Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  The children peered into her face incredulously.

  —Mum, don’t be stupid, said Coco, embarrassed for her.

  —Mum’s stupid, said Rose, glad to distract attention from her own mistake.

  Lily slipped her bare hand inside Clare’s sodden knitted glove and squeezed her fingers. Come on, Mummy darling, she said. We have to be brave.

  —I don’t want to be brave, said Clare. She held up her face in the dark to the rain, taking her punishment. I can’t. I give up. It’s all my fault.

  * * *

  THAT SAME MORNING at eleven o’clock she had felt very differently about things. She had had a meeting with Tony Kieslowski, her supervisor for her PhD. Tony was in his thirties, single, American, plump, with soft eyes in a bruise-colored slack face, shoulder-length dark hair curling onto his collar: his appearance faintly reminiscent of the Romantic poets he specialized in. Clare had noticed this tendency of literary specialists toward a physical resemblance to their subjects: modernists in crumpled linen suits and James Joyce glasses, Jamesians with paunches and waistcoats and pocket watches, Plath fanatics with alpha-grade bright faces and long gathered skirts. She hadn’t liked Tony at first. He was always phoning to cancel meetings they had arranged—sometimes he even forgot they had arranged them and didn’t turn up—and she had thought him self-important, probably because he didn’t register the bright gift of intelligence she brought to unwrap at his feet and impress him. He was abrasive and opinionated; she heard from other students how he was resented and disliked.

  Recently, though, she’d found herself taking pleasure in how genuinely distracted and disorganized he was: it made her imagine a life so different from her life with the children, where thought had to be fitted into little discrete spaces inside her routine. She imagined the slow ripening of Tony’s ideas in a rich vegetable chaos, uninterrupted by the petty necessities of mealtimes and housework. When she came to his office he would clear a space for her to sit by removing a heap of papers from a chair and then wouldn’t know where to put them down among the dead plants and cold coffee cups and mountains of other papers, so he’d stand holding on to them while he started to talk. He loved to talk. She loved it too, especially these abstract subjects: about genius (he scoffed and deconstructed the idea of genius, she defended it), about wilderness (he was susceptible to the idea of wilderness, she was skeptical), about the sublime. It was true that occasionally her mind wandered when he went on for a long time, and she waited impatiently to get her chance to speak. But she supposed that his eagerness to talk to her must mean he had begun to intuit her responsive intelligence, worthily matched with his.

  It had been raining this morning while she was in his office, rain was running down the big window overlooking the smeary gray-washed city and overflowing a gutter splashily in some courtyard four stories below. The screen-saver on Tony’s computer was an underwater scene too, with little fishes and big sharks slipping in and out of the weeds. When he offered to telephone her with the title of a book he couldn’t find, she gave him her new number, told him she was separating from her partner. She had waited for the right moment so she could drop this information offhandedly and ironically, making herself and her life sound colorful and dangerous.

  —Oh, he’d said in concern, and put down the pile of papers unheedingly onto an apple core on his desk. I’m sorry. Am I sorry? I don’t know why one feels obliged to say that. Maybe this is good news. Is it what you want?

  He was quaintly disconcerted, as if he doubted his competence as an academic to make adequate responses to this lick of trouble from out of real life.

  —What I want? she said. Isn’t that the oldest riddle? If we knew what women wanted.…

  And she had laughed as if she had said something poignant and plucky and at the same time faintly suggestive.

  Out on the road in the dark and the rain she was remembering this moment: the coziness of the underwater light in the little room; the open poetry books; the sense of their being marooned there together amid the waters, outside the world; the warm curl of possibility that a flirtation had begun, no more than that, nothing that needed to be thought through or faced, just a wriggle of pleasuring possibility that could swim in and out of stern realities irresponsibly as a fish. The memory seemed to her vivid yet remote, as if an aristocrat in a filthy torn shift on her way to the guillotine were to remember drinking chocolate out of fine porcelain among satin pillows: she thought of it not only with regret and incredulity but with accusation too. There might be some causal connection between the oblivious prodigal pleasures of that luxury and this punishment now.

  * * *

  A FEW MINUTES’ WALK farther on from where Clare sat in the road and wanted to give up, Coco found a gate and a rough track and a sign advertising BED AND BREAKFAST, 50 YARDS. The house must have been hidden behind trees in a little hollow; halfway along the stony track they could suddenly see all its lights: pink velvety light through drapes behind diamond-paned leaded windows, a carriage lamp beside a front door between clipped dwarf cypresses. It looked like a house people had retired to, not a working farm.

  A man opened the door before they’d even reached it; he must have heard them coming and been mystified to hear children’s voices at such a time of night.

  —I’m so sorry to bother you, called out Clare. She was astonished at how, out of near disintegration, it was possible to summon such a sensible-sounding, ringingly middle-class, confidence-inspiring self. Our car broke down. I was afraid to leave the children. My phone batteries were low. Could I possibly use your phone to call the AA?

  He let them advance closer before he responded; wondering whether to shut the door on them and activate the alarms, Clare thought, in case they were part of some kind of trickery, the softening advance party of something sinister and criminal concealed in the bushes.

  —How many of you are there?

  —Just me and the three little ones.

  —You’d better come in then.

  —We’re so wet. I’m embarrassed to drip all over your floor.

  —It’s all right. The porch is tiled.

  They crowded into the tiny little entrance porch and both girls began to cry quietly, probably with relief at the light and warmth. The man shut the door rather hastily behind them. He was short with the springy slimness of someone who exercised; his face was tanned and crinkled, his hair was slicked back from a receding hairline, he was wearing check slippers. He smelled faintly of whisky, and there was jazz music—Glenn Miller?—playing in the house behind.

  He looked at them in perplexity. They must be a dismal sight; water was already making pools on the porch floor. His house, to judge by the porch, was probably immaculately clean and tidy: coats were hung by their loops on a rail, the tongue-and-groove walls were ornamented with painted horseshoes and dried flower pictures, there was potpourri in a miniature basket tied with ribbon.

  —My wife’s not here, he said. She’s away for a few days. How long have you been out in this?

  —Oh, not that long. It’s just that kind of rain, it soaks you through.

  Clare tried to explain where they’d left the car and the way they’d come.

  —It took about twenty-five minutes, Coco said. I checked.

  —Rose ran out in front of a car, said Lily.

  —I saved her life, added Coco casually.

  Clare wished she’d arranged with the children in advance not to give her away; she prayed they wouldn’t tell how she’d sworn at them and cried and sat in the road. She needed the man to have faith that she was adult and competent.

  —All I have to do is to phone the AA, she said brightly and optimistically. I’ll give you the money for the phone. Then maybe we could just wait in your porch till they come.

  —Perhaps if you take off your shoes and hang up your coat, he said. The phone’s in the hall. He looked at the children and sighed. I suppose you’d all better take off your things. It’s going to take time before the AA get here. Yo
u’d better come in and get dry.

  * * *

  THE CHILDREN sat in a row at the pine breakfast bar in the kitchen drinking tea with sugar, looking like the bedraggled survivors of the wreck of some ship from exotic lands: their eyes were huge and dark-ringed; their hair was plastered to their heads or drying in wild curls; they seemed to be wearing particularly gaudy and unsuitable clothes. Rose at some point before they left home must have exchanged her sensible top for a pink sleeveless sequined T-shirt: around her neck was the filthy last scrap of her Superman cape.

  The AA were going to take an hour at least.

  —It did say bed-and-breakfast on the gate, said Clare. I’ve got my checkbook and card. There isn’t any way that we can stay, officially? I mean, otherwise I feel too embarrassed about this.

  —My wife does the bed-and-breakfasts, said the man gloomily. Actually, there’s a NO VACANCIES sign. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to do you a cooked breakfast. Or make up the beds.

  —We don’t even like cooked breakfast! Clare exclaimed. And I can make the beds. But we’ll pay you the full price. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll clear up after us. If you showed us the bedroom we could just keep out of your way.

  —Won’t they want to eat? he asked.

  —Oh, no, we’ve eaten, Clare lied. She thought of the chocolate and sweets they could share once they had their room, and willed the children not to protest or ask for anything. They seemed intuitively to know how to perform the submissive and needy children role required for her act as responsible adult: Rose’s head was even drooping pathetically forward onto the table in sleep.

  He capitulated, not terribly graciously, to the inevitable. Well, there is a family room you could have, I suppose, although I’ve no idea what state it’s in, I don’t go in there. Probably it’s all right. She keeps everything very clean.

  Unmistakably he was a man adrift in a woman’s house: he picked things up warily, opened the cupboards and used the kettle and found the milk with a frown of irritated unusedness, surprised at finding himself going through these motions of service. If he had grandchildren—he was the sort of age where you expect grandchildren—he had certainly never looked after them: he poured scalding-hot tea the same for everyone, in china cups. Clare had surreptitiously to top them off under the cold tap.

  The house was old and rambling but done up, overdone: a thick tide of fitted carpet and knickknacks had overflowed into every nook and corner. Going upstairs they had to pick their way past nests of tables, lamps with pleated fringed shades, displays of horse brasses, baby-sized wicker chairs, a collection of miniature silhouettes, a cabinet of china thimbles, vases of silk flowers. Lily was smitten with a display of collectable teddies in an alcove. Up under the roof was a big low-beamed pink room with a double bed, two single beds, a television, and a scatter of those wornout ornaments people put in a room they never use themselves. The man brought Clare a pile of flowery sheets, irritably flustered as to whether they were singles or doubles. She fiddled with unfolding them, pretending she could tell.

  —Is your wife away somewhere nice? she asked. The woman’s presence in her house was as overwhelming as if she’d stood large and loud among the ornaments in the corner of each landing. Staying with friends?

  —Friends of hers. What are you going to do about your things?

  —The kids will be delighted with a night off from tooth-brushing. And we’ll just sleep in our underclothes. She suddenly blushed. I mean they can. I’ll get my bag when I go with the AA man.

  He came back in a few minutes with something else for her: a nightdress to match the house, layered and florid with a huge tulip pattern in pink and blue and a blue satin ribbon threaded through broderie anglaise at the neck.

  —You could get inside that twice over, he said. But I suppose it’ll be better than nothing, so to speak.

  He was very deadpan; Clare didn’t know quite how much she was supposed to acknowledge the risqué joke, if it was a joke.

  * * *

  SHE SAT WITH HIM in the sitting room while she was waiting for the AA, and she decided he might be quite drunk, quietly drunk. She and her disaster had intruded on a solitary pleasure ritual, with his whisky and his jazz; perhaps he did this every night while his wife was away.

  —Actually, she’s left me, he told her. Again.

  —Again?

  —She goes every six months or so. It makes for a funny kind of marriage. She’s not my first wife. Or my second, for that matter. I’ve no objection to her going off. But there is a down side to the arrangement.

  —Well, I should think so. It must be very emotionally draining.

  —Which is that she comes back.

  —Oh, I see.

  Clare could see he might have been a charmer, to have several wives. He had the crinkled-up eyes of someone habitually socially humorous and one of those dark quick faces that might have been as appealing as an alert little bird; she thought of a sort of charm formed in an era when men murmured dangerous sharp things into the ears of women with bare shoulders and dangling earrings whose role it was to be shocked and excited. He had no illusions that it would work with her, nor any interest in her beyond the most perfunctory. He didn’t even offer her a whisky.

  The sitting room was done in gold, with gold and pink upholstery and pink velvet curtains; a contemporary landscape in oils hung above the teak fireplace, lit from above by a brass strip light as if it were in an exhibition. Clare worried that her wet jeans might leave a stain on the cushions of the sofa. She was curious about how the man accommodated himself inside the shell of his absent wife’s taste. He was submissive to her arrangements, using her coasters for his glass, fetching the dustpan for some ash that fell from the end of his slim panatella: obedient but perhaps resentful. The music (not Glenn Miller but Duke Ellington; Clare read the CD cover) coiled out of the stereo system like a snake of dissent, a last word unanswerable because spoken in an unknown language. His privacy merely used the convenience of the place so lovingly-smotheringly put together.

  —Do you like jazz? he asked her.

  —I don’t know much about it. I like John Coltrane, and Miles Davis.

  She had said the wrong thing—or the right thing. He gave her a smile from behind his smoke that made her know she had given herself away somehow; he had set her a test of taste that he was pleased she had failed.

  * * *

  CLARE DIDN’T NEED to go out with the AA man. He found the car, looked at the engine, arranged for it to be towed away, and gave her a telephone number for the garage. She phoned her mother and arranged for her to come and collect them from the bed-and-breakfast in the morning; they’d drive on to the cottage and Marian would stay with them for the weekend.

  —Do you want me to come and get you now? Marian asked.

  —Oh, no, it’s much too late, we’re fine here for the night.

  But when she put the phone down she felt a pain of childish homesickness and fear of the strange place. The house made her breathless and hot, as if it were hermetically sealed. There was no lock on the inside of the door of the family room. She undressed hastily and, overcoming an instinctive distaste, pulled the other woman’s nightdress over her head. It was huge on her: ludicrous and demeaning, changing her from herself, as she verified in the mirror in the tiny damp-smelling connected bathroom. There was also a streak of mud on her cheek, which must have been there all the time she sat downstairs. She would far rather have slept in her T-shirt and pants, but she submitted to the humiliation of the nightdress as if the man exacted it as a price for the inconvenience she had caused him. She spread out her clothes alongside the children’s on the radiators, rubbed at her teeth with a finger wet under the tap. Her hair was drying in frizzy chunks and she had no brush.

  The children’s heads on their pillows were cast about in exaggerated abandonment to sleep. They snored and groaned. At the low casement window, where she had forgotten to draw the curtains, a huge nursery-rhyme moon rolled out of
the clouds. She pushed at the window but couldn’t work out how to unfasten the catch and didn’t want to make a noise; if she pressed her face to the cool glass she could hear the rain, which dripped off the trees and was swallowed up by the soft earth.

  Behind her, outside the door of the room, a floorboard creaked.

  She didn’t ever seriously, really, think the man was coming for her.

  But she held her breath long enough for the whole spectrum of possibilities to reel through her awareness: the unlikeliness of his trying anything with all the children in the room; his having drunk so much that such a rational consideration wouldn’t deter him; the reassurance that her mother knew where she was; that compromising nightdress, as if he might mistake her having put it on for an invitation. As for his disdain for her, that could work either way: could make him not want to touch her with a barge pole or could make him need to punish her for being—what?—young, ugly, indifferent to him? Or simply for being female.

  Needless to say, at one far end of the spectrum of possibilities there flashed the irresistibly lurid vision of him standing out there with a shining machete and a homicidal light in his eyes, intending to hack them all to pieces.

  She felt—not in her heart exactly, but in the pit of her chest where lungs and heart lift above the material base of the guts—the clench of that inward gesture that must be the beginning of praying. She wished she could pray. There was a movement outward from inside her, a beseeching, like a sick-making flutter of trapped wings.

  —Help me, she tried, silently. The hills from whence cometh my help. I’m making such a mess of things. Yet will I fear no evil, thy rod and staff still comfort me.…

  There was only that one giveaway creak from outside the door. If the man was ever there, he went away again.

  Prayer addressed itself involuntarily, it seemed, to a male auditor: “rod and staff” gave the game away. Whatever goddesses she knew—Isis, Artemis, Aphrodite, Kali—she only knew vaguely from books. She couldn’t talk to them: and anyway, capricious, ruthless, vain, requiring flattering propitiations, they weren’t the ones she sought; she wanted a moralizing good God. There was the Blessed Virgin, but she was on the side of the salt of the earth, the ignorant and the weak, and would surely disapprove of Clare’s sophisticated modern problems. To her surprise (what kind of feminist was she?) Clare was overcome by a passionate longing to lie down in the bosom of a wisdom different from her own, deep-resonanced and subtle and fatherly.