by Tessa Hadley
You could see the lake from their window too. When Clare woke early, earlier than she ever did at home—by nature she was sluggish in the mornings and clung to the warm odorous den of sheets and blankets—she got up and stood in her nightdress in the window recess behind the floaty curtains. She saw dawn, she heard the dawn chorus, she saw mists lying like a layer of white milk on the fields and water, she heard the day start up outside with the multitudinous lives of animals and birds and plants, hours before the humans stirred inside the house. The cold climbed up inside her nightdress from her feet on the bare boards. She stood in a kind of ecstasy until her feet got so cold she was uncomfortable; then she put socks on and retreated back to bed to warm herself up against Bram.
This ecstasy of hers was probably absurd, in relation to the man she was obsessing about (she couldn’t call him her lover, he wasn’t that yet). As far as she knew, he—David—wasn’t in the least interested in natural things; he liked London and cars and sound technology. It was Bram her partner, and not David, who was the early riser, the birdwatcher and morning-lover and fresh-air enthusiast. David’s taste as far as she knew (she hadn’t been to his flat yet) was austerely urban and contemporary. Austerely: she felt a quiver of pleasurable chastisement at the thought of how he would cut through the half-considered shell of her homemaking with its cozy clutter.
David’s preferences excited her as if they were personal messages. At home she had taken to watching all the television programs he had said he liked; she had brought on holiday with her the tapes of music he had recommended, obscure jungle and drum and bass, types of music Clare had hardly known about three months ago. Whenever she got a chance to drive the car down to the shop on her own she played them, imagining him watching her to the soundtrack of the music, imagining him taking pleasure in the competence of her driving and the chic of her sunglasses. There was a moment’s dislocation when she turned off the ignition and the music stopped: a flicker, like shame, of self-consciousness left high and dry.
It would be a fine day. They were incredibly lucky with the weather on this holiday. The mini-market was cavelike, dark, humming with freezers, thin on temptations, odorous with cauliflower. They only seemed to sell one flavor of crisps; when she wanted a pound bag of flour, they opened a three-pound bag in spite of her protests and weighed out a third for her; they sent presents of sweets up for the children every time. Usually Clare was exaggeratedly deferential on her holidays, scrupulously aware of her outsider’s ineptness. She knew enough about Irish history to have felt apologetic for her English yawing vowels and her problems understanding what was said to her, and to have felt wincingly what reverberations might be touched off by an English family renting a Big House, even a small Big House, for their holiday. But that summer she felt licensed in her privilege, lordly in her assumption of the pleasures of the place. (Because of it she was probably friendlier and better liked.) She imagined she was responsible for the fine weather, too.
* * *
GENEVIEVE VEREY had been so disgusted by the burden of romance in the name her mother gave her that when it came to names for her own children she simply looked up surnames in the Times deaths column and chose something. So her son was Bramford and her two daughters (one older, one younger than Bram) were Tinsley and Opie. Clare could imagine Genny getting over the whole business of the births with the same pragmatism, the same slightly theatrical gestures of contempt for other people’s fuss. She had seen photographs of the young Genny, recognizable—in spite of the white hair and the thickened flesh that had come since—because of that bright scornful readiness in her expression. The old-fashioned kind of childbirth would have suited her, enema and shaved pubes, jollying injunctions to be a good girl and not make a row, new baby taken off to a nursery so mother could get a decent night’s sleep. It was impossible to imagine her in the midst of all the palaver of Clare’s generation, beanbags and water births, bonding and demand feeding; impossible to imagine hers as one of those middle-class households thrown into a kind of slack excruciated martyrdom for years on end by sleep problems and the crisis of belief in adult authority.
While they were all on holiday together, Clare tried to keep out of sight that potential in her own family life for spilling over into martyrdom and hysteria. Coco worked droopingly through a whole sequence of symptoms from a sore throat to a sprained ankle, Lily made nightly scenes about spiders, Rose’s moaning and struggling ruined every day trip they tried to take her on, so that in the end Clare and Bram took it in turns to stay behind with her in the house. Clare was sure that when Tinsley and Bram and Opie were children they wouldn’t have wasted time quarreling about TV channels (the house had Sky) but would have escaped outdoors every possible minute to the lake and the woods and the ruined mill. Of course, she couldn’t have let her children do this even if they had wanted to; she would have thought it much too dangerous. That was a perception that had changed with the generations too.
Whenever Bram and his sisters did tell stories from their childhood, which wasn’t often because they had been brought up to be shy and skeptical of talking about themselves, the stories were never about fights but about projects carried out as a little team of siblings, loyal, intimate, peculiar, with passions distributed conveniently between them: Bram with his birds, Tinsley with her rocks, Opie with her snakes. One summer they built a tree house in their back garden in Oxford and slept in it every fine night. One holiday in Northumberland they repaired an old boat they found by the river and caulked it and painted it and gave it a name and took it on leaky trips out on the water. (They named it Shimmershy: Clare wondered which one of the girls—it must have been one of the girls—had given way to romance for an inspired moment.) Such stories as far as Clare was concerned belonged inside books and were unimaginable as real childhoods; it seemed wholly characteristic that while Bram and his sisters had been busy living these adventures she had only been busy reading about them.
* * *
GENNY TOOK COCO AND LILY and the others on an expedition looking for bones in the Burren; she was chief technician for the University Bone Collection at Oxford, trained as an animal behaviorist and now working for the archaeology department. Lily under her grandmother’s tutelage was getting quite bold and had even poked at a very dead cat at the side of the road with a stick while Genny pointed out the structure and articulation. (It didn’t unfortunately make any difference to her feelings about spiders.) Bram had managed to persuade his mother not to bring the cat home and boil it up for its skeleton—they had already done several voles and a pigeon, filling the house with a stink Clare had to wash out of her hair. She had learned long ago never to look under the lids of Genny’s saucepans. Coco had helped to bleach the bones and lay them out like exquisite puzzles on old seed trays in the plantless ruined conservatory. He had a pigeon wing, too, and had showed Clare condescendingly how it folded like a fan.
When they went to the Burren, Clare stayed at home with Rose and played David’s tapes on Coco’s Walkman. She sat on the gray crumbling steps of the portico at the front of the house to smoke one of the cigarettes she had bought on her last visit to the mini-market; the cigarettes too were a fetish item from her obsession, as if by accumulating around her objects and habits associated with David she could somehow translate herself inside his real presence. No other building, except some unused sheds and one wall of the ruined mill, was visible from where she sat; she could see the lake, the islands, a field where the hay was gathered into old-fashioned beehive-shaped stooks you never saw in England anymore. It was a ten-minute drive down to the village; at night, partly because of the trees planted closely around the house, you couldn’t see another light.
Rose had taken all her clothes off and, having achieved her point in getting out of the trip to the Burren, was rewarding Clare with her deep absorption in some rite involving small stones picked from the drive and carried off to a sorting place behind the rhododendrons. Clare made a pot of real coffee and brought it out into t
he sunshine for herself and Ray, Bram’s father, who was painting at the bottom of the rough sloping lawn with his back to her. In this household of practical people (Tinsley was a geologist in plate tectonics, Bram worked on a conservation project, Opie was a physiotherapist), Clare and Ray tended to get lumped together, as if they might help one another out and understand each other’s mysteries. Today it was possibly true that they shared a sense of respite in the absence of his wife and his children. He was really startled, coming up from concentration, when she brought him his coffee; he had the same forward-set lower jaw as Bram, so that his mouth closed with an expression of gentle trustingness like a ruminant, a vulnerable deer.
She sat on the stone steps with her novel turned face down beside her because she couldn’t concentrate on it. This was one of those moments given on earth like a promise of what’s possible: the palely veiled creamy blue sky, the water glinting, the sun-warmed stone against her skin, the heat on her shoulders, the loved child happy playing in the earth, all the loved family spread safely and at their proper distances like a constellation, so that she in her place, part of it, was both holding and held. In literature though, Clare thought, there is a notorious problem with heavenly peace. It is well known that it can only be appreciated through the glass of loss. It is only after Raskolnikov has struck the blow that cleaves him forever from ordinary happiness that he can perceive its possibility. It is only because Emma Bovary’s provincial Normandy is in the irrecoverable lost past that what seemed to her banal and smothering seems to us charming, mysterious, desirable. It is only from Paris that Joyce can love Dublin. She listened to the heartbeat-stimulating rhythms on her headphones that were like a message from another place.
Rose began to weave her into her game, including her in the circuit between the drive and the bushes, offering her little stones squeezed in earth-grubby fingers; every time she came close enough Clare captured her and kissed her, drinking in the smell of hot baby skin and hair and earth and vegetation, repentant already that this was not enough, that there was always more that one greedily wanted, more than whatever precious thing it was that one held real and live and finite in one’s hands. She was thinking about telephoning David. She hadn’t ever intended to telephone him from her holiday; her idea had been that if she simply held off from contacting him or from making any arrangements to see him, the decision about what she was going to do with him would make itself. But his telephone numbers were written in her diary, and the thought of them had begun to eat like acid into her idea.
She had written down the numbers, the mobile and the home number, a month ago, on the day she went up to meet David in London, telling Bram she was going to work at the British Library on her dissertation. She had fully expected that David would take her into his bed (the bed with the mirrors that she knew about from Helly, her friend, David’s girlfriend); she had not known if she would even use her return ticket. The numbers were in case David wasn’t there to meet her at the station; but he was, with his jacket slung on one finger over his shoulder, his thick brush of black hair that grew upward like an exclamation mark, his loud voice that overfilled wherever he was, his oblivious gifted swagger in the great city. Bram wouldn’t have understood how she wasn’t disappointed by David’s showing off, wouldn’t have understood how she drank that down as the very element of her pleasure.
But confusingly David hadn’t taken her into his bed, or even to his flat, but had taken her out for a Thai meal and then to an exhibition of disconcertingly sexual Helmut Newton photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. With everything she knew about him—from Helly—she had assumed that he would be the one who would know how to bridge the unbridgeable transition between the animated conversation of friends and the first fumbles of acknowledgment, the first frank reachings-out. She had surely done enough by simply turning up. Didn’t he know to read that as her absolute surrender to whatever he wanted? But the more they talked the more the talk had seemed to pile up between them, solid and sensible as stone, separating them. All the time she was smiling and talking, putting on to the utmost an appearance of happy charm, her calculations were racing. Had she misunderstood him from the beginning? When he telephoned and said they should get together, had he meant just this, lunch and galleries? And she thought too, with humiliation, that unlike her he wasn’t desperate, he could afford to wait and see, he could afford to treat with respectful seriousness all the good reasons lunch and galleries were quite enough. She smothered a panicking sense that she would be betrayed into making a scene; she simply couldn’t bear to go home without the initiation she had come for.
Then, as they stood in the idle wide space in front of the departures board at the station, he had kissed her, and in such a way that she was quite certain after all that there had been no mistake. One of those motorized yellow litter sweepers bore down on them noisily. The sight of them kissing must have enraged the bored driver; he nudged toward them several times before they retreated out of his path, and then he came around at them again for good measure.
—Can you stay? David asked, into her ear, into her hair. Stay, please, stay. Phone home.
She shook her head. Really, she couldn’t stay. No, now they were on the far side of the unbridgeable gap, she was full of doubt suddenly. She had forgotten that she would be there with a stranger.
* * *
SHE TELEPHONED DAVID that evening while the others were swimming. Every day Genny and Tinsley and Opie and Bram and even Ray went swimming in the lake, taking turns to stay with the children in the shallow water by the little stony beach while the others struck off, racing one another for the islands. They all swam a strong crawl; when Bram and Tinsley and Opie were children they had competed in galas and worked for lifesaving badges.
Clare couldn’t. She could—just—swim, a stately slow breaststroke with her head held out of the water, which was one of the few things Bram ever laughed at her for. But only in a swimming pool, in clear chlorinated water where she could see to the bottom and the worst (bad enough) one might bob up against was a stray used sticking plaster. She was too much of a coward ever to bring herself to swim in the agitated murky sea, where jellyfish or crabs or bits of decomposing fish might be washed against her, or in the lake, which was calm but thick with brown weed growing up almost to the surface, sheltering a whole dark suspect world of underwater life and death, slippery weed that was sometimes wrapped in dark strips like stains around the swimmers’ legs when they waded out, blowing and streaming water and shouting breathless exhilarated comments about the shared ordeal to one another.
So while they swam she put out supper onto the plates in the kitchen, washed limp lettuce that was all you could get at the shop and boiled eggs and cut tomatoes and mashed tuna with mayonnaise. She sliced two loaves of floury soda bread. She stood wiping her hands on her apron, hearing the raised voices of the children from the beach. The house had been used as a hotel at some period, so although they had only a dingy miscellany of utensils and a tiny electric stove to cook on (including boiling Genny’s voles), the kitchen was full of the relics of past grandeur: a disused Aga and two deep enamel sinks and huge wooden plate racks on the walls like something from a giant’s kitchen in a fairy tale. Opie had pulled up a corner of the linoleum and found stone flags underneath.
Then Clare fished in her handbag for her diary and for coins for the pay phone and shut herself into the small cloakroom off the passage behind the kitchen where the phone was mounted on the wall. It smelled of polish and disinfectant because the cleaning things were kept in there. With shaking hands she dialed David’s number. She pressed herself back among the coats and waterproofs, distinguishing textures with exactitude against her face with her eyes closed: a button, a pocket fastened with Velcro, a corduroy trim, Rose’s frog-patterned mac.
Helly answered the phone.
Clare had told herself that if Helly answered she had the perfect alibi: Why shouldn’t she be phoning her best friend from Ireland? She would b
e phoning to complain, comically, about the Vereys; to let off steam over the well-worked theme of their imperturbable impossible decency and straightness. Helly would recognize the phone call as belonging in a long line of such calls.
In the split seconds after Helly’s voice was real and close in her ear, Clare actually imagined she could hear herself with utter naturalness beginning, “Hel, can I just be truly ghastly with you for a few minutes? I need a break. They’re all swimming. You know, not just splashing about at the edge like ordinary people do, but powering up and down across the lake. His sisters are the sort that actually knew how to inflate their pajamas for lifesaving at school. D’you remember that? How mine had a rip in and wouldn’t blow up? Look, I’m having such an incredibly wholesome time here—it’s really nice—that I just needed to say a few desperately dirty words to somebody.”
It would feel so natural that she would believe as soon as she began that this was what she had called for, the other thing would be so completely instantly submerged that she wouldn’t even be lying.
But instead she pressed down with quick silent decision the little metal rests that cut her off. Then she sat listening to the tone in the phone as though she might hear in there the aftershock of what had happened, traces of how Helly had taken it at the other end. Two things occurred to her, each sending through her a pulse of dismay like a too-rich heartbeat. If she had spoken to Helly she would have had to explain how she came to have the telephone number for David’s flat; she always spoke to Helly at her own place because Helly had never given her David’s number. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this, that she had come so near to jeopardizing herself. And then, as if she could see her doing it, she knew that Helly would dial the 1471 recall as soon as the phone went dead to find out who had been calling. But surely 1471 didn’t work for Ireland, surely the mechanical voice would simply say the number had been withheld, and Helly would have no reason to imagine it was her. Would the message specify that it had been an international call? An international call would be enough, Clare thought, to give her away.
