Tessa Hadley: Married Love and Other Stories

— He pretends this new piece is for me. But I know it’s not about me.

Edgar stood squinting at them from the doorway, getting used to the light; his khaki hooded waterproof and stooped shoulders gave him, incongruously, the toughened, bemused aura of an explorer returned. Noah imagined how infantile he and Lottie must look, lying on the floor among the toys with their bright red drinks, and how uninteresting youth must sometimes seem.

— We’re finishing up that Bacardi, Ed, Lottie said, enunciating too carefully. — Do you want some?

Edgar’s eyes these days had retreated behind his jutting cheekbones and sprouting eyebrows; something suave had gone out of his manner. He said that he would rather have a hot drink. Forgetfully he waited, as if he expected Lottie to jump up and make it for him. When he remembered after a moment, and went into the kitchen to do it himself, he didn’t imply the least reproach; he was merely absorbed, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. Noah saw how hungrily from where she lay Lottie followed the ordinary kitchen music — the crescendo of the kettle, the chatter of crockery, the punctuation of cupboard doors, the chiming of the spoon in the cup — as if she might hear in it something that was meant for her.

SHELLEY WAS HELPING out her friend Pam. Pam had her own cleaning business, but her employees were so unreliable that she ended up doing half the work herself. She’d been hired to do a scrub-off — meaning a thorough cleaning, right down to basics — at an industrial warehouse somewhere at the edge of the city. Shelley had agreed to go along; it was a few weeks before Christmas, and she could do with the extra money. When she went outside to wait for Pam it was still night, the stars showing in the sky like flecks of broken glass. Pam was late as usual, but Shelley hadn’t wanted to wait inside in case the doorbell woke the others: her daughter and baby granddaughter were asleep upstairs. She felt herself growing heavy and thick with cold. You forgot about the cold — the house had central heating, and winters weren’t like they used to be. When Shelley was a child, she’d wrapped her scarf around her head and mouth on the way to school, trying to trap the warmth of her breath inside; these days, you hardly needed a scarf. The phase of life Shelley was in now, anyway, the heat of her body came and went in blasts, and she had a horror of being caught out in tight clothes.

She could have stamped her feet or flung her arms around, but it was too early in the morning; instead, she let the cold creep into her as if she were made of stone. When the car pulled up at last, she could barely even move towards it, though she could see Pam lit up inside, peering out through the window, looking for her. Pam always drove with the interior light on. She treated her car like just another room in her house — while she was driving, she’d fiddle around with piles of paper and bits of crocheted blanket and boxes of tissues on the passenger seat, hanging on to the steering wheel with her other hand. She was a danger on the road, but Shelley didn’t drive. For a moment, before she headed over to the car, Shelley imagined herself as Pam was seeing her — just another pillar of dark, like the hedge and the phone box and the pebble-dashed end wall of the kitchen extension. She and her husband Roy lived on what had been a council estate, although they had been buying their house for years now.

Pam was fat like a limp saggy cushion, very short, with permed yellow curls that were growing out grey; her face was crumpled like an ancient baby’s. Roy said that Pam and Shelley side by side looked like Little and Large, because Shelley was tall and thin. She had never been one to eat too much. Her only weakness was tea with sugar; she drank a lot of that — couldn’t give it up. Her daughter Kerry said her insides must be black.

— Hiya, Shell.

Pam leaned over to open the door, then began throwing stuff into the back seat. — I’ve had a letter off the hospital about my gallstones.

All Pam’s conversations began as if you hadn’t stopped talking since you last saw her; they were as cluttered as her car. The heater was on high, belting out a stinging warmth that smelled of the little cardboard pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.

— What gallstones?

— Well, they may not be. I’ve got to go in on the fifteenth. Typical — that’s the day John wants the car to go and see his sister in Tamworth. I said to him, ‘You’ll have to fix another day.’ He says he doesn’t want to mess her around. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve got a lot of time for his sister.

Pam’s husband John was meant to do the books for the cleaning business, but as far as Shelley could see he sat in front of the telly and did nothing, while Pam went driving about all over the place like a mad thing — and the car was forever breaking down. John used to be a plasterer. He was supposed to have damaged his leg years ago, falling from a scaffold, but Shelley had seen him limp with a different leg on different days. Pam was a good worker, though. Once she got into a job, she stuck at it until the sweat was running off her, she wouldn’t give up. Shelley was like that too. They didn’t make a bad team.

They crossed the river. It was at low tide, sunk to a twisting channel between flanks of mud glinting with moonlight. A notice outside the red brick warehouse, which was not much more than a two-storey shed, warned that it was patrolled by security dogs, but there was no sign of them. Pam stopped in the empty car park, and they got out some of their kit from the boot; the employers were supposed to provide equipment, but sometimes they left out broken old mops or brooms so heavy you could hardly lift them.

Shelley switched her mobile off before she started working; otherwise, she couldn’t concentrate. Her son Anthony was in Afghanistan. Roy said that statistically Anthony would be in more danger if he were still playing with his rugby club, but Shelley was always waiting for some dreadful kind of message. There was a big operation under way. Anthony had told them that he’d had his leave cancelled, but Roy was sure he’d volunteered to stay. It wasn’t only that her son might be killed or injured — Shelley pushed those possibilities right down in her mind until they weren’t any more than shapes in the dark. She never watched the news; she only listened in from the kitchen while the others watched it. But when there was that fuss about the friendly-fire incident with the Danish soldiers, she fixated on the idea that Anthony had been involved in it, even though Roy insisted that he’d been nowhere near where it had happened. — Why d’you have to make up trouble, he said, — as if there wasn’t enough of the real thing?

Inside, the warehouse was a big open hall, divided into metal cages piled high with different grades of insulating material. Yellow forklifts were parked as if resting in the aisles between them. Fibrous orange dust was everywhere, but Shelley and Pam weren’t contracted to clean the warehouse itself — the men were supposed to do that. The canteen and toilets were along one wall, the offices upstairs on a sort of mezzanine. You could see why they needed the scrub-off: the regular cleaners hadn’t been doing much of a job. All the pipes in the canteen were thick with dust. Under the plate rack on the draining board and at the bottom of the plastic pot for the cutlery was a murky grey sludge. The toilets stank; the cleaners had actually mopped around a roll of toilet paper that had fallen on to the floor, not bothering to pick it up. One of the sinks was blocked and full of scummy water.

To be fair, Pam said, the boss had only been paying the regulars for two hours a day, which wasn’t enough: there was a kitchenette and a separate toilet upstairs with the offices, too. Two hours would be just enough time to wash the cups and plates and put them away, and give the toilets a quick once-over; to do the place properly you’d need four hours at least. Shelley knew what it was like if you had a job like this: you got your regular routine going, and then that was all you saw; you played your music and went into a kind of dream, wiping and sweeping, until you hardly knew what you were doing, just going through the motions. But she wasn’t the sort of person who took on this kind of work as a regular thing. She had a proper job at a school as a lunchtime supervisor. She wasn’t such a fool, either — she knew that somewhere like this, if they saw that you were keeping it clean in two hours they’d cut you down to an hour and a half. Why should you care whether the place was as filthy as hell?