Accidents in the Home (16 page)

—It's weird, said Helly. Not exactly nice, having someone else's tongue in your mouth.

—Like what? said Clare.

Clare and Helly in their bedrooms tried out kissing on each other, and sex. “Imagine if he did this,” they said, “and this.” They took it in turns to be Mr. Garrick, the French teacher (the only male teacher at school), or David Taton from youth club, or Elvis Costello. Sometimes it was into this trying out that Helly's father's voice intruded through the wall, telling them to be quiet and go to sleep. It never occurred to them to wonder what he thought they were doing, rustling and murmuring and squealing with giggles in the same bed together. Clare was astonished sometimes thinking about it afterward that they had no adequate sense of how they should conceal what they were up to. Partly they simply assumed that their teenage secrecy was impenetrably dark and deep; it was unimaginable that adults could know anything about their lives. Also, Helly had a friend in the village whose father had subscribed to a sex encyclopedia in weekly issues; everything they read in there—and avidly, of course, devouring its initiations, such as that you might pass out with the pleasure of orgasm, or that the male organ when erect could be twelve inches long—seemed peculiarly preoccupied with reassuring them that there was nothing they could do that they need feel ashamed of. They took the encyclopedia's word for it; blithely and with no burden of embarrassment, they did what they liked.

What they did together seemed uncomplicated. What they longed for were complications; for that barbed bitter maleness that would drag down and darken and make real at last their little lightweight floating clouds of pleasure.

*   *   *

NOW
C
LARE
was slicing peppers for supper with her Sabatier knife, cutting away the pith and picking out stray pips with its point. Tomato sauce bubbled messily in the frying pan, speckling the stove with orange: pasta again.

Bram was pressing Coco's crumpled picture flat with a hot iron. Coco had brought it straight to him when he came in, trusting that he would have solutions; Clare had only said it didn't matter and not to make a fuss. Bram even thought he might be able to get Rose's footprint off with an eraser. He was tall, he stooped over the ironing board, he looked tired, but he had been brought up never to complain. Clare felt sorry for his thin strong back and jutting shoulder blades under his saggy T-shirt.

—I've been so fed up, said Clare. I've not stopped for a single second all day, and yet I've achieved precisely nothing. The kids have been hideous, bickering and whining.

This wasn't what she'd meant to say and wasn't even strictly true: after lunch she'd fallen asleep in the armchair; then she'd sat down and watched television peaceably with the children for an hour in the afternoon. She had meant to commiserate with Bram; often this happened, that the kind thing she'd meant to say turned in his actual presence into an unstoppable spurt of protest.

The shoulder blades winced. Poor old thing, he said with effort, coldly.

—How was your day?

—Oh, depressing. Meetings.

—But that always sounds so jolly! Sitting round in a nice clean room with grown-ups, drinking coffee and arguing about real things.

—Real enough. The exchange we were promised by the development people—new wetlands designated as a reserve in exchange for wetlands lost—turns out not to be quite so straightforward. They're trying to back down from it, saying it won't make any difference to bird populations if we end up with an area half what we'll have lost. I can't tell you how much I'd rather have spent the day talking to Coco and the girls.

—You're always making it sound as if you prefer children to adults.

—You ought to hear the adults.

—It's the same thing as preferring animals to humans. Sentimental in the same way.

—How's it the same thing? Why ever are you suddenly picking on this?

She didn't want to quarrel, really. For a moment she could imagine a reconciliation, her invisible soul stepping over to where he was turned away, concentrating dutifully, using his skill and good sense to make something right for the children that had been spoiled. She could imagine her soul self putting its arms around him from behind in contrition, putting its face against his shoulder blades; she saw them consoling one another.

But he turned his face to her, the too-well-known handsome tanned face, whose almost girlish sweetness was not for her, indifferent to its own effect, closed with lack of sympathy. And she heard her voice pick up the quarrel, as if she was sprightly and jubilant.

—It just interests me. It makes you safe, really—doesn't it? I don't mean you, I mean anyone who thinks like that. To have made up your mind from the beginning that everything people do is spoiled and bad and ugly. Really, I can't separate it from someone who believes in original sin. It's the new doctrine of original sin, environmentalism: the sins of the technological revolutions shall be visited upon the children until the nth generation. You believe the worst, so you never have to be disappointed. It's so cowardly, really.

—How would you have any idea of what I believe?

—Well, I don't know. Perhaps I don't. Why don't you tell me?

He folded up the ironing board; she tore open the pasta bag.

—Some other time, perhaps.

—And anyway: your “nature”; how much regret does she feel? When she makes earthquakes, spews lava out of volcanoes, covers up thousands of square miles of land and its precious unique flora and fauna in ice or sea when there's some climate change of a few degrees? She's a rotten conservationist, isn't she?

When he came back from putting the ironing board away, he said gently, I expect things will be better for you once the children are back at school and you're able to get back to your own work. I know it's really hard for you, stuck all day in the house with them, I do appreciate that.

—Yes, she said. I'm looking forward to my day in London, getting down to work in the library.

As she spoke she took off the two ends of a clove of garlic with her sharp knife, slit down its skin, and peeled it. Slipping off the papery skin, she was thinking about what she had hidden under her sweaters at the back of her drawer upstairs, wrapped in tissue paper from the shop: new underwear for her London trip, satin and lace ecru underwear such as she had never worn before and which had cost more than—almost twice as much as—their weekly supermarket bill. She was ashamed—really, at that moment her face felt hot at the thought—at how much it had cost, which they couldn't afford.

That was the only thing she felt ashamed for. The other things that should have made her sorry, the careless sacrifice of her partner and children and friend: she felt as if these things spoke to her through glass; they were mute, they had lost their voices. She was not like a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel realized through her adultery, because there was no counterweight to justify her, no repression to break out from, no self-accusation to expiate her, no fear of punishment or burden of guilt and suffering to hang over her and earn her forgiveness. Where these counterweights should have been to make her sacrifices meaningful there was emptiness.

There was just the sense of want in her like a tiger, a great rapacious cat: want, not need; want like a reflex, the strong tension of slack muscles collecting themselves to spring; unmoralized. And she rejoiced in this rapacious cat in herself, shamelessly, as if strength justified itself.

*   *   *

THERE WAS A
whole history to Clare's betrayal of Helly, a history of entangled teenage love affairs.

First, there was the piano player, Alistair, who played for the Methodist church services in Poynton. He was one of the grammar-school boys who got the bus into the city with Helly, and Helly loved him first. She began to sit through the humble services in plain man's language in the little bare white church where they used Ribena for wine and Ryvita for bread. The congregation consisted of a handful of old people and a few of the teenagers from the youth club. The cheerful bachelor minister who was such an enthusiast for youth was well known for feeling up the girls at youth club parties and outings, so something riotous and crazy was always bubbling underneath the respectable church surface, and the teenagers teetered dangerously on the verge of contempt and blasphemy as if the back pews were the back row of desks in a classroom.

Alistair said he believed in something, but not in the cheap cheerfulness of the Methodist hymns he had to play. His skin was golden, his hair was blond with dark streaks like dark honey, his blue eyes were narrow and slanted, his glance was oblique. He was not tall but compact. His mouth was loose and feminine, he pouted and sulked and delivered his verdicts with a bitchiness that entranced the girls. He believed in a force in the universe, an energy you could tap into if you didn't let yourself be dragged down by negativity. He came closest to feeling this energy when he was playing the piano, not the hymns whose clichés he parodied to make them laugh, but the other things he played, classical music and songs he wrote himself. He wanted to be a singer-songwriter.

Helly said she didn't believe in anything. She thought life was just a cruel accident, a freak of chemicals in an empty universe. (This was what her father thought too.) Clare said she thought you couldn't know what the meaning of things was and she didn't believe in anything “out there,” but you ought to plunge yourself into life and taste every kind of experience you possibly could. Helly loved Alistair first and then he loved Helly. But as soon as he did, Helly was suspicious and bored, so it was Clare he first kissed and for a while “went out with,” and then later after he'd finished with her Clare discovered that Helly had all the time resented her taking Alistair away, and then Helly and Alistair got back together, and it was obvious he had wanted Helly all along.

Then there was Danny. Danny was the older brother of one of Tamsin's friends from the state school, and Clare loved him from the first moment she saw him, as people do in books; only this was probably the straightest, purest desire she ever felt, absolutely unmuddied by literature. He was tall, lean, olive-skinned, with a narrow mouth that smiled at the corners, and a face rapt in a kind of deliberate sleepy sensual attentiveness. Tamsin knew Danny because she bought dope and other things from a friend of his; he was friends with some of the bikers too. But he was a talented boy; he was staying on at school to do art in the sixth form. He lived off and on with his divorced mother in a flat on the twenty-first floor of a tower block in Churchtown, circled at its foot by great orange-lit dual carriageways like broad rivers, eerie in the dark, uncrossable. After the vandalized lift and the shadowy urine-smelling concrete stairwell, the flat was brilliant like the crystal interior of a stone struck open: flock wallpaper, gilt lamp brackets, a lit fish tank, a leather sofa, and a zebra-skin rug. Clare loved the flat with her strong inverted snobbery of that period, although she rather feared Danny's mother, who had his fine bones but was ironic and haggard with black-dyed hair. When Danny gave his jeans to his mother to mend, Clare envied her.

Clare loved Danny: desperately. Through her he met Helly and he loved Helly, and Helly went out with him for a while, only always holding something in reserve, an implication that while he was very sweet he just slightly bored her. This gave her an advantage in relation to Clare, who was abject. Then Helly finished with Danny to go out with somebody else (her Italian—which was another story), and a couple of times after parties or when parents were away for the weekend Clare and Danny ended up together, and she overflowed with blessedness. She lay beside him, ran her finger ends across his narrow hairless chest, dark-olive skin stretched across bone like the ribs of some beautiful little boat, a coracle, and underneath his heart beating.

She said, I'm so lucky.

He said, I'm not doing so badly either, am I?

And she was grateful for that.

But the last time it happened, he and Helly were already supposed to be back together again, and Clare found out months afterward that Helly knew what had happened between her and Danny, and it was another tangle between them, in which both of them claimed to feel betrayed, although in the end surely whatever justice one claimed was only straw in the blast of the jungle law of sex attraction that had nothing to do with justice.

Always, in that teenage time, Clare had to submit to this cruel law that poured all the kingdoms of the earth, it seemed, into the already overflowing laps of the beautiful ones. Helly found herself tall and blond and slender and golden-skinned with a wide astonishing red mouth, and Clare found herself short and round-shouldered with black hair that wasn't sleek but frizzy: and from those accidents all their lives unfolded. The inexorable operation of that law was a thing almost too terrible to directly contemplate, so there was always a muffled hopefulness one lived in, and then certain long nights of searing recognition that in fact worse than the worst one had dreaded was true. Once, in an elaborate solitary ceremony, Clare, dressed in the Victorian cotton nightdress Naomi had given her for Christmas, burned in a candle a list of the names of the boys she had loved (and a couple of men, including the French teacher still), renouncing all hopes of them and of any imaginable lover. She kept the ashes in a little silver pillbox. It was a long list, for age seventeen. She had a gift for loving boys. It was Helly who had the gift for being loved.

You didn't get both gifts at once, it seemed.

It was Helly (in spite of her belief in the guardian of the stump) who seemed to keep a perpetual reserve of irony and disdain in relation to male qualities. Clare (in spite of having the Greenham Common protests in her background) loved the expertise and seriousness of boys, their deep real interest in other things: vehicles, politics, machines, music, drugs even. You knew when girls weren't there boys felt relieved at being able to talk undistractedly. Male seriousness was authentic, Clare believed then, in a way female seriousness wasn't. Most interests girls had seemed to be pretenses put on and off to attract boys; their abject fascination with sex relationships sapped the truth from every other subject. Her own passionate love for books did not count for freedom, it was too muddled with her life, she was searching too feverishly in her reading to learn how to live and what to be: things boys just knew without searching. The best you could hope for was to be able to break in on male objectivity and bathe in it cleansingly: what you desired was that the authenticating look of male seriousness would actually come to rest on all you were and make you real.