by Tessa Hadley
— Surely Ed’s heard about all this stuff when he’s talked to your parents?
— My parents don’t know the half of what went on. Also, they don’t get together with Ed’s family very often. They’re shy people. They don’t talk about very much.
— And what happened? How did you get out?
— It wasn’t a prison, we were there of our free choice. I just walked away. Well, actually I caught a train.
The last few yards were a rocky scramble; their feet skidded, sending stones rattling; there was still thick sunlight on the track when they came out beside the white-painted cottage wall.
— I haven’t talked to anybody about all that for years, said Julie.
— Do you fancy a beer? he said. — There are some in the fridge. The key’s under a brick. Cordy says there is no crime round here. Or perhaps just very thick burglars. Otherwise why hide the key at all?
On the ground floor of the cottage there was just one room, with a fridge and sink and cooker and a bed; upstairs was Stella’s studio. Seth took the top off a bottle of cold beer for Julie then excused himself and went into the tiny bathroom. She sat down on the bed and took in Cordelia’s occupation of the space: her holdall on the bed with clothes half pulled out of it, a couple of paperbacks with their spines broken and pages furred, her iPod charging, a grubby make-up bag beside the sink spilling over with lipsticks, medicines, contraceptive pills, perfume. The way Cordelia allowed her intimate life to flow over and fill any given space struck Julie as unprotected, childlike, dangerous. The only signs of Seth were a masculine heap of keys and wallet and change emptied from his pocket, and a white jacket on a hanger on a cupboard door. The duvet on the bed was still pulled up over the pillows; they had only arrived this morning. The cottage was all in shadow; its perfunctory furnishings seemed a flimsy shell against the light outside the windows.
When Seth came out of the bathroom he showed Julie a little polythene packet.
— Do you fancy a little bit of charlie?
She hadn’t touched any drugs since she was pregnant with Roland, and she’d only ever done coke a few times at parties. — I don’t think so.
— We bought it specially for the weekend. I thought this might be a good moment.
— Or maybe, Julie said. — Just a little bit. You go first.
He sat on a rickety cane chair opposite her and put out the lines with a credit card from his wallet, on the cover of a book of British birds; she worried shyly that she might make a mess of doing it after all this time, but copied him exactly and remembered how.
— Nice, he said, sitting back with his eyes gleaming at her, pressing the back of his brown wrist against his nostril. — It’s decent stuff.
Julie felt the blooming of intoxication at the front of her mind like a flare, and breathed cold air in sharply. — I’d forgotten what it was like.
— About that sect, he said. — That’s fantastic. You weren’t making all that up?
— No: why would I?
— It’s just very hard to imagine you. You don’t look the type.
Julie was inspired to show him: she buttoned Ed’s shirt up to the neck. She wasn’t sure how affected she was by the coke – she’d only had a small amount, but she wasn’t used to it, so she stood up cautiously, conscious of herself swaying, not unsteadily but heavily and flexibly, like a tree. All the emptiness she had felt when she was walking alone had vanished; she was densely concentrated in the present. The understanding came to her that these alternating moods were two pulses in life, opposite and yet related, like the expansion and contraction of a heartbeat: one diffusing sensation and sending it flying apart, this one gathering it in to the living centre. She had noticed a blue tea towel folded by the sink; shaking it out she arranged it neatly over her hair, folding it across her forehead and tucking it behind her ears with accustomed fingers. It wasn’t quite big enough to make a proper headscarf but it wasn’t bad.
Seth appraised her, sprawling and tipping on the little chair, one arm across its back. — I like it.
She sat down opposite him again, on the side of the bed. Their knees touched.
— You have to imagine the kind of sex life I was having with this man: ‘my betrothed’. They used all this phoney biblical language. He was thirty, I was seventeen. Of course sexual intercourse before marriage was forbidden. The way he interpreted that was that we could do everything else except for actually fucking. And then afterwards, when we’d worked ourselves up into a fine state, we had to pray together.
— You’re kidding.
— Like this. She put her hands together on her lap, bent her covered head, and dropped her eyes; for a few moments she focused deeply, making herself sorrowful and troubled. She was conscious through her knees of Seth’s holding himself intently still, she thought she could feel the thudding in his chest.
— Lord, look into my heart, she said in a low voice, urgently. — You know what I am, you know how much sin there is in me.
Once, afterwards, when the boys were at school and nursery and Ed was out, Julie watched Seth on television, in his soap. She couldn’t actually sit and watch it concentratedly, she had to be doing something else; she set up the ironing board in front of the television and brought in a pile of Ed’s shirts and the boys’ clothes to get on with. Seth only appeared briefly in a storyline in the first part of that episode, so she spent most of it keyed up in an anticipation that came to nothing. When the credits rolled and she saw his name she doubled up with a peculiar hollow pain in her abdomen, and then she made herself hold the hot tip of the iron just for a long moment against the skin on the back of her wrist; it raised an ugly blister which didn’t heal for weeks, and left a little V-shaped scar. She was feeling all sorts of odd things around that time anyway, early in her pregnancy. After that she didn’t ever watch it again, and then later she heard that he’d left Emmerdale, and was getting decent parts in the theatre instead.
He and Cordelia split up, fairly amicably. Julie had known that was going to happen, partly from things he said, and partly from the sight of that heap of his keys and money left like a provisional small island in the sea of Cordelia’s things. Nothing changed in Cordelia’s attitude to Julie, so presumably Seth hadn’t told her anything. He telephoned Julie once, after he’d finished with Cordelia, but she said she didn’t want to see him. She told Ed that Seth had phoned, because she wanted to mention him aloud; she pretended that he’d wanted a number for a contact they’d mentioned to him over that weekend in Somerset. Ed said he thought it was a bit much.
When Julie had got back to the farmhouse on that evening of Stella’s birthday, Stella and Cordelia were just riding into the yard: she stood for a while in the dusk while they dismounted, exultant from their exercise, in the romance of the hot smell of the horses and their stiff-legged sideways dancing, hooves clattering and striking sparks from the cobbles. Rose was dozing inside on the sofa, the film had finished, the children were squabbling and watching cartoons; it was long past Frankie’s bedtime, but Rose’s children were never put to bed anyway until they fell asleep where they were. No one had even noticed that Julie had gone out. Stella put soup and bread and cheese and home-made chutney on to the oak table; while they were eating Seth came in from learning his lines at the cottage. He and Julie had carried the evening off with perfect calm.
Cordelia said she couldn’t keep awake after her ride; she yawned and huddled into an old dressing-gown of Colin’s. She put her feet on to Seth’s lap and asked him to rub them. The Laverys liked playing games on family occasions: when the younger children were finally asleep the grown-ups first played Ex Libris, which was about guessing the first or last sentences of novels, and then the game where everyone writes the names of ten famous people, real or invented, and mixes them up in a saucepan. Cordelia wouldn’t play. Julie felt joyous all evening, although she didn’t usually like games. She and Seth were on the same team; whatever clues he gave about the names he got, she seemed to be able to gu
ess them straight away. She took Roland outside to show him the moon while Seth and Ed were rolling up and smoking in the dark garden. Roland was in his pyjamas, he complained that the grass was making his feet wet; she lifted him up on to her hip, although he was seven years old and getting too heavy for her to carry. She could smell rank marijuana; in the dark the child’s body hot and heavy against hers seemed to be part of the unfolding sensation of the man’s weight against her earlier. That evening all the ordinary things that she and Seth said to one another, all the times they brushed past each other or sat down together, were a code for something else enormously important that had happened, but did not appear.
The Godchildren
THE THREE HEIRS, in three separate taxis, converged on 33 Everdene Walk on a fine afternoon in late May. They were in their early fifties and had not met since they were sixteen or seventeen. Amanda, who had been officious even as a teenager, had organised the meeting by email, via the solicitors: — If we’re all going to the house, why don’t we go at the same time? Wouldn’t it be fun to meet up?
Now each was regretting having agreed to this.
Chris, who was a lecturer at a new university, was certain he had spotted Amanda at the station, ahead of him in the queue for taxis; he had been too embarrassed to make himself known to her, even though they could have shared the fare. She surely hadn’t had all that red hair thirty-five years ago, and she hadn’t seemed so tall then, or so loosely put together: the woman in the queue wasn’t large exactly, but physically complicated, with a bright-coloured striped wrap tossed over one shoulder which made him think of beachwear. Perhaps she lived in a hot country. He’d only recognised her when she threw her unguarded, emphatic glance at everyone behind her in the queue – boldly but blindly. Quailing, Chris was suddenly his anguished seventeen-year-old self again, stripped of his disguise as someone experienced and distinguished. His memories of Mandy, young, were dim but had an ominous intensity. He wished he hadn’t come. He knew already that he wouldn’t want anything, anyway, from the horrible old house. At least he wouldn’t be alone with Amanda; although when he tried to recover his memories of Susan, the other godchild, he couldn’t find anything at all, only a neatly labelled vacancy.
The three taxis bore them, just a few minutes apart, out of the city centre, then, swooping decorously down-hill between traffic lights, through a species of suburb that seemed more remote from their present lives than anywhere they ever went on holiday. The sleepy wide road was lined with limes, then flowering cherries; they passed a little brick-built library, a church, discreetly evangelical. Infantile knee-high white-painted gates opened on to bungalow gardens smothering under the pink and white foam of weigela and flowering currant, waterfalls of clematis; the semi-detached house fronts were festooned with nostalgic wisteria. Four-by-fours were drawn up off the road, on asphalted drives. The sun shone unfalteringly, embalming everything; seeds and pollen drifted sidelong in the motionless air. What it brought back was not so much their past as a past beyond their past. By the time these three had come as children to visit their godmother here, their more fashionable parents had already decided that the suburbs were dreary: places to joke about, not to aspire to. Their parents were doing up, in those days, spindly dilapidated eighteenth-century houses, bought cheap, in the city centre. Susan’s mother still lived in one of these, now worth a great deal, and Susan had spent the previous night in her childhood bed. In her taxi, she was hardly thinking of the meeting ahead – except to wish that she weren’t going to it. She was obsessing over jagged old irritations, roused by a conversation with her mother that morning.
Chris’s and Susan’s taxis pulled up outside 33 Everdene Walk at the same moment; Amanda had got there before them, and the front door stood open upon what seemed to their foreboding a seething blackness, in contrast to the glare outside. Who knew what state the house would be in? Susan was quicker, paying her taxi off; Chris was always afraid that he would tip too little or too much. She looked away while he probed in his change purse, then they politely pretended to recognise each other. He tried to dig back in his mind to their old acquaintance: how hadn’t he seen that the invisible unremembered Susan might grow into this slim, long-faced, long-legged dark woman, somewhat ravaged but contained and elegant?
Meanwhile, Amanda, watching from a window she had just opened upstairs, saw thirty-five years of change heaped in one awful moment on both their heads. They looked broken-down to her, appalling. On her way to the house, she had bullied her resisting taxi driver into two consecutive U-turns between the lime trees: visited by a premonition of just this disappointment, and then recovering, repressing her dread, willing herself to hope. Amanda remembered the old days more vividly than either of the others, cherished the idea of their shared past – strangely, because at the time she had seemed the one most ready to trample it underfoot, on her way to better things. Now she revolted at Chris’s untidy grey-white locks, windswept without wind, around his bald patch: why did men yield so readily to their disintegration? At least Susan had the decency to keep her hair brown and well cut. Chris was stooping and bobbing at Susan, smiling lopsidedly, self-deprecatory. He wound one foot behind the other calf, rubbing his shoe on his trouser leg; when he’d done that at seventeen, it had seemed to Amanda a sign of a tormented sensibility, which she had ached to explore and conquer.
She whistled from the window, piercing the Walk’s tranquillity.
— Come on up! she shouted. — Prepare for the Chamber of Horrors!
Not only the air inside the house but the light, from forty-watt bulbs, seemed ancient and rotten. The curtains were drawn across the windows in all the rooms. Odds and ends of furniture – a folding card table, a standard lamp, a barometer, picture frames showing peeling strips of passepartout – were piled in the hall, half sorted, inventoried, forlorn and sour with damp. The house had been empty for a year, from the time of their godmother Vivien’s death. But none of the three had visited it since long before that, when they were teenagers and came together. Chris had fallen out of touch with Vivien completely, decades earlier, on political grounds, and because it had never occurred to him that he owed her any duty; Amanda and Susan had seen her occasionally in London over the years – separately, and not recently.
Susan stopped abruptly in the hall.
— But it’s so tiny! she said. — Was it always this size? How come I remember it as spacious?
— I don’t remember anything, Chris said, alarmed. — Is it some form of dementia? I thought I remembered the house, but I’d swear I’ve never set foot in here before.
— I’ve got rid of the solicitor, Amanda called from somewhere over their heads. — We’ve got it all to ourselves. I said we’d return the key to him when we finished. He was glad to get out – who can blame him? Isn’t it horrid? They’ll never sell it, will they?
A squat staircase crawled up one wall from the varnished parquet in the hall; at the top, three bedrooms opened off a landing, along with a toilet and a bathroom whose stains they shuddered at. Amanda loomed in a doorway: years ago, the striped thing draped across her shoulder would have been called a poncho. Her voice was more familiar to Chris and Susan than her person: caramel, hectoring, running on and on. What they both remembered most clearly – though differently – about the young Mandy was her physical perfection, as simple as a drawing done in a single curving line. Whatever she had worn in those days – a dress, or jeans and a T-shirt – had suggested her stepping out of it in one smooth movement. Her ease in her own body had been morally terrifying to the others. Her face was still bright – she had good skin and a thick mane of hair – but the rest of her had grown overbearing, to match her voice. Now she wore flat shoes and harem pants and a lot of jewellery.
Amanda had brought a packet of coloured stickers. The plan for today, devised by her, was that they should each choose a colour and put stickers on any items they wanted, then go shares on a man with a van to collect it all and deliver it to their respecti
ve homes. They had been invited to take whatever they liked from the house. They had also been left quite a few thousand pounds each, from a trust fund. This had come as a pleasant surprise to Chris, who was genuinely not worldly enough to have thought of the possibility, and had pretty much forgotten that he had a godmother. None of them were heir to the property itself, which had gone to a niece and a nephew, deserving because they had been kind to Vivien in her old age.
— Oh, is this her? Chris picked up a photograph from the top of a chest of drawers, where it was arranged on a lace doily along with a tin alarm clock and a cut-glass dish full of buttons and paper clips, everything soft with dust. — The face does ring a bell. He was reassured. — She’s starting to come back to me.
In the photograph, Vivien wore a checked dress with a Peter Pan collar. Her small laughing eyes, horsy long jaw, and exuberant big-toothed smile were sandwiched between two circles of glass, held in a base of faded art deco plastic.
— Somehow she persuaded us she was good-looking, Amanda said. — She used to seem so glamorous.
Susan crossed to the open window, as if to breathe. — This place is giving me the creeps. I don’t want anything.
— Don’t be silly, Amanda said. — Take it and sell it on eBay.
— It’s all old junk. Nothing’s even antique.
— You’ll be surprised what you can get for it.
Susan was fishing in her handbag. — I’m going to call the cab back. This was a mistake. Sorry, Mandy. I’ve had a dreadful morning with my mother.
Amanda, focusing, took in properly for the first time that Susan’s understated bag was made of leather as soft as cloth, and that her clothes were sumptuous: simple cream linen dress, cranberry-red cashmere cardigan over her shoulders.
