Accidents in the Home (28 page)

—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.

It was dark; he couldn't see her face; she was sitting up in bed pinching his arms painfully in her fingers. She pinched him until he was awake and listening.

—I was in a car with two men, she said. One in the passenger seat beside me, one in the back. I was trying to park; I had no reason to think anything was wrong. Suddenly the man in the passenger seat brought out a gun and shot me. I felt such pain, and I was astonished: what did he want to hurt me for? He shot me more than once; there was blood fountaining everywhere. Then the man in the backseat got out a gun too, and I thought: but why didn't you do this earlier, now it's too late to protect me? Only then he shot me too, maybe because he was so angry with me or something, for being the victim, angry because I was hurt. Through a curtain of blood I was pushing my face toward the man in the front seat, I was dying, my mouth was open in a terrible sort of groan, trying to find breath, I was reaching out with my mouth for him, I just wanted to touch him and cling to him because he was the last human being I'd ever know.…

They lay silently.

—The man in the backseat, said Graham, plays a somewhat inglorious role.

—I need to pee, said Linda, only I'm too frightened. Will you take me?

He padded downstairs after her and waited while she used the toilet with the door open. Afterward he got her settled in bed in the position she always liked in pregnancy, on her right side, right leg bent under her, left leg stretched out; then he stroked her back and shoulders until she went to sleep. He put a hand on her abdomen: hardly distended yet, no more than at the time of her normal period. He was interested in this baby. He found himself more interested in this pregnancy than he had been with any of his other children. He wondered whether when it was born he would be able to see himself in its wrinkled face, or whether he would find traces of the soulless Desmond with the upturned nose. It seemed to him that either way—or, more likely, if there was never any certainty, if he could never quite persuade himself conclusively of either case—the baby would need his special protection. Strangely, he imagined himself dandling it—when it was tiny, with its little bird limbs of that brick-red color only the new ones had—with a certain special plastic tenderness he had once felt in his fingers toward the clay things he made.

Falling asleep, he found himself imagining Linda at his father-in-law's funeral, his ex-father-in-law's, which must take place sometime in the next few days. (He had never acquired any further father-in-laws, after that first one: his second and third wives had come to him without fathers, one way or another.) In his fantasy, Linda was wearing a tight black dress and it was stretched across her stomach, which was unmistakably prominent. Perhaps a wind, too, was blowing the dress clingingly against her, outlining her bump. Yes, there must be a wind because with one hand she held in place a huge cartwheel hat that threatened at every moment to blow away, so that in spite of the solemnity of the occasion she cast a laughing glance at him from across the open grave. He fastened on the glance, its out-of-place mischievousness, its playful promise of adventure, and it sustained him while he allowed himself to fall off the edge of consciousness into the dark.

 

IT WAS
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
, October, raining. Clare was upstairs in the city library, where she had come to check a couple of references. While she waited for a book that had to be fetched from the stacks, she randomly browsed the shelves, took down a volume of Chekhov's letters, and sank into the soothing miscellany of money matters, sickness, arrangements for travel, family vexations, gripes with friends. All musty and done with and long dead.

A librarian was talking to two policemen whose white and fluorescent lime plastic raincoats dripped onto the carpet; one held a motorbike helmet behind his back and fingered its strap in huge fingers while he elicited information with a practiced questioning.

—How old would you say he was?

The librarian, small and excitable, rocked onto his toes and searched the ceiling in an effort to imagine. He brimmed with nervous importance.

—Oh, I should say about thirty-ish.

—Twenty-five to thirty. And how tall?

—Tall. Not as tall as you. But tall.

—About six foot then.

—His hair was thinning on top. I wouldn't have taken any notice of him if I hadn't happened to look into the bag: it's quite a standard request, for them to leave their bag of shopping behind our desk while they choose their books. But I did notice his badge.

Clare thought she ought not to be eavesdropping: she might be going to witness some unseemly arrest, someone's humiliation. She dropped her attention back into the receding tide of the life of the book: money matters and travel and sickness and more sickness.

*   *   *

TEN MINUTES LATER
while she waited at the checkout downstairs with her books, there came an announcement over the library intercom.

—Please evacuate the building. Please evacuate the building.

The man at the checkout desk who was stroking the codes on the books with an optical read-out pen stood up, not surprised but relieved, as if he knew something and had been expecting it.

—Leave all your books, he said. Please leave your books where you are and evacuate the building.

Clare clung onto her books for a reluctant moment; they had gone to all that trouble fetching her that one from the stacks, and anyway she had already begun the process of absorbing these books and mingling them with her thoughts. Her afternoon without them looked bleak. Then, as people obediently and without any sign of panic began to file out through the doors and down the stairs, she caught sight in the crowd of an intensely familiar little knot of people: her own three children together with Bram and Helly. It was a dizzying sensation, to see from the outside the little knot whose inside feel she knew so vividly. Bram was carrying Rose, and calmly without pushing he was striding ahead, making a path for the others to follow; Jacob was hurrying close behind, pale, staring fixedly at the back of his father's jacket, bracing himself for the worst. Helly was holding tight onto Lily's hand. Clare knew how Helly felt, gripping tight, steadying herself; you believed that if you could somehow hold them firmly and tightly enough you could stop anything from happening to them, physically hold the world still and whole for them against disaster. She put down her books and filed after them, through the glass doors and down the staircase to the foyer. Everyone was subdued and sensible. At most they smiled meekly at one another, because without a real explosion or a fire the drama of emergency was faintly embarrassing.

They looked like a handsome family when she saw them full on at the turn of the stairs, Lily's brows and lips delicately marked as a little deer, Rose's cheeks curved like a Victorian doll's, Jacob with the bridge of freckles across his rather flat nose and the serious light in his eyes, the firmly closed lips. They all had new haircuts; she had known Helly was going to take them for haircuts, but she had not known how much it would make them look like Helly's children. Bram was wearing a new brown leather jacket, something he could not possibly have afforded and never would have chosen for himself. With his reserved blond good looks it made him seem a member of some officer class, commanding and self-deprecating and heroic. Out in the street where some of the people evacuated were stopping and waiting to find out what was happening, he signaled to the family that they should walk on and said something to Helly with an affectionately teasing expression that Clare had never seen. Helly's face in return was full of concessions and eagerness to listen.

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.