Free Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley Page A

with them both. How dare they look in my private drawers? How dare they touch my things? They were never ever to go in my room again without permission, and so on. It was just the way he sat there fixing it for me.
    She put the nub end of her cigarette in the hole and palmed leaf mold across it, burying it.
    â€”So I do see what you mean.
    *   *   *
    SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED between Bram and Clare that summer. Or rather—that sounds too much as if it had happened to both of them impartially—there was something she had done to him, although neither of them could have named it. She had an image; it was as if with fiendish cunning she had contrived to lower around him, out of the clear blue sky, without his once being able to be sure she was doing it, an invisible all-smothering deadly force field of antagonism. It was like a dome of glass, cutting him off from her completely—but quite transparent. She knew there wasn’t a word he could say to complain of her. She was punctiliously generous and cheerful. She not only entered into but initiated holiday enthusiasms. She overflowed with just the right measure of affectionate names and touches, not overdoing it. Only a flaw in the quality of their eye contact could possibly give her away—she felt it on her side almost like a momentary ugly squint, that when she looked at him her glance didn’t reach his eyes straight but slipped off him, off the falsity of the bright reflective surface between them. Then, for a moment, anyone might see revealed the rictus of her hostility. So she didn’t look directly at him very often.
    The only place that what was happening was even half acknowledged was in bed. Under the green satin bedspread, inside the bleak box of that stained orange wallpaper, they were cast out of the cocoon of their familiar things; they confronted one another alertly across a raw terrain. Clare simply dispensed with the whole years-long accumulation of their intimate habits and signs and code words.
    â€”Let’s pretend, she whispered to him, when the light was still on and he was still reading, that I’m English and you’re Irish. I own the house; you’re my tenant. You’re a republican and I’m a unionist.
    They had never spoken before of their fantasies. Bram, the first time, smiled in bewilderment at her. It was as if his face was shallow—not like hers, hers was deep, opaque—and she saw running across it like shadows across water his efforts to follow her meaning. She was seized with a brief spasm of sympathetic understanding for him. But the words she had used could not be taken back. They drew her on, she was escaping up through them into an open new heady space.
    â€”You hate me. You would like to burn my house down; probably, one day, you will. You’ve been taught to hold my luxury in contempt. But at the same time you can’t resist my things. The sheets I lie in. My expensive silk underwear. My perfume. My soft skin. I hire you to carry furniture around the house. But in the bedroom I stand before the open door carelessly so that you have to squeeze past me, sweating, struggling with something heavy. I have on a thin summer’s dress, with nothing underneath. You feel my heat.
    â€”Don’t, said Bram, smiling. What are you doing?
    â€”Play, she said. Play with me.
    â€”I don’t want to. I don’t hate you.
    â€”When you first kiss me—you smell of peat smoke and animals—you think of your mother, who already looks like an old woman because of her life of hard labor. You want to refuse me, you pull your mouth away. But I touch you—like this …
    Bram never spoke a single word that she could seize as token that he had lent himself to her games. But he couldn’t close his ears; she cheated her way—that was how she thought of it—inside his desires, contaminating them. And if he was sullen and reluctant and half-disgusted,