Tessa Hadley - Married Love and Other Stories

— That’s nice, May said.

Sheila wanted to tell them about the rectory: how it was actually cold and bare and full of worn, scuffed furniture, not nearly as comfortable as this cosy room. But she didn’t because she was afraid they wouldn’t believe her, and would think that she was patronising them, trying to put them at ease because she found their home so poor.

May and Dennis got out photographs from a coach trip they had taken to Scotland. Before university, Neil had gone with them on these trips. He had explained to Sheila how, now that so many holidaymakers were going abroad, the big old country hotels that had once been exclusively for the wealthy had begun to cater to working-class coach parties. She tried to imagine Neil spending his days with a coachload of middle-aged Brummies, set apart by his youth and education, flirted with by the older women, thinking his own thoughts, taking an informed interest in all the places they visited. She found the idea seductive. He had certainly travelled more widely in Britain than she ever had, and knew more about its history.

In the photographs Dennis was usually at the centre, posed against some monument or other. Sheila was surprised that he and May relished so uncritically the grand style of their holiday: the food, the thick carpets, the ballrooms, the chandeliers, the free whisky at the distillery tour, the free soap in the bathrooms. She had expected that they would despise the luxuries of the rich, as she and Neil did. She felt a mixture of relief and deflation, as if she’d been cheated of something she’d braced herself to take on: some intensity of engagement, both scorching and testing. This is going to be easy, she thought. After all, they’re just easy sweet people.

They put Sheila in Chris’s old bedroom, in a bed made up with nylon sheets and the same rough old army blankets her mother had at home. There wasn’t much evidence of Chris left in the room: a framed embroidered picture of a squirrel, a hollow soapstone swan with a couple of hair grips in it on the dressing table. May assured Sheila that there was plenty of hot water because the immersion heater had been on all evening, but although Sheila rather longed for a bath, she didn’t want to keep everybody waiting for the bathroom. She cleaned her teeth quickly. Everything in here was scoured spotless. The only difference between May’s cheap thin towels and bath mat and the ones at home was that these had been cherished and ironed.

Sheila undressed and slithered down between cold sheets, then lay awake listening to the life of the house subside — low-voiced exchanges of practicalities, the sound of a bolt being shot to. She imagined that she was hearing what Neil had heard all his life before he came to Bristol. She was in that phase of the relationship where everything associated with Neil seemed to her charged with excitement, even the smell of the clothes he took off and left lying on the floor, even his favourite tracks on albums that she would never have chosen for herself, Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart. She couldn’t sleep. After a while, when everything was quiet, she pushed back the sheets and knelt on the bed in her nightdress, looking out of the window at the orange sodium lights and a flare of fire somewhere, perhaps from a factory chimney. Nearby she could make out the silhouetted dome of the lunatic asylum, which Neil had pointed out when he showed her the room — built in the nineteenth century in what had then been countryside. The air was chilly on her shoulders. The little house seemed to drop very quickly into cold once the gas fire was out, as if the walls were only a thin skin between the night and the lives inside.

She pressed down the handle on the bedroom door very carefully, then crept along the landing, trying not to make any sound on the lino with her bare feet. She knew which room was Neil’s — she had looked into it earlier and seen his few books on a shelf, the only books in the house, and the old card table where he had done his homework for all those years. She slipped inside and soundlessly closed the door behind her. Neil reared up in bed; in the light from the street lamps she could see the mound of the blankets around his shoulders. Sheila cuddled quickly in beside him. She had let herself get thoroughly chilled, sitting looking out the window; now the heat of his body against hers under the blankets was like a flood. To her surprise he was wearing pyjamas, which he never did in Bristol; they smelled of his mother’s washing.

He hissed a protest at her frozen feet. — What are you doing? he whispered in perplexity, grasping her by the shoulder. — We can’t do that here.

— I can’t sleep, she complained. — I miss you.

She pressed herself close against the length of him, kissing his neck and his ears, trying to undo his pyjama buttons. He pushed her off.

— Sh-h-h. You can hear everything in this house. They’ll know.

— We could be so quiet.

— No.

— Then just let me sleep here. I’ll go back in the morning.

— They’ll know. Honestly. Believe me.

— OK. Let me stay for ten minutes.

To show that he was sorry he kissed her then, but warily, not wanting to be carried away into anything. Their mouths tasted of meat from May’s casserole, which Sheila had eaten even though she was a vegetarian. With her lips she felt the growth of beard on Neil’s jawbone, not bristling but silky; he was giving out his kisses one by one, sceptically, like a bird pecking. This tension of thwarted longing — even when they were on their own and could do whatever they liked — was somehow the whole character of their relationship. Sheila was always frantic for the next thing she didn’t have from Neil; the sensation was as painful as wire spooled taut in her chest. She wondered sometimes what would become of them if the spool gave way and the tension slackened. After a while he stopped kissing her, and she knew that he really wasn’t going to let her stay.

On the landing on the way back to her room, she heard May and Dennis talking in their bedroom. That was good, it meant that they weren’t lying awake listening to her move about. She took a couple of cautious steps and stood where she might be able to catch what they were saying. She had never had any compunction about eavesdropping, or reading other people’s letters or diaries; at home, with so many brothers and sisters, a certain level of surveillance had been almost necessary for survival — unless you sneaked, you never learned what was going on. Anyway, she trusted herself to understand whatever she found out.

She couldn’t really hear May and Dennis. May was angry about something, Dennis was soothing her: he rumbled, reasonable, sympathetic. They were both suppressing their voices, naturally, in this house of thin walls. May’s tone was different from the one she’d used all evening: hard and final. Sheila knew at once that this must be her real voice, the one she used with people she was comfortable with.

— How can I talk to her? Sheila heard May say then, quavering suddenly louder. — With that accent like a mouthful of cut glass?

Sheila’s heart heaved: the thud was so strong she even imagined that Dennis and May had heard it, until he rumbled again and she knew she was safe. It serves you right, she told herself immediately, not knowing quite what it was that she had deserved, or what for.

Back in bed, she lay huddled with her knees pulled up inside her nightdress, the taste of the casserole meat rising from her stomach. She was going over the work that she had to do for the following week: a Latin prose translation, an essay on Medea . But just as she fell into sleep she recognised that May had muddled two quite separate expressions. How stupid, Sheila thought. It has to be either ‘talking through a mouthful of plums’ or ‘an accent like cut glass’. Not ‘a mouthful of cut glass’. She’s made nonsense of it.