Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

Ten years, eleven years ago, they worked out, David and Clare and Helly had all lived in this city, but had not known one another. David had even been in the sixth form with a boy Clare went out with for six months. They’d had so many teenage haunts in common, a pub, a club, even the city reference library where they revised for A levels: so many mutual acquaintances, it seemed impossible they hadn’t met.

— I’m just beginning to remember, said David. When I see you two together. It’s starting to come back to me.

— Don’t believe him, laughed Helly. He’s just flirting.

He was flirting, although Clare presumed he was only using his flirtation with her in some game with Helly. She was as aware of the unaccustomed aura of flirtation in her house as she was of the unaccustomed cigarette smoke: both things made her anxious and excited at once, and she was bracing herself already for when Bram came in. He would sniff them both out immediately, and disapprove of them, although he would be as always — infallibly — courteous and friendly. This was why Clare didn’t see Helly very often any more. It stretched her too painfully, having to defend Helly from Bram’s disapproval while mobilizing inside herself all her best arguments against how Helly’s life tempted her and invited her and made her envious.

— Did you know someone called Tim Dashwood? David asked.

— Tim Dashwood? No, said Clare.

— Yes, we did, said Helly. Remember? We went to parties at his flat. Very naughty parties. Pas devant les enfants. Where we got up to all sorts of things.

— What did you do at the naughty parties? asked Lily.

— Lots of rubbish, I expect, said Coco.

— That’s exactly right, said Helly. You’re so right. Lots and lots of rubbish. And d’you know what we used to wear? I’ll bet you can’t imagine your mummy dressed entirely in black clothes, with a black bustier, and black eye makeup and fingernails and lipstick and earrings. We were briefly gothic. It didn’t last. But that was the Tim Dashwood period. We didn’t know him well. He wasn’t particularly gothic. Bit of a bloodsucker, perhaps. He and his friends must have been older than us.

— Black lipstick! Yuk! said Lily. What’s a bustier?

— Something silly that ladies wear, like underwear, on top of their clothes.

— I suddenly had a feeling that that was where I was remembering you from, said David. I’m sure I can remember Clare at one of Tim’s parties.

— No, you can’t, said Clare quickly. Not if I can’t remember it. I don’t even remember such a person.

— Can you remember me there? Helly asked him.

— Perhaps. Did you use to have long plaits?

— Long gothic ones, naturally.

— Then maybe, maybe.

— If I ever look in my old diaries from those days, said Clare, which mostly I don’t — it’s too hideous — I feel as if I’m reading about someone else. Not just people I knew that I can’t remember, and places I went and things I did, but feelings I felt, things I wanted. It doesn’t connect to me as I am now.

— You keep a diary, do you?

— Oh, not anymore. I wouldn’t keep one now.

— She’s got volumes of them. She used to write pages every night.

— It’s so embarrassing. The entries begin with things like: calories so far today, one centimeter of toothpaste, 5. Or I know that now I will never, ever, be happy again in my whole life about some boy whose name I can’t even remember from his initials.

— So what do you remember from Tim Dashwood’s party, David? asked Helly.

He was simply the wrong scale for the little room crowded with books and pictures and delicate ceramics (Clare’s father was a potter). He was sitting in his leather coat, jammed with one leg crossed over the other knee into the most comfortable chair in the house (which was not all that comfortable). He shook his leg in a nervous habit, showing a stretch of big brown hairy calf above his scarlet sock, drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair. At least he had taken off his shades. His eyes exposed without them were comical, doleful, as if they were pulled down into his cheeks; he had a large head with decisive features and thick dark hair standing straight up from his forehead. He smiled consideringly. Rose put a small fat hand onto his knee, which he ignored.

— I don’t remember much. You know what his parties were like. That used to be the general point, didn’t it? To get so out of it you couldn’t remember much.

— Out of what? asked Lily.

* * *

CLARE AND HELLY had met at Amery-James High School for Girls; from twelve to twenty they had lived in an intimacy they would never attain again with anybody else. In the very process of their formation they were intertwined, like two trees growing up in the same space. They learned to smoke together, practicing at home (Clare’s home, with more liberal parents) under one another’s critical scrutiny until it looked right. Now Clare, who had given it up, saw that Helly still tilted up her chin and blew her smoke off to one side in the way they had decided was most flattering. At school they made a secret pact of resistance (the school motto was So hateth she derknesse ; they determined to love it); the pact was sealed by an exchange of drops of menstrual blood on tissues folded and wound around with hairs pulled from one another’s heads. They went shoplifting together (for clothes, mostly, and makeup): testing themselves, initiating themselves into the kind of adulthood they aspired to, transgressive, toughened, disrespectful (the opposite to the one Amery-James aspired to on their behalf). Helly carried the shoplifting off with flair, Clare was cowardly and full of dread. Clare was the theorist and Helly was the one who acted. Clare was the feminist — when they were fifteen they read her stepmother’s old copy of The Female Eunuch together, squeezed side by side on their stomachs on Helly’s bed — but it was Helly who later rode a motorbike and went out on her own to pubs and clubs and mostly dismissed contemptuously the boys who asked her out. Clare always suspected and concealed a secret abjection in herself, some treachery of neediness toward the other sex, which seemed to fulfill itself when they were in their early twenties and the serious business of life became men. The girls turned their backs on one another then, ruthlessly cutting away old lives and connections because they thought they had found, at last, the life they really wanted.

* * *

CLARE WAS PUTTING the Parmesan toasts in the oven when Bram came in through the back door. He was working on a two-year project recording the ecology of an area of mudflats and coastal grassland that would be covered by water when the new barrage, an artificial dam for the city’s marina, was completed. At weekends volunteer groups came down to help and he had to be there to supervise, but he’d promised to be home for lunch. She was relieved that he came in the back way because it meant Helly and David would not see him in his unflattering cycling helmet. He was so without vanity (genuinely, she was sure: she had probed for it deeply enough) that she sometimes thought he looked for ways to make himself ugly, to undo the effect of gentleness he couldn’t help; he was blond and delicate with a forward-thrust lower jaw that made him soften his consonants when he spoke.

— So what’s this one like? he asked, taking off the helmet, running his head under the cold tap, scouring himself with the towel.

— He’s perfectly friendly. I think he’s nice. After the last one, anyway. (After Helly brought the last one to visit them, Clare had found scorched silver foil in the bathroom and feared the worst.) He’s a bit too much, though.