Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley

it was like waking up inside one of Ruskin’s less temperate dreams. To Marian he simply said it was damp and depressing. In her irrational fit she was glad as she washed his breakfast things to think that this morning he had got into the open air, out among all the summer gardens blooming with flowers she had seen on her way over. This thought must have developed in her mind subliminally; if it had bubbled up into full consciousness then she would have waked and known it was not possible.
    Afterward, when she had come out of the fit and was wondering how she had made such a puzzling mistake, she realized that she had felt more than simple gladness at his getting out into the fine day. She had taken the lightness of his step out into the morning so early and spontaneously for a sign, a coded sign from him that she could hang onto, however he tried to deny it: a sign of hope and of his openness still, after all, to pleasure. What easier gesture of acquiescence than to walk out impromptu into a new day? The sky was pale veiled blue, and the walls of the back area outside the kitchen window were grown over with white and pink valerian. His going out was like a revelation of easy possibilities they had both been tangling and obfuscating; they had both between them been making everything so difficult and so bitter.
    And afterward when she was thinking about it she also wondered if she hadn’t, in fact, been imagining his death. Her fantasy of him released to light and flowers was like a benign fantasy-death, as if she had found a magic bypass around pain and ugliness and been able to imagine them released from one another, from father and daughter, with a lightness and ease angels might have at parting, not human beings.
    That was all it was. It was nothing, really; when Marian tried to tell Tamsin, later, it wasn’t even a story, just a moment’s blip in consciousness whose power, like the power of dreams, couldn’t be carried back into ordinary life. At some point after she tipped the washing up water away she had heard a sound from the study—a book slammed shut, a chair thrust impatiently back—that in an instant recalled her to herself and filled the flat’s emptiness with him and shriveled into nonsense her fantasy of light.
    It wouldn’t have seemed strange to Euan that Marian hadn’t greeted him as soon as she came in the flat; if he was busy she often didn’t bother him. She stopped singing as soon as she realized he was there: probably it was because of the singing that the book was slammed shut. Euan’s need for silence while he was working was one of the things he and Elaine fought over most bitterly. He was adamant that with both doors shut and the volume down he could still hear her radio in the kitchen; and indeed, when they both solemnly insisted that this be put to the test, it seemed he could, even though he often failed to hear other much louder noises. Elaine joked skeptically about his selective deafness, but Marian believed in it. It would have something to do with his perfect pitch; if he suspected that a false note was sounding somewhere around him, some responsive strained tautness of antipathy in him would thrum and vibrate to it, however faint it was. He couldn’t help it.
    Marian made coffee and took a cup in to him. He was writing in the chair she had had made for him, with the sloping desk fitted across its arms, the angle-poise light aimed at his page from behind his shoulder, his magnifying glass for small print at his left hand, blanket across his knees. Books were piled up, some open, some stuffed with paper markers, on the tables to either side of him. She knew what he was working on; it was a piece about the relations of Dostoevski’s thought to Russian Orthodox theology. Some of the books were in Cyrillic script. Marian could always tell by the way he sat or looked up at her whether it was going well or badly. When she and her brother were