Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

— But you can’t practise here, she said.

This was their oldest quarrel, ever since they’d moved from their first flat to this one, after Nia was born.

— They won’t be in, he said easily, as if they hadn’t been over all this so many times before. — They won’t mind.

— Why didn’t you stay and practise at the college?

— Because I hate the college. Because I can’t wait to shake the stinking dust of the college off my shoes.

— But at college they have soundproof rooms.

He stood quietly then for a few moments without moving; Helen pretended not to notice his portentousness, swirling the scrubbing brush in her bucket of water.

— Do you really hate my music so much, Phil said: not as a question but in a sort of wondering cold calm.

Phil Cerruti was a very good alto player, something in the style of Art Pepper but of course not that good. Art Pepper was his hero; he played his records over and over, he learned his solos off by heart. He got a lot of work, in the city in the west of England where they lived and the area round about, but not enough work yet to give up teaching. Helen loved him to play. She had fallen in love with him watching him onstage: his small loose-jointed body, its movements delicate and finished as a cat’s, twitching to the off-beat. Moods passed visibly, like weather, over the transparent white skin of his face, blue under his eyes when he was tired. Men were drawn to Phil as well as women; his energy was a steady heat, a promise. He walked out of the kitchen without another word and went into the lounge. Helen went on scrubbing the floor for a while and then she got to her feet with her scrubbing brush still in her hand, and followed after him as if she had something more to say. Phil was sitting on the couch beside the open alto case, wetting the reed in his mouthpiece. He had let his thick black hair grow recently almost down to his shoulders (the teacher-training college had complained). Nia and her doll were paused en route around the room, looking at him; Helen knew she was surprised that her daddy hadn’t greeted her with his usual exuberance.

— All day, Helen said, — I have to stop the children running around, in case the Underwoods start banging on the ceiling.

— Let them bang. We pay our rent, we have a perfect right for our children to run around, for me to practise my music if I want to.

— Don’t raise your voice, she said. — They’ll hear you.

— What the hell do I care, if they hear me?

— I have to live here with them, all day every day.

— Then let’s move. This is insane. I need to play. We need to feel free, in our own home.

— We’ll never find a flat as nice as this, in such a nice area, for this rent.

— What do I care about nice?

— I care.

— I can’t live like this, Phil shouted. — You’re killing me.

He dropped the alto on the couch and rolled on to the floor, shouting at whoever might be listening in the flat below as loud as he could, with his face down against the carpet. — You’re bloody killing me! For Christ’s sake!

Helen threw the scrubbing brush hard at him. Dirty water sprayed around; the brush bounced against his temple, wooden side down, and he yelped in real pain and surprise. — Jesus Christ! Nia looked astonished and embarrassed. Helen went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her and lay down on the bed. Sophie was still asleep in her cot in the corner, her breathing weightless and tiny as a feather on the air. The rank smell of Phil’s hair on the pillow filled Helen’s nose and senses; her heart seemed to be leaping to escape out of her breast. They quite often quarrelled; what she said to herself usually was that Phil was like a child, emotional and volatile. But today she believed it when he said she was killing him. She had been washing the floor so contentedly, and then in the space of a few minutes her body had been seized and occupied by this violent tempest; she saw starkly that their two lives now were set against one another, that he was desperate for freedom and art and that she needed to stop him having them. She had heard the scrubbing brush crack against his skull; she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t true, that she didn’t want to destroy him. It was horrible, that they were yoked together in this marriage. She thought that if they went on like this she might one day soon tear his saxophone out of his mouth and stamp on it and break its keys.

When Phil went out to play that evening Helen packed a suitcase and a bag and caught a bus with the children to go to where her mother lived about three miles away across the city. She could only carry enough for one night; she even left behind the pushchair, which was too heavy and too difficult to fold down. She didn’t mean, though, ever to go back to Phil. She had no idea of what lay ahead in the future, although she did think that if only she could get back her old job at the dance school, then perhaps her mother would look after the children while she worked. This wasn’t likely, however, as the management at the dance school had changed and she didn’t know the new people. She and Phil had eaten the tea she cooked in silence; they hadn’t said goodbye when he went out. Helen had thought, as she always thought when he left to play, that he might be killed that night and she might never see him again: he would be driving home when he was tired and had been drinking, on unknown roads in the dark. She always pictured these roads as twisting through forest or bleak moorland, shining and treacherous with wet. But even then she didn’t run after him. The clamour of his footsteps on the staircase died away. She heard him open the garage door and drive out the car, then stop and get out and close the garage door behind him. Then he drove off.

The clouds that had muffled the day like a fleece broke up in the evening and floated as pink wisps in a high sunny sky; a thrush was joyous in the garden as they left. Helen had Sophie on her leading rein, and could just manage the suitcase as long as she would walk. She didn’t care if the Underwoods saw her go. The little girls loved catching buses. They had to get one down to the centre and then change; Helen was only afraid that as it got past Sophie’s bedtime she would grumble and rub her eyes and want to be picked up. But the girls seemed to understand that this evening didn’t exist inside the envelope of ordinary time; they cast quick buoyant wary looks at their mother, as if they mustn’t make too much of anything. Nia, who had seen Helen throw the brush, practised an air of easy adaptation. Sophie held on to the chrome rail of the seat in front and bounced. When Helen clenched her fist on the rail, so that if the bus stopped suddenly and Sophie flew forwards she wouldn’t hit her face, she was surprised to see she was still wearing her engagement and wedding rings, distorting lumps under her glove. All that seemed left already far behind.

Helen’s father had died three years before; her mother had sold the big house where she had lived for thirty-five years and gone to live above a hairdresser’s. Socially, she had come down in the world. Her husband had been retail manager for one of the big department stores; she had used to come to this hairdresser’s as a customer, to have her hair washed and set, preserving a proper dignified distance from the staff. Now she even worked as a receptionist for them several afternoons a week, drawn deeply and happily into the world of their gossip and concerns. The only entrance to her flat was through the hairdresser’s; Helen had to ring the doorbell, then her mother peered down from between her sitting-room curtains to see whoever was calling at this time. She didn’t have a telephone, so Helen hadn’t been able to warn her. A few minutes later they could see her feeling her way along the row of dryers in the dim light from the stairs behind; she didn’t like to use the salon lights because they weren’t on her bill. No one knew that Nia’s dreams were visited by dryer-monsters with blank skin faces and huge bald egg-shaped skulls in powder blue. The glass door to the salon, hung inside with a rattling pink venetian blind, had ‘Jennifer’s’ stencilled across it in flowing cursive script, and underneath that a pink silhouette bust of a lady in an eighteenth-century wig.