When the sun was low in the sky and the children were asleep, Max suggested to Dorrie that she should go for a walk on her own, just down to the beach below the hotel.
“It’ll do you good,” he said.
He was going to sit by the bedroom’s picture window in the half-dark with a beer, and would probably be able to make out her figure if the light didn’t go too fast.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” she said.
“Go on,” he snorted. “Before I change my mind.”
She walked down barefoot through the hotel gardens, across trim tough seaside turf bordered by white-painted palisades and recently watered fuchsia bushes. Then she turned onto the low cliff path which zigzagged down to the beach and felt the longer grass brush against her legs, spiky marram grass softly spangled in the dusk with pale flowers, sea pinks and thrift and white sea campion.
Robin had had trouble getting to sleep that evening. Stay here, he had demanded tearfully, his hand on her arm; don’t go. I won’t go, she had said; close your eyes. She had stroked his temple with the side of her little finger. Gradually he had allowed himself to be lowered down, a rung at a time, towards the dark surface of sleep. He had given a tiny groan as she moved to get up, but he was too far gone to climb back. She had sat by him for a little longer, creaking with fatigue, looking at his quiet face, his still hand on her arm, savoring the deep romance and boredom of it.
There were no buildings now between her and the beach except for this last snug cottage to her left shedding light from its windows. She paused to look up at it. It must surely house an ideal family, sheltered and enclosed but with a view of the bay too. The father was reading his children a story, perhaps, while the mother brushed their hair. Where did this cozy picture come from? Certainly not from her own childhood. She turned away and carried on down to the beach.
It was lovely to stand barefoot, bare-legged indeed, invisible in the deep dusk, a great generous moon in the sky and her feet at the edge of the Atlantic. She looked out over the broad bosom of the sea and it was like an old engraving, beautiful and melancholy, and the noise it made was a sighing, a rhythmic sighing.
As sailors’ ghosts looked back on their drowned selves, dismantled, broken up, sighing like the sea for the collarbone lost somewhere around the equator, the metatarsals scattered across the Indian Ocean, so she wondered whether there could ever be a reassembly of such scattered drowned bodies, a watery danse macabre on the wreckers’ rocks beneath a full moon. Was it possible to reclaim the scattered-to-the-winds self? She was less afraid of death, or understood it a shade more, purely through coming near it each time she had had a baby; but apart from that, this puzzle was to do with the loss of self that went with the process, or rather the awareness of her individuality as a troublesome excrescence, an obsoletism. What she wanted to know was, was this temporary, like national service used to be, or was it for good?
She was filled with excitement at standing by the edge of the sea alone under the sky, so that she took great clear breaths of air and looked at the dimming horizon, opening her eyes wider as if that might help her to see more. It filled her with courage and made her want to sing, something Irish or Scottish, sad and wild and expressive of this, this wild salt air, out here, and of how it was thrilling, being alive and not dead.
When she turned back across the beach, away from the water, it was dark. The orange lights of the hotel up on the hill lengthened on the wet black sand like pillars of flame. She reached the edge of the beach, where it met the rocks and turf above, and started to climb back. A bat bounced silently past her ear as she crossed the little bridge over the stream, and then she felt the dust of the earth path beneath her feet again. As she walked on, hugging herself against the fresh chill of the dark, she looked at the cottages built on the hills around the bay, their windows yellow lozenges of enclosed warmth in the night.
Now she was walking back past the house she had envied on the way down, the house which was so secure and self-sufficient with its warm lit windows and snug family within. And from this house came the wailing of a child, a desolate hopeless noise. It was coming from this very house. On and on it went, the wailing, steady and miserable, following her up the path. Her throat tightened and her eyes prickled, she called herself every sort of fool as she trudged on; and she physically ached to pick up and hold the weeping child, and tell it there there, there there, then smooth it down and stroke its hand until it slept. The comfortless noise continued, not a baby’s crying but the sobbing of a child. No child should be left to cry like that, she thought, ambushed by pity, by memory; and—in a rage—people aren’t bloody well nice enough to their children!
Don’t be so soft, came the advice; crying never did any harm, you can’t allow them to run the show or where will that land you? Let them take themselves to hell, those hard hearts who leave their children to cry themselves to sleep alone, and in hell they will have to listen to the sound of a child crying and know that they can never comfort it. That was what Dorrie was thinking as she climbed back up the hill.
Helen Simpson
GETTING A LIFE
Helen Simpson is the author of two award-winning collections of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award) and Dear George, as well as one novel, Flesh and Grass. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 2002
Copyright © 2000 by Helen Simpson
Some of the stories were previously published as follows: “Opera” in Good Housekeeping; “Millennium Blues” in Granta; “Lentils and Lilies” (now titled “Golden Apples”) in The Mail on Sunday; “Wurstigkeit” in The New Yorker; “Hurrah for the Hols” in The Observer; and “Cheers” in The Times Literary Supplement.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Knopf edition as follows:
Simpson, Helen, 1957–
Getting a life: stories / by Helen Simpson.
Originally published: Hey yeah right get a life. London: Jonathan
Cape, 2000.
p. cm.
1. Domestic fiction, English. 2. London (England)—Social life and
customs—Fiction.
PR 6069.I4226 H4 2000b
20001090388
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42601-7
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