Authors: Tessa Hadley
When Ed and Julie drove into the yard on the morning of Stella’s sixtieth, there seemed to be no one around, although the dog came strolling to greet them. They opened the car doors, the boys spilled out, Ed and Julie sat on in the car for a few more moments, subsiding after the stress of the journey from London. The peace of the place, at the end of a no-through-road, sifted on to them out of the air. Parts of the old farmhouse were fifteenth century or even earlier; in the stonework the whorls and arcs of lost doors and windows were preserved like fossils, and high in the walls of a ruined stone barn were the niches of a dovecot. Stella was an architect, she knew how to do nothing to spoil it all.
— Go and make sure the boys are safe, Julie said.
She got out and started unpacking the bags of presents and food, and their overnight things; they seemed to need such a huge quantity of stuff these days to go away anywhere. Ed in the passenger seat kept his eyes closed; because he was very long and thin and it was a small car he had to sit with his knees almost up to his chin. He wouldn’t learn to drive. He groaned; he always managed to work himself up into a state of tension about these visits home. The dog, an intelligent old collie, pushed its head sympathetically into his crotch. Julie walked around the barn and saw that the boys had found their cousins and that they were all with Colin, who was skimming weed off the pond with a net on a long handle; he waved at her. Beyond the garden Colin and Stella owned a couple of rough fields where she kept her horses and her goats, a copse of beeches, and a tiny two-roomed cottage at the bottom of the hill which she used as a studio and for overspill guests; the whole place was hidden away in the intricate folds of red sandstone Somerset hills, reached through lanes just wide enough for one car, between the high hedgerows that were ancient field boundaries. Julie had never stayed in the country in her childhood, but her imagination of it had been something like this.
The two double glass doors in the long room at the back of the house were flung wide open on to the paved terrace for the sunny day, but the curtains were pulled across inside, and Julie had to find a way through them; then her eyes took time adjusting to the thick, dim light. Stella was sitting on the sofa at one end of the room with
her
arms round her two daughters, Rose and Cordelia. They were watching television.
— Daytime television? Julie said. — Is this because now you’re sixty you can let yourself go?
— Julie, darling, you’ve arrived! I didn’t hear Tray barking. It’s a DVD, Rose recorded it. Put it off, that’s quite enough for now. It’s rather hard to bear.
— No, let Julie see a bit of it.
— It’s Mum, in her youth, said Rose. — She’s about twenty, on some programme about what young people think. They were showing it as part of a 1960s season. She’s on a panel. I just happened to put it on and saw her on it: so we missed the beginning. It’s amazing. She’s so beautiful.
— I hardly remember doing the panel. I had no idea the footage still existed.
— It’s when she was writing for
Spare Rib
.
— No, it’s before
Spare Rib
existed.
— Look at her! Isn’t she amazing?
Julie could never get used to how Stella’s daughters were as intimate with their mother as puppies, always cuddling up and stroking and praising one another, confiding heated-up secrets or developing little tiffs. She had not known anything like this in her own family, although they didn’t get on badly. In reaction she held herself back at a satirical cool distance, as if she and Stella were the grown-ups and Rose and Cordelia were lovable children.
They made room on the sofa for her to squeeze in. The film’s washed-out colour made it look as if even the light
and
air were different in the past; Julie realised she was looking at a younger Stella. The girl on the television screen was wearing a paisley-patterned blouse and a fringed suede waistcoat. Her eyes were heavily made up and too dark for her pale perfect face, which was passionately in earnest; her long red-gold wavy hair seemed to crackle with static round her head. For the first moments it was shocking for Julie to connect that girl with the ageing woman beside her. ‘I haven’t actually taken LSD myself,’ the girl said. ‘But I can understand anyone dropping acid who isn’t ready yet for an engagement with the system at the level of conflict.’ Her voice was lighter and her accent seemed much more upper class than Stella’s was now: she sounded like a well-brought-up schoolgirl on Speech Day. She wasn’t at all awkward with the cameras on her, although there was something polished and brittle about her defiance, as if it was the performance of a part.
— I was twenty-three, said Stella. — Is that any excuse? Did I really once sound that priggish? I refuse to believe it.
— It was you! Cordelia said. — You’re just the same!
Stella turned the DVD player off although her daughters protested. — That’s quite enough of that, she said. — Too lacerating. I want to play with my grandchildren. The day’s too lovely. Where’s Ed?
She stood up and began to haul back the heavy curtains from the windows. Stella at sixty was Julie’s ideal of a certain kind of powerful older woman, tall and gaunt, with big bones; there was some pale peppery red colour left in the grey of the frizzy hair, which she still wore long, tied in a ponytail. As usual she was wearing baggy
tracksuit
bottoms with a man’s shirt. Her pale freckled skin was beginning to be age-spotted and slackening on her bones; she was the type to be contemptuous of the idea of cosmetic surgery. Sometimes the nakedness of Stella’s face dismayed Julie, sometimes she thought it was beautiful in its decay, like something she might have found in the woods round here, a piece of bark splotched over with lichen or a twiggy knot of witch’s broom. She wondered if she would have the audacity, when the time came, to let herself go like that. She thought that you would have to think very well of yourself, to bear it.
Stella said something quickly and lightly while she and Julie were hitching up the curtains on the big brass hooks that caught them back: almost as if it was not for her daughters to hear. — How can it be so long ago? It was only yesterday.
— It looked very interesting, Julie said carefully.
Ed came in, carrying bags. Whenever he first entered the family home he put on a face of nervous suffering which exasperated Julie, so that she kept her distance from him. — Happy birthday, Mother, he said, frowning and blinking: he called her Mother as if he was using the word ironically and it was too ordinary to be adequate to the history that lay between them. Ed was long and gangling like Stella, but he had Colin’s eloquent brown eyes – dog eyes, Stella called them – and his expressive red full mouth, that seemed to twist up and down to express all varieties of distress and pleasure.
— My darling boy. Stella held her arms open for him; afterwards he submitted to his sisters’ embraces.
— You and Julie are upstairs in the blue room, Stella said. — All the kids in the back attic. I’ve put Cordy and Seth down in the cottage. She thinks we’ll be too much for him.
— Seth? Julie asked. — He’s new. Is he nice?
— He’s gorgeous, Stella said.
— No, he really is. I’m totally in love.
Cordelia had Colin’s brown colouring too, and she was small and plump and soft-skinned like him.
— You’ll recognise him when you see him, Rose said. — He’s in a soap.
— Julie doesn’t watch soaps, said Cordelia.
— Which one is he in? And where is he?
—
Emmerdale
. He’s the doctor. And he’s gone into Watchet for ciggies.
— Londoners can’t seriously believe we don’t have corner shops in the country.
— Really he’s just trying to escape my clutches, now I’ve dragged him down to meet my folks.
Julie walked down the garden to find out what the children were doing. Colin was organising all five of them – Rose had three, a boy and two girls – into a team at the pond, some skimming, some forking the weedy mess, Rose’s smallest one importantly shooing the ducks, running at them waving little fat hands. When Julie saw they didn’t need her she didn’t approach any closer, she let herself drop down on to the rough grass. Unless for a moment she relaxed, she was never aware of being vigilantly on guard with Ed’s family. Rolling over on to her face now, with her arms stretched out, she closed her
eyes
, and felt the hard shapes of the earth pressing up underneath her, unmoulded to her contours. She imagined being buried, having earth in her mouth and nose and ears, insects tickling over her, her flesh turning to a dry brown fertilising cake.
The men carried out the huge table that was cut from a single piece of oak, and put it on the grass under the apple trees: the double doors had deliberately been made wide enough for this. They brought out the most comfortable armchair, too, for Colin’s mum, who was tiny, ancient, perplexed and deaf; everyone took turns to sit and chat with her. The dog lay under the table and the women spread out a cloth and put out dishes and flowers; Colin opened some white wine. He had found something special for the occasion because Stella didn’t like champagne; Julie didn’t know anything about wine, but she loved the zinging hit of the first mouthful out of the cold heavy glass. She put the glass down very carefully away from the edge of the table. All the ordinary things at Stella and Colin’s – glasses, table napkins, carving knife, milk jug – were desirable in a way that Julie hadn’t been aware of as a possibility for household items before she came to this house; although Stella handled them without any fuss, and never talked about shopping. If you asked, it would turn out that these things had been bought when they were first married and living in Iran, or that they had been made by some gifted silver designer who had died since, or were in some other way singular and interesting.
Stella changed out of her jogging bottoms into a green linen dress which she wore with bare legs and sandals and long ropes of pearls. Her daughters crowded her, exclaiming over the pearls. She made a debunking face to Julie across their bent heads. — Don’t you think pearls are awfully county? These were my mother’s, I’ve never really worn them.
— They’re worth a fortune, Rose said.
— You’re wondering which one will get them when I’m dead.
They protested in horror. — We don’t want your wretched pearls. We want you.
— You’re a wicked old woman to say such a thing.
— Haven’t I always told you she was wicked? Colin joined in complacently.
— I’ll leave the pearls to Julie then.
They made Julie try them on. She sat still where she was on one of the canvas chairs, with one leg crossed over the other, while Rose dropped them, doubled up, over her head, still warm from Stella’s neck. They all looked smiling at her. Ed was cross-legged some way off under an apple tree, squinting at her over his cigarette. Stella had forbidden him to smoke within twenty yards of the house and he had paced the distance out; Cordelia’s new boyfriend, Seth, had insisted he was happy to not smoke at all, though it was he who had driven in the first place to buy the cigarettes. Julie felt herself swallowing against the weight of the pearls.
— Well? Am I very Sloane?
It might be the wrong joke: perhaps the pearls were
too
good for that. The family Stella came from weren’t the Sloane kind of posh. However, they were all looking at her kindly, appraisingly. She had changed out of her jeans for the birthday lunch, and put on a bright red halterneck dress in a clinging stretch material that crossed over and tied in a bow at the small of her back; when she packed it she had wondered if it might be the wrong thing to wear for an outdoor summer meal, but looking round now she was sure that they approved. She could read their eyes and see herself, she didn’t need a mirror, but Rose, kind Rose, insisted on dragging her inside. — You have to be shown how lovely you are, she said. It was nice anyway, to be out of the sunshine for those few minutes, in the empty house. In the dim stone-flagged entrance hall their reflections swam at them out of a tarnished gilt-framed mirror; both of them shuddered in the cool. Julie was always wary, forced to contemplate herself head-on. She hadn’t been expected, when she was a child, to look like anything special.
— Aren’t you just perfect? See?
Not perfect, ears too big, forehead so high: but something that still surprised her, and which she imagined as if it was to do with keeping a balance, holding those long level eyes and the swing of dark short hair and the bare straight shoulders still, like holding liquid steady in a glass: it might spill out if you looked too carefully.
— And I can’t believe you’ve had two babies, Rose said wistfully, putting her hand on Julie’s flat stomach.
— Those great boys. I sometimes wonder, where did
they
come from? Julie twisted Rose’s rope of red hair in her hand. — I wish I had this.
— And the freckles that go with it?
— All the lot.
She wound the pearls in with Rose’s hair and piled it on top of her head.
— That’s very clever, said Rose. — Veronese. I look like a Venetian courtesan. He liked his women ample.
Julie didn’t have to ask who Veronese was: Ed had taken her to Venice twice. They went outside with Julie holding up Rose’s hair to show everyone. Then Cordelia wanted pearls in her hair too, and Stella had to find hairpins. Cordelia took her top off, to show them she also had Veronese breasts.
— Which really means, she said, — no kind of breasts at all, just little triangular white mounds. Like a boy’s. Like custards.
And it was true, her breasts did make Julie remember the ones in some of those huge old paintings, pink-nippled little custards, disproportionate to the goddesses’ huge thighs and bottoms; not that anything about Cordelia was huge, she was petite and pliant. Colin took a photograph of his daughter sitting at the table under the apple trees with pearls in her hair and her top off; all this was before they’d even started the food. Julie stole a quick glance at Cordelia’s boyfriend and he seemed to be taking it all in his stride, laughing and talking and looking at her breasts quite frankly. After all, he was an actor, he and Cordelia had met in a play, they would be used to this kind of thing. Only Vera, old Mrs Lavery, who wasn’t
supposed
to understand, seemed embarrassed by Cordelia’s nakedness. — Is Cordy all right? she asked no one in particular. Seth was good-looking, dark-skinned with shoulder-length black wiry curls and a strong, compact torso: at first Julie thought he must be Asian, until she worked out from his name and something he said that he was Jewish. If anything, he was trying a bit too hard to charm everyone. Ivan, Rose’s violinist husband, was so shy that no charm reached him, he sat locked into the private world of his talent (not such a great talent, Ed thought).