Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

It looked utterly desirable — and unimaginable — to be part of that family.

It was still raining; rain perfumed with tarmac hissed and steamed up off the road as the cars passed. Without knowing why she was doing it, Clare trotted after them through the rain, feeling strange without burdens, without books, without children. Helly put up her big striped umbrella — Clare knew it, the one from the Guggenheim — and tried to hold it up over them all, putting Lily and Jacob between her and Bram. They headed away from the library to join the main pedestrianized thoroughfare into town. Clare was so close behind them it was almost odd they didn’t turn around and see her. Rose might easily have looked back over Bram’s shoulder, but instead she sat straight-backed on his arm and scouted out ahead. Clare willed them not to turn around and see her, as if her survival depended on it, and yet she could not tear herself away.

This is the worst thing I’ll ever feel, Clare thought; this is the worst moment I’ll ever have, about leaving.

She knew, of course, that this picture, this composition of wholeness, was not all it seemed. She knew from the children that it was not all going wonderfully well between them and Helly: she knew that Lily had cried herself to sleep one night she was spending over there, wanting Mummy; and that Rose had acted up with Helly whenever Bram had to go out somewhere. She noticed that as they hurried along Jacob never looked Helly in the face even when she spoke to him and put her hand on his shoulder to pull him in under the umbrella. And Helly had taken out her lip ring. Who had told her they didn’t like it? Jacob? Bram?

Really the children were still hers; she hadn’t lost them. It wasn’t quite as bad as this seemed.

* * *

THEY STOPPED; a few paces behind them Clare stopped abruptly too, and had to apologize to someone who walked into her. Helly must be suggesting they find shelter from the rain; they were looking at a cheap place with big plate glass windows that did burgers. It was not the sort of place Bram or Clare would ever have chosen. As if she could hear them, Clare knew the children were asking excitedly if they could have chips. This would make up for the disappointment over the books.

As the others went in, Helly paused on the threshold and turned around to shake out her umbrella. She saw Clare standing there.

— I was behind you at the library, said Clare.

Helly looked found out: guilty and apologetic and also even fed up, as if being followed by Clare was the last straw. It must be hard work, spending the afternoon trying to make up to someone else’s children.

— Oh, she said. What was all that about?

She looked different, as if Bram’s absorption in her was actually changing her into a creature of his kind of flesh. Her face was pale and scrubbed clean, she didn’t have makeup on, she was letting her hair grow out into its natural light brown, her eyes seemed wider apart and paler and startled. Without wanting to, Clare imagined this face with its new fragile tentativeness against the pillows of her old bed. She could even imagine the particular flavor, the excitements — sensitive and nervy and confessional — of their intimacy. These excitements didn’t seem to have much to do with the golden Helly of the ice-cream advertisements.

— Bomb scare, said Clare. They found a suspect package. I overheard them talking to the police.

— What a bore. I mean if it’s just a hoax. After choosing all the books.

— I followed to make sure the children were all right, said Clare. Just in case it wasn’t a hoax.

— Do you want to join us? We’re just going to get them some chips.

— No, thanks. I have to meet my father. We’re having lunch.

— No news of Linda’s baby?

— Not yet. Any day now. Dad’s very jittery about it. You’d think he’d be pretty blasé by this time. The Earth Mother pops them out effortlessly enough.

Helly made a quick grimace of sympathetic understanding.

Babies, thought Clare. She’s started thinking about babies.

— Don’t tell the children you’ve seen me, she said. It’ll only make things worse.

* * *

NOW CLARE put up her own umbrella. The noise of cars in the rain was constant as a river in her ear, and then there was the thrumming of the rain on the tight nylon of the umbrella, the city smoking upward with wet and dirt, the frozen bright tableaux of the shop windows. She had to go past the end of the road the library was in, and she saw that the police had moved on to evacuating the frozen food store next door. She wasn’t due to meet her father for another half an hour. She wandered into a crowded clothes shop and was immediately deeply absorbed in serious consideration of skirts, tops, trousers.

How could this be? Why wasn’t she considering rather the lostness of her children without her?

She carried a mixed armful of things to try into the little changing room, a corner of the shop inadequately screened off by a curtain on big wooden hoops. Behind the curtain there were hooks for the hangers and a hot unflattering spotlight. Sweatily, hastily, she tried one garment after another, peeling things off inside out, not even taking time to put one thing back on its hanger before she was dragging the next one over her head. She swiveled and postured as best she could in the cramped space, cheeks flushed, wet hair leaving smudges on the fabrics, making that long phony-sultry face at herself in the mirror that Lily and Rose could send up to perfection. She interrogated each outfit feverishly, searching for the absolutely right thing with abandon, as though she expected any moment to be interrupted once and for all. How would she first know if there had been an explosion? Did one feel these things through one’s feet, coming up out of the earth like a quake? How much of the city would the bomb take down with it if it went off?

She tried on an electric-blue blouse with frills down the front in what her mother would have called chiffon: she loved it immediately and with passion. It had that derisory edge of ugliness without which nothing ever looked truly good; it managed to be ironic and flattering at once. In it her glance was sharp and dark as a knife; she was veiled, mysterious; she burned with a cold fire. It was the least practical garment she could have found to spend money on, money she didn’t even have. It was transparent, too, she would have to buy something to wear underneath it. But it was already indispensable. Without it now she would not be complete; this self that had only arisen for the first time in the changing-room mirror would never get to walk the earth with the gift of her powerful veiled knowingness.

* * *

WHEN SHE came out of the shop with the blouse in a bag it was like emerging blinking back into light and focus from the underground dark of some debauchery. She felt so ashamed she even considered putting the bag down somewhere and leaving it.

She thought Tony would like her in the blouse, though.

Mostly, Tony was a problem. He didn’t want to meet her children, and he didn’t want her to move in. She was on the edge, the very edge, of being desperate about him, of stepping off from the safe ground of her self-possession. Yet last night, in the chaotic front room of his flat, among the boxes of books he’d never unpacked since his last move, he had put on for her version after version of Miles Davis playing “So what,” and had written something with his finger in wine on her throat (he wouldn’t tell her what it was), and had said to her that if once he let himself go he might fall for her so heavily that he would never be able to stand on his two feet again.

She stopped in the rain and looked around for a phone box so she could call him. She felt the need to reassure somebody that she had survived: even though there hadn’t actually been any disaster.