by Tessa Hadley
—Because, you see, I have Daddy, she had explained to him once; so that he understood what a weighty counterbalance Daddy was to all the difficulties she struggled with. (He visualized this very literally: Graham’s six foot three to Naomi’s five foot two.) And then, when Toby was twelve, Graham left Naomi and went to live with the woman who became his third wife, Linda, so there was no counterbalance any more.
Tamsin had given up her job at a ticket agency, so in the mornings once Naomi had gone out Tamsin and Toby had the run of the house together. They got up late and cooked themselves extravagant breakfasts: curried scrambled eggs on toast and fruit salad with crème fraîche; fresh rolls filled with bacon and mushrooms cooked with garlic and parsley. When they finished eating, Tamsin took laxative powders; she explained to Toby that she needed to stay slim.
—Everybody does it, she said. And I might get a job modeling, like Helly.
—I thought Marian said you were thinking of doing A levels and going to college?
—Oh, that’s just to keep stalling her so she doesn’t hassle me about the rent and bills. No way am I going back to studying at twenty-six. What I want is a job that will earn me lots and lots of money and be really piss-easy. Like lying around having photographs taken of me.
It was easy to imagine that someone might want to take photographs of Tamsin. Toby could see there was something formidable in her looks that made people stare. She didn’t have boyfriends, though; or, rather, there had been one boyfriend, years ago, when Tamsin was at her teenage wildest. He had died of a drug overdose, and she had had a baby that was stillborn; that was when she had come home from the squatter’s place they had lived in to be with Marian.
—And what are you going to do, Toby?
—Oh, I’m going to go up to London and look around. Make some contacts, find a place to live, find some work to pay the bills, volunteer as a runner for some film project or other on my days off.…
But for a few weeks he made no move to go. This list of achievements he had set for himself sounded improbably difficult; he was not quite sure what sequence they would need to be attacked in, and in the meantime it was so comfortable in Marian’s house, where he and Tamsin watched television in the afternoons and then Marian or Naomi or Clare came in and cooked them supper.
* * *
IN THE EVENINGS the house filled up with some or all of its women. They took turns cooking, and Toby ate. Tamsin often refused to eat with them, Clare—if she was there—had no appetite, Naomi never ate much, Marian was afraid to put on weight: so Toby, who had come back from India even skinnier than he had gone away, demolished plateful after plateful to their immense gratification.
—He sings a little song while he’s eating if he’s really enjoying it, said Naomi. He doesn’t know he’s doing it. I always listen out for that.
After supper when the dishwasher was gurgling, Marian and Clare, if Clare wasn’t spending the evening with her children, would sometimes sit together at the kitchen table by the big pink-shaded lamp. Marian marked schoolbooks, Clare was working on her thesis on George Sand, reading and making notes and looking things up in the dictionary. Sometimes Naomi sat with them too, doing her needlepoint. Tamsin watched television; if she came through the kitchen to fetch herself a Diet Coke, the cat draped contentedly across her shoulders, she cast a look of withering disapproval at the congregation around the table. Sometimes she went out to choir practice. Sometimes someone—a male someone—telephoned for her, but she told Marian to say she was not in, and Marian sighed and lied, obediently and unconvincingly.
One night Toby brought his video camera downstairs and filmed the three women sitting at the table. They all protested—Marian, who was normally so calm, was flustered with dismay at the thought of having her picture taken—and then for a while held their faces self-consciously before they forgot about him. They weren’t talking much. Naomi, with her head bent to count the holes, pulled her thread with a soothing rasp through her canvas, stretched taut across a frame. Marian went patiently over and over a routine of ticking and correcting, and the pile of books on her right hand grew taller while the pile on her left diminished. Clare read with a willed absorption, frowning and moving restlessly in her chair as if she wanted to get inside the book.
—Why don’t you find somewhere more comfortable to read, darling? asked Marian.
—I like it here by you.
You could catch a sort of circling of glances and gestures and smiles around the table. Marian squeezed Clare’s hand or lent her a tissue or a pen; they passed Naomi’s sewing from hand to hand to admire it. Naomi made coffee and they took a break. Marian talked about a friend at school who had had a mastectomy and was trying to persuade her to come to yoga classes. Naomi told them about a jacket she’d seen in Monsoon and was tempted by. She also mentioned a flat she’d heard about through a friend at work, which might be possible for her.
—Which friend was that? asked Clare.
—Oh, just the bloke who runs the cellar, really nice actually. He’s just come out of a gay relationship like me, and he’s trying to decide what it was all about. We’ve been comparing notes.
—Naomi, said Clare, don’t get involved with renting a flat or anything from a friend. You know how these things end up.
—Oh, it’s OK, nothing like that, said Naomi, blushing. Anyway, he’s about fifteen years younger than me.
Clare talked about George Sand coming to stay at Flaubert’s house, and how she got along with his mother. Then she mentioned that Rose, her younger daughter, who was four, had been in trouble at nursery that day.
—Mrs. Worral couldn’t wait to tell me. She’s so ghastly. She gives them pictures of policemen to color in and tells them off if they don’t use blue: believe me. We don’t like her but we like the school, so we think it’s worth keeping Rosie on there. Apparently Rose had offered a sweetie to this little boy that turned out to be a bead from a game or something. So I’m supposed to give Rose a serious talk on the dangers of choking. But the trouble is—
Then Clare suddenly couldn’t go on; she pressed her mouth with her fist, her nose went red, her eyes filled with tears, and her voice changed register.
—The trouble is I don’t want to say anything negative to them at all. I only want to say nice things. I feel so guilty I can’t tell them off. It’s so pathetic.
—Of course you can’t, darling, said Marian.
—Why should you? said Naomi. She was only playing.
—Oh, no, said Clare, recovering herself. Rose actually has a thing against that particular boy. I’m sure she knew it was a bead. I’m sure she meant to choke him, in fact.
When he ran the pictures through on the viewfinder, Toby thought for a moment he could actually see something flowing around the table, like a slight distortion in the tape: a stream flowing between the three women, a stream of kindness, of sympathetic intuition, of wishing one another well.
* * *
IT WAS STRANGE, Marian thought, how during that time the three of them could sit around the table so peacefully in the evenings. The peace was real: although of course she was always worried about Clare and her situation, it was sometimes nonetheless real, and blissful, for half an hour, an hour at a time. In her imagination it even lapped away from where they sat with their heads bent over their work at the table, to wash around and include Toby and Tamsin, whether they wanted it or not: Toby hovering neutrally in that slightly exasperating way he had, as though he imagined he was invisible, all gangling six foot two of him; Tamsin fortified in her hostility in front of the television in the next room. Like a mother hen, she was still warmed by the sensation of her chickens safe under her wings. And just like a dumb imposed-upon hen, her warm sensation of family seemed to have adjusted itself to accommodate even these two others, these interlopers, these ones she had not asked for.
Sometimes, suddenly, like a dark flash exploding on her inner eye right in the middle of all the peace and the pink-shaded light, there came a
picture. She remembered Naomi sitting at another table in another kitchen: this was the kitchen in the house where, a quarter of a century before, Graham (Clare’s and Tamsin’s and Toby’s father) had been in the process of leaving Marian. She could not imagine what Naomi had been doing in that house. She could certainly only have come there once or twice in all that terrible time, which Marian thought of, if she ever thought of it at all now, as a kind of melting down, a humiliating reduction to mush and pulp of all the substance of her flesh and self and personality. It was the only time in her life she had ever tasted anything like that self-abandonment; it was the only way she knew she had inside her—buried deep now under the concrete of everything steadying that had happened since—such a howling thrashing screeching frightful creature.
She could not imagine what Naomi had been doing there in her kitchen, but she knew what Naomi had been wearing, knew the exact words that had come into her head, then, to describe what she was wearing: it was a dress worthy of a princess. She thought that to herself; she didn’t say it. The dress was made in India, when fantastical things were still coming out of India, out of several different brilliant red-patterned prints; the skirt, tied with a sash around her diminutive waist, was vast and long with bands of braid and embroidery at the hem; the bodice and the cuffs of the long sleeves were thickly embroidered. Naomi sat on a tall stool at Marian’s kitchen table. The skirt of the dress fell like a scarlet wing to the floor behind her; she pushed her long black hair back from her pale face, clasped her hands in her lap, and stared desperately ahead. She looked like a suffering saint. It was an ordeal she must have put herself through as some sort of penance. She couldn’t meet Marian’s eyes; perhaps Marian was howling at her. Graham must have been there but Marian couldn’t remember him; Clare and Tamsin must have been upstairs in bed (in bed but surely not asleep, surely listening to their mother losing herself).
Naomi had looked perfect. Marian could see that, that was exactly what she saw. She looked like a princess, an impossible prize, she glowed with helpless involuntary youth and beauty, the clean sharp jawline, the skin like cream, the tiny waist like a stem that could be broken, the small cuppable breasts swelling under her bodice. She must have been twenty. The envy Marian felt was like a hunger, it was like sexual desire, it was as though she were feeling by proxy what her husband must feel, the baffled devouring need to press this perfection to your breast, to penetrate it, to break it open, to find its explanation.
Instead, Marian had picked up the heavy chrome pasta-making machine Graham had given her for Christmas and thrown it at Naomi’s head as hard as she could. Naomi screamed and dodged, and the pasta machine crashed into some china on the table and then onto the floor, where it broke. She hadn’t wanted it for Christmas anyway—how could she, with two small children, possibly want to make her own spaghetti? She had wondered when it was given what message it could have for her, this unwanted unuseful thing that took up so much space. And, oh, yes, at this point Graham came bounding back into the picture from wherever he’d been lurking, consoling and anxious and raising his voice in insufferable protective indignation. Of course it was true that if she hadn’t thrown so clumsily, if the pasta machine hadn’t been quite so awkward to take hold of, she could have killed Naomi. Of course. That was the whole point.
But now she and Naomi, who was not killed, sat at peace at the same table together: what did that mean? What had once mattered so terribly didn’t matter anymore. And now Naomi had ropes of tendon in her neck, her flesh was loosening from under her jaw, she had deeply incised lines under her eyes and beside her nose, she had a little pot belly that showed when she wore tight trousers. She was still sometimes pretty, but the other day Marian had noticed, standing behind her, that on the crown of her head you could see her scalp through her thinning hair. And Naomi feared Tamsin. Tamsin was rude and unfriendly but it wasn’t simply that: Naomi flinched if she had to speak to her or hand her anything, as if the contrast between them—her worn face and hand and Tamsin’s glossy presumptuous youth—was scalding, exposing, something Naomi could not forgive herself.
Marian had always known the story of the lovely lady who shared a body with the old crone (she had imagined a fat sprawled dame with dabs of red and blue marking out a face on shapeless flesh, and wattles in her throat). She had always understood the point of it: as you are, so was I once; as I am, so will you be. Like mother-in-law jokes: the mother-in law dreaded and ridiculed because she is what the wife will become. But she used to think there were a thousand years, a lifetime, between the two kinds of women. Probably when she threw the pasta maker she thought there were a thousand years between the imperturbable beauty of her husband’s student and herself, overweight, sagging, lapsed into a mess of maternity, her hair already turning gray. These days she saw things in a different time scale. She knew that for the crone to change places with the lovely lady took almost no time at all, although you never saw it: it happened while you looked the other way.
* * *
ONE NIGHT NAOMI was ill. She had been drinking—she had stayed on at the bar after her shift at work. She was sick in her bed, and Marian had to change her sheets while she retched in the bathroom.
—It must be something I’ve eaten, she insisted woodenly. She kept on retching long after there was anything to bring up except a dark slime. Toby wiped her face with a flannel. Tamsin banged on the bathroom door and insisted she wanted a bath, could they please hurry up.
When finally Naomi was asleep, Toby sat cross-legged on his bed in Tamsin’s room and rolled up. Primly Tamsin, cross-legged on her own bed, frowned at him, tearing papers and sprinkling tobacco.
—I need to relax, he said.
—I disapprove.
—I keep having these dreams.
—What dreams?
—Well, not exactly dreams. That is, I’m not asleep, exactly. Sometimes it just happens when I’m walking upstairs.
—For God’s sake, Toby, what need have you for chemical stimulants if you’re already out of your mind? What kind of dreams?
—I’m carrying that girl: the one who died in the accident.
—Carrying her?
—Just carrying her. I can feel the weight of her in my arms. Her head’s sort of lolling down one side. She’s all wrapped up in something; I can’t see her face.
—And where are you carrying her to?
—I’m just carrying her. And then I’m up at the top of the stairs and it fades out, only there’s a sort of flickering light and I’m all pouring with sweat.
—You complete idiot.
—I suppose it’s because I probably did cause her death.
—What are you talking about?
—Two separate possibilities. I was sitting behind her. I was thrown forward when we hit the post. I probably broke her neck then. And then I moved her from the car, not thinking. You shouldn’t move spinal injuries. Perhaps if I hadn’t moved her, she’d have had a chance.
—Have you talked about this to anybody?
—Just to you.
—No, I mean these medical things. Do you know for certain how she broke her neck, for instance? Or whether she should have been moved?
—It wasn’t really like that. Everything was so mixed up. Nobody seemed interested in how it had happened. I think maybe one of the other girls thought it, about me being thrown forward; she said something about it, maybe, in Dutch, to the others. That’s all.
—But it wasn’t your fault, anyway: even if it was true. And you don’t understand Dutch.
—No, of course not.
—So you shouldn’t have those dreams.
—No.
Tamsin sat thinking while Toby lit up and smoked.
—I know a way, she said. We have to put our pajamas on. And clean your teeth. I can’t stand the smell of smoke.
When he came back from the bathroom she was sitting on her sheet with the duvet draped over her head like a tent. Come in here, she said. It’s like the games we used to
have.
—You’re ridiculous, he said. I’m six foot two.
—Come on. Trust me. Put the light out, I’ve got my bike light.
Toby didn’t really have pajamas. He put on some old sweatpants; then he climbed in under the duvet with Tamsin, bending his back and stooping his head so he didn’t wreck the tent. The bike light lit her up improbably: she held it under her chin so that her face was a leering mask, then buried it in the duvet so they were in the dark. She put her arms round his neck and her mouth close to his ear; her flesh was as he remembered it; it was cool and firm and smelled of something like fruit.
—I’ve got a secret too, she whispered. Do you know I can’t do sex? Since Lu and the baby died. I’ve tried but I can’t. I just sort of seize up; my muscles clamp together. It’s got a medical name, I looked it up.
—No. No, he said. I didn’t know that.
—Nobody knows. I just thought I’d tell you. That boy who calls; that’s why I have to put him off. He just thinks I don’t like him anymore.
—You could get help.
—Can you imagine? Some hairy doctor. The idea makes me sick.
—Shouldn’t you talk to your mum, or Clare?
—Marian and Clare? What do they know? Look at the mess they’ve made of everything. Everything anyone in this family’s ever done is shit; it disgusts me, it all makes me sick. The past makes me sick.
—So what are you going to do?
—I invented this magic.
—How do you mean, magic?
—Don’t be scared.
She picked up the bike light and reached a battered leather wallet from under her pillow.
