Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

The cult of the Eggy Stone didn’t seem any stranger than all the other strangenesses, in a week away from home. Misery and wonder were flooded together: gargantuan preparations in the kitchen where we took our turn at helping cater for the children from seven schools; Madeleine and I trailing hand in hand, ankle-deep in tepid sea-foam; cocoa made with water and served in tin mugs; dread of the publicity of the toilets and consequent constipation. Some of the girls (Madeleine, but not me) crept out at night to kiss the boys in their tents. We learned new obscenities: ‘min’ and ‘omo’ among them (or at least that’s how I heard them), which mystifyingly were also the names of cleaning products. On the last night the teachers made a campfire and taught us songs with accompanying actions. Indians are high-minded, / Bless my soul they’re double-jointed, / They climb hills and don’t mind it, / All day long. Madeleine beside me touched toes and reached her arms in the air with a pretty equanimity, as if whatever she was doing at a given moment was the only graceful thing possible.

I asked her the next morning, on the beach, before we got on the coach to go home, what we were going to do with the Eggy Stone. She took the stone from her pocket, holding it out reflectively on her hand for a moment; her pretty face was quite clear of either malice or tenderness. I had a proposal ready, that we should keep the thing for a week each, changing over every Monday, dividing up the holidays. I was not foolish enough to imagine that the magical game was going to carry on between us, once school camp was over. But before I could speak, Madeleine turned and threw the Eggy Stone, hard and far, with a confidence that made it clear she would one day be captain of the netball team. I heard it land with a rattle among all the other pebbles and knew that even if I went to look I would never, ever be able to find exactly the same stone again.

ONE NIGHT FORTY years ago Helen Cerruti left her husband. They were living together at the time with their two little girls on the top floor of a big Edwardian house, in a respectable street where the houses sat back behind well-tended gardens, and pollarded lime trees with blotchy bark surged up like life forces out of the civilised pavement. The Cerruti girls taking in the terrain at pushchair level saw how dogs left their small calcinous offerings among the tree roots (the dogs in those days were fed only on bones and scraps). This was just at the end of the time when women walked and pushed pushchairs in those streets in gloves, with matching handbags and shoes, suffused in that vanished elegance at once studied and nonchalant.

Helen and Phil Cerruti didn’t have much money — Phil was a jazz musician, who also gave lessons at the teacher-training college — but Helen had a gift for making herself elegant. She passed all her wisdom on to her girls, who later, in a different world, weren’t really ever able to make much use of it: that it was better to have two or three good things in your wardrobe than to have it stuffed full with inferior items; that cut and line were important above all; that instead of washing your clothes to rags you should valet them carefully, taking out stains with patent cleaner from a bottle, repairing with a needle and thread, pressing everything through a wet cloth before you wore it. They had an intimation — seeing their mother in her petticoat pressing and steaming, pinning up and letting down and taking in, grimacing at her make-up in the mirror, practising postures — of the hidden heavy labour that underlay the nonchalant surface. Helen was a dancer; that is, she had been a dancer before she had her children. She still had a dancer’s figure, driftwood washed to leanness. In 1965 she was wearing shirt dresses and pale pink lipstick; her dark hair was cut short, backcombed up behind a broad hair-band.

The access to their top-floor flat was up a metal staircase added on to the side of the house, which gave out a booming noise however quietly you tried to step. If the Cerrutis had too many visitors, or Phil ran back two at a time because he’d forgotten something, or Nia rapt in one of her daydreams came stomping up, a heavy stolid little thing, after playing out in the garden, then the retired Reverend Underwood who lived with his wife on the floor below would pull back the net curtains and rap on the windows at them. Helen made Phil climb up in his socks when he came in after playing late at night, with his shoes in his hand, unless it was raining. She also feared that if he’d been drinking he’d slip on those damn stairs and break his neck. And the stairs meant she had to keep Sophie’s pushchair down in the garage where Phil kept the car. Every expedition, even round the corner to the grocer’s, or to the clinic for Sophie’s orange juice, was a performance; when they got home she had to climb the stairs with Sophie struggling in her arms, laden with her shopping bags, clinging on to the metal handrail, desperate not to look down. Nia would go first and be entrusted with the keys. Straining on her stout legs she could just reach the keyhole. Solemn with her own importance, each time not quite believing that the trick would work, she would stagger forwards, hanging on to the keys, as the door swung in upon the familiar safe scene, extraordinarily unchanged since the moment they’d gone out, which would by now seem to Nia like hours and long ages ago.

Helen left Phil on an April evening, at about half past six. They had parted at breakfast on perfectly friendly terms; then one of Phil’s lessons had been cancelled in the afternoon, which meant less money, and she had heard him bounding up the stairs, pleased of course at the release, a couple of hours before she expected him. She wasn’t ready for him; she’d taken advantage of Sophie’s afternoon nap to wash the linoleum in the kitchen, and was on her hands and knees in her oldest slacks, with her hair tied up in a scarf. Nia was leading one of her dolls on an adventure round the lounge, instructing it confidingly: along the bookcases made of planks and bricks, behind the jazz records, among the hilly cushions on the low couch covered in olive green, through the forest of the goatskin rug whose skin peeled in scraps that looked like tissue paper. The weather was grey, the clouds had been suffused all day with a bright light that never quite broke through them. Helen had all the windows open up here in the flat, she hated stuffiness; they were so high at the top of the house that they looked out into the hearts of the garden trees almost as if they were birds nesting. It was that suspenseful moment in spring when the cold has loosened its grip, the tender leaves are bursting out everywhere, a bitter green smell tugs at the senses. The adults are all poised for something momentous to happen to fill out the meaning of this transformation, anxious already in case another year is slipping past without certainty, without anything becoming clear.

— That’s a very attractive proposition, said Phil when he came in and saw her scrubbing the floor intently with her back to him, her bottom stuck up in the air. He ran his hand suggestively around the curve of it under the tight cloth.

She looked over her shoulder at him, resting her weight on one arm, wiping her sweaty face on her shirtsleeve. — You’re early.

— Cancellation, he said jubilantly. — Freedom! I’ve come home to practise.

Usually, when she was ready for him, Helen made an effort to be welcoming when Phil came home: to have a meal ready, to freshen up her make-up and perfume, to take an interest in whatever he’d been doing. She had herself had a perfectly nice day. She had taken the girls to the park on the way back from the shops this morning; this evening when Phil went to play she was going to cut out the new chunky white cotton drill she had bought to make a suit to wear to his sister’s wedding. She didn’t even mind washing the floor. She was sorry for Phil, having to go out and teach when he hated it.