Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

— The rest of you go, Rachel says. — I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. But I’m feeling quite tired. I fancy an early night. And I probably should just keep an eye on her.

Kieran drops on his haunches till he’s at Sukey’s level, he speaks to her gravely, sweetly; she yields herself, allows him to feel her forehead, pull back her eyelids and look into her pupils, take her pulse. His fingers, with their bitten yellow nails and curling black hairs, are dark and coarsely male against her pearl-pink skin. Rachel’s eyes are fixed on Kieran’s face, calmly enough.

He says to Sukey, — Mummy knows exactly what the matter is. I would trust her. Mummies usually know best. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here.

And he smiles into Rachel’s expectant open gaze.

Kieran doesn’t smile very often. When he does, his face becomes quite jolly and ordinary. It’s like a reprieve, as if a daunting problem had unexpectedly turned out to be easy.

— Why don’t you see how she is in half an hour? he says. — If she goes off to sleep peacefully enough I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t leave her. It would probably be good for you to get a break.

— Maybe, Rachel murmurs gratefully.

Sam thinks that if Kieran can get this out of being a doctor — this exchange of authority and submissive trust — then perhaps everything will be all right for him after all.

Upstairs, fifteen minutes later, Janie and Rachel are giving Dom and Melia a bath.

— Rach, why don’t you go to the pub? I really don’t mind staying in. Anyway, I’m worried in case Lulu doesn’t sleep through. I can call you if Sukey’s sick again.

— No, honestly. I’d rather not.

— I just thought, you know, if Kieran’s only here for tonight.

Rachel hides her involuntary smile in Dom’s frog-flannel. — There is something, isn’t there? she whispers.

— God, yes, Janie whispers back. — The way he looked at you when we came in.

— I know.

— Then go to the pub.

— No. I don’t think so. I’m not ready. I’m not ready for it yet.

Sukey doesn’t throw up again; her temperature comes down. Rachel reads to her and then sits beside her bed until she is soundly asleep. All the other children are asleep, too, by this time, except Joshua and Tom, who are watching a DVD in the front room. Rachel goes downstairs and out into the garden. The light is draining imperceptibly out of the sky; the velvety plum colour of the copper beech is drinking up darkness. Yellow light from inside the house glitters on the stone flags of the patio. Through the French windows, the TV flickers behind the silhouetted heads of the boys intently watching.

Vince comes back from the pub for his fags. He stops to smoke one in the garden. She has one, too, although she doesn’t usually, and they experience a rush of mutual friendliness. Vince thinks Rachel’s a sweet woman, not his type but warm and nurturing. Rachel feels sorry for Vince — she thinks Janie gives him a hard time. He tells her that he’s really enjoying himself (he’s forgotten how he felt in the morning). He says that this place means a lot to him, that he and Janie really ought to try to move out of London. It isn’t fair bringing kids up there; they need wide open spaces and contact with nature. Rachel listens to him indulgently, knowing that nothing will come of it, and that Vince would fade away with boredom in the country.

When he’s gone, a clamour of rooks passes overhead. It’s darker now. Moths come visiting Rachel’s chive flowers and nicotiana in a pale blur of movement. A bat stirs the air with a beat of its leathery wings. There’s a moment’s impulse when she thinks she’ll tell the boys that she’s going to the pub after all, and that they have to listen for the babies. But she doesn’t move, she stays planted there in the still air darting with invisible movement, washed in streams of incense from the balsam poplar.

On the way home from the pub, Janie and Kieran fall behind the others because she stops to listen when he says that he can hear an owl hunting. She is genuinely delighted when she hears it too. These two haven’t spoken together much during the evening. Sam and Kieran were arguing about Iraq (it’s typical of Kieran that he won’t condemn the war, when everybody else does). She and Vince were having one of their talks, about how he’s got to start being home more, to make space for her to get on with her art work. (Vince didn’t point out tonight, not in so many words, that his work brings in money and hers doesn’t.) Janie has never quite trusted Kieran; she’s always thought that he was one of Sam’s Cambridge types, too absorbed in himself, preoccupied with the game of jockeying for intellectual position. She wonders what he’s up to with Rachel.

The stretch of road outside the pub is lit, but when they turn off to climb the hill to the cottage they are plunged into a darkness deep and complete and astonishing to these city folk, who are used to the perpetual urban orange seepage of light. They didn’t think to bring a torch. Walking into that darkness, solid and prohibitive, feels as counter-intuitive as walking into a wall.

Janie falters. — I’ve no idea where I’m going, she says.

— Hold on to me, Kieran says, reaching out. — Though I’ve absolutely no idea, either.

— I suppose at least if we fall into anything we’ll go together.

They can’t see each other; she feels his hand come searching, and she clasps his upper arm, when she finds it, with both her hands. She remembers what he’s wearing — a green shirt patterned with yellow motifs in some kind of slippery material — as if it were suddenly significant, although she’s been looking at it without interest (if anything, with distaste) all evening. The slippery fabric slides under her fingers. His hand blunders against her bare arm under the cardigan she has slung across her shoulders.

They can hear the others’ voices some way ahead. — OK, Janie? Vince calls.

— Fine!

— Fucking dark! Kieran shouts. — Fucking countryside!

— Navigate by the fucking stars! Sam shouts back.

Kieran and Janie have both drunk enough to be unsteady, hanging on to each other in the middle of the road without any visual clues to help them. They stagger and he grabs her and pulls her against him and then begins to kiss her face with a beery smoky garlicky mouth (the garlic was in the pasta, which she and Rachel didn’t eat). He lands kisses randomly at first, on her ear, on the side of her nose. After a moment’s surprise, she kisses him back, putting her hand up into his hair and finding his mouth with hers. It’s a long time since she’s properly kissed anyone but Vince; she’s pleased that she seems to manage it suavely and skilfully. Then her head swims and they lose their balance and almost fall. He sets his feet apart on the road so he can support her; he puts an arm around behind her shoulders.

— Who are you? he says softly, so close she can taste his breath on her. — It’s so dark it could be anyone.

She can smell the salty sourness of his hair, too, as if he didn’t bother with shampoo. — I’ve no idea, she says. — Who are you? What just happened?

— Don’t stop. Don’t stop, please. His voice is urgent, pleading. He means it.

Janie thinks that this is what he meant, when he looked at Rachel in the afternoon: he was just desperate to lose himself like this. She will do just as well, for his need, as Rachel; and yet that’s not insulting but exhilarating. She feels the same way: he will do for her, just as well. She doesn’t stop. She starts again.

His mouth is hot and liquid. His lips feel swollen and thin-skinned; his beard growth is long enough to be sleek and not stubble-rough against her mouth and her wet cheek. She thinks of the many parties at Sam and Rachel’s where she has stayed dumb while Kieran has spoken out eloquently on some subject; and now that same tongue of his is shyly tentative against hers, and hers is bolder. It’s marvellously simplifying that there’s no time for this to become anything more than a kiss. They have only this moment before they have to follow the others and go back inside the light.