Tessa Hadley: Married Love and Other Stories

For a moment, however, she could imagine the sensation of chewing politely and sufferingly on a mouthful of broken crystal, tasting salty blood.

Neil came to the rectory for a few days after Christmas. Sheila never quite got over the surprise of his being there, where he didn’t belong, among the left-behind scenes of her childhood. She knew that she was reacting badly to the situation — as if she were blinking into a light that distracted her from seeing him fairly. She was irritated when he seemed to get along with her parents. At supper the first night, he talked with her father about the Knox family; Sheila’s family — the Culverts — was distantly related to them. A Culvert had been one of the first Evangelical bishops to be ordained in the Church of England: the old sober kind of Evangelical, not the new guitar-playing excitable kind. Neil knew about the Ronald Knox translation of the Bible because his mother had been brought up a Catholic, and because he knew about so many things. Reverend Culvert told him about the Roman earthenware found in the scrubland close to the river that the villagers called the Ditch, and about the carved flints that lay about in the fields for picking up. He sputtered mashed potato and gesticulated with pleasure at having someone informed to talk to. His own children kept their intellectual interests strictly apart from family mealtimes; they were embarrassed if their father ever veered from his habitual ironic distance. He was a tall thin man, whose head with its long earlobes was austere in repose, as if it were carved out of hard ancient wood; to see him so boyishly eager was compromising, like watching a tortoise bob its skinny neck out from the decency of its shell.

Sheila was aware of how gratifying it was to her father that someone like Neil, who came from a working-class background, should be doing so well. The Reverend, despite the disappointments he was daily faced with — the sullen village boys, their cursing, their fatalism — kept up, in the solitude of his study at least, a whole set of hopeful ideals that had to do with justice and progress. Sheila winced when he gleamed with pleased surprise at Neil’s intelligent comments. She and her siblings had grown up with a horror that their father might sometime make a sermon out of the things that they did, or that happened to them. Sheila’s mother, peculiar and ravaged, was simply grateful that the conversation didn’t require her dutiful bolstering; she bowed her head low over her plate to eat, while the children exchanged veiled glances. The boys were horrible mimics: they would be mentally rehearsing Neil’s accent. The gammon was too salty and the parsley sauce had been made from a packet; Sheila only ate the mash and the Brussels sprouts. Her mother’s cooking was loveless and institutional. An old book of fine recipes in French — a wedding present — sat unopened on a shelf above the kitchen stove, its pages gummed together by the steam from hundreds of pans of boiling potatoes.

— How can you not see how awful they are? Sheila hissed to Neil the next day when she took him on a walk to get away from the house. They set out along the flank of the wide shallow valley, into a freezing wind that rippled the slate-coloured water standing on the clay in the valley bottom, where the Ditch had overflowed. — They’re so dried up, so false. Nothing they say is ever real.

He shrugged. — At least your parents don’t make remarks about West Indians being too lazy to work and wanting to sit all day with a string tied round their big toe, fishing in the creek.

— I wish they would, Sheila said gloomily. — Does your dad really believe that?

— Didn’t he treat you to his Al Jolson impression?

— But don’t you see how sickening the opposite thing is, too? Always having to be up on the moral high ground. We actually have a family abbreviation for it, you know: the MHG. Mum shouts it when the kids are quarrelling: ‘MHG! Back down and take the MHG!’ Sometimes the whole family goes berserk — I can’t tell you. My brother Andrew — the one who left home — once stabbed Stephen with a fork. He was shouting at him, ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt!’ Dad was trying to separate them, Mum was threatening to call the police. Then that evening when it had all died down we were just sitting around the table again, eating boiled liver or something, pretending that nothing had happened. ‘Almighty God, who hast given us grace at this time.’

Neil laughed.

— You closed your eyes when he prayed at the table last night, she said accusingly.

— Did I? No, I didn’t.

Sheila was walking backward ahead of him along the path, in her eagerness to convey to him the truth about her parents. The wind on her back whipped her hair across her face from under her knitted hat. Mrs Culvert had insisted that Neil, who didn’t own a hat, borrow some awful thing from the tallboy in the hall which no one could remember ever wearing, a kind of bonnet with a furry lining and earflaps; it changed him piquantly, into a beady-eyed, perky cartoon animal. He seemed more interested in the landscape than in Sheila’s family. He asked her the names of places they could see, which she didn’t always know; he couldn’t believe that she had lived here all her life and wasn’t sure where north was. They reached a stand of beech trees growing on a slope about a mile from the village. Among the trees, the wind that had blown so insistently against them dropped, and they stopped to recover their equilibrium on a muffling carpet of dried leaves. The smooth trunks of the trees surging up out of the earth seemed present and intelligent, grey beasts standing soberly to watch them. A musky mushroomy perfume rose in the stillness from the mulch underfoot. Neil put his arms around Sheila and kissed her; the embrace felt comical and unsexual through their bulky layers of jumpers, coats and scarves.

— I could put my coat on the ground, Neil said insinuatingly into her neck, his earflaps scratching her chin. — It would be nice to cuddle up.

— You’re joking, Sheila said in horror. — In broad daylight?

Needless to say, at the rectory they were sleeping separately: Sheila was in her old room with her sister Hilary, Neil was in with Anthony and Stephen. — I feel awful, Mrs Culvert had mumbled, not looking at Neil, bobbing her thick shock of grey hair and apologising for there being no spare room that he could have to himself. — What you must think … Of course we should — five bedrooms. Don’t know if Sheila’s told you Gillian’s problems? (Gillian, who was eight, was epileptic, and had difficulty coping with school. She was seeing a psychiatrist in Cambridge; apparently she needed her own room. ‘Which makes me think she’s smarter than she looks,’ Sheila had said.)

— We’re out in the countryside, Neil said to Sheila, nuzzling her. — There’s no one to see.

— That just shows how much you know about the countryside. She pushed him away from her with both gloved hands. — Everyone will know that we’re up here already. If we don’t walk on soon, they’ll be looking at their watches.

— Who cares? he said, trying again.

— I do, she said passionately. — Don’t spoil this place for me. It’s somewhere I used to come to be by myself when I was a girl, when I couldn’t bear any of them at home. It’s holy to me. I used to read poetry here.

Neil couldn’t argue with that, and so they moved on, faintly mutually resentful long after they’d resumed holding hands and talking. In fact, Sheila had somewhat misrepresented the significance of the beech grove. She had used to go there with Hilary; she would never have gone walking anywhere around here on her own. It was true, though, that she and her sister had sometimes brought their books to the grove with them, and had worked themselves up over what they were reading into states of exalted excitement.