Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  Afterward, when she had come out of the fit and was wondering how she had made such a puzzling mistake, she realized that she had felt more than simple gladness at his getting out into the fine day. She had taken the lightness of his step out into the morning so early and spontaneously for a sign, a coded sign from him that she could hang onto, however he tried to deny it: a sign of hope and of his openness still, after all, to pleasure. What easier gesture of acquiescence than to walk out impromptu into a new day? The sky was pale veiled blue, and the walls of the back area outside the kitchen window were grown over with white and pink valerian. His going out was like a revelation of easy possibilities they had both been tangling and obfuscating; they had both between them been making everything so difficult and so bitter.

  And afterward when she was thinking about it she also wondered if she hadn’t, in fact, been imagining his death. Her fantasy of him released to light and flowers was like a benign fantasy-death, as if she had found a magic bypass around pain and ugliness and been able to imagine them released from one another, from father and daughter, with a lightness and ease angels might have at parting, not human beings.

  That was all it was. It was nothing, really; when Marian tried to tell Tamsin, later, it wasn’t even a story, just a moment’s blip in consciousness whose power, like the power of dreams, couldn’t be carried back into ordinary life. At some point after she tipped the washing up water away she had heard a sound from the study—a book slammed shut, a chair thrust impatiently back—that in an instant recalled her to herself and filled the flat’s emptiness with him and shriveled into nonsense her fantasy of light.

  It wouldn’t have seemed strange to Euan that Marian hadn’t greeted him as soon as she came in the flat; if he was busy she often didn’t bother him. She stopped singing as soon as she realized he was there: probably it was because of the singing that the book was slammed shut. Euan’s need for silence while he was working was one of the things he and Elaine fought over most bitterly. He was adamant that with both doors shut and the volume down he could still hear her radio in the kitchen; and indeed, when they both solemnly insisted that this be put to the test, it seemed he could, even though he often failed to hear other much louder noises. Elaine joked skeptically about his selective deafness, but Marian believed in it. It would have something to do with his perfect pitch; if he suspected that a false note was sounding somewhere around him, some responsive strained tautness of antipathy in him would thrum and vibrate to it, however faint it was. He couldn’t help it.

  Marian made coffee and took a cup in to him. He was writing in the chair she had had made for him, with the sloping desk fitted across its arms, the angle-poise light aimed at his page from behind his shoulder, his magnifying glass for small print at his left hand, blanket across his knees. Books were piled up, some open, some stuffed with paper markers, on the tables to either side of him. She knew what he was working on; it was a piece about the relations of Dostoevski’s thought to Russian Orthodox theology. Some of the books were in Cyrillic script. Marian could always tell by the way he sat or looked up at her whether it was going well or badly. When she and her brother were children, her mother used to bring reports from the study, as if his moods were a weather on which they all depended: if he was stuck, she and Francis might be sent off to the cinema for the afternoon. Her father was a big man, he had had the physique—bulky shoulders and thick neck—of a statesman or an actor or a laborer, not a man of letters. His face had always been complex and unfinished, with lowering brows and long rugged cheek planes; now it was pouched, and blotched with purple. The fine convolutions of inner life and expression had always translated themselves in him into the stubbornnesses and martyrdoms of the flesh. Today he brooded over his page without lifting his head; that might have been her singing.

  —It’s a lovely day, Daddy.

  —Is it?

  —Would you like to sit outside?

  —No.

  —But you know it cheers you up.

  —Nothing makes me feel lower than being cheered up.

  Setting the coffee down on its mat on the side table, she put her arm around his shoulders.

  —Is it Saturday? he asked, which was supposed to mean that he wished it were Elaine and not she who had brought his coffee.

  She kissed his head, its baldness blotched with brown age blemishes, flaky with dry skin. He twisted with irritation and resentment under her kiss, but she told herself that at some deeper level he was fed by it, kept alive, reminded that he was loved. Marian was not, by nature, a kisser or a toucher, but her mother had always done it and she had taken on the part when her mother died. Possibly what she had taken on was not simply the innocent tending it looked like. Possibly it was instead a part of the subtle fight of the female with the male, of female insistent sweetness against male bitterness, female blithe confidence against male doubt.

  When they were children and their mother came back from the study with her reports, their attitude had been complicated. Everything arranged itself around the father and his work; there was no question about that. They were frightened if he was angry, proud when he did well and was acclaimed. But there was also a subtle kind of triumph in their subjection. They thought it was funny, his moodiness, his weakness, his need for them to surround him with consideration. It was a game they played with their mother, exaggerating their anxieties about him as if he were a ghoul or a troll; and weren’t they stronger, she and they, because they didn’t need anything so complicated or contingent? When they went off to the cinema or the shops, leaving him to his suffering over books written in languages they didn’t understand, didn’t they have a kind of swagger, because they could manage ordinary things?

  Of course, all the while, it might have been they who suffered, not knowing it, while he pleased himself. Feminists would have said so, and Marian surely was one. Complication upon complication.

  Marian didn’t like to feel she was playing a part, any longer, in that complicated war of males against females. She had thought she had finished with that forever when her marriage finished: long, long ago. Her marriage—and far behind that, her childhood—seemed ages off, eras ago: like history. Hadn’t everything in the world, and especially the things to do with men and women, changed out of all recognition since then? And hadn’t she, Marian, proved it by spending her mostly single life as an independent woman and a teacher?

  That morning, after the strange episode of her misinterpretation, the strange half hour or so of light and flowers, she was stricken with disappointment. She made Euan’s bed and tidied his bedroom and prepared his trays of lunch and supper under a cloud of sadness and fatalism, as if something precious had been shown to her and lost.

  * * *

  THERE WAS a problem with money. Marian’s mother had inherited some property; the income from this property was never spent after Marian and her brother left home; it all went into an investment account. Now Euan had withdrawn some of these savings in cash, to avoid the family’s paying tax on them after he was dead; he really had very little interest in money, but he liked to imagine himself as a man of the world, cunning and knowing when it came to material things. He kept the money hidden, despite all Marian’s pleadings and warnings, in a space under the floor in the airing cupboard that no one was supposed to know about except Marian and Francis, in Toronto. The last time Marian fetched Euan some money from the hiding place, she discovered that two hundred pounds were missing. She didn’t tell Euan, but crossed out in his little notebook the amount that there should have been and deducted what she had just taken out, as if nothing were wrong.

  At home she confided in Tamsin over supper. Tamsin was her younger daughter, who lived at home with Marian and was unnervingly domesticated. Tamsin had had a very wild youth, which had culminated five years before in a dreadful crisis, with a stillborn baby and boyfriend who had accidentally overdosed and died. She had shaved her head, in those days, and had her nose and tongue pierced; but now, at twenty-six, s
he had her hair cut neatly short, like a boy’s, and saved her wages to buy nice designer clothes. She worked in an office for an agency selling theater and concert tickets and appalled her father, who had in his youth handed out leaflets outside factories for the Communist Party, by announcing that she had voted Conservative at the last election (the one when nobody else did). She also sang with the city choral society, went out nightclubbing occasionally with the girls from the office, and, so far as Marian could tell, slept alone every night in her neat narrow bed.

  —Nobody knows where this wretched money is hidden except me and Francis and Daddy, said Marian.

  —And me, said Tamsin.

  —You don’t know.

  —I guessed.

  —The most likely thing is Daddy’s taken some of it out himself and just forgotten to tell me. But two hundred? What for? And I think he’d find it quite difficult; you really have to get down on your hands and knees. Then there was the man who came to repair the central heating boiler a few weeks ago. Perhaps he had to look around under the floor for pipes, and he found it. But then why only take two hundred, not all of it?

  —Maybe to mislead you, so that it wasn’t obvious.

  —And anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t him. This is what’s so horrible about the whole thing. He seemed a nice man, we’ve had him before, and he’d never do anything so stupid, obviously incriminating himself. He was only mending the thermostat, why would he need to look for pipes? Probably the whole thing’s just a mistake: I miscounted, or we miscounted right in the beginning, or perhaps the building society made a mistake in the first place, and we checked carelessly.

  —What does it matter, so long as Grandpa doesn’t know?

  —Well, it does matter: two hundred pounds! Sooner or later he’s bound to know; he’ll want me to get it all out and count it for him or something.

  Marian helped herself to the last slice of quiche. She was always hungry after one of Tamsin’s suppers. They took it in turns to cook, although Tamsin didn’t really cook, she went to Marks & Spencer’s on her way home and bought selections of things in plastic pots that were somehow enticing but not fulfilling. Marian on her nights cooked hearty platefuls of rice or pasta, which Tam-sin picked at. Tamsin’s lilac silk blouse showed off shadowy hollows in her throat and under her collarbones. Marian had never had those; she had always been tall and heavy like her father; for a while now she had been aware of a sort of girdle of packed flesh between her bosom and her hips that seemed to grasp her tight and make her breathless and constrained, so that she had to swivel her body in one solid piece if she wanted to look behind her.

  —What about Elaine? Or Mark?

  —Oh, Tamsin, no. Of all the people in the world.… And anyway, Elaine doesn’t know it’s there. Unless he’s forgotten she doesn’t know and mentioned it. But wouldn’t you trust Elaine with your life?

  —Probably not, said Tamsin. I wouldn’t trust anybody with my life.

  Tamsin often affected this flip cynicism, opening her hazel eyes wide and blank. Marian didn’t know whether it was just the conversational small change of the girls in the office or whether she was supposed to be reminded of that time when Tamsin really might have imagined her life as a thing thrown around carelessly by all of the ones who professed to love her, and dropped, and almost lost. Otherwise they never talked of that time. Tamsin wouldn’t talk.

  * * *

  ELAINE STOOD SMOKING by the sink in the kitchen with the window open. Like playing the radio, smoking was forbidden, but Euan had managed to make her so angry this afternoon she didn’t care, or only cared enough to try to fan the smoke through the window with her hand. Marian listened to her with little groans of sympathy and outrage, calculating anxiously whether Elaine was actually offended enough this time to go, and leave her with the dreadful choice between finding a replacement housekeeper or persuading Euan to go into a home. Before Elaine there had been a quick succession of three perfectly pleasant and competent women who had not been able to put up with Euan’s temper and his manner.

  Euan had called Elaine a servant again. He had corrected her speech when it was ungrammatical. Also, he objected to her perfume, he said it gave him headaches, although she denied she ever wore any when she came to work. And he insisted on going through all the receipts with her whenever she came back from shopping, even though he had no idea what things cost. Marian thought treacherously of the two hundred pounds. Was it possible Elaine thought herself justified, taking it to make up for all these offenses to her pride? Her face heated apologetically for having dreamed of it.

  —Sometimes he comes in here after me, when we’ve been having words about something, Elaine said. I walk out and he follows me; he can’t leave it alone, he comes staggering across the hall without his stick, bellowing at me. “Elaine, Elaine, you’ve been touching my papers again! How many times do I have to tell you they are nothing to do with you? My work must not be sacrificed to this mania for tidiness!”

  She imitated Euan rather well, in a surprising deep voice, trembling with outrage, his and her outrage at the same time.

  —As if I would ever dare touch his precious papers.

  That was Marian’s mother’s phrase exactly: “his precious papers”: contempt and awe, at once, and jealousy. Marian thought of women married into some priestly caste, expressing their resentment against augury.

  —As if he hates me, really hates me, Elaine said.

  Elaine was in her late forties, petite and blond with plump golden skin whose wrinkles didn’t look like weaknesses but like decisive folds. She had a characteristic settling gesture, where she drew her head back into a double chin while she tapped the ash off her cigarette; she ran the butt under the tap when she had finished and buried it in the bin. She was the kind of woman who would think less of you for washing your whites with your coloreds or letting the inside of your kettle get furred up when there was a perfectly good device to prevent it: Euan’s kitchen was suddenly full of such sensible devices, a splashguard and a meat thermometer, matching oven mitts and apron, a mug tree. The microwave—which had proved invaluable—had been Elaine’s idea.

  Marian liked Elaine but rather feared her; she found herself preserving defensively her dignity as a teacher in case Elaine penetrated behind it and caught her out in some careless absentmindedness. Elaine’s son, Mark, was in Marian’s lower sixth A-level history group: that was not a coincidence, it was through Mark that Marian had arranged eighteen months ago for Elaine to work for Euan.

  —What was she shouting about? Euan asked later. She’s got an uncontrollable temper.

  It should have been funny, the way each of them imagined the other subject to incontinent rages and was so sure of his or her own calm reasonableness. Marian could never be certain what actually went on when the two of them were alone here, what raw indecorous scenes erupted within the walls of this flat laid out for the deep quiet rhythms of the contemplative life. She knew—at least, she had had reported to her—that once Elaine had slapped Euan, not across the face but across the legs, when he stood over her explaining something while she on her hands and knees washed the kitchen floor, and that once when she reached up to tuck in his muffler under his coat collar he had pushed her away so hard she fell and bruised herself against a piece of furniture.

  Their conflict was not the whole story. There were plenty of passages of calm between them. He loved her cooking and mopped up her cream sauces and wine gravies greedily, even though he complained they were too rich; neither his wife nor his daughter had ever cooked decently. And she was very ready to adopt that posture of baffled superstitious mistrust toward the mysteries of his work that suited him better in women than interest or adulation. Days and weeks would pass after one of these big blowups where both were abashed and cautious and there was never a squeak out of them.

  —Elaine, I’m so sorry, said Marian. Of course if you really want to go, I can’t stop you, I’d even understand, although personally I’ll be devastated; I kn
ow I’ll never find anyone else so able to manage him.… I know that although he can be insufferable at least you understand where the frustrations come from.

  She was sure that behind her expression of sorely tried forbearance Elaine was not actually thinking over the tragic plight of the brilliant old man but the convenience of the job, the decent pay, her relative independence. Marian would have thought the same in her place.

  —You’ll have to tell him, Marian. I won’t be talked to like that, though I may not have your education or your lifestyle. (Where had Marian’s education come into it, she wondered?) But he is very good to Mark. I’d be sorry for the boy to lose out on his visits here.

  The mention of Mark was a kind of capitulation.

  Mark often came to the flat after school, if Elaine was working late. He was an only child; neither he nor Elaine ever mentioned a father. He used to do his homework on the kitchen table. Then Euan began to take an interest in him, interrogating him, impressed by his intelligence, appalled by his ignorance, taking it upon himself—grumbling but visibly delighted—to fill up the deficiency. Mark was the cleverest pupil Marian had ever taught. Although her school was an inner city comprehensive school and didn’t send many pupils into higher education of any sort, she was encouraging Mark to apply to do history at Cambridge.

  When Marian opened the door to the study, the old man was balancing a vinyl record delicately on his thick finger ends with his head on one side, looking across the surface for flaws, blowing off the dust. (He didn’t approve of the cold sound of compact disc.) As a child Marian had loved the intimate felty smell inside the gramophone cabinet she had never been allowed to touch, and her father’s gesture reminded her of that old excitement. The boy smiled around at her from where he sat as he sat in her classes, attentive, obedient, absorbed. Euan was holding forth.