* * *
TINSLEY — THE DRY HUMORIST of the family — was tall, with wolfish lean sexiness and blond-streaked hair she pushed out of her way behind her ears or stuffed in a rubber band; she dressed in yellow waterproofs and yellow and blue and red clothes that always looked, even the dresses, as if they were bought in a shop selling mountaineering equipment. No one knew much about Tinsley’s love life; she was spending months at a time cooped up in a research station in the arctic where they were drilling long cores of ice from deep below the surface for the geological record, and she was sometimes the only woman alone with ten or fifteen men. Occasionally she turned up at home with some snow-tanned expert man in tow — once a bearded fat boozing American mineralogist whom Clare suspected just because he was so improbable — but she never offered any elucidation of their relationship and Genny never asked.
Opie was smaller and darker and plumper than Tinsley and Bram, with her dark hair cropped short; she was neat and watchful and devoted to her boyfriend. She was a secret smoker; it was not so much, she told Clare, that she didn’t dare tell her family as that she wouldn’t in a million years have been able to enjoy smoking in front of them anyway. So several times a day she absented herself discreetly and hid herself to smoke in a little den she had found, tucked behind a ruined wall above where the river flowed out of the lake and toward the mill. She even started keeping her tin of rolling tobacco and papers and lighter behind a loose stone in the wall. It was just what Swallows and Amazons would have done if they’d taken up smoking, Clare thought.
That evening when the children were finally asleep, Clare went out and sat in the den with her. It was late; the sun was setting behind the plantation of trees in a sky like a sea all brilliant with orange and mauve, one dark navy cloud sailing in it like a boat. The lake was dim. The den on its little mound was in a last pocket of light and warmth above the shadows.
— Good lookout point, said Opie. She trickled tobacco along a paper, refusing Clare’s bought cigarettes.
— I telephoned a friend this afternoon, said Clare, but she wasn’t in. I wonder if one-four-seven-one works from Ireland?
— Golly, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so.
— Just wondering whether she’ll know I’ve called. It doesn’t matter.
— No, but I know what you mean. I hate that. Sometimes you have an impulse to talk to somebody and they’re not in and then the impulse passes and you really hope they don’t do one-four-seven-one and get your number, because the point of your calling them is completely finished. Once I had a row with Jamie, before we lived together, and I phoned him to make friends and he wasn’t in, and about half an hour later I was furious because I’d completely changed my mind about forgiving him, but I knew he’d know I’d called.
— I can’t imagine you rowing with Jamie.
— Oh can’t you! Laughing, she blew out smoke and contemplated an inner happy place. We’re both so stubborn. And then we’re always both utterly miserable until we make friends again.
— But not real rows. Not like me and Bram.
Clare didn’t know why she’d said this; she and Bram very rarely argued, and she certainly had no desire to try to tell anyone in his family what was happening between them that summer, unspoken, quite unacknowledged.
— Oh, dear, said Opie, surprised. Is there something the matter between you two? Not you two.
— Not in the least. Not really. But you know what Bram’s like. I mean, he’s wonderful. He does so much with the children, he’s so patient. He’s so fair about my studying, he makes time for me to get on with it in the evenings, even when he’s been at work all day, he puts the children to bed for me, washes the dishes.…
— But?
— But nothing, really. He really is good. He makes me feel like a lower form of life sometimes.
Opie was dabbling in the leaf mold, making a shallow hole.
— I remember once, she said, when we were teenagers, I had deliberately broken something, a china bird Mum had brought me back from one of her trips. I broke it because she wouldn’t let me go out to a club for a friend’s birthday. Then I felt terrible. I had the broken pieces wrapped up in a T-shirt at the back of my drawer; I was hoping she wouldn’t notice. One day when I came home from school Bram was gluing it on the kitchen table. And Mum was all nice about it, thinking it had been an accident. And I was so angry with them both. How dare they look in my private drawers? How dare they touch my things? They were never ever to go in my room again without permission, and so on. It was just the way he sat there fixing it for me.
She put the nub end of her cigarette in the hole and palmed leaf mold across it, burying it.
— So I do see what you mean.
* * *
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED between Bram and Clare that summer. Or rather — that sounds too much as if it had happened to both of them impartially — there was something she had done to him, although neither of them could have named it. She had an image; it was as if with fiendish cunning she had contrived to lower around him, out of the clear blue sky, without his once being able to be sure she was doing it, an invisible all-smothering deadly force field of antagonism. It was like a dome of glass, cutting him off from her completely — but quite transparent. She knew there wasn’t a word he could say to complain of her. She was punctiliously generous and cheerful. She not only entered into but initiated holiday enthusiasms. She overflowed with just the right measure of affectionate names and touches, not overdoing it. Only a flaw in the quality of their eye contact could possibly give her away — she felt it on her side almost like a momentary ugly squint, that when she looked at him her glance didn’t reach his eyes straight but slipped off him, off the falsity of the bright reflective surface between them. Then, for a moment, anyone might see revealed the rictus of her hostility. So she didn’t look directly at him very often.
The only place that what was happening was even half acknowledged was in bed. Under the green satin bedspread, inside the bleak box of that stained orange wallpaper, they were cast out of the cocoon of their familiar things; they confronted one another alertly across a raw terrain. Clare simply dispensed with the whole years-long accumulation of their intimate habits and signs and code words.
— Let’s pretend, she whispered to him, when the light was still on and he was still reading, that I’m English and you’re Irish. I own the house; you’re my tenant. You’re a republican and I’m a unionist.
They had never spoken before of their fantasies. Bram, the first time, smiled in bewilderment at her. It was as if his face was shallow — not like hers, hers was deep, opaque — and she saw running across it like shadows across water his efforts to follow her meaning. She was seized with a brief spasm of sympathetic understanding for him. But the words she had used could not be taken back. They drew her on, she was escaping up through them into an open new heady space.
— You hate me. You would like to burn my house down; probably, one day, you will. You’ve been taught to hold my luxury in contempt. But at the same time you can’t resist my things. The sheets I lie in. My expensive silk underwear. My perfume. My soft skin. I hire you to carry furniture around the house. But in the bedroom I stand before the open door carelessly so that you have to squeeze past me, sweating, struggling with something heavy. I have on a thin summer’s dress, with nothing underneath. You feel my heat.