Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— You can be sure, Tamsin also said, that the next sadist has already sniffed her out and is halfway to convincing her he’s the one to save her from herself. Let’s just hope he’s a man , for God’s sake, and heterosexual. At least then we’ll know where we are. I loathe lesbians. I’m praying she doesn’t try to start anything with Mum.

— Don’t be ridiculous, said Toby. You are ridiculous.

— You know how she works. “I’m such a failure! Everything I touch comes to no good! I’m just too trustful, the people I get involved with always seem so sweet at first; I’m so hopeless at seeing through them.” I mean, she’s so right: but Mum’s a complete sucker for that stuff. And now we’ve got Clare too: “I’ve made such a mess! I’m such a failure! I’m so selfish: I wrecked my relationship, I’ve damaged my children.”

Toby didn’t take offense when Tamsin insulted Naomi. All his earliest memories had Tamsin in them. He seemed to have always known that Naomi was his mother and that the girls had a separate mother somewhere else, but in his family memories from childhood it was Tamsin whom Naomi was mostly preoccupied with: Tamsin screaming and kicking and (her specialty) banging her head against the floor, Tamsin refusing to go to the play park, Tamsin refusing to eat anything except cream crackers and peanut butter, Tamsin waking up with nightmares, Tamsin cutting vengeful slits in the sitting room curtains with scissors after she was told off for something, Tamsin wetting the bed. He remembered that during these scenes Clare would frown and put her fingers in her ears and read her book; he wondered what he’d done. Perhaps he watched. He had somehow known from his mother that they must put up with this; they must hold off from one another because they owed something to the girls, something they couldn’t do enough to make up for.

— Because, you see, I have Daddy, she had explained to him once; so that he understood what a weighty counterbalance Daddy was to all the difficulties she struggled with. (He visualized this very literally: Graham’s six foot three to Naomi’s five foot two.) And then, when Toby was twelve, Graham left Naomi and went to live with the woman who became his third wife, Linda, so there was no counterbalance any more.

Tamsin had given up her job at a ticket agency, so in the mornings once Naomi had gone out Tamsin and Toby had the run of the house together. They got up late and cooked themselves extravagant breakfasts: curried scrambled eggs on toast and fruit salad with crème fraîche; fresh rolls filled with bacon and mushrooms cooked with garlic and parsley. When they finished eating, Tamsin took laxative powders; she explained to Toby that she needed to stay slim.

— Everybody does it, she said. And I might get a job modeling, like Helly.

— I thought Marian said you were thinking of doing A levels and going to college?

— Oh, that’s just to keep stalling her so she doesn’t hassle me about the rent and bills. No way am I going back to studying at twenty-six. What I want is a job that will earn me lots and lots of money and be really piss-easy. Like lying around having photographs taken of me.

It was easy to imagine that someone might want to take photographs of Tamsin. Toby could see there was something formidable in her looks that made people stare. She didn’t have boyfriends, though; or, rather, there had been one boyfriend, years ago, when Tamsin was at her teenage wildest. He had died of a drug overdose, and she had had a baby that was stillborn; that was when she had come home from the squatter’s place they had lived in to be with Marian.

— And what are you going to do, Toby?

— Oh, I’m going to go up to London and look around. Make some contacts, find a place to live, find some work to pay the bills, volunteer as a runner for some film project or other on my days off.…

But for a few weeks he made no move to go. This list of achievements he had set for himself sounded improbably difficult; he was not quite sure what sequence they would need to be attacked in, and in the meantime it was so comfortable in Marian’s house, where he and Tamsin watched television in the afternoons and then Marian or Naomi or Clare came in and cooked them supper.

* * *

IN THE EVENINGS the house filled up with some or all of its women. They took turns cooking, and Toby ate. Tamsin often refused to eat with them, Clare — if she was there — had no appetite, Naomi never ate much, Marian was afraid to put on weight: so Toby, who had come back from India even skinnier than he had gone away, demolished plateful after plateful to their immense gratification.

— He sings a little song while he’s eating if he’s really enjoying it, said Naomi. He doesn’t know he’s doing it. I always listen out for that.

After supper when the dishwasher was gurgling, Marian and Clare, if Clare wasn’t spending the evening with her children, would sometimes sit together at the kitchen table by the big pink-shaded lamp. Marian marked schoolbooks, Clare was working on her thesis on George Sand, reading and making notes and looking things up in the dictionary. Sometimes Naomi sat with them too, doing her needlepoint. Tamsin watched television; if she came through the kitchen to fetch herself a Diet Coke, the cat draped contentedly across her shoulders, she cast a look of withering disapproval at the congregation around the table. Sometimes she went out to choir practice. Sometimes someone — a male someone — telephoned for her, but she told Marian to say she was not in, and Marian sighed and lied, obediently and unconvincingly.

One night Toby brought his video camera downstairs and filmed the three women sitting at the table. They all protested — Marian, who was normally so calm, was flustered with dismay at the thought of having her picture taken — and then for a while held their faces self-consciously before they forgot about him. They weren’t talking much. Naomi, with her head bent to count the holes, pulled her thread with a soothing rasp through her canvas, stretched taut across a frame. Marian went patiently over and over a routine of ticking and correcting, and the pile of books on her right hand grew taller while the pile on her left diminished. Clare read with a willed absorption, frowning and moving restlessly in her chair as if she wanted to get inside the book.

— Why don’t you find somewhere more comfortable to read, darling? asked Marian.

— I like it here by you.

You could catch a sort of circling of glances and gestures and smiles around the table. Marian squeezed Clare’s hand or lent her a tissue or a pen; they passed Naomi’s sewing from hand to hand to admire it. Naomi made coffee and they took a break. Marian talked about a friend at school who had had a mastectomy and was trying to persuade her to come to yoga classes. Naomi told them about a jacket she’d seen in Monsoon and was tempted by. She also mentioned a flat she’d heard about through a friend at work, which might be possible for her.

— Which friend was that? asked Clare.

— Oh, just the bloke who runs the cellar, really nice actually. He’s just come out of a gay relationship like me, and he’s trying to decide what it was all about. We’ve been comparing notes.

— Naomi, said Clare, don’t get involved with renting a flat or anything from a friend. You know how these things end up.

— Oh, it’s OK, nothing like that, said Naomi, blushing. Anyway, he’s about fifteen years younger than me.

Clare talked about George Sand coming to stay at Flaubert’s house, and how she got along with his mother. Then she mentioned that Rose, her younger daughter, who was four, had been in trouble at nursery that day.

— Mrs. Worral couldn’t wait to tell me. She’s so ghastly. She gives them pictures of policemen to color in and tells them off if they don’t use blue: believe me. We don’t like her but we like the school, so we think it’s worth keeping Rosie on there. Apparently Rose had offered a sweetie to this little boy that turned out to be a bead from a game or something. So I’m supposed to give Rose a serious talk on the dangers of choking. But the trouble is—