Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

The children press home their opportunity and clamour for ice cream.

— Pretty please, Mummy, pretty please.

— It’ll keep us happy for much longer. You won’t have to worry about us.

The guns the boys have bought were made in Germany, and, on the packages, inside the bright orange explosion where it says Bang Bang in English it also says Toller Knall , which is presumably the German equivalent. The children point the guns at one another’s heads, shouting, Toller Knall, Toller Knall , then laugh delightedly at how unthreatening it sounds.

— You know I can’t bear that, Rachel says. — I have a thing about guns pointing at heads.

— Mum, they’re only plastic toys, Joshua explains patiently. — It would probably be more dangerous to poke him with my finger.

But the boys give way cheerfully and aim at imaginary rabbits in the grass instead, squinting along their sights.

— Sam actually encourages it, Rachel says sotto voce to Janie. — He wants to take Joshua to join a gun club. He came out with all this stuff about teaching him respect for weapons.

— But didn’t he used to fulminate against the arms trade?

— Oh, probably at some point. But for me it’s not his principles that are the problem: have you ever seen him trying to put up shelves? It’s not Joshua I’m worried for. Sam shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a gun.

Melia, Janie’s middle child (much more difficult than the charming boys), pretends to get upset about the rabbits and ends up bursting into real tears. Rachel sometimes wonders whether Melia wouldn’t respond better to a little less understanding, but she preserves a diplomatic silence while Janie comforts and negotiates. Rachel thinks that she has taken more naturally to motherhood than Janie has; Janie is dreamier and misses her solitude painfully.

— Maybe ice cream would be a good idea, Janie decides.

The children plant their coloured plastic windmills in the grass and run to queue at the yellow-and-white painted café. Rachel is telling Janie about a man, Kieran, a friend of Sam’s in London, who she thinks she might have some sort of a thing going with. Janie knows Kieran, too, though not well.

— It’s really nothing, it’s probably nothing, Rachel says. — You’ll think I’m making it all up. Only it’s funny that he turned up one evening last month, while he was back in Bristol visiting his parents. I’m sure he knew that Sam was going to be out. I had Sukey and Dom in the bath, I had my sleeves rolled up, I was in my foulest old clothes, my hair was just pulled into this elastic band, I’m sure I hadn’t brushed it since I got up in the morning.

— Maybe he goes for that, Janie says. — You know how some men have this idea of domesticated women that really turns them on — only the ones who aren’t living with them, needless to say.

— Joshua answered the doorbell or I wouldn’t have even bothered. And then I thought he’d just leave because Sam wasn’t there, but he came into the bathroom and he helped me out with the kids and actually it was really nice — we just got on so well. He cleaned the bath out afterwards while I was reading to them; I didn’t even realise that till later. Sam would never, ever think of cleaning out the bath unless I asked him to. I always thought Kieran was such a serious sort of intellectual — you know, only interested in talking about Habermas or Adorno or something. But we were joking away, and then he was telling me about his sister’s children. Dom was splashing us with his plastic ducks, we were completely soaked, and I was so apologetic, only Kieran said he loved it. ‘I love it,’ he said. And then I thought afterwards, What was he trying to say? What exactly did he love? Only perhaps I’m taking it the wrong way.

Janie thinks that Rachel is dangerously susceptible to men; she thinks that her own sceptical suspicion of them makes her much shrewder in her assessments of their motivations and characters. Also, she doesn’t know how Rachel can put up with Sam’s moods. She has her own problems with Vince, but she would never allow anyone to domineer over her life the way Sam does over Rachel’s, with his black looks and his silences and his stormings.

— I almost dialled Kieran’s number the other night, Rachel says. — The week before we came to the cottage. I did dial it, but I put the phone down before it even rang. I pretended to myself that calling him was just a natural friendly thing to do. I was only going to complain to him — you know, make a funny story out of the sort of day I’d had. Perhaps I should have. And I was going to say that he should come and spend a few days with us in the country.

Janie is solicitous. She is feeding Lulu, the shadows of the tree’s leaves flickering over her bared breast and the baby’s head moving with its rhythmic sucking. — Don’t get hurt, she says.

Rachel throws herself restlessly down on her back on the grass. — I should be so lucky, she says. — As if.

— I’d wait, Janie says, — for him to contact you.

Later in the afternoon, Rachel takes the children for a round on the putting green. They are hopelessly slow because there are so many of them and the little ones take so many shots to get the ball in the hole, even when Joshua and Tom cheat gallantly on their behalf. Melia throws down her iron, sulks, traipses after them, joins in again. By the time they are halfway around the green several groups of players are backed up behind them and Rachel takes a break to let them past. She runs over to where Janie is watching from beside the pushchair. She has had an idea. When they’ve finished on the green, why don’t they buy sausages and chips at the café so they don’t have to cook tonight? This liberation seems of a piece with the lovely day. The drudgery ahead — peeling potatoes, frying, feeding, washing up — lifts from the evening as lightly as a floating cloud. Why not? Life might be easy after all. Rachel phones Sam and Vince on her mobile to tell them to cook themselves something; she has to walk off a little distance between the trees before she can get a decent signal.

When Rachel switches off the mobile and turns round, Janie thinks for a moment that Sam must have said something vile. Rachel’s face is concentrated with surprise; she walks back across the grass as if she were looking carefully where to put her bare feet.

— You’ll never guess, she says.

— What?

— Kieran’s turned up.

— Oh, Rach.

— But I really never did phone him. I never asked him. He’s been before, a couple of times. Apparently, he just turned up this afternoon. He knew we’d be at the cottage because Sam mentioned it. Sam’s going to make them something with pasta.

— Are you glad?

— It feels like a sign: that this thing I’ve imagined must be real, it must be something.

— I suppose so.

— I truly thought I might just be making it up. But you said to wait for him to contact me and he has. Sort of. It feels serious.

In all the agitations of the putting, Rachel’s hair has come partly out of its pins; long strands coil on her neck. She’s statuesque, with waxy creamy skin, like a Reynolds portrait; she doesn’t have the physical lightness or fluidity that suggests affairs, easy transitions between men, concealments. The boys are shouting from the green; it’s time for them to take their turn again. She picks up her putting iron thoughtfully. Janie can feel excitement radiating out from her like heat.

Kieran’s arrival could have been awkward for the men back at the cottage, because Kieran and Sam have been friends for years, since they were at Cambridge, whereas Sam only knows Vince because of Janie and thinks of him as a bit of a lightweight. All morning, while Sam was at work on the computer, he was uneasily suppressing an awareness of Vince at a loose end downstairs, strolling around the rooms, reading yesterday’s paper, getting himself something to eat. Sam was irritated that the girls hadn’t taken Vince with them when they went to town; and then that they were staying out so long.