Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

She had written down the numbers, the mobile and the home number, a month ago, on the day she went up to meet David in London, telling Bram she was going to work at the British Library on her dissertation. She had fully expected that David would take her into his bed (the bed with the mirrors that she knew about from Helly, her friend, David’s girlfriend); she had not known if she would even use her return ticket. The numbers were in case David wasn’t there to meet her at the station; but he was, with his jacket slung on one finger over his shoulder, his thick brush of black hair that grew upward like an exclamation mark, his loud voice that overfilled wherever he was, his oblivious gifted swagger in the great city. Bram wouldn’t have understood how she wasn’t disappointed by David’s showing off, wouldn’t have understood how she drank that down as the very element of her pleasure.

But confusingly David hadn’t taken her into his bed, or even to his flat, but had taken her out for a Thai meal and then to an exhibition of disconcertingly sexual Helmut Newton photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. With everything she knew about him — from Helly — she had assumed that he would be the one who would know how to bridge the unbridgeable transition between the animated conversation of friends and the first fumbles of acknowledgment, the first frank reachings-out. She had surely done enough by simply turning up. Didn’t he know to read that as her absolute surrender to whatever he wanted? But the more they talked the more the talk had seemed to pile up between them, solid and sensible as stone, separating them. All the time she was smiling and talking, putting on to the utmost an appearance of happy charm, her calculations were racing. Had she misunderstood him from the beginning? When he telephoned and said they should get together, had he meant just this, lunch and galleries? And she thought too, with humiliation, that unlike her he wasn’t desperate, he could afford to wait and see, he could afford to treat with respectful seriousness all the good reasons lunch and galleries were quite enough. She smothered a panicking sense that she would be betrayed into making a scene; she simply couldn’t bear to go home without the initiation she had come for.

Then, as they stood in the idle wide space in front of the departures board at the station, he had kissed her, and in such a way that she was quite certain after all that there had been no mistake. One of those motorized yellow litter sweepers bore down on them noisily. The sight of them kissing must have enraged the bored driver; he nudged toward them several times before they retreated out of his path, and then he came around at them again for good measure.

— Can you stay? David asked, into her ear, into her hair. Stay, please, stay. Phone home.

She shook her head. Really, she couldn’t stay. No, now they were on the far side of the unbridgeable gap, she was full of doubt suddenly. She had forgotten that she would be there with a stranger.

* * *

SHE TELEPHONED DAVID that evening while the others were swimming. Every day Genny and Tinsley and Opie and Bram and even Ray went swimming in the lake, taking turns to stay with the children in the shallow water by the little stony beach while the others struck off, racing one another for the islands. They all swam a strong crawl; when Bram and Tinsley and Opie were children they had competed in galas and worked for lifesaving badges.

Clare couldn’t. She could — just — swim, a stately slow breaststroke with her head held out of the water, which was one of the few things Bram ever laughed at her for. But only in a swimming pool, in clear chlorinated water where she could see to the bottom and the worst (bad enough) one might bob up against was a stray used sticking plaster. She was too much of a coward ever to bring herself to swim in the agitated murky sea, where jellyfish or crabs or bits of decomposing fish might be washed against her, or in the lake, which was calm but thick with brown weed growing up almost to the surface, sheltering a whole dark suspect world of underwater life and death, slippery weed that was sometimes wrapped in dark strips like stains around the swimmers’ legs when they waded out, blowing and streaming water and shouting breathless exhilarated comments about the shared ordeal to one another.

So while they swam she put out supper onto the plates in the kitchen, washed limp lettuce that was all you could get at the shop and boiled eggs and cut tomatoes and mashed tuna with mayonnaise. She sliced two loaves of floury soda bread. She stood wiping her hands on her apron, hearing the raised voices of the children from the beach. The house had been used as a hotel at some period, so although they had only a dingy miscellany of utensils and a tiny electric stove to cook on (including boiling Genny’s voles), the kitchen was full of the relics of past grandeur: a disused Aga and two deep enamel sinks and huge wooden plate racks on the walls like something from a giant’s kitchen in a fairy tale. Opie had pulled up a corner of the linoleum and found stone flags underneath.

Then Clare fished in her handbag for her diary and for coins for the pay phone and shut herself into the small cloakroom off the passage behind the kitchen where the phone was mounted on the wall. It smelled of polish and disinfectant because the cleaning things were kept in there. With shaking hands she dialed David’s number. She pressed herself back among the coats and waterproofs, distinguishing textures with exactitude against her face with her eyes closed: a button, a pocket fastened with Velcro, a corduroy trim, Rose’s frog-patterned mac.

Helly answered the phone.

Clare had told herself that if Helly answered she had the perfect alibi: Why shouldn’t she be phoning her best friend from Ireland? She would be phoning to complain, comically, about the Vereys; to let off steam over the well-worked theme of their imperturbable impossible decency and straightness. Helly would recognize the phone call as belonging in a long line of such calls.

In the split seconds after Helly’s voice was real and close in her ear, Clare actually imagined she could hear herself with utter naturalness beginning, “Hel, can I just be truly ghastly with you for a few minutes? I need a break. They’re all swimming. You know, not just splashing about at the edge like ordinary people do, but powering up and down across the lake. His sisters are the sort that actually knew how to inflate their pajamas for lifesaving at school. D’you remember that? How mine had a rip in and wouldn’t blow up? Look, I’m having such an incredibly wholesome time here — it’s really nice — that I just needed to say a few desperately dirty words to somebody.”

It would feel so natural that she would believe as soon as she began that this was what she had called for, the other thing would be so completely instantly submerged that she wouldn’t even be lying.

But instead she pressed down with quick silent decision the little metal rests that cut her off. Then she sat listening to the tone in the phone as though she might hear in there the aftershock of what had happened, traces of how Helly had taken it at the other end. Two things occurred to her, each sending through her a pulse of dismay like a too-rich heartbeat. If she had spoken to Helly she would have had to explain how she came to have the telephone number for David’s flat; she always spoke to Helly at her own place because Helly had never given her David’s number. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this, that she had come so near to jeopardizing herself. And then, as if she could see her doing it, she knew that Helly would dial the 1471 recall as soon as the phone went dead to find out who had been calling. But surely 1471 didn’t work for Ireland, surely the mechanical voice would simply say the number had been withheld, and Helly would have no reason to imagine it was her. Would the message specify that it had been an international call? An international call would be enough, Clare thought, to give her away.