by Tessa Hadley
—What did she say, Francis? Can’t you remember?
—It’s an age ago. I thought I told you all this before. I probably did: you’ve forgotten.
—But what did he do?
—Oh, not anything. Not any big thing. He used to turn records up to drown out what she was saying to him. That sort of thing. God knows. He called her a witch. He wouldn’t let her wear glasses, though she could hardly see to walk, said they made her look like a tribal fetish. They did, a bit. She said she didn’t have any fun. She was bored. He liked books. She liked parties and people.
There was a photograph of Jean in a silver frame on Euan’s bedside table. The next time Marian was at the flat, she picked it up and recovered instantaneously the late last images of her that should have belonged at the top of the successive layers of remembering. What had she been thinking of, imagining sex and all that young kind of desperation to explain her mother’s late attempts at escape? This was a funny old lady with a white helmet of permed hair and a bosom like a shapeless cushion stuffed into an inappropriate pink T-shirt with short sleeves tight around the fat of her arms. The skewy mouth that had in the prize-giving days been demurely suggestive was opened like a gash across a face sagged and jowly, not bothering to please, although she smiled—slyly or derisively—for the camera. A hand held flat for shade, like the peak of a cap, cast a dark ledge of shadow down over those terrible—surely deliberately and challengingly terrible—glasses. Whatever Euan had commanded, she was wearing the glasses. And wearing them, what’s more, in the one photograph that he had selected from among all the possible others to watch over him.
The photograph had been taken in her garden. It was hard to imagine that Jean had ever wanted to leave her husband enough to want to leave her garden, big, old, walled, with apple trees and vegetable plots and herbaceous borders where Jean reigned as the only half-benevolent Creator, nurturing plants with tender skilled fingers, deadheading and pruning, waging war on pests. She used to describe to Marian the remorse she felt, carrying a big slug wrapped in a leaf to her killing pot full of salt water in the shed.
—You can feel its weight in the leaf, a little animal, the weight of a mouse: a living thing.
Jean surely hadn’t been all that interested in parties, not in those last years. Marian couldn’t be certain that Francis wasn’t exaggerating the whole thing, hadn’t told her all of it really because he wanted to say “She came to me” to counterbalance Marian’s staked claim, now—staked out of the most quotidian necessity—of primacy with their father.
And strangely out of that thought came another, as Marian put the photograph back in its place on the bedside table.
I’m like him, she thought. Not like her. I was like him all the time. We don’t like parties. We’re neither of us any good at growing things. We’re better with people in books or classrooms. We’re too ashamed to be tender or merciful.
But then her mother had tipped the slug, in any case, into that dark plastic jug in the shadowy shed, which would develop an unholy smell if she forgot to empty it.
* * *
—THERE WAS something wrong with that madwoman yesterday, said Euan to Marian. More than usual. Her time of the month, I suspect. Or else she’s menopausal. Said something about Tamsin.
—About Tamsin?
—Complaining about her breaking the lid of the teapot. Ostensibly. But behind that little opening I detect a whole furtive hinterland of disapproval. Her disapprovals are the only extensive thing about her.
—Did Tamsin break the teapot lid? What a nuisance. She didn’t tell me.
—Of course it’s about the boy. You can imagine the sort of dreary petit bourgeois sequence of aspirations Elaine is nurturing on his behalf. I’m quite sure they don’t include Tamsin. He’ll have to kick free of his mother, if he genuinely wants to do something. He could soar. He’s got the intelligence, but it’s not just that.
—Kick free? That’s a horrible way of putting it, when Elaine’s worked so hard, bringing him up alone. And anyway Tamsin’s twenty-five years old, she couldn’t possibly be interested in Mark.
—My dear daughter, he said. Which one of us is blind?
Marian had her apron on, which somehow disadvantaged her. It was Saturday again, she was making him sandwiches to leave for his tea. He was in ebullient mood; there was another pile of manuscript ready to go to the woman who word-processed it for him. He had even asked for a glass of wine with his lunch. Marian concentrated on slicing a tomato.
—So did Elaine buy a new teapot?
—I have no idea, he said. Deliberately, I don’t ask. If I’m not careful, she fills every space in my mind with her trivial conversation, and I can’t think. She does it purposely, whether she knows it or not. Intrinsically, she’s opposed to intellectual work. It will be a triumph for her if I never finish the book. Which I won’t, anyway. I can feel death coming on—faster than I can keep ahead of it. It lives inside here. He pressed his fist against his chest.
—Don’t be silly, Marian said. When you’re doing so well.
—And even if I finish it, of course, no one will be interested. I’m writing in a lost language, outmoded, irrelevant, boring. Unforgivably, I will have omitted to make my obeisances to the new critical gods.
—There you are. Your sandwich is in the fridge, Daddy.
—Is she coming tonight?
—Elaine doesn’t come in the evenings.
—Not her, Tamsin. That boy doesn’t stand a chance. The little cat who always lands on her feet; I like to watch her.
Euan had never been told about the dead boyfriend or the baby.
—It’s Saturday, Daddy. I told you Tamsin was singing tonight; and I’m going to hear her. That’s why I’ve put your sandwich in the fridge.
—Singing? What kind of singing?
—With the choral society. Missa Solemnis. I said, if you wanted to come, we could use the wheelchair, it’s all fixed up for that now at the concert hall. I could still phone and try for tickets.
—I don’t want tickets. What would I want tickets for? I’m too sick to go out, why don’t you ever listen to me tell you that? You try to fuss me into things, try to distract me, pretend everything is still all right, as if I was an infant. I accept, you see, he explained—with bad-tempered mock patience, as if to a spiritual defective—I accept this … this doom. I accept it.
—What’s given on earth is not final, she offered, rather offhandedly, as consolation.
He turned on her a look white with rage, discovering his precious words in her mouth. What? he spat out, what?
He screwed up his face, putting his hand to his ear in a derisive pantomime of deafness. His enunciation was icily exact.
—I have no idea what you are talking about.
* * *
ELAINE CAME to see Marian in school when Marian was busy in her office making last-minute adjustments to the timetable for public examinations. It was four o’clock and the great tide of children had receded from the site, leaving only the last flotsam and jetsam of individuals in the corridors and rooms. A greenish summer light came in the high windows of the office, propped open to their full extent, and made it aquarium-like; dapples of light floated across the backs of Marian’s hands as she pasted strips of paper across some names, wrote in others in neat black ink.
Elaine had found another job. She would work out her month with Euan, but then Marian would have to find someone else. And then when Marian said she was very sorry to see Elaine go, but she understood that her father wasn’t an easy man to work for, Elaine explained that it wasn’t simply that, there was something else; there was Marian’s daughter.
—Mark’s everything I’ve got, she said. And I don’t want to see him come to grief.
Marian ran her fingers through the liquid-seeming light on the timetable. To grief, she thought. I suppose that’s what it is.
—Why? What do you imagine is going on?
Elaine trembled with the intensity of her opposit
ion. I’m not stupid.
—I suppose I am, said Marian. Might they not just be friends?
—Bite marks on his chest, said Elaine, and Marian blushed. I’m sorry for what happened to your daughter. But Mark’s got so much ahead of him. I don’t want him to get mixed up in anything.
Marian was afraid that Elaine would see that she didn’t want Mark to get mixed up in anything either; it didn’t seem supportive of Tamsin.
—I’ll talk to her, she said. I’ll try and find out what’s happening.
—Just so long as you’re aware of my views, said Elaine. I’d rather they didn’t meet, so I won’t be bringing Mark to Euan’s anymore, for these last weeks.
—Fair enough. Although my father will miss him.
Elaine gave a qualified grunt of assent, tucking in her double chin; she was thinking perhaps that she and her son would be better rid of the whole dangerous family.
When Elaine had gone—neat heels tapping smartly in the empty corridor—Marian had her timetable to think about, and behind that the worry about Euan and whether she could face the idea of his going into a home or whether she had to go through trying to find another housekeeper. She hardly had time to consider the bother of Tamsin and Mark; and then when she walked to get her car, the last one parked in the concrete area behind the labs, there were two dogs who had been mating and were still embarrassingly and absurdly stuck together. They stood side by side, shamedly ignoring one another, pretending they weren’t attached at their rear ends. Wherever one stepped the other had to shuffle dejectedly alongside, and both gave out little whimpers of pain when they moved. Marian couldn’t tell which one was the male. She felt responsible; was one supposed to throw cold water? But she would have to walk a long way back to get water; and what if it was cruel? She also felt slightly disgusted and humiliated; she hoped no one was around to see her seeing this and not knowing what to do. She was supposed to be so sensible and unsqueamish.
Then from nowhere came the thought of “bite marks” like a wave of heat, making her wet under the arms; avoiding the pantomime-horse-dogs’ pleading looks she got quickly into her car, drove off, and left them. Nature ought to have its own cure for such a wretched mess; it wasn’t any of her business. How problematic, how foolish, it all was. Thank goodness she was well out of it (twenty years out of it, although she didn’t confess that to anyone in case they thought she was sick or deprived): the abjectness, the pairing up, the whimpering, the wet and sucking flesh. Something for dogs and teenagers.
* * *
MARIAN OFTEN CAME IN from school to find Tamsin and Mark together in the house. She wondered at the amount of time off from work Tamsin seemed to be taking. More, she worried about Mark’s schoolwork: he used to spend all his free time in the library. They weren’t exactly furtive when she came in; they weren’t even always in Tamsin’s room, sometimes they were drinking coffee on the sofa or beer on the patio. They didn’t blush or look resentful at being interrupted. Mark would stand up politely; he still called her Mrs. Menges.
He had his hair cut differently. What a handsome pair they made; you couldn’t help thinking that, the tall fair boy with his attentive ironic watchfulness, ready to joke, the slight dark fey girl leading him after her by an invisible silken cord. If Mark began talking to Marian about work and school, then Tamsin tugged. A raised eyebrow, a low-voiced word left behind her as she exited through a door; with an apologetic glance to Marian, as though he knew she appreciated it couldn’t be any other way, Mark was pulled after. Neither Mark nor Tamsin ever offered any explanation for their suddenly spending so much time together, or any name for their relationship. Their languorous circumnavigations from TV to stereo to garden to bedroom to TV again filled up Marian’s house when they were there, and she found herself skulking in the kitchen or going into her own bedroom to be out of their way.
She dutifully told Mark that his mother was worried and wasn’t happy that he was spending all his time with Tamsin. He reassured her kindly that he was working as hard as ever, but she wasn’t any more convinced than Elaine would have been; there was a distracted dry glitter in his eye that suggested to her the phase of the overturning of goals and idols, the phase of the discovery of secret possibilities so all-altering that in pursuit of them any loyalties could be sacrificed, any assurances given. When school started up again after the summer holidays Mark resumed attending his A-level classes diligently, but while he was listening to her he was sometimes unconsciously smiling at something else.
One day as Marian came in through the front door there was a flash of crimson across the landing at the top of the stairs: Tamsin running out of Marian’s bedroom (the only room with a full-length mirror) in a crimson dress, a stunning full-length dress in clinging satin cut on the cross over her hips, long black beads (Marian’s?) whipping after her. A whirl of Tamsin like a paparazzo’s snatch of film star, loud laughter cut off, a door (Tamsin’s bedroom door) pulled shut with a bang. Left for Marian on the wrong side of the door was the not-quite-quiet of the shut out. From behind the door came, warm and thick as dove song or slow cooking, the burbling of silly talk, the up and down crooning of pleasure: not sex noises, just pleasurable intimacy. For the first time, something was being deliberately hidden from her. She couldn’t exactly stride up and throw open the door upon them, though. After all, they were allowed to do whatever they might choose to do in there.
Marian found herself following an unexpected train of thought. She went to the old toy chest in the TV room and dug out the biscuit tin from the bottom. It had never occurred to her to check the money after she had moved it here; she had only feared a burglary. Now she suddenly thought with puzzlement about what she had been distracted from these last few weeks, worrying about Euan, advertising for and interviewing the new housekeeper. Tam-sin had flickered distractingly on her horizon in a succession of splendid outfits: trouser suits, jeans with skinny T-shirts, a velvet pinafore, a beaded blouse, a short chiffon dress with satin appliqué. Now it occurred to Marian for the first time to ask how she had possibly been able to afford these—and her share of rent and bills and food money—when she only seemed to be working half her usual hours. It had seemed a sort of conjuring trick or a sort of genius, something beautiful youth could do that wasn’t for dingy middle age to question.
She knelt on the carpet in the TV room and opened her father’s slightly rusted old biscuit tin, breaking a fingernail on it. She tipped the money out. More money had gone, much much more; Marian’s hands were so sweaty and shaking so nervously and her thoughts were racing so fast that she couldn’t focus to count it properly; she kept on making piles of notes and then forgetting how much was in each pile and having to recount them. Perhaps a thousand pounds was gone altogether, a whole thousand pounds; only because she was so upset she didn’t trust herself to have done her sums properly, she had better start again. When she started counting again she began to cry, rather loudly and excessively, as if there was a point to this crying and it was not quite for herself alone; and after a while the crying took over and she gave up counting. She wiped her soaking face and runny nose on an old blouse of hers that had been folded on top of her workbasket, waiting to have its button sewn on and a rip mended.
Someone put a hand on her arm.
Crouched on her haunches opposite where Marian had collapsed was Tamsin, changed out of the crimson dress into leggings and baggy T-shirt: Tamsin peering at her with a mixture of dismay and, ready close behind it, annoyance.
—Mum, for God’s sake! It’s only money.
But it wasn’t only money. It was the flash of a crimson dress, and the door banged shut.
* * *
MARIAN HAD A DREAM. It was such a blessed dream; she tried to explain it to her father. They had a morning’s respite from his pains and his troubles (his eyes were too bad, he had had to give up writing the Dostoevski book). They seemed to have found a live-in housekeeper who was suitable, although Marian could already see the fault lines along which
the arrangement would fracture: Dana filled the flat with expensive bunches of flowers (like a funeral, Euan said) and called him sweetheart and poppet. She had pretty eyes and a strong jaw and favored pastel dresses; Marian suspected she might be a transsexual and wondered if Euan suspected it too, and whether he’d mind.
It was Saturday, Dana’s day off: Marian made them both coffee.
—I was in a meadow. I know in the dream that’s what I called it, though I also thought pré, like the French. Anyway, it was a lovely meadow full of long grass, all different species of grass, and hundreds of kinds of flowers, sloping away out of sight in the sunlight, and everywhere you looked there were butterflies, hundreds and thousands of them, beautiful ones, rare ones, going from flower to flower collecting nectar, and then when you looked closer there were little animals too, all kinds of species mixed together, hares and field mice and little black foxlike things with big ears—that was because someone at school was talking about seeing fennec foxes at the zoo. And then I saw there was something dangling in the grass; there’d been some sort of fall—if you can imagine that on a perfectly fine day—like an ice storm, and hanging in the long grass were these ice medallions, perfect and transparent like glass but formed in the shape of pictures, perfect tiny pictures, of deer and castles and dogs and trees. And I knew it was a paradox—I knew the really amazing thing was that they had been accidentally arrived at, in nature, these perfect representations. I knew that once I’d seen these, it had to change everything I believed about the world and about what was possible.
But Euan looked at her confusedly, and she had to give up her attempt to explain how it had charmed her and made her happy when she woke up, and how it was still with her now, like a dispensation, a sign of reassurance whose explicit meaning lay just out of reach.
