Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  Falling asleep, he found himself imagining Linda at his father-in-law’s funeral, his ex-father-in-law’s, which must take place sometime in the next few days. (He had never acquired any further father-in-laws, after that first one: his second and third wives had come to him without fathers, one way or another.) In his fantasy, Linda was wearing a tight black dress and it was stretched across her stomach, which was unmistakably prominent. Perhaps a wind, too, was blowing the dress clingingly against her, outlining her bump. Yes, there must be a wind because with one hand she held in place a huge cartwheel hat that threatened at every moment to blow away, so that in spite of the solemnity of the occasion she cast a laughing glance at him from across the open grave. He fastened on the glance, its out-of-place mischievousness, its playful promise of adventure, and it sustained him while he allowed himself to fall off the edge of consciousness into the dark.

  IT WAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON, October, raining. Clare was upstairs in the city library, where she had come to check a couple of references. While she waited for a book that had to be fetched from the stacks, she randomly browsed the shelves, took down a volume of Chekhov’s letters, and sank into the soothing miscellany of money matters, sickness, arrangements for travel, family vexations, gripes with friends. All musty and done with and long dead.

  A librarian was talking to two policemen whose white and fluorescent lime plastic raincoats dripped onto the carpet; one held a motorbike helmet behind his back and fingered its strap in huge fingers while he elicited information with a practiced questioning.

  —How old would you say he was?

  The librarian, small and excitable, rocked onto his toes and searched the ceiling in an effort to imagine. He brimmed with nervous importance.

  —Oh, I should say about thirty-ish.

  —Twenty-five to thirty. And how tall?

  —Tall. Not as tall as you. But tall.

  —About six foot then.

  —His hair was thinning on top. I wouldn’t have taken any notice of him if I hadn’t happened to look into the bag: it’s quite a standard request, for them to leave their bag of shopping behind our desk while they choose their books. But I did notice his badge.

  Clare thought she ought not to be eavesdropping: she might be going to witness some unseemly arrest, someone’s humiliation. She dropped her attention back into the receding tide of the life of the book: money matters and travel and sickness and more sickness.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER while she waited at the checkout downstairs with her books, there came an announcement over the library intercom.

  —Please evacuate the building. Please evacuate the building.

  The man at the checkout desk who was stroking the codes on the books with an optical read-out pen stood up, not surprised but relieved, as if he knew something and had been expecting it.

  —Leave all your books, he said. Please leave your books where you are and evacuate the building.

  Clare clung onto her books for a reluctant moment; they had gone to all that trouble fetching her that one from the stacks, and anyway she had already begun the process of absorbing these books and mingling them with her thoughts. Her afternoon without them looked bleak. Then, as people obediently and without any sign of panic began to file out through the doors and down the stairs, she caught sight in the crowd of an intensely familiar little knot of people: her own three children together with Bram and Helly. It was a dizzying sensation, to see from the outside the little knot whose inside feel she knew so vividly. Bram was carrying Rose, and calmly without pushing he was striding ahead, making a path for the others to follow; Jacob was hurrying close behind, pale, staring fixedly at the back of his father’s jacket, bracing himself for the worst. Helly was holding tight onto Lily’s hand. Clare knew how Helly felt, gripping tight, steadying herself; you believed that if you could somehow hold them firmly and tightly enough you could stop anything from happening to them, physically hold the world still and whole for them against disaster. She put down her books and filed after them, through the glass doors and down the staircase to the foyer. Everyone was subdued and sensible. At most they smiled meekly at one another, because without a real explosion or a fire the drama of emergency was faintly embarrassing.

  They looked like a handsome family when she saw them full on at the turn of the stairs, Lily’s brows and lips delicately marked as a little deer, Rose’s cheeks curved like a Victorian doll’s, Jacob with the bridge of freckles across his rather flat nose and the serious light in his eyes, the firmly closed lips. They all had new haircuts; she had known Helly was going to take them for haircuts, but she had not known how much it would make them look like Helly’s children. Bram was wearing a new brown leather jacket, something he could not possibly have afforded and never would have chosen for himself. With his reserved blond good looks it made him seem a member of some officer class, commanding and self-deprecating and heroic. Out in the street where some of the people evacuated were stopping and waiting to find out what was happening, he signaled to the family that they should walk on and said something to Helly with an affectionately teasing expression that Clare had never seen. Helly’s face in return was full of concessions and eagerness to listen.

  It looked utterly desirable—and unimaginable—to be part of that family.

  It was still raining; rain perfumed with tarmac hissed and steamed up off the road as the cars passed. Without knowing why she was doing it, Clare trotted after them through the rain, feeling strange without burdens, without books, without children. Helly put up her big striped umbrella—Clare knew it, the one from the Guggenheim—and tried to hold it up over them all, putting Lily and Jacob between her and Bram. They headed away from the library to join the main pedestrianized thoroughfare into town. Clare was so close behind them it was almost odd they didn’t turn around and see her. Rose might easily have looked back over Bram’s shoulder, but instead she sat straight-backed on his arm and scouted out ahead. Clare willed them not to turn around and see her, as if her survival depended on it, and yet she could not tear herself away.

  This is the worst thing I’ll ever feel, Clare thought; this is the worst moment I’ll ever have, about leaving.

  She knew, of course, that this picture, this composition of wholeness, was not all it seemed. She knew from the children that it was not all going wonderfully well between them and Helly: she knew that Lily had cried herself to sleep one night she was spending over there, wanting Mummy; and that Rose had acted up with Helly whenever Bram had to go out somewhere. She noticed that as they hurried along Jacob never looked Helly in the face even when she spoke to him and put her hand on his shoulder to pull him in under the umbrella. And Helly had taken out her lip ring. Who had told her they didn’t like it? Jacob? Bram?

  Really the children were still hers; she hadn’t lost them. It wasn’t quite as bad as this seemed.

  * * *

  THEY STOPPED; a few paces behind them Clare stopped abruptly too, and had to apologize to someone who walked into her. Helly must be suggesting they find shelter from the rain; they were looking at a cheap place with big plate glass windows that did burgers. It was not the sort of place Bram or Clare would ever have chosen. As if she could hear them, Clare knew the children were asking excitedly if they could have chips. This would make up for the disappointment over the books.

  As the others went in, Helly paused on the threshold and turned around to shake out her umbrella. She saw Clare standing there.

  —I was behind you at the library, said Clare.

  Helly looked found out: guilty and apologetic and also even fed up, as if being followed by Clare was the last straw. It must be hard work, spending the afternoon trying to make up to someone else’s children.

  —Oh, she said. What was all that about?

  She looked different, as if Bram’s absorption in her was actually changing her into a creature of his kind of flesh. Her face was pale and scrubbed clean, she didn’t have makeup on, she was letting her hair
grow out into its natural light brown, her eyes seemed wider apart and paler and startled. Without wanting to, Clare imagined this face with its new fragile tentativeness against the pillows of her old bed. She could even imagine the particular flavor, the excitements—sensitive and nervy and confessional—of their intimacy. These excitements didn’t seem to have much to do with the golden Helly of the ice-cream advertisements.

  —Bomb scare, said Clare. They found a suspect package. I overheard them talking to the police.

  —What a bore. I mean if it’s just a hoax. After choosing all the books.

  —I followed to make sure the children were all right, said Clare. Just in case it wasn’t a hoax.

  —Do you want to join us? We’re just going to get them some chips.

  —No, thanks. I have to meet my father. We’re having lunch.

  —No news of Linda’s baby?

  —Not yet. Any day now. Dad’s very jittery about it. You’d think he’d be pretty blasé by this time. The Earth Mother pops them out effortlessly enough.

  Helly made a quick grimace of sympathetic understanding.

  Babies, thought Clare. She’s started thinking about babies.

  —Don’t tell the children you’ve seen me, she said. It’ll only make things worse.

  * * *

  NOW CLARE put up her own umbrella. The noise of cars in the rain was constant as a river in her ear, and then there was the thrumming of the rain on the tight nylon of the umbrella, the city smoking upward with wet and dirt, the frozen bright tableaux of the shop windows. She had to go past the end of the road the library was in, and she saw that the police had moved on to evacuating the frozen food store next door. She wasn’t due to meet her father for another half an hour. She wandered into a crowded clothes shop and was immediately deeply absorbed in serious consideration of skirts, tops, trousers.

  How could this be? Why wasn’t she considering rather the lostness of her children without her?

  She carried a mixed armful of things to try into the little changing room, a corner of the shop inadequately screened off by a curtain on big wooden hoops. Behind the curtain there were hooks for the hangers and a hot unflattering spotlight. Sweatily, hastily, she tried one garment after another, peeling things off inside out, not even taking time to put one thing back on its hanger before she was dragging the next one over her head. She swiveled and postured as best she could in the cramped space, cheeks flushed, wet hair leaving smudges on the fabrics, making that long phony-sultry face at herself in the mirror that Lily and Rose could send up to perfection. She interrogated each outfit feverishly, searching for the absolutely right thing with abandon, as though she expected any moment to be interrupted once and for all. How would she first know if there had been an explosion? Did one feel these things through one’s feet, coming up out of the earth like a quake? How much of the city would the bomb take down with it if it went off?

  She tried on an electric-blue blouse with frills down the front in what her mother would have called chiffon: she loved it immediately and with passion. It had that derisory edge of ugliness without which nothing ever looked truly good; it managed to be ironic and flattering at once. In it her glance was sharp and dark as a knife; she was veiled, mysterious; she burned with a cold fire. It was the least practical garment she could have found to spend money on, money she didn’t even have. It was transparent, too, she would have to buy something to wear underneath it. But it was already indispensable. Without it now she would not be complete; this self that had only arisen for the first time in the changing-room mirror would never get to walk the earth with the gift of her powerful veiled knowingness.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE came out of the shop with the blouse in a bag it was like emerging blinking back into light and focus from the underground dark of some debauchery. She felt so ashamed she even considered putting the bag down somewhere and leaving it.

  She thought Tony would like her in the blouse, though.

  Mostly, Tony was a problem. He didn’t want to meet her children, and he didn’t want her to move in. She was on the edge, the very edge, of being desperate about him, of stepping off from the safe ground of her self-possession. Yet last night, in the chaotic front room of his flat, among the boxes of books he’d never unpacked since his last move, he had put on for her version after version of Miles Davis playing “So what,” and had written something with his finger in wine on her throat (he wouldn’t tell her what it was), and had said to her that if once he let himself go he might fall for her so heavily that he would never be able to stand on his two feet again.

  She stopped in the rain and looked around for a phone box so she could call him. She felt the need to reassure somebody that she had survived: even though there hadn’t actually been any disaster.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS TO Shelagh Weeks and Deborah Gregory, for reading and helping. Thanks to all my friends and colleagues at Bath Spa University College, who love writing and take it seriously. Thanks to Richard Francis, who was not only generous with his time but also knew what to do next, and to Caroline Dawnay, Joy Harris, Dan Franklin, and Jennifer Barth, in whom I trust.

  Additional Acclaim for Tessa Hadley’s Accidents in the Home

  “Hadley’s style is lyrical but unfussy, and she manages to combine lightness of touch with remarkable subtlety of insight and relentlessness of observation.”

  —Michael Griffith, The Washington Post Book World

  “It’s the kind of story each generation must find its own ways of telling, and Hadley has a way of delivering resonant details that both link Clare’s plight to a well-known tradition and root it in the present.… With her intense, concentrated prose style, Hadley is more serious, less funny than her fellow British adultery specialist David Lodge, but she shares his talent for creating multifaceted moral complications.”

  —Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review

  “[A] captivating first novel, but the thrill of this tale lies in her distinctive characters—their fleeting elation and cleverly plotted contradictions, and the repercussions of their actions.”

  —The Herald Journal (Logan, Utah)

  “Hadley is a skilled and thoughtful writer, and her characters have much to say about the complexity and durability of marriage.”

  —Library Journal

  “Directed by a rigorous and acute insight into the human score.”

  —Gretchen Gurujal, The Spectrum (Salt Lake City)

  “Hadley weaves characters’ lives and sensibilities into an affecting tapestry of love, loss, pain, and introspection in her debut novel.… Their stories are compelling and rich in the minutiae of family life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “There are plenty of writers honest, witty, and perceptive enough to capture these small, quotidian details, but there are very few who can make proper, pungent, and serious literature out of them. Hadley’s book is a match for almost any current critically lauded novel you could name. In fact, you have to wonder whether, if she was male and American and the book was twice as heavy, she wouldn’t have the whole of the chattering classes falling at her feet. This writer is a rare and startling gem; she deserves to be read.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME. Copyright © 2002 by Tessa Hadley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt and Company under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press.

  Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763

  Fax: 212-677-7456

  E-mail: trademarketing@stmartins.com


  Title page photograph by Raquel Jaramillo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hadley, Tessa.

  Accidents in the home: a novel / Tessa Hadley

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-42102-8

  1. Married women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.A35 A65 2002

  823'.914—dc21

  2001039935

  First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

  First Picador Edition: May 2003

  eISBN 9781466829589

  First eBook edition: September 2012