by Tessa Hadley
She said, I’m so lucky.
He said, I’m not doing so badly either, am I?
And she was grateful for that.
But the last time it happened, he and Helly were already supposed to be back together again, and Clare found out months afterward that Helly knew what had happened between her and Danny, and it was another tangle between them, in which both of them claimed to feel betrayed, although in the end surely whatever justice one claimed was only straw in the blast of the jungle law of sex attraction that had nothing to do with justice.
Always, in that teenage time, Clare had to submit to this cruel law that poured all the kingdoms of the earth, it seemed, into the already overflowing laps of the beautiful ones. Helly found herself tall and blond and slender and golden-skinned with a wide astonishing red mouth, and Clare found herself short and round-shouldered with black hair that wasn’t sleek but frizzy: and from those accidents all their lives unfolded. The inexorable operation of that law was a thing almost too terrible to directly contemplate, so there was always a muffled hopefulness one lived in, and then certain long nights of searing recognition that in fact worse than the worst one had dreaded was true. Once, in an elaborate solitary ceremony, Clare, dressed in the Victorian cotton nightdress Naomi had given her for Christmas, burned in a candle a list of the names of the boys she had loved (and a couple of men, including the French teacher still), renouncing all hopes of them and of any imaginable lover. She kept the ashes in a little silver pillbox. It was a long list, for age seventeen. She had a gift for loving boys. It was Helly who had the gift for being loved.
You didn’t get both gifts at once, it seemed.
It was Helly (in spite of her belief in the guardian of the stump) who seemed to keep a perpetual reserve of irony and disdain in relation to male qualities. Clare (in spite of having the Greenham Common protests in her background) loved the expertise and seriousness of boys, their deep real interest in other things: vehicles, politics, machines, music, drugs even. You knew when girls weren’t there boys felt relieved at being able to talk undistractedly. Male seriousness was authentic, Clare believed then, in a way female seriousness wasn’t. Most interests girls had seemed to be pretenses put on and off to attract boys; their abject fascination with sex relationships sapped the truth from every other subject. Her own passionate love for books did not count for freedom, it was too muddled with her life, she was searching too feverishly in her reading to learn how to live and what to be: things boys just knew without searching. The best you could hope for was to be able to break in on male objectivity and bathe in it cleansingly: what you desired was that the authenticating look of male seriousness would actually come to rest on all you were and make you real.
* * *
AND NOW, because adulthood turned out to offer all kinds of redress to the inexorable teenage law, Clare was arriving on the train at Paddington. Inside her carefully chosen adulterous costume—her loose black crepe jacket, charity-shop pink silky shirt, and baggy black trousers—her new underwear slithered strangely. When she shifted on the seat she smelled her own warmed body and wafts of the orangey perfume she had sprayed on her wrists and her neck in the bedroom at home that morning. She had sat as far away as she could from any families with small children; she had unpacked her book from her briefcase—she was rereading L’Éducation Sentimentale—and then couldn’t concentrate on her reading but looked out of the window all the way. She had thought about Rosanette telling Frederic as they drove in the forests of Fontainebleau how she was first sold to a man when she was fifteen; she had thought about Flaubert telling Louise Colet in a letter that he had just finished writing the “Big Fuck” between Emma and Rodolphe in Madame Bovary, among the trees while their horses waited. She had fallen asleep once. The sky outside the train window was powder blue with faint drifts of cloud as though it had milk stirred in; she filled with the imagined embraces of lovers all the woody dells, tipped with the first bronzes of autumn, of the resplendent sunlit England that rolled to the horizon on either side from where the train divided it, straight and speeding as an arrow. She had sat deliberately at a table of men—a student and a businessman with a laptop—because she didn’t want to be drawn into the kind of conversation friendly women had, offering little hostages from family and home in an exchange of decencies, flying the safe white flag.
This time there could be no mistake between her and David. They had said too much on the telephone for either of them to understand what she had come for any other way. The train stopped outside the station for five minutes; the passengers looked onto a blackened wall patterned with a relief of arches, draped with thick ropes of black cables, painted at intervals with numbers in old white paint. Pale weeds had taken root in the mortar between the bricks. Then the train eased, groaning, alongside the platform.
David was waiting for her where they had arranged, near the foreshortened little statue of Brunel; she saw him before he saw her. He was wearing a shirt she immediately didn’t like, with short sleeves and a fifties retro motif of trellis and grapes in black brush strokes against yellow and green; it tipped the strong planes of his face, the carved prominent cheekbones and jaw, almost into foolishness. He had his shades pushed up, too, into his thick brush of dark hair. She wondered at once, of course, why it was him she had chosen. But then she had prepared exactly for all this, gone over and over the sequence of emotions she must expect: doubt and distance, panic and regret. She was quite prepared even to feel at moments the absolute conviction that she was making a most terrible mistake. None of this must confuse her into forfeiting her chance.
—Hey, babe, he said.
It was all right: he stepped toward her, his expression lit up, he took her in, she looked good (she had starved herself, to be thin; she was hungry now).
—Hey, she said.
She knew they mustn’t wait to kiss; she slid herself into his arms with a movement she had imagined at home but had not been quite sure she would execute with this sureness, this gliding feeling of two fluid pieces locking into their fitted place against one another. He was scorchingly hot where they pressed together.
—Clare, he said, stroking her hair: not asking her anything, but as if he weighed her name. That was very gratifying. She thought, He must have dwelled on my name and sometimes used it deliberately, just as I’ve used his.
He had kissed her before, so she was prepared for the wetness of his mouth and the taste of cigarettes. They stood and kissed for several minutes; he was about her height (Bram was taller). She hung with both arms around his neck; he held her with one hand cupped behind her head and the other, with spread fingers, around her waist, squeezing and pressing, working down until he was molding and pressing her bottom. They began to forget where they were. He pulled his mouth away from her with a gasp.
—Shall we go back to my place? he said. You know Helly’s away. Shall we go now? Why don’t we? We’ll get a cab.
She looked up at the pigeons flying under the roof; Brunel’s vault was turning, swooping rhythmically down past her as if she were drunk.
—There’s no hurry. She laughed, exulting. We can wait just one more hour. I’m so hungry, I’ll fall over if we don’t have lunch.
She couldn’t quite have named the pleasure it was, to stretch out to its utmost the last hour before she had what she came for.
* * *
HELLY ARRIVED at the house just as Bram was packing up the few things for his trip. He had been pulling out the tent from the back of the cupboard in the spare room; when the doorbell rang he sat back, banging his head painfully against the shelf above, and cursed, and almost decided not to answer it.
Helly was the last person on earth he was expecting to see.
She was so far from his thoughts that for a moment he hardly recognized her; also, she wasn’t dressed up in one of her usual spectacular outfits, she was wearing some big shapeless dark sweater and her face wasn’t made up. Her usual beauty—which he thought of, if he thought of it a
t all, as a kind of remote and dazzling performance in a genre that was of no interest to him—was quenched. She looked ordinary: ordinary and, in some indefinite way that rang a vague alarm, perhaps unhappy or ill.
—Hello, Bram.
—God: Helly, why didn’t you phone? Clare’s not here. She’s away for the weekend.
She couldn’t have come at a worse time; he was all ready, he wanted to get going. He had an exasperated sinking sense that he would be obliged to go through the sociable motions, invite her in, talk with her, perhaps even feed her; and all the while he would be raging inwardly, longing to be alone, stricken with visions of the little sandy field with rowan trees behind the dunes at Ogmore where he planned to put up his tent the first night. Although he already knew he would submit to those wretched laws of sociability—not his laws, but laws whose authority he conceded in the world of Clare and Clare’s friends—he didn’t yet move from his position at the door.
—So what are you doing down here?
—Oh. Oh, she said. So Clare’s not here. And she executed a funny little turn on her feet, looking behind her, twisting her long mouth in a stricken way that put him on his guard: she was portentous with something, with trouble, with scenes, with confidences.
—I’m so sorry. She’s staying at a B and B in London tonight, so she can get lots of work in at the library. You should have phoned. I’m just on my way out. I’ve got to go.
—So you’re here with the kids?
—No: the kids are at Clare’s mum’s.
—That’s such a shame: I really wanted to see them.
—Why don’t you go round to Marian’s? She’d love to see you, and she’d be delighted at a bit of adult solidarity, I should think. He hoped he didn’t sound too relieved as this solution to her appearance presented itself; he even stepped back slightly into the hall and opened the door wider, as if to distract her attention from how eager he was for her to go.
—Can’t I come in?
He sighed; he submitted.
The house looked strange to him as they walked through it: empty of all the presences whose signs still filled it with mute clamor, the usual litter of the children’s toys and drawings, Clare’s desk with its piles of library books built up like walls around her sacrosanct working space.
Helly sat cross-legged and straight-backed in the armchair in the living room and lit a cigarette; he hated smoking, he had to find a saucer for her to use as an ashtray. She talked to him while he made her tea. She always talked as if she were in public, laughing and finding startling and original things to say. Bram’s role was to react as if he was slightly perplexedly amused by her, but he wasn’t sure if he really thought her amusing. She said she was down visiting her parents at Poynton for the weekend: she described to him the effect she had in the Close when she arrived in her leathers on her motorbike. My mother said she wished I would invest in a nice little Nissan.
—Milk? Sugar?
—Black, please. No: actually, why not? I feel like sugar, milk and sugar, make it really sweet, put two. Three. So: Bram. Where are you so eager to be off to? You can’t wait to get rid of me. Where are you going? Are all these piles of macho-looking outdoor equipment yours?
He felt a visceral reluctance to part with the information: his field, his rowan trees, his deep covering night, pregnant with his absence, awaiting him.
—Work. A field trip.
—D’you mean lots of sweaty biologists with worms in jars singing folk songs in a center?
—One sweaty biologist in a tent, in fact. The worms and the folk songs are my secret.
—Let me come with you, she said, in a suddenly completely different voice.
He stopped still, slopping the tea he was carrying in for her. Don’t be ridiculous.
—Let me come, she said.
—Under no circumstances can you come. Or—he remembered to be courteous—could you possibly want to come, where I’m going.
—Please let me come. I can’t be alone, not tonight. Otherwise I’ll die. Are you really so oblivious? It doesn’t occur to you: if Clare’s in London, why isn’t she visiting me? What am I doing here? Of course it does. I know it does. I know you know what I know about what Clare’s doing in London this weekend.
He felt a kind of rage against her that made his hands shake. Wasn’t this just the sort of thing her set thrived on?
—I’d really rather not talk about this, he said. He handed her the mug of tea; she took a mouthful of it and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater.
—But for God’s sake! Don’t you care? Don’t you want to do something? If your partner is fucking my fucking boyfriend?
—I really don’t want to talk about this with you.
—Then I won’t talk about it. I swear to God I won’t talk about it, I won’t say another word, if you don’t want. But let me come with you, wherever you’re going. I’m not up to anything, honestly. I’ll sleep in the car. I’m not trying to get revenge or anything you might think. I know you don’t like me much. It’s just—if I’m alone I’ll die, I’ll really die.
—How do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you talk like that?
He sat down on the sofa with his head between his hands, fingertips against the temples where he had a headache coming.
—She’s done this to me before, Helly said. A long time ago. I didn’t dream it could happen again. I thought she was so happy, with you and the children.
She held the mug of hot tea in her laced fingers as if she was frozen, the usually pale skin of her cheeks was blotched with red and her big mouth was ugly as it slipped loose with weepy protest.
—I don’t want you to come, he said. I’m sorry. I really want to be alone.
—But let me.
* * *
DAVID TOOK CLARE to a Polish restaurant and they drank cold sweet beer while they waited for their food. She felt the alcohol thud into action instantly, because she had an empty stomach; she told herself to be careful, to drink just enough to unbind her for what was to come, not so much that she made a mess of it or lost any of it in a drunken fog.
Under the table they pressed their knees together. Over the table they smiled at one another with slow-burning smiles, and he took her hand from where she was playing with the packets of sugar and kissed it.
—Very Eastern European, she said. Shall we throw our glasses into the fireplace too?
—Not till we’ve finished our beer.
—When did you remember me? I mean, that we’d known each other before, at that party?
—Known, in the biblical sense.
—In the biblical sense. So, when? I didn’t recognize you at all, when Helly first brought you to the house. I’d never have remembered.
—I remembered. Not straightaway, though there was something nagging at me. Maybe when you changed into that dress. “Something in the way she moved,” as the song says.
—But for God’s sake! I was seventeen and probably dressed as a vampire! I’d have hoped I’d have changed beyond recognition.
—You were nice then, he said. You were a nice vampire. Now, you’re better than nice. I love that little edge that thirty brings. Seventeen’s too bland and formless.
—I’m not thirty, she said. Not quite yet.
—But you’ve got that edge.
It was very exciting to Clare, that he met her with his frank sexual interest in her. Men were supposed to approach you like this, always wanting one thing, but in her experience they mostly did not: you had to pretend to be talking about books, or politics, or telling each other your life stories, so that the sex could seem to happen inadvertently when you had drunk enough.
While they were eating their blinis with sour cream, someone came into the restaurant who knew David. David jumped up to shake hands with him and punch his arm, saying it was great to see him, inviting him to sit down with them. Clare guessed from this that the man—Nick—knew Helly too and that David was embarrassed that he had found them togethe
r.
Nick gave Clare a qualified careful smile as he sat down.
—This is Clare, said David. She’s an old friend of Helly’s. She’s up to work at the British Library; I’m entertaining her to lunch. This is Nick, the video whiz kid, worked on Helly’s ice-cream contract and he’s done some shows with me, the one with the band in Vienna.
—Nice to meet you, said Nick, more unreservedly.
—And you. Clare smiled warmly.
Inwardly she was appalled. What was David doing? He had given away too much, too eagerly. And he had invited this stranger to sit down with them, to spoil their delicious flirtation; she felt as if she had been dragged out from a snug secret sensual cocoon into cold hostile air, to stand on her own two uncertain feet. How long might it take to get rid of him? Hot tears welled up in her eyes; she had to pretend to wipe her nose with her paper napkin. She realized she was drunker than she had thought.
Nick was nice-looking and softly spoken, with self-deprecating private school know-how. He ordered beer and a sausage and sauerkraut; he ate it while they drank their coffee and plum brandy. Clare wanted to get up when she had finished her coffee and say that she must get back to the library now, but she was afraid David wouldn’t find the right way of explaining that he was coming with her, so she sat paralyzed, painfully conscious of the time spilling away and soaked up in conversation. Her alibi was less plausible, too, for every five minutes she sat on.
