by Tessa Hadley
– Don’t get the wrong idea, Pia said, shifting again, as if the accusation erupted out of her physical irritation. – Nothing happened.
– Something must have happened.
– I changed my mind. That’s all.
– Something must have happened to make you change your mind.
She turned her face away from him to stare out of the window. This stretch of motorway was lit, the tall stems of the lamps flicking past and the hanging veils of light giving the space an empty grandeur, cathedral-like. Then they came out on the bluff above the flat estuary valley, and saw ahead the two lit bridges coiling over the water into Wales. Paul was careful not to speak, in case he deflected whatever was coming. If she had found out something shameful, she wouldn’t want him to have guessed at it.
– It was me, she said. – It was my fault.
As if he had asserted something different, she insisted that Marek was a good man, he and Anna were kind, generous people. And Marek really loved her. She was sure that he wanted to have a family with her, he meant it.
– I don’t know why I did what I did.
– What did you do?
It was so stupid, Pia said. She had pretended that the baby was Marek’s.
That wasn’t really as bad as it sounded. When they first got together she hadn’t had any idea she was pregnant. She had liked Marek, he used to come into the café to see Anna; she liked his way of making a fuss of her, it seemed romantic. He was different from the English boys she was at university with, grown-up compared to them. And he was the first one to realise why she was being sick; he asked her about her periods and everything. As soon as she understood, she knew Marek wasn’t the father, because she’d been feeling these things for a few weeks before anything had happened with him. But he had taken it for granted that the baby was his, naturally enough. And she hadn’t put him right. At first she’d thought if she was going to get rid of it anyway, there wasn’t any point in putting him right. But then she hadn’t got rid of it. The dates they’d given her at the hospital had confirmed what she already knew; she had lied to Marek and Anna about these.
A momentary spatter of rain made Paul switch the windscreen wipers on.
– So, who is the father?
– Who d’you think? James, of course.
– Oh. Paul considered this. – Does James know that he is?
She shook her head. No.
He drove without saying anything for a while. They passed the site of the accident he had seen on his way over: there was still single-file traffic past it, but the emergency services had all gone and men were manoeuvring the smashed cars onto a breakdown truck.
– You’re mad at me, Pia said. – I knew you’d be mad at me.
– I’m not mad at you.
But he did feel obscurely hurt, and disappointed. He had been ready to feel outraged by Marek and Anna, and now instead he felt uncomfortable and guilty, as if he was implicated in Pia’s deception of them. She had seemed steady – a steady, fair English girl – and she had not been. He had imagined her given over in good faith to her adventure; now he couldn’t help picturing their surprise, or disgust, or distress, when they read the note she said she’d left behind. Pia said they wouldn’t know how to find her – they didn’t have her mother’s address, they only knew Paul lived somewhere in Wales. She would change her mobile. She had never told them anything about James. And anyway, they wouldn’t want to find her.
Her voice was small and bleak.
– I want to feel free. I just want to be my own person again.
On the approach road to the village, she asked him to drive her to Blackbrook and drop her off there. It had not occurred to Paul that she wouldn’t be coming with him to Tre Rhiw, at least for this one night. At the idea of arriving home without her he lost his temper, stopping the car, pulling it into the grass verge so that shoots of bramble grazed along the window on his side.
– You’re being unreasonable, he said. – It’s two o’clock in the morning. We can’t wake them up at this time. There’s nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.
– We can ring the bell on the extension. Only James will hear. I’ve tried his phone but he’s got it turned off.
– I think you ought to listen to me, after I’ve driven you this far.
Pia undid her seat belt and opened the car door, clambering out heavily. A blast of night air disrupted the warmth inside the car; the drift of fine rain passing over, damping the baked earth, had roused a rank vegetable stink. Paul knew where they were: beyond the dense invisible hedgerow of hazel and blackthorn, the green shoots were standing a foot high in Willis’s fields.
– I know my way from here, Pia said. – It’s easy.
– Don’t be ridiculous. It’s pitch dark.
– I have to talk to James.
– Talk to him in the morning.
She set out walking ahead of the car along the road, visible in his headlights, encumbered, obstinate, her back set in resistance to him, then stumbling over something, a pothole or a stone. Cruising after her, he wound his window down.
– What about your rucksack?
– I’ll get James to come for it tomorrow.
– OK, I give in. Pia, get in the car. I’ll take you.
She was breathing heavily when she climbed back in. He thought she was crying; she wound the window down on her side, and pressed her face out into the night. Where the drive forked at Blackbrook, Paul took the lower track, leading towards the converted outbuildings where James had his room. As he drew up outside, a security light clicked on and a dog barked up above them, at the main house. Paul thought how he hated Willis’s conversion, featureless and glaring with its new ceramic roof tiles and plastic windows, the old barn’s soul exposed and dissipated.
– This is a really bad idea, he said.
– Don’t worry.
– You know Willis is a nutcase. And he hates me.
– Everything isn’t always about you, Dad.
They got out together and Pia pressed the doorbell. They waited while she pressed it twice more, hearing it ring inside. Crouching at the level of the letter box, knees apart, she called through in a voice that she tried to make subdued and penetrating at once.
– James! James!
Someone inside thudded down an uncarpeted wooden staircase. Pia only just scrambled up in time before the door swung inwards; Paul saw how, expecting James, she sagged forward in relief. But it was Mrs Willis instead who stood behind the door: stout, stubby, grey-black hair cut short so that it stood up on her head like a brush. She didn’t look her best, roused from sleep presumably, glaring and defensive, in an incongruously feminine pink nightdress.
– What’s up?
– I’m really sorry, Susan, Pia said. – I didn’t think you’d be sleeping over here. I didn’t want to wake you. I wanted James.
– Did you now!
The woman’s intelligence came awake behind her eyes and darted between Paul and Pia’s face blotched with tears, her swollen shape. Behind Susan Willis the hallway and staircase had the neutrality of a holiday let, with no comforting accretion of belongings or mess.
Paul was helpless to stop himself sounding English and effete. – I tried to persuade Pia that it was an unreasonable hour. But she was adamant.
Adamant wasn’t a word he even used.
– Is he here? Pia persisted, desperate.
At that moment James appeared on the stairs in boxers and saggy T-shirt, bare legs fuzzy with blond hair, face bloated and blinking from sleep, missing a couple of steps in his fuddled state and only just saving himself from falling headlong by grabbing the handrail. Susan Willis was still staring at Pia, calculating, bemused – but not preparing to be outraged or devastated, Paul thought. He’d only seen her in passing before; he’d spoken to her once or twice when he was sent to buy ice-cream and she was serving in their shop. He hadn’t recognised then this reserve of irony in her. Perhaps she was sleeping in the annexe to be apar
t from her husband.
– She says she wants to talk to James, Paul said. – But we could come back in the morning, if you’d rather she didn’t stay.
– She can stay if she likes, said Susan warily. – If it’s what James wants.
– What? James said. – What’s she doing here?
– She wants to talk to you. It looks like you might have something to talk about.
– It’s nothing to do with me, said James.
– No, it is, Pia said.
– This is what she told me, Paul said, – in the car on the way down here.
– I pretended it wasn’t to do with you. I almost came to tell you the truth once. I bought the ticket at Paddington and then I didn’t get on the train. I got on and got off again, at the last minute.
– I don’t believe you, James said.
He was rubbing his fists in his eyes, shocked out of his deep adolescent sleep, doubting and resistant. Pia looked shocked too, as if the revelation wasn’t going the way she had pictured it in advance.
– It’s a girl, she said shyly. – Apparently it’s a girl.
When Paul was born, his mother had been expecting a girl, they had had a girl’s name ready. There was some old wives’ tale: you dangled a ring on a thread over the unborn child, watching to see if it spun clockwise or anticlockwise. So much for old wives’ tales. Evelyn hadn’t been disappointed, she’d been relieved. She’d said to him once when he was still living at home that she hadn’t wanted a daughter, to be born into drudgery. A son could get away into a different life. Perhaps she had felt otherwise about it later, when Paul in his different life had left her behind – didn’t visit often enough, didn’t know how to turn over on the phone with her the interminable, essential detail of her everyday. A daughter might have been a better bet.
Paul sat for a while in his car after Pia had been swallowed up inside the Willis’s house. Evelyn, when she was alive, would have hated the idea of Pia pregnant and unmarried; she wouldn’t have understood why they were all taking it so calmly, as if it wasn’t momentous. The world turned and the old forms, which had seemed substantial as life itself, were left behind and forgotten. There wasn’t any place he could go now to remember his mother. Perhaps her name was written in a book in the crematorium – or did they only do that in churches? – name after name in neat black calligraphy, with an embroidered bookmark on the opened page, furred with dead moths and dust. He preferred to think about her in the dark. She had been visiting him again, since he came home – but with less ferocity than at first. In her dead self, in his dreams, she could even seem forgiving, the knots of her anxious fearfulness loosened. Paul was so tired, he almost fell asleep there in the car. He didn’t want to drive the last quarter of a mile.
Searching everywhere inside the house, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Was Gerald here somewhere, with Elise? Party mess was piled up in the kitchen, dirty plates, sleazy regiments of bottles, leftover food not put away in the fridge. Upstairs, the spare mattresses were dragged out onto the girls’ bedroom floor, extra children were curled heaps under duvets or in sleeping bags. All of them were asleep amid signs of wild play cut short, the toy box upended, dressing-up clothes trampled on the floor where they’d been thrown off. He touched the door to the bedroom across the landing, which stood open as always: swinging back soundlessly, it revealed only the landing light trapped in the mirror, the expanse of white counterpane on their bed undisturbed, Elise’s make-up bag on the dressing table disgorging pencils, tweezers, pots of colour. The open window rattled on its catch; the flurry of rain had stirred up smells of earth and growth in the garden. Moths batted inside the luminous paper globe on the landing behind him.
Elise was extravagantly absent.
Were all these children safe, alone in the house without her?
From the window he thought he saw pale shapes moving in the meadow. He went downstairs again, deliberately clattering, running the tap noisily in the kitchen, calling out of the back door for her. Coming from the lit indoors, when he stepped out into the yard and then across into the garden it felt as if he pressed against a skin of darkness and then broke through it, having to step cautiously and lift his knees, wading in a thicker medium, not sure where he was putting his feet down.
– El? Where are you?
She seemed to break through something, too, when she was suddenly ahead of him, the night thinning out around her form. She must have pulled a jumper over her shirt when it turned chilly, but he knew from her height in relation to his shoulder that she was still barefoot. He intuited across the space between them her intensely familiar sceptical scrutiny, invisible in the night.
– Paul? Is it you? What have you done with Pia?
– I’ve left her at Blackbrook. She wanted to be with James.
– That’s good, because there are children on all the mattresses. What was it all about? Is she all right?
Paul told her more or less what had happened, Pia’s deception and escape, waking Susan Willis in the middle of the night. – I can’t believe we’re mixed up with the appalling Willises now. Actually genetically mixed up with them. It’s a nightmare.
Elise said she’d thought there was something funny with Pia’s dates. She had looked too big in the pictures she sent Becky.
– Was it a good party, after I’d gone?
– It was a drunken party. We drank too much.
– Fun drunk or hazardous drunk?
– Anyway I’m sober now. I’ve been sober for hours. I went out to walk under the apple trees by myself. It’s amazing what you can see and hear in the dark. Your eyes get used to it. It was lovely there.
– Did Gerald turn up?
She answered airily, lightly. – He did turn up. But you know what he’s like. He doesn’t say anything in company. He just sits there – exasperating really. You’re wondering all the time whether he’s judging everything, or just oblivious to it.
– He doesn’t like parties much.
– Someone brought the speakers outside and we danced, but Gerald wouldn’t join in. Then I looked round and he’d gone. I suppose he caught the last train. But I’d told him he could stay. I mean, this was almost his home for weeks, when he was ill. We were very close, when he was here and I was looking after him. One night I had to hold onto him for hours, Paul, he had such an attack of horrors. Nothing happened, you understand, except that I held him.
Paul took this in.
– Never mind, he said. – You know what he’s like. That’s what he does, he comes and goes. He lives in his own world.
Garden flares stuck in the plant pots had burned out hours ago, the yard was dark. They peered in through the window at the lit-up kitchen: the piles of dirty washing up, the greasy leftovers, the chairs displaced, bunches of dried herbs and corn dollies and postcards pinned to the beams and thick with dust, school notices bristling on the fridge door.
– Whoever lives in this house, Elise said, – I’m glad it’s not us. It’s a filthy mess.
– Me too. I’m glad about it.
– I’d hate to have to go in there and get started on that washing up.
Her voice was careless; massaging her shoulders, though, Paul felt her disappointment and humiliation, resistant as a knotted rope. Her jumper slithered under his working fingers, against the silky shirt. Through his hand, he seemed to be in touch with the surge of her inner life, which mostly wasn’t disclosed to him: deeper and more chaotic than it ever showed itself in the words they exchanged. He felt as if he hardly knew her, this wife and mother of his children. When they first met he had been drawn to Elise because she seemed complete and fearless, with all the bright presumption of the class she came from. Now, it was as though she was stepping out of that identity – leaving it behind like a husk – into something new and more precarious. He was stricken and desiring, imagining her walking about alone, before he came home, under the trees in the meadow where the children had played in the twilight. What had she been thinking, all
that time?
– Let’s not go inside just yet, he said. – Let’s walk.
– It’s some crazy hour of the night, you know. We’ll be shattered tomorrow. Those kids’ll be up at the crack of dawn.
– I know. But it’s nice out here.
At first they were both blind again, when they turned to face into the garden, because they’d looked too long into the kitchen light. Paul promised to get up first with the children in the morning.
– All right then, Elise said. – I don’t mind, if you promise.
Only Children
I
C ora on the eve of her wedding day, twelve years ago.
Before dawn she had woken in her parents’ house, her childhood bed, to the sound of rain pattering and rushing, intimate around her, on the roof, in the gutters. Net curtains, blowing out into the rain through the open window, were soaked at the hem. She got out of bed and knelt on the window seat, where some of her old dolls and teddy bears were still arranged, out of habit – she wasn’t infantile, but her childhood really wasn’t far behind. The house was in a terrace overlooking a narrow strip of park: she leaned out of the window, breathing in freshness from the saturated earth, the drenched, labouring trees. She didn’t care about the rain spoiling things, she didn’t care anything about the outer shell of the wedding, which so devoured her mother: flowers and guest list and caterers. Cora hadn’t been brought up as religious, and she’d never belonged to any church, but her religious instincts were strong; she was concentrated in the mystery of what she was undertaking. Also, she imagined herself in a continuum with the serious, passionate women whose weddings she’d read about in novels: Kitty in Anna Karenina , Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow . She was twenty-three. The rain seemed blessed to her, sitting alone in her washed-pale pyjamas at the window, thoughts reaching out into the night. She had a vision of herself as a figure outside her own self-knowledge, emblematic, almost sacrificial.
