Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

The new galleries are very hands-on; you can make a chair, design a coat of arms, identify porcelain. The women try on a crinoline over their clothes, they take turns to walk up and down in it.

— Oh, it’s nice , see how it swings, it’s very light.

— Wouldn’t you just clear space ?

— You could have a man inside, said one. — Imagine.

The women are at that age which on the outside is ambivalent: young and not-so-young are difficult to disentangle, in good clothes, in a good light, after a good life of the privileged kind of work that doesn’t weather or wizen you. Inside, though, these years register for the women themselves, inexorably and determiningly as a clock ticking. There’s a year when you’re thinking anything could still happen, reproduction-wise (this either makes you hopeful or cautious, depending on what you want). Then there’s a year when you think you never know (after all, Cherie Blair had one). And then there’s a year when you think it isn’t any way going to happen now, not without an improbable Old Testament miracle or the intervention of some crazed Italian doctor. These women are both, in fact, at this Old Testament stage, although they can both get away with looking as if they might not be.

One of them — Louie, the taller one with red hair — is a mother: she has two daughters. The dark one, Phil, is not. You can’t tell this from looking at their bodies either, not from the outside: both are trim and slender. Perhaps you might guess, though, that Louie is the mother. Although she’s more awkward than Phil, and probably thinks she’s not as attractive, she’s less self-conscious about parading up and down in the crinoline in front of other visitors. That might come from seeing herself reflected in the eyes of her daughters, who will love her or think her absurd however she tries, so that she doesn’t need to try so hard. (In the early days of motherhood, she wouldn’t have put it as positively as that: it felt sometimes as though she’d been taken out of her own possession and become no more than a rag doll for her daughters’ entertainment. But now the girls are fifteen and twelve, and she’s recovered, somewhat.)

In the museum café they talk unstoppably, as they always have done since they first got to know one another at college. They used to talk about men, with intensity and absorption: the rage against men was almost as stimulating as the sexual excitement men generated. Now all that’s eased off. Sometimes Louie grumbles about Duncan, her husband, but the fervour’s gone out of it. Once you’ve been together with someone for twenty years there’s no excuse for hanging on with them if you think they’re so awful: and of course she doesn’t really think Duncan’s awful, she supposes that she even loves him dearly, these days, underneath it all. Phil, on the other hand, has only been with Merrick for five years, and she’s still tender about him and defensive, so that she won’t reciprocate when Louie makes sniping remarks about his sex. Talking about men was more fun when Louie was really, really, planning on leaving Duncan, or at least having an affair with someone else; and when Phil was in the throes of a tormenting love for a no-good community activist who made her do things in bed that frightened her.

Now they talk about all kinds of other interesting subjects. Work, of course: Phil is a designer for a publisher, Louie works from home as a translator. And then about writing, painting, politics, parents. Phil’s mother is very frail and may have to go into a home. Louie took her girls on the march against the war in Afghanistan. Both friends have, separately, seen the Auerbach exhibition: both were moved and disturbed by the monastic absolutism of his pursuit of truth. Louie confides in Phil (at tedious length, she fears) about the terrible struggle she is engaged in with her older daughter Ella, over Ella’s attitude, over whether she’s allowed out on her own in town, over what time she’s supposed to come in if she is allowed out, and so on. Louie has noticed that when she begins to complain about Ella, Phil’s expression tightens slightly: as if she is not completely, absolutely, on Louie’s side.

When they have finished looking round the galleries Phil and Louie both go back to Phil’s flat; they are hosting a meeting of their creative writing group there that evening, and Louie is staying over. Duncan is going to look after the girls (for once). Merrick is away (he is a rep for a wine company and often has to travel abroad).

Phil has been in this same small flat for years (from long before she knew Merrick): in the same period Duncan and Louie have moved three times, once with each promotion Duncan has had at the newspaper. Phil has a gift for making a place inviting: the shelves are piled with collections of books and objects, there are cushiony corners for reading. Everything promises retreat and solitude and concentration. Louie has never, in truth, liked any of her own houses as much as she likes it in here.

— I’ve brought you a present, says Louie. — I got this in the museum shop when you weren’t looking.

Phil feels inside the paper bag: then she turns a strange face on her friend.

— Oh, Louie, she wails. — You’ve given me an egg.

Louie realises what she has done: she blushes darkly. The egg is an (expensive) replica of the kind that Victorian dairywomen put under hens to encourage them to lay: made in off-white porcelain with a grey crazing all over its surface. She had only wanted it because it was heavy and cold and smooth and she was bothered and footsore in the crowded shop.

— Don’t you like it?

— Another egg! Phil laughs. — You really don’t know you’re doing it, do you? Merrick won’t believe that you don’t know; but I’m sure.

— I’ve never given you an egg before, have I?

Phil goes off into the front room and brings back a plate on which there is a whole collection of eggs: blown and painted ones, wooden ones, stone ones, one in burnished metal. The collection must have been out on display among all the other interesting things, on all the many evenings Louie has spent here.

— I gave you all those? When? Surely not. Some of them I’ve never seen before.

— All of them. Over the past — oh, five or six years?

— God: have you thought that I meant something by it? Some awful kind of hint?

— You tell me.

— No, honestly, Phil, if I really try to think, it’s probably just that there’s something contained and satisfying and. you know. elliptical. about the shape, which makes me think of you. Of how you are. That’s all I can imagine.

— Only I’d rather, says Phil, — that we agreed that at this point my egg collection’s complete. It’s finished. There aren’t ever going to be any chickens.

They only began writing about a year ago: but it has taken hold of them both with a ferocity and a destructive importance. Neither is satisfied with anything they’ve done, yet. There are five of them in the writing group: under its surface appearance of supportive and sane encouragement a kind of anarchy of need and self-doubt and competition runs loose. Phil and Louie agree privately that none of the other three are very good. Even more privately, they doubt one another. That evening Phil reads out a story about a love affair between an older woman and a boy: the paper shakes in her hands. Louie feels embarrassed for her: the story is unconvincing and mawkish. Because of the egg disaster, however, she feels absolutely unable to say anything critical about it; in fact she praises it exaggeratedly, singling out the one or two moments which could be read as if they were ironic.

— About these eggs, says Louie when the others have gone. — I feel so awful. But do you know what occurred to me? You’re always giving me jugs.