Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

So Tony had phoned her.

Had bothered to phone her, in fact, twice: he must have tried her at home or at Marian’s first and got the cottage number from Bram or from Tamsin. He would be phoning to give her the name of that book. But she also knew, with a flash of that passional intuition nineteenth-century writers make so much of, that by the end of the conversation he would casually suggest that they should meet for a drink sometime. She would of course say yes. And that would be the beginning of something between them. This was a thrill, a bliss, flattering her, opening up infinite new possibilities, shoring her up. There was never any chance of her refusing it.

But in the split seconds before she stood up and ran down the stairs to talk to him — they were like those elastic seconds that are supposed to be given to the drowning, to review their lives — she was sorry. Was this all the freedom she had meant, pulling on her wet jeans that morning? Love, again? All those emotional entanglements poised ready to fall into place: the jubilations and the raptures, the tugs and rendings and abasements, all quite outside the jurisdiction of her suspicious separate self. It would be good to refuse, to choose instead, like George Sand retiring to Nohant-Vicq after all those lovers, the sounder happiness of gardening, cooking, children, books. It would be good to set out on the road like the old Tolstoy trying to leave the fraudulent fantasies of lust behind. Not going back to Bram, but not changing him for another man either.

But that would have to wait, she thought. After all, she was only twenty-nine.

Absurd, anyway, absurd. Probably he was only phoning to give her the name of the book.

She picked up the phone, spoke warily as if to the unknown.

— Yes?

GRAHAM MET his third wife, Linda, at a party.

He hadn’t even wanted to go to the party, he was too old for parties. It had been Naomi, his second wife, who wanted to go, and because he worried sometimes that his middle age must weigh inhibitingly on her youthful need for a social life (she was twenty years younger), he braced himself to accompany her uncomplainingly. Then, in the afternoon of the day of the party, Naomi started to get a sore throat and a headache. He could remember standing in their kitchen while she made herself a drink of lemon and honey and dithered, with genuine disappointment, over whether she felt well enough to go.

— The one time I manage to get a baby-sitter on a Saturday!

The kitchen door stood open onto the brick-paved herb garden, and from outside came something — at this distance in time he’d lost the specificity of what it was; it might have been a trill of birdsong, or a finger of breeze that slipped under his shirt, or a smell of green things — something that as he ran his eye down the Radio Times to see if there was anything to watch on television instead made him make up his mind, to his own surprise, to go to the party anyway, whether she was sick or not. Naomi was surprised at him too, and of course he registered (although he studiously pretended not to) the little hard gleam of anxious jealousy that kindled instantly in her stare.

— Of course I don’t mind. I just didn’t think you were that keen. You hardly know them …

But he was suddenly subject to an unexpected stir of that restless ennui he thought he had forgotten.

He took it for granted that he would be disappointed; that his ennui would be just as ennuyé out as it might have been at home. He had found himself at parties recently taking on the role of someone avuncular who stood back and watched and considered and approved (or, worse, disapproved). It went with his height and his curling gray beard and — most of all, he supposed — with his age, his fifty-plus years; but it had happened without his intending it or liking it. One said and did the same things as one always had, and they were taken differently; the stream had flowed past him and was leaving him behind. Of course some people usually knew he was “the potter” (he had always eschewed the phony professionalism of “ceramicist”—which probably also dated him). That helped out with the problematic dignity of the avuncular role. But these days he had to mount careful guard against a pleased vanity when he was recognized and shyly admired or loudly lionized. There had been a time he’d hated to talk about his work; now he was afraid he liked talking about it too much.

He didn’t, indeed, know many people at the party that night, and they were mostly much younger than he was. If Naomi had been with him these things might have been the source of a patiently controlled irritation; as it was, alone, he found himself rather enjoying his alcohol-fueled prowl around the rooms, the fragments of vivid irresponsible contact with strangers, the cat-pee thin trace of pot woven in and out of an air thick with spiced food and incense. His hosts were the couple who owned the shop Naomi worked in, businesslike ex-hippies who traveled in India and North Africa and the Far East buying goods to sell; she had hennaed hair cut to hang across her eyes, and he had skin so tanned it looked smoked, a dark stubble like ink dots, and finely incised laughter lines. When hippies made money they didn’t exactly change their look, but it acquired a deeper tone and a glossy finish. The inside of their stolid Victorian house was rich with curiosities, hangings and paintings and dishes and glassware, much better things than ever went into the shop. It was a fine night: the windows and doors of the house were thrown open as far as they would go, the party had spilled out into the garden, and clumps of guests drew close together talking as the dark came down, louder and more animated and warmly intimate as they lost the precision of one another’s faces. Their host lit big torches stuck into the earth of the flower beds; they burned smokily with colored flames, illuminating shocked-pale bushes of rose and clematis.

From the room where people were dancing to what sounded like South African township music (so the craze for that had come round again, had it?) there came a crash, a scream, voices raised in laughter, consternation, reassurance. Graham was in the garden talking to a young colleague from the College of Art he’d bumped into unexpectedly. Mark Elstree was a painter whose work Graham particularly disliked. He had been holding forth only the other day to someone about the defeat for visual meaning in an art that depended upon explanations in words and about a generation of painters who couldn’t draw; so it was strange that meeting him at the party Graham had been pleased to see him and to be seen there. Mark stood out rather stylishly against the background of ethnic dresses and collarless shirts; he had his hair shaved close to his well-shaped skull (because it was receding, Graham suspected) and was dressed in a suit with narrow lapels and a tie whose knot he had pulled half undone. Tentatively he offered Graham a share of his joint.

— I don’t know if you’re interested in this.…

Graham, inhaling under the night sky, could smell — mingled with the pot and the smoking torches — green things again, earth.

— So how do you know the Marshalls?

— My wife works for them, as a matter of fact.

— But she’s not here?

— No, she didn’t feel well this afternoon; she seems to be developing a sore throat.

— They’ve got some incredible stuff. Not exactly my style, though.

— Not exactly my style either. For all their impeccable political correctness, there’s an unmistakable aura of heaped-up booty, isn’t there?

Mark laughed delightedly at the sky. Plunder.

He seemed genuinely respectfully interested in what Graham thought; although it was perfectly possible that out of earshot in another conversation he might have condemned him as an old dinosaur or lightly dismissed his work as catering for the craft-fair end of the market.