Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

In the study, where Morrison’s writing table was set out with pens and notebooks, as if he had just this minute stepped out for a walk in the fields in search of inspiration, there was also a shallow locked glass case in which were displayed first editions of the novels and some of his longhand drafts, as well as the copies that Anne had typed up on her Olivetti, scribbled furiously over in his dark soft pencil. Gina had handled his notebooks and typed manuscripts, and was familiar with his processes of composition. When the others had moved on, she peered closely into the case at one of the notebooks. These longhand drafts were not difficult to read, although his handwriting was odd, with large capitals and crunched-up lower case. She recognised the text immediately. It was the scene in Winter’s Day when the middle-aged daughter declares her love for the doctor, in the house where her father is dying. They have left him with the nurse for an hour, and the doctor is trying to persuade Edith to take some rest. A lamp is burning although there is daylight outside the windows; they are surrounded by the overspill of chaos from the sickroom, basins and medicines and laundry. Edith tells the doctor, who is married, that what she can’t bear is that when her father is dead he won’t be coming to visit any more. ‘Because we shan’t have our talks — you could have no idea, because you’re a man and you have work to do, of what these mean to me. My life has been so stupidly empty.’ She presses her face, wet with tears, against the wool sleeve of his jacket. The doctor is shocked and offended, that Edith’s mind is not on her father. Also, he is not attracted to her: he thinks with pity how plain she looks, haggard from exhaustion, and with bad teeth.

There weren’t many corrections to this passage in the notebook. It was a kind of climax, an eruption of drama in a novel whose texture was mostly very quiet. But Morrison must have cut the scene in a later draft; in the published book all Edith said when she broke out was: ‘Because we shan’t have our talks. I will miss them.’ Gina’s eyes swam with tears as she bent over the case, reading the words. She was astonished: she never cried, she never got colds, so she didn’t even have a tissue in her bag. Luckily, she was alone: she wiped her face on the back of her hand, and decided not to follow the rest of the party upstairs to the bookshop. Instead she made her way out into the exquisitely blooming back garden, and found a seat in a bower overgrown with Nelly Moser clematis and some tiny white roses with a sweet perfume.

Why did it move her, this scene of the woman giving away power over herself? It ought to disgust her, or fill her with rage — or relief, that a whole repertoire of gestures of female abasement was at last, after so many centuries, culturally obsolete. No one would dream of using a scene like that in a novel now. That wet face, though, against the rough wool sleeve, sent Gina slipping, careering down the path of imaginary self-abandonment. (Was the sleeve still there in the published version? She couldn’t for the moment remember for sure.) She could almost smell the wool and imagine its hairy taste against her mouth, although none of the men she had loved ever wore that kind of tweedy jacket, except her father, perhaps, when she was a little girl. It was sexual, of course, and masochistic: female exposed nakedness rubbing up against coarse male fibre; the threat of abrasion, of an irritated reaction on the finer, more sensitised, wet female surface.

You could see how it all worked. You could rationally resist it, and you could even — and here was the answer, perhaps, to the question that had brought her down to Wing Lodge in the first place — feel sure that you would never be able to surrender yourself like that, ever again. And yet the passage had moved her to unexpected tears. There was something formally beautiful and powerful and satisfying in it: that scene of a woman putting her happiness into a man’s hands. Beside it, all the other, better, kinds of power that women had nowadays seemed, just for one floundering moment, second best.

Gina sat for a long time. A bee, or some bee-like insect, fell out of the flowers on to her skirt, and she was aware of the lady guide looking at her agitatedly from the French windows, probably wanting to close up the house. There came to her, in a flood of regret for her youth, the memory of a card trick, the one where you sorted the pack into black and red in advance, so that your victim wouldn’t be able to put a card down wrong.

WE FOUND THE Eggy Stone that first afternoon of the school camp.

As soon as we had dumped our things in the big khaki canvas tents, each with eight metal bedsteads in two rows, the teacher took us down to the sea. We crunched in socks and sandals across a rim of crisped black seaweed and bone and sea-washed plastic: the tide was in, the long grey line of the waves curled and sucked at the cramped remainder of the beach, a narrow strip of pebbles. For the moment we weren’t allowed to go near the water. Under our sandals the big pale pebbles rattled and shifted awkwardly. The boys began throwing them in the sea; we felt between them for treasures, the creamy spirals from old shells, bits of washed-soft glass.

Her hand and mine found the Eggy Stone at the same moment, our fingers touched, and somehow that sealed it: I was hers and she was mine for the duration of the holiday. We had never been friends before. I didn’t deserve her; she had only been in the school for a few months, but her status was clear, she had been put to sit the very first day on the table where the charming girls sat. I was clever: but she was blonde and daintily neat, with that fine pink skin the light almost seems to shine through. She had a pencil case full of the right kind of felts and danced with the other favoured girls in the country-dancing team that did ‘Puppet on a String’ instead of ‘Trip to the Cottage’. Even her name was pretty: Madeleine. I was ready to adore her.

She was fragile but firm. It was she who named the stone and held it out on her palm for me to share. It was small and egg-shaped and dull black, with a ring of white crystal teeth around it at one end, just where you would cut the top off an egg to eat it. If it hadn’t become, the moment we chose it, ‘the Eggy Stone’, it would have been nothing special: there were hundreds and thousands more pebbles just as interesting. Madeleine began the cult, but I elaborated it. We took it in turns to hold the Eggy Stone, and the turns were decided by various ritualised competitions, including folded-paper fortune tellers, knocking the heads off plantains, and a kind of wrestling we invented, kneeling opposite each other with the stone placed between us and swaying in each other’s arms, trying to force our opponent to touch ground on one side or another. Before each competition there was a form of words: something like ‘Eggy Stone / On your own / All alone / Inaccessible light’. I was probably the one who made it up (although it owed something to a hymn we sang at school). I had a bit of a reputation as a poet; whereas Madeleine was the kind of girl who chanted things by rote and knew all the skipping rhymes and all the variations for games like ‘Please Jack may we cross the water?’

Whoever possessed the stone felt privileged and secure for as long as it lasted. The sensation of it, smooth and warmed and resistant in the hand, came to be an end in itself, a real pleasure; and whoever didn’t possess it yearned for it, until the moment arrived for another challenge. Once or twice Madeleine cheated, pushing her hand into my pocket and filching the stone without any contest, showing me with her quick brilliant smile that any appearance of fair play was only ever granted by her favour. I was outraged and helpless then, thrown back upon a self no longer complete without her. But mostly the passing of the stone was kind between us, an extraordinary bond. We went about with arms draped round one another’s necks, and all Madeleine’s usual friends included me tolerantly in their circle. We took it in turns to hold the stone at night, in the dark, in our sleeping bags (we slept in different tents).