Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

— There were excesses, Keith conceded fondly. — But then, excess was in the air. Anything could have happened. That’s what’s missing now. Caro, you sound so New Labour. I’m still a revolutionary, aren’t you? Don’t you still want socialism?

She shrugged. — Oh, well, yes, socialism, I suppose.

That conversation had ended awkwardly, each embarrassed by what they thought of as the other’s false position. Keith probably thought that Caro had ‘sold out’ (he might even have put it in those words, perhaps to Lynne). She worked as personal assistant to a Labour MP, a man she mostly liked and respected. (Before that she had worked for Panasonic.) On the second and fourth Mondays of every month she went to Amnesty International meetings in a shabby upstairs room of the Friends’ Meeting House, and was currently involved in a campaign for the release of a postgraduate student imprisoned in China for his researches into ethnic Uighur history. This compromising pragmatic liberalism might in time turn out to be as absolutely beside the point as the articles she had once written for Black Dwarf : who could tell? Your ethical life was a shallow bowl brimming impossibly; however dedicatedly you carried it about with you there were bound to be spills, or you found out that the dedication you brought wasn’t needed, or that you had brought it to the wrong place.

While Caro was tidying up she had had to go into the spare room to put away her grandmother’s 1920s water jug, painted with blue irises, in its place on the lace mat on top of the bureau. This could have waited until the morning when Keith was gone; perhaps she had just made it an excuse to go in and take the measure of him uninhibitedly, free of the wakeful obligation to smile and reassure. She swung the door quietly behind her to admit just a narrow ribbon of light, then stood waiting for her eyes to adjust, breathing in the slight, not unpleasant fug of his smell: good French soap and cologne and a tang of his sweat and of gas flavoured with the garlic she had put in her cooking. He slept on his side with his face pressed in the pillow, frowning; his chest with its plume of grey-black hair down the breastbone was bare, the duvet lay decorously across his waist, under it he seemed to have his hands squeezed between his jackknifed knees, his mouth was open, he made noises sucking in air. She wondered all the time she stood there whether he wasn’t actually aware of her presence and faking sleep.

He didn’t look too bad. He took good care of himself (or Lynne took care of him): he hadn’t put on much weight, although where he had been lean and hard he was nowadays rangy and slack, with jutting bowed shoulders under his T-shirt and a small soft pouch of belly above his belt. He probably still had the power of his sexual attraction; whereas Caro who was a couple of years younger knew she could no longer count on hers, even though she also took care of herself, and was slim, and had her hair coloured at Vidal Sassoon (she thought now that this old gender inequity probably had less to do with patriarchal systems than with desires hard-wired into human evolutionary biology). Keith had opted to deal with his advancing baldness by cutting very short even the rim of hair he had left growing behind his ears and at the back; this was a good move, she thought, pre-empting pretence and turning what might have looked like a vulnerability into an assertion of style. However, it made the starkness of his craggy head shocking. All the years of his age, all the drinking, all the history and difficulty of the man, was concentrated in the face laid bare: its eaten-out hollows, the high exposed bony bridge of his nose that rode him like the prow of his ship, the deep closed folds of flesh, the huge dropped purple eyelids flickering with sensitivity.

She sat thinking now about the time when Keith was the most attractive man in the room, the man you couldn’t afford to turn your eyes away from, careless and dangerous with his young strength. It hadn’t been a good or tender thing exactly; it hadn’t had much joy in it for Caro. Nonetheless she quaked at the power of this enemy, stronger than either of them, who had slipped in under her roof and was stealing everything away.

When Keith had telephoned from France to say that he had to come over for a couple of days to talk to some people in Cardiff about a new film project, Caro had planned and shopped for an elaborate meal. She didn’t make anything heavy or indigestible, but unusual things that took careful preparation, little Russian cheese pastries for starters, then fillet of lamb with dried maraschino cherries and spinach, and for dessert gooseberry sorbet with home-made almond tuiles. Because she lived alone, she loved to cook when she was entertaining friends.

She had spent all day getting ready what they had eaten in an hour or so. And of course the food had taken second place to their talk, with so much to catch up on; although Keith had helped himself hungrily and appreciatively. In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women’s work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. These days she felt about it differently. The disproportion seemed part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult and testing preparation for a few moments’ consummation.

Now she used her mother’s rolling pin to roll out her pastry; she kept Keith’s mother’s recipes for Welsh cakes and bara brith. In her tasks around the flat — polishing furniture, bleaching dishcloths, vacuuming, taking cuttings from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard — she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother’s domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces. This was how change happened, always obliquely to the plans you laid for it, leaving behind as dead husks all the preparations that you nonetheless had to make in order to bring it about.

WHEN I WAS twenty, not all that long ago, I fell in love with one of my lecturers at college. I know this is a very ordinary thing to do. And I know now that the lecturers sigh and feel anxious at the news of yet another smitten girl-child traipsing round moonily after them. They feel anxious and all those other things you would expect, too: flattered and confirmed and a bit stimulated.

His name was Patrick Hammett, and he taught Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry and critical theory. I chose all his courses; I made him my interpreter of the whole world. Patrick was tall, with rather bowed shoulders; he was hollowly thin except for a small beer belly nestled in the stretched cloth of his T-shirt above his belt. He wore his thick black hair down to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears. He used gold-rimmed glasses to read but took them off when he was talking and swung them in his fingers, and sometimes dropped them; his eyes without the glasses were deep-set and squinted slightly. In a crowd, in a club, you wouldn’t have picked him out as particularly good-looking. But in the lecture room, sitting with us in the democratic circle of chairs that he insisted upon, his looks were a power, a force that I felt physically, like velvet against my skin. I loved the whitened pressure points that his glasses left on the bridge of his thin nose. I loved the big nervous hands he was always waving in the air, gesturing uncontrollably in accompaniment to his words.