Late in the Day

by Tessa Hadley

  Five

  AFTER CHRISTINE HAD TELEPHONED AND Lydia had spoken to her, Alex got up out of the bed, Zachary’s bed, and began putting on his clothes without looking at Lydia. She sat naked against the pillows with the white sheet across her breasts, watching him, drinking in his reality fearfully. Her eyes were unguarded for once, naked as her body – she had taken off her make-up before her shower. Lydia knew that in speaking to Christine she might have lost him. She waited for him to say something, to break the silence. What now? She couldn’t even make conversation or ask about her own daughter, how Grace’s spirits were when Alex left her in Glasgow. That domestic way was closed to Lydia for the moment, the prohibition heavy as a hand across her mouth. She and Alex had entered a forbidden terrain where their paths were blocked in all directions. And now, by speaking to Christine, Lydia had cut them off from saving themselves, from stepping back again into what they were before. She’d made it impossible – though not premeditatedly, she hadn’t had any plan when she picked up the phone – for Alex to step back.

  Lydia knew he was scalded by what she had said to Christine. Not because he was a coward or had calculated on deceiving anyone, but because there was something ingenuous in how she’d delivered her news – so baldly, like a teenager who intervenes out of her depth, precipitating adult consequences beyond what she can understand. Recalled to himself, Alex had been appalled by finding he was embroiled with Lydia, the Lydia he knew, with her exasperating passivity and fatalism like a child’s. His arm sticky with sweat had been around her neck the whole time she was talking to Christine, strands of her honey-coloured hair alien against his chest. He had been helpless not to overhear Chris’s utterly unsuspecting innocence: she was so slow to understand at first, and then so wounded and bewildered. Casting around to make sense, she hadn’t even accused them or been outraged – not yet. How could Alex and Lydia not dread each other after that? When Christine cut off the call he’d pulled away from Lydia in cold horror.

  Yet Lydia persisted in clinging to those truths of the body she’d found out when she was a teenager. Their act couldn’t be undone because it wasn’t nothing: their awareness of it was present in the room all around them like a shadow-play, overmastering their reasoning. There was no redemption in the world, only in this: teenagers knew. Alex had lost himself, and if Lydia let him go now he would hate her. He pissed in the bathroom then ran the tap full force and washed his face, dried it in her towel; without looking at her or speaking, he left the room and she heard him go downstairs. She waited without moving, listening out for the sound of the front door closing with finality behind him, shutting her out. But it didn’t come. Eventually she got out of bed and put on her gown, glancing at her reflection in the wall-mirror, running her fingers through her hair – dishevelled because she hadn’t finished drying it when Alex turned up. She didn’t look too bad.

  She found him on the sofa downstairs in front of the cold stove, sitting with his head bowed, fingers tensed against his temples, frowning at the floor in a despair that might have appeared theatrical at a different moment. Bringing the whisky bottle and one glass, she crouched between his knees on the rug, poured for both of them and drank first and deeply, then handed the glass to him. Her elbows on his knees, her face turned up to his, she claimed him for herself – whatever was between them wasn’t over. Alex touched her hair with resigned kindness. In the pressure of his hand, cupping the back of her skull as his eyes with their irony sought out something in her face – did he find it? her own irony? – Lydia felt all the reproaches he held back and explanations he gave up. He yielded to her and she was almost frightened, because the relation of her passion had always been to Alex’s resistance, his difficulty. He said that he had to go to Christine, talk to her.

  — She won’t want to see you, not yet. She won’t let you in.

  — I have to try.

  She took his hand and put it inside her gown, on her warm breast. — But you’ll come back to me? Don’t just drop me, Alex, will you – not after this? I don’t know what I’d do.

  He drove through the fitful imperfect darkness of the night streets, furtive with their intermittent traffic, red-eyed with lights; then alongside the shrouded Heath. What had happened? This new reality seemed like a trick of the darkness: momentous but so accidental. He had almost not gone to Garret’s Lane. And he had no idea what came next: much gnashing of teeth and wailing, no doubt. They had broken, he and Lydia, something that had been a monument containing everyone’s sorrow – how could they not be punished? He was in his fifties and for all he knew, the shape of all their lives was shaken loose now; his awareness burned with the hurt he had done to his wife. Yet an intimation surfaced, like a post standing up out of a tide for him to steer by: that he was strong enough for whatever it was, this twist of his fate. He had always known what lay behind this opening, more or less decently closed in his married life so far: the ocean depths of sex. This possibility had existed in him always, he was like his father.

  When he’d found a parking space in their street he tried to open the front door to the flat with his key, but Christine had pushed the bolt across. He rang the bell and seemed to sense her listening very close to him, on the other side of the door – he was sure he heard her breathing. He called her name in a low voice but didn’t knock, in case he woke their neighbours downstairs in the divided house – Chris would hate that. From the car he tried phoning but her mobile was turned off; she let the landline ring and didn’t answer it. A light was on in their first-floor sitting room, the blinds were drawn down: he thought he saw her shadow passing behind them and then the light went out, definitive as an eye closing, repudiating sight and being seen. When he drove away he didn’t go back to Garret’s Lane at once but chose a different route through the centre, parked somewhere by the Thames where he wasn’t supposed to, and got out of the car. He stood for twenty minutes watching the broad river slipping past on its own urgent business from bridge to bridge, its brown water oily as mud in the oblique half-light. But he wasn’t imagining throwing himself in. Something cruel and cold had come to the surface in his life, appalling and exhilarating. He could smell the river’s mineral breath, hear a rhythmic slow knocking from one of the static pontoons moored in the current.

  Replacing the phone in its socket after she’d spoken to Lydia, Christine sat poised on the edge of the sofa with her knees pressed together, waiting to see how she would feel. Her knees were trembling so that perhaps she couldn’t have stood even if she’d wanted to. Of course, she was devastated. But she floated above that in her mind, observing it wryly. This humiliated her: it was as if she’d been stripped bare in public. And now everyone would have to condemn them and be horrified by what they’d done – Alex and Lydia, Lydia and Alex! Their pairing seemed suddenly so inevitable, it had been bound to happen. And Christine was bored in advance with all the sympathy she would enlist, and the outrage – she was furious with distaste at their incurring it, those two, and at the stupid necessity for emotion and action and reaction they had unloosed. What an unattractively dreary role she, Christine, would have to play – the wronged wife!

  — I knew, I knew, she said, needing to reassure herself.

  Hadn’t she known and not known – what had she ever thought Lydia would do, now that she didn’t have Zachary? And why had Christine called her and no one else, when Alex was missing? At least, anyway, Alex wasn’t smashed up in an accident, she was let off that hook. No horrifying maiming, no hospital visiting: she could get on with things. But what things? Now, how would she live, if Alex left – or if she threw him out? Recognition after recognition tumbled down, giving way under her, leaving their gaping vacancies; when she thought of the word husband she was most stricken, although in all the time she and Alex had been married she’d never used it quite sincerely. Now perhaps she would be no one’s wife. Christine stood up confidently enough then and went all around the flat, up to the top bedroom and into the kitchen, seeing it differently, in a
surge of possessive passion. Whatever else happens, she thought, this place is mine. They don’t get this. And she was almost pleased, picking up objects in the rooms and putting them down again, straightening pictures, admiring the rich accumulation of interesting things as if she’d just come into some inheritance. It would be so convenient, to have all this to herself.

  Everything she saw that was Lydia’s she snatched up, stuffing it into a black bin bag: her scarf, magazines, bits of her wet washing on the clothes horse, letters from the bank and her solicitors, lighter, shoes. Lydia had taken a few of her things home, but left most of them. How untidy she was, how she spread herself everywhere! In the spare room Christine began dragging Lydia’s clothes off the hangers, shoving them into the bag, dropping bottles from the dressing table and bathroom in on top. In her vindictive cold soul she repudiated the other two, felt herself retracting away from them. It was a kind of freedom. But could she manage solitude? Wasn’t she a coward? All the years with Alex might have been only the staving off of solitude. For a moment she imagined explaining this to Lydia, who understood things.

  Confronted with the door to her studio, she remembered that its key was in her handbag. No, not in her handbag, she’d moved the key recently to a blue coffee pot where they kept receipts, on a kitchen shelf. She could fetch it easily: wasn’t her art her resource in this crisis, now she was left alone? Art was supposed to come out of what was ripped open. Also she would need money, she’d need to start earning again. But she was too afraid of what lay behind the door, she veered away and felt nausea at the idea of it, in case it was a failure, a rotten dead nullity – in case she never sold another thing. The time hadn’t come for testing her work, not yet. Too much was at stake. She might sink altogether, if it turned out she was no good any longer.

  When she heard the car draw up in the street outside she hurried to push the bolt across the front door to the flat, then watched from the sitting room, through the crack of sight down the side of the blind, as Alex approached the house. How strange that he was entirely familiar even though everything else was changed: in his quick abstracted walk, head down, hands clenched into fists – in the past, with a cigarette half concealed, poking between the knuckles. She used to think, he walks as if his path is marked out for him on the pavement, taking him somewhere, only no one else sees the marks: when she’d drawn him, she’d tried to draw this. From her viewpoint above, when the security light came on, she watched as he used his key in the outer door, saw the vulnerable spot where his faded tow-coloured hair was thinning. If only Lydia hadn’t spoken, and she hadn’t had to know! This stupid spasm of sex could have been buried decently, under the surface of the rest of their lives; they could have gone on growing old together, the three of them left. Then Christine thought of dropping something on Alex’s head, to kill him. She returned to sit in her usual place on the sofa, arms hugged around her ribs, listening out for his step on the stair – so that she wasn’t really on the other side of their front door when Alex was so sure he sensed her closeness. He gave up calling her name and went downstairs again and tried to phone her from the car; the peremptory loud ringing was like an invasion into her self-possession, excruciating. Yet until the last moment she expected herself to let him in, pick up the phone, have explanations out with him. She switched off the lights and stood waiting in the dark.

  When he had driven away at last she felt sleepy, and thought she could lie down on the bed to rest: in all her clothes because she’d never taken them off. But the moment she put her head on the pillow – with her knees up and her hands clasped calmly between them, closing her eyes – a great grey panic, crowded with very specific images and ideas, seized her and smothered her. She had to sit up again quickly to recover. Her heart leaped in her chest so painfully that she was sure she must be having a heart attack – which would solve everything, she thought melodramatically.

  In a reckless moment Isobel had texted the man she’d drenched in beer on their first date. He’d done his generous best to rescue that afternoon from its sticky beginning, making a joke of it; clearly though, once he’d delivered her home, he hadn’t wanted to take a chance on her again. She hadn’t heard a word from him. If she’d had any sense, Isobel thought, then she’d have felt the same: been relieved that she worked for the Department of Communities and Local Government and Blaise for the Foreign Office, so that their paths would probably never cross. Isobel was in a project on youth homelessness; he said he spent a lot of time counting Afghani Taliban and marking their positions on a map. Yet she felt regret for some affinity between them which hadn’t had time to show itself – probably existed only in her hoping for it. She felt as if they’d known each other as children, although they hadn’t; she had liked something stolid and gauche in him, and how he had been as scrupulous not to open doors for her, or help her off with her coat or pay for her, as a man like him in another generation would have been scrupulous to do those things. Blaise was shorter than she was, pudgy around the waist, with woolly gingery hair and clever eyes like chips of blue glass, set rather far back in his head; he’d seemed awkward in his jeans and she guessed that he’d always look better in his suit, tie loosened and shirt only half tucked into his trousers. He was one of those thirty-year-old men rushing headlong into middle age, with their boyishness still alive in their faces.

  He had replied to her text almost at once. She’d expected a painful interval of waiting while he composed the right gently regretful let-down; imagined him wincing over it in front of one of his maps stuck with Taliban-pins, in a dingy office with an eighteenth-century fireplace.

  — Do you fancy throwing a coffee over me? he wrote.

  At her desk, Isobel laughed in relief, and they arranged to meet the next day. She dressed up for the occasion in a cotton summer top and striped skirt, white patent leather belt, sandals; by the time she left the office it was bright enough for sunglasses, and she’d thought happily that she looked like a girl in a film hurrying to meet her lover. Then she’d sat alone in the cafe for forty minutes, digesting her disappointment, feeling overdressed as a doll. How could he? When he texted her later she wouldn’t even look to see what he said straight away, she was so hurt and offended. She didn’t want to read that something had come up, or that he’d forgotten, or been unavoidably detained in a meeting.

  — Where were you? he wrote.

  With hasty fingers she replied with the same question. Of course, there were two Prêt à Mangers in Trafalgar Square. And so their unlucky pattern was set. Both of them really, in the rest of their lives, they swore it, were very competent people. But when Blaise invited her round to his place, to cook for her, and they both intended – without either of them hinting it or even suggesting it by a significant look – for it to be the first occasion they slept together, she got some sickness bug. Blaise had to wipe the hair from her forehead as she hung vomiting over his toilet – and he’d prepared such a lovely meal, buying everything fresh from the farmers’ market. He might have given up then, Isobel thought. And perhaps she had seemed almost insanely persistent; she hoped that he didn’t begin to dread her. Aspects of his character which she might not have liked – his deliberateness, a certain unassailable privacy, some self-satisfaction – gained power over her because she was afraid she’d lose him. Blaise was self-sufficient like a much older single man: already he’d started collecting things and knowing about them, wine and antique books and clocks. He said he was conservative with a small c, voted Lib Dem and read the Economist and the Financial Times. — I suppose you’re a Guardian reader? he enquired sympathetically. She tried to tell him about Alex. — My father’s very brilliant. He’s special.

  — Oh, what does he do?

  When she said he was a primary school teacher she saw Blaise stop believing in the brilliance. — But he’s an inspired teacher, she explained. — And he could have been a poet or just about anything, except that he carries this burden about with him from his Czech legacy, because they had to leave
when he was a boy and his father never recovered.

  Isobel realised that Alex would never think Blaise was good enough for her. She would never be able to explain to him about that nugget of Blaise’s wholeness and goodness she was attracted to, seeking it out inexorably as a Geiger counter under all the layers of his stuffiness. Blaise’s education was Eton and Balliol; his mother was a barrister, his father farmed and hunted. Isobel wanted to ask him, if you had children, would you have to have all that for them too? And although they hadn’t actually even kissed yet, except for hello and goodbye, she lay awake worrying about her principles, whether if they had children together her commitment to state education would give way in the face of Blaise’s intransigence, if he were intransigent. When she’d recovered from her sickness bug she asked him round to her place, and as they poured their third glass of wine her mother rang. Isobel turned her phone over, but then while Blaise was in the bathroom listened to her messages, just in case. — Something happened last night, Christine said in a heavy voice, irritatingly portentous. — I’d like to talk about it. But it’s all right, don’t worry. Could you come round?

  — Would you like me to go with you? Blaise asked when she told him.

  — Oh no, hell, Isobel said unhappily. — Perhaps I’ll just ignore it.

  — You could do that.

  She hesitated. — We’ve had this awful thing recently, that’s the trouble. We’re all so sad, Mum’s sad. Someone very close to us died, the last person you’d ever think would die: so full of force. He just dropped dead one day in the middle of talking in his office. He was my dad’s best friend, my best friend’s father, Mum’s best friend’s husband.