Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley Page A

children, her mother used to bring reports from the study, as if his moods were a weather on which they all depended: if he was stuck, she and Francis might be sent off to the cinema for the afternoon. Her father was a big man, he had had the physique—bulky shoulders and thick neck—of a statesman or an actor or a laborer, not a man of letters. His face had always been complex and unfinished, with lowering brows and long rugged cheek planes; now it was pouched, and blotched with purple. The fine convolutions of inner life and expression had always translated themselves in him into the stubbornnesses and martyrdoms of the flesh. Today he brooded over his page without lifting his head; that might have been her singing.
    â€”It’s a lovely day, Daddy.
    â€”Is it?
    â€”Would you like to sit outside?
    â€”No.
    â€”But you know it cheers you up.
    â€”Nothing makes me feel lower than being cheered up.
    Setting the coffee down on its mat on the side table, she put her arm around his shoulders.
    â€”Is it Saturday? he asked, which was supposed to mean that he wished it were Elaine and not she who had brought his coffee.
    She kissed his head, its baldness blotched with brown age blemishes, flaky with dry skin. He twisted with irritation and resentment under her kiss, but she told herself that at some deeper level he was fed by it, kept alive, reminded that he was loved. Marian was not, by nature, a kisser or a toucher, but her mother had always done it and she had taken on the part when her mother died. Possibly what she had taken on was not simply the innocent tending it looked like. Possibly it was instead a part of the subtle fight of the female with the male, of female insistent sweetness against male bitterness, female blithe confidence against male doubt.
    When they were children and their mother came back from the study with her reports, their attitude had been complicated. Everything arranged itself around the father and his work; there was no question about that. They were frightened if he was angry, proud when he did well and was acclaimed. But there was also a subtle kind of triumph in their subjection. They thought it was funny, his moodiness, his weakness, his need for them to surround him with consideration. It was a game they played with their mother, exaggerating their anxieties about him as if he were a ghoul or a troll; and weren’t they stronger, she and they, because they didn’t need anything so complicated or contingent? When they went off to the cinema or the shops, leaving him to his suffering over books written in languages they didn’t understand, didn’t they have a kind of swagger, because they could manage ordinary things?
    Of course, all the while, it might have been they who suffered, not knowing it, while he pleased himself. Feminists would have said so, and Marian surely was one. Complication upon complication.
    Marian didn’t like to feel she was playing a part, any longer, in that complicated war of males against females. She had thought she had finished with that forever when her marriage finished: long, long ago. Her marriage—and far behind that, her childhood—seemed ages off, eras ago: like history. Hadn’t everything in the world, and especially the things to do with men and women, changed out of all recognition since then? And hadn’t she, Marian, proved it by spending her mostly single life as an independent woman and a teacher?
    That morning, after the strange episode of her misinterpretation, the strange half hour or so of light and flowers, she was stricken with disappointment. She made Euan’s bed and tidied his bedroom and prepared his trays of lunch and supper under a cloud of sadness and fatalism, as if something precious had been shown to her and lost.
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    THERE WAS a problem with money. Marian’s mother had inherited some property; the income from this property was never spent after Marian