Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— But perhaps no one would have come.

— Surely someone would.

— Then they’ll pass us now. We can wave and stop them.

— But we’ll have to be careful. We’re not wearing anything white, we won’t show up much.

Lily without a word pressed her chin in Clare’s coat and stretched up her arms pleadingly; it was her baby gesture, meaning she wanted to be picked up.

— Can’t you see? How can I? Do you seriously think I can carry two of you? Actually, I can’t even carry one. She pulled apart Rose’s wet woolen mittens from where they were clasped at the back of her neck and slithered her down to the ground. There. We all have to walk. We just have to walk. I’m not going back to sit in that car and wait, like a sitting target. This is England, not Russia or somewhere. There’ll be a house soon. When we get to the top of the hill we’ll see lights. Then we can telephone.

She held Rose’s hand and they toiled on. They were splashing through such deep water it was like walking upstream. Then Rose tripped and, although she dangled from Clare’s hand and didn’t go down completely, her legs and skirt got soaked. Clare picked her up and carried her again, and felt the wet soaking through her own coat to her skin.

Rose moaned and shivered.

— Shut up, said Clare. Stop it.

* * *

CLARE HAD BEEN READING Tolstoy’s Resurrection. (It was packed in one of the bags in the back of the car.) She thought there were two ways you could read it, either with your defenses up or your defenses down. If you read it with your defenses up, you could cleverly perceive all the ways it was unbalanced and twisted by certain sexual obsessions. For instance, the portraits of the wealthy women in the novel are so distorted and uncompassionate, loaded with Tolstoy’s disgust at how he desires them, their flattering flirtations and their naked shoulders.

But she was wondering about that now. What if the cleverness to see those twisted things was just another kind of complacency, to defend oneself against the truth in the book? A privileged wealthy man sees a prostitute tried for murder. He recognizes her as a girl he once seduced; he understands the falsity in his own life and the inequity in his society; he gives up everything to follow the girl to Siberia and offers to marry her, not because he desires her again (apparently he does not) but to redeem himself, to do right.

He changes his life.

What if this expressed a true possibility?

Clare thought while she was reading this novel that perhaps in her life she was wrong, she was perverted, she was in her foolishness and vanity sacrificing something precious. What if she was leaving a good man and breaking up a family, not even for love but just for curiosity, out of dissatisfaction? What if she was doing this not, as she had believed, out of deep inner need but in fact because she was following a pattern, a seductive and flattering and false suggestion that flowed at her on all sides from novels and films and advertising, about the importance, the paramount and endless intricate intriguing importance, of her own fulfillment?

* * *

THE WIND DROPPED and the rain eased off. The night dripped and rustled; there were stinks of rank vegetation and dung. They reached the top of the road where they had left the car, and turned left, and then right, Clare trying to remember their route when they’d come the other way. They must have reached the top of a slope because they found themselves climbing down again, but they hadn’t seen any lights. For a while, Clare found, you could achieve a kind of mechanical equilibrium, where your body repeated the round of movements that produced a forward motion while your mind floated detached somewhere outside: presumably this was what soldiers did when they marched. But the moment she was aware she had achieved this equilibrium, it was spoiled by consciousness; she became painfully aware of how difficult each effort was, and then her movement disintegrated, she stepped onto something awkward underfoot, a branch or a stone, Rose slid down her hip, her back ached, her restraining hands parted under Rose’s weight, she simply couldn’t move forward any farther. She had to let Rose slither to the ground again.

They heard the sound of a car, then saw its lights. Partly Clare was concerned to press them all back safely into the hedge, partly she was trying to think how to stop the car and ask for help. It took a while to catch up with them, dipping out of sight, winding behind a hill and reemerging; and then, when it was close, its lights and speed and the roar of its engine were overwhelming. Clare, waving her hat at the car and pointlessly shouting, felt a strong embarrassment. Who would these people be, what would they think of her, wandering with her little vulnerable brood astray in the wild night?

Somehow, in the disorientation of the approaching din and glare, Rose slipped out of Clare’s grasp. She was well beyond the age of darting heedlessly into traffic; she might have been trying to attract the car’s attention because she was fed up with walking, or she might have panicked at its oncoming noise and been unable to escape in any direction except directly at what she feared. The slick blue of her raincoat was suddenly illumined in the car’s lights. Clare screamed: her hands flew to block her mouth as if to stop what was going to happen coming out from there. Coco threw himself at Rose and snatched her back out of the way of the car as it passed in a waist-high spew of water: she landed on her face at the side of the road with Coco half fallen on top of her. He smacked her once heavily across the bottom in the wake of the drama of the receding car.

— You naughty naughty little girl, he shouted.

There was no way of ever being quite sure, in the reconstructions afterward, whether the car would have hit Rose or not, if Coco hadn’t snatched her back. The car didn’t stop. Probably the driver never even saw them; or he shook his head at such irresponsible pedestrians.

Clare knelt on the road beside her. Is she all right?

Rose didn’t move. They shone the torch on her: the elastic on her hat was up under her nose; there was a smear of mud on her creamy cheek and a trickle of blood; her big eyes stared into a tangle of muddy roots in the hedge.

—’Course I’m all right, she said, willing there to be nothing dangerous or dreadful that had happened, that could touch her. She sat up.

Coco rocked on his haunches, shivering and chattering his teeth. I saved her life, he remarked experimentally.

— You ran into the road, Rosie, reproached Lily. How many times have you been told?

Clare sat in a pool of water. The rain began to fall again, the sound of the first drops sharp as a handful of thrown gravel, then the successive sweeps of it like a rustle of fine cloth through the trees, pressing, hastening.

— I can’t go on, she said. You go on without me. I just want to stay here and die.

The children peered into her face incredulously.

— Mum, don’t be stupid, said Coco, embarrassed for her.

— Mum’s stupid, said Rose, glad to distract attention from her own mistake.

Lily slipped her bare hand inside Clare’s sodden knitted glove and squeezed her fingers. Come on, Mummy darling, she said. We have to be brave.

— I don’t want to be brave, said Clare. She held up her face in the dark to the rain, taking her punishment. I can’t. I give up. It’s all my fault.

* * *

THAT SAME MORNING at eleven o’clock she had felt very differently about things. She had had a meeting with Tony Kieslowski, her supervisor for her PhD. Tony was in his thirties, single, American, plump, with soft eyes in a bruise-colored slack face, shoulder-length dark hair curling onto his collar: his appearance faintly reminiscent of the Romantic poets he specialized in. Clare had noticed this tendency of literary specialists toward a physical resemblance to their subjects: modernists in crumpled linen suits and James Joyce glasses, Jamesians with paunches and waistcoats and pocket watches, Plath fanatics with alpha-grade bright faces and long gathered skirts. She hadn’t liked Tony at first. He was always phoning to cancel meetings they had arranged — sometimes he even forgot they had arranged them and didn’t turn up — and she had thought him self-important, probably because he didn’t register the bright gift of intelligence she brought to unwrap at his feet and impress him. He was abrasive and opinionated; she heard from other students how he was resented and disliked.