Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

He waved irritatedly with his free hand at Marian to leave him alone.

She listened outside the door. Lucia Popp singing Strauss’s “Last Songs.”

* * *

BEFORE SHE MARRIED, Marian had been writing a PhD thesis on women in the mob in the French Revolution. She had been in Paris in 1968; George Rudé, who was on sabbatical leave from Montreal researching a new book, had agreed to meet her and discuss her ideas. She had sat in the window of a cheap hotel near Saint-Sulpice writing up her notes from the interview with Rudé and listening to the sounds of rioting in the streets that reached her like a kind of mournful weather carried on the air. It was weirdly like eavesdropping on the groans and protests and outrages of lovemaking. (She had had unwillingly to do this through the plasterboard partitions of her room in residence in her last undergraduate year.)

Then the day after she got back to London she met Graham Menges at a party and something happened that overturned all the plans she had had for her life. She found out for herself all about the groans and protests of lovemaking; involved in that was a whole seismic change of perspective, or so it seemed at the time. Not only the body instead of the mind; also art instead of academic study. Graham’s ceramics, whorled and lush with glaze or dragged into brittle lace, represented the wisdom of hands instead of words. Marian thought out quite consciously an analogy between Graham’s hands on her shadowy strange-to-herself body under the blankets and his hands turning pots on his wheel. When she thought of herself as whirling wet clay turning under his hands she forgot herself enough to have orgasms. She neglected the writing up of the PhD; it seemed to her to have been overtaken, buried by a great culture quake, after which one could not be sure that any of the same things would matter anymore.

It was a time of believing in such overturnings. It was the time when respectable BBC presenters unlearned received pronounciation and tried to say “yeah” and “groovy” and talked about pot and psychedelia: all of this wince-making and hilarious in retrospect, but nonetheless a change forever, the end of the imperturbable authority of class and hierarchy. It was the time when the generation of the fathers unbuttoned and undid themselves.

It was a time of much misinformation for women, Marian thought now. Because of all that pounding writhing music that purported to be the product of anguished sexual desire—”Foxy lady,” “Baby let me light your fire,” “She belongs to me”—it was easy to make the mistake of thinking yourself empowered as the object of that desire. Easy not to notice that the object was more or less interchangeable, and that it was to other men and not to women that those beautiful young geniuses looked for critical approval when the music was over. Sometimes being the object of that desire was no more empowering than suttee. After Jimi Hendrix died, young girls he’d never known went to his flat and tried to jump out the window.

Marian and Graham left London and moved back to live in the provincial city where she had grown up; he got some teaching at the art college, she got pregnant and had babies, and then Graham left her for one of his young students. She had two daughters ages five and three and never considered completing the abandoned PhD. She trained to be a schoolteacher instead, and her second job was at the school where she was now head of history and in charge of the (small) sixth form. The school buildings were old-fashioned, 1930s red brick, with wood- and glass-paneled corridors, white-tiled science labs, and a hall with a stage and draped curtains and a rather skimpily filled honors board. Half the children at the school were from Muslim families, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and (toughest) Somalis; the other half were from the local white working-class community. It was a reasonably cheerful place, not horribly deprived or troubled. Examination results weren’t very good. But Marian wouldn’t have wanted to teach in any less challenging type of school.

A flight of cement stairs for staff use only climbed from the reception foyer to the main corridor; there was a smell there of cleaning fluid, or a trick of the watery light from a high window overlooking the park at the back, which for some reason always, even after twenty years, triggered a gust of sensation in Marian whenever she happened to go that way. Perhaps it had been a sensation of pleasurable pride once, but now it was just like a sudden strong self-awareness in the midst of all her daily preoccupations: this is me, she thought; I am here; I have done this all by myself; this is my place.

* * *

ANOTHER TWO HUNDRED POUNDS disappeared. Marian telephoned her brother in Toronto.

— It has to be the housekeeper, he said. What’s her name?

— Elaine. How can you say that, Francis? You don’t even know her.

— Are we moving on to one of our “you’re not here doing your share” conversations? Will it help if I’m just abject in advance and we skip that bit?

— And even if it was Elaine, you see, she’s so invaluable, I need her so desperately, if she goes I’ll have to face up to the idea of a home, and I quake when I try to imagine that. So even if she is taking money, I just can’t afford to mention it.

— You’re suggesting we just allow her to pay herself a cool extra couple of hundred every week?

— I notice it’s suddenly “we” when it comes to money.

— Our inheritance.

— Oh, Francis, don’t. It disgusts me that you think of it like that.

— You’re such an old romantic. An old hippie.

— Better than a materialistic vulture. I’m sure it’s not Elaine, anyway.

She only phoned to bother him, really, not because she thought he would be able to help. She wanted to spill over some small poisonous surplus of her anxieties and put him off his blithe evasive stroke for a couple of hours.

— It’s been such an awful week. He’s been on the phone to me every night with some new outrage she’s committed. She refused to bathe him, or that’s what he said; she said he wouldn’t let her. It was all about this aqueous cream she wants him to use in the water for his eczema. He was sure he’d slip. They’re both so stubborn. I thought I was going to have to bathe him myself.

— Oh, Marian. Bad for your Oedipus complex.

— You have to pumice the soles of his feet and dry between his toes. Let alone other bits.

— God.

— You couldn’t.

— I couldn’t.

— Actually you could, perfectly well. Anyone can do anything if they have to.

— You say so.

Francis was an academic like Euan, another literary critic. The women in the family had feared for him in the rivalry with his father — bright and beautiful, slight and fair like his mother — but they needn’t have. He had decisively pronounced himself un-great and unoriginal and taken himself off into safe exile across the Atlantic, specializing in scholarly work in the Henry James archives, taking on a tinge of critical theory when it got fashionable. Euan looked at all his things and wrote him nice notes, complacently. Euan couldn’t read James.

— Do you know what Daddy’s got taped to the inside of his porch door?

— Go on, surprise me. “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.” “Go forth gently into the whatever-it-is.” “Home sweet home.”

— Shipwreck. Just the word shipwreck. It turns out to be the code word he’s given to the gas company and so on, when they send people round. It’s a service for old people, so they don’t let con men in.

— Sensible.

— But why shipwreck? He’s never even been in a ship, not that kind of ship. D’you know what I think? It’s what he thinks about old age. Not peaceful or resigned at all. Shipwreck. Black night, a catastrophe that tips you into deep cold water, an undignified dreadful struggle for your life, in vain. No rescue.