Tessa Hadley: Married Love and Other Stories

— When you say ‘great man’, her father considered, — I get the feeling that you’re not talking about one of your fellow students.

Hattie saw what he meant, after gaping at him for half a second. — One of your teachers! Is it?

Lottie, blinking behind her glasses, turned her round white face towards her mother, precarious, defiant.

— Does this teacher know that you feel this way about him?

— You seriously think I’m making it all up? I told you, he loves me. He’s going to marry me.

Duncan wondered if it wasn’t Edgar Lennox. — He’s some kind of High Anglican, isn’t he? I believe he writes religious music.

— And so? Lottie challenged. — If it was him?

— Oh, no! Hattie stood up out of her chair, uncharacteristically guttural, almost growling. — That’s out of the question. Edgar Lennox. That’s just not thinkable, in any way, shape or form.

— I hate it when you use that phrase, Lottie shouted, standing up, too. — Way, shape or form. It’s so idiotic. It’s exactly the sort of thing you would say. It just goes to show your mediocrity.

— Let’s try to talk about this calmly, Duncan said.

Edgar Lennox was old enough to be Lottie’s grandfather. Forty years older than she was, Hattie shrieked; later, it turned out to be more like forty-five. His already being married, to his second wife, was a minor difficulty compared with this. Duncan and Hattie had met him twice: once when they went to the university Open Day with Lottie, and once before that, at a private view of paintings by one of Hattie’s friends. He had seemed at the time Hattie’s ideal of an elderly creative artist: tall, very thin, with a shock of upstanding white hair, a face whose hollows seemed to have been carved out by suffering, tanned skin as soft as leather, a charcoal-grey linen shirt.

— When you say he’s touched your life, could we be quite specific about this? Duncan said. — Has he actually, in the ordinary, non-transcendent sense of the word, touched you?

Em protested in disgust. — Dad, you can’t ask her that!

Em had been crying; her eyelids were swollen and puffy, and her face was blotched. Hattie’s and Lottie’s eyes were hot and dry.

Hattie turned on him. — How can you put it like that? How could you make it into one of your clever remarks?

— If you’re asking, Lottie said, — whether we’ve consummated our relationship, then, yes, of course we have. What do you think we are? We’re lovers.

— Naturally, I’m making a formal complaint to the university, Hattie said. — He’ll lose his job. There’s no question about that.

— That’ll be sensible, won’t it? Em said. — Then if they are married he won’t be able to support her.

— You’re sure she isn’t making all this up? Rufus suggested.

— Think what you like, Lottie said. — You’ll soon know.

She sat with her mouth primly shut, shining with a tragic light. Beyond the kitchen windows, veils of rain drove sideways into the sodden skirts of the horse chestnut tree, darkening the pink flowers. Hattie said that the whole thing reminded her of when she was at art college, and a friend of hers had heard suddenly that her sister was on the point of entering a convent, a closed order that allowed no contact with family or friends.

— We all piled on to a train and went up to Leeds together on the spur of the moment, six or seven of us who were close then, and met this sister in a tea shop, and tried to convince her of everything in the world that was worth staying for.

— Don’t be ridiculous, Mum. I’m not going into a convent.

— Did it work? Noah asked. — Did you convince her?

Hattie frowned and pressed her knuckles to her forehead. — I can’t remember whether she went into the convent or not in the end. Perhaps she did. I can only remember the tea shop, and after that a pub, and trying to think of all the things we couldn’t bear to leave behind, and getting gradually drunker and drunker.

— This isn’t the same thing, Duncan said firmly. — And we aren’t at anything like that stage yet, anyway.

Lottie stared at them in genuine bewilderment. — I don’t understand you all, she said. — How can you not want for me what I want?

Noah saw his parents leave the house late in the evening. His bedroom was in the attic, he was sitting on the sill of his little casement window, his feet in the lead-lined gutter that ran like a trough the length of the Georgian terrace, looking down over the stone parapet into the street, four storeys below. Though it was strictly forbidden, he had liked to sit this way ever since he was given this bedroom when he was eight; he used to fit into the small space perfectly, but now he had to squeeze, and his knees were jackknifed up in front of his face. Rain was sluicing down the slate roof into the gutter. In the light of the street lamps, the road shone black; parked cars were plastered with wet leaves from the beeches and horse chestnuts in the muddy triangle of public garden opposite. His mother’s high heels scraped fiercely in the empty street as she crossed to the car: she must have dressed up in her teaching clothes for the occasion. She was hanging on tightly to the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. She and Duncan dithered around the car under the half-globes of their umbrellas, probably quarrelling about who should drive; they seemed as small as dolls from where he watched. He supposed they were going to try to find Edgar Lennox at his house; they had been calling him on the phone all day, without getting through. It was strange to think of the two households, more or less unknown to each other before tonight, connected by this drama, awake in the city when everyone else was getting ready for sleep.

Hours later — he wasn’t sure how many hours, as he’d fallen asleep at his desk while revising for the geography GCSE exam he had on Monday morning — Noah woke to the sound of his mother’s voice in the house again. She sounded like she did when she’d had too much wine at parties: rash and loud, extravagantly righteous. He went out to listen, leaning over the banister and sliding noiselessly down, a few steps at a time. The steep and narrow staircase, the core of the skinny house, drew sound upward. Above his head, an ancient skylight as wide as the stairwell rattled under the rain, leaking into a strategically placed bucket. His parents and Rufus and Em were crowded at the foot of the stairs, in the hallway’s jumble of boots and bikes and baskets, junk mail, umbrellas dripping on the grey and white tiles. His mother still had her fawn mac on.

— I thought he’d be ashamed, she was saying, — if I told him that Lottie was marrying him because she thinks he’s a great man. But it was obvious that he thinks he is one, too.

— Is he one? Rufus asked.

— Don’t be ridiculous. What would he be doing teaching in a second-rate music department at a provincial university?

— I thought you said the department was something wonderful.

— That was before this.

— He does some film and television work if he can get it, Duncan said. — All fairly high-toned. And he writes for the cathedral choir. Anyway, greatness wouldn’t necessarily make him any better, as far as Lottie’s concerned.

— He said that he could see how it must look from our point of view, from what he called ‘any ordinary perspective’.

— How dare he think we’re ordinary? Em raged.

— He said that the erotic drive was a creative force he felt he had to submit to.

— Oh, yuck! Hideous!

— Hattie, he didn’t say that, exactly.

— And what was his wife like? Was she there? What’s her name?

— Valerie. Val, he calls her. She was frosty. She said, ‘Whatever happens, I keep this house’, as if that were something we were after. The house wasn’t what you’d expect, anyway, not arty: stuffy and old-fashioned. I should think the wife’s about my age, but she’s let herself go — grey ponytail, no make-up, one of those dowdy skirts with an elastic waistband.