Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

To her dismay Clare found herself imagining it.

— I can always tell when he likes someone. And we’ve done three in a bed.

Clare genuinely shrank in disapproval from all this: even talking about it seemed to her a betrayal of what she believed was her grown-up self, watching over the kind of sacred bedroom secrets decent grown-up couples share. At the same time she was seized with curiosity urgent as a cramp: she noted that Helly presumed that David didn’t like her, or she surely would have mentioned it.

— With another woman?

— Yes.

— God, Helly. What was that like?

— Oh, well, you know: strange and familiar.

— Strange and familiar? So what was strange?

— You ought to try it.

— No, thank you. I’m quite happy as I am.

— Do you know what I found the other day? Helly said suddenly, with a blithe quick laugh. I found a little box of earrings.

— Earrings?

— Among David’s things. Just single earrings. At first I thought maybe he had had his ear pierced at some point, but I asked him and he hadn’t. Anyway, some of these just weren’t that sort of earring, not that a man would wear.

— So what on earth do you think?

— I think he’s collected them. In the past. From other women.

— You’re joking. Like trophies?

— Not exactly like trophies. That would be too ridiculous. More like souvenirs.

— Oh, no, said Clare. Surely not. That can’t be.

— I didn’t tell him I found them. The box was dusty, down at the bottom of a drawer full of old things, and the earrings were sort of dingy, the shine had gone off them. There wasn’t anything very good. So I don’t think he collects them anymore. And anyway maybe I made it all up in the first place: he could have them for any odd reason. Perhaps he had an old girlfriend with only one ear pierced and she left them.

— How many were there?

— I didn’t want to count. I don’t know. Quite a lot; they were all in a tangle together. I put them back and I haven’t looked at them again.

— It doesn’t matter anyway, said Clare. As you say, it was probably all years and years ago.

* * *

THERE IS A minute or two on the video where Toby catches David sitting alone in the front room in the not-so-comfortable chair. David looks up at him and then away again, absorbed in thinking about something. He’s photogenic; all those things about him that seem exaggerated and overeager in the flesh — the hard curved cheekbones, the standing-up thick hair, the big mouth full of talk — are toned down by the camera. Clare rewinds the video (this is weeks later, when Toby sends her a copy of his final version). She likes his smile, the lazy look he gives Toby, lids half closed, eyebrows raised, long cheeks in shadow. She rewinds it because she can’t work out what he’s doing in there. He isn’t — he might have been — taking a few relieved minutes off from a dull afternoon to commune with his precious laptop or check his e-mail. This is after he brings the children back from their trip in his special car that rises up on its wheels. (Lily’s face at the door was portentous with tales to tell of how he drove along entertaining them by making it dance, taking his foot on and off the brake in time to the music on his stereo. Coco was disgusted at his showing off. Only Rose liked him, she chose him, there on the beach, Rose the child Clare thinks of as most like herself.) Helly is in the kitchen helping Clare get supper ready (only not helping much). Bram is taking a shower. The children are playing something noisy on the stairs that involves tipping out all the contents of the toy basket (it’s one of those moments where she wishes they had telly).

David is looking at her books. He isn’t looking at them as a reader might, getting close to see the titles, pulling them out and opening them up. He isn’t a reader, he’s hardly read anything, she’s already worked that out. He’s just sitting with his head thrown back and one leg propped across the other, surveying her books with a kind of thoughtful smile as if he’s putting together an idea of the sort of person who might want to read them all, someone whose life was hidden under these covers.

Clare feels slightly uneasy, and amused, watching him look. He may of course have completely the wrong idea of what is in her books. People who don’t read often imagine that a life lived with books is serenely truthful, perhaps rather idealistic, elevated to a higher sphere above the trickeries and treacheries of real life. Combined with the children, and the little house without television, and the making of her own bread and the salting of lemons, the books may make him think she is wholesome and sane. He may think he is much more devious than she is.

* * *

THREE DAYS AFTER the visit an envelope came in the post addressed to Clare. Bram had left for work, she was on her way to walk the kids to school, pinning Rose down in her stroller to fasten her straps. She didn’t recognize the handwriting: she tore it open, shouting at Coco to get his lunch box. Inside, wrapped in a slip of tissue paper, was a single earring. Of course.

As soon as she got home from delivering the children she dug out an old jewel box she kept in a drawer in her bedroom (the box had once played music and been her grandmother’s); inside was a jumble of souvenirs and junk, museum tickets, suitcase keys, bills from cafés she and Bram had been to in Venice and Stockholm, picture hooks, the tassel from an old embroidered belt. She scrabbled in the mess of tarnished damaged jewelry and thumbtacks at the bottom of the box and found the matching earring to the one she had been sent. It was black, of course, gothic black and silver: to go with the lipstick and the nails.

She would never have recognized him; it was only when Helly told her about his collection of souvenirs that she remembered what had happened at that party of Tim Dashwood’s. David had never given her any sign, all weekend, that he remembered. If he had said anything, or even looked significantly at her, the whole thing would only have been funny or embarrassing. As it was, the broken token that had been restored (that’s how Clare thought of it; she kept the two earrings buried far apart from one another in different hiding places) seemed to have an exaggerated power to frighten and excite her, so that for a while she simply didn’t know what would happen to her next, or what she might do.

* * *

ONCE, TOBY found an ax.

It was when he was about twelve; he was playing one evening with a gang of other boys in a grassed-over area with benches and young trees near his home. They were not allowed to play football there but they did, until late, until it was too dim to see the heaps of their coats used as goalposts, and their shouts bounced eerily against a sky slipping higher and higher away from them behind the dark.

Toby went to fetch the ball from behind some bushes and found a small cairn of pale stones, each about hand-sized, neatly built in a concealed place between the bushes and a wall. The pile was as high as his knees; he almost fell over it, looking for the ball. He crouched down beside it and began taking off the stones one by one to find out what was underneath. He could hear the other boys calling, and then one of them broke through the bushes and breathed strenuously down at him.

— Where’s the ball, Tobe, man?

— I want to find what’s underneath.

— Underneath wha’?

The boy bent down to watch Toby’s painstaking dismantling. The others pushed in and soon they were all, five of them, pressed into the awkward space between the bushes and the wall, watching. You could see the stones because they were pale in the murky light, like Toby’s hands moving them.

— Who made it? one of them asked.