Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

— I’d miss you if you moved to Prague, she said.

— Get a sabbatical. Come out and stay.

She loved having him near her in London. But as soon as she had imagined Prague she knew that it was what she wanted for him: something more than the slick game of opportunity and advancement, a broader and deeper initiation into old sophisticated Europe, into a grown-up life with complications.

— I have to go, Thomas said.

He had looked at his watch three or four times in the last fifteen minutes.

— You’re meeting Annie?

— No, he lied.

Though he had made his confession to Christine, she wasn’t even in imagination to follow him to wherever he was meeting his big, dark, clever girl. She was only his mother, after all. It might be Anna’s night for Pilates or whatever it was she did. The lovers might have the whole evening ahead of them, after Annie had finished work, to sit in a hidden corner in a pub somewhere, crushing out cigarettes half smoked, going over and over the same broken bits of logic, pressing knees against knees under the table, getting excitedly drunker. Or to go back to her place. All that stuff.

By the time Thomas left, the sky outside Christine’s window had changed again. The bank of grey-black had broken up and swallowed the lemon lake; now tousled scraps of cloud tumbled untidily in a brooding light. Christine had another hour to work before she finished for the day and showered and changed; she was meeting a friend for a film — a Bergman screening at the BFI — and a late supper. She picked up her copy of Good Morning, Midnight. Her name was on the flyleaf: Christine Logan, Girton College, 1971. She was certain that she had held this same copy in her hands the morning of the day that Thomas was born, in 1980 — not his birthday but the day before, since he wasn’t actually born until half past midnight. She had been working on her thesis then, typing up a new chapter to show her supervisor, checking every quotation carefully against her text, when she felt the first pain.

The first pain — the first sign she’d had that Thomas was coming, two weeks before his time — had been like a sharp tiny bell struck as a signal; feeling it had been more like hearing something, a very precise high note, from deep inside her swollen abdomen, which was pressed with some difficulty into the space between her chair and the little rickety desk she worked at. None of the other things that the midwives at the hospital had warned her to expect had happened — the show of bloody mucus, or the waters breaking — only this little bell of pain, so small it was more pleasurable than unpleasant, zinging away from time to time inside her. She knew that she was supposed to delay going into the hospital for as long as she could, so she continued typing, her mind seeming to move at a pitch of high, free clarity between the words of the novel and her own extraordinary circumstance. All this went on in the sitting room of the little cottage she rented from Jesus College in those days, in the Kite in Cambridge. The cottage was gone now, pulled down to make way for new developments.

Once, while she waited, she had got up from the desk and stared at her face in a tarnished old junk-shop mirror she kept propped up on the mantelpiece for the sake of its frame. She thought that only fifty years before, at the time when the Rhys novel was written, she might have stared at herself like this, on the brink of the unknown ordeal, and been justified in wondering whether she would survive it. In the novel, Sasha’s baby died. Christine was not afraid, exactly, but she could not imagine what lay in wait for her on the far side of the hours to come. When she was at the hospital for her antenatal appointments, she had sometimes passed new mothers walking out to a waiting car or a taxi, followed by nurses carrying their babies bundled in white shawls. She didn’t have friends with babies; she didn’t know what it would mean, to be responsible for a white-wrapped bundle of her own.

She had picked up the telephone once or twice to call Alan, but cut herself off before she even finished dialling. Although the plan had always been for him to be there with her at the birth of their child, for the first time the idea of his large presence bothered her: he was a big tall man with a booming voice and a curling salt-and-pepper beard, a historian, a Marxist. I can manage this by myself, she had thought that morning, timing the little bells of pain which began to ring louder and stronger. It was as if she had intuited with the first pang of Thomas’s arrival, and quite rightly, that her delighted possession of her son would push apart whatever mechanism it was that had bound her to his father for those years of her youth.

Christine’s thesis was on certain women writers of the early twentieth century. She had argued that in their novels and stories they had broken with the conventions deep-buried in the foundations of the fiction tradition: that all good stories end in marriage, and that the essential drive in plot is courtship, bringing men and women together. Katherine Mansfield’s femmes seules and Woolf ’s solitaries represented a break that was at least as revolutionary, surely, as Lawrence’s and Joyce’s iconoclasm. In the late seventies, the automatic gesture of obeisance to feminism had not yet been internalised among academics, and an amused hostility was still the norm. Alan wouldn’t read Christine’s work then: he said once that he took no interest in the nuances of bourgeois ladies’ hypersensibility. She had tolerated this attitude, at least at first; she had even been attracted by it, as if in his contemptuous maleness he were a huge handsome bear whose ferocity she had to take on, and tame, and teach.

When Thomas was four or five years old he had asked her once if he was going to die. She wasn’t sure where this exchange had taken place — on a beach perhaps, although not on a summer day. She associated it vaguely with a windy walk across pale pebbles that were awkward underfoot, along the sea’s rim of crisp-dried detritus: seaweed, plastic netting, bird bones. Perhaps it was on one of their trips to the Norfolk coast with Alan when he and she were still seeing each other.

She must have been carrying Thomas. She remembered his weight slipping on her hip.

— It’s all right, Christine said. — Don’t worry about dying. Maybe by the time you grow up they’ll have invented some medicine so you won’t have to.

She remembered Alan stopping abruptly. Perhaps she put Thomas down then and he went to dabble in the sea-rubbish.

— I can’t believe you just said that.

He was laughing, but she thought with certainty at that moment: He hates me. The conviction reverberated like a blow against armour; she tasted blood and she wanted to fight.

— What’s wrong with saying it? I used to think that when I was a little girl.

— But it isn’t true.

— Of course it’s not true. It’s something reassuring to keep you going until you’re old enough. You know, like Heaven.

— If any adult had ever lied to me about anything so important, when I found out the truth I’d never have forgiven them.

She was shocked at herself, for a moment: she wondered if he was right. Then, recovering, she mocked him.

— But that’s just what you’re like, isn’t it? You love to go around not forgiving people for things. How austere and rigorous it must make you feel. What a little prig of a child you must have been.

He opened his mouth to answer, closed it, and turned to stride away from her down the beach. She hurried raggedly after him, not finished, snatching Thomas up from whatever he was interested in: threading washed-up ring pulls on his fingers or poking a dead gull with a stick. In her memory a wind came whipping up, tearing out her words.