Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

— Too much of what?

— They sort of fill the place up.

— She always brings several changes of clothes, doesn’t she? Just in case.

— You can hardly get past their luggage in the hall.

— And I suppose you’ve been hearing all about the cultural delights of the capital?

— Oh, they’ve been everywhere and done everything. And know everyone, of course.

This rehearsal of mutual ironic judgment felt comradely and consoling, but as soon as Bram went to talk to the visitors and Clare was left setting the table she was filled with unreasonable resentment at his tone. They hadn’t really talked much about London; mostly, she and Helly had talked about the old days. It was Clare’s own fault if she had taken away any impression that things in London were more brilliant and thrilling than down here.

The lunch went off all right. At least, the soup was good, and there seemed to be plenty of talk, although perhaps most of it was Helly’s and David’s: Helly told them funny stories about the shoot for the ice-cream ad (she imitated the voice-over for them: Forgive yourself: it’s irresistible ), and David seemed to hold forth on every topic, he knew someone or he’d read something or he’d once worked somewhere. He even managed to find some kind of software program to talk about to Bram: mostly Bram didn’t try to compete whenever the conversation was noisy. Clare was used to presuming, wincingly defensively, that Helly must think Bram was dull and stolid. Helly always made a point of trying to coax him out of what she probably imagined was his shell. Clare winced defensively for Helly too. She had no idea how Bram recoiled from her coaxing.

Toby got it all on his video. Both visitors tried encouraging him out from behind his viewfinder: David had friends in a video production company he should get in touch with, Helly lit his cigarette for him (Clare hated Toby smoking) and tried to draw him out on the subject of himself. But he couldn’t resist how the shots framed themselves around David and Helly, how their clothes and scent and cigarette smoke and loud laughter crowded the space, and how dingy they managed to make ordinary family life seem. Rose tipped over her orange juice. Lily and Rose wouldn’t eat the onion soup. Coco had broken his glasses, which had to be mended with sticking plaster until they could get to the optician’s on Monday. For some reason Clare was exasperated at this, and at how patiently Bram mopped up Rose’s orange juice with a cloth, although she knew this was unfair and knew how much more exasperated she would have been if he hadn’t mopped it.

She had taken a few minutes before lunch to change into a dress and brush out her hair and spray on perfume. She wasn’t sure whether she was really flirting with David at that point; she was making up to him, flattering him, because that would make everything go smoothly, Helly would be satisfied, and he would be at least kept sweet for the afternoon. She could see herself, when she watched the video later, backing away in front of them down the path of their weekend, his and Helly’s, sweeping and sprinkling it ahead of them with her interest and her attention, helping to damp down David’s impatience to be gone.

* * *

THEY WENT OUT in the afternoon to look at Bram’s project. Bram had been amused that Helly had to change her clothes first; although actually she reappeared in sensible scruffy trousers and shirt, in which she still managed to look spectacular. It was Clare in her dress who got her legs bitten and scratched in the long grass. They walked around the bay, which would eventually become the marina: now it was low tide and the ruined jetties of the old harbor marched out up to their knees in sleek gray glinting mud. Oystercatchers and curlews (Bram identified them) picked their fastidious way between them. Across the ring of the bay the piled up buildings of the city loomed, glinting and flashing from plate-glass office-block windows whenever the sun flew out from between ragged slate-colored clouds. It was May. There was a wind that flattened the pale mauve-green grass like a pelt and sent it racing in liquid waves; from time to time the sky shook out cold drops of rain. David was taking photographs. Bram left them to go and find his group of volunteers, who were counting lugworms farther on, around into the estuary. They climbed down some concrete steps with a rusted handrail onto a scrap of beach heaped up with stones and sticks and plastic rubbish and cans that the sea had bleached to the same opaque pale pastels.

As soon as she saw water, Rose began to take her clothes off. She was an ironic, willful, huge-eyed baby with rolls of translucent pale flesh at her wrists and chin and waist, and she despised clothes. She stripped at every opportunity, winter and summer, streaking triumphantly just out of reach of pursuing adults, flashing in triumph the long tender crease of her vagina and the pink cheeks of her bottom. Clare worried that Rose’s taste for nakedness was outgrowing her innocence — she would be four in a few months — and she thought she needed to be taught to protect herself.

Rose protested that this was the seaside.

— No it’s not, it’s dirty water, and you’re not to go in it.

Rose seemed to concede defeat.

But a few minutes later she was suddenly nowhere to be seen, and there was a little pile of her clothes dropped down beside an oilcan with the bottom rusted out. It seemed impossible that she could have gone anywhere out of their sight in so short a time. Everyone began calling her name, looking for her along the beach and back up the steps. The crescendo of dismay, from the first exasperated flutter of worry ( What a pain she is! ) to hollowing uninhibited panic only took a few minutes: Clare screamed at the other two children to stay where they were and kicking off her shoes ran barefoot across the shingle and the potentially lethal debris of glass and tin, to stand soaking her skirt in the scummy edge of the water, shrieking along the shoreline to right and left, fumbling in the water with her arms to try and feel for anything pulled under and washing in that dirty tide of sluggish brown waves that hardly broke, hardly made spume. She couldn’t see the bottom, she couldn’t imagine what she ought to do next, whether she ought to somehow submerge herself in it and try to open her eyes: wasn’t this always how it was with accidents, that the parents tinkered grotesquely, futilely, in the wrong place, failing confusedly as you fail in dreams?

David shouted for Helly to go one way and he ran the other, back up the steps. Clare felt a passionate revulsion from her guests. It was in her preoccupation with them that she had taken her attention off Rose; she had been talking to David, pretending she was interested in cameras. If Bram had been here this would never have happened. Frantically, puritanically, Clare linked up her moment’s neglect with other falsities, with her efforts to impress upon Helly and David the charms of family life, with the perfume she’d sprayed on, with their money, with Helly’s advertising contract, even with the scorched tinfoil in the bathroom.

It occurred to her that there was a literary tradition of guilty women whose children pay for their mother’s momentary lapses of attention, their casual betrayals (in the mornings when Rose was at nursery she was writing a PhD thesis on George Sand). Wasn’t there a scene in Flaubert — or Balzac? — where an adulteress watches over the cot of a sick child, pledging the whole of her selfish future happiness against the few degrees his temperature must come down for him to live? At that moment she imagined such a scene, if it existed, quite without irony, the cheap irony that smirks at literary machinery. It seemed a revelation of a naked truth before which irony could only grovel.