Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

The meeting was in a basement room in the History Department as usual. As usual, it was mostly men, though there were three or four girls, bright history and politics students, friends of Caro’s, who came regularly. The girls really did get asked to make the tea, and really did make it. They sat at desks arranged in a square under a bleak light bulb with an institutional-type glass shade, surrounded by maps on the walls that were of course nothing to do with them — Europe after the Congress of Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 — but nonetheless gave the place an air they all rather enjoyed of being a command centre in some essential world-changing operation. By the time Caro arrived the usual thick fug of cigarette smoke was already building up (she smoked too, in those days). She was greeted, because of the trouser suit, with a couple of wolf whistles, and everyone looked up. It was complicated to remember truthfully now just how one had felt about that whistling. A decade later it became obligatory for women to be indignant at it and find it degrading; at the time, however, she would probably have felt without it that her trouser suit had failed of its effect. You met the whistle without making eye contact but with a little warm curl of an acknowledging smile, a gleam of response.

Two men had come from Agit Prop, to talk to the meeting about the festival (Agit Prop was a loose association of activists and artists named after Trotsky’s propaganda train and dedicated to promoting revolutionary messages through aesthetic means). That was how Caro met Keith Reid for the first time: when she arrived he had already taken his place in a chair at the centre of things, commanding the whole room. Keith was a very attractive man — it was the first thing you needed to know about him, to get any idea of who he was, then. Not handsome, exactly: off-centre quirky features held together by a fluid energy, fragile hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a lean loose strong body, a shoulder-length mess of slightly greasy dark curls. He had a Welsh accent: it was a Valleys accent in fact — he was from Cwmbach near Aberdare — but in those days Caro had never been to Wales and couldn’t tell one accent from another. At a time when Left politics was saturated in the romance of the workers, this accent was in itself enough to melt most of the women (and the men).

He looked at Caro in her trouser suit.

— Don’t you find, he said, — that dressing up like that puts off the working classes?

She thought about this now with stupefaction. Had she really once inhabited a world where such absurdities were a currency? She should have laughed in his face. She should have turned round and walked out of the meeting and never gone back.

— No, she said, calmly taking a place directly in Keith’s line of sight, so that he could get his eyeful of the offending item, — I find it gives them something good to look at.

Of course she wasn’t really calm. She was raging, and humiliated, and struggling with a muddled and not yet confident sense of something fundamentally flawed and unfair to do with men and women in what he had said and all that lay behind it: everything that was going overflow into the flood of feminism in the next couple of decades. And no doubt at the same time she was scalding with shame at her bourgeois depraved frivolity in the face of decent suffering working-class sobriety, just as Keith meant her to be. And she was thinking how she would make him pay for that.

They had such energy, then, for all the battles.

After the meeting the visitors from Agit Prop had needed a floor to stay on and Caro had taken them back to the disintegrating old mock-Tudor house, its garden overgrown as a jungle, which she shared with a motley collection of students and friends and politicos. (Later she had had trouble with that house; it was rented in her name, and some of the people using it refused to pay their share. She had to hassle them for it, and came home once to find ‘Rachman bitch’ scrawled in red paint on her bedroom wall.) They sat up until late smoking pot and sparring; Caro and Keith arguing not about the trouser suit, which wasn’t mentioned again, but about the dockers’ support for Enoch Powell and its implications for the alliance between left alternative politics and the working-class movement. Caro had been on the anti-racist march to Transport House: Keith thought she was overstating the problem in a way that was typical of bourgeois squeamishness in the face of the realities of working-class culture.

The way Keith dominated a room and laid down the law and didn’t seriously countenance anybody else’s opinions should have made him obnoxious; but his ironic delivery in that accent of his made it seem as though there was something teasing in his most exaggerated assertions. Everyone was willing to listen to him because he was older and his pedigree was impeccable: a miner’s son, kicked out of Hornsey Art College for his political activities, he had been working on building sites ever since. In any case, that sheer imperturbable male certainty was intriguing to women in those days. They felt in the face of it a complex mix of thrilled abjection with a desire to batter at it with their fists; also, probably strongest, they believed that given the chance they would be able to find out through their feminine sexuality the weaknesses and vulnerable places behind the imperturbable male front. (This last intuition was all too often accurate.)

Eventually Caro found sleeping bags for everybody and they distributed themselves around mattresses and sofas and floors in the high-ceilinged damp-smelling rooms of the house. And then at some point in the night Keith must have got up again and wandered about until he found, not Caro, who had half expected him, but her sister Penny, who happened to be staying with her for a few days. Penny was a year older than Caro but didn’t look it: most people took her to be the younger sister. She was smaller, softer-seeming, prettier. Caro found them in the morning twined around one another in their zipped-together sleeping bags. All she could make out at first was the mess of Keith’s dark curls and his naked young shoulders, tanned and muscular from the work he did; and then she saw how down inside the bag Penny’s head with its swirl of auburn hair like a fox’s brush was wrapped in his brown arms against his chest.

She remembered that she had felt a stinging shock. Not heartbreak or any kind of serious sorrow: she hadn’t had time to do anything like fall in love with Keith, and anyway, love didn’t seem to be quite what it was that could have happened, if things had gone differently, between them. It was more as if she felt that, if you put the two of them alongside Keith Reid, it was in some obvious way she and not Penny who was his match, his mate. Penny all through the loud debate of the night before had sat quietly while Caro met him, point for point, and smoked joint for joint with him. Also, there was unfinished business between her and him: some contest he had begun and had now abruptly — it made him seem almost cowardly — broken off. Even as Caro recoiled, just for that first moment, in the shock of finding them, she knew she was learning from it something essential she needed to know for her survival, something about the way that men chose women.

Penny had given up after one year at art college and was living at home again with their parents in Banbury. She was thinking about going to do teacher training. Instead, she embarked on the relationship with Keith: it did almost seem, in retrospect, like a career choice. That whole long middle section of Penny’s life, twenty years, was taken up in the struggle with him: pursued by him; dedicating herself to him; counselling him through his creative agonies when he was writing; bearing his children; supporting his infidelities, his drinking, his disappearances, his contempts; making every effort to tame him, to turn him into a decent acceptable partner and father. Then when Penny had finished with him once and for all, he slipped without a protest into cosy domesticity with his second wife, as if there hadn’t ever been a problem. — I was just the warm-up act, Penny joked about it now. — Softening him up ready for the show with Lynne.