Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— But for God’s sake! Don’t you care? Don’t you want to do something? If your partner is fucking my fucking boyfriend?

— I really don’t want to talk about this with you.

— Then I won’t talk about it. I swear to God I won’t talk about it, I won’t say another word, if you don’t want. But let me come with you, wherever you’re going. I’m not up to anything, honestly. I’ll sleep in the car. I’m not trying to get revenge or anything you might think. I know you don’t like me much. It’s just — if I’m alone I’ll die, I’ll really die.

— How do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you talk like that?

He sat down on the sofa with his head between his hands, fingertips against the temples where he had a headache coming.

— She’s done this to me before, Helly said. A long time ago. I didn’t dream it could happen again. I thought she was so happy, with you and the children.

She held the mug of hot tea in her laced fingers as if she was frozen, the usually pale skin of her cheeks was blotched with red and her big mouth was ugly as it slipped loose with weepy protest.

— I don’t want you to come, he said. I’m sorry. I really want to be alone.

— But let me.

* * *

DAVID TOOK CLARE to a Polish restaurant and they drank cold sweet beer while they waited for their food. She felt the alcohol thud into action instantly, because she had an empty stomach; she told herself to be careful, to drink just enough to unbind her for what was to come, not so much that she made a mess of it or lost any of it in a drunken fog.

Under the table they pressed their knees together. Over the table they smiled at one another with slow-burning smiles, and he took her hand from where she was playing with the packets of sugar and kissed it.

— Very Eastern European, she said. Shall we throw our glasses into the fireplace too?

— Not till we’ve finished our beer.

— When did you remember me? I mean, that we’d known each other before, at that party?

— Known, in the biblical sense.

— In the biblical sense. So, when? I didn’t recognize you at all, when Helly first brought you to the house. I’d never have remembered.

— I remembered. Not straightaway, though there was something nagging at me. Maybe when you changed into that dress. “Something in the way she moved,” as the song says.

— But for God’s sake! I was seventeen and probably dressed as a vampire! I’d have hoped I’d have changed beyond recognition.

— You were nice then, he said. You were a nice vampire. Now, you’re better than nice. I love that little edge that thirty brings. Seventeen’s too bland and formless.

— I’m not thirty, she said. Not quite yet.

— But you’ve got that edge.

It was very exciting to Clare, that he met her with his frank sexual interest in her. Men were supposed to approach you like this, always wanting one thing, but in her experience they mostly did not: you had to pretend to be talking about books, or politics, or telling each other your life stories, so that the sex could seem to happen inadvertently when you had drunk enough.

While they were eating their blinis with sour cream, someone came into the restaurant who knew David. David jumped up to shake hands with him and punch his arm, saying it was great to see him, inviting him to sit down with them. Clare guessed from this that the man — Nick — knew Helly too and that David was embarrassed that he had found them together.

Nick gave Clare a qualified careful smile as he sat down.

— This is Clare, said David. She’s an old friend of Helly’s. She’s up to work at the British Library; I’m entertaining her to lunch. This is Nick, the video whiz kid, worked on Helly’s ice-cream contract and he’s done some shows with me, the one with the band in Vienna.

— Nice to meet you, said Nick, more unreservedly.

— And you. Clare smiled warmly.

Inwardly she was appalled. What was David doing? He had given away too much, too eagerly. And he had invited this stranger to sit down with them, to spoil their delicious flirtation; she felt as if she had been dragged out from a snug secret sensual cocoon into cold hostile air, to stand on her own two uncertain feet. How long might it take to get rid of him? Hot tears welled up in her eyes; she had to pretend to wipe her nose with her paper napkin. She realized she was drunker than she had thought.

Nick was nice-looking and softly spoken, with self-deprecating private school know-how. He ordered beer and a sausage and sauerkraut; he ate it while they drank their coffee and plum brandy. Clare wanted to get up when she had finished her coffee and say that she must get back to the library now, but she was afraid David wouldn’t find the right way of explaining that he was coming with her, so she sat paralyzed, painfully conscious of the time spilling away and soaked up in conversation. Her alibi was less plausible, too, for every five minutes she sat on.

— I’ve edited those sequences we shot on the river, said Nick to David. There’s some excellent stuff; the water in that weird light lapping at the piers of the old iron bridge looks completely abstract. Why don’t you come by now and have a look at it? My place is only round the corner. If you’re not doing anything else.

David stood up, his thighs rather thick between the bench and the table, and frowned and hummed as if in a dilemma, biting his lip and running his hands up through his thick brush of hair. She saw something about him that she hadn’t seen before; she was reminded that she hardly knew him. He wasn’t just being over-friendly to try and put this man off the scent, he actually found it hard to resist his suggestion, he really wanted to have all these pleasures that offered themselves, wanted to fit in being the man’s friend as well as the other things he had planned for that afternoon. Helly had said he could never turn down an invitation; they hardly ever went out on their own. He was like a friendly dog, she had also said, wanting to lay his head on everyone’s knee.

— We could, I suppose, he said, pleading to Clare. Just for half an hour. We could just have a look.

— Well, as I’ve finished at the library now, said Clare stiffly, not looking at the other man.

— Exactly.

— Although we were going to go to that exhibition at the ICA.

— But just half an hour, said David.

— OK, she said, putting her head on one side and smiling hard at him, to communicate her resistance.

Nick’s flat was farther away than she had expected. David carried her heavy briefcase, which held her night things and her toothbrush as well as her notebooks and papers, but her new shoes began to hurt. David and Nick walked ahead, talking. The long London streets seemed implacable; a hot wind blew up dust and litter and smells of dog shit and rank vegetation from the locked gardens in the squares.

Inside, the flat was stylish and made her feel that her clothes and her hair were provincial; she sat on a long cream and chrome sofa afloat on a sea of waxy boards and slipped off her shoes and was suddenly overwhelmingly sleepy after the beer and food and the walk. Nick laid out papers and tobacco and grass wrapped in a twist of newspaper on a table of thick green glass and told David to roll up while he made more coffee. While he was out of the room David took the opportunity to reach over and stroke one fingertip down her cheek and promise they would only be half an hour.

— I just didn’t want to make it too obvious, he said.

The doorbell rang and someone else arrived, a friend of Nick’s David didn’t know, a fattish man with a shaved head and a thick short neck in folds and little gold-rimmed glasses, the producer for a music video Nick was working on. They all three became very absorbed in watching the material Nick had shot for David on a huge television screen. The picture was mostly rippling water, black and white. It was going to be the back projection for a crossover concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. They talked about what cameras Nick had used.