She had said the wrong thing — or the right thing. He gave her a smile from behind his smoke that made her know she had given herself away somehow; he had set her a test of taste that he was pleased she had failed.
* * *
CLARE DIDN’T NEED to go out with the AA man. He found the car, looked at the engine, arranged for it to be towed away, and gave her a telephone number for the garage. She phoned her mother and arranged for her to come and collect them from the bed-and-breakfast in the morning; they’d drive on to the cottage and Marian would stay with them for the weekend.
— Do you want me to come and get you now? Marian asked.
— Oh, no, it’s much too late, we’re fine here for the night.
But when she put the phone down she felt a pain of childish homesickness and fear of the strange place. The house made her breathless and hot, as if it were hermetically sealed. There was no lock on the inside of the door of the family room. She undressed hastily and, overcoming an instinctive distaste, pulled the other woman’s nightdress over her head. It was huge on her: ludicrous and demeaning, changing her from herself, as she verified in the mirror in the tiny damp-smelling connected bathroom. There was also a streak of mud on her cheek, which must have been there all the time she sat downstairs. She would far rather have slept in her T-shirt and pants, but she submitted to the humiliation of the nightdress as if the man exacted it as a price for the inconvenience she had caused him. She spread out her clothes alongside the children’s on the radiators, rubbed at her teeth with a finger wet under the tap. Her hair was drying in frizzy chunks and she had no brush.
The children’s heads on their pillows were cast about in exaggerated abandonment to sleep. They snored and groaned. At the low casement window, where she had forgotten to draw the curtains, a huge nursery-rhyme moon rolled out of the clouds. She pushed at the window but couldn’t work out how to unfasten the catch and didn’t want to make a noise; if she pressed her face to the cool glass she could hear the rain, which dripped off the trees and was swallowed up by the soft earth.
Behind her, outside the door of the room, a floorboard creaked.
She didn’t ever seriously, really, think the man was coming for her.
But she held her breath long enough for the whole spectrum of possibilities to reel through her awareness: the unlikeliness of his trying anything with all the children in the room; his having drunk so much that such a rational consideration wouldn’t deter him; the reassurance that her mother knew where she was; that compromising nightdress, as if he might mistake her having put it on for an invitation. As for his disdain for her, that could work either way: could make him not want to touch her with a barge pole or could make him need to punish her for being — what? — young, ugly, indifferent to him? Or simply for being female.
Needless to say, at one far end of the spectrum of possibilities there flashed the irresistibly lurid vision of him standing out there with a shining machete and a homicidal light in his eyes, intending to hack them all to pieces.
She felt — not in her heart exactly, but in the pit of her chest where lungs and heart lift above the material base of the guts — the clench of that inward gesture that must be the beginning of praying. She wished she could pray. There was a movement outward from inside her, a beseeching, like a sick-making flutter of trapped wings.
— Help me, she tried, silently. The hills from whence cometh my help. I’m making such a mess of things. Yet will I fear no evil, thy rod and staff still comfort me.…
There was only that one giveaway creak from outside the door. If the man was ever there, he went away again.
Prayer addressed itself involuntarily, it seemed, to a male auditor: “rod and staff” gave the game away. Whatever goddesses she knew — Isis, Artemis, Aphrodite, Kali — she only knew vaguely from books. She couldn’t talk to them: and anyway, capricious, ruthless, vain, requiring flattering propitiations, they weren’t the ones she sought; she wanted a moralizing good God. There was the Blessed Virgin, but she was on the side of the salt of the earth, the ignorant and the weak, and would surely disapprove of Clare’s sophisticated modern problems. To her surprise (what kind of feminist was she?) Clare was overcome by a passionate longing to lie down in the bosom of a wisdom different from her own, deep-resonanced and subtle and fatherly.
She should go back to Bram.
Standing watching the door in that ugly and hostile pink room (it was a pink that tried for roses but instead hit something medical, like adhesive dressings) she was visited by a vision of herself going back. The vision was vague but sweet, involving some highly improbable gestures such as her kneeling and pressing Bram’s hand to her cheek, his touching her head with his hand in a kind of absolution, her burying her face in his shirt as he drew her to him so that she didn’t have to meet his eyes (that last one was from literature somewhere). In the vision as in reality she was wearing the blue tulip nightdress.
— Forgive me, she imagined herself saying to Bram. I didn’t know what I was doing.
The vision was highly ridiculous. Not only had she never in reality dreamed of asking Bram to forgive her, it had never occurred to her that there was anything she needed to be forgiven for. Everything the breakup had actually been like — the impossible convoluted ferreting out of blames and causations, the twisting of their old knowledge of one another to use in hostilities, the sheer meanness of their unleashed dislike of one another — all that was cleared aside in this vision as if it were finished with, when of course it wasn’t.
But then ridiculous was just what one ought to expect revelation to be; that was the whole point. By definition it couldn’t show you anything you could deduce or arrive at by yourself. It didn’t follow on from anything that had come before, and it changed everything.
She could really do this. Perhaps not in the tulip nightdress, and perhaps not actually kneeling, but she could go to Bram and offer herself, and — even though he might turn her down, even though it might turn out he already loved Helly instead — to do it might be in itself a kind of solution, a blissful simplification, whatever happened. It would be restful to submit to its outcome. Clare already felt a strange bliss in her limbs as she went around the room, picking up the last clothes from the floor, covering the children with their duvets, kissing their sleeping faces. Everything that had been rigid and willed in her movements was now suddenly free and fluid, she thought.
Rose was wrapped up in her bottom sheet like a cocoon and had to be unwound from it, protesting sleepily. In her eagerness not to be a nuisance, Clare had taken all single sheets from the man, too small to tuck in on the double bed: she and Rose spent the night with the sheets wrapped sweatily around their arms and legs or wrinkled in clumps underneath them. All night long in light uneasy sleep, Clare dreamed she was driving. The road wound down a forlorn hillside muffled in a sort of thick gray rain, which then became shrubby furry wet undergrowth and was somehow inside as well as outside the car. Or she was driving on a causeway across an inlet with shallow tepid saltwater full of seaweed washing about to either side of her, suddenly realizing she’d forgotten to check the safe times for crossing.
* * *
THE FIRST THOUGHT her mind reoccupied as she came to consciousness in the morning was this plan for her reconciliation with Bram. It seemed to her instantly factitious and false, sickening: a scene out of a novel, not out of her real life. She felt ashamed at her capacity for this kind of fantasy and at the danger she was always in of acting upon her fantasies and living by them. In contrast, what she felt that morning, waking before any of the children in the strange room, was the welcome abrasiveness of the real. It was bright outside. Pools and glimmers of pink light came and went on the walls. Under her bare feet the carpet was hairy and greasy; all their clothes on the radiators were still soaked, as the central heating had never been turned on. She wet one of the little hand towels in the bathroom to wash herself, then pulled on stiff wet socks, cold pants, heavy jeans, relishing the resistance the clothes offered to her wincing warm flesh. Of course she was not going back, of course not. This was what she had left for, to have adventures in strange houses, to wake up by herself in rooms that weren’t snugly and safely molded to her shape, ugly rooms like dead shells inside which she would know herself more sharply alive.