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 CLARE 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.