Tessa Hadley: Married Love and Other Stories

It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of Anthony. The Army really had sorted him out: the first time he came home on leave he was tanned from training outdoors, his neck had thickened and his shoulders bulked out. He’d had his hair cropped short, and he seemed calmer and more deliberate. — I didn’t do too bad, he said, his glance slipping away from his mother towards the others. He’d never done a day’s hard work in his life, and now suddenly he seemed weighed down with sense and responsibility.

At first, whenever he was on leave he was keen to hang about with his old no-good friends, but eventually he lost interest in them. He said they were going nowhere, smoking themselves silly, which was just what Shelley had always told him. His officers thought he was dedicated, a good soldier.

Since Anthony had been posted to Afghanistan, Roy had gone on the Internet and found out everything about what was going on there. He followed it on the blogs and on YouTube. He talked about ‘the lines’ and ‘advance to contact’ and ‘hearts and minds’. Shelley thought this talk made Anthony uncomfortable, because it was impossible for him to share with them what really happened out there. He’d told them once about clearing out Taliban compounds after an attack and finding the bloody clothes they’d left behind when they retreated with their dead and wounded; it had occurred to Shelley that he must have seen much worse than bloody clothes, and then she guessed that he was describing the clothes because he couldn’t talk about the other things. Whenever they parted now, he kissed her as if he were putting her aside, kindly but firmly.

She felt around in the blocked sink with her rubber gloves, poking into the plughole with the toothbrush, pulling at the ends of the fibres caught in the trap, tugging and coaxing until she began to deliver up out of the drain a nasty mass, a thick rope of hair and soap and matted insulation, in a gulp of bad drain smell. Triumphant, she flopped it out on to the enamel, black-green and slimed. The foul water, released, went gurgling down the pipe, and at that moment Shelley was washed through with one of her hot flushes. She had to stop to tear her gloves off inside out, flap her T-shirt, lift her hair away from her blazing neck. She leaned forward over the sink, unexpectedly dizzy, taking her weight on her arms and staring down into the dark passage of the drain, understanding it for a few seconds as if it opened a way out of the world, or into it. Then, hearing the boy flush the toilet in the cubicle behind her, she scooped up the nasty mess with some paper towels and dropped it into the black bag she had with her for rubbish, so that he would not have to see it.

* * *

When the job was finished they packed away their gear; the car park was full now, but there was no one about outside. Pam struggled to start the car: she always gave it too much choke, Roy said. Shelley in the passenger seat turned on her mobile. There was a bad moment every time, while the logo appeared and the music chimed. She expected the worst then; she seemed to be staring out for it greedily, her heart straining.

— All right? Pam asked her.

The little car, after its hacking convulsions, rocked into silence, resigned.

— All right, Shelley said. — Nothing.

They sat there for a few minutes, too tired to move, giving the car time to recover, talking about their Christmas shopping: who they’d bought for, what they still had to get. More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no colour; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow glow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.

THE HOUSE WHERE Neil was born, in 1952, had been at the centre of Birmingham, in a Victorian slum that was knocked down a few years later. Nobody lived there now, there were only roads and office blocks, and the people who’d lived in the slums had been moved out to the new estates that ringed the city. Neil told Sheila that the house he was born in had had a crack in the outside wall that let the rain and wind through, so that for the years he lived there he and his sister had had to sleep in his mum and dad’s room, because they couldn’t use the bedroom upstairs. His sister had slept in a cot until she was six; he had slept in the bed with his parents. He told Sheila that the house had shared a yard at the back with several other houses in the terrace; there were outside toilets and a brick wash-house with a coal-fired boiler and a mangle where the women did their laundry. The house had been condemned by the council the whole time he lived there, but the family had had to wait for the authorities to find them somewhere else to live.

At university in Bristol in 1972, Neil didn’t have to be ashamed of these things or hide them. Because of the politics of the time, the student politics especially, his origins were even glamorous. It was the children of bankers and managing directors who had to apologise for their upbringing, and practise roughening their too refined accents. Sheila had grown up with eight brothers and sisters in a vicarage in Suffolk; vicars’ daughters were in a category so impossibly quaint and comical that it hardly seemed worth despising.

Neil could have played on his working-class credentials much more than he did. Sheila had never heard him tell anyone else, for instance, about the crack in the wall. This reserve, like a strength withheld, was part of what made her love him quite desperately. He was very clever and he had absolute opinions; friends glanced quickly at him after they spoke, to see what he thought. Sheila had never expected to love someone who was two inches shorter than she was. It was a surprise to discover how her desire could attach itself to the aura of Neil’s power and not to the particulars of his face and body, which in her mental picture of him were always blurred. Although he wasn’t fat, he was rather soft and shapeless; his walk was shambling and he hid behind his long brown hair. When he pushed the hair back, his face was round, sweet like a girl’s. Yet just the thought of the quick, small, almost prim smile that flickered open in his expression when he was amused made Sheila sick with longing; it touched her more nakedly even than when he made love to her, because he did that with irony, holding himself back.

In the autumn of her second year, Neil took her home for a weekend to meet his family. He hadn’t been especially keen to do this. He’d warned her that she would be bored, that his parents would make a big fuss, but Sheila had wheedled at him until he gave way. His family didn’t have a telephone; he left a message with the neighbours. She braced herself then for something dark and raw, something that differed definitively from her own past. Whenever she remembered the vicarage she felt coilings of shame at the meanness of her life there. For all her family’s crowded closeness, neither her parents nor her siblings were any good at intimacy; they communicated in evasive codes, fumbling and deflecting contact. She prepared a perfect openness for her visit to Neil’s home, ready to offer up her real self at last. They caught a bus from the coach station out to Northfield and then walked up through the estate. Rows of low grey houses curved behind open grass spaces, their front doors all painted the same red. Children were playing in the streets. A man was cutting a hedge with shears in a front garden. The place wasn’t pretty, exactly, but it was neat and respectable. This took Sheila by surprise. She realised that although she knew that Neil’s family had moved out of the slums when he was a child, she had gone on imagining him pressed upon by frowning Victorian concentrations of population.