Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

Mamie’s children might not be clever, but they didn’t actually say stupid things, as Gina did, tongue-tied with bookish awkwardness. On the contrary, they were funny and chatty and informed about practical matters. They were indifferent to politics, but sincerely charming and generous with the lady who came to clean and cook and iron for them every day, whereas Gina didn’t know how to talk to her. They were masters of arts that Gina knew she could never be competent in, however hard she tried: tennis, for example, and motorbiking, and snorkling. She couldn’t even ride a pushbike. They had tried to persuade her to put on a wetsuit to swim in; her resistance must have seemed fanatical. All the boys could sail, and had the use of their father’s boat; Gabriel and Josh were preparing to take it to the Bahamas in September.

Gabriel, the oldest, had a darkroom and developed his own photographs. Becky posed for him unembarrassed, arranging her face to look its best. If ever Gabriel turned the camera on Gina she swivelled away, protesting and sulking; so he soon stopped trying. The house was filled with vivid laughing photographs in which the lives of this family seemed poignant and enchanting even beyond anything you could grasp in everyday contact with them. Gina studied the photographs with the same yearning she felt looking at fashion pictures in magazines: trying to learn how one might possess oneself with such certainty, know so confidently how to live.

They were all beautiful. Gabriel and Becky looked like Mamie, small with pretty puppy-dog faces, turned-up noses and huge eyes. The others looked like their father, who was in France with friends. (This separation seemed strange to Gina, whose parents did everything together: her mother had hinted, out of confidences given her when she was crawling round a hemline with her mouth full of pins, that all was not well in Mamie’s marriage. Dickie’s absence was a relief, anyway. Gina had seen him once or twice when he came to pick up Mamie after a fitting: tanned with white teeth, savagely impatient.) Tom and Josh — Josh was the nearest boy to Gina in age — were tall, with slim brown bodies, fine skin taut over light strong bones, long sensitive-knuckled hands and feet. She got used to their near-nakedness on the beach, in swimming trunks, or bare-chested in cut-off jeans. It was 1974:they wore their sun-bleached hair long and they walked barefoot everywhere.

The spare bedroom Gina stayed in was on the ground floor and opened on to the hall, whose dark parquet was always dusted with a layer of fine sand blown in from the beach. Sometimes when she peeped out of her door to see if the coast was clear to visit the bathroom (she was ‘working’, she told them, at the little table Mamie had set up for her), she saw prints of the boys’ bare feet in the sand, crossing the hall to the kitchen or to the stairs. For some reason this moved her, and her heart clenched in an excitement more breathlessly sexual than if she’d actually seen the boys themselves.

The visit to Wing Lodge had been part of the pretext for Gina coming to visit Mamie in the first place. It was the house where her favourite novelist had lived, and she had wanted to make a pilgrimage there; but she was beginning to wish that she could have come on her own. She was burdened by her sense of Mamie’s kindness: Mamie had clearly never read any of Morrison’s books, so she could have no good reason, surely, to want to see his house. Gina worried over the things that Mamie would probably rather have done, and in more congenial company. They arrived in the little town and found Wing Lodge in one of the oldest streets, behind the church, in a walled front garden which even in the rain was lovely: pale roses bowed and dripping with water, a crumbling sundial, a path of old paving stones set into the grass, wandering to a bench under a gnarled apple tree.

— Isn’t it just charming? Mamie exclaimed, pausing in the porch to shake off the umbrella which she had gallantly insisted in sharing with Gina, so that they were now both wet. — This is such a treat. Thank you so much for bringing me here. I can’t imagine why I’ve never been before.

Gina had thought that at last, at Wing Lodge, she would be on home ground. She knew so much about this writer: a friend of Conrad and Ford, given a complimentary mention by Henry James in ‘The New Novelists’. She had written the long essay for her English A level on his use of complex time schemes. She loved the spare texture of his difficult sad books, and felt that she was exceptionally equipped to understand them. Faced with his most obscure passages (he wasn’t elaborate like James but compressed and allusive) she trusted herself to intuit his right meaning, even if she couldn’t quite disentangle it yet, syntactically. But as she followed Mamie through the front door into the low-ceilinged hall, she realised that she was not entering one of Morrison’s books, where she could feel confident; she was entering his house, where she might not. Two middle-aged ladies presided at a table over leaflets and a cash box and tickets; wood panelling polished to a glow as deep and savoury as conkers reflected the yellow light from a couple of lamps; tall vases of flowers stood against the wall on the uneven stone-flagged floor. Gina stepped flinchingly around a Persian rug that opened like a well of colour under her feet.

— This is Gina, Mamie said to the ladies while she got out her purse to pay. — She’s the daughter of a very gifted and creative friend of mine. We’re here today because she loves this writer’s books so much and has written her A-level essay about him. She’s very, very bright, and is taking her Cambridge Entrance in the autumn.

Their smiles at Gina were coldly unenthusiastic. They advised the visitors to start in the room on the right and make their way around to the study, which was arranged as it had been in the writer’s lifetime. If they went upstairs at the end of the tour they would find an exhibition of editions of the works. — Which might interest you, one of them suggested sceptically.

The house was furnished — sparely, exquisitely — with a mixture of antiques and curiosities and modern things: a venerably worn Indian tapestry thrown across an old chaise longue, an elm art deco rocking chair, drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was dark everywhere and the lamps were switched on in the middle of the day: the low, deeply recessed casement windows were running with rain and plastered with wet leaves. Mamie moved through the rooms in a kind of hushed rapture.

— So sweet! she whispered emphatically. — What a darling place. What treasures.

Gina thought perplexedly of the letters Morrison had written from Wing Lodge: full of damp walls and leaking roofs and smoking chimneys and penetrating cold, as well as self-deprecating confessions of untidiness and neglect. The writer had never made much money: she hadn’t imagined that his house would be like this. How could he have afforded these kind of possessions? The rooms were like Mamie’s rooms: glossy with value and distinction, a kind of patina of initiated good taste.

— Do they live here? she asked. — Those ladies.

— Oh, I should think so, wouldn’t you? It feels very much a home rather than a musem. The widow stayed on here, apparently, until she died a few years ago. So I suppose they’ve just kept a few of the rooms as she left them. It’s only open a couple of afternoons a week.

There was a photograph of Anne, the American wife and widow, on the plain writing table in the study: young, with a Katherine Mansfield fringe and bobbed hair and a necklace of beads the size of cherries. Morrison had been a world-wanderer, with a Scottish father and a Norwegian mother (you could feel the influence of a certain Scandinavian neurasthenia in his novels). He had settled down at last to marriage here in the south of England, and written his best books here, and died here, in his fifties, in 1942.