Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— Caftans and Cabernet Sauvignon.…

A woman in a white dress and bare feet stepped out through the French doors and came toward them, carrying something with concentration in her hands. Graham guessed she was drunk from how she stepped out across the gravelly path and the flower bed as unfalteringly as if they were carpet. A few people crowded in the door behind her. He thought she must be coming for Mark, and he moved himself just very slightly out of her trajectory, smiling the avuncular smile.

She didn’t smile.

She was dressed to attract attention: her white dress was unbuttoned down to between her breasts and slit up to her thighs, pinched in at the waist with a wide elastic belt. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a tangled bird’s nest of curls; it was too dark to see its color, which was bright orange. But other things he could see — skin of that slightly blemished luminous paleness, long complicated ears, bony boyish shoulders and big hands — suggested the type and the orange hair along with it. He could see even in the dark that she wasn’t exactly beautiful. She wasn’t curvaceous enough, really, for the revealing dress; but on the other hand she carried it off with confidence; she walked in it as though she were a priestess involved in a rite or had a part in a play. She was actually — this is probably what Graham thought, that first look — scary, formidable. He would probably have avoided her if she hadn’t been heading straight for him: not for Mark, it turned out, but for him.

She held out to him whatever it was she had in her hands.

— Apparently I’ve broken one of your bowls. They tell me it was yours.

Her voice was drunken, too: not slurred but challenging.

She was carefully carrying a pile of five or six huge jagged pieces of thin pale glazed pot. Graham felt Mark glance quickly at him, perhaps to see how he took the loss of his work. He didn’t recognize the broken pieces in the slightest, had had no idea the Marshalls owned anything of his. (Should he have been more polite about their taste?) He took the pieces from her in dismay.

— Never mind about the bowl. You shouldn’t be carrying these nasty things around. You’ll cut your hands to ribbons.

— I’m an idiot. Forgive me. It was nice. You won’t believe me, but really I had looked at it and thought, There’s one real, good, pure, true thing. You’ll think I made that up, though.

— Thank you. Thank you retrospectively for the bowl that’s gone. And believe me, I had forgotten it existed, until you put an end to it. Let’s see your hands.

He was pulling out his handkerchief to wipe her hands if she was bleeding: suitably avuncular, he thought (she was his wife’s age). She sank to her knees on the grass in front of him and embraced his legs, resting her face against his thigh so that he was looking down into the bird’s nest of hair.

— I’ve come to do penance, she said. What can I give you to make up for what I’ve done?

There were cheers from the people crowded in the French windows. Mark laughed, pushing his hands boyishly in his trouser pockets with the unmistakable slight excitement and bravado of sexual envy. I don’t get women breaking my pictures, he said.

— This is the one great advantage of ceramics, said Graham.

— Now he tells me.

— I could sleep with you tonight, she said. I’ve had a row with my husband anyway. He’s gone home to his mother. That’s the kind of marriage we have.

— Well, said Graham, looking down at her bemusedly. It was only one bowl. Though I’d have to say, it looks as though it might have been a good one. I’m sure we could come to an arrangement.

An idea that he would like to see that tangle of hair nestled against his thigh under different circumstances stirred in some deep chamber of his thoughts.

— Or I could dance with you, she said muffledly. For starters. I’m Linda, by the way.

— Don’t mind me, old man, said Mark. I’d hate to get between you and a lady’s penance.

Graham flattered himself he did a passable township jive. He helped Linda up and wiped her hands, which were indeed bloody from one long but shallow cut across the ball of her left thumb, which he tried to tie with his handkerchief (afterward he found her blood on his trousers where she had embraced him, and he tried to soak them, which was how Naomi got suspicious and the whole thing came out). He followed her into the room where people were dancing, slightly apprehensive that he might be expected to jump around a lot, but she hung herself languorously around his neck so that they moved in a slow waltzlike counterpoint to the poignant happy-time music.

He was very discreet. These were his wife’s friends. He made his courteous farewells and left the party early, but Linda followed him out twenty minutes later as he had suggested she should and he drove her to her home, where they had sex in her marital bed under a reproduction of a Robert Doisneau photograph of adolescents kissing beside the Seine. (He had had in the years since then — discreetly, again, discreetly — to gradually filter out the worst of the pictures and things she brought to the house they moved into together.)

He remembered distinctly the twenty minutes he waited for her in his car. He nearly drove off without waiting; he was sure anyway she wouldn’t come. He sobered up in the presence of so many reminders of his real life: the petrol smell from the leak in the fuel pipe he had to take in for mending tomorrow; Naomi’s incorrigible clutter of tissues and beads and apple core and headache pills on the dashboard; the girls’ perfumes still lingering from when he’d given them and their friends a lift into town earlier (all dressed up, as he had put it to them, like a parcel of whores); the dried mud lozenges fallen off Toby’s football boots. His middle age was rich and flavorsome and sustaining as a mulch; he couldn’t quite believe in himself sitting there still hoping for this quite other thing that ought to belong to youth: dicey, raw, stupid, intoxicating. He felt as if he had just discovered in himself — after all the reassurance of the sober years — an addiction dangerous as gambling or alcohol.

After the sex, when he was trying out for the first time the orange of her hair against the muddy skin of his arm and noting the incipient vulnerable sore at the edge of the lips he had sucked on, he asked Linda what she did for a living. She told him she was headmistress of the adolescent unit at the psychiatric hospital. At every turn she was powerful, more powerful than he would ever have chosen for himself; she was not the sort of woman he would ever have approached. Again he was scared and felt he was in deep water.

* * *

AND HE WAS. She was deeper water than he had ever entered, and she closed over his head. Now, when they had been together for years and looked as settled as any other married couple (their oldest child was ten), he was still in a state of perpetual exhilarated anxiety about her. He feared so many things.

He feared of course that she would go off with another man. She was not really beautiful. Filled out by a lesser spirit, her face and figure could have been merely freckled and worthy and worn and proletarian: she sometimes made him think of Walker Evans’s photographs of farmers’ wives in the American dustbowl. She was knobbly and skinny rather than smooth; the end of her nose was prone to redness and soreness; she was one of those women who can look spectacular or can look dreadful, if they put on the wrong clothes (and her taste was not infallible, nor did she much care what she wore). But men (some men, enough men for him to fear) liked her. Leggy and gangling, black mascara on gingery lashes, the first signs of aging (she was forty-five now) naked on her face, she held court: at work or at home, where there were always visitors, usually male visitors. She said she liked women, but she didn’t have many women friends.