Accidents in the Home (2 page)

—You keep a diary, do you?

—Oh, not anymore. I wouldn't keep one now.

—She's got volumes of them. She used to write pages every night.

—It's so embarrassing. The entries begin with things like:
calories so far today, one centimeter of toothpaste, 5.
Or
I know that now I will never, ever, be happy again in my whole life
about some boy whose name I can't even remember from his initials.

—So what do you remember from Tim Dashwood's party, David? asked Helly.

He was simply the wrong scale for the little room crowded with books and pictures and delicate ceramics (Clare's father was a potter). He was sitting in his leather coat, jammed with one leg crossed over the other knee into the most comfortable chair in the house (which was not all that comfortable). He shook his leg in a nervous habit, showing a stretch of big brown hairy calf above his scarlet sock, drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair. At least he had taken off his shades. His eyes exposed without them were comical, doleful, as if they were pulled down into his cheeks; he had a large head with decisive features and thick dark hair standing straight up from his forehead. He smiled consideringly. Rose put a small fat hand onto his knee, which he ignored.

—I don't remember much. You know what his parties were like. That used to be the general point, didn't it? To get so out of it you couldn't remember much.

—Out of what? asked Lily.

*   *   *

C
LARE AND
H
ELLY
had met at Amery-James High School for Girls; from twelve to twenty they had lived in an intimacy they would never attain again with anybody else. In the very process of their formation they were intertwined, like two trees growing up in the same space. They learned to smoke together, practicing at home (Clare's home, with more liberal parents) under one another's critical scrutiny until it looked right. Now Clare, who had given it up, saw that Helly still tilted up her chin and blew her smoke off to one side in the way they had decided was most flattering. At school they made a secret pact of resistance (the school motto was
So hateth she derknesse
; they determined to love it); the pact was sealed by an exchange of drops of menstrual blood on tissues folded and wound around with hairs pulled from one another's heads. They went shoplifting together (for clothes, mostly, and makeup): testing themselves, initiating themselves into the kind of adulthood they aspired to, transgressive, toughened, disrespectful (the opposite to the one Amery-James aspired to on their behalf). Helly carried the shoplifting off with flair, Clare was cowardly and full of dread. Clare was the theorist and Helly was the one who acted. Clare was the feminist—when they were fifteen they read her stepmother's old copy of
The Female Eunuch
together, squeezed side by side on their stomachs on Helly's bed—but it was Helly who later rode a motorbike and went out on her own to pubs and clubs and mostly dismissed contemptuously the boys who asked her out. Clare always suspected and concealed a secret abjection in herself, some treachery of neediness toward the other sex, which seemed to fulfill itself when they were in their early twenties and the serious business of life became men. The girls turned their backs on one another then, ruthlessly cutting away old lives and connections because they thought they had found, at last, the life they really wanted.

*   *   *

C
LARE WAS PUTTING
the Parmesan toasts in the oven when Bram came in through the back door. He was working on a two-year project recording the ecology of an area of mudflats and coastal grassland that would be covered by water when the new barrage, an artificial dam for the city's marina, was completed. At weekends volunteer groups came down to help and he had to be there to supervise, but he'd promised to be home for lunch. She was relieved that he came in the back way because it meant Helly and David would not see him in his unflattering cycling helmet. He was so without vanity (genuinely, she was sure: she had probed for it deeply enough) that she sometimes thought he looked for ways to make himself ugly, to undo the effect of gentleness he couldn't help; he was blond and delicate with a forward-thrust lower jaw that made him soften his consonants when he spoke.

—So what's this one like? he asked, taking off the helmet, running his head under the cold tap, scouring himself with the towel.

—He's perfectly friendly. I think he's nice. After the last one, anyway. (After Helly brought the last one to visit them, Clare had found scorched silver foil in the bathroom and feared the worst.) He's a bit too
much,
though.

—Too much of what?

—They sort of fill the place up.

—She always brings several changes of clothes, doesn't she? Just in case.

—You can hardly get past their luggage in the hall.

—And I suppose you've been hearing all about the cultural delights of the capital?

—Oh, they've been everywhere and done everything. And know everyone, of course.

This rehearsal of mutual ironic judgment felt comradely and consoling, but as soon as Bram went to talk to the visitors and Clare was left setting the table she was filled with unreasonable resentment at his tone. They hadn't really talked much about London; mostly, she and Helly had talked about the old days. It was Clare's own fault if she had taken away any impression that things in London were more brilliant and thrilling than down here.

The lunch went off all right. At least, the soup was good, and there seemed to be plenty of talk, although perhaps most of it was Helly's and David's: Helly told them funny stories about the shoot for the ice-cream ad (she imitated the voice-over for them:
Forgive yourself: it's irresistible
), and David seemed to hold forth on every topic, he knew someone or he'd read something or he'd once worked somewhere. He even managed to find some kind of software program to talk about to Bram: mostly Bram didn't try to compete whenever the conversation was noisy. Clare was used to presuming, wincingly defensively, that Helly must think Bram was dull and stolid. Helly always made a point of trying to coax him out of what she probably imagined was his shell. Clare winced defensively for Helly too. She had no idea how Bram recoiled from her coaxing.

Toby got it all on his video. Both visitors tried encouraging him out from behind his viewfinder: David had friends in a video production company he should get in touch with, Helly lit his cigarette for him (Clare hated Toby smoking) and tried to draw him out on the subject of himself. But he couldn't resist how the shots framed themselves around David and Helly, how their clothes and scent and cigarette smoke and loud laughter crowded the space, and how dingy they managed to make ordinary family life seem. Rose tipped over her orange juice. Lily and Rose wouldn't eat the onion soup. Coco had broken his glasses, which had to be mended with sticking plaster until they could get to the optician's on Monday. For some reason Clare was exasperated at this, and at how patiently Bram mopped up Rose's orange juice with a cloth, although she knew this was unfair and knew how much more exasperated she would have been if he
hadn't
mopped it.

She had taken a few minutes before lunch to change into a dress and brush out her hair and spray on perfume. She wasn't sure whether she was really flirting with David at that point; she was making up to him, flattering him, because that would make everything go smoothly, Helly would be satisfied, and he would be at least kept sweet for the afternoon. She could see herself, when she watched the video later, backing away in front of them down the path of their weekend, his and Helly's, sweeping and sprinkling it ahead of them with her interest and her attention, helping to damp down David's impatience to be gone.

*   *   *

THEY WENT OUT
in the afternoon to look at Bram's project. Bram had been amused that Helly had to change her clothes first; although actually she reappeared in sensible scruffy trousers and shirt, in which she still managed to look spectacular. It was Clare in her dress who got her legs bitten and scratched in the long grass. They walked around the bay, which would eventually become the marina: now it was low tide and the ruined jetties of the old harbor marched out up to their knees in sleek gray glinting mud. Oystercatchers and curlews (Bram identified them) picked their fastidious way between them. Across the ring of the bay the piled up buildings of the city loomed, glinting and flashing from plate-glass office-block windows whenever the sun flew out from between ragged slate-colored clouds. It was May. There was a wind that flattened the pale mauve-green grass like a pelt and sent it racing in liquid waves; from time to time the sky shook out cold drops of rain. David was taking photographs. Bram left them to go and find his group of volunteers, who were counting lugworms farther on, around into the estuary. They climbed down some concrete steps with a rusted handrail onto a scrap of beach heaped up with stones and sticks and plastic rubbish and cans that the sea had bleached to the same opaque pale pastels.

As soon as she saw water, Rose began to take her clothes off. She was an ironic, willful, huge-eyed baby with rolls of translucent pale flesh at her wrists and chin and waist, and she despised clothes. She stripped at every opportunity, winter and summer, streaking triumphantly just out of reach of pursuing adults, flashing in triumph the long tender crease of her vagina and the pink cheeks of her bottom. Clare worried that Rose's taste for nakedness was outgrowing her innocence—she would be four in a few months—and she thought she needed to be taught to protect herself.

Rose protested that this was the seaside.

—No it's not, it's dirty water, and you're not to go in it.

Rose seemed to concede defeat.

But a few minutes later she was suddenly nowhere to be seen, and there was a little pile of her clothes dropped down beside an oilcan with the bottom rusted out. It seemed impossible that she could have gone anywhere out of their sight in so short a time. Everyone began calling her name, looking for her along the beach and back up the steps. The crescendo of dismay, from the first exasperated flutter of worry (
What a pain she is!
) to hollowing uninhibited panic only took a few minutes: Clare screamed at the other two children to stay where they were and kicking off her shoes ran barefoot across the shingle and the potentially lethal debris of glass and tin, to stand soaking her skirt in the scummy edge of the water, shrieking along the shoreline to right and left, fumbling in the water with her arms to try and feel for anything pulled under and washing in that dirty tide of sluggish brown waves that hardly broke, hardly made spume. She couldn't see the bottom, she couldn't imagine what she ought to do next, whether she ought to somehow submerge herself in it and try to open her eyes: wasn't this always how it was with accidents, that the parents tinkered grotesquely, futilely, in the wrong place, failing confusedly as you fail in dreams?

David shouted for Helly to go one way and he ran the other, back up the steps. Clare felt a passionate revulsion from her guests. It was in her preoccupation with them that she had taken her attention off Rose; she had been talking to David, pretending she was interested in cameras. If Bram had been here this would never have happened. Frantically, puritanically, Clare linked up her moment's neglect with other falsities, with her efforts to impress upon Helly and David the charms of family life, with the perfume she'd sprayed on, with their money, with Helly's advertising contract, even with the scorched tinfoil in the bathroom.

It occurred to her that there was a literary tradition of guilty women whose children pay for their mother's momentary lapses of attention, their casual betrayals (in the mornings when Rose was at nursery she was writing a PhD thesis on George Sand). Wasn't there a scene in Flaubert—or Balzac?—where an adulteress watches over the cot of a sick child, pledging the whole of her selfish future happiness against the few degrees his temperature must come down for him to live? At that moment she imagined such a scene, if it existed, quite without irony, the cheap irony that smirks at literary machinery. It seemed a revelation of a naked truth before which irony could only grovel.

Also, she suddenly dimly remembered someone called Tim Dashwood and odd details of a party she had gone to at his flat when she was a teenager: a plastic armchair pocked with cigarette burns, the suspect slickness of a greasy carpet under bare dancing feet, men with ponytails and slow-burning smiles who brought her and Helly drinks in plastic cups and didn't bother even to learn their names. Like good little girls they swallowed and smoked everything that was put in front of them. The slow black ink mushroom-clouding in her mind came back to her, a fearful sensation of cold deep water slipping past, tugging the ground out from under her. All sorts of things could have happened to them—did happen to them—at those parties. She splashed out of the water and ran along the shoreline, staggering with the pain in her feet, shouting for Rose.

A high sheer stone wall came down into the water, too high for Rose to have climbed. Clare ran back up the beach alongside it, her breath coming jaggedly in sobs, stopping to peer into a hollow culvert that pierced the wall, wide enough for a child to crawl into: it was dark and foul and stank inside, with nameless black shapes half submerged in an oily black puddle, but no Rose. Clare became convinced again that she was being dangerously distracted from the real disaster, which was happening somewhere else, and she ran back down to the sea.

*   *   *

D
AVID FOUND
R
OSE
. She was quite unhurt and only thirty yards from where they had been standing and shouting, hidden from them by a grassy bluff. Clare made him show her the place afterward, at the back of the beach where a wet trickle that might have been a stream and might have been sewage emerged from a big concrete pipe set into an earth bank: Rose had been dabbling her feet where the water spilled over the lip of the pipe. She might possibly have been contemplating crawling up into the pipe, and possibly if it had rained (as it proceeded to do shortly after she was found) there might have been a rush of water off the land. But these dangers were too remote to count, or even to produce any retrospective jolt of imagination at a horror narrowly skirted; the only one hurt was Clare, who had cut her foot on something in the water.