by Tessa Hadley
Margita had learned to do her shopping on a computer – which, like the vases, was displayed on a crocheted doily on the sideboard – so that she hardly left her flat except on Sundays, when she was borne off to Alex and Christine’s for lunch. She sat at their table stiffly in her too-tight white patent shoes with kitten heels; hurt, but only half-heartedly, because they didn’t invite her to live with them, although this wasn’t really what she wanted. Aware of her superior intelligence in competition with English Granny, she knew that she lacked Barbara’s emollient social lightness and deprecating charm. Margita complained that Alex never talked to her on the telephone. He only wished she was dead and out of the way, it was always Christine who called.
One hand clutched Isobel’s, its wedding ring bedded deep in loose flesh, while the other scrabbled in the cigarette carton with its photographs of cancerous lungs. — And what about you, hey, Izabelka darling? How’s your love life?
— Granny, it’s non-existent. What am I to do? Nobody wants me! Am I so horrible?
— You’re too nice, Margita soothed her. — Be patient. These selfish boys, they don’t deserve you. Something good is waiting, just you see.
— At least Grace just goes out there and takes what she can get!
They settled down to browsing the men on Tinder on Isobel’s phone. Not that Isobel ever actually went as far as Tinder – she drew the line, she said, at anything worse than Guardian Soulmates. — What about this one? Margita encouraged her. — He’s more mature. Lawyer maybe: sporty, nice car.
But Isobel couldn’t warm to his carnivorous smile.
One night when Alex couldn’t sleep and went downstairs, he found Lydia in her nightdress in the sitting room, on the sofa with her feet tucked under her. He shut the door quietly behind him, so that they wouldn’t wake Christine. — You aren’t even reading, he said sympathetically, sitting down beside her, close but not touching. — What are you doing? Aren’t you cold?
The blinds were pulled down at the windows, but the street lamp outside gave them light to see each other. — I’m just being, I’m not doing anything.
— Can I get you a drink? Or a cup of tea?
— Sit there for a bit, Alex, she said. — That might help. Don’t go away. Talk to me about something abstract and very clever.
— Now you’ve put me on the spot.
— It doesn’t matter, you don’t have to talk to me. Just keep me company.
Alex poured himself vodka and then when he sat down again Lydia took the glass from him and drank from it, they shared it, both of them feeling its heat spread inside them. She was unsettled by sitting at such close quarters with him, in the T-shirt and stretch cotton shorts he wore to bed, his physique in these disconcertingly youthful: she was used to him in the jacket and tie he wore for school. She was beginning to see Alex again with the old intensity – that dangerous sprung tension in his posture, the keen lines of his face. Her awareness of him was a taut wire. He told her he was reading a comparative study of educational systems around the world, showing how each system was formed by the culture and ideology of that country, and also shaped and influenced by it. — But I’m boring you, he said. — You’re not interested in this.
— You always think I’m not interested. I was listening carefully.
— All the richness of the book is in the detail, which I can’t do justice to.
A few hours ago they had all sat watching a film, a thriller, on television in this room – with Christine’s mother, Barbara, too, who’d come for supper. Their chairs were still pulled around the screen, there were dregs in the wine glasses and coffee cups left out on a low table; Christine sewed pieces of Zachary’s quilt while she watched. Afterwards they’d enjoyed picking the film to pieces; all evening their collective domesticity had seemed friendly and inevitable, almost ordinary. But now in the thin middle of the night it appeared to Lydia too strange and strained to last. — I should go home, Alex, she said. — I don’t know what I’m doing here. I know it’s difficult for you two.
In that moment she was guileless and helpless, with her hands clasped between her knees, naked shoulders hunched. — We need to stick together, he said.
— Are you sure? I’m not sure.
She was shivering in her skimpy nightdress. Christine had left her cardigan on the arm of a chair and before he went upstairs again he picked it up, dropped it across Lydia’s bare shoulders.
Isobel begged Sandy to take Grace out somewhere, just to calm her down. He invited her to eat with him in an expensive, fashionable place, relieved to have the distance of a tabletop between them, pouring her wine parsimoniously so that she didn’t get carried away. Alone with Sandy, however, Grace lost all her bravado; she sat meekly in her cheeky T-shirt, ordering whatever he recommended, intimidated as if she hadn’t been used to eating in nice restaurants since she was a baby. She blushed when she dropped her fork on the floor with a clatter, and questioned him eagerly about the band, regressing to the little worshipping cousin who’d trotted round everywhere after Sandy like a devoted dog whenever their two families holidayed together. Sandy had used to torture Grace, calling her Mop-head, tying her hands behind her back with her own skipping rope, requiring her to stand unflinching while he fired potato pellets at her. He had taken her out once in an inflatable boat into the middle of a pond, and then swum back and left her alone without a paddle, gripping the sides of the boat and not calling out for help for such a long time – she couldn’t swim, and Sandy had known it. That had got him into awful trouble.
Grace could remember waiting for him in the close, humming, buzzing afternoon, under a lid of cloud – water boatmen scudding across the surface tension between fat lily pads, unseen fish mouthing their spreading rings, and after a while a shower of rain pocking the water all around her with a prickling sound, secretive and teasing as if it rose from the depths of the pond rather than falling from above. Of course Sandy was nicer now. Grace had every reason to be grateful to the saving veneer of adult decency: there was a wince of contrition in his new consideration for her. He even unwound a little in the balm of her uncritical attention, with no one else listening – dropped news of a forthcoming US tour into the conversation with unguarded self-importance. In the restaurant he brought off the performance required of him by his public, sophisticated celebrity combined with rebel youth. He spoke with extreme courtesy to the staff, signed an autograph without fuss, and didn’t finish anything he’d ordered; staring around him restlessly he shifted on his seat, crossing and uncrossing his long legs. Grace ate up all the food he didn’t want. — You know me, I’m so greedy, she said, with chocolate on her cheek, which he leaned over wordlessly to wipe off with his napkin, dipped in his water glass.
Only at the very last minute, outside the restaurant, when he was about to put her into a cab back to Isobel’s – sliding out two virgin twenty-pound notes from his wallet while they made their farewells, pleating them in his fingers, ready to slip them inconspicuously to the cabbie – did she fling her arms around his neck and kiss him, tasting for one heady moment, mingled with coffee and amaretto, his clean young skin and salty hair. — Take me home with you, why don’t you, Sandy? Please, just for this once? You know I’d never ask anything more of you, afterwards. Don’t you think I’m pretty? Aren’t I pretty enough for you? Just for one night?
Sandy extricated himself, ducking under her arm and leaning into the cab window, handing over the money, giving the driver Isobel’s address. — Grace, you’re very pretty. You know how fond I am of you. You’re a wonderful girl. But I respect you too much to ever take advantage of you.
— Oh please, don’t respect me, she cried too loudly in the street. — Please take advantage.
His respect, however, was inexorable.
Christine sometimes went guiltily back to bed in the afternoons, before Alex came in from school, to read or doze. Coming downstairs once when she woke after a nap, treading quietly because she thought Lydia too might be asleep, she
saw through the open doorway that her friend was reading on the sofa in the sitting room. Something prevented her from stepping forward across that threshold, offering to make tea, breaking the spell of Lydia’s solitude. Her concentration on her book was so intense, almost severe; frowning, straight-backed, wearing her reading glasses, sitting forward from the sofa cushions, her face uncharacteristically slack and plain because she believed herself unobserved. Lydia was reading Alex’s poems. Her hair, fastened in a clip at the nape of her neck, glinted with bronze in the sunlight from the window, and she wound and unwound one loose strand around her finger.
A breeze fanned the newspaper on the table, the smells of a city summer were wafted through the open window: tar and car exhaust, the bitter-green of the flowering privet hedge. Police horses went past in the broad street, their hooves clip-clopping conversationally alongside the voices of the women who rode them; the stables were nearby. Christine saw in the hard light how the flesh was beginning to be puffy under Lydia’s eyes and drag down her cheeks. Yet this late ripeness was attractive in itself, she could see that too, softening Lydia’s haughty beauty, filling it out with character and experience. Lydia must be so afraid, now she was left alone, of wasting this late flare of her power on no one, on emptiness. In a few years they would be old women: sixty! There wasn’t much time.
Christine stepped back from the door, then sat down on the stairs in the dim light, to think where it was cool. Lydia appeared to be studying Alex, setting herself the problem of what he was. Long ago, when Isobel was a baby, Christine had fought Alex for her life, so that he would acknowledge that in the domain of the mind they were equals, separate as equals. She couldn’t remember now why this had mattered so much, or where her appetite had come from for those long late-night sessions, prising away layer upon layer of resistance and falsity, confession matched with counter-confession. The lovemaking that usually ended things had sometimes amazed and reconciled them, sometimes seemed the continuation of their fight by other means. When Isobel woke them in the early morning their eyes had been sore with lack of sleep, they’d gone about in a daze of exposure.
She had been so keenly interested, then, in what Alex thought. But after a while things weren’t so difficult after all, and she never really knew how much that had to do with all those sessions of interrogation. Anyway, she didn’t think any longer about the truth in that same way: as a core underneath a series of obfuscations and disguises. In the long run, weren’t the disguises just as interesting, weren’t they real too? She and Alex were so unlike, really: associated through some accident in their youth – the accident of his choosing her, because of what he thought she was. Since that beginning, they had both changed their skins so often. Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.
Lydia must have sensed Christine’s presence in the doorway, or felt its alteration in the light, at just the instant she withdrew it. After a pause Christine heard her stand up from the sofa and walk over to the door; she stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up, her eyes taking time to adjust to the different light. Alex’s book was still in her hand dropped by her side, finger holding it open at a certain page – she made no attempt to conceal what she’d been reading. Why should she?
— Chris, what are you doing there?
— Just thinking, Christine said. — I was thinking about the four of us.
— What about us?
— You know, all our history together, the way we were.
— Oh, I see.
Lydia sounded disappointed, as if she’d waited for something else.
— Is it drawing to a close, do you think? Our bourgeois sensibility. All our sadness and our subtlety, our complicated arrangements. Our privilege of subtlety and irony is at an end. What’s in that Polish poem Alex quotes? Something about how the barbarians don’t object to irony. They just grind it up and use it as their salt.
— So it’s all up for us, the lilies of the field.
— You’re a lily. I’ve never been a lily.
Lydia climbed the stairs and sat down beside Christine with the book in her lap. — Who wants to be a fucking lily? Although I must say, look how nice I was once, in your picture. What fun we had in those days.
One of Christine’s acrylics, a painting of Lydia from years ago, hung on the opposite wall. Lydia was holding a fan, with a scarf of black lace over her hair, like a Maja; she was painted in dense brushstrokes with a lot of black, the room behind in an exaggerated childlike perspective, decorated with symbols which were deliberately obvious – a goldfinch, cherries. Christine had been thinking of her work then as set designs for plays that were never performed or even written. It was from around the time when she won the Whitechapel Prize, and everyone had been so surprised – painting was still unfashionable, and they hadn’t thought anyway it would go to a woman – that it hadn’t given the boost to her career it should have done. — Can I have it when you’re tired of it? Lydia said. — It means a lot to me, it’s beautiful. It’s my past.
— You can have it now. It’s yours.
— Why aren’t you painting, Chris? Is it because I’m here?
— You think everything’s about you. It isn’t about you, Lydia.
— About Zachary then. I think it’s about him.
Lydia felt Christine stiffen against her in repudiation. She said she didn’t want to talk about her work – she was taking a break, that was all. Why was everyone making such a fuss? Her face closed stubbornly.
— Talk to me about Zachary, Lydia said. — I need to think about him. He was so transparent in his life and now in his death he’s an enigma, I can’t get through to him. Tell me things you know about him, that I don’t know.
— I can’t, Lydia. I can’t bear to. Not just now, I’m sorry.
Grace wanted to get back to her friends in Glasgow. — It’s bad for me down here, she said to Isobel. — I’m just dwelling on Dad. I’m longing to do something with my hands, without my mind in it.
— I’ll miss you so much, I’ll be so solitary. Don’t stay away too long.
— I want to get back to my chisels, and vent all my pent-up feelings on some stones. Not that they’re very pent up, you’re thinking, Iz. Anyway, I’ve got to do something with the rest of my life.
The four women sat up late one night, finishing their quilt – even Lydia joined in, stitching with a frowning effort disproportionate to the tiny progress she made. When they held the quilt up finally, they were moved by what they’d brought into being between them. They hadn’t appliquéd Zachary’s whole name in the end, only woven a huge Z into their spiral design, cut out of a bright red flannel that had once been his waistcoat. Christine said she would sew on the backing fabric, with cotton wadding, on her machine.
— And who’s going to have it then? Grace challenged. — To sleep under.
Christine had imagined hanging it up somewhere. — It would look gorgeous against a white wall.
— No, we have to use it, Grace was adamant. — Not just look at it. We have to touch it every day and love it and spill things on it. It has to be part of life. Mum should have it, shouldn’t she? She can sleep underneath Dad’s name, to cheer herself up.
— We should drink to the completion of the quilt, exclaimed Christine. — Where’s that bottle of the Czech brandy Zach liked? The kind Vaclav Havel drank when he met up with Polish dissidents in the Harz mountains.
— Not the Harz mountains, Mum, Isobel said. — They’re in Germany.
— Isn’t she just like her father? Christine appealed to the others. — With the two of them, it’s like being trapped for life inside a general knowledge quiz. Can you imagine just how corrected I perpetually feel?
— The funniest thing happened to me, by the way, Isobel said, smiling round at them all. — I meant to tell you. I had a date for once – someone at work had fixed it up for me, friend of a friend.
Isobel was so wholesomely attractive, Christi
ne thought with a rush of love, in her neat blue cotton skirt and print shirt, with sturdy bare brown legs and sensible brogues. Her appearance made you imagine preparatory rituals, bathing and tending and ironing; a distinctive tight fold under her green eyes was edged in dark lashes as densely and precisely as if in pencil. — When was this? she said anxiously. — I do like to know, darling, just in case.
— At the weekend, Mum, don’t be silly: it was fine, Sunday lunchtime. But you just won’t believe my bad luck, it’s so typical. He was really quite nice, we drove out to a pub on the river in Henley, and we were both thirsty. He bought two pints of beer, we were standing up together, we chinked glasses. Maybe I was nervous, but really, we didn’t chink that hard. And my glass just broke! Around the middle, so that the bottom fell out neatly onto my feet and both of us were simply deluged in a whole pint of beer, from the waist down. I mean, I hardly knew him! It wasn’t exactly an auspicious beginning.
— It was a baptism, Iz, Lydia pronounced. — I think he’s the one.
— He was very nice about it, Isobel said. — But I haven’t heard from him since.
Alex took Grace back to Glasgow. He cleaned up the kitchen in the shared house above the shop and filled it with bread and cheese and pasta and fruit, unpacked the fruit cake which Christine had made for her. Two of her housemates were in residence and he didn’t know whether it was Grace’s bereavement which made them creep around so meekly, bursting with their repressed shy sympathy, or his inhibiting presence and forbidding age. He stayed overnight, in a sleeping bag on a dank sofa whose springs had collapsed, and the next day he escorted her to the Art School. In a chilly damp studio looming with unborn or half-born forms amid sodden sandbags, filthy with stone dust, he watched Grace in goggles and dust mask cut vindictively into the lump of half-carved limestone she’d left behind her in another life. He had a feeling she was only obliterating every trace of her old intentions, returning her artwork to pre-existence. He offered to stay another night, make sure she was OK, but she didn’t want him. He wasn’t any use to her, he was the wrong person, he wasn’t Zachary. He telephoned Christine to let her know he was setting out for home.
