Married Love

by Tessa Hadley

  He flicked his lighter and sucked in his cheeks, shaking back his hair, drawing flame into his raggedy cigarette; after the first deep pull into his lungs, he turned it round in his fingers to admire it. — We’re not actually lovers, he said in a strangulated voice, holding the smoke in. — Not in the sense of sexual consummation. I don’t think she’d ever really let me near her. Anyway I never dared try, in case she turned me down. D’you want some?

  He held out the cigarette to Kristen.

  — No thank you, she said, her cheeks burning primly.

  — But I suppose we have had a tiff. I’m in a mess over your mother. I can’t seem to cope unless I’ve got her around, and I’m terrified she’ll take herself away. Then I say precisely the things that make her most angry.

  Kristen seemed to be in a moon-terrain where naked facts lay around for anyone to find.

  — So why not just take yourself away instead?

  He didn’t notice she was being rude. — Don’t imagine I haven’t thought of that. But I’m weak, pathetically weak. He closed his eyes and yawned, leaning his head back against the brick ledge. — I could be happy, in a place like this. It’s nice in here.

  — There’s a well, you know.

  — A real well?

  — But no water in it. Tom and I looked.

  — You didn’t bring out any food?

  Kristen gave the Pune the second slice of lemon fridge cake, she ate an apple down to its stalk, they finished the sherry. He described some film he’d seen, where angels came to earth, and one of them fell in love with an acrobat and took on mortal form to be with her. He was just the same as when he was an angel, except that there was a bald patch in his hair and his clothes didn’t suit him. — But it was all worth it, the Pune said. — In exchange for mortal love. So the film said. What do you think?

  (Tom said afterwards that he’d heard of this film, and it was pretentious crap.)

  — I don’t know, said Kristen.

  He yawned again. — Go and tell Peggy I’m out here. Tell her I need her, tell her I’m in a state, tell her I’m going to do something desperate.

  — I’ll have to take the candle, she warned him.

  Walking back to the party, she held up her curved hand to shield the candle flame from the draught of her movement. She did deliver the Pune’s message, but not to Peggy.

  — Simon’s in the greenhouse, she said to Jim when she met him.

  He was piling up his plate from the wrecked remains of the buffet set out on the dining table. In the front room Peggy was dancing to ‘Because the Night’ (her favourite), with the artist who’d drawn the bosoms Kristen and Tom had stolen years ago.

  — Simon? What greenhouse? You mean our old greenhouse?

  — He wants Mum to go out to him. He says he needs her.

  — He can go fuck himself, said Jim. — Excuse my French, Pigeon.

  — Are you going to tell her?

  — No, I don’t think I am.

  Then Kristen went upstairs to her bedroom, and changed into her pyjamas. All the time she was nursing her drunkenness as tenderly as if it was the candle flame, carrying herself upright, planting one foot in front of another, choosing small sensible words that she could hold like little stones in her mouth. She used the bathroom, stood up and was slightly sick into the toilet, washed her hands and cleaned her teeth, stretched back her lips and bared her teeth at her image in the cabinet mirror. Switching off the light in her bedroom, she stood at the window looking out; one of the paper lanterns in the trees had caught fire and was blazing up, the flare illuminating a pale mass of leaves shocked out of night-time invisibility. She had left Simon by himself, out in the greenhouse in the dark: it was a triumph in their Punic Wars.

  And then she was leaping and pounding back across the grass and into the wood, mounds of breasts bouncing under her pyjamas, hardly noticing the sharp sticks and rocks that cut at her bare feet.

  The Pune couldn’t really have thrown himself in the well. A child might just about fall into it, but it wasn’t wide enough for an adult, they would only get stuck if they tried: she pictured his feet sticking up out of the well and waving around, a sob of breathy derision ripped her chest. Anyway, it hadn’t been all that far down to the dry bottom when she and Tom had looked, only ten feet or so, perhaps not that much. The torch beam – she had remembered, this time, to snatch the torch from Tom’s room on her way out – jagged and bobbed in front of her as she ran, breath hiccuping in her ears; she trained it at the rough ground ahead, leaping over roots and dodging past the old wheelbarrow tipped on its side, a broken go-kart.

  But there were other ways to die. Some awful tearing heaving noise came from the dark greenhouse as the torch beam found it, catching first on the rusting ornate pinnacle of the gable above the door, then reflecting off filthy panes overgrown with ivy. The iron frame shook. Through the glass, quenching her in horror, Kristen seemed to see a black shape hanging; then at the shape’s centre suddenly, as if a spirit struggled out, a small light bloomed and spurted.

  Kristen had forgotten that the Pune had his lighter.

  She stepped into the doorway.

  — Hello, he said. — Don’t tell me. She wouldn’t come.

  — I didn’t say anything to her. She was busy dancing.

  — Don’t worry. She wouldn’t have come anyway.

  — Are you OK?

  — You were wrong. Look: there is water in it.

  She should have recognised the noise she heard: he had been heaving aside the great stone that covered the entrance to the well, more easily than she and Tom had moved it, both pushing together. He was holding up his lighter over the opening; she tilted down her torch beam. Light slid on slick black, nearer to the top than she was expecting.

  — But it really was dry, when we looked.

  — It’ll be a spring. They can dry up in a drought and then come back again. Find something to throw down.

  Kristen remembered seaside pebbles, lined up along the windowsill; when they dropped them in, one at a time, the well swallowed them with an intimate small wet gulp, an old sound not given out for years. The Pune stared after them. His face was washed in the light shining back from the well’s surface: the long slanting lines of his cheekbones, the pits of his eye-hollows, the gathered concentration.

  He and Kristen exchanged smiles of satisfaction.

  Journey Home

  HIS SISTER CHANGED her relationship status on Facebook to single. Alec didn’t do Facebook, but he checked on hers fairly often, because there were only the two of them, no one else to look out for her (one parent dead and one a mess). It probably meant nothing; she was always falling out with this latest boyfriend. Alec thought the boyfriend was no good. He texted Emmie anyway.

  All that morning, his faint consciousness of worry floated against the greenish Venice light. He was staying in a residential centre, a modern block attached to a monastery on San Giorgio; it had been raining for days, he had to dry his wet clothes by hanging them along the lukewarm radiators in his room. Tourists in gondolas draped themselves under the blue tarpaulins, the front of St Mark’s fumed, pavements were awash or greasy with salt spray; he had imagined that flood water must wash over out of the canals, but it seemed to seep out of the foundations of the buildings. The water in the Grand Canal flowed undulating and fast, glaucous green; the famous facades withdrew, forbidding, behind their winter veil of rain. As Alec hurried under his umbrella, his writing about the paintings seemed a heat source inside him like the blood reds of the paint, less mental than visceral.

  He switched his phone off while he was working in the archives in the Frari, turned it on again when he came out – startled, after receding so far inside the study room’s velvety quiet, at being buffeted again by the weather in the bustling, splashy, narrow calle. The light smoked and was brownish, reflecting off the high walls in the rain. His Italian wasn’t really good enough for deciphering the old documents; he was afraid he had wasted this morning, hi
s last morning. And there was nothing on his phone from Em. Usually she was quick to get back to him; she spent too much time on her iPhone, hunkered angular on the floor in coloured thick tights and lace-up boots, presiding over the realm of her connections. Finely made, with narrow wrists and fingers, delicate ears, she was only twenty-two; when she was fifteen, she’d once taken an overdose of pills. She was pretty like a doll, with black hair cut in a short bob, and a strained, wide, eager smile. Alec had asked her what she saw in this latest guy. — Sex, she’d said, deliberately to embarrass him and shut him up. — Not everyone’s an intellectual like you.

  Alec was flying home next day; he wove through the crowds of umbrellas and slick waterproofs towards the Accademia, meaning to pay his farewell visit to Titian’s Pietà, which was at the centre of his idea, and his book. But at the last minute he joined the press across the Rialto instead, went to his usual restaurant and ate risotto with peas and ham, drank a half-carafe of straw-coloured wine. The restaurant had all its lights on in the early afternoon, gloom had so thickened outside the windows; passers-by seemed to weave in an underground labyrinth. He could return to the Accademia after lunch: packing wouldn’t take him half an hour; he had hardly colonised with his belongings his little cell, which despite its microwave and wireless connection was somehow appropriately monkish.

  Its monkishness had suited him. He was beginning to think it might be his preference, his character, to be alone – with all the mixed package of banality and elevation that brought. It was banal, for instance, to be eating here by himself, calculating how many euros he had left, feeling the faint dampness of his clothes that had never thoroughly dried out. There was a mismatch between the Renaissance magnificence of his inner life and this flat surface on which magnificence scarcely showed up. The forms that were his imagination’s language seemed untranslatable into a contemporary idiom. Alec had chosen art history, or it had chosen him, ten years ago, inter-railing in his gap year, finding his own way to the galleries that didn’t interest his friends: the Magdalene running, arms upraised, out of the Pietà had seemed to bring some message for him.

  Now he hesitated over returning to it for a last renewal. He didn’t want the painting to fail to shock him – its depth and timbre and huge occupation of actual space, which could not be carried away in any mental picture, nor reproduced in copy. Over his espresso, then counting out euro notes on to the bill in its saucer, he hovered between obligations – not to miss the encounter, not to spoil it. The rain was falling now in earnest, blown against the walls in spasms like slaps from wet washing; the gallery would be full of sodden tourists with no interest in art. Perversely, that didn’t make him head back to San Giorgio and a last session of endeavour on his laptop, or a few more hours, reading, wrapped up for warmth in his duvet.

  He went straight through the galleries to the Pietà, not looking for once right or left at what tempted him from every wall, and found room on the bench in front of it. The murmuring, damp, texting, flirting teenagers crowding him in impersonal intimacy (one group Spanish, one American) hardly spared the painting’s murky browns and blacks a second glance, but they weren’t a distraction; in an emptier room his emotions might have been less concentrated. His friends (and Emmie) imagined that art was good for you, elevating and purifying like yoga or cutting down alcohol; they envied its virtue vaguely, and put off getting round to it. And his throb of recognition in front of the painting was pleasure: it was sensual, stronger than drink. But it wasn’t consolation. In the archive he had been reading about how after Titian’s death and the death of his son in the plague of 1576, the house where they had worked and lived like princes was ransacked in the general chaos, the paintings dispersed. The Pietà seemed to be news from such a world: the running Magdalene, Christ’s body dead-white across his mother’s lap, Jerome an old man naked and crawling. Worse is always possible past the worst thing you’re afraid of.

  * * *

  He had to change at Paris for his flight to Aberdeen. It had been foggy in the early morning when they took off from Marco Polo, but there had been no warning of problems ahead. In Paris, however, it was snowing, and their onward flight had been postponed. Still he’d had no contact from Emmie. He texted her again, letting her know he was delayed. Then he texted Maggie, a mutual friend: ‘Have you seen Em? Is she OK?’ A bald, shallow snow-light reflected on to the airport’s interior surfaces, equalising them so the spaces seemed dimensionless. Everyone was drawn to look out through the glass to where more snow was falling, so thickly that at times you couldn’t see through it; when it thinned, the shapes of planes loomed oversized, clumsily innocent in motionlessness. Nothing was taking off.

  Alec had brought Gell’s Art and Agency in his hand luggage and he tried to read it, but mostly it was impossible to concentrate. He was washed through with a succession of reactions – exasperation, resignation, panic. Maggie texted him that she had seen Em at the weekend with Aaron (the boyfriend), and that she had seemed fine. Alec could have asked Maggie to go round and check on her (Maggie knew about Em’s history), but felt shame at this fussing over his sister, almost uxorious. He also felt fatalistic, an atom dropped arbitrarily in the vast stalled machinery of travel: what could he effect? It was half a relief. The airport wasn’t quieter than usual, but he caught himself listening for what was missing – the perpetual machine-room hum of purposive forward motion, whose absence was scarcely perceptible and yet altered everything, tipping it into doubt.

  He began to get to know the little group of his fellow passengers for Aberdeen. He and a couple of other men took turns to keep each other’s places while they went scouting for information, and to stretch their legs. People were getting hungry; beyond where they had all come through security, there were only snack food outlets selling coffee and croissants. Then came news that their flight was cancelled; they had to queue for tickets on alternative flights, either to Aberdeen next day or to Edinburgh and Glasgow. The two young women assigned to oversee the process were thin and tired-looking, heavily made up. They did their best to placate the frustrated travellers, but their English was limited to a few stock phrases, and they were overruled by a man with a morose face like crumpled leather, who made a languid importance out of keeping all information to himself; in their blue uniforms, cut tight around the breasts and knees, they were somehow at his mercy.

  A Romanian couple, too neat in their best clothes, travelling for the first time to visit their daughter, couldn’t speak a word of French or English; Alec talked on their phone to the daughter in Aberdeen, she translated to her parents what he explained. In the mid-afternoon the snowfall stopped and the sky flaunted again, a surprising blue. There was activity outside, men with snowploughs conferring and gesticulating, and an impression of flights being called in far-flung other limbs of the airport. Then daylight was extinguished beyond the windows, and darkness changed the passengers’ mood, bringing dread. A girl travelling home with her boyfriend began storming and sobbing, cursing. She was tall and heavy with sensible short hair and a stuffed toy pinned into one pocket of her rucksack. The resentment of the whole group seemed gathered up for a moment in her Scots righteousness, like a tight skin full to bursting.

  The official would only respond in French, not looking directly at the flushed, plain girl but addressing the whole group, as if with a rage of disdain he’d been constrained to hold in until now. He had been patient and made efforts on their behalf; now their rudeness had changed everything, they would not be issued with tickets for any further flights. — No more tickets! he shouted suddenly in English. The passengers got the gist of it and responded in an opening scatter of indignant protest. Alec stood up and tried to negotiate with the man, doing his best in French. He explained that all they asked was to be kept informed and comfortable; they were hungry. At least the decent long coat he’d bought last winter gave him gravitas; no one could mistake him these days for a student. After a short wait, trays of sandwiches arrived with coffee and bottles of
water. He found himself informally a bit of a hero in the little group; people asked for his opinion on the situation, or shared theirs with him.

  No more flights left that night. It began to snow again. Mattresses were given out, so thin that Alec decided he was better off in his seat. Impulsively, late, he decided to ask Maggie after all to go round to check on Emmie; he stood by the window to make the call, where the stale light of the airport abutted on to blackness beyond. But Maggie didn’t pick up – probably she’d already gone to bed. Alec touched his forehead against the cold of the glass. His phone was running out of battery, and the charger was packed in his suitcase.

  All the next day they waited. In the morning it snowed; in the afternoon blue sky showed itself again and the snowploughs went out, but apparently to no effect. Tedium bulked substantial as a wall across the hours. From time to time a flare of anticipation roused, that flights were imminent – then sank again. As daylight faded, they were told they would be accommodated in hotels for this second night; they queued for coaches. Feeling drawn ever more deeply aside out of their real lives, they travelled for an hour in the dark, along roads deep in mysterious snow.

  They were dropped in Disneyland, at a hotel like a chateau cut out in plastic; in the foyer an inflatable Mickey Mouse strained upwards from where it was anchored, its rictus of merriment not reflected in the faces of the staff at the desk below. Along the identical empty corridors, oversized Snow Whites and Donald Ducks were set at intervals. It was a huge relief, to shower and be alone. Alec wondered what it meant, this exchange of his cell in Venice for another one, whose essential ingredients – warmth, bed, bathroom – were hardly different. Perhaps the existence of this non-place made the other one nothing too, and the paintings nothing. He lost his conviction that things could be themselves and not simply copies of other things, and was oppressed by a foggy anxiety, as if a catastrophe had happened somewhere offstage, beyond where he could reach to intervene in it. He tried to call Em again, from the handset beside the bed, but she didn’t answer.