Accidents in the Home (23 page)

*   *   *

THE WIND DROPPED
and the rain eased off. The night dripped and rustled; there were stinks of rank vegetation and dung. They reached the top of the road where they had left the car, and turned left, and then right, Clare trying to remember their route when they'd come the other way. They must have reached the top of a slope because they found themselves climbing down again, but they hadn't seen any lights. For a while, Clare found, you could achieve a kind of mechanical equilibrium, where your body repeated the round of movements that produced a forward motion while your mind floated detached somewhere outside: presumably this was what soldiers did when they marched. But the moment she was aware she had achieved this equilibrium, it was spoiled by consciousness; she became painfully aware of how difficult each effort was, and then her movement disintegrated, she stepped onto something awkward underfoot, a branch or a stone, Rose slid down her hip, her back ached, her restraining hands parted under Rose's weight, she simply couldn't move forward any farther. She had to let Rose slither to the ground again.

They heard the sound of a car, then saw its lights. Partly Clare was concerned to press them all back safely into the hedge, partly she was trying to think how to stop the car and ask for help. It took a while to catch up with them, dipping out of sight, winding behind a hill and reemerging; and then, when it was close, its lights and speed and the roar of its engine were overwhelming. Clare, waving her hat at the car and pointlessly shouting, felt a strong embarrassment. Who would these people be, what would they think of her, wandering with her little vulnerable brood astray in the wild night?

Somehow, in the disorientation of the approaching din and glare, Rose slipped out of Clare's grasp. She was well beyond the age of darting heedlessly into traffic; she might have been trying to attract the car's attention because she was fed up with walking, or she might have panicked at its oncoming noise and been unable to escape in any direction except directly at what she feared. The slick blue of her raincoat was suddenly illumined in the car's lights. Clare screamed: her hands flew to block her mouth as if to stop what was going to happen coming out from there. Coco threw himself at Rose and snatched her back out of the way of the car as it passed in a waist-high spew of water: she landed on her face at the side of the road with Coco half fallen on top of her. He smacked her once heavily across the bottom in the wake of the drama of the receding car.

—You naughty naughty little girl, he shouted.

There was no way of ever being quite sure, in the reconstructions afterward, whether the car would have hit Rose or not, if Coco hadn't snatched her back. The car didn't stop. Probably the driver never even saw them; or he shook his head at such irresponsible pedestrians.

Clare knelt on the road beside her. Is she all right?

Rose didn't move. They shone the torch on her: the elastic on her hat was up under her nose; there was a smear of mud on her creamy cheek and a trickle of blood; her big eyes stared into a tangle of muddy roots in the hedge.

—'Course I'm all right, she said, willing there to be nothing dangerous or dreadful that had happened, that could touch her. She sat up.

Coco rocked on his haunches, shivering and chattering his teeth. I saved her life, he remarked experimentally.

—You ran into the road, Rosie, reproached Lily. How many times have you been told?

Clare sat in a pool of water. The rain began to fall again, the sound of the first drops sharp as a handful of thrown gravel, then the successive sweeps of it like a rustle of fine cloth through the trees, pressing, hastening.

—I can't go on, she said. You go on without me. I just want to stay here and die.

The children peered into her face incredulously.

—Mum, don't be stupid, said Coco, embarrassed for her.

—Mum's stupid, said Rose, glad to distract attention from her own mistake.

Lily slipped her bare hand inside Clare's sodden knitted glove and squeezed her fingers. Come on, Mummy darling, she said. We have to be brave.

—I don't want to be brave, said Clare. She held up her face in the dark to the rain, taking her punishment. I can't. I give up. It's all my fault.

*   *   *

THAT SAME MORNING
at eleven o'clock she had felt very differently about things. She had had a meeting with Tony Kieslowski, her supervisor for her PhD. Tony was in his thirties, single, American, plump, with soft eyes in a bruise-colored slack face, shoulder-length dark hair curling onto his collar: his appearance faintly reminiscent of the Romantic poets he specialized in. Clare had noticed this tendency of literary specialists toward a physical resemblance to their subjects: modernists in crumpled linen suits and James Joyce glasses, Jamesians with paunches and waistcoats and pocket watches, Plath fanatics with alpha-grade bright faces and long gathered skirts. She hadn't liked Tony at first. He was always phoning to cancel meetings they had arranged—sometimes he even forgot they had arranged them and didn't turn up—and she had thought him self-important, probably because he didn't register the bright gift of intelligence she brought to unwrap at his feet and impress him. He was abrasive and opinionated; she heard from other students how he was resented and disliked.

Recently, though, she'd found herself taking pleasure in how genuinely distracted and disorganized he was: it made her imagine a life so different from her life with the children, where thought had to be fitted into little discrete spaces inside her routine. She imagined the slow ripening of Tony's ideas in a rich vegetable chaos, uninterrupted by the petty necessities of mealtimes and housework. When she came to his office he would clear a space for her to sit by removing a heap of papers from a chair and then wouldn't know where to put them down among the dead plants and cold coffee cups and mountains of other papers, so he'd stand holding on to them while he started to talk. He loved to talk. She loved it too, especially these abstract subjects: about genius (he scoffed and deconstructed the idea of genius, she defended it), about wilderness (he was susceptible to the idea of wilderness, she was skeptical), about the sublime. It was true that occasionally her mind wandered when he went on for a long time, and she waited impatiently to get her chance to speak. But she supposed that his eagerness to talk to her must mean he had begun to intuit her responsive intelligence, worthily matched with his.

It had been raining this morning while she was in his office, rain was running down the big window overlooking the smeary gray-washed city and overflowing a gutter splashily in some courtyard four stories below. The screen-saver on Tony's computer was an underwater scene too, with little fishes and big sharks slipping in and out of the weeds. When he offered to telephone her with the title of a book he couldn't find, she gave him her new number, told him she was separating from her partner. She had waited for the right moment so she could drop this information offhandedly and ironically, making herself and her life sound colorful and dangerous.

—Oh, he'd said in concern, and put down the pile of papers unheedingly onto an apple core on his desk. I'm sorry. Am I sorry? I don't know why one feels obliged to say that. Maybe this is good news. Is it what you want?

He was quaintly disconcerted, as if he doubted his competence as an academic to make adequate responses to this lick of trouble from out of real life.

—What I want? she said. Isn't that the oldest riddle? If we knew what women wanted.…

And she had laughed as if she had said something poignant and plucky and at the same time faintly suggestive.

Out on the road in the dark and the rain she was remembering this moment: the coziness of the underwater light in the little room; the open poetry books; the sense of their being marooned there together amid the waters, outside the world; the warm curl of possibility that a flirtation had begun, no more than that, nothing that needed to be thought through or faced, just a wriggle of pleasuring possibility that could swim in and out of stern realities irresponsibly as a fish. The memory seemed to her vivid yet remote, as if an aristocrat in a filthy torn shift on her way to the guillotine were to remember drinking chocolate out of fine porcelain among satin pillows: she thought of it not only with regret and incredulity but with accusation too. There might be some causal connection between the oblivious prodigal pleasures of that luxury and this punishment now.

*   *   *

A FEW MINUTES' WALK
farther on from where Clare sat in the road and wanted to give up, Coco found a gate and a rough track and a sign advertising
BED AND BREAKFAST
, 50
YARDS
. The house must have been hidden behind trees in a little hollow; halfway along the stony track they could suddenly see all its lights: pink velvety light through drapes behind diamond-paned leaded windows, a carriage lamp beside a front door between clipped dwarf cypresses. It looked like a house people had retired to, not a working farm.

A man opened the door before they'd even reached it; he must have heard them coming and been mystified to hear children's voices at such a time of night.

—I'm so sorry to bother you, called out Clare. She was astonished at how, out of near disintegration, it was possible to summon such a sensible-sounding, ringingly middle-class, confidence-inspiring self. Our car broke down. I was afraid to leave the children. My phone batteries were low. Could I possibly use your phone to call the AA?

He let them advance closer before he responded; wondering whether to shut the door on them and activate the alarms, Clare thought, in case they were part of some kind of trickery, the softening advance party of something sinister and criminal concealed in the bushes.

—How many of you are there?

—Just me and the three little ones.

—You'd better come in then.

—We're so wet. I'm embarrassed to drip all over your floor.

—It's all right. The porch is tiled.

They crowded into the tiny little entrance porch and both girls began to cry quietly, probably with relief at the light and warmth. The man shut the door rather hastily behind them. He was short with the springy slimness of someone who exercised; his face was tanned and crinkled, his hair was slicked back from a receding hairline, he was wearing check slippers. He smelled faintly of whisky, and there was jazz music—Glenn Miller?—playing in the house behind.

He looked at them in perplexity. They must be a dismal sight; water was already making pools on the porch floor. His house, to judge by the porch, was probably immaculately clean and tidy: coats were hung by their loops on a rail, the tongue-and-groove walls were ornamented with painted horseshoes and dried flower pictures, there was potpourri in a miniature basket tied with ribbon.

—My wife's not here, he said. She's away for a few days. How long have you been out in this?

—Oh, not that long. It's just that kind of rain, it soaks you through.

Clare tried to explain where they'd left the car and the way they'd come.

—It took about twenty-five minutes, Coco said. I checked.

—Rose ran out in front of a car, said Lily.

—I saved her life, added Coco casually.

Clare wished she'd arranged with the children in advance not to give her away; she prayed they wouldn't tell how she'd sworn at them and cried and sat in the road. She needed the man to have faith that she was adult and competent.

—All I have to do is to phone the AA, she said brightly and optimistically. I'll give you the money for the phone. Then maybe we could just wait in your porch till they come.

—Perhaps if you take off your shoes and hang up your coat, he said. The phone's in the hall. He looked at the children and sighed. I suppose you'd all better take off your things. It's going to take time before the AA get here. You'd better come in and get dry.

*   *   *

THE CHILDREN
sat in a row at the pine breakfast bar in the kitchen drinking tea with sugar, looking like the bedraggled survivors of the wreck of some ship from exotic lands: their eyes were huge and dark-ringed; their hair was plastered to their heads or drying in wild curls; they seemed to be wearing particularly gaudy and unsuitable clothes. Rose at some point before they left home must have exchanged her sensible top for a pink sleeveless sequined T-shirt: around her neck was the filthy last scrap of her Superman cape.

The AA were going to take an hour at least.

—It did say bed-and-breakfast on the gate, said Clare. I've got my checkbook and card. There isn't any way that we can stay, officially? I mean, otherwise I feel too embarrassed about this.

—My wife does the bed-and-breakfasts, said the man gloomily. Actually, there's a
NO VACANCIES
sign. I don't know. I wouldn't be able to do you a cooked breakfast. Or make up the beds.

—We don't even like cooked breakfast! Clare exclaimed. And I can make the beds. But we'll pay you the full price. You don't have to do anything. I'll clear up after us. If you showed us the bedroom we could just keep out of your way.

—Won't they want to eat? he asked.

—Oh, no, we've eaten, Clare lied. She thought of the chocolate and sweets they could share once they had their room, and willed the children not to protest or ask for anything. They seemed intuitively to know how to perform the submissive and needy children role required for her act as responsible adult: Rose's head was even drooping pathetically forward onto the table in sleep.

He capitulated, not terribly graciously, to the inevitable. Well, there is a family room you could have, I suppose, although I've no idea what state it's in, I don't go in there. Probably it's all right. She keeps everything very clean.

Unmistakably he was a man adrift in a woman's house: he picked things up warily, opened the cupboards and used the kettle and found the milk with a frown of irritated unusedness, surprised at finding himself going through these motions of service. If he had grandchildren—he was the sort of age where you expect grandchildren—he had certainly never looked after them: he poured scalding-hot tea the same for everyone, in china cups. Clare had surreptitiously to top them off under the cold tap.