Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— Won’t they want to eat? he asked.

— Oh, no, we’ve eaten, Clare lied. She thought of the chocolate and sweets they could share once they had their room, and willed the children not to protest or ask for anything. They seemed intuitively to know how to perform the submissive and needy children role required for her act as responsible adult: Rose’s head was even drooping pathetically forward onto the table in sleep.

He capitulated, not terribly graciously, to the inevitable. Well, there is a family room you could have, I suppose, although I’ve no idea what state it’s in, I don’t go in there. Probably it’s all right. She keeps everything very clean.

Unmistakably he was a man adrift in a woman’s house: he picked things up warily, opened the cupboards and used the kettle and found the milk with a frown of irritated unusedness, surprised at finding himself going through these motions of service. If he had grandchildren — he was the sort of age where you expect grandchildren — he had certainly never looked after them: he poured scalding-hot tea the same for everyone, in china cups. Clare had surreptitiously to top them off under the cold tap.

The house was old and rambling but done up, overdone: a thick tide of fitted carpet and knickknacks had overflowed into every nook and corner. Going upstairs they had to pick their way past nests of tables, lamps with pleated fringed shades, displays of horse brasses, baby-sized wicker chairs, a collection of miniature silhouettes, a cabinet of china thimbles, vases of silk flowers. Lily was smitten with a display of collectable teddies in an alcove. Up under the roof was a big low-beamed pink room with a double bed, two single beds, a television, and a scatter of those wornout ornaments people put in a room they never use themselves. The man brought Clare a pile of flowery sheets, irritably flustered as to whether they were singles or doubles. She fiddled with unfolding them, pretending she could tell.

— Is your wife away somewhere nice? she asked. The woman’s presence in her house was as overwhelming as if she’d stood large and loud among the ornaments in the corner of each landing. Staying with friends?

— Friends of hers. What are you going to do about your things?

— The kids will be delighted with a night off from tooth-brushing. And we’ll just sleep in our underclothes. She suddenly blushed. I mean they can. I’ll get my bag when I go with the AA man.

He came back in a few minutes with something else for her: a nightdress to match the house, layered and florid with a huge tulip pattern in pink and blue and a blue satin ribbon threaded through broderie anglaise at the neck.

— You could get inside that twice over, he said. But I suppose it’ll be better than nothing, so to speak.

He was very deadpan; Clare didn’t know quite how much she was supposed to acknowledge the risqué joke, if it was a joke.

* * *

SHE SAT WITH HIM in the sitting room while she was waiting for the AA, and she decided he might be quite drunk, quietly drunk. She and her disaster had intruded on a solitary pleasure ritual, with his whisky and his jazz; perhaps he did this every night while his wife was away.

— Actually, she’s left me, he told her. Again.

— Again?

— She goes every six months or so. It makes for a funny kind of marriage. She’s not my first wife. Or my second, for that matter. I’ve no objection to her going off. But there is a down side to the arrangement.

— Well, I should think so. It must be very emotionally draining.

— Which is that she comes back.

— Oh, I see.

Clare could see he might have been a charmer, to have several wives. He had the crinkled-up eyes of someone habitually socially humorous and one of those dark quick faces that might have been as appealing as an alert little bird; she thought of a sort of charm formed in an era when men murmured dangerous sharp things into the ears of women with bare shoulders and dangling earrings whose role it was to be shocked and excited. He had no illusions that it would work with her, nor any interest in her beyond the most perfunctory. He didn’t even offer her a whisky.

The sitting room was done in gold, with gold and pink upholstery and pink velvet curtains; a contemporary landscape in oils hung above the teak fireplace, lit from above by a brass strip light as if it were in an exhibition. Clare worried that her wet jeans might leave a stain on the cushions of the sofa. She was curious about how the man accommodated himself inside the shell of his absent wife’s taste. He was submissive to her arrangements, using her coasters for his glass, fetching the dustpan for some ash that fell from the end of his slim panatella: obedient but perhaps resentful. The music (not Glenn Miller but Duke Ellington; Clare read the CD cover) coiled out of the stereo system like a snake of dissent, a last word unanswerable because spoken in an unknown language. His privacy merely used the convenience of the place so lovingly-smotheringly put together.

— Do you like jazz? he asked her.

— I don’t know much about it. I like John Coltrane, and Miles Davis.

She had said the wrong thing — or the right thing. He gave her a smile from behind his smoke that made her know she had given herself away somehow; he had set her a test of taste that he was pleased she had failed.

* * *

CLARE DIDN’T NEED to go out with the AA man. He found the car, looked at the engine, arranged for it to be towed away, and gave her a telephone number for the garage. She phoned her mother and arranged for her to come and collect them from the bed-and-breakfast in the morning; they’d drive on to the cottage and Marian would stay with them for the weekend.

— Do you want me to come and get you now? Marian asked.

— Oh, no, it’s much too late, we’re fine here for the night.

But when she put the phone down she felt a pain of childish homesickness and fear of the strange place. The house made her breathless and hot, as if it were hermetically sealed. There was no lock on the inside of the door of the family room. She undressed hastily and, overcoming an instinctive distaste, pulled the other woman’s nightdress over her head. It was huge on her: ludicrous and demeaning, changing her from herself, as she verified in the mirror in the tiny damp-smelling connected bathroom. There was also a streak of mud on her cheek, which must have been there all the time she sat downstairs. She would far rather have slept in her T-shirt and pants, but she submitted to the humiliation of the nightdress as if the man exacted it as a price for the inconvenience she had caused him. She spread out her clothes alongside the children’s on the radiators, rubbed at her teeth with a finger wet under the tap. Her hair was drying in frizzy chunks and she had no brush.

The children’s heads on their pillows were cast about in exaggerated abandonment to sleep. They snored and groaned. At the low casement window, where she had forgotten to draw the curtains, a huge nursery-rhyme moon rolled out of the clouds. She pushed at the window but couldn’t work out how to unfasten the catch and didn’t want to make a noise; if she pressed her face to the cool glass she could hear the rain, which dripped off the trees and was swallowed up by the soft earth.

Behind her, outside the door of the room, a floorboard creaked.

She didn’t ever seriously, really, think the man was coming for her.

But she held her breath long enough for the whole spectrum of possibilities to reel through her awareness: the unlikeliness of his trying anything with all the children in the room; his having drunk so much that such a rational consideration wouldn’t deter him; the reassurance that her mother knew where she was; that compromising nightdress, as if he might mistake her having put it on for an invitation. As for his disdain for her, that could work either way: could make him not want to touch her with a barge pole or could make him need to punish her for being — what? — young, ugly, indifferent to him? Or simply for being female.