Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— Yes, she said. Wait. Wait till the croissants are done. D’you want milky coffee?

She poured him coffee and doled out croissants and put butter and jam on the table: she was drinking peppermint tea, she didn’t do any croissants for herself. He was swamped with shame at the thought that he could not survive his grief if he lost her. He thought this was just how she would arrange to tell them she was dying.

— I’m having a baby, she said.

— A baby?

— Oh, Mummy! Anna slid from her chair into her mother’s arms and dissolved into tears.

— You funny thing! Linda laughed at her. Isn’t it good news?

— You can’t be! said Graham.

— That’s what I thought. At my age. I couldn’t believe it. But I have it on oath from Dr. Donald.

— But he won’t let you. He’ll forbid it. You can’t possibly go through that again.

— He says he’s not worried, as long as I take it easy.

— My God! The man’s a criminal! What does he think he’s playing at?

— Graham.… Linda slid her hand across his where it was clenched on the table and smiled at him significantly with her head tilted onto one shoulder, as if she were trying to reach a difficult patient. Don’t spoil it. I’m so happy. Don’t make it difficult for me. You should be pleased for us. You know I love babies. Eat your croissants.

She did love babies. She adored the whole apparatus of that period of early babyhood and had never looked quite so completed and triumphant as when she bore home from hospital the latest squalling mite in its white shawls.

Obediently, Graham and Anna began to eat.

— Anna will have to start thinking of names. What shall we have, Annie, a boy or a girl?

— I don’t mind, said Anna stoutly, though tears still stood in her eyes. I love both. I’m so glad it’s a baby.

— But it’s out of the question, Graham insisted. Apart from all the medical implications, we don’t have the space.

— Don’t be silly. Remember, I grew up with my three sisters in one tiny bedroom.

— Exactly. Exactly my point.

When he thought about what he feared in Linda he often thought about that room. He’d seen it — Linda’s mother still lived in the same house — and it was unimaginably too small for the four grown women he knew, all of them nearly six feet tall, domineering, voluble, two redheads, two brunettes. Fighting when they were teenagers for the space to dress and undress, do their homework, manage their periods, daydream, they seemed to have developed a kind of generous fever-heated ruthlessness toward one another with which they proceeded once they were out of the room to manage the other people in their lives.

— Anyway, said Linda, I don’t know why you’re talking as if there’s any question. It’s not a question. It’s a fait accompli.

* * *

IT SURPRISED HIM afterward just how long it took for the penny to drop. He must have gone around for several hours that day simply worrying about Linda and rehearsing practicalities: he went shopping, he remembered, to buy bread and things for supper and cough mixture for Anna, and the sun still hadn’t broken through the dirty-gray cotton-wool sky. The single thought when it finally arrived — he was bent down unpacking vegetables into the salad compartment in the fridge — dropped like a coin into its slot and instantly set in motion all its consequences in his mind, coarse and farcical as one of those pier-end automated peep shows of his childhood.

He and Linda hadn’t had sex for weeks.

Weeks and weeks: how many? Certainly not since she had been feeling ill — morning sickness, of course (how could he have missed it?). But before that, for how many weeks? Months, even? He remembered specifics from the last time, little agitating shots and glimpses, he always remembered: but he couldn’t place it in relation to anything else that would give him an exact day or a weekend. Until it came to him that he had opened his drawer to look for clean pajamas afterward and had been pleased at the sight of the Christmas present he’d bought her, a fine gray wool pash-mina shawl, still in its plastic carrier, waiting to be wrapped.

— So when’s your delivery date? he casually asked her.

— Oh, Dr. Donald’s not sure, because my periods have been so funny recently. He said to wait for the scan.

Graham wanted to ask, How many periods have you missed, exactly? But he bit his lip.

— So when’s the scan?

— God, darling, I don’t know. Don’t fuss. Two or three weeks or something.

Was he sure, was he absolutely sure that that was the last time, that time before Christmas?

He was almost sure.

The excitement of this almost-certainty, the presence inside him of this might-not-be momentous secret, was bizarre, breathtaking. At moments he almost wanted to catch Linda’s eye and giggle with her at this game that they surely could not sustain: as if she had done something naughty which of course because they were grown-ups she was going to own up to sooner or later. But she didn’t give any sign of a desire to own up to anything whatsoever; and meanwhile ordinary life rearranged itself impeccably and convincingly around their new circumstances.

— You should be proud of yourself, she said in the dark one night, snuggled against him, pressing her toes on his. Fathering a child in your sixties. Doesn’t it make you feel patriarchal? Like Picasso?

He was almost too distracted to answer. He was puzzling perplexedly over whether she would have the audacity to say this to him if she knew he hadn’t fathered it at all; then he thought of how inventively and inveterately those girls in that little bedroom must have had to lie in order to protect their secret lives from one another.

He could have asked her, in the dark, Is it mine?

But the words would not quite form themselves into real sounds in the air between them. And anyway, he never felt sure any longer that anything was his, definitely his.

* * *

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT depended upon an extraordinary coincidence. Graham had a problem with the car; the engine was missing and dying at traffic lights. Stan, who had fixed his cars for him for thirty years, had moved location recently; or, rather, he had semiretired and now was just doing a few jobs as favors for old customers in the garage at the back of his house. Graham arranged to take the car out there one morning at eleven for Stan to have a look. Stan lived in Stoke Upton, which although it must have been part of the city for a hundred years somehow clung on to a few signs of rusticity: a scrubby patch of grass like a village green in front of a row of failing-looking shops, a field with horses in it beside the Texaco garage, and — between the fifties council housing and the modern estates — a few little old streets that meandered lazily according to some other logic than town planning. It was a place people came out to walk with their dogs by the river on Sundays: dog shit everywhere.

Graham discussed this very subject with Stan while he was revving the engine and Stan was looking under the bonnet.

— I stand there and watch them, said Stan. I say to them, This is my front garden, you know. But they’ve got no shame. I’ve taken to carrying a plastic bag in my pocket. I offer it to them, to take it home with them or put it into one of those bins. Some do. But some of them just look right through you, as if they weren’t even connected to the bloody dog at the other end of the leash they’re holding.

Stan was somewhat diminished, Graham thought, working from home and on his own: he remembered the racier and more anarchic repartee at the place in town. Mrs. Stan was just visible, spraying something on her roses, through the trellis that firmly separated the oil-dark garage from the garden.