Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

Marian made coffee and took a cup in to him. He was writing in the chair she had had made for him, with the sloping desk fitted across its arms, the angle-poise light aimed at his page from behind his shoulder, his magnifying glass for small print at his left hand, blanket across his knees. Books were piled up, some open, some stuffed with paper markers, on the tables to either side of him. She knew what he was working on; it was a piece about the relations of Dostoevski’s thought to Russian Orthodox theology. Some of the books were in Cyrillic script. Marian could always tell by the way he sat or looked up at her whether it was going well or badly. When she and her brother were children, her mother used to bring reports from the study, as if his moods were a weather on which they all depended: if he was stuck, she and Francis might be sent off to the cinema for the afternoon. Her father was a big man, he had had the physique — bulky shoulders and thick neck — of a statesman or an actor or a laborer, not a man of letters. His face had always been complex and unfinished, with lowering brows and long rugged cheek planes; now it was pouched, and blotched with purple. The fine convolutions of inner life and expression had always translated themselves in him into the stubbornnesses and martyrdoms of the flesh. Today he brooded over his page without lifting his head; that might have been her singing.

— It’s a lovely day, Daddy.

— Is it?

— Would you like to sit outside?

— No.

— But you know it cheers you up.

— Nothing makes me feel lower than being cheered up.

Setting the coffee down on its mat on the side table, she put her arm around his shoulders.

— Is it Saturday? he asked, which was supposed to mean that he wished it were Elaine and not she who had brought his coffee.

She kissed his head, its baldness blotched with brown age blemishes, flaky with dry skin. He twisted with irritation and resentment under her kiss, but she told herself that at some deeper level he was fed by it, kept alive, reminded that he was loved. Marian was not, by nature, a kisser or a toucher, but her mother had always done it and she had taken on the part when her mother died. Possibly what she had taken on was not simply the innocent tending it looked like. Possibly it was instead a part of the subtle fight of the female with the male, of female insistent sweetness against male bitterness, female blithe confidence against male doubt.

When they were children and their mother came back from the study with her reports, their attitude had been complicated. Everything arranged itself around the father and his work; there was no question about that. They were frightened if he was angry, proud when he did well and was acclaimed. But there was also a subtle kind of triumph in their subjection. They thought it was funny, his moodiness, his weakness, his need for them to surround him with consideration. It was a game they played with their mother, exaggerating their anxieties about him as if he were a ghoul or a troll; and weren’t they stronger, she and they, because they didn’t need anything so complicated or contingent? When they went off to the cinema or the shops, leaving him to his suffering over books written in languages they didn’t understand, didn’t they have a kind of swagger, because they could manage ordinary things?

Of course, all the while, it might have been they who suffered, not knowing it, while he pleased himself. Feminists would have said so, and Marian surely was one. Complication upon complication.

Marian didn’t like to feel she was playing a part, any longer, in that complicated war of males against females. She had thought she had finished with that forever when her marriage finished: long, long ago. Her marriage — and far behind that, her childhood — seemed ages off, eras ago: like history. Hadn’t everything in the world, and especially the things to do with men and women, changed out of all recognition since then? And hadn’t she, Marian, proved it by spending her mostly single life as an independent woman and a teacher?

That morning, after the strange episode of her misinterpretation, the strange half hour or so of light and flowers, she was stricken with disappointment. She made Euan’s bed and tidied his bedroom and prepared his trays of lunch and supper under a cloud of sadness and fatalism, as if something precious had been shown to her and lost.

* * *

THERE WAS a problem with money. Marian’s mother had inherited some property; the income from this property was never spent after Marian and her brother left home; it all went into an investment account. Now Euan had withdrawn some of these savings in cash, to avoid the family’s paying tax on them after he was dead; he really had very little interest in money, but he liked to imagine himself as a man of the world, cunning and knowing when it came to material things. He kept the money hidden, despite all Marian’s pleadings and warnings, in a space under the floor in the airing cupboard that no one was supposed to know about except Marian and Francis, in Toronto. The last time Marian fetched Euan some money from the hiding place, she discovered that two hundred pounds were missing. She didn’t tell Euan, but crossed out in his little notebook the amount that there should have been and deducted what she had just taken out, as if nothing were wrong.

At home she confided in Tamsin over supper. Tamsin was her younger daughter, who lived at home with Marian and was unnervingly domesticated. Tamsin had had a very wild youth, which had culminated five years before in a dreadful crisis, with a stillborn baby and boyfriend who had accidentally overdosed and died. She had shaved her head, in those days, and had her nose and tongue pierced; but now, at twenty-six, she had her hair cut neatly short, like a boy’s, and saved her wages to buy nice designer clothes. She worked in an office for an agency selling theater and concert tickets and appalled her father, who had in his youth handed out leaflets outside factories for the Communist Party, by announcing that she had voted Conservative at the last election (the one when nobody else did). She also sang with the city choral society, went out nightclubbing occasionally with the girls from the office, and, so far as Marian could tell, slept alone every night in her neat narrow bed.

— Nobody knows where this wretched money is hidden except me and Francis and Daddy, said Marian.

— And me, said Tamsin.

— You don’t know.

— I guessed.

— The most likely thing is Daddy’s taken some of it out himself and just forgotten to tell me. But two hundred? What for? And I think he’d find it quite difficult; you really have to get down on your hands and knees. Then there was the man who came to repair the central heating boiler a few weeks ago. Perhaps he had to look around under the floor for pipes, and he found it. But then why only take two hundred, not all of it?

— Maybe to mislead you, so that it wasn’t obvious.

— And anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t him. This is what’s so horrible about the whole thing. He seemed a nice man, we’ve had him before, and he’d never do anything so stupid, obviously incriminating himself. He was only mending the thermostat, why would he need to look for pipes? Probably the whole thing’s just a mistake: I miscounted, or we miscounted right in the beginning, or perhaps the building society made a mistake in the first place, and we checked carelessly.

— What does it matter, so long as Grandpa doesn’t know?

— Well, it does matter: two hundred pounds! Sooner or later he’s bound to know; he’ll want me to get it all out and count it for him or something.

Marian helped herself to the last slice of quiche. She was always hungry after one of Tamsin’s suppers. They took it in turns to cook, although Tamsin didn’t really cook, she went to Marks & Spencer’s on her way home and bought selections of things in plastic pots that were somehow enticing but not fulfilling. Marian on her nights cooked hearty platefuls of rice or pasta, which Tam-sin picked at. Tamsin’s lilac silk blouse showed off shadowy hollows in her throat and under her collarbones. Marian had never had those; she had always been tall and heavy like her father; for a while now she had been aware of a sort of girdle of packed flesh between her bosom and her hips that seemed to grasp her tight and make her breathless and constrained, so that she had to swivel her body in one solid piece if she wanted to look behind her.