Free Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley Page B

he only played the part she had devised for him.
    It wasn’t only unionist and republican. She did Miss Julie and her servant; the society beauty tempting the hermit in his hut; the young trade union leader and the spoiled factory owner’s wife. She did Bertha Mason and Mr. Rochester. “He used to visit her, you know, in the attic. Even when Jane was sleeping under the same roof.” They were all costume dramas and period pieces. She detailed the furniture of the rooms, and the clothes that came off or half off, the complicated olden-times knots and hooks and buttons that had to be fumbled with hasty, sweating hands.
    She was disgusted with herself; she winced with shame the next day, remembering. There had been months at a time in her life when if she caught sight of the suckings of mouths or the slithering of oiled bodies on someone’s television she only felt ennui and numbness. Now her obsession was a burden to her, heavy and distorting. Just before they came away on holiday she had been to the optician’s for a routine test, checking the prescription for her reading glasses. The examination was carried out by a young man she had not seen before, rather shy, with a mop of dark fluffy hair and Wallace and Gromit socks. It was all perfectly straightforward. And yet when he turned the lights off, her heart had pounded with excitement.
    â€”Which looks brighter, red or green?
    â€”Is it clearer with this one? Or this one? Clearer now? His woolly hair brushed her cheek, he was breathing close to her face, he held up for her to follow his little torch with a lit bulb the size of a seed pearl. She thought, Now, now, he’ll touch me. But all the time she actually had on her face those grotesque test frames full of lenses, or he’d been instructing her to look left, look up, look down, peering into the red of her peeled up lids or pulled-down rims. How could she have thought of sex? What was this sickness that made the whole world reach her through its prism, suffused in its slippery drugged rainbow excitements?
    This rainbow revelation that then like a light went out?
    Eventually, Bram refused her.
    â€”Pretend I’m a senior figure in the KGB, she whispered. You’re a dissident, a young physics lecturer who’s also written a book on Dostoevski. You’re brought to my room, for interrogation—
    â€”Oh, for Christ’s sake, he said. Don’t you think that’s a bit off?
    â€”A bit off? Her laugh was meant to convey insouciance, amusement at his priggishness. But she also felt a wince of exposure, the same as when she turned off the ignition in the car and the throb of supporting music died. What d’you mean by a bit off?
    For some long minutes he didn’t answer. Her perky smile hung in the dark like the Cheshire cat’s.
    â€”If you don’t know, he said, then I can’t tell you.
    She sat up in bed. It was cold in the room, the nights were cold because the days were so clear. She felt the chill strike her bare shoulders; she took it like a punishment. It was hours before dawn.
    â€”OK, she said into the dark, perkily, bleakly.
    *   *   *
    B RAM AND T INSLEY showed the children how to build a dam (a “barrage,” the children called it, because they all knew about the one that was being built at home). Tinsley in cut-off jeans stood with the water riding against her knees in the deepest part of the river and assumed command. The children, who had been prized unwillingly from in front of the Discovery channel and turned out into the sunshine blinking and wincing, were soon organized into an eager workforce.
    Clare watched from her vantage point in Opie’s den, where she had taken her book.
    â€”We need big ones! shouted Tinsley. Big ones to make a strong base.
    Bram helped Coco with an overambitious huge rock that came away from its bed like a tooth from a socket; he solemnly accepted the handfuls of wet grit Rose