Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

Forty years later, only Nia can remember any of this. Sophie was too young to remember. Nana Allen is long dead; and Nia’s father is dead too, in his fifties, of a heart attack. When Nia tells the story to her mother, Helen simply flatly denies it; and Nia is sure she isn’t pretending, that she’s genuinely forgotten. In her late sixties Helen is still elegant and striking-looking, with suffering deep-set eyes and beautiful skin (‘Never use soap on your face, Nia’). She complains about her hairdresser, but he’s good: she has her hair dyed a dark honey colour with silver streaks, cut to fall loose and straight in a boyish look she calls ‘gamine’. People who meet Helen think she must have been something important, a broadcaster or a designer, although actually what she has mostly done in her life is that old-fashioned thing: being an attractive and interesting woman. She has had two significant relationships with men since Phil died, but she wouldn’t marry either of them, although (she says, and Nia believes) they begged her. One of these men died too, and the other went back to his wife. The way she tells it now, the relationship with Phil Cerruti was the true love of her life, because Phil was a true artist. Nia isn’t meaning to challenge this, either, when she brings up the subject of the time they ran away to Nana Allen’s.

— I won’t deny we did fight, Helen says. — We were both pretty passionate people. But no, I would remember it if I’d ever actually left him. I don’t think the possibility would have crossed my mind. By the standards of today, of course I should have left. Everything in our family life had to be fitted around his music; you can’t domesticate a real musician. But I was happy. The women of your generation wouldn’t stand for it, darling, I know. But we’d been brought up to believe you stuck by your husband and that was it. You took the rough with the smooth.

On the other hand, Helen does now sometimes talk about her dancing. It has become part of her story, that she could have had a career as a dancer and she gave it up because that’s how it was in those days, if you married and had children; the way she tells it, you can’t tell whether she thinks the sacrifice was a shame or a splendid thing. Helen and Nia get on reasonably well most of the time these days. When Nia was in her twenties she went through (as she sees it now) a drearily dogmatic feminist phase. She lived for a while as a lesbian, and camped at Greenham Common. She gave herself a new name because she didn’t want to use her father’s, and then when Phil died (suddenly, so that she never said goodbye to him) she went into a depression for two years, and only came out of it with the help of therapy. Now she works as a therapist herself, and has a steady relationship with a man, Paul, although they don’t live together and don’t have any children. (Sophie has two boys and a girl, so Helen isn’t cheated of grandchildren.)

Nia suggested to her mother last Christmas that in the spring the two of them should fly together to New York, to see the exhibition of Rubens drawings at the Met. The teacher at Helen’s art classes had said how wonderful they were; and Helen had never been to America. It should have been one of those brilliant late-night inspirations that crumble to nothing in the light of practicalities, but somehow they really went ahead with this and booked their flights and their hotel. Then it was too late to change their minds, although in the week before they left Nia was consumed with doubt and dismay, imagining every kind of disaster. Her mother who suffered from angina wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere; she would be taken ill, and Nia would have to deal with the American medical system. Or they would quarrel over something and not be able to escape from one another. On the flight over, Nia sat in the window seat and looked down at the unpopulated earth below, wherever it was, Greenland or Canada: for hundreds of miles, nothing but the black whorls and coils of rock, snow and winding rivers and frozen lakes. There was no cloud layer; there must be unbroken cold sunshine down there. She calmed herself by imagining she was translated down into that landscape; though not of course in her hopeless human body, which would only know how to stumble around in it and die.

They arrived in New York in torrential rain. The hotel in Greenwich Village, where Nia had stayed once before with Paul, looked rougher than she remembered. It was the kind of place she and Paul enjoyed, full of atmosphere and the traces of an older New York which they knew from films, with a marble-faced dado and huge gilt mirrors in the hallway, little metal mailboxes for the permanent residents, a lift painted around inside with acanthus blooms, oddly assorted books on the shelves in every room. Now she could only see it through her mother’s eyes. The furniture was cheap, made from split cane. They had to use a bathroom out on the corridor, and the first time Nia went in there she found a dirty sticking plaster on the floor. The breakfasts were awful, in a basement where a fierce Hispanic woman presided over Thermoses full of coffee and hot water. Mother and daughter were both shy, transplanted out of the worlds they knew. Nia was often anxious, worrying about how to get from place to place, and where to eat, and whether Helen was tired; probably Helen was worrying too.

They were also always aware, however, that they would think about the things they were doing as wonders, afterwards, when they got home. Their shared bedroom had a view on to the street of elegant and wealthy brownstones, where the trees were just coming into leaf. While Helen did her face and hair at the dressing table in the mornings, Nia (who only showered and towelled her short hair dry) watched out of the window, exclaiming at the New York dogs: extravagantly big or small or pampered, sometimes being exercised in gangs of five or six by bored professional walkers. They gave up the hotel basement and found a place round the corner which did breakfasts of rough peasant bread and seed bread with real fruit jam and café au lait in bowls; they made friends with the waiter. And on their second day the sun came out and was even hot; they took a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty and the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island; they marvelled at the Manhattan skyline. Helen persuaded Nia to let her pay for some oatmeal cotton trousers and a long moss-green cardigan; Nia in the expensive Fifth Avenue shops felt cornered and oversized and fraudulent. She longed for the new clothes to transform her, to prove that her mother’s old instincts hadn’t lapsed or fallen out of date.

After they had seen the Rubens drawings they had tea in the American Wing café in the Met, and watched through the glass wall a gang of workers in Central Park, pulling the ivy out of the bare winter trees. They tied ropes around it and heaved together until the ivy came away in heavy masses, which the men then fed on a conveyor belt into a shredder. Helen that day was wearing a grey suit and a silk scarf decorated with blue and yellow birds; the scarf had got somehow skewed sideways so that it stuck up rakishly behind one ear and made her look as if she was drunk or slightly dotty. Nia could see, too, where her lipstick was bleeding into the fine wrinkles at the edges of her lips. She talked about the mistakes Sophie was making with her children, in a tone of tactful light regret which Nia knew Sophie found particularly maddening. After tea when Helen came out from the Ladies, where she would have checked herself in the mirror, the scarf was tidied into its usual casual elegance. She looked tired, though, and had to use her angina spray when they were walking from the museum to find a taxi.

— Don’t those exquisite drawings simply make everything worthwhile? she said when they were back in their hotel room, groaning and easing her feet out of her shoes.