Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— I want to fuck you too, she said.

Then she pressed down the metal rests and cut him off.

Now she had truly crossed the bridge to the other side, to the different place. Although nothing was burning. The image was very precise in her mind: there was no burning bridge behind her, only a wide impassable space of twinkling water, twinkling and dancing and silvery; banal, and shallow, even.

A FUNNY THING happened to Marian one Saturday morning when she went around as usual to her father’s flat. It was a lapse, a blink of dark in the bright light of ordinary consciousness, like the lapses her father had sometimes when he blanked out something they’d gone through only ten minutes before.

— I have no idea what you’re talking about, he would throw out at her exasperatedly, his reproach cold and sharp in his still perfect enunciation.

Euan wasn’t senile; he still had his brilliant mind; he was extraordinary considering he was almost ninety years old. But it was as though he saved his brilliance for deeper things now and had cut loose from some of the clutter she had to pester him with: appointments at the eye hospital or at the doctor’s, money matters, problems with his housekeeper, Elaine.

What happened to Marian that morning was that when she arrived at her usual time (she always went on Saturdays and Sundays to do his food and see everything was all right because Elaine didn’t work on weekends), the front door wasn’t double-locked and the alarm system wasn’t switched on. All this really meant was that Euan must have opened the door already that morning, probably to give his usual handful of dried catfood to a visiting cat, and hadn’t bothered to redo it all when he went back inside because he knew she was coming. But for some strange reason Marian completely and illogically misinterpreted these signs; she thought they meant her father had dressed himself and gone out before she arrived for a walk in the beautiful morning.

This was strange and illogical not only because if he had gone out for a walk he could perfectly well have double-locked the door behind him and set the alarm, but because for — how long, eighteen months? two years? three years? one forgot the timings of these stages of regress as one forgot the forward progress of one’s babies — for some time now Euan had not been able to walk out into the streets unaided. He could get about the flat, using the route around chair backs and pieces of furniture that Marian and Elaine had designed for him and were careful not to disturb; he could even, with the help of his walker, which he hated, get himself out into his garden on a nice afternoon, as long as they had put his chair ready for him and beside it on a little stool his straw boater and his plaid blanket and his thick dark glasses against the glare. Then the neighborhood cats he gave food to came and repaid him with sinuous and uninvolving cat love. But he was too frail to walk out in the streets alone anymore; his legs were too unreliable ever since a fall a couple of winters ago when he’d cracked his pelvis, and he was prone to spells of dizziness (he had classes for this too, at the hospital, that she had had to organize for him).

So it was strange that without in the least examining her idea or its probability, but quite convinced that her father had gone off on a walk, Marian on that fine Saturday morning went on into the flat and began clearing up his breakfast things, running hot water into the sink for the washing up, collecting his nighttime glass from the bedroom, putting his porridge bowl to soak (Elaine would make porridge the night before and had taught him how to heat it in the microwave). She watered the plants on the kitchen windowsill, singing. She wouldn’t have sung if she’d thought he was there; like her daughter Tamsin he had perfect pitch, and they both complained about her tunelessness and her taste in music. She was singing a song whose first line was “Do you know the way to San Jose?”: she couldn’t remember whose song it was. It dated her, anyway. She had grown up listening to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, but it seemed to be these poppy middle-of-the-road tunes that had seeped in to the deepest layers of her awareness and that made her feel happy now.

The fine day seemed to fill the flat with an unusual light — she usually thought of it as a dark place, dark with his books, dark with the condensed shadow of his intelligence folded in upon itself. It was a University flat; they had always had a University house, and he had moved to this flat twenty years ago when Marian’s mother died. Like the University it was Victorian gothic, with pointed casement windows and deep stone sills, heavy doors that shut with the deep clunk of finality, and an ancient vociferous and effective heating system. Euan said — to visitors, he said — that it was like waking up inside one of Ruskin’s less temperate dreams. To Marian he simply said it was damp and depressing. In her irrational fit she was glad as she washed his breakfast things to think that this morning he had got into the open air, out among all the summer gardens blooming with flowers she had seen on her way over. This thought must have developed in her mind subliminally; if it had bubbled up into full consciousness then she would have waked and known it was not possible.

Afterward, when she had come out of the fit and was wondering how she had made such a puzzling mistake, she realized that she had felt more than simple gladness at his getting out into the fine day. She had taken the lightness of his step out into the morning so early and spontaneously for a sign, a coded sign from him that she could hang onto, however he tried to deny it: a sign of hope and of his openness still, after all, to pleasure. What easier gesture of acquiescence than to walk out impromptu into a new day? The sky was pale veiled blue, and the walls of the back area outside the kitchen window were grown over with white and pink valerian. His going out was like a revelation of easy possibilities they had both been tangling and obfuscating; they had both between them been making everything so difficult and so bitter.

And afterward when she was thinking about it she also wondered if she hadn’t, in fact, been imagining his death. Her fantasy of him released to light and flowers was like a benign fantasy-death, as if she had found a magic bypass around pain and ugliness and been able to imagine them released from one another, from father and daughter, with a lightness and ease angels might have at parting, not human beings.

That was all it was. It was nothing, really; when Marian tried to tell Tamsin, later, it wasn’t even a story, just a moment’s blip in consciousness whose power, like the power of dreams, couldn’t be carried back into ordinary life. At some point after she tipped the washing up water away she had heard a sound from the study — a book slammed shut, a chair thrust impatiently back — that in an instant recalled her to herself and filled the flat’s emptiness with him and shriveled into nonsense her fantasy of light.

It wouldn’t have seemed strange to Euan that Marian hadn’t greeted him as soon as she came in the flat; if he was busy she often didn’t bother him. She stopped singing as soon as she realized he was there: probably it was because of the singing that the book was slammed shut. Euan’s need for silence while he was working was one of the things he and Elaine fought over most bitterly. He was adamant that with both doors shut and the volume down he could still hear her radio in the kitchen; and indeed, when they both solemnly insisted that this be put to the test, it seemed he could, even though he often failed to hear other much louder noises. Elaine joked skeptically about his selective deafness, but Marian believed in it. It would have something to do with his perfect pitch; if he suspected that a false note was sounding somewhere around him, some responsive strained tautness of antipathy in him would thrum and vibrate to it, however faint it was. He couldn’t help it.