Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

Helen and her mother weren’t very alike. Everything about Helen had always been poised and quiveringly defiant; her mother seemed in contrast compliant and yielding. They didn’t look alike: Helen had her father’s stark cheekbones and strong colouring, her mother had been pinkly pretty and had faded and grown plump. But Helen was aware of a stubbornness deep down in her mother’s softness; when you pushed, she didn’t give way. When Helen was a teenager she and her mother had fought over every single thing — over dancing, over make-up, over Phil — as if one of them must destroy the other before it could end; Helen’s father, who had always appeared to be the stern parent, could only look on in perplexity. It was through the birth of the babies that they had been reconciled; as if that blood sacrifice had satisfied both their honours. Now, as soon as she had undone the bolts and opened the salon door, Nana Allen seemed to know intuitively what had happened.

— You’ve left him, she said. — He didn’t hit you, did he? Has he been drinking?

Helen gave a little bleat of laughter and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. — I hit him. I threw something at him and hit him on the side of the head.

— A scrubbing brush, explained Nia solemnly.

Nana Allen laughed then too.

— Oh God, these children saw it, Helen said; and then for the first time tears spilled out from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

— Sophie didn’t see it, Nia corrected.

— Get them inside, her Nana said. — Come on in, my little lambs. Come and get warm in Nana’s flat. Have you eaten anything? I’ve got some casserole.

Nia got past the egghead dryers by clinging on to her nana’s skirt and burying her eyes in the familiar comfortable-smelling cloth. Helen couldn’t believe these tears, now that they came; they hadn’t been part of how she had imagined her exit, or her austere altered life. She hadn’t even known she had inside her whatever deep reservoir of sorrow the tears poured from, flooding out of her, wave after wave, so that she was sodden, sobbing, helpless to speak. Her mother made her sit down in the corner of the sofa, wrapping her up in the old wartime quilt from home that she put over her knees in the evenings against the draughts (before Helen came she had been sitting reading her library book). She made cups of milky sweet tea for the children, made Nia a pickled-onion sandwich, gave them the biscuit barrel full of lemon creams; she had a special pronged fork for the pickled onions, with a pusher on a spring to press them off on to your plate. Helen eventually was able to drink a cup of tea too. The women together put the children to bed: Sophie in Nana’s bed because it was wider and she was less likely to fall out of it, Nia in the bed in the spare room, which they had to make up first. They left the doors just open, in case the children called out. Then they sat and talked together for hours. Helen’s mother held her hand while they talked, and stroked her hair, and brought a cool flannel for her to wipe her face. Nia could just hear their voices, although she couldn’t hear the words. She fell asleep and the voices became a kind of loose safety net into which she fell, drooping and stretching under her, bearing her up, letting her go.

— I hate him, Helen said adamantly at some point that evening. — He hates me. We’re killing each other. It’s horrible. But I’ve seen through the whole thing, now. I couldn’t ever put myself back inside it.

She was pacing about the room then with her old important restlessness, that still irritated her mother sometimes. She stopped to light another cigarette; the ashtray was already full, they were both smoking. Helen sucked on the cigarettes as if she was drinking the smoke down thirstily.

— Love is such a lie, she said. — In marriage, it’s a lie. You kiss each other goodbye in the morning but actually inside you’re both burning up with anger at things the other one’s done or not done, and relief at getting rid of them for a few hours. I don’t love him any more. I see right through him. All he cares about is his music and actually I agree with him: why shouldn’t he?

— You gave up your dancing.

Helen looked at her in surprise. — I wasn’t very good. Not good enough. I wouldn’t want Phil to give up his music. That’s not the point.

— I thought you were very good.

(In fact she had exerted her utmost powers to dissuade Helen from a career in dance.)

— All those jazz standards about love and women, Helen went on, indifferent for the moment to the long-ago story of her dancing. — But actually they’re only interested in each other, they’re not genuinely interested in women at all. I mean, not once they’ve got what they want. All they’re thinking about when they play all those songs about the women they can’t bear to live without, the beautiful women they’ve lost, is actually what other men think. Am I playing it as well as him? What does he think of the way I did that solo? Is he impressed?

— He does care about you.

— No, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m his enemy. He wants to be free.

— It will seem different tomorrow morning.

— It won’t. Or if it does, then it won’t be the truth. I will be lying to myself again.

Nia woke up very early. She knew at once where she was, from the way a vague light was swelling behind her nana’s lilac-coloured silky curtains. Even though Nia didn’t go to school yet — she only went three afternoons a week to a little nursery where in fine weather they lay on mats in the playground to nap — that lilac-toned light already meant to her a precious freedom from routine. Usually the accompaniment to the lilac light at Nana’s was the sound of car engines starting up in the street outside and then droning deliciously away into the distance; but it was too early even for that to have begun.

Helen was in the bed with her. She had forgotten to wonder where her mother would sleep. Once or twice at home Nia had been put into bed with her when she was ill, but it was a rare, strange treat. Helen had her back turned and her head buried down in the pillows. She was wearing her blue seersucker pyjamas, and snoring slightly; she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair still had some of its backcombed stiffness from the day, only matted and flattened; Nia reached out her fingers and felt it sticky with hairspray. She lifted herself carefully on one elbow, to survey her mother from this unaccustomed advantage of consciousness; everyone was asleep in the flat apart from her. Helen hadn’t taken her make-up off before she came to bed: some of it was smeared on Nana’s pillowcase. She radiated heat, and gave off her usual beloved complicated smell, like face powder and fruit cake. Shut up and inactive behind her closed eyes, frowning in her sleep, she seemed more and not less mysterious. Nia settled down again, pressing up cautiously behind her mother so as not to wake her. Through the puckery material of the pyjamas she could feel against her face the skin of her mother’s warm back; she breathed in and out with her mouth open, tasting her. She wondered if their lives had changed, and if she would be able to sleep with her mother every night from now on. Anything seemed possible.

Some time later she was wakened again by a sound of knocking, then of Jennifer (who wasn’t really Jennifer but Patsy) opening the salon door and speaking crossly to someone with a man’s voice: her daddy. Then the doorbell rang up in the flat. Helen sat bolt upright in bed, as though she came from sleep to full consciousness in one movement; she slithered her legs over the side of the bed and dashed into the sitting room, where she collided with Phil who had just dashed upstairs. She gave out a little moan: of subsidence, remorse, relief. Nia snuggled into the warm space her mother left behind. She could hear Jennifer moving about downstairs, tidying up and running water. She knew that soon the bell on the salon door would begin to tinkle as the staff arrived, and then the customers. If she was lucky she would be allowed down later. The hairdryers were only harmless and comical during the day; she would sit out of the way and play with the perm papers.