Sunstroke and Other Stories

by Hadley, Tessa

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tessa Hadley

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Sunstroke

  Mother’s Son

  Buckets of Blood

  Phosphorescence

  The Enemy

  The Surrogate

  Exchanges

  A Card Trick

  The Eggy Stone

  Matrilineal

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers, pent-up in childcare, dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parent’s holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach.

  Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; and the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter. These stories about the interior dramas of family life are compelling, ferocious and dangerous.

  About the Author

  Tessa Hadley is the author of three highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, Everything Will Be All Right and The Master Bedroom. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.

  ALSO BY TESSA HADLEY

  Accidents in the Home

  Everything Will Be All Right

  The Master Bedroom

  For Dad and Tom

  Sunstroke and Other Stories

  Tessa Hadley

  SUNSTROKE

  THE SEAFRONT REALLY isn’t the sea but the Bristol Channel: Wales is a blue line of hills on the other side. The district council has brought sand from elsewhere and built a complicated ugly system of sea walls and rock groynes to keep it in and make the beach more beachlike, but the locals say it’ll be washed away at the first spring tide. Determined kids wade out a long way into soft brown silt to reach the tepid water, which barely has energy to gather itself into what you could call a wave. It’s hard to believe that the same boys and girls who have PlayStations and the Internet still care to go paddling with shrimping nets in the rock pools left behind when the tide recedes, but they do, absorbed in it for hours as children might have been decades and generations ago.

  It’s a summer day with the same blue sky and unserious puffs of creamy cloud as on the postcards. The high street is festive with bunting and flowers; the toyshops have set out their metal baskets of buckets and spades and polythene flags; the cafés are doing good business selling cream teas and chips. There are a lot of people holidaying in Somerset this year. Pink-skinned in shorts and sunglasses, with troops of children, they buy locally made ice cream, they visit the steam railway kept open by enthusiasts, they change twenty-pound notes into piles of coins and lose them all in the machines in the amusement arcades. Not so long ago, these old seaside resorts seemed to have been passed over for ever, left to the elderly by people rushing to take their vacations abroad; but now some people aren’t so keen to fly. These tourists are congratulating themselves: with this weather, who needs to go abroad, who wants to?

  Across the road from the beach are the Jubilee Gardens (that’s Victoria’s Jubilee, not the recent one), where there’s a putting green and even a bandstand, though today there’s no band. Two young women have established a messy family camp of bags, cardigans, plastic water bottles, discarded children’s tops, half in and half out of the dappled shade of some kind of ornamental tree that neither can identify – although both, lying back on the grass, have stared dreamily up into the delicate lattice of its twigs and leaves, stirring against the light with an effect like glinting water. The children (they have three each) wheel in and out around their mothers’ centre, wanting drink, money, kisses, indignantly demanding justice. The women hardly interrupt their conversation to dole out what’s needed, to open up their purses, issue stern ultimatums. They talk, sometimes across the heads of the youngest ones, curled up hot and heavy in their laps, sticky tears pressing crumples into their summer dresses. The baby dozes in her pushchair, and later lies on a blanket blinking up into the tree, responding with little jerks of her arms and legs to the shifting patterns of light.

  It’s easy to guess even from the outward appearance of these women and their assorted children that they’re not staying at any of the guest houses in this resort town, and certainly not at the refurbished holiday camp further along the front. They don’t look wealthy (the kids’ clothes are hand-me-downs, the purses are worn, and the women frown into them), but they look, if it still means anything, bohemian. Rachel’s curving calves and strong bare arms are defiantly untanned; her luxuriant, nearly black hair is pinned up untidily on her head. Janie, who went to art college, wears a short gauzy green dress with seventies-style pink paisley patterns. Her hair, which is light brown and dead straight, is cut in some style that Rachel deplores and admires: ragged, uneven lengths, as if it had been chopped off at random. They are both in their early thirties, at that piquant moment of change when the outward accidents of flesh are beginning to be sharpened from inside by character and experience.

  They have come to town just for the day. Rachel and her husband Sam have a cottage inland, where they spend their holidays; Janie and her partner Vince are visiting. Rachel and Janie have been best friends since school. They did their degrees together in Brighton and shared a house. When Rachel moved back to Bristol, where they grew up (Sam was working for the BBC there), Janie went to look for work in London and stayed. They’re not obviously alike: Rachel is impulsive and can sound bossy and loudly middle class; Janie’s more wary and ironic. But they tell each other everything, almost everything. During the long months between visits, they talk for hours on the phone. Both of them have other friends, but it’s not the same: there’s no one else to whom they can unfold their inner lives with the same freedom.

  The two have been talking intensely today, ever since they woke up. First, Rachel came into Janie’s bedroom and sat on the bed in her pyjamas while Janie fed Lulu, and then they talked as they clambered on all fours to tidy the children’s mattresses, laid out end to end in the attic. Hours ago, they got the children dressed and drove into town; this was supposedly to do some shopping and get the kids out of the house so that Sam could get on with his writing, but all along they had in mind exactly the treat they are enjoying now – this lazy, delicious, stolen afternoon doing nothing, escaped from the men, talking on and on about them. They dip into their purses extravagantly, and the children sense the possibility of largesse. The older boys race off to the toyshop to buy guns for themselves, windmills for the little ones.

  In order to earn this day in the sunshine with their beautiful children running around them, how many toiling domesticated days haven’t these young mothers put in? Both of them do a token amount of work outside the home – Janie does a few hours of art therapy with special-needs children, Rachel does a bit of copy-editing – but truly for years they have been, half involuntarily, absorbed into the warm vegetable soup of motherhood, which surprisingly resembles their own mothers’ lives, thirty years ago. They don’t know quite how this happened; before the children were born, their relationships had shown every sign of being modern ones, built around the equal importance of two careers and the sharing of housework.

  Neither is exactly unhappy, but what has built up in them instead is a sense of surplus, of life unlived. Somewhere else, while they are absorbed in pushchai
rs and fish fingers and wiping bottoms, there must be another world of intense experiences for grown-ups. They feel as if, through their perpetual preoccupation with infantile things, they, too, have become infants; as if their adult selves were ripening and sweetening all in vain, wasted. You can see this sensual surplus in them. It glistens on their skin and in their eyes, like cream rising to the top of the milk (though neither of them is fat: Rachel is tall and muscular, Janie slight and boyish, only her breasts rounded because she’s breastfeeding). They half know this about themselves, how visibly they exude their sexual readiness. They know that they make a picture, spread out there under the trees in their summer dresses, with their brood gambolling around them.

  The children press home their opportunity and clamour for ice cream.

  —Pretty please, Mummy, pretty please.

  —It’ll keep us happy for much longer. You won’t have to worry about us.

  The guns the boys have bought were made in Germany, and, on the packages, inside the bright orange explosion where it says Bang Bang in English it also says Toller Knall, which is presumably the German equivalent. The children point the guns at one another’s heads, shouting, Toller Knall, Toller Knall, then laugh delightedly at how unthreatening it sounds.

  —You know I can’t bear that, Rachel says.—I have a thing about guns pointing at heads.

  —Mum, they’re only plastic toys, Joshua explains patiently. —It would probably be more dangerous to poke him with my finger.

  But the boys give way cheerfully and aim at imaginary rabbits in the grass instead, squinting along their sights.

  —Sam actually encourages it, Rachel says sotto voce to Janie. —He wants to take Joshua to join a gun club. He came out with all this stuff about teaching him respect for weapons.

  —But didn’t he used to fulminate against the arms trade?

  —Oh, probably at some point. But for me it’s not his principles that are the problem: have you ever seen him trying to put up shelves? It’s not Joshua I’m worried for. Sam shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a gun.

  Melia, Janie’s middle child (much more difficult than the charming boys), pretends to get upset about the rabbits and ends up bursting into real tears. Rachel sometimes wonders whether Melia wouldn’t respond better to a little less understanding, but she preserves a diplomatic silence while Janie comforts and negotiates. Rachel thinks that she has taken more naturally to motherhood than Janie has; Janie is dreamier and misses her solitude painfully.

  —Maybe ice cream would be a good idea, Janie decides.

  The children plant their coloured plastic windmills in the grass and run to queue at the yellow-and-white painted café. Rachel is telling Janie about a man, Kieran, a friend of Sam’s in London, who she thinks she might have some sort of a thing going with. Janie knows Kieran, too, though not well.

  —It’s really nothing, it’s probably nothing, Rachel says. —You’ll think I’m making it all up. Only it’s funny that he turned up one evening last month, while he was back in Bristol visiting his parents. I’m sure he knew that Sam was going to be out. I had Sukey and Dom in the bath, I had my sleeves rolled up, I was in my foulest old clothes, my hair was just pulled into this elastic band, I’m sure I hadn’t brushed it since I got up in the morning.

  —Maybe he goes for that, Janie says.—You know how some men have this idea of domesticated women that really turns them on – only the ones who aren’t living with them, needless to say.

  —Joshua answered the doorbell or I wouldn’t have even bothered. And then I thought he’d just leave because Sam wasn’t there, but he came into the bathroom and he helped me out with the kids and actually it was really nice – we just got on so well. He cleaned the bath out afterwards while I was reading to them; I didn’t even realise that till later. Sam would never, ever think of cleaning out the bath unless I asked him to. I always thought Kieran was such a serious sort of intellectual – you know, only interested in talking about Habermas or Adorno or something. But we were joking away, and then he was telling me about his sister’s children. Dom was splashing us with his plastic ducks, we were completely soaked, and I was so apologetic, only Kieran said he loved it. ‘I love it,’ he said. And then I thought afterwards, What was he trying to say? What exactly did he love? Only perhaps I’m taking it the wrong way.

  Janie thinks that Rachel is dangerously susceptible to men; she thinks that her own sceptical suspicion of them makes her much shrewder in her assessments of their motivations and characters. Also, she doesn’t know how Rachel can put up with Sam’s moods. She has her own problems with Vince, but she would never allow anyone to domineer over her life the way Sam does over Rachel’s, with his black looks and his silences and his stormings.

  —I almost dialled Kieran’s number the other night, Rachel says.—The week before we came to the cottage. I did dial it, but I put the phone down before it even rang. I pretended to myself that calling him was just a natural friendly thing to do. I was only going to complain to him – you know, make a funny story out of the sort of day I’d had. Perhaps I should have. And I was going to say that he should come and spend a few days with us in the country.

  Janie is solicitous. She is feeding Lulu, the shadows of the tree’s leaves flickering over her bared breast and the baby’s head moving with its rhythmic sucking. —Don’t get hurt, she says.

  Rachel throws herself restlessly down on her back on the grass. —I should be so lucky, she says.—As if.

  —I’d wait, Janie says,—for him to contact you.

  Later in the afternoon, Rachel takes the children for a round on the putting green. They are hopelessly slow because there are so many of them and the little ones take so many shots to get the ball in the hole, even when Joshua and Tom cheat gallantly on their behalf. Melia throws down her iron, sulks, traipses after them, joins in again. By the time they are halfway around the green several groups of players are backed up behind them and Rachel takes a break to let them past. She runs over to where Janie is watching from beside the pushchair. She has had an idea. When they’ve finished on the green, why don’t they buy sausages and chips at the café so they don’t have to cook tonight? This liberation seems of a piece with the lovely day. The drudgery ahead – peeling potatoes, frying, feeding, washing up – lifts from the evening as lightly as a floating cloud. Why not? Life might be easy after all. Rachel phones Sam and Vince on her mobile to tell them to cook themselves something; she has to walk off a little distance between the trees before she can get a decent signal.

  When Rachel switches off the mobile and turns round, Janie thinks for a moment that Sam must have said something vile. Rachel’s face is concentrated with surprise; she walks back across the grass as if she were looking carefully where to put her bare feet.

  —You’ll never guess, she says.

  —What?

  —Kieran’s turned up.

  —Oh, Rach.

  —But I really never did phone him. I never asked him. He’s been before, a couple of times. Apparently, he just turned up this afternoon. He knew we’d be at the cottage because Sam mentioned it. Sam’s going to make them something with pasta.

  —Are you glad?

  —It feels like a sign: that this thing I’ve imagined must be real, it must be something.

  —I suppose so.

  —I truly thought I might just be making it up. But you said to wait for him to contact me and he has. Sort of. It feels serious.

  In all the agitations of the putting, Rachel’s hair has come partly out of its pins; long strands coil on her neck. She’s statuesque, with waxy creamy skin, like a Reynolds portrait; she doesn’t have the physical lightness or fluidity that suggests affairs, easy transitions between men, concealments. The boys are shouting from the green; it’s time for them to take their turn again. She picks up her putting iron thoughtfully. Janie can feel excitement radiating out from her like heat.

  Kieran’s arrival could have been awkward for the men back at the cottage, bec
ause Kieran and Sam have been friends for years, since they were at Cambridge, whereas Sam only knows Vince because of Janie and thinks of him as a bit of a lightweight. All morning, while Sam was at work on the computer, he was uneasily suppressing an awareness of Vince at a loose end downstairs, strolling around the rooms, reading yesterday’s paper, getting himself something to eat. Sam was irritated that the girls hadn’t taken Vince with them when they went to town; and then that they were staying out so long.

  However, Kieran has brought with him a big polythene packet of weed, which, as they set about rolling it up and smoking it, produces an immediate cheerful camaraderie. They sprawl in the plastic garden chairs in the sunshine, smoking and drinking cup after cup of tea. Sam is so relieved he doesn’t have to make conversation with Vince all by himself that he becomes expansively friendly towards him. He always forgets what it is that Vince does for a living (usually he covers this up by talking about the contemporary novel: Sam had one published three years ago and is supposed to be working on the next). Tactfully now, he leads the conversation around to the kind of crossover electronic music he remembers Vince likes, and Vince tells them that he designed the lighting recently for a concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Vince is eager to please. He is lean, with the wedge-narrow face of a well-bred collie, and his hair, bleached-pale silk, is cut to flop into his eyes. He has the kind of good looks that men don’t mind imagining women like. Sam doesn’t hold it against Vince that he himself is bulky-shouldered and putting on weight. His brown curls are thinning on top and he wears little gold-rimmed glasses; he fancies he looks a bit like middle-period Coleridge.

  The peace of the afternoon seems deeper because of all the children’s toys lying where they were dropped, the bikes beached on their sides, the swing hanging still. The cottage is tucked into the bottom of a crease worked deep between the rounded slopes of the hills; sheep are grazing in the field that rises so steeply behind them that you can almost touch their roof from the path that winds along its lower edge. In the wide bowlful of tender light the buzzards sail superbly, mewing and turning their pale undersides to the declining sun. Wrens are pecking the greenfly from Rachel’s sweet-pea plants.