Accidents in the Home (24 page)

The house was old and rambling but done up, overdone: a thick tide of fitted carpet and knickknacks had overflowed into every nook and corner. Going upstairs they had to pick their way past nests of tables, lamps with pleated fringed shades, displays of horse brasses, baby-sized wicker chairs, a collection of miniature silhouettes, a cabinet of china thimbles, vases of silk flowers. Lily was smitten with a display of collectable teddies in an alcove. Up under the roof was a big low-beamed pink room with a double bed, two single beds, a television, and a scatter of those wornout ornaments people put in a room they never use themselves. The man brought Clare a pile of flowery sheets, irritably flustered as to whether they were singles or doubles. She fiddled with unfolding them, pretending she could tell.

—Is your wife away somewhere nice? she asked. The woman's presence in her house was as overwhelming as if she'd stood large and loud among the ornaments in the corner of each landing. Staying with friends?

—Friends of hers. What are you going to do about your things?

—The kids will be delighted with a night off from tooth-brushing. And we'll just sleep in our underclothes. She suddenly blushed. I mean they can. I'll get my bag when I go with the AA man.

He came back in a few minutes with something else for her: a nightdress to match the house, layered and florid with a huge tulip pattern in pink and blue and a blue satin ribbon threaded through broderie anglaise at the neck.

—You could get inside that twice over, he said. But I suppose it'll be better than nothing, so to speak.

He was very deadpan; Clare didn't know quite how much she was supposed to acknowledge the risqué joke, if it was a joke.

*   *   *

SHE SAT WITH HIM
in the sitting room while she was waiting for the AA, and she decided he might be quite drunk, quietly drunk. She and her disaster had intruded on a solitary pleasure ritual, with his whisky and his jazz; perhaps he did this every night while his wife was away.

—Actually, she's left me, he told her. Again.

—Again?

—She goes every six months or so. It makes for a funny kind of marriage. She's not my first wife. Or my second, for that matter. I've no objection to her going off. But there is a down side to the arrangement.

—Well, I should think so. It must be very emotionally draining.

—Which is that she comes back.

—Oh, I see.

Clare could see he might have been a charmer, to have several wives. He had the crinkled-up eyes of someone habitually socially humorous and one of those dark quick faces that might have been as appealing as an alert little bird; she thought of a sort of charm formed in an era when men murmured dangerous sharp things into the ears of women with bare shoulders and dangling earrings whose role it was to be shocked and excited. He had no illusions that it would work with her, nor any interest in her beyond the most perfunctory. He didn't even offer her a whisky.

The sitting room was done in gold, with gold and pink upholstery and pink velvet curtains; a contemporary landscape in oils hung above the teak fireplace, lit from above by a brass strip light as if it were in an exhibition. Clare worried that her wet jeans might leave a stain on the cushions of the sofa. She was curious about how the man accommodated himself inside the shell of his absent wife's taste. He was submissive to her arrangements, using her coasters for his glass, fetching the dustpan for some ash that fell from the end of his slim panatella: obedient but perhaps resentful. The music (not Glenn Miller but Duke Ellington; Clare read the CD cover) coiled out of the stereo system like a snake of dissent, a last word unanswerable because spoken in an unknown language. His privacy merely used the convenience of the place so lovingly-smotheringly put together.

—Do you like jazz? he asked her.

—I don't know much about it. I like John Coltrane, and Miles Davis.

She had said the wrong thing—or the right thing. He gave her a smile from behind his smoke that made her know she had given herself away somehow; he had set her a test of taste that he was pleased she had failed.

*   *   *

C
LARE DIDN'T NEED
to go out with the AA man. He found the car, looked at the engine, arranged for it to be towed away, and gave her a telephone number for the garage. She phoned her mother and arranged for her to come and collect them from the bed-and-breakfast in the morning; they'd drive on to the cottage and Marian would stay with them for the weekend.

—Do you want me to come and get you now? Marian asked.

—Oh, no, it's much too late, we're fine here for the night.

But when she put the phone down she felt a pain of childish homesickness and fear of the strange place. The house made her breathless and hot, as if it were hermetically sealed. There was no lock on the inside of the door of the family room. She undressed hastily and, overcoming an instinctive distaste, pulled the other woman's nightdress over her head. It was huge on her: ludicrous and demeaning, changing her from herself, as she verified in the mirror in the tiny damp-smelling connected bathroom. There was also a streak of mud on her cheek, which must have been there all the time she sat downstairs. She would far rather have slept in her T-shirt and pants, but she submitted to the humiliation of the nightdress as if the man exacted it as a price for the inconvenience she had caused him. She spread out her clothes alongside the children's on the radiators, rubbed at her teeth with a finger wet under the tap. Her hair was drying in frizzy chunks and she had no brush.

The children's heads on their pillows were cast about in exaggerated abandonment to sleep. They snored and groaned. At the low casement window, where she had forgotten to draw the curtains, a huge nursery-rhyme moon rolled out of the clouds. She pushed at the window but couldn't work out how to unfasten the catch and didn't want to make a noise; if she pressed her face to the cool glass she could hear the rain, which dripped off the trees and was swallowed up by the soft earth.

Behind her, outside the door of the room, a floorboard creaked.

She didn't ever seriously, really, think the man was coming for her.

But she held her breath long enough for the whole spectrum of possibilities to reel through her awareness: the unlikeliness of his trying anything with all the children in the room; his having drunk so much that such a rational consideration wouldn't deter him; the reassurance that her mother knew where she was; that compromising nightdress, as if he might mistake her having put it on for an invitation. As for his disdain for her, that could work either way: could make him not want to touch her with a barge pole or could make him need to punish her for being—what?—young, ugly, indifferent to him? Or simply for being female.

Needless to say, at one far end of the spectrum of possibilities there flashed the irresistibly lurid vision of him standing out there with a shining machete and a homicidal light in his eyes, intending to hack them all to pieces.

She felt—not in her heart exactly, but in the pit of her chest where lungs and heart lift above the material base of the guts—the clench of that inward gesture that must be the beginning of praying. She wished she could pray. There was a movement outward from inside her, a beseeching, like a sick-making flutter of trapped wings.

—Help me, she tried, silently. The hills from whence cometh my help. I'm making such a mess of things. Yet will I fear no evil, thy rod and staff still comfort me.…

There was only that one giveaway creak from outside the door. If the man was ever there, he went away again.

Prayer addressed itself involuntarily, it seemed, to a male auditor: “rod and staff” gave the game away. Whatever goddesses she knew—Isis, Artemis, Aphrodite, Kali—she only knew vaguely from books. She couldn't talk to them: and anyway, capricious, ruthless, vain, requiring flattering propitiations, they weren't the ones she sought; she wanted a moralizing
good
God. There was the Blessed Virgin, but she was on the side of the salt of the earth, the ignorant and the weak, and would surely disapprove of Clare's sophisticated modern problems. To her surprise (what kind of feminist was she?) Clare was overcome by a passionate longing to lie down in the bosom of a wisdom different from her own, deep-resonanced and subtle and fatherly.

She should go back to Bram.

Standing watching the door in that ugly and hostile pink room (it was a pink that tried for roses but instead hit something medical, like adhesive dressings) she was visited by a vision of herself going back. The vision was vague but sweet, involving some highly improbable gestures such as her kneeling and pressing Bram's hand to her cheek, his touching her head with his hand in a kind of absolution, her burying her face in his shirt as he drew her to him so that she didn't have to meet his eyes (that last one was from literature somewhere). In the vision as in reality she was wearing the blue tulip nightdress.

—Forgive me, she imagined herself saying to Bram. I didn't know what I was doing.

The vision was highly ridiculous. Not only had she never in reality dreamed of asking Bram to forgive her, it had never occurred to her that there was anything she needed to be forgiven for. Everything the breakup had actually been like—the impossible convoluted ferreting out of blames and causations, the twisting of their old knowledge of one another to use in hostilities, the sheer meanness of their unleashed dislike of one another—all that was cleared aside in this vision as if it were finished with, when of course it wasn't.

But then ridiculous was just what one ought to expect revelation to be; that was the whole point. By definition it couldn't show you anything you could deduce or arrive at by yourself. It didn't follow on from anything that had come before, and it changed everything.

She could really do this. Perhaps not in the tulip nightdress, and perhaps not actually kneeling, but she could go to Bram and offer herself, and—even though he might turn her down, even though it might turn out he already loved Helly instead—to do it might be in itself a kind of solution, a blissful simplification, whatever happened. It would be restful to submit to its outcome. Clare already felt a strange bliss in her limbs as she went around the room, picking up the last clothes from the floor, covering the children with their duvets, kissing their sleeping faces. Everything that had been rigid and willed in her movements was now suddenly free and fluid, she thought.

Rose was wrapped up in her bottom sheet like a cocoon and had to be unwound from it, protesting sleepily. In her eagerness not to be a nuisance, Clare had taken all single sheets from the man, too small to tuck in on the double bed: she and Rose spent the night with the sheets wrapped sweatily around their arms and legs or wrinkled in clumps underneath them. All night long in light uneasy sleep, Clare dreamed she was driving. The road wound down a forlorn hillside muffled in a sort of thick gray rain, which then became shrubby furry wet undergrowth and was somehow inside as well as outside the car. Or she was driving on a causeway across an inlet with shallow tepid saltwater full of seaweed washing about to either side of her, suddenly realizing she'd forgotten to check the safe times for crossing.

*   *   *

THE FIRST THOUGHT
her mind reoccupied as she came to consciousness in the morning was this plan for her reconciliation with Bram. It seemed to her instantly factitious and false, sickening: a scene out of a novel, not out of her real life. She felt ashamed at her capacity for this kind of fantasy and at the danger she was always in of acting upon her fantasies and living by them. In contrast, what she felt that morning, waking before any of the children in the strange room, was the welcome abrasiveness of the real. It was bright outside. Pools and glimmers of pink light came and went on the walls. Under her bare feet the carpet was hairy and greasy; all their clothes on the radiators were still soaked, as the central heating had never been turned on. She wet one of the little hand towels in the bathroom to wash herself, then pulled on stiff wet socks, cold pants, heavy jeans, relishing the resistance the clothes offered to her wincing warm flesh. Of course she was not going back, of course not. This was what she had left for, to have adventures in strange houses, to wake up by herself in rooms that weren't snugly and safely molded to her shape, ugly rooms like dead shells inside which she would know herself more sharply alive.

—I was hopeless last night, she confessed to her mother later. I didn't know what to do. I got the children out on the road in the dark, and in all that rain. Rose ran in front of a car, it was Coco who grabbed her.

—I'm sure you did the right thing, said Marian, surprised. You took them where they could be dry and warm, in a house where you could phone.

—But what if there hadn't been a house? Or if the man had been dangerous or something?

—Well, there was a house. And the man seemed perfectly pleasant.

—What if Rose…?

—But she didn't. Good for Jacob. I'll have to give him a special lifesaving medal.

*   *   *

THEY FOUND
the garage and picked up Clare's bags and arranged for her to collect the car later in the week, then drove on to the cottage. Clare was making up beds and Marian was cooking supper when the phone rang. Clare thought it must be Bram. She'd left him her number; perhaps he'd found out somehow about the car. She began to run downstairs but Marian got there first. There was a low crooked window on the landing where she paused to see if the call was indeed for her; she had to drop onto her knees to see through the distorting old panes thick as bottles to where the children were playing in the garden on some parallel bars and a swing. Coco was walking along the top of the bars with his nose screwed up to hold his glasses and his arms outstretched either side for balance, like wings. He was pale because he wasn't a natural, but he moved in a swift true line because he believed he could do it. Lily was mothering Rose, wrapping her arms around her to hold her safely on the swing; there was a protesting scowl on Rose's blunt little face and she was pulling busily at Lily's hands to dig herself out from under the embrace.