Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  * * *

  THEY WENT OUT in the afternoon to look at Bram’s project. Bram had been amused that Helly had to change her clothes first; although actually she reappeared in sensible scruffy trousers and shirt, in which she still managed to look spectacular. It was Clare in her dress who got her legs bitten and scratched in the long grass. They walked around the bay, which would eventually become the marina: now it was low tide and the ruined jetties of the old harbor marched out up to their knees in sleek gray glinting mud. Oystercatchers and curlews (Bram identified them) picked their fastidious way between them. Across the ring of the bay the piled up buildings of the city loomed, glinting and flashing from plate-glass office-block windows whenever the sun flew out from between ragged slate-colored clouds. It was May. There was a wind that flattened the pale mauve-green grass like a pelt and sent it racing in liquid waves; from time to time the sky shook out cold drops of rain. David was taking photographs. Bram left them to go and find his group of volunteers, who were counting lugworms farther on, around into the estuary. They climbed down some concrete steps with a rusted handrail onto a scrap of beach heaped up with stones and sticks and plastic rubbish and cans that the sea had bleached to the same opaque pale pastels.

  As soon as she saw water, Rose began to take her clothes off. She was an ironic, willful, huge-eyed baby with rolls of translucent pale flesh at her wrists and chin and waist, and she despised clothes. She stripped at every opportunity, winter and summer, streaking triumphantly just out of reach of pursuing adults, flashing in triumph the long tender crease of her vagina and the pink cheeks of her bottom. Clare worried that Rose’s taste for nakedness was outgrowing her innocence—she would be four in a few months—and she thought she needed to be taught to protect herself.

  Rose protested that this was the seaside.

  —No it’s not, it’s dirty water, and you’re not to go in it.

  Rose seemed to concede defeat.

  But a few minutes later she was suddenly nowhere to be seen, and there was a little pile of her clothes dropped down beside an oilcan with the bottom rusted out. It seemed impossible that she could have gone anywhere out of their sight in so short a time. Everyone began calling her name, looking for her along the beach and back up the steps. The crescendo of dismay, from the first exasperated flutter of worry (What a pain she is!) to hollowing uninhibited panic only took a few minutes: Clare screamed at the other two children to stay where they were and kicking off her shoes ran barefoot across the shingle and the potentially lethal debris of glass and tin, to stand soaking her skirt in the scummy edge of the water, shrieking along the shoreline to right and left, fumbling in the water with her arms to try and feel for anything pulled under and washing in that dirty tide of sluggish brown waves that hardly broke, hardly made spume. She couldn’t see the bottom, she couldn’t imagine what she ought to do next, whether she ought to somehow submerge herself in it and try to open her eyes: wasn’t this always how it was with accidents, that the parents tinkered grotesquely, futilely, in the wrong place, failing confusedly as you fail in dreams?

  David shouted for Helly to go one way and he ran the other, back up the steps. Clare felt a passionate revulsion from her guests. It was in her preoccupation with them that she had taken her attention off Rose; she had been talking to David, pretending she was interested in cameras. If Bram had been here this would never have happened. Frantically, puritanically, Clare linked up her moment’s neglect with other falsities, with her efforts to impress upon Helly and David the charms of family life, with the perfume she’d sprayed on, with their money, with Helly’s advertising contract, even with the scorched tinfoil in the bathroom.

  It occurred to her that there was a literary tradition of guilty women whose children pay for their mother’s momentary lapses of attention, their casual betrayals (in the mornings when Rose was at nursery she was writing a PhD thesis on George Sand). Wasn’t there a scene in Flaubert—or Balzac?—where an adulteress watches over the cot of a sick child, pledging the whole of her selfish future happiness against the few degrees his temperature must come down for him to live? At that moment she imagined such a scene, if it existed, quite without irony, the cheap irony that smirks at literary machinery. It seemed a revelation of a naked truth before which irony could only grovel.

  Also, she suddenly dimly remembered someone called Tim Dashwood and odd details of a party she had gone to at his flat when she was a teenager: a plastic armchair pocked with cigarette burns, the suspect slickness of a greasy carpet under bare dancing feet, men with ponytails and slow-burning smiles who brought her and Helly drinks in plastic cups and didn’t bother even to learn their names. Like good little girls they swallowed and smoked everything that was put in front of them. The slow black ink mushroom-clouding in her mind came back to her, a fearful sensation of cold deep water slipping past, tugging the ground out from under her. All sorts of things could have happened to them—did happen to them—at those parties. She splashed out of the water and ran along the shoreline, staggering with the pain in her feet, shouting for Rose.

  A high sheer stone wall came down into the water, too high for Rose to have climbed. Clare ran back up the beach alongside it, her breath coming jaggedly in sobs, stopping to peer into a hollow culvert that pierced the wall, wide enough for a child to crawl into: it was dark and foul and stank inside, with nameless black shapes half submerged in an oily black puddle, but no Rose. Clare became convinced again that she was being dangerously distracted from the real disaster, which was happening somewhere else, and she ran back down to the sea.

  * * *

  DAVID FOUND ROSE. She was quite unhurt and only thirty yards from where they had been standing and shouting, hidden from them by a grassy bluff. Clare made him show her the place afterward, at the back of the beach where a wet trickle that might have been a stream and might have been sewage emerged from a big concrete pipe set into an earth bank: Rose had been dabbling her feet where the water spilled over the lip of the pipe. She might possibly have been contemplating crawling up into the pipe, and possibly if it had rained (as it proceeded to do shortly after she was found) there might have been a rush of water off the land. But these dangers were too remote to count, or even to produce any retrospective jolt of imagination at a horror narrowly skirted; the only one hurt was Clare, who had cut her foot on something in the water.

  David looked funny—improbable—holding a pink naked baby, balancing her as he picked his way down the beach, concentrating warily; Rose clung on with her arms round his neck. Clare had known all the time they were looking for Rose that if anything bad—anything sickeningly terrible—had happened, she would have never seen either of them again, David or Helly. There would have been a few hours of unspeakable practicalities with doctors and police and then they would have got out of it as soon as they decently could and driven back to London in their special Citroen that rose up on its wheels when you started it, and she would never ever in the remainder of her ruined life have been able to forgive them their association with that day. But now they were all reprieved; now she could like these friends again and smile at them. David was pleased with himself for finding Rose and tickled her awkwardly on the cheek, like a man who has not had practice at such things; she was still clinging to him as he handed her over, and Clare up close felt gratefully his friendly heat. Now she would be able to tell Bram that they had lost Rose and it would only mean an ordinary manageable hitch in the day; he would not be able to see through it to any deep dereliction, any dangerous absence of mind.

  Helly put her cardigan around Clare’s shoulders, as the rain came pattering in dark spots on the stones, and tried to help her get Rose dressed, pulling tight socks on the wet feet, T-shirt on the twisting little body.

  —You’re a naughty naughty girl, said Clare. You mustn’t take your clothes off, and you mustn’t wander away. Mummy was seriously frightened.

  Helly looked abashed at what the moment had unleashed in Clare, the excess of reaction.
It was excessive, Clare supposed: all that shrieking and thrashing about in the water, and the cut foot, which was bleeding now into her shoe. But she felt rather recklessly as if she’d showed Helly something, something she couldn’t know about, being childless.

  * * *

  CLARE SAT WITH her knees drawn up under her chin on her big unmade brass bed, opposite Helly cross-legged at the pillow end. She had bathed her cut with antiseptic and checked that her tetanus injection was still up to date (Bram kept meticulous records of these things). Her foot was aching. David had taken Coco and Lily out for a drive in his car, “to leave the girls to talk,” as he put it; Rose was asleep in her cot.

  —So what’s he like? Clare asked.

  —He’s nice, said Helly. Nicer probably than you’d think. He can seem a bit full of himself.

  —I like him better than the last one.

  A little involuntary spasm of pain and regret twisted Helly’s expression.

  —Everyone but me could see it. But David’s much more steady, don’t you think?

  Clare thought of him finding Rose. Oh, yes, she said. He seems kind. And sensible.

  —I know he shows off a bit.

  —Not in the least, Clare protested stoutly. He’s just exuberant. He knows how to enjoy himself.

  —Oh, yes. He certainly knows that.

  Helly thoughtfully closed her teeth on the cuff of her shirtsleeve and pulled at it, not meeting Clare’s eyes, sharing some joke with herself. Bram probably thought it was just a sensible shirt; Clare had recognized something expensive and perfect of its kind, all the better for being casual and crumpled.

  —Meaning? Clare stiffened.

  —Oh, you know.… Do you remember Moments of Beauty?

  This was private jargon from a game they had played when they were teenagers: winding pop videos and films backward and forward to isolate the “moment of beauty” for their favorite male stars, the summation of what melted and undid them, some grin, some sleepy inadvertent glance, some lazy look of sexual appraisal. They had even tried for a while to isolate their own (female) moments of beauty in the mirror, so as to work on them; they gave up when their faces were beginning to freeze into perpetual self-consciousness.

  —Well?

  —David’s very good, sexually. You couldn’t really know him—I mean, what’s so appealing about him—without sort of knowing that. It’s his Moment.

  Clare braced herself against the end of the bed. She felt caught out in the very scene of her decent connubial satisfactions: the duvet cover they sat on was faded and flowery and its fasteners were missing, so that an innards of gray duvet spilled out of one end. One of Rose’s teddy bears lay between their pillows with an air of baleful occupation; and for some reason she was visited by a memory of Bram calling out to her in the bathroom not to run the tap while she was cleaning her teeth because it wasted water.

  —I see, she said.

  —We do all kinds of things I never thought I’d do.

  —Oh? Such as?

  —Well, mirrors.

  —You mean mirrors on the ceiling and all that kind of thing?

  —And cameras.

  —Oh, God, Helly, that’s awful.

  —No, really it’s not. Helly laughed.

  —But it’s so cold! I just don’t think that would give me any pleasure, thinking about it and setting about it in that deliberate kind of way.

  —You’d be surprised.

  —Isn’t it supposed to just happen spontaneously? Isn’t there something wrong if you have to plan for it? It seems unnatural.

  —He naturally likes women, Helly said. You’d think you can take that for granted—I mean, under the circumstances—but believe me, I’m beginning to realize lots of men don’t like women, whatever they say.… Really, he likes them, it’s special, he has this look.…

  To her dismay Clare found herself imagining it.

  —I can always tell when he likes someone. And we’ve done three in a bed.

  Clare genuinely shrank in disapproval from all this: even talking about it seemed to her a betrayal of what she believed was her grown-up self, watching over the kind of sacred bedroom secrets decent grown-up couples share. At the same time she was seized with curiosity urgent as a cramp: she noted that Helly presumed that David didn’t like her, or she surely would have mentioned it.

  —With another woman?

  —Yes.

  —God, Helly. What was that like?

  —Oh, well, you know: strange and familiar.

  —Strange and familiar? So what was strange?

  —You ought to try it.

  —No, thank you. I’m quite happy as I am.

  —Do you know what I found the other day? Helly said suddenly, with a blithe quick laugh. I found a little box of earrings.

  —Earrings?

  —Among David’s things. Just single earrings. At first I thought maybe he had had his ear pierced at some point, but I asked him and he hadn’t. Anyway, some of these just weren’t that sort of earring, not that a man would wear.

  —So what on earth do you think?

  —I think he’s collected them. In the past. From other women.

  —You’re joking. Like trophies?

  —Not exactly like trophies. That would be too ridiculous. More like souvenirs.

  —Oh, no, said Clare. Surely not. That can’t be.

  —I didn’t tell him I found them. The box was dusty, down at the bottom of a drawer full of old things, and the earrings were sort of dingy, the shine had gone off them. There wasn’t anything very good. So I don’t think he collects them anymore. And anyway maybe I made it all up in the first place: he could have them for any odd reason. Perhaps he had an old girlfriend with only one ear pierced and she left them.

  —How many were there?

  —I didn’t want to count. I don’t know. Quite a lot; they were all in a tangle together. I put them back and I haven’t looked at them again.

  —It doesn’t matter anyway, said Clare. As you say, it was probably all years and years ago.

  * * *

  THERE IS A minute or two on the video where Toby catches David sitting alone in the front room in the not-so-comfortable chair. David looks up at him and then away again, absorbed in thinking about something. He’s photogenic; all those things about him that seem exaggerated and overeager in the flesh—the hard curved cheekbones, the standing-up thick hair, the big mouth full of talk—are toned down by the camera. Clare rewinds the video (this is weeks later, when Toby sends her a copy of his final version). She likes his smile, the lazy look he gives Toby, lids half closed, eyebrows raised, long cheeks in shadow. She rewinds it because she can’t work out what he’s doing in there. He isn’t—he might have been—taking a few relieved minutes off from a dull afternoon to commune with his precious laptop or check his e-mail. This is after he brings the children back from their trip in his special car that rises up on its wheels. (Lily’s face at the door was portentous with tales to tell of how he drove along entertaining them by making it dance, taking his foot on and off the brake in time to the music on his stereo. Coco was disgusted at his showing off. Only Rose liked him, she chose him, there on the beach, Rose the child Clare thinks of as most like herself.) Helly is in the kitchen helping Clare get supper ready (only not helping much). Bram is taking a shower. The children are playing something noisy on the stairs that involves tipping out all the contents of the toy basket (it’s one of those moments where she wishes they had telly).

  David is looking at her books. He isn’t looking at them as a reader might, getting close to see the titles, pulling them out and opening them up. He isn’t a reader, he’s hardly read anything, she’s already worked that out. He’s just sitting with his head thrown back and one leg propped across the other, surveying her books with a kind of thoughtful smile as if he’s putting together an idea of the sort of person who might want to read them all, someone whose life was hidden under these covers.

  Clare feels slightly uneasy,
and amused, watching him look. He may of course have completely the wrong idea of what is in her books. People who don’t read often imagine that a life lived with books is serenely truthful, perhaps rather idealistic, elevated to a higher sphere above the trickeries and treacheries of real life. Combined with the children, and the little house without television, and the making of her own bread and the salting of lemons, the books may make him think she is wholesome and sane. He may think he is much more devious than she is.

  * * *

  THREE DAYS AFTER the visit an envelope came in the post addressed to Clare. Bram had left for work, she was on her way to walk the kids to school, pinning Rose down in her stroller to fasten her straps. She didn’t recognize the handwriting: she tore it open, shouting at Coco to get his lunch box. Inside, wrapped in a slip of tissue paper, was a single earring. Of course.

  As soon as she got home from delivering the children she dug out an old jewel box she kept in a drawer in her bedroom (the box had once played music and been her grandmother’s); inside was a jumble of souvenirs and junk, museum tickets, suitcase keys, bills from cafés she and Bram had been to in Venice and Stockholm, picture hooks, the tassel from an old embroidered belt. She scrabbled in the mess of tarnished damaged jewelry and thumbtacks at the bottom of the box and found the matching earring to the one she had been sent. It was black, of course, gothic black and silver: to go with the lipstick and the nails.

  She would never have recognized him; it was only when Helly told her about his collection of souvenirs that she remembered what had happened at that party of Tim Dashwood’s. David had never given her any sign, all weekend, that he remembered. If he had said anything, or even looked significantly at her, the whole thing would only have been funny or embarrassing. As it was, the broken token that had been restored (that’s how Clare thought of it; she kept the two earrings buried far apart from one another in different hiding places) seemed to have an exaggerated power to frighten and excite her, so that for a while she simply didn’t know what would happen to her next, or what she might do.