Accidents in the Home (14 page)

Crouched on her haunches opposite where Marian had collapsed was Tamsin, changed out of the crimson dress into leggings and baggy T-shirt: Tamsin peering at her with a mixture of dismay and, ready close behind it, annoyance.

—Mum, for God's sake! It's only money.

But it wasn't only money. It was the flash of a crimson dress, and the door banged shut.

*   *   *

M
ARIAN HAD A DREAM
. It was such a blessed dream; she tried to explain it to her father. They had a morning's respite from his pains and his troubles (his eyes were too bad, he had had to give up writing the Dostoevski book). They seemed to have found a live-in housekeeper who was suitable, although Marian could already see the fault lines along which the arrangement would fracture: Dana filled the flat with expensive bunches of flowers (like a funeral, Euan said) and called him sweetheart and poppet. She had pretty eyes and a strong jaw and favored pastel dresses; Marian suspected she might be a transsexual and wondered if Euan suspected it too, and whether he'd mind.

It was Saturday, Dana's day off: Marian made them both coffee.

—I was in a meadow. I know in the dream that's what I called it, though I also thought
pré
, like the French. Anyway, it was a lovely meadow full of long grass, all different species of grass, and hundreds of kinds of flowers, sloping away out of sight in the sunlight, and everywhere you looked there were butterflies, hundreds and thousands of them, beautiful ones, rare ones, going from flower to flower collecting nectar, and then when you looked closer there were little animals too, all kinds of species mixed together, hares and field mice and little black foxlike things with big ears—that was because someone at school was talking about seeing fennec foxes at the zoo. And then I saw there was something dangling in the grass; there'd been some sort of fall—if you can imagine that on a perfectly fine day—like an ice storm, and hanging in the long grass were these ice medallions, perfect and transparent like glass but formed in the shape of pictures, perfect tiny pictures, of deer and castles and dogs and trees. And I knew it was a paradox—I knew the really amazing thing was that they had been accidentally arrived at, in nature, these perfect representations. I knew that once I'd seen these, it had to change everything I believed about the world and about what was possible.

But Euan looked at her confusedly, and she had to give up her attempt to explain how it had charmed her and made her happy when she woke up, and how it was still with her now, like a dispensation, a sign of reassurance whose explicit meaning lay just out of reach.

He was very vague this morning.

—Where was this? he asked her irritatedly. Where did you say you'd been?

 

C
LARE THOUGHT
about Helly, her best friend.

She was cooking fish fingers for the children's lunch; Helly didn't have any children. It was raining outside. There was another week before Coco and Lily went back to school and Rose to nursery. That morning Rose had woken them at six o'clock, and Clare, whose turn it was to get up, had sat resentfully downstairs watching Rose play for an hour and a half before the others got up, drinking tea and listening to farming programs on the radio, wrapping her cold feet in the hem of an old pinkish-gray nightgown that had once belonged to Bram's grandmother. In fact it still had Bram's grandmother's name stitched into the neck, from when she had ended up in an old people's home where all their washing was done together and things got mixed up and lost.

Bram got up and went to work. Since then Clare had made breakfast for the children, washed the dishes, got them all dressed, tidied the beds. She had sorted out a load of washing for the machine and hung it out on one of the two drooping wooden clothes horses she had to use to dry the clothes in a corner of the kitchen when it wasn't fine enough to hang them outdoors: their rungs were permanently blackened with wet and left marks on pale clothes if you weren't careful. The children had mostly watched the television (Clare had bought it for them at the beginning of the summer and they hadn't fallen out of love with it yet). Rose had managed to step on the Tintin comic Coco was meticulously drawing with a ruler and pencil crayons; she crumpled and tore it and left a dirty bare footmark. Coco understandably but unpicturesquely went berserk, trying to pound his baby sister with his fists and baring his teeth and squeezing out from between them a kind of growling scream. Clare thought helplessly of different, better children somewhere sometime else who played adventurous games together away from the adults and had been taught self-control and discipline and that you didn't hit girls or anyone younger than yourself. She sagged with the sense of a lost civilization and was nagged by a guilty idea that she ought to be doing something creative with them. But she knew what it was if you began creative things without conviction, how quickly you were found out, how shamingly your temper would fasten on their ingratitude.

And anyway, there were all these other uncreative things she had to do, taking up an impossible space, swelling to stuff out every corner of her time and to smother any chinks she had fondly imagined she was keeping for a grown-up coffee and a read of the paper. Now it was lunchtime; the children must be fed. One felt as if one invented this stuff in some kind of crazy conspiracy of martyrdom; surely other better mothers had found sweeter brighter ways of passing their days than this? She must be producing this impasse, this stickily inflating burden of routine, out of sheer spite; it must be oozing from her own smothered vengefulness. But if she tried to come clean and step out of it, she was confronted with real unanswerable problems. What would happen if she didn't feed them? Didn't dress them? Didn't tidy the house and wash the dishes and wash the clothes and shop and cook? It wouldn't be liberation, they would simply all drown deeper and more miserably in their sticky mire. This domestic machine required her drudgery, implacably; the hours of her life were the fuel it needed just to tick over.

She had a pain somewhere: was it in her heart? In her spleen, more like; or, no, between her ears, curved like one of those rigid Alice bands she had once worn to school. Or a dim poisonous fog connecting and attacking all the organs of her body.

She thought about Helly.

She imagined a morning for Helly, a parallel place in the world where Helly moved with lightness between free choices, taking a long shower, picking out clothes from her wardrobe, drinking filter coffee, eating a croissant and then a peach from a shallow ceramic fruit bowl on a glass table, looking over a script for a rehearsal she was going to in the afternoon. She knew enough about Helly's life, of course, to picture her surroundings accurately and fill in some authenticating detail. The flat was not tidy—Helly was notoriously slovenly—there were clothes dropped over the backs of chairs and on the floor, the duvet in its yellow cover with red poppies was heaped on the bed where she'd climbed out from under it, and Sunday supplements and magazines were strewn all over the place. But it was clean, she could afford a cleaner these days, after the ice-cream contract and now the work for the TV series about a special-needs teacher (Helly was not the special-needs teacher but the French teacher the special-needs teacher's partner was having an affair with). Sunlight struck in through its open sash windows across the polished wood floor, there were flowers in a vase drinking up the light, unusual cut flowers, delphiniums or something that you could only buy in good florists in London. Blue delphiniums and yellow goldenrod. Not in season: but Clare allowed herself this one little cheat.

David, Helly's boyfriend, was not part of Clare's picture.

Partly, it was precisely the singleness of Helly's life that Clare most envied. She and David kept their separate flats and didn't see one another for days at a time. The idea of such empty acres of solitude was a cooling balm against the promiscuous itch of Clare and Bram's crowded little house, where every surface was greasy with touching and there was no lock on the toilet door and at night the children wandered from bed to bed.

Partly, it was better not to think about David's life with Helly, because of what was going on between him and Clare: not an affair exactly, not yet, but some kind of promise of one. This promise occupied a very particular space in Clare's thoughts at the moment. It was buried deep under all the casual daily material of her life and the deliberate thought of it was mostly avoided by her; and yet at the same time she never for a single fraction of a moment was unconscious of it wrapping her around and changing her like an alien skin fitted indistinguishably over her real one.

She was going to meet him in London in ten days.

*   *   *

FOR A LONG TIME
Clare Menges hadn't distinguished Helly Parkin from the alien crowd at school. Helly didn't practice the moody dark withdrawal that was standard for those who chose not to belong: she was even good at netball, and loud and exuberant, with light brown hair braided onto her head like Angie in
East Enders,
protuberant ears, a husky voice, a grin so wide her laughter was a red gulf. Clare inclined toward the ones who wore their hair like Annie Lennox, short and spiky, and didn't grin.

One lunch break toward the end of their second year, when the games and lessons to come were casting their deep shadows across the sunshine and the crowds of green-clad girls in it, foolishly-innocently French skipping across knotted elastic bands, Helly claimed her. Clare was sitting on the grass with her back to the wall of the biology lab, devouring a book, holding it open with her elbows, with her hands over her ears and her forehead screwed up in what was meant to be an all-excluding frown. She and a couple of friends were in a phase of passing around dreadful historical novels: in irony, knowing they would be disappoved of, but also genuinely addicted to the ripe lurid matter inside, which fed some hunger left over by the long pale schooldays. (She never had any trouble later in life remembering the marriages and adulteries and sticky ends of the royal families of Europe.)

Helly, who as far as Clare could remember had never talked to her before, crouched on the grass in front of her, forcing her to look up from the book and speaking in an absurdly portentous artificial voice.

—Come forth with me to witness the secret sacrifice. Speak to none else of it.

Clare was dizzy from being dragged out of her story in too much of a rush: Ferdinand and Isabella had just made a messenger who brought unfortunate news eat his own boiled shoe leather. Helly's words seemed an extravagance from the book spilled out into the thin real air; otherwise she might simply have ignored her. She certainly felt embarrassed for her: by the end of the second year it was not the thing to play imaginary games, you were supposed to have graduated to games with rules.

—I don't want to, I'm reading.

Helly put a finger to her lips in convincingly real dismay. Speak not: ‘tis deadly dangerous, if they but knew. Come forth at once, utter no further word.

With a darting surreptitious glance around at the crowds of tranquilly idling girls, she walked off; after an exasperated moment's hesitation, Clare followed. They wound through the knot garden beside Old House, through the door onto the terrace, then down the terrace steps and past the tennis courts and around the huge trunk of the old cedar to a gap in the tall thick shrubs that grew around the boundary wall. Clare felt apologetic and ridiculous, following—she shrugged at an inquiring friend who passed going the other way—but at the same time she was half excited, susceptible to the suggestion that under the banal surface of school life there must be reserves of possibility, untapped.

Behind the gap in the shrubs was a space big enough for a den; Clare had been in there before. The earth was worn shiny, the bushes in their interior were twiggy and dusty and leafless; you could sit on the wide top of the wall. The wall overlooked a suburban street whose empty ordinariness was mysterious and desirable because it was outside and free. Helly had two other acolytes already squeezed into the space, girls Clare didn't know well. They couldn't keep up the unfaltering seriousness Helly managed; they giggled and looked as if they felt exposed in foolishness when Clare joined them.

—What's all this about?

Helly closed her eyes, waited for silence.

—Clare Menges, you have been chosen.

—For what, exactly?

—To join the sacred sisterhood of the stump.

There was a sawn-off stump of some kind of shrub at the back of the den, beside the wall: when Clare looked closely she could see it was studded with thumbtacks; there were hair clips and scraps of cloth and bits of jewelry stuffed behind its bark and into its crevices. They looked wet and dirty and rather dismal.

—You have to give something, Helly said. In return for our sacrifices the guardian of the stump protects us with his powers and brings misfortune to our enemies.

—The thumbtacks are the curses, one of the others said. They really work.

—I don't know if I want to belong to the sisterhood of the stump, said Clare.

—Too late, intoned Helly, who could sustain her portentous intonation without collapse or irony. You've seen his mysteries. If you betray them, may you rot in torment.

—But anyone could see them. And anyway, why does the guardian of the stump have to be a he? (Clare's stepmother was a regular at the Greenham Common women's protest against cruise missiles.)

Helly frowned. He just is. Don't you want his powers?

—I just thought it would make more sense to sacrifice to a female thingy, that's all. As it's a sisterhood.

—But the powers that control this school are female: haven't you thought of that? We need him to combat them, the great guardian of the stump: let his name be ever sacred, and his mystery deep.

—If you say so.