by Tessa Hadley
And in the middle of the night she picked up Alex’s books as if they were stepping stones across the darkness, frowning over Clifford Geertz and Alfred Gell, labouring to comprehend them, discipline her thoughts. She never usually read non-fiction; now she couldn’t bear novels, which were too much like life. This scaffolding of abstract thought at one remove from experience – describing it rather than enacting it – was a relief, lifted a burden from her. And she began to find her own thought leaping with genuine interest after the leaps of these clever, sympathetic writers; she lifted her head from the page to think, but not of her own life and crisis, or not directly. She copied certain sentences into her notebook. What revelation of the frameworks underpinning things! Then she wished Alex was with her – not for passion only, but also to question him on this new plane, about these new subjects. She had a fresh lucid vision of possibility for their companionship. Of course, Alex’s range was so much greater than hers, he had read everything, understood how it all fitted together. But still, she had her own quick perceptions, her logic and good memory. She had believed in the past that most of her inward intimations were incommunicable: Zachary had been afraid of her thinking too much, had only ever wanted to cherish her and cheer her up. Now for the first time she began to imagine sharing her ideas, even the dark ones. If only Alex would come back.
Christine heard someone unlocking the door to the flat and felt a surge of resentment, sure for a moment that it was Alex. Hadn’t she asked him to keep away? She was tidying her bedroom upstairs, sorting out drawers, throwing out a lot of stuff she hadn’t worn for years. Then she remembered that Alex didn’t have the new keys to the flat. It was Isobel who waited for her in the front room, standing in the sunshine, looking out of the window into the street. — Why aren’t you at work, darling? Christine asked anxiously. — How lovely to see you!
— Sorry Mum, I’ve interrupted you. Were you painting?
— Don’t be silly, I don’t mind. Are you all right?
Isobel said she’d taken the day off, she was feeling a bit under the weather, that was all, she was fine – and didn’t want coffee, only a glass of water. She was looking around her at the rearranged room with its new paint and cushions. — It’s all lovely in here now, isn’t it?
Christine joked that she was depressed by how lovely the flat looked. Didn’t everyone do this as they got older, the ones anyway that didn’t just go to seed? Compensating for their own decaying looks, they spruced up the outer spaces of their lives to perfection – then knocked around inside these mini-palaces like wizened nuts in a shell. Isobel laughed and said that this was nonsense. Christine’s looks weren’t decaying and she wasn’t a wizened nut.
— Take off your coat, her mother coaxed, putting an arm round her shoulders, unwinding the scarf from her neck. — Tell me what’s the matter.
— Nothing’s the matter.
But she submitted to Christine’s helping her off with her coat, easing its pink silk lining along her arms hanging down dejectedly. — Now sit and talk to me.
— I need to go to the bathroom.
She went up to Christine’s bathroom in the attic; after a few minutes, when the toilet had flushed but Isobel didn’t reappear, Christine followed her upstairs and found her lying on her side on the bed with her face turned away, pressed into the pillows.
— I’m pregnant of course, Isobel said, muffled. — As if you couldn’t guess.
Christine was overthrown, and shocked at herself because this hadn’t occurred to her. She’d been too distracted, had thought that perhaps the thing with Blaise had broken up; hoped for it, even. Pregnant – she couldn’t take that in. Sitting down on the bed beside her, saying everything loving and cautious and sympathetic, she stroked her daughter’s downy arms and the brown hair which grew so coarse and strong from the nape of her young neck. Important with her news, Isobel seemed for the first time heavier and more substantial than her mother, the curve of her hip sculptural in her dress – plum coloured wool with a retro paisley pattern, like something Christine might have worn herself when she was young, thirty years ago. Isobel said that she felt like shit – she never normally used bad language, she was never crude. — The condom split. It’s the latest in a whole chapter of accidents. Everything goes wrong for us, for me and Blaise. It’s just the last thing I wanted. Fucks up my career nicely.
— And what does Blaise say?
Isobel hadn’t told him yet. — He hardly knows me, it’s all happening too soon. He’ll just think I’m a walking disaster area. But I like him, Mum, I really like him. And I suppose he’ll want to send his kids to private school, you know there’s all that in his background and I’m not giving in to it. I’m keeping this baby anyway, whatever he thinks.
Of course she was, Christine said. With or without Blaise; if Isobel was sure that was what she wanted. Her parents would support her in whatever she chose, Alex would feel just the same. Christine was panicking, though, imagining the reality of a baby – perhaps a baby in this flat. Where else would Isobel live, if Blaise didn’t support her? There would be no time for art then, she thought fatalistically. But she calmed down, told herself she should know from past experience not to panic. There was always time for art, you could always make time somehow. Or find the money to buy time, buy childminding if need be – money from Lydia, perhaps. Lydia owed her. And meanwhile her daughter was pregnant, and the fine afternoon darkened into evening beyond the skylight.
— I know I’m the right person for Blaise, Isobel was explaining. — I’ll save him from himself, he needs me. We balance out perfectly. Because without me he’s in danger of becoming quite stuffy, such an old fogey. With his clocks and first editions.
— Oh, do you think so? Christine said, cautiously.
— I’ll be good for him.
After Oxford, Alex had driven west and south in the lovely autumn weather, visited second-hand bookshops, seen four cathedrals, two ruined abbeys and a castle. He who never took time off from work was truanting and aware – not guiltily – of the fixed intervals of school-time passing somewhere, like a clock ticking, behind the wandering formlessness of his days. In the evenings he did what was even more out of character: sat with his drink in the lounges of dull old picturesque hotels, spending money on his credit card, ordering solitary meals, browsing in the books he’d bought. The deadness of his phone muffled him in its silence, like the muffling thick carpets, too-hot central heating, silk-shaded lamps, furniture stiffly upholstered. He eavesdropped on the lively, involved interactions and flirtations of the hotel workers – only the guests in these places were discreet, not the staff – but didn’t chat to them, as if he was in a foreign land and didn’t know their language. The staff were mostly Central and East Europeans, but all spoke in good English.
Alex’s first impulse, when he drove off in London, had been rebellious – he had thought that anything could happen next, he could do anything. And he knew it was amusing that his rebellion had been deflected into this utterly innocent thing, a holiday in English beauty spots fit for a blamelessly retired schoolmaster. No opportunities had arisen, anyway, for anything not blameless. Yet it turned out that innocence had its ecstasies too: one early evening, for instance, the façade of a great cathedral was spectral with livid orange light and he had the whole grassy precinct to himself. Pigeons wheeling in their flock, back and forth from the façade with its ranked saints, showed in concert first their dark backs and then their pale undersides, like the flickering play of some spirit around the fixed monument of the Church.
He could have spoken to Lydia – or Christine, for that matter – at any time, from the phone in his hotel room: he considered it. But in the end he never did, and then one afternoon he was suddenly bored by his freedom; the temperature had dropped and the light changed within an hour from clean-washed to louring. Thunder rumbled at the end of the handsome old stone streets of a provincial town whose history seemed to him exhausted, smothered under so much bland cultivation.
He paid his hotel bill and headed for home, arrived in Garret’s Lane without giving Lydia any warning, let himself in with his keys and hurried through the dusky rooms, full of anticipation. She was on the mezzanine, started up from where she was sitting bent over a book; it was early evening yet she was in her dressing gown, wearing reading glasses which she pulled away from her face as soon as she saw him. She hadn’t switched on any lamps apart from the one she’d been reading by. — Alex, I’m so glad to see you.
— Are you ill? Why are you sitting in the dark?
He ran up the last few steps to embrace her, putting his lips to her forehead, anxiously pushing back her hair. Lydia put up her hands to frame his head, holding off their kisses, studying him with intensity. He couldn’t imagine why he’d stayed away so long. She reassured him that she was perfectly well. — The day ran away with me. I’ve showered, I meant to get dressed.
She looked older, he thought. There was a new weakness in the flesh around her mouth and her jaw – or perhaps he’d just forgotten this while he was away, made a cult out of his idea of a younger more perfect Lydia. Her weakness disconcerted him, but didn’t make him care for her any less; on the contrary, it made him gentler, more considerate. After all, he was growing older too. He touched the blemishes in her soft skin and she offered herself up to his fingers uninhibitedly, without flinching: he saw that she knew what he saw. — Have you been eating enough, Lyddie? You’re too thin.
— You should have warned me you were coming. There’s nothing in the place for supper. Are you starving?
— I’m starving. We’ll go out, but not yet. First things first. Come upstairs with me.
Perhaps because his sensibility was imprinted with the grave old architecture of abbeys and cathedrals, their lovemaking on this occasion seemed to Alex ceremonious and poignant, more like leave-taking than homecoming. Draughts stirred the floor-length muslin curtains at the windows, the reflected lights of passing vehicles moved in slow arcs across the ceiling. Afterwards, hidden against him in the near-dark, Lydia tried to talk about the books she’d read. — I had so many ideas! There were so many things I wanted to discuss with you, about religion and history and art. Now they’ve all gone out of my head.
Alex reassured her that they would come back. It was always like that with reading, he said. It was difficult to translate into speech the density of an argument set out in writing. — I liked the feeling, Lydia said, — that contemplating these big themes saved me from myself. You know, one’s insistent self, always so agonised and burdensome.
He was listening carefully and agreed he liked that feeling too.
Lydia didn’t want to move from where they were so perfectly mingled together under the duvet. — I suppose we have to go out?
But Alex was hungry. So while he ran a bath she put on the vermilion dress she’d worn on the day of Zachary’s vigil, then sat at the dressing table and made her face up boldly, with brilliant lipstick. Across the table in the restaurant she told Alex that she’d come up with a new idea. She thought that they ought to leave the premises at Garret’s Lane, find a place of their own. They couldn’t sell, because the whole place was tied up in the Trust; but Zachary had purchased another property years ago in Mile End, in Lydia’s name, in case the gallery had ever failed. They could sell this, and buy somewhere else – big enough for Grace too, so that they didn’t all three have to live too much on top of one another. Perhaps Hannah and Jenny would like to move in above the gallery; any rent from the Garret’s Lane premises was Lydia’s. She watched Alex push his fish thoughtfully around his plate with his fork. Of course he felt the net of a new ownership dropping over him. And he was wondering whether it would really work out, if Grace came to live with them. Lydia loved the idea of a new relationship with her daughter, but no doubt the daily reality would prove more complex.
— I know I’ve been feeble, she reassured him, — but I feel better now. I’ll be able to do much more, I won’t be so helpless. I could be more involved with the Trust, and with the gallery. I’ve got friends who could surely find a use for me: on one of the art magazines, say.
Alex looked into her face, seeing beyond her words. Following Lydia across the restaurant when they arrived, seeing her swaying on her high heels, poised and buoyant, drawing looks from the other diners, the red fabric of her dress pulled tight across the attractive curves of her behind, he had had some perception of the effort it took to sustain this high performance. He’d been impressed as if with a strained, inward heroism, like an aged actress girding on her costume for the play. — No, you’re right of course, he said. — It’s a good plan. It’s what we ought to do.
Lydia, you will be surprised to get this email from me. It is dawn outside the window. I never usually wake this early – I’ve been sleeping well, since I’ve been sleeping alone. The light in here in the study – which I can’t help still thinking of as Alex’s study, because I don’t really ever do anything like studying these days – is thin, so that I still seem to be inside my dreams. I woke just now to such a lovely sensation, I thought I was somewhere beside the sea. Not just as a memory but the actual thing, real all around me: salty air and waves breaking on a beach, gulls wheeling and calling, rock pools, plastic buckets of seawater, the tide’s debris of wet seaweed, white cuttlefish bones. Even as I write down these details the sensation eludes me, it was so delicate – yet overwhelming. I felt very free and unencumbered, like a child on holiday. The long day opening ahead of me, carelessly capacious, ripe with possibilities for pleasure.
One good thing about living alone – of course there are downsides – is that you can act on your impulses, with no one taking any notice. So I got up and came in here. I thought of you. I wanted to tell you something but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s the same as in my dream – wet seaweed, cuttlefish bones. I had such a luminously clear picture of you, amidst the sensations of my seascape – your crooked wit, your disabusedness. In your school uniform, of all things – which you always wore with consummate stylish wit. That horror of a green felt hat, jammed down on your head like their vain attempt to extinguish you. Don’t reply to this, Lydia. I don’t want to ‘make friends’, as the adults say to quarrelling children. Anyway children know that friends can’t be made, only found – or lost again. But don’t be sorry. Everything’s what it is. Your, C. x
The last thing Zachary had arranged for the gallery before he died was an exhibition of late paintings by an American artist, a woman who’d worked in the fifties in Coenties Slip in Manhattan alongside Barnett Newman, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney. It was quite a coup because there had recently been a big retrospective of her work at MOMA. — You’ll love these, Zachary had enthused to Christine, when he had confirmation it was coming off. — I think they’ll speak to you. It’s so good that everyone’s excited about painting again. And although they’re abstracts, and they’re big, I see something like your cool sensibility and detailed subtle touch. Even a similar palette.
Now Hannah had finally opened the exhibition. Christine didn’t know what to expect, she hadn’t seen reproductions and refused to look at anyone’s work on the internet, where even numinous masterworks became so many interchangeable Post-it notes. Preparing for her visit to Garret’s Lane felt like a kind of pilgrimage, invested with significance, almost dread – and not only because she hadn’t been near the place since Alex left. These paintings would surely have a message for her, like a message from Zachary. She checked that she had tissues in her bag because she was afraid that she’d cry if they moved her too much, make a fool of herself. Of course she’d made sure beforehand, through Isobel, that Alex and Lydia were away – in Glasgow as it happened, because they were helping transport all Grace’s things back down to London, she was coming home. They hadn’t moved out of the Garret’s Lane apartments yet, although according to Isobel they had found somewhere to buy. A new member of staff was on duty in the gallery when Christine went in, so she wasn’t recognised, there was no embarrassm
ent over her connection with it. Stepping once again into the airy, tranquil exhibition space, with its soaring ribs of pale brick above white walls, she felt as if all her history and future were gathered up there, waiting for her to see it clearly at last. There were only two or three other visitors looking round.
And then after all that fuss of anticipation she didn’t much like the paintings. They bored her: that possibility hadn’t occurred to her, it really was a surprise. There was no danger of her shedding tears. It wasn’t that she thought they were false or pretentious exactly: she could imagine the very authentic journey the artist had made towards these big pale canvases with their silver and grey and wheat colours, their painstaking exact grids and geometries, fine as quilting. In pursuit of some truth of the spirit she had refined away every intrusion of ugly life: all the dirty marks it made, all its aggression and banally literal languages. There were some beautiful effects of paint: Christine liked one work in particular, where the acrylic wash had run between grey stripes into denser forms, like rain clouds. But the end result, nonetheless, seemed to her puritanical, and too wholesome and homespun: even sentimental, in its conviction of the possibility of purity, like a sentimental mysticism. You had to be so vigilant, if you banished all obvious meanings from the front of your art, that they didn’t return unobserved by the back door.
