by Tessa Hadley
—Go round the back! someone else shouted.
All the adults within the house were at once bolt upright, startled out of themselves, expecting for split seconds whatever dreadful thing it is that one expects to break in roughly and unceremoniously in the small hours upon one’s sleep. Bram jumped out of bed and grabbed his bathrobe, but Ray in pajamas was downstairs ahead of him, pulling open the big front door they had learned from the locals not to bother to bolt.
—What in heaven’s name?
Bram and Tinsley and Opie and Clare loomed supportively behind Ray in the hall.
Mrs. Tierney, with black dyed hair and a worn face and lipstick applied approximately to her mouth, was very much the worse for whatever was in the bottle they were handing around in the car. She swayed and came to rest against the door lintel. She was wearing some kind of pale trouser suit, which, as they stood confronted, looked farcically like a match with Ray’s pajamas; perhaps that was why when he swung the door open there was another outbreak of laughter from the car, abruptly choked off. Inside the house the English family in their nightwear were sober and frowning. A crumple-faced man they didn’t recognize pushed his way in front of Mrs. Tierney on the steps, waving his cigarette that left its trail of odor on the night, sounding as if he was placating them and offering a long explanation that they could only partly follow.
—She’s come to read the meter? Tinsley snorted in disbelief.
—That’s right, missus, said the man. We’ve come to read the meter.
—But it’s the middle of the night, objected Ray.
—Sure it is, said the man. Only tomorrow she has a nephew coming up from Cork (he pronounced it Cork-e). The t’ing was, she would have come over here earlier.… He circumscribed a significant shape with his cigarette on the night.
—Only she’s pissed out of her mind and doesn’t know what time of night or day it is, said Tinsley.
—I thought it best, said Mrs. Tierney, swaying in hostile dignity, to wait till you’d have finished using the electric.
—Oh, for God’s sake, let them come in and get on with it.
The Vereys in their pajamas traipsed through the downstairs rooms of the house after Mrs. Tierney and her friend. Mrs. Tierney couldn’t remember where the meter was; they all offered more or less helpful suggestions, opening cupboards, poking around in the cloakroom and under the stairs. Others from the car drifted after them into the house, a teenage girl in a short dress and an overweight young man with a bald patch like a tonsure and a worn shiny brown suit. Clare could not be quite sure how much the party’s air of suppressed hilarity was directed at the English holidaymakers; in the dining room the girl heaved up one of the sash windows and shouted something out to whoever was left behind in the car. There was another explosion of laughter from outside, and a thick waft of black cold humming night air into the room, dispersing the smell of their sausage-and-cabbage supper.
Strangely, when they looked into the room they called the library, Genny was sitting up in all her clothes in front of the embers of the peat fire. She must have heard the noise of their arrival and crazy progress around the house: there was something prepared, theatrical, in the way she lowered her book and frowned over the top of it.
—What on earth is going on? she exclaimed.
—Stay where y’are, missus, soothed the crumple-faced man. We’ve no need to disturb you.
—Jesus, Michael, where the hell is it? Mrs. Tierney focused for a moment in perplexity.
—Cast your mind back now, Michael coaxed her.
—Could you possibly meditate elsewhere? said Genny. I’m trying to read.
When Bram eventually found the meter in a cupboard in the kitchen, they then had to find a pen and paper for Mrs. Tierney. Michael called out the numbers and she wrote them down with breathy concentration, then shoved the paper carelessly into her handbag. The party raggedly departed, calling farewells that might or might not have been mocking, their extravagance a blare that hung on the night behind them after the sound of the car engine had nosed its way far down toward the village.
—Why is Mum up? asked Opie.
—Couldn’t sleep, said Ray.
—But she’s in her clothes.
—She’s not been sleeping well.
Clare felt a thickening of meaning around this exchange, a familial alert that excluded her. In the library Genny sat holding her book on her knee, keeping her finger in her place.
—Weren’t we just wonderfully po-faced! exclaimed Tinsley. They must have been delighted!
—Insufferably rude. Whatever did they think they were playing at, at this time of night? Have they woken the children?
—You were up. Why didn’t you answer the door?
—Didn’t hear it. Until they came bursting in here.
—Are you going to bed now?
—Mum! said Opie. You’ve hurt yourself.
In surprise Genny turned the back of her hand toward herself, where three parallel weals trickled drips of blood.
—Blast, she said. I didn’t realize I’d made such a mess. I did it on the metal tape around the peat brickettes, just now. I should get some tissue or something. But she didn’t move. In fact, she sat in her chair with a strange heaviness as if she couldn’t move, her head collapsed back and her mouth slightly open; there was an effortful delay each time before she spoke, although when she did she sounded sensible and normal.
Silently Tinsley handed her a tissue from her sleeve.
Ray offered to make tea. His pajamas flapped emptily over the hollows of his skinny chest and legs; he didn’t make eye contact with his wife but looked hopefully at his children.
—I suppose now we’re up, said Bram, we might as well.
—I don’t want tea, hissed Genny, with an intensity that was a moment’s glimpse of something hidden, lethal, gleaming. Why don’t you all go back to bed? Leave me alone. I don’t know why you let those people in in the first place. In the baggy skin of her weathered face, the pouches under her eyes were purple thumbprints from lack of sleep.
—You’re probably right, said Ray. It’s too late for tea. But we could hardly have left them hammering away at the door.
Clare thought that one of them would ask Genny what was the matter. That was what would have happened in her own messy family, with its rich history of betrayals and divorces, and then there would have been recriminations, counteraccusations, raised voices, tears. But instead the Vereys did quietly what Genny asked and filed off to bed and left her alone, and Clare, for the moment, went along with that.
—Good night, Mum, Opie said. Don’t stay down too long.
Perhaps this was the way that families managed to stay together. There weren’t any guarantees, anyway, that what came out in tears and recriminations was any more truthful than this evasion. She didn’t even ask Bram, when they were alone in the bedroom, what it had all been about; even though she had seen for herself that the tape around the brickettes wasn’t broken and that Genny hadn’t put any new peat on the fire. He said something about “one of my mother’s moods.” If she accused his family of evasion he might ask her to look straight at him.
* * *
CLARE WOKE on Friday morning very early. The sunlight and the sounds of the birds from outside were thrilling presences in the room, irresistible once you wholly opened yourself to them. Rose had joined them at some time during the night and was asleep face down between them, hot little limbs flung abandonedly as if the bed were all hers, hard small feet kicking and pushing into free space, leaving the adults only a straitened margin that in their sleep they had submissively adapted to. Clare eased herself from under Rose’s embrace and slipped out of bed; then, without forming any articulate plan, she picked up her sandals and a sweater and went downstairs and out the back door into the morning. It seized her—still warm from her bed—like a gulp of ice water, waking her immediately and completely. She took the shortcut across the meadow down to the lakeshore; there was a heavy dew on the
long grass and soon her feet were slipping wetly in her sandals, and the hem of her stretch nightshirt was soaked and clinging to her ankles. Arbitrary-looking puffs of milky mist were still lying about here and there on the fields and the water, not blotted up yet by the clear hot day.
There was a wooden dinghy drawn up on the shingle beach that was theirs to use. Clare had been out in it twice with the others and knew more or less how to row. She fetched the oars, which were hidden across the joists of an old boathouse, and pushed the dinghy out into the water, holding her nightshirt up above her knees. For a split second she queried what she was doing, incredulously returning into her normal self and doubting—What if the boat leaks, what if I’m pulled by the current out of the lake down the river toward the mill, what if I get tangled in the weeds, what if there’s something essential the others know that I just don’t know about?—but danger seemed unreal, the unpopulated golden morning felt like a promise of safety, a charm that meant she could do nothing wrong. The dinghy rocked and tipped wildly when she slithered across the side onto her knees in its wet bottom, but it didn’t spill her out; she maneuvered herself up onto the seat and remembered which way to face and pushed away from the shingly shallows with an oar.
She could do this. Buoyant, sweating, panting, a hundred yards from shore, she shipped her oars (Tinsley had taught the children all the nautical terms) and took off her sweater. She closed her eyes and held her face to the sun; on her lids were crimson trees growing upward, twisting into flames. When she opened them she saw that the water around the dinghy was thick with brown weed; because of a trick of the early slanting light she could see deeply in. The water was glassy and luminous between the brown stirring wafting fronds; she was looking into an illuminated drowned forest. In an impulse that was more physical than like a thought, she stripped off her nightshirt too. If anyone was watching from the edge of the lake she was too far off for them to see much; she even imagined there was someone and supplied for her voyeurs the teenage girl and the brown-suited man left over from some Arcadian pastoral coupling the night before. She convinced herself, but quite without any alarm, even with a sense of fitness and mutual appreciation, that she could make out his brown suit and her pale legs against the camouflaging russets of a stretch of bank.
Holding the dinghy with both hands she stepped over the side and into the water. It slipped over her naked body like a glove of cold, clenching her tight in its shock. The weeds touched her—not clingingly or spongily as she’d imagined, but intimately, lightly, like prompts and hints. She swam because there wasn’t anything else to do but move to keep alive; if she had stopped still her lungs might have seized up with cold and forgotten how to draw in air. So she cleaved the glassy water with her slow breaststroke, the sound of her own gasping breaths loud and strange in her ears and the weed ends brushing along her naked breasts and stomach. Birds on the water took flight, she heard the crack and beating of their wings. She’d never swum before without a bathing suit, her body felt unbound and loose and as if it were actually mingling and exchanging substance with the lake. At the same time she was so distinct from the lake, she parted it, and it opened ahead of her in obedience to the strong shapely movements of her limbs.
One part of her mind was already thinking that it would be difficult to get back in the boat, but another was still able to marvel at herself, at the reality of her doing this, this epic and improbable thing, not just imagining it but doing it, in the flesh, in the astonished and jubilant flesh.
* * *
IT WAS DIFFICULT, getting back in the boat. The dinghy had drifted, by the time she turned and swam back to it. She had even whimpered with fear and frustration, clinging on to its side, feeling the strength drain dangerously out of her. And she had hurt herself, scraped a long bleeding weal down her hip, when by a superhuman, grunting, undignified effort she had finally heaved herself aboard, panicking in horror that she might pull the dinghy over on herself. But once she was in the boat and had scrambled into her nightshirt she was all right, although at first her legs and arms trembled too much for her to row. She looked out defiantly for watchers on the bank. They couldn’t have known, at such a distance, how complete her abasement had been, so it didn’t count. She had had her swim. Her swim had been blissful.
She didn’t tell anyone.
Later that afternoon Clare and Opie volunteered to clean the house while the others took the children out. As Opie did the bedrooms upstairs, Clare telephoned David again. She knew she would get him this time, just as she had known for two whole weeks that it was in her power to keep the weather fine. She proposed a date when she could come to London, the soonest date she could manage. She said she would come to his flat.
—Are you on your own, right now? he asked, in an odd low conspiratorial voice.
—Sort of. Bram’s sister is upstairs.
—When you come to the flat, then, he said, I want to fuck you.
She buried her head back among the concealing hot coats hanging in the cloakroom, squeezing her eyes shut. Her hair was scraped back into a plait, her face was sweaty and gritty with dust, her hands smelled of dishcloths and bleach. Her hurt thigh ached.
—I want to fuck you too, she said.
Then she pressed down the metal rests and cut him off.
Now she had truly crossed the bridge to the other side, to the different place. Although nothing was burning. The image was very precise in her mind: there was no burning bridge behind her, only a wide impassable space of twinkling water, twinkling and dancing and silvery; banal, and shallow, even.
A FUNNY THING happened to Marian one Saturday morning when she went around as usual to her father’s flat. It was a lapse, a blink of dark in the bright light of ordinary consciousness, like the lapses her father had sometimes when he blanked out something they’d gone through only ten minutes before.
—I have no idea what you’re talking about, he would throw out at her exasperatedly, his reproach cold and sharp in his still perfect enunciation.
Euan wasn’t senile; he still had his brilliant mind; he was extraordinary considering he was almost ninety years old. But it was as though he saved his brilliance for deeper things now and had cut loose from some of the clutter she had to pester him with: appointments at the eye hospital or at the doctor’s, money matters, problems with his housekeeper, Elaine.
What happened to Marian that morning was that when she arrived at her usual time (she always went on Saturdays and Sundays to do his food and see everything was all right because Elaine didn’t work on weekends), the front door wasn’t double-locked and the alarm system wasn’t switched on. All this really meant was that Euan must have opened the door already that morning, probably to give his usual handful of dried catfood to a visiting cat, and hadn’t bothered to redo it all when he went back inside because he knew she was coming. But for some strange reason Marian completely and illogically misinterpreted these signs; she thought they meant her father had dressed himself and gone out before she arrived for a walk in the beautiful morning.
This was strange and illogical not only because if he had gone out for a walk he could perfectly well have double-locked the door behind him and set the alarm, but because for—how long, eighteen months? two years? three years? one forgot the timings of these stages of regress as one forgot the forward progress of one’s babies—for some time now Euan had not been able to walk out into the streets unaided. He could get about the flat, using the route around chair backs and pieces of furniture that Marian and Elaine had designed for him and were careful not to disturb; he could even, with the help of his walker, which he hated, get himself out into his garden on a nice afternoon, as long as they had put his chair ready for him and beside it on a little stool his straw boater and his plaid blanket and his thick dark glasses against the glare. Then the neighborhood cats he gave food to came and repaid him with sinuous and uninvolving cat love. But he was too frail to walk out in the streets alone anymore; his legs were too unreliable ever si
nce a fall a couple of winters ago when he’d cracked his pelvis, and he was prone to spells of dizziness (he had classes for this too, at the hospital, that she had had to organize for him).
So it was strange that without in the least examining her idea or its probability, but quite convinced that her father had gone off on a walk, Marian on that fine Saturday morning went on into the flat and began clearing up his breakfast things, running hot water into the sink for the washing up, collecting his nighttime glass from the bedroom, putting his porridge bowl to soak (Elaine would make porridge the night before and had taught him how to heat it in the microwave). She watered the plants on the kitchen windowsill, singing. She wouldn’t have sung if she’d thought he was there; like her daughter Tamsin he had perfect pitch, and they both complained about her tunelessness and her taste in music. She was singing a song whose first line was “Do you know the way to San Jose?”: she couldn’t remember whose song it was. It dated her, anyway. She had grown up listening to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, but it seemed to be these poppy middle-of-the-road tunes that had seeped in to the deepest layers of her awareness and that made her feel happy now.
The fine day seemed to fill the flat with an unusual light—she usually thought of it as a dark place, dark with his books, dark with the condensed shadow of his intelligence folded in upon itself. It was a University flat; they had always had a University house, and he had moved to this flat twenty years ago when Marian’s mother died. Like the University it was Victorian gothic, with pointed casement windows and deep stone sills, heavy doors that shut with the deep clunk of finality, and an ancient vociferous and effective heating system. Euan said—to visitors, he said—that it was like waking up inside one of Ruskin’s less temperate dreams. To Marian he simply said it was damp and depressing. In her irrational fit she was glad as she washed his breakfast things to think that this morning he had got into the open air, out among all the summer gardens blooming with flowers she had seen on her way over. This thought must have developed in her mind subliminally; if it had bubbled up into full consciousness then she would have waked and known it was not possible.
