Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

Recently, though, she’d found herself taking pleasure in how genuinely distracted and disorganized he was: it made her imagine a life so different from her life with the children, where thought had to be fitted into little discrete spaces inside her routine. She imagined the slow ripening of Tony’s ideas in a rich vegetable chaos, uninterrupted by the petty necessities of mealtimes and housework. When she came to his office he would clear a space for her to sit by removing a heap of papers from a chair and then wouldn’t know where to put them down among the dead plants and cold coffee cups and mountains of other papers, so he’d stand holding on to them while he started to talk. He loved to talk. She loved it too, especially these abstract subjects: about genius (he scoffed and deconstructed the idea of genius, she defended it), about wilderness (he was susceptible to the idea of wilderness, she was skeptical), about the sublime. It was true that occasionally her mind wandered when he went on for a long time, and she waited impatiently to get her chance to speak. But she supposed that his eagerness to talk to her must mean he had begun to intuit her responsive intelligence, worthily matched with his.

It had been raining this morning while she was in his office, rain was running down the big window overlooking the smeary gray-washed city and overflowing a gutter splashily in some courtyard four stories below. The screen-saver on Tony’s computer was an underwater scene too, with little fishes and big sharks slipping in and out of the weeds. When he offered to telephone her with the title of a book he couldn’t find, she gave him her new number, told him she was separating from her partner. She had waited for the right moment so she could drop this information offhandedly and ironically, making herself and her life sound colorful and dangerous.

— Oh, he’d said in concern, and put down the pile of papers unheedingly onto an apple core on his desk. I’m sorry. Am I sorry? I don’t know why one feels obliged to say that. Maybe this is good news. Is it what you want?

He was quaintly disconcerted, as if he doubted his competence as an academic to make adequate responses to this lick of trouble from out of real life.

— What I want? she said. Isn’t that the oldest riddle? If we knew what women wanted.…

And she had laughed as if she had said something poignant and plucky and at the same time faintly suggestive.

Out on the road in the dark and the rain she was remembering this moment: the coziness of the underwater light in the little room; the open poetry books; the sense of their being marooned there together amid the waters, outside the world; the warm curl of possibility that a flirtation had begun, no more than that, nothing that needed to be thought through or faced, just a wriggle of pleasuring possibility that could swim in and out of stern realities irresponsibly as a fish. The memory seemed to her vivid yet remote, as if an aristocrat in a filthy torn shift on her way to the guillotine were to remember drinking chocolate out of fine porcelain among satin pillows: she thought of it not only with regret and incredulity but with accusation too. There might be some causal connection between the oblivious prodigal pleasures of that luxury and this punishment now.

* * *

A FEW MINUTES’ WALK farther on from where Clare sat in the road and wanted to give up, Coco found a gate and a rough track and a sign advertising BED AND BREAKFAST, 50 YARDS. The house must have been hidden behind trees in a little hollow; halfway along the stony track they could suddenly see all its lights: pink velvety light through drapes behind diamond-paned leaded windows, a carriage lamp beside a front door between clipped dwarf cypresses. It looked like a house people had retired to, not a working farm.

A man opened the door before they’d even reached it; he must have heard them coming and been mystified to hear children’s voices at such a time of night.

— I’m so sorry to bother you, called out Clare. She was astonished at how, out of near disintegration, it was possible to summon such a sensible-sounding, ringingly middle-class, confidence-inspiring self. Our car broke down. I was afraid to leave the children. My phone batteries were low. Could I possibly use your phone to call the AA?

He let them advance closer before he responded; wondering whether to shut the door on them and activate the alarms, Clare thought, in case they were part of some kind of trickery, the softening advance party of something sinister and criminal concealed in the bushes.

— How many of you are there?

— Just me and the three little ones.

— You’d better come in then.

— We’re so wet. I’m embarrassed to drip all over your floor.

— It’s all right. The porch is tiled.

They crowded into the tiny little entrance porch and both girls began to cry quietly, probably with relief at the light and warmth. The man shut the door rather hastily behind them. He was short with the springy slimness of someone who exercised; his face was tanned and crinkled, his hair was slicked back from a receding hairline, he was wearing check slippers. He smelled faintly of whisky, and there was jazz music — Glenn Miller? — playing in the house behind.

He looked at them in perplexity. They must be a dismal sight; water was already making pools on the porch floor. His house, to judge by the porch, was probably immaculately clean and tidy: coats were hung by their loops on a rail, the tongue-and-groove walls were ornamented with painted horseshoes and dried flower pictures, there was potpourri in a miniature basket tied with ribbon.

— My wife’s not here, he said. She’s away for a few days. How long have you been out in this?

— Oh, not that long. It’s just that kind of rain, it soaks you through.

Clare tried to explain where they’d left the car and the way they’d come.

— It took about twenty-five minutes, Coco said. I checked.

— Rose ran out in front of a car, said Lily.

— I saved her life, added Coco casually.

Clare wished she’d arranged with the children in advance not to give her away; she prayed they wouldn’t tell how she’d sworn at them and cried and sat in the road. She needed the man to have faith that she was adult and competent.

— All I have to do is to phone the AA, she said brightly and optimistically. I’ll give you the money for the phone. Then maybe we could just wait in your porch till they come.

— Perhaps if you take off your shoes and hang up your coat, he said. The phone’s in the hall. He looked at the children and sighed. I suppose you’d all better take off your things. It’s going to take time before the AA get here. You’d better come in and get dry.

* * *

THE CHILDREN sat in a row at the pine breakfast bar in the kitchen drinking tea with sugar, looking like the bedraggled survivors of the wreck of some ship from exotic lands: their eyes were huge and dark-ringed; their hair was plastered to their heads or drying in wild curls; they seemed to be wearing particularly gaudy and unsuitable clothes. Rose at some point before they left home must have exchanged her sensible top for a pink sleeveless sequined T-shirt: around her neck was the filthy last scrap of her Superman cape.

The AA were going to take an hour at least.

— It did say bed-and-breakfast on the gate, said Clare. I’ve got my checkbook and card. There isn’t any way that we can stay, officially? I mean, otherwise I feel too embarrassed about this.

— My wife does the bed-and-breakfasts, said the man gloomily. Actually, there’s a NO VACANCIES sign. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to do you a cooked breakfast. Or make up the beds.

— We don’t even like cooked breakfast! Clare exclaimed. And I can make the beds. But we’ll pay you the full price. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll clear up after us. If you showed us the bedroom we could just keep out of your way.