Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley Page B

suitable and reasonable that Keith was not. They lived now in the country near Banbury, not far from where Penny and Caro had grown up. Meanwhile Keith met Lynne, and they shared their time between London and the Dordogne. So that in the end it was Caro who was left living in Wales, and if she thought sometimes that it was partly because of Keith Reid that she had ended up making her life there she didn’t mind, she just thought that it was funny.
    She turned out all the lights in the flat; she could see well enough in the light that came from the street lamp outside her front window to pour herself a whisky in hopes thatit would help put her to sleep. She sat to drink it with her feet tucked under her on the end of the sofa where she had sat an hour or so before listening to Keith; she heard a soft pattering of rain and a police siren, too far off to think about. In the half-dark, awareness of the familiar fond shapes of the furniture of her present life – tasteful and feminine and comfortable – was like a soft blanket settled around her shoulders. She should have felt safe and complete; it annoyed her that she was still gnawed by some unfinished business just because Keith Reid was asleep in her spare room. There were other men who had been much more important in her life, and yet when they came to stay (sometimes in the spare-room bed and sometimes in hers), it didn’t bother her this way.
    Her heart had sunk when halfway down the second bottle Keith began to wax nostalgic and maudlin about the sixties and the decay of the socialist dream. You heard this everywhere these days, in the newspapers and on television; usually of course from people who had been young then. The formula, surely inadequate to the complicated facts, was always the same: that what had been ‘idealism’ then had declined sadly into ‘disillusion’ now.
    —But remember, she had insisted, —that in 1968 when we marched round Trafalgar Square we were chanting ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh’! I mean, for Chrissake! Ho Chi Minh! And at that revolutionary festival you could play skittles with French riot police helmets stuck on Coca-Cola bottles. And remember us getting up at the crack of dawn to go and try and sell
Socialist Worker
to workers in that clothing factory in Shacklewell Lane. Expecting them to spend their hard-earned money on that rag with its dreary doctrine and all its factional infighting. And I used to go back to bed afterwards, when I got home, because I hated getting up so early. Remember that we spoke with respect of Lenin, and Trotsky, and Chairman Mao, all those mass murderers.Remember that we had contempt for the welfare state, as a piece of bourgeois revisionism.
    —There were excesses, Keith conceded fondly.—But then, excess was in the air. Anything could have happened. That’s what’s missing now. Caro, you sound so New Labour. I’m still a revolutionary, aren’t you? Don’t you still want socialism?
    She shrugged.—Oh, well, yes, socialism, I suppose . . .
    That conversation had ended awkwardly, each embarrassed by what they thought of as the other’s false position. Keith probably thought that Caro had ‘sold out’ (he might even have put it in those words, perhaps to Lynne). She worked as personal assistant to a Labour MP, a man she mostly liked and respected. (Before that she had worked for Panasonic.) On the second and fourth Mondays of every month she went to Amnesty International meetings in a shabby upstairs room of the Friends’ Meeting House, and was currently involved in a campaign for the release of a postgraduate student imprisoned in China for his researches into ethnic Uighur history. This compromising pragmatic liberalism might in time turn out to be as absolutely beside the point as the articles she had once written for
Black Dwarf
: who could tell? Your ethical life was a shallow bowl brimming impossibly; however dedicatedly you carried it about with you there were bound to be spills, or you found