by Tessa Hadley
— How can you not see how awful they are? Sheila hissed to Neil the next day when she took him on a walk to get away from the house. They set out along the flank of the wide shallow valley, into a freezing wind that rippled the slate-coloured water standing on the clay in the valley bottom, where the Ditch had overflowed. — They’re so dried up, so false. Nothing they say is ever real.
He shrugged. — At least your parents don’t make remarks about West Indians being too lazy to work and wanting to sit all day with a string tied round their big toe, fishing in the creek.
— I wish they would, Sheila said gloomily. — Does your dad really believe that?
— Didn’t he treat you to his Al Jolson impression?
— But don’t you see how sickening the opposite thing is, too? Always having to be up on the moral high ground. We actually have a family abbreviation for it, you know: the MHG. Mum shouts it when the kids are quarrelling: ‘MHG! Back down and take the MHG!’ Sometimes the whole family goes berserk – I can’t tell you. My brother Andrew – the one who left home – once stabbed Stephen with a fork. He was shouting at him, ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt!’ Dad was trying to separate them, Mum was threatening to call the police. Then that evening when it had all died down we were just sitting around the table again, eating boiled liver or something, pretending that nothing had happened. ‘Almighty God, who hast given us grace at this time.’
Neil laughed.
— You closed your eyes when he prayed at the table last night, she said accusingly.
— Did I? No, I didn’t.
Sheila was walking backward ahead of him along the path, in her eagerness to convey to him the truth about her parents. The wind on her back whipped her hair across her face from under her knitted hat. Mrs Culvert had insisted that Neil, who didn’t own a hat, borrow some awful thing from the tallboy in the hall which no one could remember ever wearing, a kind of bonnet with a furry lining and earflaps; it changed him piquantly, into a beady-eyed, perky cartoon animal. He seemed more interested in the landscape than in Sheila’s family. He asked her the names of places they could see, which she didn’t always know; he couldn’t believe that she had lived here all her life and wasn’t sure where north was. They reached a stand of beech trees growing on a slope about a mile from the village. Among the trees, the wind that had blown so insistently against them dropped, and they stopped to recover their equilibrium on a muffling carpet of dried leaves. The smooth trunks of the trees surging up out of the earth seemed present and intelligent, grey beasts standing soberly to watch them. A musky mushroomy perfume rose in the stillness from the mulch underfoot. Neil put his arms around Sheila and kissed her; the embrace felt comical and unsexual through their bulky layers of jumpers, coats and scarves.
— I could put my coat on the ground, Neil said insinuatingly into her neck, his earflaps scratching her chin. — It would be nice to cuddle up.
— You’re joking, Sheila said in horror. — In broad daylight?
Needless to say, at the rectory they were sleeping separately: Sheila was in her old room with her sister Hilary, Neil was in with Anthony and Stephen. — I feel awful, Mrs Culvert had mumbled, not looking at Neil, bobbing her thick shock of grey hair and apologising for there being no spare room that he could have to himself. — What you must think … Of course we should – five bedrooms. Don’t know if Sheila’s told you Gillian’s problems? (Gillian, who was eight, was epileptic, and had difficulty coping with school. She was seeing a psychiatrist in Cambridge; apparently she needed her own room. ‘Which makes me think she’s smarter than she looks,’ Sheila had said.)
— We’re out in the countryside, Neil said to Sheila, nuzzling her. — There’s no one to see.
— That just shows how much you know about the countryside. She pushed him away from her with both gloved hands. — Everyone will know that we’re up here already. If we don’t walk on soon, they’ll be looking at their watches.
— Who cares? he said, trying again.
— I do, she said passionately. — Don’t spoil this place for me. It’s somewhere I used to come to be by myself when I was a girl, when I couldn’t bear any of them at home. It’s holy to me. I used to read poetry here.
Neil couldn’t argue with that, and so they moved on, faintly mutually resentful long after they’d resumed holding hands and talking. In fact, Sheila had somewhat misrepresented the significance of the beech grove. She had used to go there with Hilary; she would never have gone walking anywhere around here on her own. It was true, though, that she and her sister had sometimes brought their books to the grove with them, and had worked themselves up over what they were reading into states of exalted excitement.
When they had all eaten their cauliflower cheese that evening, Mrs Culvert suggested unexpectedly that they play games.
— We always do at Christmas, she explained to Neil. — Family tradition … no television. With you here – new blood, so to speak.
Neil was fairly appalled at the idea and no one else seemed keen, but nonetheless when the washing up was done they assembled to play in the front room, the girls snuggling round the meek warmth of the storage heater with their jumpers pulled down over their hands, the boys erupting into spasms of kicking on the broken-backed sofa. Mrs Culvert carried armfuls of props downstairs for charades and dumped them triumphantly in a heap: a fur coat, a parasol, straw boaters, an inflatable rubber ring for the beach, an air-raid warden’s helmet, dog leashes, an evening dress of crinkled green Fortuny silk, a croquet mallet. The Reverend, in magnanimous concession, poured glasses of fizzy cider for everyone but the three youngest children.
Poor Neil was out of his depth. He had never played charades before, and he was hopeless at it. His team acted ‘Eucharist’, and for ‘ewe’ they dressed him up as a shepherd in a stripy flannelette sheet with a crook left over from someone’s Nativity play. Nola and Patricia frisked around his feet, baaing, while Hilary who was usually earnest and silent followed on all fours, wrapped in a sheepskin rug from the study. Neil made no effort to get into the role of the shepherd; he batted uncomfortably at the girls with his crook and almost ruined everything by mumbling pointedly, — And here’s the ewe, when Hilary appeared.
The Culverts threw themselves into these games, once they got started, with an extravagance that was almost a mania. For ‘wrist’, Reverend Culvert put on the green silk dress and minced up and down with his wife’s handbag, drooping his wrist and exclaiming, — Dear me, ducky. Neil looked frankly astonished. He wasn’t much better at guessing, either. Hilary and her father got Sheila’s team’s word – ‘seductress’ – long before Neil did; they held back to give him a chance, and he stared miserably, bemusedly, at Mrs Culvert’s egg-laying (—Poultry? he ventured), and at Stephen as a hairdresser perming Anthony’s blond nylon wig. Sheila, acting the whole word in the finale, in her father’s silk dressing gown and a pair of old high heels, was languidly seductive as Neil had never seen her: husky-voiced, rolling her hips, adjusting her stocking, letting the dressing gown fall open when she sat down, smoothing her perfectly shaped long legs. She patted a place beside her on the sofa for her mother, dressed as a shy boy, in tails with a top hat and cane, a moustache drawn with a black mascara brush on her upper lip; she pulled the boy over by his tie to kiss her. Neil was dismayed to feel strong stirrings of desire as he watched.
— Never mind! Mrs Culvert said to him consolingly when the game was over and they all sat flushed and panting among the disregarded heaps of costumes and props, bubbling weakly with smiles and shamed giggles at what they had done. Mrs Culvert still had her moustache. — Awfully silly, really, she said. — You’ll get the hang of it next time.
The next morning, Sheila and Hilary took the short cut through the garden on their way back from buying hair dye at the shop in the village; Sheila was determined to do something with Hilary’s mousy hair. The short cut meant that they had to plough through dead weeds and brambles at the long garden’s bottom end. A wet mist like sticky,
grubby wool was still clinging to the earth at ten o’clock, and their trousers were almost immediately soaked to the knees, the water seeping through their desert boots to their socks. They tugged at the naked branches of a silver birch overhead to drench each other thoroughly, squealing in the shower of drops. For the first time, Sheila experienced a rush of strong feeling for her home and her past, a tenderness for the winter garden’s desolation. The same grey sodden dishcloths had been left hanging for months on the washing line. A plastic bucket was half filled with rotting apples from the trees. Children’s trikes and an old pedal car had been left out to rot too. Everything in the flower beds had over-grown and died, and now the silky seed heads and swollen blackened pods, slashed down by wind and rain, lay dissolving into the earth.
The daylight was so grudging that the lamp was turned on in the vicar’s study. The sisters had often watched their father from out here as he rehearsed his sermons or conducted symphonies on the gramophone, thinking nobody could see him. Neil had found some LPs that Andrew had left behind, and Reverend Culvert, who was visiting elderly parishioners in hospital this morning, had said at breakfast that he could play them in the study if he wanted to. Through the French windows, the girls could see him sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking, his hair falling forward across his face. He was swaying his head in time to a song they couldn’t hear: rock music, Frank Zappa probably, nothing that the dusty old study with its walls of books had ever been treated to before. (Andrew had had his own hi-fi, which he had taken away with him.) Hilary couldn’t help bursting out with a snort of laughter.
— I’m sorry, Shuggs, but he does look funny.
— It’s all right, Sheila said. — I know he does.
She was taken aback by this stranger of hers, ensconced so outrageously in the innermost sanctum of her family home. The shock of it was voluptuous; she felt with a shudder that the closer Neil came to her, the less familiar he was. She would have liked to see her life as he saw it, stripped of its ordinariness; she wished that she could possess him as he only was when he was alone. She heard a soft thud and a rattle of glass; Neil heard it too from inside the room, and turned his head. Hilary had picked out one of the tiny half-rotten apples from the bucket and pitched it at the study windows, dropping to hide herself behind a stretch of overgrown wall where there had once been a greenhouse. When Neil looked away again, she stood up to pitch another one; Sheila joined in. Neil got to his feet. It must have been difficult, with the light on, for him to see them in the murky day outside. He came over and peered through the French windows and they threw apples at him, not bothering in the end to hide, standing out in the grey daylight as he watched them, hurling all the apples at him, one after another, until they reached a layer of impossibly mushy ones at the very bottom of the bucket.
The Trojan Prince
IT’S AN APRIL morning and a young man waits at a black-painted front door in a decent street in Tynemouth. It’s a much more decent street than the one where his home is. Both streets are terraced, but here the scale’s quite different; a curving flight of stone steps climbs to the door, flanked by railings also painted black. Dropped behind more railings there’s a basement area, and rising from down there are the sounds of pans clashing and women’s voices, and the steam of cooking – but he’s determinedly not looking down. He fixes his attention on the front door as if he’s willing it to open – he has tugged at the bell-pull and heard a distant jangling inside, but doesn’t know if he’ll have the nerve to pull it twice. The year is 1920. This young man has missed the World War – he has closed his mind now even to the idea of the war, which, it seems to him, has devoured everyone’s pity and imagination for too long.
The street is quiet. It’s past the hour when the kind of men who live in these houses leave for their offices and boardrooms – he has meant to avoid them. But he’s hoping it’s still early enough for the women to be at home. He has only a vague idea of how the kind of women who live here pass their days. The wind is tearing scraps of cloud in a fitfully gleaming sky, and combing through the twigs of the hornbeam trees (the trees are another difference between this street and his), setting them springing and dancing like whips. Last night it rained heavily – he lay awake listening to it in the bed he shares with his brother – and the stone walls are still dark with wet, though the wind has dried the pavements. Beside the door an iron implement something like the upside-down end of a hoe is set into the stone step; too late, just as the door swings back, he realises that it must be for scraping the mud off your boots before you go inside the house. He’s walked or run down this street a hundred times before, and never noticed the boot scrapers or given any thought to their function, because then he was a boy with no interest in going inside. There’s no time now to check whether his boots are dirty.
A maid has opened the door – he knew that would happen and worried that she might be a girl he’d known at school. But she’s a stranger, tall and big-boned with a smut on her cheek, so he’s able to push past her into the hall, doffing his cap. It’s only as the still atmosphere of the house envelops him that he’s aware of the particular weather of the morning left behind – its touch on his face and tug at his coat, the urgings of the onset of spring, the twigs glowing russet, swelling into bud.
— Can I speak to Miss Ellen, please? he says, with the aplomb he has rehearsed at home.
The cessation of the wind is so abrupt that he feels for a moment as if he were deaf; it must be the quiet that makes this house seem so different to his own, because the smells are familiar enough: furniture polish, scalded dish-rags, boiling cabbage. The maid is frowning at him sulkily, not knowing if she should have let him in. He guesses that she spends her life afraid of trouble from one side or another.
— Don’t know if she’s at home.
— I should think she’d like to see me. She’ll be sorry if she misses me. I’m her cousin. I’m going away to sea.
The maid dithers fatalistically.
— I’ll go and tell Missus. What’s your name?
— McIlvanney, he says. — Tell her it’s James McIlvanney.
— Do you want to wait here, then?
— Here’s all right.
She puts out her hand to him and he waits a moment too long, not knowing what she wants. Then blushing he gives her his cap and sees a little light of contempt come into her eyes, which are round and hard and wet like blue pebbles – but it doesn’t matter, he’s got this far. Going up the stairs, she makes a show of stamping her feet heavily, as if she’s actually too weary to climb to the first floor.
He’s only sixteen, despite the man’s overcoat and the new tweed cap. His hair is jet black and very straight, and his face is composed of strong fine lines, clean and clear and exquisite like his clear pink and white skin; his eyebrows are as well-shaped as a woman’s, his curved lips pressed shut as if he’s holding in important news. The jut of his cheekbones and jaw is masculine enough – strained and resilient; his expression is keenly alive with self-interest, which makes him appear blind and alert at the same time. The air in the hall is thick and dim and greenish because the blinds are all drawn down – as they are in the parlour at home – to save the light fading the furniture. It makes him remember floating underwater once, when he dived into the canal and hit his head on an old bedstead dumped in there. A clock ticking in the hall is like his own pulse urging him on. He can hear the maid’s voice upstairs, other voices responding, impatient, querulous – he has dropped an interruption into the smooth unfurling of the women’s morning. Without warning, he experiences a slight nausea and dizziness.
He holds his head back warily, defiantly on his shoulders, so that the furnishings in here won’t get the better of him: the dado with its raised pattern of diamonds under thick brown paint, the polished wood of the hall stand glowing dark, yellow gleams of brass among the shadows – the face of the clock, a rack for letters, a little gong hanging in a frame with a suede-covered mallet balanced across two hook
s, a tall brass pot for the umbrellas. He doesn’t look down at the pattern of blue and cream tiles underfoot in case he has trodden mud on them. Through an open door he glimpses low chairs fat with stuffing, crouched on a sea of flower-patterned carpet. The smell of brushed carpets tickles in his nose. Everything in this house is slick with prosperity, with the labour of servants. In his own home, there’s only a girl who comes in two mornings a week to help his mother with the heavy work.
What James McIlvanney thinks is: I’ll have all this one day.
He doesn’t particularly like it, but he wants it.
He stores it up, so that he knows what to want.
But there’s no definite plan of how to get it. It wasn’t a plan that brought him here today. Ellen Pearson really is his cousin – second cousin, at least. She belongs to the branch of his family who have done well for themselves; his mother’s uncle, Ellen’s grandfather, made money in India, then came home to set up a company importing jute. Ellen’s mother is related to the Fenwicks, who own a department store in Newcastle. Ellen’s a pale blonde girl James has seen on a couple of family occasions but never spoken to, attractive in a sickly kind of way, and shy; though the truth is, that when he last saw her at a family party he didn’t bother to notice whether she was attractive or not, because then he was only a boy, chafing in his prickling wool suit, consumed by the idea of escaping to his cronies out on the streets, whose adventures at that point of his life absorbed him wholly. But since leaving school and getting a proper job, he has begun to open his eyes to the world from this altered perspective, and has found himself interested in Ellen, attributing a kind of mystery to her and her blonde languor, to the life he imagines she leads as a privileged only child.
