Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

— You do remember?

— Well, something awful. I really thought, though, you wouldn’t have guessed, that it was all just my own horrible idea.

— But in the boat.

— In the boat? In the boat? What did I do in the boat? Oh, don’t tell me, please, I don’t want to know. God — I can’t explain it, there’s no explanation. When my own son got to that age I used to think, that boy. It was such a rotten summer, Don and I. I remember I used to sit there on the beach just dreaming of lacerating him all over with a kitchen knife. Poor Don. He really wasn’t so bad. Cooped up all summer together in that awful hut. She looked at him with shock. — You do know that Don and I split up? No, of course, why should you? But that was in another lifetime, really. My husband’s an architect. We had another daughter together, four children altogether. She spelled out these things as if she owed him explanations.

— Are the children at school?

— At school? Her eyes were wet again, her loose mouth slipped, smiling, she took his hand off her knee. — I’m a grandmother. I’ve got two grandchildren. The daughter you didn’t know — she’s at art college, final year. You see — I’m an old woman. Hideous, isn’t it? Oh God, this is awful. Let’s have a drink.

She poured them both huge splashes of Scotch.

— But your name’s the same, that’s how I followed you up.

— I didn’t want all that business, taking my husband’s name. I wanted to do things differently, the second time. Whether it worked out so very different, this man — woman thing, it’s so difficult. They chinked glasses, she blushed very darkly. — Have you forgiven me? It hasn’t ruined your life or anything? I’m really so ashamed. I was, afterwards; then I began to wonder if I really could have done anything so awful. I thought I might have just dreamed it. But of course I’ve never thought I’d see you, that we’d recognise one another. We lived in the north for years.

— I recognised you. Why food hygiene, by the way?

She was blank again. — Oh! Food hygiene! She ran mentally over a room of faces. — Were you at that conference? Yes — I part own a restauraunt, a French restaurant in Kingsmile.

They drank their whisky quickly and she poured more with shaking hands. She looked appeasingly into his face. — You are nice-looking, she said. — I always had good taste in men. Oh dear. It is all right, isn’t it? You haven’t come to punish me or anything?

— No, he said. — That’s the last thing.

Nonetheless, when he began kissing her and putting his hands under her clothes, he did it without tentativeness, as if he was claiming something he was owed. And she let him, watched him, said, — Are you really sure? I don’t think of anyone wanting this from me any more. I mean, any stranger.

— I’m not a stranger, he said.

— You are to me. In spite of everything you tell me. I remember it, just. But of course not with you. I remember a boy, you see. I’ve never seen you before.

But she didn’t stop him. Several times, for all his intentness, he caught her look of curiosity at him, curiosity like his own, hard and greedy and tinged with shame.

Carol swung the door open as he put his key in the lock.

— Where have you been? I’ve been out of my mind. I’ve phoned all the hospitals, your dinner’s ruined, the kids –

— Carol, didn’t I tell you? We had a GCSE moderation, it went on for bloody hours. I’m sure I told you. I said I’d get sandwiches.

— But I phoned the college, there was no answer.

— Love, I’m sorry. The phone rings in the office, there’s no one there to pick it up. I’m sorry, maybe I did forget to mention it. I was so sure I had. Let me come in and get the kids to bed for you.

She stood staring at him. — It’s so unlike you. You’re usually so organised. But I really don’t remember you telling me about this one. And isn’t it a bit early for a moderation? You haven’t finished marking all the papers yet.

For a moment he was sure she could smell something on him, see something of the dazzle that was clinging to him, dripping off him, flashing round in his veins. But he saw her deliberately tidy that intimation away, out of consciousness. This was her husband, the man she knew. He was a physics teacher and competition-standard chess player, wasn’t he?

WHEN KEITH HAD finished up the second bottle of wine he began to yawn, the conversation faltered companionably as it can between old friends, and then he took himself off to bed in Caro’s spare room, where she knew he fell asleep at once between her clean white sheets because she heard him snort or snuffle once or twice as she was carrying dishes past the door. She relished the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases. Caro herself felt awake, wide awake, the kind of awakeness that seizes you in the early hours and brings such ultimate penetration and clarity that you cannot imagine you will ever sleep again. She cleared the table in the living room where they had eaten together, stacked the dishes in the dishwasher ready to turn on in the morning, washed up a few delicate bowls and glasses she didn’t trust in the machine, tidied the kitchen. In her bare feet she prowled around the flat, not able to make up her mind to undress and go to bed. Tomorrow was Sunday, she didn’t have to get up for work.

What was it about Keith, after all this time, that could still make her restless; could make her feel this need to be vigilant while he snored? When they sat eating and drinking together she hadn’t felt it; she had felt fond of him, and that his old power to stir and upset her was diminished. He was nicer than he used to be, no doubt about that. They had talked a lot about his children; the ones he had had with Penny, Caro’s sister, who were in their twenties now, and then the younger ones he had with his second wife Lynne. She had been amused that he — who had once been going to ‘smash capitalism’ — took a serious and knowledgeable interest in the wine he had brought with him for them to drink (he had come to her straight from France; he and Lynne seemed to spend most of the year at their farmhouse in the Dordogne).

Nonetheless the thought came involuntarily into her head as she prowled, that tonight she had her enemy sleeping under her roof. Of all things: as if instead of a respectable middle-aged PA living in suburban Cardiff she was some kind of Anglo-Saxon thane, sharpening her sword and thinking of blood. Just as the thane might have, she felt divided between an anxious hostility towards her guest and an absolute requirement to protect him and watch over his head.

In May 1968 Caro had turned up for a meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation at her university wearing a new trouser suit: green corduroy bell-bottoms with a flower-patterned jacket lining and Sergeant Pepper-style military buttons. The meeting was to organise participation in a revolutionary festival in London the following month, generating support for the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation. The festival was already provoking all kinds of ideological dissent: the Trotskyists thought the whole project was ‘reformist’, and the Communist Party were nervous at the use of the word ‘revolutionary’. The Young Communists were going to appear riding a fleet of white bicycles which they had collected and were donating to the Vietnamese.

Caro had bought the trouser suit because her godmother (whom she had adored as a little girl but had stopped visiting recently because of her views on trade unions and immigration) had sent her twenty-one pounds for her twenty-first birthday. She could have put it aside to help eke out the end of her grant, but instead, on impulse, she had gone shopping and spent it in a trendy boutique in town that she had never dared to go inside before. It was months since she had had any new clothes; and she had never possessed anything quite so joyous, so up to the minute and striking, as this trouser suit. She knew that it expressed perfectly on the outside the person she wanted to be from within. With her long hair and tall lean figure it made her look sexy, defiant, capable (in skirts she often only looked gawky and mannish).