Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

— She’s not safe to drive, he thought. But then he’d often thought that.

The red Fiesta passed him and she never even glanced in his direction. At that moment, as she passed within yards of where he sat staring, she looked quite grotesque, terrifying; her face was distorted and working and her mouth was wide open. She must be groaning and moaning: howling, even. He supposed he’d seen her like that, suffering like that, in childbirth; only then she had had everyone on her side, and all the admiring nurses around her, encouraging her. The Fiesta windows were closed and so were his and it was windy, so he couldn’t hear anything. Then she was past him. She turned left at the end of the road, on her way back into town to pick up Daniel and Katie.

He got out of the car, walked up to the red door, and rang the bell. After a while he rang again. Someone came down the stairs inside and the door opened. He looked at the man who opened it with astonishment: it was no one he knew, none of the various friends and colleagues of Linda’s he’d run in mental review before his fears. This man was in his late forties or early fifties, not tall, with thick neatly combed gray hair and a mustache and a pleasant, wide face, the kind of face you repose your trust in when it belongs to a lawyer or a bank manager, bland and prosperously tanned. Only his nose was rather small; it tipped up at the end and was somehow demeaning, Graham thought, as if it betrayed effeminacy or a lack of soul. He was wearing suit trousers and a blue office shirt and tie, and he was in his socks. There were no marks on him: no traces of turmoil or upheaval to match what Graham had seen a few moments before on Linda.

The man was looking at Graham in astonishment.

— Yes?

Something in his surprise made Graham sure this wasn’t his home — it didn’t look like a home, anyway, not for a man like him: the stairs behind him were covered in a cheap sagging carpet that smelled, and there were no pictures. He couldn’t have expected anyone to have rung the bell for him; he must have thought it was Linda coming back.

— I was looking for Graham, Graham said. I thought Graham lived here.

He hadn’t known he was going to say this: he had had no plan in his mind when he rang the bell.

— No, no one of that name, said the man thoughtfully, warily.

— You don’t know where he lives, then? I was sure it was here.

It seemed to Graham that the man began to guess something then: or at least that a disconcerting but bizarre and unlikely possibility had occurred to him. He must have known what Linda’s husband’s name was. To his credit he did not begin to shut the door on him; on the contrary, he probably held it open a little longer and more accommodatingly than their conversation superficially warranted.

— I’m sorry. I can’t help you.

— Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter, Graham said, and they stood confronted a few moments longer, until it was ridiculous for the man not to begin to close the door.

Graham asked, And you are…?

The man hesitated. It was absurd to ask, of course.

— I’m Des. Desmond, he said uncomfortably.

— Oh. Thank you.

* * *

HE NEVER TRIED that name on Linda. He kept it for himself.

But over the weekend they sat out together in the garden, and he did take the opportunity to mention the spark plugs and the car. They were waiting for Clare, Graham’s oldest daughter, who was bringing her children to stay with them for the weekend because her grandfather, her mother’s father, had died, and she wanted to help her mother make all the arrangements. Graham had filled the paddling pool, and Anna and Katie and Daniel were jumping in and out of it, squealing and shrieking.

— Did I tell you old Stan was retiring?

Linda was sitting on the plaid rug on the grass, rubbing sun cream into her legs and feet.

— Oh, dear, she said sympathetically. Does that mean we’ll have to find someone else to do the cars? We’ll never find anyone else as nice as Stan. Or as cheap.

— It doesn’t exactly. He’s going to go on doing a bit of work from home; he’s got just about enough room in their place at Stoke Upton. That’s where I took the car on Thursday, actually, only I forgot to tell you.

— Do my shoulders? she said, handing him the sun cream, piling her hair up and holding it out of his way, bending her neck. Stoke Upton? Where’s that?

He didn’t answer, he concentrated on massaging the cream into her freckled white shoulders and the tops of her arms until it disappeared. He rolled the straps of her shirt carefully down off her shoulders so as not to miss any place where she might burn.

— I need a hat, she said. A sun hat for this summer. One of those wonderful great big cartwheel ones, a sort of Audrey Hepburn hat, you know, joyous and exuberant. Do you know the kind I mean?

— A hat?

— A hat. A really special hat.

— I see.

Clare, in dark glasses and laden with bags, emerged with her children out from the passage down the side of the house, and Graham sat back, screwing the top onto the tube of cream.

— So when did Stan say he was getting the spark plugs in? Linda asked him hastily, as if in a last binding exchange of domestic necessity before the frivolities of sociability intervened.

— Tuesday, Graham said.

— OK.

— I’ll go out there Tuesday morning.

— OK.

— Otherwise he said the engine’s fine.

Clare put down her bags on the rug, looking lean, distracted, impatient (she was leaving her husband and had embarked on an unpromising new relationship with the supervisor for her PhD). Rose was already tearing all her clothes off for the pool; Lily was stamping her foot and starting a sulk because they hadn’t brought their bathing suits. Clare looked at them, frowning, as if she were looking through them.

— Wear your underwear, she said.

Lily winced and delicately colored. Mummy! How can you?

— How are you all? Linda commiserated. How’s Marian? Is she coping? Your grandfather was such an extraordinary man, a beautiful spirit. We all should have venerated him. I can find Lily a suit, don’t worry about it.

— Mum is so bereft and distraught, Clare said to Graham. When you think what a burden Grandpa’s been. And he could be so horrid to her. But she’s in a dreadful state.

— Poor dear old Marian, said Linda. She’s such a saint.

There was a certain way Graham’s older daughters had of sometimes staring hard and smilingly at nothing, widening their eyes (he could tell Clare’s were widening even behind the dark glasses); he knew very well this was their comment on Linda. Their disapproval was another thing he had imperceptibly to protect her from.

— But you’d be surprised, said Linda. Some of these very independent-seeming career women, the extent to which they’ve actually bought in to the whole patriarchal thing.

— I suppose I would, said Clare. He surprised, I mean.

Anna and Lily became inseparable for the afternoon. Solemn-faced and with arms draped over one another’s shoulders, they maintained a dignified distance from the wild game of plunging and throwing water that the others had begun in the pool.

— Aren’t you just dreading when they start mooning around over boys? Linda said to Clare.

She brought out a heap of old clothes from the house for the girls to dress up in, including her wedding dress, the one she’d been married in the first time, to the surgeon husband: it was long and white and Princess Diana — inspired, and Anna and Lily dragged around the garden magnificently in it in turns until it was covered in grass stains.

* * *

THAT NIGHT Linda woke Graham, urgently, out of deep sleep.

— Gray? Wake up! I’m frightened! I’ve had a really horrible dream.