by Tessa Hadley
Stan was somewhat diminished, Graham thought, working from home and on his own: he remembered the racier and more anarchic repartee at the place in town. Mrs. Stan was just visible, spraying something on her roses, through the trellis that firmly separated the oil-dark garage from the garden.
The problem was spark plugs, Stan decided. He’d have to order some. He’d have them by Tuesday.
As Graham was waiting to turn out of the end of Stan’s road, Linda passed him in her red Fiesta. There was something almost comical, that first instant, in the sight of the so-familiar face in the unfamiliar place, frowning intently, and leaning forward over the steering wheel as usual. He hadn’t known that Linda had ever heard of Stoke Upton, let alone knew how to get there; she was notoriously blank about directions and places. He’d told her he was taking the car to Stan’s, but there hadn’t been any reason to mention it wasn’t to the usual garage in town. And hadn’t she said she was going to spend all day at the unit? He turned out of Stan’s road and followed her. Really, for a moment he was only going to catch up with her, to share the surprise of the coincidence, or in case she was looking for him. Then suddenly instead he was following her, even dropping back so she wouldn’t catch sight of him.
She turned right, then left, without hesitation, as if she knew her way: as if she’d been here before. Now they were on the road that ran past the shops and the green; there was more traffic, he’d had to let a couple of cars turn out in front of him, he was afraid he’d lose her. She pulled into a space in front of the row of shops. He had no choice but to pass her; then he managed to stop about thirty yards farther on, just past a video rental place that was the last of the little row. Throwing himself around inside his seat belt with the engine still running, he looked for her through his rear window: he felt so conspicuous, he couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen him. She was locking her car; she wasn’t looking at him. Her hair was pinned up and she had makeup on and dangling earrings: she was wearing black leggings and some sort of stretchy shiny shirt he hadn’t seen before, with her suit jacket. She looked odd, as if she had made an effort to dress up but had chosen wrong things that subtly betrayed her. Perhaps her shape was already beginning to change.
She was parked in front of a hairdresser’s called A Cut Above. He wildly entertained the thought that she was going to cut off her hair. But she crossed the pavement quickly to a bright red-painted door beside the shop that must be the front door to a flat upstairs; she found a key, not on her key ring but from somewhere in her bag, opened the door, and disappeared inside. Graham waited for her to reappear. The windows of the flat above the shop were blanked out with bamboo blinds: he stared up at them but they relayed no sign of what might be happening behind them.
It was midday.
Graham sat in his car. He felt as if the world quietly came to rest about him. The traffic seemed to ease off, and the desultory shoppers dwindled: was there somewhere left in the world where people still had lunch at twelve o’clock? A couple of young stylists came twittering out of the hairdresser’s and returned at the end of ten minutes with sandwiches and bags of cakes, their blond hair in their eyes and their skirts blowing against their brown bare legs in the wind. One ancient-looking little cavernous sweet shop and newsagent even shut its door and put up a CLOSED sign. The video store of course didn’t work to that old rhythm; young well-fed men and women came and browsed and went away with their next glitter-fix in its anonymous covers, and Graham repressed a twinge of rage at the prodigal unimaginable waste of afternoons spent in front of the television.
He waited. She might have been visiting a client, a difficult client, who for some reason couldn’t come to the door and had given her a key: perhaps wheelchair bound, or (more Linda’s line) agoraphobic.
After about half an hour he got out of the car. It was quite a nice day, sunny, although with a cold wind that pasted litter up against tree trunks and car wheels and streamed through the scrappy little trees that had been planted in an effort to make the place vaguely continental. He walked up and down past the shops a couple of times, past the red door, which had a bell but no name; he bought some cigarettes in a convenience store although he didn’t really smoke. There were two empty shops, a butcher and an electrical retailer; they showed no signs of having been re-let and their windows were thickly pasted with posters as though they had been closed for a long time. The baker sold sandwiches and even had a couple of tables squeezed between the counter and wall at the far end of the shop where presumably you could order coffee.
He was afraid at first that if he went into any of the shops he would miss Linda coming out: he didn’t know how long she was going to be. Then it occurred to him that she might take hours, that she might never come out. Finally he realized that he knew she would reappear at about three o’clock: she had to pick Daniel up from nursery school at half past three to take him to the doctor’s for his measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and she would need to leave half an hour to get from Stoke Upton into town. Linda had to take Daniel to the doctor’s because Graham took Anna to ballet after school on Thursdays; what Linda didn’t know was that Chloe’s mother had offered to take Anna to ballet, so that he could take Daniel and Katie to the surgery. He had been going to phone Linda on her mobile phone to tell her she needn’t come back early. He supposed her phone would have rung here, in Stoke Upton, in the flat above the hairdresser’s, if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary coincidence of his sighting her, and they would have exchanged practicalities without his having any clue that she spoke to him from another side of the world. She would have reached for her phone, he thought, out of a tangle of sheets: for an insane moment he had the sheets vividly in front of his eyes: a bright flowery type with a little trim of pink and yellow braid (she had had some like this years ago that he had replaced with plain blue ones from Habitat). Then he took firm hold upon himself.
He bought himself milky instant coffee in a plastic cup at the baker’s and drank it and then went back past the red door to sit in the car. He worried tangentially that someone might become suspicious of his sitting there and call the police, but no one did, although the girl from the video store did lean out of the shop door and stare at him a couple of times, as if she was curious about him. Business didn’t really pick up in the afternoon. The sweet shop didn’t reopen. The bamboo blinds at the windows of the flat never stirred.
* * *
IT WAS UNIMAGINABLE that he would fall asleep but he did, perhaps for ten or fifteen minutes. He was woken by the sound of the red door pulled shut; he was sure it was that even before he flung himself around in the car to see, as sure as if it were a sound he recognized because he’d known it all his life. His face felt folded and creased from sleep; his mouth was stale from the cigarette he’d smoked, with repositories of bile secreted along his gums; there was a wet patch on the sleeve of his shirt where he must have drooled.
It was three o’clock.
Linda was dressed in the same things again (what had he expected?) but she wavered, tottered, in her line across the pavement beneath the agitated trees. Her makeup was smeared, her face was strange, and the red hair was pulled into a perfunctory ponytail. As he watched she paused and fetched out of her jacket pocket not her car keys but her earrings, which she then tried to hook into her ears, missing and persisting, while the wind blew some sheet of junk mail up against her calves. Her face was strange, mobile and raw, because she was crying. Graham glared into the video rentals store to see if the girl was watching, but she was preoccupied with something behind her counter at the back of the shop. One of the girls came out from the hairdresser’s but scarcely looked up from where she was battling to keep her skirt down over her thighs. Linda fixed one earring in and gave up on the other one; she put it back in her pocket and fished in her bag for her keys, her face still distorted with crying. It seemed strange to Graham that she had taken her earrings off in the first place.
—She’s not safe to drive, he thought. But then he’d
often thought that.
The red Fiesta passed him and she never even glanced in his direction. At that moment, as she passed within yards of where he sat staring, she looked quite grotesque, terrifying; her face was distorted and working and her mouth was wide open. She must be groaning and moaning: howling, even. He supposed he’d seen her like that, suffering like that, in childbirth; only then she had had everyone on her side, and all the admiring nurses around her, encouraging her. The Fiesta windows were closed and so were his and it was windy, so he couldn’t hear anything. Then she was past him. She turned left at the end of the road, on her way back into town to pick up Daniel and Katie.
He got out of the car, walked up to the red door, and rang the bell. After a while he rang again. Someone came down the stairs inside and the door opened. He looked at the man who opened it with astonishment: it was no one he knew, none of the various friends and colleagues of Linda’s he’d run in mental review before his fears. This man was in his late forties or early fifties, not tall, with thick neatly combed gray hair and a mustache and a pleasant, wide face, the kind of face you repose your trust in when it belongs to a lawyer or a bank manager, bland and prosperously tanned. Only his nose was rather small; it tipped up at the end and was somehow demeaning, Graham thought, as if it betrayed effeminacy or a lack of soul. He was wearing suit trousers and a blue office shirt and tie, and he was in his socks. There were no marks on him: no traces of turmoil or upheaval to match what Graham had seen a few moments before on Linda.
The man was looking at Graham in astonishment.
—Yes?
Something in his surprise made Graham sure this wasn’t his home—it didn’t look like a home, anyway, not for a man like him: the stairs behind him were covered in a cheap sagging carpet that smelled, and there were no pictures. He couldn’t have expected anyone to have rung the bell for him; he must have thought it was Linda coming back.
—I was looking for Graham, Graham said. I thought Graham lived here.
He hadn’t known he was going to say this: he had had no plan in his mind when he rang the bell.
—No, no one of that name, said the man thoughtfully, warily.
—You don’t know where he lives, then? I was sure it was here.
It seemed to Graham that the man began to guess something then: or at least that a disconcerting but bizarre and unlikely possibility had occurred to him. He must have known what Linda’s husband’s name was. To his credit he did not begin to shut the door on him; on the contrary, he probably held it open a little longer and more accommodatingly than their conversation superficially warranted.
—I’m sorry. I can’t help you.
—Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter, Graham said, and they stood confronted a few moments longer, until it was ridiculous for the man not to begin to close the door.
Graham asked, And you are…?
The man hesitated. It was absurd to ask, of course.
—I’m Des. Desmond, he said uncomfortably.
—Oh. Thank you.
* * *
HE NEVER TRIED that name on Linda. He kept it for himself.
But over the weekend they sat out together in the garden, and he did take the opportunity to mention the spark plugs and the car. They were waiting for Clare, Graham’s oldest daughter, who was bringing her children to stay with them for the weekend because her grandfather, her mother’s father, had died, and she wanted to help her mother make all the arrangements. Graham had filled the paddling pool, and Anna and Katie and Daniel were jumping in and out of it, squealing and shrieking.
—Did I tell you old Stan was retiring?
Linda was sitting on the plaid rug on the grass, rubbing sun cream into her legs and feet.
—Oh, dear, she said sympathetically. Does that mean we’ll have to find someone else to do the cars? We’ll never find anyone else as nice as Stan. Or as cheap.
—It doesn’t exactly. He’s going to go on doing a bit of work from home; he’s got just about enough room in their place at Stoke Upton. That’s where I took the car on Thursday, actually, only I forgot to tell you.
—Do my shoulders? she said, handing him the sun cream, piling her hair up and holding it out of his way, bending her neck. Stoke Upton? Where’s that?
He didn’t answer, he concentrated on massaging the cream into her freckled white shoulders and the tops of her arms until it disappeared. He rolled the straps of her shirt carefully down off her shoulders so as not to miss any place where she might burn.
—I need a hat, she said. A sun hat for this summer. One of those wonderful great big cartwheel ones, a sort of Audrey Hepburn hat, you know, joyous and exuberant. Do you know the kind I mean?
—A hat?
—A hat. A really special hat.
—I see.
Clare, in dark glasses and laden with bags, emerged with her children out from the passage down the side of the house, and Graham sat back, screwing the top onto the tube of cream.
—So when did Stan say he was getting the spark plugs in? Linda asked him hastily, as if in a last binding exchange of domestic necessity before the frivolities of sociability intervened.
—Tuesday, Graham said.
—OK.
—I’ll go out there Tuesday morning.
—OK.
—Otherwise he said the engine’s fine.
Clare put down her bags on the rug, looking lean, distracted, impatient (she was leaving her husband and had embarked on an unpromising new relationship with the supervisor for her PhD). Rose was already tearing all her clothes off for the pool; Lily was stamping her foot and starting a sulk because they hadn’t brought their bathing suits. Clare looked at them, frowning, as if she were looking through them.
—Wear your underwear, she said.
Lily winced and delicately colored. Mummy! How can you?
—How are you all? Linda commiserated. How’s Marian? Is she coping? Your grandfather was such an extraordinary man, a beautiful spirit. We all should have venerated him. I can find Lily a suit, don’t worry about it.
—Mum is so bereft and distraught, Clare said to Graham. When you think what a burden Grandpa’s been. And he could be so horrid to her. But she’s in a dreadful state.
—Poor dear old Marian, said Linda. She’s such a saint.
There was a certain way Graham’s older daughters had of sometimes staring hard and smilingly at nothing, widening their eyes (he could tell Clare’s were widening even behind the dark glasses); he knew very well this was their comment on Linda. Their disapproval was another thing he had imperceptibly to protect her from.
—But you’d be surprised, said Linda. Some of these very independent-seeming career women, the extent to which they’ve actually bought in to the whole patriarchal thing.
—I suppose I would, said Clare. He surprised, I mean.
Anna and Lily became inseparable for the afternoon. Solemn-faced and with arms draped over one another’s shoulders, they maintained a dignified distance from the wild game of plunging and throwing water that the others had begun in the pool.
—Aren’t you just dreading when they start mooning around over boys? Linda said to Clare.
She brought out a heap of old clothes from the house for the girls to dress up in, including her wedding dress, the one she’d been married in the first time, to the surgeon husband: it was long and white and Princess Diana–inspired, and Anna and Lily dragged around the garden magnificently in it in turns until it was covered in grass stains.
* * *
THAT NIGHT Linda woke Graham, urgently, out of deep sleep.
—Gray? Wake up! I’m frightened! I’ve had a really horrible dream.
It was dark; he couldn’t see her face; she was sitting up in bed pinching his arms painfully in her fingers. She pinched him until he was awake and listening.
—I was in a car with two men, she said. One in the passenger seat beside me, one in the back. I was trying to park; I had no reason to think anything was wrong.
Suddenly the man in the passenger seat brought out a gun and shot me. I felt such pain, and I was astonished: what did he want to hurt me for? He shot me more than once; there was blood fountaining everywhere. Then the man in the backseat got out a gun too, and I thought: but why didn’t you do this earlier, now it’s too late to protect me? Only then he shot me too, maybe because he was so angry with me or something, for being the victim, angry because I was hurt. Through a curtain of blood I was pushing my face toward the man in the front seat, I was dying, my mouth was open in a terrible sort of groan, trying to find breath, I was reaching out with my mouth for him, I just wanted to touch him and cling to him because he was the last human being I’d ever know.…
They lay silently.
—The man in the backseat, said Graham, plays a somewhat inglorious role.
—I need to pee, said Linda, only I’m too frightened. Will you take me?
He padded downstairs after her and waited while she used the toilet with the door open. Afterward he got her settled in bed in the position she always liked in pregnancy, on her right side, right leg bent under her, left leg stretched out; then he stroked her back and shoulders until she went to sleep. He put a hand on her abdomen: hardly distended yet, no more than at the time of her normal period. He was interested in this baby. He found himself more interested in this pregnancy than he had been with any of his other children. He wondered whether when it was born he would be able to see himself in its wrinkled face, or whether he would find traces of the soulless Desmond with the upturned nose. It seemed to him that either way—or, more likely, if there was never any certainty, if he could never quite persuade himself conclusively of either case—the baby would need his special protection. Strangely, he imagined himself dandling it—when it was tiny, with its little bird limbs of that brick-red color only the new ones had—with a certain special plastic tenderness he had once felt in his fingers toward the clay things he made.
