Authors: Tessa Hadley
On the landing on the way back to her room, she heard May and Dennis talking in their bedroom. That was good, it meant that they weren’t lying awake listening to her move about. She took a couple of cautious steps and stood where she might be able to catch what they were saying. She had never had any compunction about eavesdropping, or reading other people’s letters or diaries; at home, with so many brothers and sisters, a certain level of surveillance had been almost necessary for survival – unless you sneaked, you never learned what was going on. Anyway, she trusted herself to understand whatever she found out.
She couldn’t really hear May and Dennis. May was angry about something, Dennis was soothing her: he rumbled, reasonable, sympathetic. They were both suppressing their voices, naturally, in this house of thin walls. May’s tone was different from the one she’d used all evening: hard and final. Sheila knew at once that this must be her real voice, the one she used with people she was comfortable with.
— How can I talk to her? Sheila heard May say then, quavering suddenly louder. — With that accent like a mouthful of cut glass?
Sheila’s heart heaved: the thud was so strong she even imagined that Dennis and May had heard it, until he rumbled again and she knew she was safe. It serves you right, she told herself immediately, not knowing quite what it was that she had deserved, or what for.
Back in bed, she lay huddled with her knees pulled up inside her nightdress, the taste of the casserole meat
rising
from her stomach. She was going over the work that she had to do for the following week: a Latin prose translation, an essay on
Medea
. But just as she fell into sleep she recognised that May had muddled two quite separate expressions. How stupid, Sheila thought. It has to be either ‘talking through a mouthful of plums’ or ‘an accent like cut glass’. Not ‘a mouthful of cut glass’. She’s made nonsense of it.
For a moment, however, she could imagine the sensation of chewing politely and sufferingly on a mouthful of broken crystal, tasting salty blood.
Neil came to the rectory for a few days after Christmas. Sheila never quite got over the surprise of his being there, where he didn’t belong, among the left-behind scenes of her childhood. She knew that she was reacting badly to the situation – as if she were blinking into a light that distracted her from seeing him fairly. She was irritated when he seemed to get along with her parents. At supper the first night, he talked with her father about the Knox family; Sheila’s family – the Culverts – was distantly related to them. A Culvert had been one of the first Evangelical bishops to be ordained in the Church of England: the old sober kind of Evangelical, not the new guitar-playing excitable kind. Neil knew about the Ronald Knox translation of the Bible because his mother had been brought up a Catholic, and because he knew about so many things. Reverend Culvert told him about the Roman earthenware found in the scrubland close to the river that the villagers called the Ditch, and about
the
carved flints that lay about in the fields for picking up. He sputtered mashed potato and gesticulated with pleasure at having someone informed to talk to. His own children kept their intellectual interests strictly apart from family mealtimes; they were embarrassed if their father ever veered from his habitual ironic distance. He was a tall thin man, whose head with its long earlobes was austere in repose, as if it were carved out of hard ancient wood; to see him so boyishly eager was compromising, like watching a tortoise bob its skinny neck out from the decency of its shell.
Sheila was aware of how gratifying it was to her father that someone like Neil, who came from a working-class background, should be doing so well. The Reverend, despite the disappointments he was daily faced with – the sullen village boys, their cursing, their fatalism – kept up, in the solitude of his study at least, a whole set of hopeful ideals that had to do with justice and progress. Sheila winced when he gleamed with pleased surprise at Neil’s intelligent comments. She and her siblings had grown up with a horror that their father might sometime make a sermon out of the things that they did, or that happened to them. Sheila’s mother, peculiar and ravaged, was simply grateful that the conversation didn’t require her dutiful bolstering; she bowed her head low over her plate to eat, while the children exchanged veiled glances. The boys were horrible mimics: they would be mentally rehearsing Neil’s accent. The gammon was too salty and the parsley sauce had been made from a packet; Sheila only ate the mash and the Brussels sprouts. Her mother’s
cooking
was loveless and institutional. An old book of fine recipes in French – a wedding present – sat unopened on a shelf above the kitchen stove, its pages gummed together by the steam from hundreds of pans of boiling potatoes.
— How can you not see how awful they are? Sheila hissed to Neil the next day when she took him on a walk to get away from the house. They set out along the flank of the wide shallow valley, into a freezing wind that rippled the slate-coloured water standing on the clay in the valley bottom, where the Ditch had overflowed. — They’re so dried up, so false. Nothing they say is ever real.
He shrugged. — At least your parents don’t make remarks about West Indians being too lazy to work and wanting to sit all day with a string tied round their big toe, fishing in the creek.
— I wish they would, Sheila said gloomily. — Does your dad really believe that?
— Didn’t he treat you to his Al Jolson impression?
— But don’t you see how sickening the opposite thing is, too? Always having to be up on the moral high ground. We actually have a family abbreviation for it, you know: the MHG. Mum shouts it when the kids are quarrelling: ‘MHG! Back down and take the MHG!’ Sometimes the whole family goes berserk – I can’t tell you. My brother Andrew – the one who left home – once stabbed Stephen with a fork. He was shouting at him, ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt!’ Dad was trying to separate them, Mum was threatening to call the police. Then that evening when it had all died
down
we were just sitting around the table again, eating boiled liver or something, pretending that nothing had happened. ‘Almighty God, who hast given us grace at this time.’
Neil laughed.
— You closed your eyes when he prayed at the table last night, she said accusingly.
— Did I? No, I didn’t.
Sheila was walking backward ahead of him along the path, in her eagerness to convey to him the truth about her parents. The wind on her back whipped her hair across her face from under her knitted hat. Mrs Culvert had insisted that Neil, who didn’t own a hat, borrow some awful thing from the tallboy in the hall which no one could remember ever wearing, a kind of bonnet with a furry lining and earflaps; it changed him piquantly, into a beady-eyed, perky cartoon animal. He seemed more interested in the landscape than in Sheila’s family. He asked her the names of places they could see, which she didn’t always know; he couldn’t believe that she had lived here all her life and wasn’t sure where north was. They reached a stand of beech trees growing on a slope about a mile from the village. Among the trees, the wind that had blown so insistently against them dropped, and they stopped to recover their equilibrium on a muffling carpet of dried leaves. The smooth trunks of the trees surging up out of the earth seemed present and intelligent, grey beasts standing soberly to watch them. A musky mushroomy perfume rose in the stillness from the mulch underfoot. Neil put his arms around Sheila and kissed
her
; the embrace felt comical and unsexual through their bulky layers of jumpers, coats and scarves.
— I could put my coat on the ground, Neil said insinuatingly into her neck, his earflaps scratching her chin. — It would be nice to cuddle up.
— You’re joking, Sheila said in horror. — In broad daylight?
Needless to say, at the rectory they were sleeping separately: Sheila was in her old room with her sister Hilary, Neil was in with Anthony and Stephen. — I feel awful, Mrs Culvert had mumbled, not looking at Neil, bobbing her thick shock of grey hair and apologising for there being no spare room that he could have to himself. — What you must think … Of course we should – five bedrooms. Don’t know if Sheila’s told you Gillian’s problems? (Gillian, who was eight, was epileptic, and had difficulty coping with school. She was seeing a psychiatrist in Cambridge; apparently she needed her own room. ‘Which makes me think she’s smarter than she looks,’ Sheila had said.)
— We’re out in the countryside, Neil said to Sheila, nuzzling her. — There’s no one to see.
— That just shows how much you know about the countryside. She pushed him away from her with both gloved hands. — Everyone will know that we’re up here already. If we don’t walk on soon, they’ll be looking at their watches.
— Who cares? he said, trying again.
— I do, she said passionately. — Don’t spoil this place for me. It’s somewhere I used to come to be by myself
when
I was a girl, when I couldn’t bear any of them at home. It’s holy to me. I used to read poetry here.
Neil couldn’t argue with that, and so they moved on, faintly mutually resentful long after they’d resumed holding hands and talking. In fact, Sheila had somewhat misrepresented the significance of the beech grove. She had used to go there with Hilary; she would never have gone walking anywhere around here on her own. It was true, though, that she and her sister had sometimes brought their books to the grove with them, and had worked themselves up over what they were reading into states of exalted excitement.
When they had all eaten their cauliflower cheese that evening, Mrs Culvert suggested unexpectedly that they play games.
— We always do at Christmas, she explained to Neil. — Family tradition … no television. With you here – new blood, so to speak.
Neil was fairly appalled at the idea and no one else seemed keen, but nonetheless when the washing up was done they assembled to play in the front room, the girls snuggling round the meek warmth of the storage heater with their jumpers pulled down over their hands, the boys erupting into spasms of kicking on the broken-backed sofa. Mrs Culvert carried armfuls of props downstairs for charades and dumped them triumphantly in a heap: a fur coat, a parasol, straw boaters, an inflatable rubber ring for the beach, an air-raid warden’s helmet, dog leashes, an evening dress of crinkled green Fortuny silk, a croquet mallet. The Reverend, in magnanimous
concession
, poured glasses of fizzy cider for everyone but the three youngest children.
Poor Neil was out of his depth. He had never played charades before, and he was hopeless at it. His team acted ‘Eucharist’, and for ‘ewe’ they dressed him up as a shepherd in a stripy flannelette sheet with a crook left over from someone’s Nativity play. Nola and Patricia frisked around his feet, baaing, while Hilary who was usually earnest and silent followed on all fours, wrapped in a sheepskin rug from the study. Neil made no effort to get into the role of the shepherd; he batted uncomfortably at the girls with his crook and almost ruined everything by mumbling pointedly, — And here’s the ewe, when Hilary appeared.
The Culverts threw themselves into these games, once they got started, with an extravagance that was almost a mania. For ‘wrist’, Reverend Culvert put on the green silk dress and minced up and down with his wife’s handbag, drooping his wrist and exclaiming, — Dear me, ducky. Neil looked frankly astonished. He wasn’t much better at guessing, either. Hilary and her father got Sheila’s team’s word – ‘seductress’ – long before Neil did; they held back to give him a chance, and he stared miserably, bemusedly, at Mrs Culvert’s egg-laying (—Poultry? he ventured), and at Stephen as a hairdresser perming Anthony’s blond nylon wig. Sheila, acting the whole word in the finale, in her father’s silk dressing gown and a pair of old high heels, was languidly seductive as Neil had never seen her: husky-voiced, rolling her hips, adjusting her stocking, letting the dressing gown
fall
open when she sat down, smoothing her perfectly shaped long legs. She patted a place beside her on the sofa for her mother, dressed as a shy boy, in tails with a top hat and cane, a moustache drawn with a black mascara brush on her upper lip; she pulled the boy over by his tie to kiss her. Neil was dismayed to feel strong stirrings of desire as he watched.
— Never mind! Mrs Culvert said to him consolingly when the game was over and they all sat flushed and panting among the disregarded heaps of costumes and props, bubbling weakly with smiles and shamed giggles at what they had done. Mrs Culvert still had her moustache. — Awfully silly, really, she said. — You’ll get the hang of it next time.
The next morning, Sheila and Hilary took the short cut through the garden on their way back from buying hair dye at the shop in the village; Sheila was determined to do something with Hilary’s mousy hair. The short cut meant that they had to plough through dead weeds and brambles at the long garden’s bottom end. A wet mist like sticky, grubby wool was still clinging to the earth at ten o’clock, and their trousers were almost immediately soaked to the knees, the water seeping through their desert boots to their socks. They tugged at the naked branches of a silver birch overhead to drench each other thoroughly, squealing in the shower of drops. For the first time, Sheila experienced a rush of strong feeling for her home and her past, a tenderness for the winter garden’s desolation. The same grey sodden dishcloths
had
been left hanging for months on the washing line. A plastic bucket was half filled with rotting apples from the trees. Children’s trikes and an old pedal car had been left out to rot too. Everything in the flower beds had over-grown and died, and now the silky seed heads and swollen blackened pods, slashed down by wind and rain, lay dissolving into the earth.
The daylight was so grudging that the lamp was turned on in the vicar’s study. The sisters had often watched their father from out here as he rehearsed his sermons or conducted symphonies on the gramophone, thinking nobody could see him. Neil had found some LPs that Andrew had left behind, and Reverend Culvert, who was visiting elderly parishioners in hospital this morning, had said at breakfast that he could play them in the study if he wanted to. Through the French windows, the girls could see him sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking, his hair falling forward across his face. He was swaying his head in time to a song they couldn’t hear: rock music, Frank Zappa probably, nothing that the dusty old study with its walls of books had ever been treated to before. (Andrew had had his own hi-fi, which he had taken away with him.) Hilary couldn’t help bursting out with a snort of laughter.