Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

How could Christine envy Thomas’s two girls? Who could want to be one of the two foolish Anns, desperate for him? Or to be Alan, with his beard shaven and his silvery hair clipped close to his skull, hoping to start out on the adventure of passion all over again? How much happier she was, how much less time and energy it took to be Thomas’s mother: a relationship founded on one fixed and unalterable truth. Outside her spectacular arched window the wind threw rain in long ragged gusts across the housefronts and tore at the estate agents’ signs, setting them flapping in crazy ecstasy. Christine told herself that she was glad she was on this side of the glass, but she lay still on her sofa for a long time, and after a while she turned her back on the view.

THE COACH JOURNEY from Cambridge to Bristol took six hours. Hilary Culvert was wearing a new purple skirt, a drawstring crêpe blouse and navy school cardigan, and over them her school mac, because it was the only coat she had. The year was 1972. In the toilets at Oxford bus station where they were allowed to get out she had sprayed on some perfume and unplaited her hair. She worried that she smelled of home. She didn’t know quite what home smelled like, as she still lived there and was used to it; but when her sister Sheila had come back from university for Christmas she had complained about it.

— You’d think with all these children, Sheila had said, — that at least the place would smell of something freshly nasty. Feet or sweat or babies or something. But it smells like old people. Mothballs and Germolene: who still uses mothballs apart from here?

Hilary had been putting Germolene on her spots; this was the family orthodoxy. She put the little tube aside in horror. Sheila had looked so different, even after only one term away. She had always been braver about putting on a public show than Hilary was: now she wore gypsy clothes, scrumpled silky skirts and patchwork tops with flashing pieces of mirror sewn in. Her red-brown hair was fluffed out in a mass. She had insisted on washing her hair almost every day, even though this wasn’t easy in the vicarage: the old Ascot gas heater only dribbled out hot water, and there were all the younger children taking turns each night for baths. Their father had remonstrated with Sheila.

— There’s no one here to admire you in your glory, he said. — You’ll only frighten the local boys. Save your efforts until you return to the fleshpots.

— I’m not doing it for anyone to admire, said Sheila. — I’m doing it for myself.

He was a tall narrow man, features oversized for the fine bones of his face, eyes elusive behind thick-lensed glasses; he smiled as if he was squinting into a brash light. His children hadn’t been brought up to flaunt doing things for themselves, although the truth was that in a family of nine a certain surreptitious selfishness was essential for survival.

Now Hilary in her half-term week was going to visit Sheila in the fleshpots, or at Bristol University, where she was reading Classics. A lady with permed blue-white hair in the seat next to her was knitting baby clothes in lemon-yellow nylon wool which squeaked on her needles; Hilary had to keep her head turned to stare out of the window because she suffered terribly from travel sickness. She wouldn’t ever dream of reading on a coach, and even the flickering of the knitting needles could bring it on. The lady had tried to open up a conversation about her grandchildren and probably thought Hilary was rude and unfriendly. And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn’t talk to. Outside the window there was nothing to justify her fixed attention. The sky seemed never to have lifted higher all day than a few feet above the ground; rolls of mist hung above the sodden grass like dirty wool. The signs of spring coming seemed suspended in a spasm of unforgiving frozen cold. It should have been a relief to leave the flatlands of East Anglia behind and cross into the hills and valleys of the west, but everywhere today seemed equally colourless. Hilary didn’t care. Her anticipation burned up brightly enough by itself. Little flames of it licked up inside her. This was the first time she had been away from home alone. Sheila was ahead of her in their joint project: to get as far away from home as possible, and not to become anything like their mother.

At about the same time that Sheila and Hilary had confided to each other that they didn’t any longer believe in God, they had also given up believing that the pattern of domestic life they had been brought up inside was the only one, or was even remotely desirable. Somewhere else people lived differently; didn’t have to poke their feet into clammy hand-me-down wellingtons and sandals marked by size inside with felt-tip pen; didn’t have to do their homework in bed with hot-water bottles because the storage heaters in the draughty vicarage gave out such paltry warmth. Other people didn’t have to have locked money boxes for keeping safe anything precious, or have to sleep with the keys on string around their necks; sometimes anyway they came home from school to find those locks picked or smashed. (The children didn’t tell on one another; that was their morality. But they hurt one another pretty badly, physically, in pursuit of justice. It was an honour code rather than anything resembling Christian empathy or charity.) Other people’s mothers didn’t stoop their heads down in the broken way that theirs did, hadn’t given up on completed sentences or consecutive dialogue, didn’t address elliptical ironical asides to their soup spoons as they ate.

Their mother sometimes looked less like a vicar’s wife than a wild woman. She was as tall as their father but if the two of them were ever accidentally seen standing side by side it looked as if she had been in some terrible momentous fight for her life and he hadn’t. Her grey-black hair stood out in a stiff ruff around her head; Sheila said she must cut it with the kitchen scissors in the dark. She had some kind of palsy so that her left eye drooped; there were bruise-coloured wrinkled shadows under her eyes and beside her hooked nose. Her huge deflated stomach and bosom were slapped like insults on to a girl’s bony frame. She was fearless in the mornings about stalking round the house in her ancient baggy underwear, big pants and maternity bra, chasing the little ones to get them dressed: her older children fled the sight of her. They must have all counted, without confessing it to one another: she was forty-nine, Patricia was four. At least there couldn’t be any more pregnancies, so humiliating to their suffering adolescence.

As girls, Sheila and Hilary had to be especially careful to make their escape from home. Their older brother Andrew had got away, to do social policy at York and join the Young Socialists, which he told them was a Trotskyite entrist group. He was never coming back, they were sure of it. He hadn’t come back this Christmas. But their sister Sylvia had married an RE teacher at the local secondary modern school who was active in their father’s church and in the local youth clubs. Sylvia already had two babies, and Sheila and Hilary had heard her muttering things to herself. They remembered that she used to be a jolly sprightly girl even if they hadn’t liked her much: competitive at beach rounders when they went on day trips to the coast, sentimentally devoted to the doomed stray dogs she tried to smuggle into their bedroom. Now, when they visited her rented flat in Haverhill, her twin-tub washing machine was always pulled out from the wall, filling the kitchen with urine-pungent steam. Sylvia would be standing uncommunicatively, heaving masses of boiling nappies with wooden tongs out of the washer into the spin tub, while the babies bawled in the battered wooden playpen that had been handed on from the vicarage.