Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

Of course I didn’t have a chance with him. Who was I? I wasn’t anybody. I wasn’t even one of the cleverest in the classes. I wasn’t an absolutely average student either; I was aware that I had a quirky way of looking at things, which sometimes came out as insight and sometimes just left everyone looking blank. Patrick encouraged me. Once, he reminded all of them of something I’d said. — You remember the point that Carla made in last week’s seminar? Another time, after I’d made some remark about freedom of choice in Much Ado About Nothing , he said, — That’s very well expressed, Carla. I couldn’t have put that more eloquently myself. This made me very happy. But I didn’t delude myself. I wasn’t the kind of student who would get a first-class mark. When I tried to put my thoughts down in writing, the dart of intuition that was clear and sharp when it flew into my mind got tangled in something muffling and clumsy. And Patrick’s being surprised sometimes by my penetration didn’t really mean he had singled me out. I didn’t really exist for him, outside that circle of chairs in the lecture room.

In the seventeenth-century poetry seminar he read us ‘An Exequy’, by Henry King.

Dear loss! Since thy untimely fate

My task hath been to meditate

On thee, on thee: thou art the book,

The library whereon I look

Though almost blind.

’Tis true, with shame and grief I yield,

Thou like the Van first took’st the field,

And gotten hast the victory

In thus adventuring to dy

Before me, whose more years might crave

A just precedence in the grave.

But heark! My Pulse like a soft Drum

Beats my approach, tells Thee I come ;

And slow howere my marches be ,

I shall at last sit down by Thee.

I can’t adequately express the effect this poem had on me then. I don’t remember now what season of the year it was, but I do remember that we had the strip lights on in the lecture room in the middle of the day because the sky was so dark outside, navy-blue clouds pressing close to the earth like an artificial ceiling. Little gouts of rain were spitting against the window, and in the gently sloping field outside (the campus was built up around an eighteenth-century house in the middle of an estate farmed by the Duchy of Cornwall) the bullocks, instead of lying down as they should have done with rain coming, were jostling uneasily and heaving up against the fence and clambering on to one another’s backs.

When I look at the poem now, I see that it is the lament of a much older man for a young wife snatched away by death, and that it depends upon a confidence in the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day. I don’t know anything about those things. But at the time I felt that the words of the poem were so immediate and relevant that they spoke to me not just through my mind but through my body. I could hear that Drum; its beating came right up out of the floor of the classroom and shook me through the soles of my feet. I made one of those remarks that didn’t come out well, and nobody took much notice of it. — He longs for her and she isn’t there, I said. It sounded too obvious to need stating. I’d wanted to use the word ‘sexual’ (we were trained to see sexual implications everywhere, and surely in this case I would have been right), but I couldn’t bring myself to be the first to say it. Patrick wanted us to talk about the metaphor of the beloved object as text (‘thou art the book, / The library whereon I look’). For me the poem was Patrick. All its passion, its concentration, I attributed to him. The poem became my intimation of the pulse of his life, from which I was shut out.

He was only seven or eight years older than we were, but we thought his life must be made out of different stuff to the lives we knew. As far as we could tell he wasn’t married or living with anyone. Someone said he had once had a relationship with a student (although they’re not supposed to). That didn’t make me any more hopeful. She had probably been one of the clever ones who got firsts. She had probably been beautiful. I didn’t think I was. My looks (I’m small and blonde with eyes that used to make the kids at school call me frogface) were like the quirky things I said in class. Good on a good day.

I dreamed about him all the time. I don’t mean sleeping dreams, although sometimes he was in those as well. Too many of my waking hours were spent fantasising scenes in which Patrick and I somehow met outside the classroom and our relationship was changed out of distant acquaintance into passionate amour. I was very exacting as the author and director of these scenes in my mind. Nothing must happen in them that was absurdly improbable or out of character. Patrick wasn’t ever allowed, for example, to tell me that he had always loved me, that he had been fascinated by me from the moment I first walked into the lecture room. The scene could begin with no more than a friendly appreciation of an interested student, a teacherly investment in my intellectual development. He might at most be allowed a little stir of vanity at the depth and earnestness of my response to him.

Given these constraints, the journey from the plausible encounter to the moment when he reached out for me could still be travelled in a thousand different ways.(Even in my fantasies I didn’t dare reach out for him, in case he turned me down.) He had to be surprised out of his position of friendly neutrality and into a dawning, uneasy recognition of his growing attraction to me, an attraction that he perhaps couldn’t quite rationally account for. The transformation could be precipitated in various ways; these were the only extravagance I allowed myself. Sometimes we would be accidentally stranded by a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, after he’d innocently offered me a lift home from college. Or we’d be caught by a freak storm when calling at a cottage belonging to friends of his to pick up some books he’d lent them. Or he would have to take refuge in my room one night after being beaten up by muggers and left bleeding in the road just as I was on my way home.

My favourite scene was acted out somewhere that I don’t think I’ve ever actually been. I imagined a path through a green meadow. I’m absolutely a city girl and don’t know much about the countryside but of course I’ve visited it. I needed to be clear in my mind exactly how we’d got there. Sometimes it was in the aftermath of some other encounter nearer home. (‘Why don’t you come out for a walk next weekend, and I’ll show you where Coleridge is supposed to have started writing “The Ancient Mariner”?’) Or a whole group of us were out on a college field trip and Patrick and I got separated from the others while we were talking. (Tricky, as the only trip he ever came on was to the theatre at Stratford.) Or he had employed me to do some research over the holidays and then on impulse said he’d like to buy me tea in the country as a reward.

We’d walk down this grassy path and reach a gate, which opened into a wood beyond. At the threshold of the wood the light changed from broad bright sunlight to a secretive and dappled shade. There were rustlings among the dead leaves that spread like a carpet under the trees. It was a place I’d invented for a transition, for the passage over from my life into his, from his to mine. The gate was made of old grey wood washed silvery by the rain, it swung crookedly on rusting hinges. He held it open for me, or I climbed over and he helped me down. Something in the change of light stilled us, made us pause; the wood with its pillar-like tree trunks and its tracery of branches was a cathedral. He was still supporting my weight, or I was cast up against him in some way as I came through the gate or passed him on the narrow path. I could feel the heat of his body under the ragged grey wool of the sweater he really often wore.