms opened onto a garden, and sunlight fell through the French windows in shifting patches onto Ann’s cutting table.

  Someone came down the steps to the side entrance, then tapped on the opaque glass panes of the door; Ann looked up, irritated at being interrupted. Kit said they should always switch over to the Third Programme when clients came – it was more sophisticated – but there wasn’t time, and Ann could make out enough through the bubbled glass to know that the woman standing on the other side wasn’t sophisticated anyway. She was too bulky, planted there too stolidly, with an unassuming patience. Some clients pushed their faces up against the door and rattled the handle if they were kept waiting for even a moment.

  — Ann? Do you remember me? It’s Nola.

  Nola Higgins stood with military straightness, shoulders squared; she was buttoned up into some sort of navy-blue uniform, unflatteringly tight over her heavy bust. — I know I shouldn’t have turned up without an appointment, she apologised cheerfully. — But do you mind if I ask a quick question?

  Ann and Nola had grown up in the same street in Fishponds and had both won bursary places at the same girls’ grammar school. Nola was already in her third year when Ann started, but Ann had ignored her overtures of friendship and avoided sitting next to her on the bus that took them home. She’d hoped that Nola understood about her need to make new friends and leave Fishponds behind. Nola had trained to be a district nurse when she left school, and Ann didn’t often cross paths with her; now she guessed, with a sinking heart, that Nola had come to ask her to make her wedding dress. There had been other girls from her Fishponds past who’d wanted her to do this – it wasn’t strictly speaking even her past, because for the moment she was still living there, at home with her family. She and Kit needed the work, but Kit said that if they were seen to be sewing for just anyone they’d never get off the ground with the right people. Perhaps when Nola knew their prices she’d be put off. Hesitating, Ann looked at her wristwatch. — Look, why don’t you come on in for ten minutes? I am busy, but I’ll take a break. I’ll put some coffee on to perk.

  She showed Nola into the fitting room. They had a sewing room and a fitting room and a little windowless kitchenette and a lavatory; a dentist on the ground floor used the front basement rooms for storage, and they sometimes heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. The Third Programme helped drown out the sound of his drill when clients came for fittings. Ann and Kit had made gold velvet curtains for the fitting-room windows and covered a chaise longue in matching velvet; on the white walls there were prints of p
aintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it. Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass. Kit sometimes brought her boyfriends to this room at night, and Ann had to be on the lookout for the telltale signs – dirty ashtrays, wine glasses, crumpled cushions. She was convinced that Kit had actually been making love once on top of someone’s evening dress, laid out on the chaise longue after a fitting.

  Ann wondered whether Nola Higgins was impressed by the glamorous new style of her life or simply accepted it, as calmly as she’d have accepted any place she walked into. She must have seen some things during the course of her work as a nurse, some of them horrors. Nola’s home perm made her look closer to their mothers’ age; the dark curls were too tight and flat against her head, and when she sat down she tugged her skirt over her knees, self-conscious about her broad hips. But her brown eyes were very alert and steady, and she had that kind of skin that was so soft it looked almost loose on her bones, matte pink as if she were wearing powder, though she wasn’t.

  Ann put on the percolator in the kitchenette. Kit had grown up in France, or claimed she had, and insisted that they always make real coffee. They served it in little turquoise coffee cups, with bitter-almond biscuits, on a Japanese lacquer tray that Ann had found in a junk shop. Sometimes the coffee was so strong the clients could hardly swallow it.

  — I won’t keep you long, Nola said. — But I have a favour to ask.

  She didn’t have the same broad Bristol accent as her parents – Ann’s mother would have said that she was nicely spoken. It was about a wedding dress, of course. The wedding would be in June, Nola said. It would be a quiet one, at least she hoped so. She knew this was short notice and probably Ann was all booked up, but they had decided in a hurry. — Not that kind of hurry, she added, laughing without embarrassment. — I suppose you sometimes have to let out the waists as the brides get bigger.