“Coda,” by Tessa Hadley

As a carer, she actually added something of value to the world, which was more than Emma Bovary ever did. She was kind to old Mr. Hansen, and competent, and worked hard for a living, no doubt underpaid by some agency that was raking in the profits. And yet I felt sure that she was possessed by that same divine restlessness, or whatever power it was that sent Madame Bovary off in the early morning, making her way shamelessly to visit her lover, dragging her full skirts through the soaked fields. Our neighbors carer exuded this surplus energy; even watching her attending patiently to the old man, I seemed to feel it coiling off her like heat. She had her life as a carer, and she had this other, secret life, concealed inside it. Or perhaps the surplus energy was all mine. At first my breathlessness when I thought of her was only a game, like the crushes I used to have at school. I hurried upstairs in the hope of seeing her, contriving reasons for it cunningly, because Margot must not be allowed any clue as to what was going on. My fixation helped to pass the time, the long empty days.
I hadnt felt anything like this for years. And in those schoolgirl crushes, too, I hadnt really wanted consummationor recognition, even, from the beloved one. I had just wanted to feel faint with worship, as I whisked past the object of my desire in the school corridors while she was hurrying in the opposite direction, and was agitatedly, keenlyglancing around for teachers, because we werent supposed to talk in the corridorspouring gossip into some friends ear. Not gossip about me. She didnt even know that I existed. Or Id watch her swivel on one foot on the netball court, holding the ball tensely on her shoulder before throwing it, so that the little skirt of her gym tunic flared with her movement. I was never the one who caught the ball. I was never in the right place at the right time.
Once a week I was driving to the supermarket to stock up on food. I could have ordered the shopping online but, although I wasnt in the least resentful of Margot, I appreciated an opportunity to get out of the house, play Radio 4 in the car for ten minutes each way without any need to comment, and have my thoughts to myself as I piled up our usual items in the shopping trolley. One late afternoon, I met my Emma Bovary in the Morrisons car park at dusk. It was the shortest day of the year, and the wind was gusting frozen sleety rain in our faces, slicking the plastic carriers. She was on her way out as I was going in; we were both wearing our masks, but Id have recognized her anywhere. I heard the chink of bottles in her bag, and felt almost tenderly, as though they were kin to the bottles Id be picking out from the shelves myself, any minute now. Margot and I were getting through the Martinis at a rate, in the evenings.
To my surprise, I found myself stopping in front of her, blocking her way. Affronted, head down against the rain, she tried to get past me.
Hello, I said. I think I know you.
No recognition when she raised her head to look at me, eyes as blank as the dark windows where Id stood watching her. She was impatient, because I was preventing her from getting out of the rain into her car: that low-slung blue car, perhaps. And was she driving it this time, or was her man waiting in it? Youre looking after our neighbor, I said. Mr. Hansen. I see you with him sometimes in the garden.
She seemed to arrange her face then into an expression of guarded minimal pleasantness, appropriate for dealing with someone of the employer class; of course, I could see only her eyes. Her mask was one of those black ones made of stretch material, faintly suggestive and sinister, like a carnival mask. Mr. Hansens a lovely old gent, she said. Im very fond of him.
Youre very kind to him.
He likes to get out there with his plants. So which of those houses is yours?
How constrained her voice was, compared with when Id heard her wheedling and teasing on her phone. I was eager to abolish the distance and class divide between us. Its not my house, I said, which was, after all, strictly true. Im in with the old lady at No. 7, looking after her.
She looked at me oddly then, and more penetratingly. It must have been because I was wearing my own mask that I was able to utter these half lies, as if they could be made innocuous, filtered through the cloth over my mouth. I thought there was a daughter, she said. All this time she was backing away from me through the nasty weather, toward her car parked nearby; I was aware of a blur of blue somewhere at the edge of my vision. I waved my hand at her as if the daughter were a long story.
Do you know them, then? I called. Do you know Margot? Shes had the first shot of her vaccination. How about Mr. Hansen?
Were booked in for Thursday, she said. The car boot sprang open, operated from inside the car; she lifted her bags to put them in, raising her voice above the rain. I do know Margot, yes. Not very well.
Then it was Christmas, and after Christmas it rained for a week, so there wasnt much opportunity for spying. Our neighbors carer opened the front door when she wanted a cigarette and stood just inside it, so that I could see only her hand wafting the smoke away; when she arrived in the mornings I looked down into the tortured black nylon of her umbrella with its broken rib. I was sometimes aware of her and Mr. Hansen moving around inside the house, and if I put my ear to the wall I could hear their voices dimly, or the TV turned up loud like ours. As soon as the weather was better I watched out for them in the back garden. One morning after coffee we went up to Margots bedroom, at the back of the house; Margot was longing, she said, to have a go at my hair. Sitting in her place at the dressing table, I stared stoically at both our reflections; she stood behind me with an inspired face, sifting her hands through my gray-brown hair like a professionalit had grown out of its cut, into long clumps like spaniel ears. Outside, a mass of cloud was refulgent with gold light, and a bitter wind scoured the blue sky; twiggy winter trees bent under it stiffly. Margot glanced inadvertently into the next-door garden, then let go of my hair in dismay.
Christ, its that woman! Dont look at her, Diane.
What woman? I said, getting up to look, keeping out of sight behind the curtains.
I dont know, whats-her-name, Teresa.
Mr. Hansen was being taken for his walk in all the wind and flashing sunshine, wrapped up in his overcoat and scarf, leaning on his carer. She seemed to lift her face toward our window when they turned at the end of the path. Margot was cowering excitedly, bobbing behind my shoulder. She used to look after Dickie when he was poorly.
Really? I dont remember her.
Well, she was one of the ones who came. I didnt like her one bit; I wish the Hansens had asked me before they hired her. She tried to make Dickie go out in all weathers, too, but he hated it.
It would have done him good. He was supposed to exercise. He got too fat.
It was torture for the poor man. He could have caught his death of cold.
He died of cirrhosis of the liver.
No thanks to Teresa.
Sitting down again at the dressing table, I was reassured when I saw in the mirror my composed, imperturbable surface, its habitual heavy severity between the spaniel ears. She looks Mediterranean, I said. Is she Portuguese?
Maltese. Her parents were Maltese, I believe.
I rolled her name voluptuously around inside my mind. Teresa. And Malta fit, too, somehow: my idea of it, Catholic, militaristic, patriarchal. And you dislike her just because she made Dickie go outside?
Margot tried to go back to my hair, but when she rested her hands on my head I felt them trembling. She took money.
I was shocked and half thrilled, and said she should be careful before she went around making that sort of accusation. Are you sure, Mum? Do you mean you left money lying around and it was gone? But half the time youve no idea how much is in your purse.
Dickie gave her money.
How do you know?
I found the stubs in the checkbook. He thought I never looked in there. It wasnt just her pay. There were separate sums, over and above. He only wrote T, but Im sure those payments were for her; he pretended he couldnt remember, when I asked him. Not that much money: twenty-five pounds here, fifty there.
She looked meaningfully at my reflection in the mirror. Margot had adored Dickie. He was the one shed loved best of all her husbands: faded and drawling and handsome, hed had that deprecating Englishness which melted her (my father was Czech and a Jew, the boring banker a Scot). Like her, hed got by all his life on his looks and his charm, and there was an almost feminine camaraderie to their intimacy: Dickie fastened the clasps of her necklaces and did up her zips and pinned her hair skillfully, advising her on her outfits. I remembered him being carried out of the house for the last time, strapped into a stretcher-chair, insisting in his delirium that he had important calls to make.
So what was he paying her for?
What do you think?
I dont know why I felt a surge of cruelty toward my mother then. Usually Margot couldnt wait to talk about sex, lit up with the naughtiness and the scandal of it: she teased me for being puritanical. It was fervid in her generation, their conviction that sex was behind everythingshe derived her force from it, and her validation. Men cant help themselves, darling. I know what girls that age are like. You should flaunt that nice figure of yours, not hide it away. I wanted to laugh at this story of Dickie and make light of it, although it was clearly painful to her.
Do you mean that he was paying her for sex?
I think she let him touch her. Nothing under the clothes: thats what he insisted when I confronted him. He held her, she let him put his head against her. He wasnt capable by that time, lets be honest, of much more. It was an infatuationhe was a sick man. He didnt know what he was doing.
She couldnt stop giving me all this, spitting it out viciously, now that shed begungetting rid of a blockage of secret knowledge, which had been poisoning her. I couldnt work out at first why she hadnt told me before; it would have been just her sort of story if it had been about someone else, and shed made me wince often enough in the past, with her frankness about her sex life. Perhaps she hadnt wanted me to think less of Dickie, however outraged she was with him. But then I realized that, if she was scalding with shame, it wasnt on Dickies behalf. In her world, if there was shame anywhere in a sex transaction, it always stuck to the woman. When a man was unfaithful, the disgrace of it was somehow with the woman whod failed to hang on to him. Hadnt she made a lovely home for him? Wasnt she keeping herself up? Wasnt she any good in bed? If Dickie had done anything with Teresa, it would have shamed my mother, gouging out wounds in her self-respect, even though he was a bent old man who couldnt dress himself. He could have touched her, but hed preferred someone else.
I went through the bank statements. I dont think she even cashed those checks.
Nobody uses checks these days, Mum. Theyre more of a nuisance than theyre worth. Ill bet they were nothing to do with her.
Or she took them just to humiliate us. Thats what I couldnt forgive.
I thought that Teresa might have been humoring an old man. She might have put her arms around him kindly in the ordinary course of her caring duties, and she might have refused the extra checks at first, and then, when he made a fuss, taken them away just to please him, with no intention of ever cashing them. Or the Teresa who cavorted on the phone for her lover, and ground out cigarettes under her heel, may have taken her own twisted pleasure in the uncashed checks. Perhaps they gave her a leverage in her thoughts, against these employers whod fallen into the slough of old age from such superior heights of elegance and wealth. Or perhaps the checks were simply Dickies mistakes, screwed up and thrown in the wastepaper basket.read more