Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

— Can’t you just imagine being able to write, at this desk? said Mamie encouragingly.

Gina looked at her dumbly across the charming room with its waxed floor slanting quaintly to the window, its framed woodcuts on the walls. It seemed unlikely to her that anyone could ever write anything worth reading in a place like this. She thought of art as a concealed ferocity; writers were like the Spartan boy carrying the fox under his shirt. What could one do, set up in the too-complete loveliness of this room: write cookery books perhaps, or a nostalgic memoir? At the same time she was filled with doubt, in case she was deluded, in case it turned out after all that art and the understanding of art was a closed club she would never be able to enter, she who had never owned one thing as beautiful as the least object here.

Sometimes Gina came out victorious from her struggle with Mamie’s pressing hospitalities, and succeeded in staying at home when everyone else went to the beach. (The sea was only a few minutes’ walk from the front door across the dunes, but the beach they liked best for swimming and surfing was a short drive away.) She heard and winced at the little crack of impatience in Mamie’s voice — ‘I suppose it’s awfully good of you, to want to have your head buried in a book all day’ — but that was worth incurring, in exchange for the freedom of having the house to herself for hours on end.

She didn’t really spend all that time studying. She drifted from her books to the windows to the cupboards in the kitchen, eating whatever Mamie had left for her almost at once, and then spooning things out of expensive jars from the delicatessen (only enough so that no one could ever tell) and ferreting out the forgotten ends of packets of cakes and biscuits and nuts. She made herself comfortable with her bare legs up over the back of the collapsed chintz sofa, hanging her head down to the floor to read Becky’s copies of Honey and 19. She took possession of the lovely weather-washed old house with a lordly offhandedness she never felt when the others were around. She ran herself copious baths perfumed with borrowed Badedas in the old claw-foot tub with its thundering taps. She tried on Mamie’s lipstick and Becky’s clothes. She browsed through the boys’ bedrooms with their drawn curtains and heaps of salty sandy beach gear and frowsty sock-smells; she experimented with their cigarettes and once for an hour lost herself over a magazine of dizzyingly explicit sexual photographs she found stuffed down between one bed and the wall (she didn’t know whose bed it was, and the next time she felt for the magazine it had gone). She sat in a deckchair on the sagging picturesque veranda whose wood was rain-washed to a silvered grey, drinking Campari in a cocktail glass with a cherry from a bottle and a dusty paper umbrella she found in a drawer: afterwards she cleaned her teeth frantically and chewed what she hoped were herbs from the garden, so no one would smell alcohol on her breath.

Once, after about an hour of this kind of desultory occupation of the place, she happened to glance up through the open French windows from her dangling position on the sofa and was stricken with horror: she had been sure they had all gone to the beach (except Gabriel, who was back in London), but there was Tom, stripped to the waist, cutting the meadow of long grass behind the house with a scythe, working absorbedly and steadily with his back to her. Tom was particularly frightening: moody like his father, dissenting and difficult enough even to have required at some point consultations with psychologists (this from more confidences over the pins and pattern-cutting). Actually, he was the one Gina chose most often for her fantasies, precisely because he was difficult: she imagined herself distracting, astonishing, taming him.

Appalled to think what he might have seen of her in her rake’s progress around his mother’s house, she scuttled to her bedroom, where she spent the rest of the long day in a state of siege, not knowing whether he knew she was there or not, paralysed with self-consciousness, avoiding crossing in front of her own bedroom window, unable to bring herself to venture out from her room even when she was starving or desperate to pee. Tom came inside — perhaps for lunch or perhaps because he’d finished scything — and played his Derek and the Dominoes album loudly as though he believed he had the house to himself. Gina lay curled in a foetal position on the bed. She dreaded that he might open the door and find her, but dreaded too that if he didn’t find her, and then learned that they had shared the house for the whole afternoon without her even once appearing, he would think her — whom he mostly scarcely noticed — something grotesque, insane, something that deserved to live under a stone.

She wept silently into her pillow, wishing he’d go, and even at the same time mourning this opportunity slipping away, this long afternoon alone in the house together that was after all the very stuff of her tireless invention. They might have conversed intelligently over coffee on the veranda; she might have accepted one of his cigarettes and smoked it with offhanded sophistication; surprised at her thoughtfulness and quiet insight, he might have held his hand out to her on impulse to take her walking with him down among the dunes. And so on, and so on, down to the crashing inevitable too-much-imagined end.

When Gina was at her unhappiest during that fortnight, she wanted to blame her mother. Her mother had been so keen on her taking up Mamie’s invitation: ostensibly because she worried that Gina was studying too hard, but really because of a hope, which had never been put into words but which Gina was perfectly well aware of, that Gina might get on with Mamie’s boys. ‘Get on with’: it wouldn’t have been, not for her mother, any more focused than that; a vague idea of friendly comradeship, the boys coming through daily unbuttoned summertime contact to appreciate Gina’s ‘character’, as her mother optimistically conceived of it. Boys, her mother obviously thought, would be good for Gina; they might help to make her happy. But her mother wasn’t solely responsible. When the holiday was suggested, Gina had had to be coaxed, but she hadn’t refused. She must have held out hopes too: less innocent hopes, grotesquely and characteristically misplaced.

There came another day of rain. At the end of a long afternoon of Monopoly and a fry-up supper Mamie was desperate, shut up with her charm and a crowd of disconsolate young ones in the after-aroma of sausages and chips. When she proposed a surprise visit to friends who had a place twenty miles along the coast, she hardly bothered to press Gina to join them, or Josh, either, who was building card houses on the table and said he didn’t want to go. She and Becky and Tom set off with bottles of wine and bunches of dripping flowers from the garden; the sound of escape was in their voices calling back instructions and cautions, Tom shaking the car keys out of his mother’s laughing reach, saying she couldn’t manage his old car, which needed double declutching.

Gina was going home the next day. Mamie would run her into town to catch the train. Probably that was the explanation for the comfortable flatness she felt now: it didn’t even occur to her to mind either way that Josh had stayed. She knew with a lack of fuss that it had nothing to do with her: he had stayed because he didn’t feel sociable and because he was idly fixated on a difficulty he was having with the card houses. The sound of the car driving off sank down and dissolved into the rustle of the rain, behind which, if she pushed her hair back behind her ears to listen, she could hear the waves of the sea, undoing and repairing the gravel on the beach. When Gina had finished putting away the dishes she sat down opposite Josh, watching him prop cards together with concentrating fingers; she was careful not to knock the table or even to breathe too hard. They talked, speculating seriously about why it was that he couldn’t make a tower with a six-point base; he had built one right up to its peak from a three and a four and a five base, but he had been trying and failing for hours to do a six. Josh had a loose, full lower lip which made his grin shy and qualified. There was silky fair beard growth on his chin and upper lip. He was gentler than his brothers, and had a slight lisp.