Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

— So I hear your father’s getting married again?

— Who told you? There was a flicker of solicitousness in his expression, in case she minded.

— Someone who knows Laura. Poor Laura.

Laura had been Alan’s first wife, the one he was married to all through his affair with Christine, those long years ago. Laura had always made Thomas welcome in her home, even after Alan strayed a second time, and then a third, and then stayed away permanently. Thomas was close to his half-brothers and — sisters, and managed gracefully a whole complex of loyalties.

— I think Laura’s OK, Thomas said. — I think she’s pretty indifferent these days to what Dad’s up to.

This wasn’t what the person at the dinner party had told Christine.

— I hear the girl he’s marrying is young enough to be his daughter.

Thomas couldn’t help his grin: spreading, conspiratorial. He was easily entertained. — You know what he’s like.

— Have you met her?

— She’s OK. I reckon she knows what she’s getting into. But put it this way: I don’t think it was her intellectual qualities he fell for. I thought that you might be in college today, he added. — I only came here on the off chance.

— Thursdays I usually work at home. Why aren’t you in the office?

— I phoned and told them I was ill. I haven’t pulled a sickie for ages. I’ve got a lot of stuff going round in my head and I wanted some time out to really think about it. And I thought I might stop by to have a bit of a chat about something that’s cropped up.

Christine was touched: he rarely came to her to talk about his problems. In fact, there had been almost no problems. He was an affable, sociable boy whose directness was of the easy and not the exacting kind. Thomas heaved himself upright in the chair, so that his knees were jackknifed in front of his face; he stirred two spoons of sugar into his coffee and ate chocolate biscuits.

— Is it about your dad and this wedding?

— God, no. That honestly isn’t a big deal. I’m glad for him.

— Work?

He made a face. — And other stuff.

Thomas had finished at Oxford the year before and had been working as an assistant to a Labour MP, a woman, no one very special. All he did was photocopy and file and send standard answers to constituents’ letters, but the idea was that this could lead to bigger and better things, some kind of political career. It was only an idea, being tested. Thomas didn’t know whether a political career was what he really wanted. Christine thought he might be too finely constituted, too conscientious for it. On the other hand she was proud of his realism, and that he was thinking unsentimentally about ways to get power and change things.

— I’ve got myself in a bit of a mess, Thomas said. — With Anna.

— Oh?

He fished his tobacco and rolling papers out of a pocket and used the flat tops of his knees as a table.

— I seem to have got involved with somebody else.

— Oh, Thomas.

He told her about a girl he had met at work. He said that he hadn’t liked her at first — he’d thought she was too full of herself. But then they’d had to work on some assignment together and he’d got to know her a lot better. He could talk to her in a way he’d never talked to anyone else. She was very bright. She wasn’t good-looking in the way Anna was good-looking.

— She’s quite big, he said. — Not fat. Curvy. With this sort of messy black hair. Long.

Thomas’s own hair was hanging down across his face as he rolled his cigarette, so Christine couldn’t see his expression. She could hear, though, his voice thick with an excitement that she recognised as belonging to the first phase of infatuation, when even speaking about your lover, saying ordinary things about him or her, is a part of desire.

— The worst thing is, he said, shaking his hair back and looking frankly at her. — Well, not the worst thing. But they both have the same name. Not quite the same. She’s called Annie.

Christine couldn’t help a puff of laughter.

— I know, he said. — Shite, isn’t it? He laughed with her. — The two Anns.

— Have you told Anna?

He shook his head. — I thought at first it was just, you know, nothing. Not worth upsetting her about.

— But it’s something?

He shrugged and opened his hands at her in a gesture of defencelessness, squinting in the smoke from the roll-up that wagged in his mouth. How was he to know? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

Christine felt protective of Anna, although she had sometimes thought her too sweet and dull for Thomas. How clearly she could imagine this new girl: less pretty, overweight, clever, treacherous. These were all the things that she herself had been: she was on her guard at once, as if against a rival.

— She’s different, he said. — She’s funny; she makes me laugh. She doesn’t take everything too seriously.

— And how do you feel about deceiving Anna?

He gulped his coffee. She saw him flooded with shame then, not able to trust himself to speak: an unpractised liar.

— These things happen, she soothed. — We can’t pretend they don’t. Even if we were good, if we were perfectly and completely chaste, we can’t control what happens in our imagination. So being good might only be another kind of lie.

When Christine had begun her affair with Alan, there had been a possibility of his leaving his wife and family. For a while, in fact, he had left, and they had lived together. Thomas was conceived during that time. It had not worked out, they had fought horribly, and Alan had been sick with missing his children. In the end he had taken himself home. Such storms, such storms, there had been in Christine’s life then: with Alan, and with others, afterwards. When she longed for her youth, those storms were what she missed, and not the happy times. The excitement of upheaval, a universe open with possibility, the phone calls that changed everything, the conspiratorial consultations with girlfriends, the feverish packing for surprise trips, escaping out of the last thing or rushing to embrace the next. Perhaps Thomas remembered some of those adventures, too: late-night train journeys when he had sat beside her with big sleepless eyes, sucking at his dummy, fingering the precious corner of his blanket, his little red suitcase packed with books and toys.

Later, once he was established at school, she had settled into a steadier routine for his sake. But perhaps now, when he found himself infatuated and intoxicated and behaving badly, at some level of consciousness he’d recognised it as her terrain, and come to her because he thought she would know what he should do next. Perhaps his coming to her with his own crisis was a kind of forgiveness, for those upheavals.

— What about work? she said.

Thomas looked at her vaguely. Work seemed, of course, a straw, in relation to the great conflagration of his passionate life.

— You said there were work issues as well that you were worried about.

— Only the old question. I mean, here I am stuffing envelopes for an MP who voted for the war in Iraq. Should I stay inside the tent pissing out? Perhaps it would be more dignified to get out and do some pissing in.

— Dignified pissing.

— But we’ve been over all that so many times.

— Only now it’s complicated because she’s there at work? Annie.

— It would solve everything if I just took off and went away by myself to live in Prague or somewhere. Budapest.

— Leave both of them you mean? Christine said. — Woman trouble, she sighed, making a joke of it.

She was suddenly quite sure that he would, in fact, move abroad for a while, even though he didn’t know it yet himself, and it had only popped into his conversation as a joke-possibility. After much confabulation and self-interrogation and any number of painful scenes with his two girls, this was what he would do.