by
Tessa Hadley
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By the time Alex and Juliet returned from the dinner party – they found their babysitters watching television innocently, side by side on the sofa – Alex was in a better mood. He joked with them while Juliet searched in her purse for the money to pay them. He asked if they were still reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Had they given up on decadence yet? Lydia turned on all her charm and chattered eagerly, punctuating her remarks with false-sounding bursts of laughter. — Oh no, she said. — We’re going to be decadent for years!
But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed amused delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence, so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.
Soon Lydia was round at Kensal Rise almost every day. She didn’t see much of Alex, though; mostly she was babysitting for Sandy or drinking coffee or wine at the kitchen table with Juliet, who poured out to her all the dissatisfactions of her marriage. Actually Lydia liked Juliet. Lydia was really very impressionable, although she appeared so disabused and knowing, and had such decided opinions. She was drawn into strong connection with women she met, studying them for clues as to how to grow up, what kind of person to be; she admired Juliet’s bright little house, her tidy cupboards, her competence and toughness – and was rather afraid of her, fascinated by the idea of her intimacy with Alex. She could not imagine achieving for herself any existence so strongly flavoured, so deep.
Christine was surprised by the violence she felt, being wrenched out of her concentration on her picture. Usually, if she was working on her thesis, she looked forward to being interrupted at this time of the evening. She was uneasily aware of her growing preoccupation with her drawings: as if what began as a small black inkblot at the centre of her vision was spreading, eating up the attention she was supposed to be devoting to criticism, sapping her intellectual rigour. She borrowed art books from home without asking her mother, kept them under her bed and pored over them secretly, joyously: the flame-orange hair of Degas’s women, the ferocity of his black lines, the sublime modernity of his figures cropped inside the frame, the jagged angles of their elbows, his compositions cut across with empty space. It was wrenching, humiliating, to go back from these to her own stupid efforts. And yet the noise of the nib as she scratched at the black wax felt intimate as breathing, filling up the room. She was back inside the irresponsible absorption of her childhood, when she had drawn lying on her stomach on the floor in her bedroom, inventing a whole alternative universe, an island with mountains and a city and its own history and fragments of language. She could still remember letters from her secret alphabet.
— I like their emptiness, the absences in them.
— That’s only because I can’t do people yet. I’m going to learn how to do them. I’ve signed up for life-drawing classes.
— Don’t put people in them. People only spoil things.
— Oh! So that’s why your poems are all about furniture.
Alex laughed. He hadn’t known that she had read his poems. He took this girl in properly for the first time: her stiffness and thinness, her evasive look, her dark-blooded lips in their asymmetrical smile so wary and withholding. He forgave her for preferring the kind of poetry that rhymes.
A breeze fanned the newspaper on the table, the smells of a city summer were wafted through the open window: tar and car exhaust, the bitter-green of the flowering privet hedge. Police horses went past in the broad street, their hooves clip-clopping conversationally alongside the voices of the women who rode them; the stables were nearby. Christine saw in the hard light how the flesh was beginning to be puffy under Lydia’s eyes and drag down her cheeks. Yet this late ripeness was attractive in itself, she could see that too, softening Lydia’s haughty beauty, filling it out with character and experience. Lydia must be so afraid, now she was left alone, of wasting this late flare of her power on no one, on emptiness. In a few years they would be old women: sixty! There wasn’t much time.
Christine felt negligent then, wondering if she cared that Alex wasn’t writing. She didn’t think about it much. People did seem to like his poems. Although they hadn’t been much reviewed at first, in the years since they were published they’d acquired a certain cult following. Anyway, he had seemed stubbornly perverse to her, taking on seasonal work at the post office on top of his language classes, getting up in the freezing flat at an hour when it was still dark, when it wasn’t even conceivably morning. Why didn’t he try to find a job he liked? There was something self-dramatising in his sacrifices, though stoically he never uttered one word of complaint.
Alex was the moody prince with his pent-up angst. He was still slight at the waist and hips, still had his thick hair with its bronze gleam cut in the old style, fringe hanging into his eyes. The hazel cat’s eyes and curving mouth – too often closed in disappointment – were sensual and feminine despite himself. He’d have liked to give nothing away. And yet he was also vain, he was human, he was like everyone else: Christine knew how, although he avoided mirrors, if he caught sight inadvertently of his own reflection he straightened his shoulders and stood taller, renewed by these glimpses of his good looks, his power. When they went out in company other women looked at Alex surreptitiously or hungrily, and Christine was gratified that such a man had chosen her. But how long would the women admire him if he persisted in refusing to take on any substantial role in the world, or any status? Reading so much and knowing so much, but with nothing to show for it.
damn
[...] A young woman, blonde, wearing a leather skirt and a white ribbed jumper tight over her breasts, was standing alone at the bar drinking coffee, her light mac folded over her arm because the night was warm. The bartender didn’t seem to know her. Perhaps she was a prostitute; Alex wasn’t confident that he could read the signs, in a strange country. Anyhow, he liked her pale skin and defined, small features, faintly cruel and impersonal – he thought of a Venus in a Cranach painting. She asked him for a cigarette and when he lit it for her she tilted her head and dropped her glance in a certain way – at once flirtatious and withheld – which made him nostalgic, as if it were a gesture from an old film. The bartender was cashing up, the bar was closing.
— Something’s always lost though. Even in the end of the Cold War.
— Nothing good was lost! Really, was it?
He thought about it. — Something crabbed and cobwebby and disenchanted. I hated that crabbed thing in my father. Yet it was also very ambitious, very purely intellectual. We may come to think that those dissident Central European cultures were the last to keep a classical ideal alive, an ideal of disenchantment.
Isobel, softening, said she couldn’t imagine how bad Lydia must be feeling. Christine could imagine it. She knew Lydia better than Alex ever would or could, she thought; Lydia would always be performing for him. — She tells herself it was fated, it was bound to happen. And also that passion is always selfish and amoral, but can’t be resisted, only submitted to. She thinks what a selfish person she is, but thinks it luxuriantly.