Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  Lydia agreed, accepting her doom. — He’s completely the wrong person. But it’s love, I don’t have any choice.

  In spite of her lady poets, Christine didn’t quite believe in that kind of love. She was always falling in love herself, with her supervisor, with a brother of one of their housemates – even with a boy who worked in the butcher’s shop. And at the same time she could drily watch herself stoking her own anguish and abjection, knowing she could be free in one minute if she chose. But perhaps what Lydia felt was the authentic thing, and it was her own ironic detachment which was exceptional, shutting her out from life.

  By the time Alex and Juliet returned from the dinner party – they found their babysitters watching television innocently, side by side on the sofa – Alex was in a better mood. He joked with them while Juliet searched in her purse for the money to pay them. He asked if they were still reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Had they given up on decadence yet? Lydia turned on all her charm and chattered eagerly, punctuating her remarks with false-sounding bursts of laughter. — Oh no, she said. — We’re going to be decadent for years!

  But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed amused delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence, so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.

  Soon Lydia was round at Kensal Rise almost every day. She didn’t see much of Alex, though; mostly she was babysitting for Sandy or drinking coffee or wine at the kitchen table with Juliet, who poured out to her all the dissatisfactions of her marriage. Actually Lydia liked Juliet. Lydia was really very impressionable, although she appeared so disabused and knowing, and had such decided opinions. She was drawn into strong connection with women she met, studying them for clues as to how to grow up, what kind of person to be; she admired Juliet’s bright little house, her tidy cupboards, her competence and toughness – and was rather afraid of her, fascinated by the idea of her intimacy with Alex. She could not imagine achieving for herself any existence so strongly flavoured, so deep.

  Alex was moody and difficult, Juliet complained. He didn’t know how to enjoy himself. He loved his little son but thought he could just go on with the old life he’d had before there was a child, reading all day and tapping away on his typewriter, or just leaving the house without saying anything, not coming home sometimes for hours on end. He expected Juliet to take the brunt of the childcare – which made it difficult for her to get any acting work, even though it paid much better than his poetry. In fact his poetry didn’t pay at all. Juliet wasn’t supposed to say a word about all the books he bought, although they were so short of money that she had to cook for weeks on end with lentils and potatoes. — He doesn’t care, she said. — He hardly notices what he eats.

  Lydia entered sympathetically into Juliet’s difficulty in living with Alex: and yet these stories at the same time made him more desirable. She thought that if she had him she wouldn’t try to tame him, tie him down. And then, who wouldn’t rather buy books than lentils?

  — Don’t you feel bad? Christine said. — I mean, letting Juliet give all this away to you, while all the time your plan is to carry him off? Are you going to start an affair?

  — But I don’t even see him! The only one besotted with me is the kid. He can’t get enough of me, he’s always trying to put his hands up my skirt or into my bra. And he drives me up the wall with his questions. Remind me never, ever to have children.

  — It would be different if it was your own.

  — You think? Maybe.

  The girls pored together over Alex’s poems, when his book came out. Lydia read them aloud one at a time, trying to crack them like a code, find the key to what he wanted. Each poem was short enough, set apart at the centre of its creamy page, and the words weren’t in themselves incomprehensible, they were the plain words of everyday speech. Superficially the poems seemed to be about real material objects – a sofa or a coal shed or a bread knife – or actual moments in the real world. And yet the girls, trained as they were, had no idea how to read them or what to take from them. They learned from the author’s note that Alexandr’s family had come to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1968, when he was nine, and that his father had been a writer too, a novelist. The poems reminded Christine of the solid things in Alex’s study: not charming or poignant like the poetry she was used to, but dense and heavy on the page, functional, the words fitting his thoughts as closely as tools worn smooth with handling. Their power was in the resistance they offered to any reading that was pretty or comforting.

  Juliet told Lydia that publishing the collection had made Alex miserable. He ought to have been delighted, fame at last. — Not that anybody’s reviewed it yet or anything, she said. — Of course, that’s a sore point. He says in England it’s just little circles of posh poets, reviewing one another.

  Lydia found out where Alex went drinking with his friends, a filthy old pub off Pentonville Road, near King’s Cross. She breezed through there one night as if by accident, and got introduced to them all, and after that she began to drop in often. At first she was excited to belong to this new set of friends, the only woman among all those clever men, the shouted arguments. Alex took more notice of her, he was kind and encouraged her to talk. But his kindness was not enough, it was not what Lydia wanted, and after a while it was crushing. It reinforced her obsession: she knew there was a streak of fanaticism in her make-up, and was half frightened by the power she’d given this man over her happiness. Perhaps she’d feel better, she thought, if Christine was a part of these evenings. Christine was sane, she put things in perspective. — Why don’t you come along? she pleaded. — Please, Chris? You can tell me if there’s any chance he’ll ever like me – I mean, really like me – or if I should just start drinking myself to death right now. And anyway there’s somebody else you ought to meet. Really, Zachary’s the perfect one for you. I think it could work. He’s a close friend of Alex’s but he’s so different to Alex: so easy to get along with. And terribly rich.

  Just like the girls, Alex and Zachary had been friends since they were at school together. At least the girls had gone home to their families every evening. Both sets of the boys’ parents had, against the grain of their progressive politics, decided to send their sons to be boarders inside the public school system – where they were, not unpredictably, thoroughly unhappy. Their parents had only wanted to keep them safe, inoculate them against exclusion: both families had histories that gave them cause to feel nervous. Zachary Samuels’s grandparents had got out of the Ukraine in the early twentieth century, but so many of their relatives had not. Alex Klimec’s novelist-father had never written a word, in any language, after he had to leave Bratislava so abruptly. His silence had brooded over their household.

  Something in both the boys – stubbornness perhaps in Alex’s case, generous self-sacrifice in Zachary’s – prevented them from begging their parents, more than the statutory once or twice in the first weeks, to take them away from the ghastly place. Yet their parents should have taken in the signs of strain: the boys had come back changed from their first term, with a new brittle carapace of mockery. Probably Zachary was always too rosy and too buoyant for anyone to notice; and no doubt Alex’s parents, exiled themselves, thought his pinched misery was the usual human condition. So the boys, in their small society of two – which expanded flexibly enough, in certain phases, to take in other strays – had to make up to each other, at school, for the loss of everything. Alex spoke English perfectly, that had been the first great conscious effort of his life, to pass as belonging; but he existed inside those words as if inside an alien shell, whose forms were not quite his – this made survival easier. He had to protect Zachary, who was so unguarded. When Alex first saw his friend’s expectant grin, he thought of those birds and mammals on remote islands who haven’t learned yet
to be afraid of predators. On the other hand Zachary was liked, by the boys and the masters, and Alex wasn’t; they thought he sneered at them. He could be very cutting, with his distinctive vocabulary, using with perfect fluency words the other boys hardly knew.

  The great relief and release, and the beginning of their free lives, when school was over and they both got into Cambridge, didn’t end the friendship – no one else would ever know what that time had been. Alex and Zachary didn’t talk about school but their shared experience bound them together, closer than brothers. (And as it happened Zachary’s parents sent his brother Max to the local state school, which was very good, because Zachary said that Max would be happier there – and afterwards Max always resented what he saw as Zachary’s advantage.) Now Alex and Zachary were both trying to write. As well as publishing his poems, Alex was getting some university teaching and reviewing for good papers; he was making a name. Zachary was struggling with a novel, and he was making clever little light-box installations too. It was typical of his resilient good luck and his charm – and his connections, because his wealthy parents were enthusiastic patrons of the arts – that he had editors and galleries interested in his work, although he hadn’t finished anything yet. Alex thought he never would finish. He didn’t think Zachary had the necessary cruelty that made an artist, or the incompleteness in himself. He was too rounded and too hopeful. His work was derived from his enthusiasm for the arts, which was all upside down. But then Alex’s ideas about an artist’s life were based naturally on his own father, whose gifts had been so bitterly unfulfilled.

  The group of friends who drank together – Alex and Zachary and Nathan Kearney and Martin Shield and others – didn’t do anything so crass as discuss an artist’s life or personality. If they talked about books or music or films at all it was almost always a competitive swapping of assertions: this or that was superb, or – more often – it was no good, they’d seen through it. The grounds of taste went without saying. They handled shared certainties, or poured incredulous scorn on each other’s preferences, or just shut up if the other man didn’t see the point, wasn’t worth arguing with. Alex was often reserved in that company, he held himself apart. He was uneasy with their consensus because he felt so queasy, himself, about committing to any certainty. Everything he’d ever written he wanted to destroy when he’d finished it – or at least half wanted to. Even his poems, forged in such heat, then worked over and over with such cold scrupulousness, seemed shrunken to something disappointing as soon as he saw them exposed on the pages of a book. It was only loyalty to his past self, and also self-preservation – best not to fuss – that kept him from disowning them.

  Alex’s withdrawn silences, when he was with his friends, didn’t do any harm to the reputation he had as the rarest, most talented among them; and then when he did talk he was original, forceful and funny. The others took their opinions from him. The distinctive way Alex used words may have been the last trace of his foreignness: his talk was substantial, like his poems – he liked plain language, vocabulary drawn from daily life. But he knew so much, he’d read everything. He read at night – his friends wondered if he ever slept. They deferred to him and jousted for his approval, for the warming gleam of his responsiveness. Without being aware they were doing it, they even adopted elements of his style, wore the same kind of tight-fitting wool jumpers, developed the same taste for drinking their coffee black. They were afraid, too, of the hard snap of Alex’s correction sometimes, and his moods. He thought their revolutionary fervour naïve, was scathing on the subject of the high hopes of leftists in the West. Outside his immediate circle there were a few who strongly disliked and resented him.

  The crisis in his marriage made Alex unhappy. He had had every intention, when he married Juliet because she was pregnant with their son, of seeing their arrangement through with decency. He had respect for something enduring in the institution of marriage, binding people together: the idea of a failed marriage, and fresh beginnings over again, were clichés for the middle-aged. He’d never been unfaithful to Juliet, although she imagined atrocities – but he wouldn’t spell out for her as she demanded where he’d been, every hour of his day. She was always worst when she’d been talking on the phone to her sisters, who echoed her complaints back to her, redoubling them, eliminating any ambiguity, working her up into a fury of recrimination.

  — Sandy told me you left him alone in the library, Juliet said.

  He couldn’t even think, for a few moments, what she was talking about.

  — You left him there, and told him not to move from where he was sitting until you came back, and then you disappeared for half an hour. He was frightened.

  — It was ten minutes, he said. — He was happy looking at the pictures in a book. I went upstairs into the reference section. When I came back he hadn’t moved.

  — My God, Juliet said. — Anything could have happened!

  Alex wondered whether they’d reached a new low point, using their son as an informer in the war between them. He didn’t believe that Sandy had really been frightened. When he’d tried taking him up into the reference section, Sandy had only whined to go downstairs again, disturbing the people who were working. It worried Alex that the boy wasn’t more childlike and robust; Juliet encouraged him to play these games, manipulating his parents’ emotions. Looking at his son, Alex could hardly recognise anything from his own childhood. — Sandy was sitting in perfect safety, he said, — in a library. Have you any idea what kinds of responsibility other children his age have to take on, around the world? Don’t you actually plan to give him the freedom of his own competence?

  — This isn’t other children, it’s our child. It isn’t anywhere else in the world. He’s four years old, Alex. He could have wandered out into the street, anyone could have abducted him. Why can’t you see things from a normal point of view?

  Inexorably they worked their way round once again to counselling: this was her sisters’ solution to everything. They should have therapy, they should talk to someone. — I won’t talk to anyone, Alex said. If they wanted the marriage to continue, Juliet said, then they had to make some changes in how they related to each other. He knew she told other people that he was cold, but at this moment he was making an effort to speak to her entirely without artifice or guile. — I won’t change, he said. — I don’t think that I can. And even if you succeeded in making me change, wouldn’t you be afraid that I might hate you for it?

  — I think you hate me anyway. You behave as if you hate me.

  — I don’t hate you.

  — And why are we only talking about you, as usual? You might hate me, you might not hate me, how am I supposed to tell? Both things come out looking rather the same. Why don’t you ask about me, just for once? What if I hated you?

  — Then don’t tell me. It’s best if I don’t know.

  They had been in the middle of undressing for bed when this argument erupted. Now Juliet sat turned away from him on the other side of the bed with her shirt off, back bowed and her head dropped into her hands, the knobs of her vertebrae sticking up sharply on her narrow brown back, cut across by the black strap of her bra. When Juliet let her ferocity and vigilance lapse, he felt so sorry they had fallen out. He liked her, he felt at a loss in the face of her opposition. Couldn’t they just live alongside one another, leaving each other mostly alone, in peace? This bristling opposition and competition, flaring up at every hour of every day, exhausted them both. He wished they didn’t always have to talk. He touched her shoulder and felt the heat of her smooth skin, on her neck under her hair. For a few moments she sat without resisting, allowed him to caress her.

  — You think this is the solution for everything! she protested eventually.

  — Isn’t it?

  But he took his hand away.

  When she did finally come along to the Pentonville Road pub, Christine hardly spoke at first. She was too impressed by so many clever men talking and joking, so well-informed and witty.
Their sheer physical bulk and confidence and careless loud voices were impressive in themselves, along with their liberating indifference to their appearance – the dirty old second-hand clothes, ragged jumpers with holes at the elbow, tangled unwashed hair, the spontaneity in their keen young faces. Everything else fell into place behind the men’s intelligence and their ideas; beside this, Christine felt her female intelligence as fatally self-conscious. She puzzled out her ideas with genuine interest during the day, yet when she brought them out in conversation in the evening she couldn’t help being aware of what she was wearing and how she might appear. Didn’t that undermine her authenticity? At work on her thesis, even while her thoughts went leaping ahead under their own momentum, in the same moment she imagined her supervisor admiring her cleverness. Self-doubt gnawed at Christine: this double-think made her despondent, she couldn’t find any way round it.

  Lydia put in her own remarks among the men, and they all deferred to her, but Christine saw that they didn’t quite take what she said seriously – not because they thought it was stupid exactly, but because her appearance blocked their attention, like a dazzle of sunlight in a reflection off glass. They were exaggeratedly solicitous and encouraging when the girls spoke, as they never were with one another. There was a danger, Christine thought, that you might end up performing for them, like a curiosity – and Lydia was inclined to show off if she had an audience. She made them laugh when she said that the only career which had ever interested her was as a grande horizontale; she’d like to have been the mistress of one of the great bankers or statesmen in nineteenth-century Paris. Christine looked quickly at Alex, to see if he was seduced by this idea. But it seemed to her that he was only amused and curious. Surely he guessed that Lydia was there for him. The more pointedly she flirted with the others, the more obvious it was.