Free Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley

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.
    â€”Good lookout point, said Opie. She trickled tobacco along a paper, refusing Clare’s bought cigarettes.
    â€”I telephoned a friend this afternoon, said Clare, but she wasn’t in. I wonder if one-four-seven-one works from Ireland?
    â€”Golly, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so.
    â€”Just wondering whether she’ll know I’ve called. It doesn’t matter.
    â€”No, but I know what you mean. I hate that. Sometimes you have an impulse to talk to somebody and they’re not in and then the impulse passes and you really hope they don’t do one-four-seven-one and get your number, because the point of your calling them is completely finished. Once I had a row with Jamie, before we lived together, and I phoned him to make friends and he wasn’t in, and about half an hour later I was furious because I’d completely changed my mind about forgiving him, but I knew he’d know I’d called.
    â€”I can’t imagine you rowing with Jamie.
    â€”Oh can’t you! Laughing, she blew out smoke and contemplated an inner happy place. We’re both so stubborn. And then we’re always both utterly miserable until we make friends again.
    â€”But not real rows. Not like me and Bram.
    Clare didn’t know why she’d said this; she and Bram very rarely argued, and she certainly had no desire to try to tell anyone in his family what was happening between them that summer, unspoken, quite unacknowledged.
    â€”Oh, dear, said Opie, surprised. Is there something the matter between you two? Not you two.
    â€”Not in the least. Not really. But you know what Bram’s like. I mean, he’s wonderful. He does so much with the children, he’s so patient. He’s so fair about my studying, he makes time for me to get on with it in the evenings, even when he’s been at work all day, he puts the children to bed for me, washes the dishes.…
    â€”But?
    â€”But nothing, really. He really is good. He makes me feel like a lower form of life sometimes.
    Opie was dabbling in the leaf mold, making a shallow hole.
    â€”I remember once, she said, when we were teenagers, I had deliberately broken something, a china bird Mum had brought me back from one of her trips. I broke it because she wouldn’t let me go out to a club for a friend’s birthday. Then I felt terrible. I had the broken pieces wrapped up in a T-shirt at the back of my drawer; I was hoping she wouldn’t notice. One day when I came home from school Bram was gluing it on the kitchen table. And Mum was all nice about it, thinking it had been an accident. And I was so angry