Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

Needless to say, at one far end of the spectrum of possibilities there flashed the irresistibly lurid vision of him standing out there with a shining machete and a homicidal light in his eyes, intending to hack them all to pieces.

She felt — not in her heart exactly, but in the pit of her chest where lungs and heart lift above the material base of the guts — the clench of that inward gesture that must be the beginning of praying. She wished she could pray. There was a movement outward from inside her, a beseeching, like a sick-making flutter of trapped wings.

— Help me, she tried, silently. The hills from whence cometh my help. I’m making such a mess of things. Yet will I fear no evil, thy rod and staff still comfort me.…

There was only that one giveaway creak from outside the door. If the man was ever there, he went away again.

Prayer addressed itself involuntarily, it seemed, to a male auditor: “rod and staff” gave the game away. Whatever goddesses she knew — Isis, Artemis, Aphrodite, Kali — she only knew vaguely from books. She couldn’t talk to them: and anyway, capricious, ruthless, vain, requiring flattering propitiations, they weren’t the ones she sought; she wanted a moralizing good God. There was the Blessed Virgin, but she was on the side of the salt of the earth, the ignorant and the weak, and would surely disapprove of Clare’s sophisticated modern problems. To her surprise (what kind of feminist was she?) Clare was overcome by a passionate longing to lie down in the bosom of a wisdom different from her own, deep-resonanced and subtle and fatherly.

She should go back to Bram.

Standing watching the door in that ugly and hostile pink room (it was a pink that tried for roses but instead hit something medical, like adhesive dressings) she was visited by a vision of herself going back. The vision was vague but sweet, involving some highly improbable gestures such as her kneeling and pressing Bram’s hand to her cheek, his touching her head with his hand in a kind of absolution, her burying her face in his shirt as he drew her to him so that she didn’t have to meet his eyes (that last one was from literature somewhere). In the vision as in reality she was wearing the blue tulip nightdress.

— Forgive me, she imagined herself saying to Bram. I didn’t know what I was doing.

The vision was highly ridiculous. Not only had she never in reality dreamed of asking Bram to forgive her, it had never occurred to her that there was anything she needed to be forgiven for. Everything the breakup had actually been like — the impossible convoluted ferreting out of blames and causations, the twisting of their old knowledge of one another to use in hostilities, the sheer meanness of their unleashed dislike of one another — all that was cleared aside in this vision as if it were finished with, when of course it wasn’t.

But then ridiculous was just what one ought to expect revelation to be; that was the whole point. By definition it couldn’t show you anything you could deduce or arrive at by yourself. It didn’t follow on from anything that had come before, and it changed everything.

She could really do this. Perhaps not in the tulip nightdress, and perhaps not actually kneeling, but she could go to Bram and offer herself, and — even though he might turn her down, even though it might turn out he already loved Helly instead — to do it might be in itself a kind of solution, a blissful simplification, whatever happened. It would be restful to submit to its outcome. Clare already felt a strange bliss in her limbs as she went around the room, picking up the last clothes from the floor, covering the children with their duvets, kissing their sleeping faces. Everything that had been rigid and willed in her movements was now suddenly free and fluid, she thought.

Rose was wrapped up in her bottom sheet like a cocoon and had to be unwound from it, protesting sleepily. In her eagerness not to be a nuisance, Clare had taken all single sheets from the man, too small to tuck in on the double bed: she and Rose spent the night with the sheets wrapped sweatily around their arms and legs or wrinkled in clumps underneath them. All night long in light uneasy sleep, Clare dreamed she was driving. The road wound down a forlorn hillside muffled in a sort of thick gray rain, which then became shrubby furry wet undergrowth and was somehow inside as well as outside the car. Or she was driving on a causeway across an inlet with shallow tepid saltwater full of seaweed washing about to either side of her, suddenly realizing she’d forgotten to check the safe times for crossing.

* * *

THE FIRST THOUGHT her mind reoccupied as she came to consciousness in the morning was this plan for her reconciliation with Bram. It seemed to her instantly factitious and false, sickening: a scene out of a novel, not out of her real life. She felt ashamed at her capacity for this kind of fantasy and at the danger she was always in of acting upon her fantasies and living by them. In contrast, what she felt that morning, waking before any of the children in the strange room, was the welcome abrasiveness of the real. It was bright outside. Pools and glimmers of pink light came and went on the walls. Under her bare feet the carpet was hairy and greasy; all their clothes on the radiators were still soaked, as the central heating had never been turned on. She wet one of the little hand towels in the bathroom to wash herself, then pulled on stiff wet socks, cold pants, heavy jeans, relishing the resistance the clothes offered to her wincing warm flesh. Of course she was not going back, of course not. This was what she had left for, to have adventures in strange houses, to wake up by herself in rooms that weren’t snugly and safely molded to her shape, ugly rooms like dead shells inside which she would know herself more sharply alive.

— I was hopeless last night, she confessed to her mother later. I didn’t know what to do. I got the children out on the road in the dark, and in all that rain. Rose ran in front of a car, it was Coco who grabbed her.

— I’m sure you did the right thing, said Marian, surprised. You took them where they could be dry and warm, in a house where you could phone.

— But what if there hadn’t been a house? Or if the man had been dangerous or something?

— Well, there was a house. And the man seemed perfectly pleasant.

— What if Rose…?

— But she didn’t. Good for Jacob. I’ll have to give him a special lifesaving medal.

* * *

THEY FOUND the garage and picked up Clare’s bags and arranged for her to collect the car later in the week, then drove on to the cottage. Clare was making up beds and Marian was cooking supper when the phone rang. Clare thought it must be Bram. She’d left him her number; perhaps he’d found out somehow about the car. She began to run downstairs but Marian got there first. There was a low crooked window on the landing where she paused to see if the call was indeed for her; she had to drop onto her knees to see through the distorting old panes thick as bottles to where the children were playing in the garden on some parallel bars and a swing. Coco was walking along the top of the bars with his nose screwed up to hold his glasses and his arms outstretched either side for balance, like wings. He was pale because he wasn’t a natural, but he moved in a swift true line because he believed he could do it. Lily was mothering Rose, wrapping her arms around her to hold her safely on the swing; there was a protesting scowl on Rose’s blunt little face and she was pulling busily at Lily’s hands to dig herself out from under the embrace.

— Someone for you, called Marian, grimacing to communicate she didn’t recognize the voice. American? she added in an undertone.

Clare saw air bubbles in the greenish glass between her and the happy scene outside, as if the glass were suddenly more opaque; as if she were looking through it at something that had in those seconds already changed.