Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  Alex had actually been a headmaster – in a local primary school, where the kids spoke thirty-two languages between them and forty-eight per cent were on free meals. When he got the headmaster’s job it had seemed like the inevitable destination of his career as an inspiring, progressive teacher, adored by the children. But in fact it had made him unhappy, and after three years he’d returned to being a classroom teacher with a class of nine-year-olds, never regretted it. Under his urbane, appealing surface, Alex wasn’t really a public man as Zachary was. He was too intolerant when he was thwarted, driving his enemies into bitter opposition. Really he was a solitary thinker, not interested in most of his colleagues. The vision he had for the school – with children as thinkers and artists at its core – went needless to say against the grain of public policy on education. It went against the way the world worked. And unlike Zachary, Alex had no conviction that progress was possible, or that you could build any institution into a power for good. There was a contradiction, Christine thought, between his passionate scepticism and his commitment to the children’s education. He didn’t believe that anything could get better, and was often despairing – yet he dedicated himself to building and nourishing their imaginations, as if hope depended on it. She also sometimes thought, when she was angry with him, that when they left his class he forgot them.

  Lydia always took up the same position when she was in their flat, at one end of the sofa where Alex had been reading his book earlier. In the pink light of the lamp she leaned back against the cushions, her sultry beauty in relief. Zachary had said that she posed like an odalisque. Christine wanted to sit close beside her, touching her, but couldn’t: something warned her off. Because Lydia was desperate, she was putting on a performance of exaggerated calm. — Is this going to be the end of me? she said, lighting up another cigarette. — Did Zachary define me, who I am? I didn’t think he did. But perhaps I’ll have to change my mind. I’ve never taken the trouble to imagine myself without him. I’ve never done anything without him, not for years. I’m not even competent. I don’t know how to pay my taxes. I can’t drive.

  — Oh, Lyd, don’t worry about that now, Christine said. — Of course you’re competent. It won’t be the end of you.

  — Why not now? We should talk about everything now. I suspect this moment doesn’t come round again. What happens next is that everything hardens into its final form. We forget what he was really like.

  — We won’t forget.

  — I’m forgetting him already. Something else is taking his place: the whole idea of his death, which is so improbable. He wasn’t the dying type. Death is crowding out the real sensations of what he was. I’m trying to remember him at breakfast today, for instance. What did he eat?

  — What did he usually eat?

  — By the time I came downstairs, still in my dressing gown, he had been round to the bagel shop already, probably done a hundred things. You know he just sort of bursts out of bed energetically in the mornings, it’s so exhausting. He wakes up singing. If you’re not like that, if you’re a night person, it can be trying. We had fresh bagels with our coffee. He slathered on that special Brittany butter he buys with the salt crystals in it, then piled it up with home-made jam from the farmers’ market, ate it standing up, gulping down his coffee, always in a rush. No wonder he had a heart attack. I did warn him, I was always warning him.

  Their eyes met, they were horrified by the lost innocence of that breakfast, imagining the reality of his body now.

  — Chris, he was so strong. How could this happen?

  — Oh I know, I know how strong he was.

  As if to hold off finality, they began listing all Zachary’s faults. — He wasn’t perfect, Lydia said. — We mustn’t forget that he was just really himself, not a dream.

  — Nobody’s perfect.

  — He was so noisy, and he talked a lot as if he knew everything – but really he was bluffing half the time. He drank too much and then he was a bore, when he was drunk he didn’t make sense.

  — He papered over bad things, Christine said. — Sometimes he was sentimental, he wanted to be too hopeful about everything.

  Lydia sat very still, her face was white. — I found that difficult, you know. Because sometimes he was lazy, he didn’t want to face the truth.

  — But that’s why you two balance out so perfectly! Christine insisted fervently – as if she were trying to save their marriage, not console her friend for her loss. Then she realised this was the last day, ever, that Zachary would have been alive in, and she didn’t want it to end. But when she looked at her watch it was past midnight already.

  — Tell me when you want to sleep, she said gently to Lydia. — The bed is all made up ready. I’ll sit with you if you like.

  — I can’t! Lydia shuddered. — Imagine waking up, to this. I can cope with it now because I’m all screwed up to it, but I don’t think I can bear to let it all go and then have to start again from the beginning. Anyway, I’m waiting for Grace. I ought to be awake for her. I know I’m such a rotten mother. I have to be better from now on.

  — But she won’t be here until tomorrow lunchtime, at the earliest.

  Lydia smoked one cigarette after another, staring at the lit ends between puffs, coughing. — I’m not really going to take up smoking again. I only really did it to annoy Alex.

  They opened another bottle and soon Lydia’s lips and teeth were blue from the red wine. She did sleep eventually and in the early morning Christine heard her crying, and went into the spare room in her nightdress, sat beside her on the bed. Lydia grabbed her hand, dragging it under the bedclothes to hold it again against her stomach which was hot and tensed and hard. — I feel it in here, she said. — It’s a pain, a terrible pain. But it’s not love. I have to tell the truth to you, no one else. Otherwise I can’t bear it. You know it isn’t love, don’t you?

  Grace was finishing her third year as an art student, very talented, a sculptor in stone and wood. Alex drove all night and arrived in Glasgow at dawn. He slept for an hour in the car, and then he searched in the early morning light until he found the address Hannah had given him. The city seemed like an underworld – a Victorian necropolis towered behind the blackened cathedral, the lights were all on in a vast hospital. Grace was sharing a house with other students, in the south side of the city, above a shop; metal shutters were pulled down across all the shop windows. By this time it was seven o’clock. The front door was beside the shop entrance and the bell didn’t work; Alex hammered on it with his fist, not loudly but insistently, not giving up; after a while he heard footsteps on the stairs inside and a boy came down to the door, prepared to be aggrieved. Alex said he needed to talk to Grace, it was important, a family illness. Grace wasn’t there, the boy didn’t think: he would check her room. No, she’d been out to a party the night before, hadn’t come home.

  — What party? Where?

  Then Alex drove to where the party had taken place – Grace wasn’t there either. He picked his way across an apocalyptic scene, bodies curled in sleeping bags among the party debris; a girl in the kitchen, cooking eggs, remembered that Grace had left the party with somebody. She looked cautiously at Alex before she would tell him any more. — Why don’t you try her phone? she said. He explained that someone in Grace’s family had been taken ill and she needed to know at once, he’d driven all the way from London to tell her in person. Then he made his way to another house, someone let him in and called to Grace, who was sleeping upstairs. Alex went up to look for her. He didn’t care what he saw, although at any other time he’d have respected Grace’s privacy. She was asleep on a mattress on the floor in a little cramped room, with the duvet pulled over her head; the thick mop of her black curls gave her away. She and her boyfriend from the night before were sleeping without touching, backs turned to each other, the boy’s back raw with acne. The room stank oppressively of their bodies and of cigarette smoke and sex. A thick curtain was pulled across the closed window; Alex opened the wi
ndow, then sat on the floor beside the bed to wait until Grace woke. She opened her eyes into his gaze, her breath sour with sleep. When she recognised him she sat up abruptly. — What are you doing here? Alex?

  Scrambling up on all fours, backing away from him, she retreated against the wall as if she were poised for flight; she looked so like her father that he almost couldn’t speak. The dirty white T-shirt didn’t cover her nakedness: her flanks were lean as a boy’s and the bristling, dark pubic hair was just like Zachary’s. Her beauty wasn’t the type Alex desired in women, too forceful; she’d had this force ever since she was a tiny girl, and it had always roused some pain of protection in him, afraid for the consequences of her bluntness and lack of inhibition. He was relieved that his own daughter Isobel was reserved and feminine, knew how to take care of herself. Grace was tall and sturdily built, muscular from her work with hard materials; her slight breasts were the merest points under the T-shirt and her head was shapely, proportionate like a classical ideal, almost androgynous; her wiry hair grew out in a dense mass of black. Under ordinary circumstances, she was drily humorous. She and Alex were famous jokers usually, when they got together.

  — Who is this? the boy said, putting a hand out to Grace supportively, but she shook him off, smacking out at him, so that Alex saw he wasn’t important. He was clearly a mistake, with his whiskery gingery beard, blundering out of his depth.

  — Would you mind leaving us? Alex said. — I have something I have to tell her.

  Grace put her hands over her ears. — No, no, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know! I don’t want to hear it!

  The boy was bemused. — What’s going on?

  — I’m so sorry, my beloved Grace, Alex said.

  — Don’t tell me! she cried.

  Afterwards she said she’d known, as soon as she opened her eyes and saw his face. — You should see your face, Alex. It’s a giveaway. And of course if anyone else had died, Dad would have come to tell me.

  In the car on the way home, she kept her little rucksack on her knee and was distinctively herself: looking round her out the window, taking everything in, questioning him sensibly about what had happened. He repeated to her all the detail that was becoming mythic, about Jane Ogden’s new show, Zachary keeling over in the gallery, hitting his head on the desk. — But why, but why? Grace said, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, rocking backwards and forwards just perceptibly in a childish rhythm, hugging the rucksack that she wouldn’t put down on the back seat, or on the floor. At some point she announced that she was starving, and they stopped at a motorway service station. She ate something disgusting, with every sign of hearty appetite – a full English breakfast; and then shortly afterwards, when they were on the motorway again, he had to pull over quickly onto the hard shoulder. She jumped out of the car and vomited into the tall grass full of daisies, which was blowing in sensuous long ripples in the wind.

  — That was melodramatic, she said when she sat beside him again, wiping her mouth. — Sorry.

  — It’s a time for melodrama, he said. — You do whatever you need to.

  The journey seemed twice as far as when he’d driven up to fetch her. Grace fiddled with the radio, found some pop music which Alex tolerated because he understood it was difficult for her to speak. Then she got out her phone and began sending texts. — So is that your new boyfriend? he asked.

  — Jesus, no, she said. — Just some guy I met at a party.

  He wanted to warn her to hold herself back from the guys she met at parties, to keep herself aloof in the upper sphere where she belonged, because she was an exceptional, rare being. But it wasn’t the moment for that. He talked to her instead about his own father, who had died when he was about the same age as she was now. Grace listened attentively, rocking in her seat, although he guessed she could hardly make any connection between what was happening to her, tearing up her life, and his old story worn smooth in history.

  Parking at last outside the flat, he saw how she was tensed in anticipation of meeting her mother, or meeting anyone. The knot of muscles in her neck was hard as iron when he touched her. Upstairs it was as if the women hadn’t moved since he left: Lydia was in her usual place on the sofa, Christine – who had changed into a dark navy dress, choosing mourning colours perhaps unconsciously – was in the big armchair. She glanced away from him evasively – she preferred to conceal herself, in extreme situations, behind her habitual irony. Against the dark dress her face looked haggard, flesh slack on her bones: probably she hadn’t slept. They were drinking coffee instead of alcohol, that was the only change – and Isobel had joined them, she was standing beside the mantelpiece with her back to her reflection in the gilt mirror, waiting calmly and sorrowfully. When Grace came in, still hugging her rucksack, she went straight to Isobel, who opened her arms to her. The two young friends were so spontaneous in their sorrow that their mothers looked frozen beside them.

  There was something intolerable in the expectation in that room, strained around Zachary’s absence, which could not be filled. The time when they might have been waiting for him to walk through the door was so recent, so close at hand, that it seemed vividly possible; they could imagine how he’d make his entrance, noisy with reassurances, full of jokes, puzzled by their glum faces. He was always so up to date on everything, so full of news. It seemed impossible he didn’t know this latest fact, his own death.

  — Where is Dad? Grace asked. — I want to see him.

  Lydia tried to dissuade her. — It’s only his empty body, darling, he won’t be there.

  — I love his body. I want to say goodbye to it.

  Then Grace announced that she wanted to make a death mask, so that later she could carve her father’s face in stone. — I was planning it all the way from Glasgow, she said. – I know where I can find out how to do it properly. I know someone I can ask.

  — As if things weren’t grotesque enough, Lydia said, shuddering.

  — Let’s take our time, Alex said, placating them. — Let’s think about it.

  He supposed there would have to be an autopsy.

  — I’d like to be present at the autopsy, Grace volunteered promptly.

  — That’s not possible, my sweet girl, he said flatly. — Not possible or desirable.

  Christine put out food on the kitchen table, but all anyone wanted was coffee, which they drank until it tasted poisonous. The phone began to ring in the afternoon and didn’t stop: friends who’d heard something, or artists Zachary had worked with, who’d got hold of their number. Lydia had spoken already to Zachary’s brother, but there were so many other people who needed to know what had happened. Alex took the phone into the study next door; again and again, patient with each new shock, he had to tell the story of Zachary’s keeling over in the office, Jane Ogden and Hannah going with him to the hospital. They could all hear him from the sitting room. While he was speaking they sat in silence, as if they needed to hear the story over and over, experience the fresh astonishment with every caller. Grace sat on the floor with her forehead dropped against her knees; Isobel was on the sofa close beside her, her hand on Grace’s hair. The girls had been very close since they were children, although they were opposite types: Grace so abrasive and rash, with her spectacular boyish beauty, Isobel distinctively poised and reserved. She worked as a civil servant, fast-track entrance, in housing; her green eyes were set wide apart, her skin was clear, her light brown hair pinned up in a smooth knot.

  — I did ask about the mask, Alex said, crouching in front of Grace, taking her hands in his. — Not sure it’s a good idea. Wait and see how you feel about it in the morning.

  — Most of it’s on the internet, Grace said. — But there’s someone I need to talk to about sourcing the right kind of plaster.

  — Don’t I have any say in this? Lydia asked.

  — Wait and see, wait and see, Christine soothed them.

  Lydia wanted to talk about money. Had Zachary had life insurance? She had no idea, he t
ook care of all that side of things. — How can you? Grace said. When Lydia had retired to her bed in the spare room with a sleeping pill, Christine tried to explain to Grace why her mother was behaving so clumsily. — You don’t need to tell me, Grace said, pushing her springy hair back from her forehead under both palms as if it helped her to think, her face stark in its severe lines. — I get it. I understand.

  Grace and Isobel went over to Isobel’s flat in Queens Park, where Grace would sleep – it was only twenty minutes on the bus, they insisted they didn’t want a lift, or a cab. — I want to be normal, Grace said. They would come back in the evening to eat, so they could all be together again. When they’d gone, Christine took a lasagne out of the freezer. Then she stood for a few minutes alone under the sloping roof in her bedroom. It wasn’t like a stone after all, this intrusion of grief: a stone was cold and still, you could surround it, but this swelled inside her and receded then swelled again uncontrollably; she felt helpless against its violence, her usual self wrecked and lost, turned inside out. She called out subduedly to Alex, to come upstairs. They spoke in low voices. — Do you mind if I go out just for half an hour while Lydia sleeps? Will you keep an eye on her? I need to walk.

  He touched her face sympathetically; the flesh under her eyes was swollen with crying and fatigue. In a crisis Alex was strong and she leaned on him: it was a form of laziness, a convenience between them. And it suited him too, she thought, to play the role of her protector from time to time. Neither she nor Lydia were conventional in their personalities, they called themselves feminists, yet both had chosen patterns of relationship with men which looked almost like their mothers’ marriages, dependent and sheltered; they lived their secret lives inside the strong shell of their husbands’ worldliness and competence. Now Lydia’s shell had been broken open and she was exposed, alone.

  Christine didn’t often wear make-up but felt the need to put it on today, before she could show her face outside. When the drawer in her dressing table jammed she was flooded with rage and tugged so hard that it came flying out, scattering its stupid contents. She stared at the mess, then crouched to pick up the eye-pencils, hair grips, eyeshadow, tubes of face cream, sachets of depilatory cream, indigestion pills, contraceptives she no longer needed – even a couple of ancient Tampax from the past, their paper wrappings tatty and grubby. A film of dirty, greasy powder from the bottom of the drawer settled on the wool carpet.