Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  When the French classes ended, Christine hardly thought about him again – she only remembered Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! But in the autumn after they’d graduated, Lydia confessed that she had found out where Alex lived, and that he was married with a child. She had introduced herself to Juliet as one of Alex’s students, said that she was looking for babysitting work. Juliet had taken her number, and had already called her.

  — I want you to come with me the first couple of times, Lydia said to Christine. — So they don’t think it’s anything sinister. Although it is, of course.

  — But you don’t even like children!

  — I’m not doing it to get close to his child. Chris, I’m desperate about this man. I’ve let him into my dreams – I don’t mean daydreams, I mean actual dreams in my sleep at night. In these dreams I’m always stumbling after him, and then he turns around and doesn’t even know me, or looks right through me. Or I’ve got blood on my skirt or something, or I’ve done my homework for him but it’s dirty because I’ve dropped the pages in the street.

  — This is awful though, Lyd, snooping around his home.

  — I have to know, if I’ve got any chance. I swear, if we find out they’re contentedly, blissfully married, I’ll abandon the whole thing. I’ll tell Juliet I’ve given up babysitting because a dog bit me or something. Or a baby. I won’t mention the name Klimec to you ever again. I’ll retire to a nunnery.

  They were drinking China tea with lemon, in Lydia’s room; sitting cross-legged on her unmade bed, in a crumpled scarlet silk kimono, her eyes painted with kohl, she waved a cigarette about between her fingertips in the affected way she had, puffing at it superficially. Lydia could make Christine feel very unworldly. She was unworldly in those days: tall and thin and oblivious, with a rope of light brown hair coiled round her head like a caricature of an old-fashioned lady scholar, though she was only twenty-two; she rode an old bicycle round everywhere, with her books in the front basket, kicking off with one foot from the pavement then sitting very upright on the saddle, almost comically upright, in the dense London traffic. Christine had grown up in London, she was perfectly at ease in the city, yet she lived there somehow as if she were in exile from a more stately, slower world. There was something virginal about her, although she wasn’t literally a virgin. Lydia envied her friend’s calm self-possession: she couldn’t ride a bike, couldn’t imagine ever making her way so unprotected and trusting through the city traffic.

  — So what’s his wife like? Christine asked, concerned.

  — One of those miniature doll-bodies, dyed black hair, parchment skin, nervous. I should think she was a child-bride. Juliet by name, Juliet by nature. Apparently she’s an actress. Going out of her mind looking after the kid all day while Alex writes his poetry.

  — Does he write poetry?

  — He has a book of poems coming out. He’s a genius of course.

  Lydia never hesitated when she was pronouncing judgements in her flat, hard little girl’s voice – though afterwards she would laugh at herself, at her own excesses. The friends had felt such relief at finding each other’s irony when they first met at their girls’ grammar school – each had feared she was the only unbeliever. Lydia doubted everything. It was almost a disappointment to Christine that Lydia had fallen heavily in love at last: it had always been the boys who pursued her, while she kept aloof. And Alex wasn’t supposed to be Lydia’s type – she had claimed that she hated intellectuals, so awkward and so self-important. Her boyfriends until now had been the pretty boys she met in clubs, or at the bar where she worked: lithe and skinny, with bleached hair or wearing eye make-up, hard and dangerous. When these boys took furtive calls on the house phone, monosyllabic or coaxing, Christine thought they might be dealing drugs. She had kept herself apart from this aspect of Lydia’s life – not because she disapproved of it, but because she was shy, and afraid that the boys would despise her plummy accent, her good manners.

  Lydia felt herself at some crisis, now they’d arrived at the end of their formal education. Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame – now something more was called for, and she dreaded testing her reserves of imagination and energy, finding them empty. At first she had played at falling in love with Alex because it gave a shape to her days, and a motivation: then her obsession had swallowed up its original purpose. Her lack of him gnawed at her, making her incomplete; she thought fatalistically that if she had any talent it was probably for this, for a destructive passion. Lydia had the biggest room in the shared house, with the biggest bed – where she slept sprawling luxuriantly in dirty sheets, rarely getting up before midday. Her room was chaotically untidy, with clothes heaped on every piece of furniture, or dropped on the floor where she’d taken them off. She had a gift for finding treasures – old couture silks and satins, stiff net petticoats – among the dross in junk shops; everything smelled of mothballs, or of beer and cigarette smoke from the bar.

  The whole house was a semi-ruin and they lived in it like children camping, playing at grown-up life. Christine’s room on the ground floor was half the size of Lydia’s and chilly, with a greenish light she loved: its French windows opened onto a ruined conservatory and overgrown garden. It was in this green-lit room that Christine pored over her books of poetry, making notes, working in the evenings in the light from her desk lamp, hearing the subdued frisson of rain on the leaves in the garden at her back. Her PhD was on Christina Rossetti. The male teachers at university had tried to dissuade her, saying Rossetti’s verse was too flimsy, wouldn’t bear up under that level of sustained attention. She persevered, but not without self-doubt. If Lydia had a night off from bar-work, then Christine would take a tray of tea things up to her room at the end of the evening. Lydia would have been reading too: the whole house would seem charged with their separate concentration, their silence. But Lydia read so differently: always novels, not poetry, devouring them one after another, classics and contemporary fiction and thrillers muddled in together, opening up something new almost as soon as she’d finished reading the last words of the previous one. While she read she was utterly absorbed, then she closed the books mostly without comment, or with a snap judgement uttered with finality: dull, or excellent. Christine would pick up the book and puzzle into its pages, worrying over so many words. — But why is it dull?

  — The heroine had such a silly name.

  As soon as she’d finished her last university exam, Lydia had stopped thinking about books in the critical language she’d had to learn for her degree; yet in her exams she’d done very well, almost as well as Christine. She spoke about that critical analysis as if it was a trick you could put on and off, for strategic purposes; this was bruising to Christine, who was betting her future on analysis. But then she was used to being bruised by Lydia, she didn’t mind. Christine had had such a happy childhood, she’d been so encouraged, she had a lot to make up for. Lydia’s family were perfectly all right too: her parents ran a pub. Only they weren’t very interested in their daughter’s cleverness, and wondered why she didn’t get a proper job. When she won a free place at the grammar school they’d supposed she might become a businesswoman, or a lawyer. Christine was in awe of Lydia’s parents because in those days she romanticised the working classes, so they thought that Lydia’s inseparable friend was stand-offish. And certainly didn’t think of themselves as working class.

  The friends had met in a long look of shared incredulity at their first school Founder’s Commemoration Day, across so many submissive heads bowed in prayer, the muddy tide of voices obediently murmuring forms of words learned by rote. It wasn’t that they were naughty: other girls who believed everything the school told them were far naughtier. Christine Drinkwater and Lydia Smith had the subversive earnestness of true dissenters. They pinned on the noticeboard newspaper articles denouncing the evils of private education, they boycotted the Form Charity – which was always for animals. Christine was drawn to Lydia’s c
oncentrated energy, which wasn’t turned outward but was like something unrealised, burning with a slow heat inside her. Her daring negativity opened up possibilities, promised adventures.

  Christine was bemused now by the long days when she had nothing to do except study in the university library, or at her desk at home. She didn’t need a job because she had a full grant for her PhD – and she hadn’t embarked yet on any university teaching. She was diligent, and liked her work, but it couldn’t really fill all the hours of her day, or all the space inside her. And so she too, like Lydia, lived in a suspended state, expecting to discover something more serious to be the business of her life. Perhaps it would be motherhood, Christine sometimes thought. Her own mother spoke significantly about the happiness that came with children, and Christine believed in it – and yet that possibility seemed remote, so she waited patiently.

  She was overcome with sleep sometimes, while she sat poring over her texts. And sometimes she lay down on her bed in the middle of the afternoon, guiltily but deliciously, relinquishing responsibility. Then she woke up to the green light of the room in a strange mood, exempted from all the solid pressures of her usual nature and her obligations. Sometimes on these lost afternoons she drew, and while she was drawing she turned the face of her alarm clock away so that she couldn’t see how time was passing. She had done well in art classes at school, she had a gift for catching the likeness of things, but no one had ever suggested she should continue with her art, it had never seriously occurred to her. She and her brothers had all aimed at university; art school could only have been seen as a compensation for failing to get in anywhere worthwhile. Her family put a high value on the visual arts, and went to all the exhibitions, but would have found it presumptuous to dream of being an actual artist. New art was too raw. Who knew, until posterity’s confidence had silted up around it, what was any good? They preferred their subjects cooked. Nobody would have minded if she’d studied art history.

  Christine only thought of this drawing at first as doodling, passing the time while she focused her thought on particular poems, wondering what to write about them. In an art shop, ashamed of wasting money on a childish whim, she bought scraperboards. And while she bent over them, alone in the house, digging out the black wax and leaving the white lines in relief, she seemed to be gouging out some new terrain, which came out of her self and yet was unknown to her. There was something savage and exuberant in it, and high-risk. The first picture she completed showed a section cut through a turf in a graveyard, its grass wet with drops from a shower of rain, and an odd back-end view of a blackbird with its tail feathers in a fan, all very close up to the viewer’s eye and cramped. A body was buried in the loamy earth, along with stones and worms: though not decomposing, rather as if it were alive – and not the whole body, but just a shoulder and neck and hair seen from behind and pressed up close against the picture frame. She knew once the picture was finished that it was horribly clumsy and faux-Victorian, and she didn’t show it to anyone, hid it away under some papers in a drawer in her desk.

  From the first time they went babysitting, Christine could see how Lydia was getting it wrong with Alex. She took all afternoon putting on one thing after another, trying too hard, deciding eventually on an antique blouse made of black silk chiffon embroidered with jet beads, worn over jeans, which wasn’t convincing as an outfit suitable for childcare. Also she wore too much make-up, as well as her fox fur collar. Alex opened the door to them: he and Juliet were renting a little terraced cottage in Kensal Rise, with railings and a narrow strip of front garden where Juliet grew herbs in pots. He did seem to remember the girls vaguely, but not their names. When they said they were babysitting he called suspiciously for Juliet, who came out from the back kitchen, hobbled by her little boy clinging to her knees.

  — Alex, you haven’t forgotten! Juliet reproached him, hoisting the boy up onto her hip; she was very small and Sandy was very tall and lean and pale, so he couldn’t help looking like one of those overgrown children, hanging on to babyhood too long. — We’re going out to dinner at the Fairlies’. These are the girls I told you about. Say hello, Sandy.

  Sandy hid his face against his mother, fingering her breast self-consciously.

  — Christ, Jules, Alex said. — I don’t want to go to dinner at the Fairlies’. We don’t even like the Fairlies. Ring up and tell them Sandy’s ill or something. And you can send these girls away.

  It was obvious that he and his wife were in the middle of some bitter wrangle, much bigger than this one particular evening; Christine felt Lydia’s alert attention to each sign. Alex returned inside his study and closed the door, hardly looking at them. — Don’t take any notice, Juliet said smoothly. — He has to have his little sulk. You know what men are like.

  Both the girls sided at once, unfairly, with Alex – Christine because of the French classes, and the hypocrite lecteur. Sentimentally, they took the side of art and the closed study door, against the tedium of childcare. Juliet might have been small, but there was something pugnacious and resolved about her: she was quick and light on her feet, with curling black hair caught up in a comb, dangling painted earrings in the shape of parrots, and a pale, poised little face, pretty and sharp. When she diminished Alex and cut him down to size, the girls knew how she appraised them too in her blunt way, seeing through them and their romance across her miles of married experience. She disappeared into Alex’s study, leaving the girls with Sandy, who wept and pressed himself against the crack in the door as if he could squeeze through it after his mother.

  The girls were transfixed and fascinated, listening to the argument – whose actual terms weren’t audible – rising and falling with suppressed vehemence on the other side: much more of Juliet than Alex, his silences weighty. Eventually Juliet emerged triumphant and went to get changed upstairs – into a gypsy-dress in printed black Indian cotton, which showed off her small breasts defiantly. She tried to put Sandy to bed but he soon reappeared, haunting his babysitters, lugubriously ghostly in washed-out pyjamas: he had huge heavy eyes and skin so transparent it was almost blue. — You don’t mind, do you? Juliet said blithely. — He’ll take himself off to bed when he feels tired.

  Alex, martyred, lifted the car keys off a hook, followed his wife out to the car without a word; Sandy cast himself against the door closed behind his parents, in a mute paroxysm. — Obviously he doesn’t love her, Lydia pronounced, lighting up her first cigarette.

  — Lyd, shush. Anyway, you can’t possibly tell. We just don’t know, about how marriage works.

  — Who doesn’t love who?

  Sandy was suddenly attentive. Lydia laughed at him with her husky laugh; she had no idea how to behave with children. — Just some people you don’t know. Friends of ours. X doesn’t love Y. What do you know about love anyway? You’re a little eavesdropper, aren’t you?

  — What’s an ease-dropper?

  Sandy was drawn to Lydia as if he couldn’t help himself, and to begin with she exerted all her adult charm on him, flirting and teasing, asking him inappropriate questions in her deadpan voice. — Can you read and write? Why can’t you? What are those pictures on your pyjamas? Yachts? Do you own a yacht, then? Who d’you love best, your mummy or your daddy?

  — My mummy, Sandy responded promptly.

  Lydia pretended to be his daddy, feeling sad, rubbing her fists in her eyes and moaning. Sandy pityingly drew close, almost with tears in his own eyes: then she grabbed him and poked his tummy, playing at biting him. It was all too much. Soon he was thoroughly worked up, running round screaming with excitement. When he collapsed five minutes later in frantic sobs, Lydia grew tired of him and Christine had to take him to bed, calm him down, read him stories. Meanwhile she could hear Lydia snooping around downstairs, opening drawers and cupboards.

  — It’s for my survival, Lydia explained when Sandy was finally asleep. — I have to find out everything about Alex. Do you think they’re sleeping together? Obviously there’s only the one doubl
e bed. But do you think they’re actually having sex in it? I don’t think they are. I don’t feel any electricity between them.

  Christine didn’t want to think about Alex, whom they hardly knew and were in awe of, having sex with anyone. She said she had no idea. Yet she couldn’t help her own curiosity, in relation to the material thickness of these lives – Juliet, too, became glamorous by association with Alex. The girls searched in the fridge, tried the alcoholic drinks, read the postcards propped on the windowsill among the plants, even read a few letters left lying around; they felt for married secrets in the arrangements of the rooms. It was clear two forces were at odds in the tiny house, pitted against each other. On the female side there were the jars of lentils and pasta with gaily painted lids, the child’s drawings stuck on the fridge, the Indian embroideries on velvet, plants everywhere. Juliet was good at growing things. Ranged against this female brightness and optimism were the books in their plain covers on the shelves in Alex’s study, in English and French and other languages they didn’t recognise, piled punishingly high and thick with dust. The electric typewriter, the desk with its brimming ashtray, the broken dirty venetian blind hanging at a slant against the dark outside, the swivel chair on its chrome stem: all these were so deliberately ugly, modern, an austere exhibition of the life of the mind. Black-and-white photographs propped on the shelves or pinned on the walls were all photographs of men, other writers presumably, taken in rooms very like Alex’s study, also piled untidily with books and papers.

  Christine flushed at something antiquarian in her own studies, her fusty lovelorn lady poets. And she felt protective on Lydia’s behalf, against what was forbidding in Alex: the whole weight of a world of knowledge they didn’t share, a history and prestige in other languages which shut them out, showed them up as provincial and ignorant. Lydia was betting on the power of sex, against all this monumental difference. — Are you sure that Alex’s right for you? Christine wondered carefully. — I mean, even if he wasn’t married and everything. I think he’s quite cold. I admire him but I don’t think I like him.