Accidents in the Home (7 page)

Rose had taken all her clothes off and, having achieved her point in getting out of the trip to the Burren, was rewarding Clare with her deep absorption in some rite involving small stones picked from the drive and carried off to a sorting place behind the rhododendrons. Clare made a pot of real coffee and brought it out into the sunshine for herself and Ray, Bram's father, who was painting at the bottom of the rough sloping lawn with his back to her. In this household of practical people (Tinsley was a geologist in plate tectonics, Bram worked on a conservation project, Opie was a physiotherapist), Clare and Ray tended to get lumped together, as if they might help one another out and understand each other's mysteries. Today it was possibly true that they shared a sense of respite in the absence of his wife and his children. He was really startled, coming up from concentration, when she brought him his coffee; he had the same forward-set lower jaw as Bram, so that his mouth closed with an expression of gentle trustingness like a ruminant, a vulnerable deer.

She sat on the stone steps with her novel turned face down beside her because she couldn't concentrate on it. This was one of those moments given on earth like a promise of what's possible: the palely veiled creamy blue sky, the water glinting, the sun-warmed stone against her skin, the heat on her shoulders, the loved child happy playing in the earth, all the loved family spread safely and at their proper distances like a constellation, so that she in her place, part of it, was both holding and held. In literature though, Clare thought, there is a notorious problem with heavenly peace. It is well known that it can only be appreciated through the glass of loss. It is only after Raskolnikov has struck the blow that cleaves him forever from ordinary happiness that he can perceive its possibility. It is only because Emma Bovary's provincial Normandy is in the irrecoverable lost past that what seemed to her banal and smothering seems to us charming, mysterious, desirable. It is only from Paris that Joyce can love Dublin. She listened to the heartbeat-stimulating rhythms on her headphones that were like a message from another place.

Rose began to weave her into her game, including her in the circuit between the drive and the bushes, offering her little stones squeezed in earth-grubby fingers; every time she came close enough Clare captured her and kissed her, drinking in the smell of hot baby skin and hair and earth and vegetation, repentant already that this was not enough, that there was always more that one greedily wanted, more than whatever precious thing it was that one held real and live and finite in one's hands. She was thinking about telephoning David. She hadn't ever intended to telephone him from her holiday; her idea had been that if she simply held off from contacting him or from making any arrangements to see him, the decision about what she was going to do with him would make itself. But his telephone numbers were written in her diary, and the thought of them had begun to eat like acid into her idea.

She had written down the numbers, the mobile and the home number, a month ago, on the day she went up to meet David in London, telling Bram she was going to work at the British Library on her dissertation. She had fully expected that David would take her into his bed (the bed with the mirrors that she knew about from Helly, her friend, David's girlfriend); she had not known if she would even use her return ticket. The numbers were in case David wasn't there to meet her at the station; but he was, with his jacket slung on one finger over his shoulder, his thick brush of black hair that grew upward like an exclamation mark, his loud voice that overfilled wherever he was, his oblivious gifted swagger in the great city. Bram wouldn't have understood how she wasn't disappointed by David's showing off, wouldn't have understood how she drank that down as the very element of her pleasure.

But confusingly David hadn't taken her into his bed, or even to his flat, but had taken her out for a Thai meal and then to an exhibition of disconcertingly sexual Helmut Newton photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. With everything she knew about him—from Helly—she had assumed that he would be the one who would know how to bridge the unbridgeable transition between the animated conversation of friends and the first fumbles of acknowledgment, the first frank reachings-out. She had surely done enough by simply turning up. Didn't he know to read that as her absolute surrender to whatever he wanted? But the more they talked the more the talk had seemed to pile up between them, solid and sensible as stone, separating them. All the time she was smiling and talking, putting on to the utmost an appearance of happy charm, her calculations were racing. Had she misunderstood him from the beginning? When he telephoned and said they should get together, had he meant just this, lunch and galleries? And she thought too, with humiliation, that unlike her he wasn't desperate, he could afford to wait and see, he could afford to treat with respectful seriousness all the good reasons lunch and galleries were quite enough. She smothered a panicking sense that she would be betrayed into making a scene; she simply couldn't bear to go home without the initiation she had come for.

Then, as they stood in the idle wide space in front of the departures board at the station, he had kissed her, and in such a way that she was quite certain after all that there had been no mistake. One of those motorized yellow litter sweepers bore down on them noisily. The sight of them kissing must have enraged the bored driver; he nudged toward them several times before they retreated out of his path, and then he came around at them again for good measure.

—Can you stay? David asked, into her ear, into her hair. Stay, please, stay. Phone home.

She shook her head. Really, she couldn't stay. No, now they were on the far side of the unbridgeable gap, she was full of doubt suddenly. She had forgotten that she would be there with a stranger.

*   *   *

SHE TELEPHONED
D
AVID
that evening while the others were swimming. Every day Genny and Tinsley and Opie and Bram and even Ray went swimming in the lake, taking turns to stay with the children in the shallow water by the little stony beach while the others struck off, racing one another for the islands. They all swam a strong crawl; when Bram and Tinsley and Opie were children they had competed in galas and worked for lifesaving badges.

Clare couldn't. She could—just—swim, a stately slow breaststroke with her head held out of the water, which was one of the few things Bram ever laughed at her for. But only in a swimming pool, in clear chlorinated water where she could see to the bottom and the worst (bad enough) one might bob up against was a stray used sticking plaster. She was too much of a coward ever to bring herself to swim in the agitated murky sea, where jellyfish or crabs or bits of decomposing fish might be washed against her, or in the lake, which was calm but thick with brown weed growing up almost to the surface, sheltering a whole dark suspect world of underwater life and death, slippery weed that was sometimes wrapped in dark strips like stains around the swimmers' legs when they waded out, blowing and streaming water and shouting breathless exhilarated comments about the shared ordeal to one another.

So while they swam she put out supper onto the plates in the kitchen, washed limp lettuce that was all you could get at the shop and boiled eggs and cut tomatoes and mashed tuna with mayonnaise. She sliced two loaves of floury soda bread. She stood wiping her hands on her apron, hearing the raised voices of the children from the beach. The house had been used as a hotel at some period, so although they had only a dingy miscellany of utensils and a tiny electric stove to cook on (including boiling Genny's voles), the kitchen was full of the relics of past grandeur: a disused Aga and two deep enamel sinks and huge wooden plate racks on the walls like something from a giant's kitchen in a fairy tale. Opie had pulled up a corner of the linoleum and found stone flags underneath.

Then Clare fished in her handbag for her diary and for coins for the pay phone and shut herself into the small cloakroom off the passage behind the kitchen where the phone was mounted on the wall. It smelled of polish and disinfectant because the cleaning things were kept in there. With shaking hands she dialed David's number. She pressed herself back among the coats and waterproofs, distinguishing textures with exactitude against her face with her eyes closed: a button, a pocket fastened with Velcro, a corduroy trim, Rose's frog-patterned mac.

Helly answered the phone.

Clare had told herself that if Helly answered she had the perfect alibi: Why shouldn't she be phoning her best friend from Ireland? She would be phoning to complain, comically, about the Vereys; to let off steam over the well-worked theme of their imperturbable impossible decency and straightness. Helly would recognize the phone call as belonging in a long line of such calls.

In the split seconds after Helly's voice was real and close in her ear, Clare actually imagined she could hear herself with utter naturalness beginning, “Hel, can I just be truly ghastly with you for a few minutes? I need a break. They're all
swimming.
You know, not just splashing about at the edge like ordinary people do, but powering up and down across the lake. His sisters are the sort that actually knew how to inflate their pajamas for lifesaving at school. D'you remember that? How mine had a rip in and wouldn't blow up? Look, I'm having such an incredibly wholesome time here—it's really nice—that I just needed to say a few desperately dirty words to somebody.”

It would feel so natural that she would believe as soon as she began that this was what she had called for, the other thing would be so completely instantly submerged that she wouldn't even be lying.

But instead she pressed down with quick silent decision the little metal rests that cut her off. Then she sat listening to the tone in the phone as though she might hear in there the aftershock of what had happened, traces of how Helly had taken it at the other end. Two things occurred to her, each sending through her a pulse of dismay like a too-rich heartbeat. If she had spoken to Helly she would have had to explain how she came to have the telephone number for David's flat; she always spoke to Helly at her own place because Helly had never given her David's number. She couldn't believe she hadn't thought of this, that she had come so near to jeopardizing herself. And then, as if she could see her doing it, she knew that Helly would dial the 1471 recall as soon as the phone went dead to find out who had been calling. But surely 1471 didn't work for Ireland, surely the mechanical voice would simply say the number had been withheld, and Helly would have no reason to imagine it was her. Would the message specify that it had been an international call? An international call would be enough, Clare thought, to give her away.

She went back to cutting up spring onions in the kitchen, focusing intently on chopping off the ends and then slitting them shallowly down one side to slip off the outer coarser layer. She put them white end down in a glass on the table so that everything was pretty, and then rapped the shells of the boiled eggs under the tap in the sink and peeled them and distributed the cut halves with blobs of mayonnaise from a jar around the plates beside the tomatoes. When the others came in with wet hair and loud relishing complaints about the coldness of the water it seemed soothing and consoling that what was happening to her was quite invisible to them. She was even grateful to them for their safe insensibility and glad she hadn't betrayed them by making fun of them to Helly. She listened with real absorption to Genny explaining to Coco and Lily about how you could tell from the spinal bones of a horse whether or not it had been ridden, and about how she was working with an archaeologist to establish the period in which horses were first domesticated.

Rose started spattering her tomato with the back of a spoon and Tinsley smartly took away her plate. Possibly this meant Tinsley was finding the children annoying—or finding Rose annoying, anyway—and that she disapproved of how Clare and Bram indulged them. But Clare felt protected from her usual sensitivity to such criticism by the thick wadding of her private thoughts.

*   *   *

T
INSLEY—THE DRY HUMORIST
of the family—was tall, with wolfish lean sexiness and blond-streaked hair she pushed out of her way behind her ears or stuffed in a rubber band; she dressed in yellow waterproofs and yellow and blue and red clothes that always looked, even the dresses, as if they were bought in a shop selling mountaineering equipment. No one knew much about Tinsley's love life; she was spending months at a time cooped up in a research station in the arctic where they were drilling long cores of ice from deep below the surface for the geological record, and she was sometimes the only woman alone with ten or fifteen men. Occasionally she turned up at home with some snow-tanned expert man in tow—once a bearded fat boozing American mineralogist whom Clare suspected just because he was so improbable—but she never offered any elucidation of their relationship and Genny never asked.

Opie was smaller and darker and plumper than Tinsley and Bram, with her dark hair cropped short; she was neat and watchful and devoted to her boyfriend. She was a secret smoker; it was not so much, she told Clare, that she didn't dare tell her family as that she wouldn't in a million years have been able to enjoy smoking in front of them anyway. So several times a day she absented herself discreetly and hid herself to smoke in a little den she had found, tucked behind a ruined wall above where the river flowed out of the lake and toward the mill. She even started keeping her tin of rolling tobacco and papers and lighter behind a loose stone in the wall. It was just what Swallows and Amazons would have done if they'd taken up smoking, Clare thought.

That evening when the children were finally asleep, Clare went out and sat in the den with her. It was late; the sun was setting behind the plantation of trees in a sky like a sea all brilliant with orange and mauve, one dark navy cloud sailing in it like a boat. The lake was dim. The den on its little mound was in a last pocket of light and warmth above the shadows.