Sunstroke and Other Stories (17 page)

When Phil went out to play that evening Helen packed a suitcase and a bag and caught a bus with the children to go to where her mother lived about three miles away across the city. She could only carry enough for one night; she even left behind the pushchair, which was too heavy and too difficult to fold down. She didn’t mean, though, ever to go back to Phil. She had no idea of what lay ahead in the future, although she did think that if only she could
get back her old job at the dance school, then perhaps her mother would look after the children while she worked. This wasn’t likely, however, as the management at the dance school had changed and she didn’t know the new people. She and Phil had eaten the tea she cooked in silence; they hadn’t said goodbye when he went out. Helen had thought, as she always thought when he left to play, that he might be killed that night and she might never see him again: he would be driving home when he was tired and had been drinking, on unknown roads in the dark. She always pictured these roads as twisting through forest or bleak moorland, shining and treacherous with wet. But even then she didn’t run after him. The clamour of his footsteps on the staircase died away. She heard him open the garage door and drive out the car, then stop and get out and close the garage door behind him. Then he drove off.

The clouds that had muffled the day like a fleece broke up in the evening and floated as pink wisps in a high sunny sky; a thrush was joyous in the garden as they left. Helen had Sophie on her leading rein, and could just manage the suitcase as long as she would walk. She didn’t care if the Underwoods saw her go. The little girls loved catching buses. They had to get one down to the centre and then change; Helen was only afraid that as it got past Sophie’s bedtime she would grumble and rub her eyes and want to be picked up. But the girls seemed to understand that this evening didn’t exist inside the envelope of ordinary time; they cast quick buoyant wary looks at their mother, as if they mustn’t make too much of anything. Nia, who had seen Helen throw the brush, practised an air of easy adaptation. Sophie held on to the chrome rail of the seat in front and bounced. When Helen clenched her fist on the rail, so that if the bus stopped suddenly and Sophie flew forwards she wouldn’t hit her face, she was surprised to see she was still wearing her engagement and wedding rings,
distorting lumps under her glove. All that seemed left already far behind.

Helen’s father had died three years before; her mother had sold the big house where she had lived for thirty-five years and gone to live above a hairdresser’s. Socially, she had come down in the world. Her husband had been retail manager for one of the big department stores; she had used to come to this hairdresser’s as a customer, to have her hair washed and set, preserving a proper dignified distance from the staff. Now she even worked as a receptionist for them several afternoons a week, drawn deeply and happily into the world of their gossip and concerns. The only entrance to her flat was through the hairdresser’s; Helen had to ring the doorbell, then her mother peered down from between her sitting-room curtains to see whoever was calling at this time. She didn’t have a telephone, so Helen hadn’t been able to warn her. A few minutes later they could see her feeling her way along the row of dryers in the dim light from the stairs behind; she didn’t like to use the salon lights because they weren’t on her bill. No one knew that Nia’s dreams were visited by dryer-monsters with blank skin faces and huge bald egg-shaped skulls in powder blue. The glass door to the salon, hung inside with a rattling pink venetian blind, had ‘Jennifer’s’ stencilled across it in flowing cursive script, and underneath that a pink silhouette bust of a lady in an eighteenth-century wig.

Helen and her mother weren’t very alike. Everything about Helen had always been poised and quiveringly defiant; her mother seemed in contrast compliant and yielding. They didn’t look alike: Helen had her father’s stark cheekbones and strong colouring, her mother had been pinkly pretty and had faded and grown plump. But Helen was aware of a stubbornness deep down in her mother’s softness; when you pushed, she didn’t give way. When Helen was a teenager she and her mother had fought over every single thing –
over dancing, over make-up, over Phil – as if one of them must destroy the other before it could end; Helen’s father, who had always appeared to be the stern parent, could only look on in perplexity. It was through the birth of the babies that they had been reconciled; as if that blood sacrifice had satisfied both their honours. Now, as soon as she had undone the bolts and opened the salon door, Nana Allen seemed to know intuitively what had happened.

—You’ve left him, she said. —He didn’t hit you, did he? Has he been drinking?

Helen gave a little bleat of laughter and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. —I hit him. I threw something at him and hit him on the side of the head.

—A scrubbing brush, explained Nia solemnly.

Nana Allen laughed then too.

—Oh God, these children saw it, Helen said; and then for the first time tears spilled out from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

—Sophie didn’t see it, Nia corrected.

—Get them inside, her Nana said. —Come on in, my little lambs. Come and get warm in Nana’s flat. Have you eaten anything? I’ve got some casserole.

Nia got past the egghead dryers by clinging on to her nana’s skirt and burying her eyes in the familiar comfortable-smelling cloth. Helen couldn’t believe these tears, now that they came; they hadn’t been part of how she had imagined her exit, or her austere altered life. She hadn’t even known she had inside her whatever deep reservoir of sorrow the tears poured from, flooding out of her, wave after wave, so that she was sodden, sobbing, helpless to speak. Her mother made her sit down in the corner of the sofa, wrapping her up in the old wartime quilt from home that she put over her knees in the evenings against the draughts (before Helen came she had been sitting reading her library book). She made cups of milky sweet tea for the children,
made Nia a pickled-onion sandwich, gave them the biscuit barrel full of lemon creams; she had a special pronged fork for the pickled onions, with a pusher on a spring to press them off on to your plate. Helen eventually was able to drink a cup of tea too. The women together put the children to bed: Sophie in Nana’s bed because it was wider and she was less likely to fall out of it, Nia in the bed in the spare room, which they had to make up first. They left the doors just open, in case the children called out. Then they sat and talked together for hours. Helen’s mother held her hand while they talked, and stroked her hair, and brought a cool flannel for her to wipe her face. Nia could just hear their voices, although she couldn’t hear the words. She fell asleep and the voices became a kind of loose safety net into which she fell, drooping and stretching under her, bearing her up, letting her go.

—I hate him, Helen said adamantly at some point that evening. —He hates me. We’re killing each other. It’s horrible. But I’ve seen through the whole thing, now. I couldn’t ever put myself back inside it.

She was pacing about the room then with her old important restlessness, that still irritated her mother sometimes. She stopped to light another cigarette; the ashtray was already full, they were both smoking. Helen sucked on the cigarettes as if she was drinking the smoke down thirstily.

—Love is such a lie, she said. —In marriage, it’s a lie. You kiss each other goodbye in the morning but actually inside you’re both burning up with anger at things the other one’s done or not done, and relief at getting rid of them for a few hours. I don’t love him any more. I see right through him. All he cares about is his music and actually I agree with him: why shouldn’t he?

—You gave up your dancing.

Helen looked at her in surprise.—I wasn’t very good.
Not good enough. I wouldn’t want Phil to give up his music. That’s not the point.

—I thought you were very good.

(In fact she had exerted her utmost powers to dissuade Helen from a career in dance.)

—All those jazz standards about love and women, Helen went on, indifferent for the moment to the long-ago story of her dancing. —But actually they’re only interested in each other, they’re not genuinely interested in women at all. I mean, not once they’ve got what they want. All they’re thinking about when they play all those songs about the women they can’t bear to live without, the beautiful women they’ve lost, is actually what other men think. Am I playing it as well as him? What does he think of the way I did that solo? Is he impressed?

—He does care about you.

—No, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m his enemy. He wants to be free.

—It will seem different tomorrow morning.

—It won’t. Or if it does, then it won’t be the truth. I will be lying to myself again.

Nia woke up very early. She knew at once where she was, from the way a vague light was swelling behind her nana’s lilac-coloured silky curtains. Even though Nia didn’t go to school yet – she only went three afternoons a week to a little nursery where in fine weather they lay on mats in the playground to nap – that lilac-toned light already meant to her a precious freedom from routine. Usually the accompaniment to the lilac light at Nana’s was the sound of car engines starting up in the street outside and then droning deliciously away into the distance; but it was too early even for that to have begun.

Helen was in the bed with her. She had forgotten to wonder where her mother would sleep. Once or twice at
home Nia had been put into bed with her when she was ill, but it was a rare, strange treat. Helen had her back turned and her head buried down in the pillows. She was wearing her blue seersucker pyjamas, and snoring slightly; she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair still had some of its backcombed stiffness from the day, only matted and flattened; Nia reached out her fingers and felt it sticky with hairspray. She lifted herself carefully on one elbow, to survey her mother from this unaccustomed advantage of consciousness; everyone was asleep in the flat apart from her. Helen hadn’t taken her make-up off before she came to bed: some of it was smeared on Nana’s pillowcase. She radiated heat, and gave off her usual beloved complicated smell, like face powder and fruit cake. Shut up and inactive behind her closed eyes, frowning in her sleep, she seemed more and not less mysterious. Nia settled down again, pressing up cautiously behind her mother so as not to wake her. Through the puckery material of the pyjamas she could feel against her face the skin of her mother’s warm back; she breathed in and out with her mouth open, tasting her. She wondered if their lives had changed, and if she would be able to sleep with her mother every night from now on. Anything seemed possible.

Some time later she was wakened again by a sound of knocking, then of Jennifer (who wasn’t really Jennifer but Patsy) opening the salon door and speaking crossly to someone with a man’s voice: her daddy. Then the doorbell rang up in the flat. Helen sat bolt upright in bed, as though she came from sleep to full consciousness in one movement; she slithered her legs over the side of the bed and dashed into the sitting room, where she collided with Phil who had just dashed upstairs. She gave out a little moan: of subsidence, remorse, relief. Nia snuggled into the warm space her mother left behind. She could hear Jennifer moving about downstairs, tidying up and running water. She knew that soon the bell on the salon door would begin
to tinkle as the staff arrived, and then the customers. If she was lucky she would be allowed down later. The hairdryers were only harmless and comical during the day; she would sit out of the way and play with the perm papers.

Forty years later, only Nia can remember any of this. Sophie was too young to remember. Nana Allen is long dead; and Nia’s father is dead too, in his fifties, of a heart attack. When Nia tells the story to her mother, Helen simply flatly denies it; and Nia is sure she isn’t pretending, that she’s genuinely forgotten. In her late sixties Helen is still elegant and striking-looking, with suffering deep-set eyes and beautiful skin (‘Never use soap on your face, Nia’). She complains about her hairdresser, but he’s good: she has her hair dyed a dark honey colour with silver streaks, cut to fall loose and straight in a boyish look she calls ‘gamine’. People who meet Helen think she must have been something important, a broadcaster or a designer, although actually what she has mostly done in her life is that old-fashioned thing: being an attractive and interesting woman. She has had two significant relationships with men since Phil died, but she wouldn’t marry either of them, although (she says, and Nia believes) they begged her. One of these men died too, and the other went back to his wife. The way she tells it now, the relationship with Phil Cerruti was the true love of her life, because Phil was a true artist. Nia isn’t meaning to challenge this, either, when she brings up the subject of the time they ran away to Nana Allen’s.

—I won’t deny we did fight, Helen says.—We were both pretty passionate people. But no, I would remember it if I’d ever actually left him. I don’t think the possibility would have crossed my mind. By the standards of today, of course I should have left. Everything in our family life had to be fitted around his music; you can’t domesticate a real musician. But I was happy. The women of your generation
wouldn’t stand for it, darling, I know. But we’d been brought up to believe you stuck by your husband and that was it. You took the rough with the smooth.

On the other hand, Helen does now sometimes talk about her dancing. It has become part of her story, that she could have had a career as a dancer and she gave it up because that’s how it was in those days, if you married and had children; the way she tells it, you can’t tell whether she thinks the sacrifice was a shame or a splendid thing. Helen and Nia get on reasonably well most of the time these days. When Nia was in her twenties she went through (as she sees it now) a drearily dogmatic feminist phase. She lived for a while as a lesbian, and camped at Greenham Common. She gave herself a new name because she didn’t want to use her father’s, and then when Phil died (suddenly, so that she never said goodbye to him) she went into a depression for two years, and only came out of it with the help of therapy. Now she works as a therapist herself, and has a steady relationship with a man, Paul, although they don’t live together and don’t have any children. (Sophie has two boys and a girl, so Helen isn’t cheated of grandchildren.)