Married Love Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tessa Hadley

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Married Love

  Friendly Fire

  A Mouthful of Cut Glass

  The Trojan Prince

  Because the Night

  Journey Home

  In the Country

  The Godchildren

  She’s the One

  In the Cave

  Pretending

  Post-production

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie’s university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie’s life unfolds; her marriage to Edgar, the tiny flat they share, the children that follow. It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing new collection.

  On full display in these stories are the qualities Tessa Hadley has been praised for often before: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humour, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful and precise prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies – captured and distilled to remarkable effect.

  Married Love is a collection to treasure, a masterful new work from one of the most accomplished storytellers of today.

  About the Author

  Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom and The London Train, and one previous collection of stories, Sunstroke. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.

  Also by Tessa Hadley

  ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME

  EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT

  SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES

  THE MASTER BEDROOM

  THE LONDON TRAIN

  to Georgina Hammick

  Married Love

  and Other Stories

  Tessa Hadley

  Married Love

  LOTTIE ANNOUNCED THAT she was getting married.

  This was at the breakfast table at her parents’ house one weekend. The kitchen in that house was upstairs, its windows overlooking the garden below. It was a tall, thin, old house, comfortably untidy, worn to fit the shape of the family. The summer morning was rainy, so all the lights were on, the atmosphere close and dreamy, perfumed with toast and coffee.

  — Whatever for? Lottie’s mother Hattie said, and carried on reading her book. She was an English teacher, but she read crime novels at weekends: this one was about a detective in Venice.

  Lottie was nineteen, but she looked more like thirteen or fourteen. She was just over five feet tall, with a tight little figure and a barrel chest; she insisted on wearing the same glasses with thick black frames that she had chosen years earlier, and her hair, the colour of washed-out straw, was pulled into pigtails.

  Everyone happened to be at home that weekend, even Lottie’s older brother Rufus and her sister Em, who had both moved away.

  — Have you got a boyfriend at last? Em asked.

  Lottie was always pale, with milky translucent skin behind a ghostly arc of freckles across her snub nose, but she seemed to be even whiter than usual that morning, blue veins standing out at her temples; she clenched her hands on either side of the place mat in front of her. They were improbable hands for a violinist: pink and plump, with short blunt fingers and bitten cuticles.

  — You’re not taking me seriously! she cried.

  A squall of rain urged against the steamed-up window-panes, the kettle boiled, toast sprang from the toaster for no one in particular. Vaguely, they all looked at her, thinking their own thoughts. Lottie emanated intensity; her personality was like a demon trapped inside a space too small. Even as a baby she had been preternaturally perceptive and judgmental. Her talent for the violin, when it was discovered, had seemed an explanation for her surplus strength, or a solution to it; she had begun on an instrument so tiny that it looked like a Christmas-tree decoration. Now she was living with her parents while she studied for her music degree at the university.

  — Why ever would you want to get married? Hattie said reasonably. — Dad and I have never felt the need.

  — I’m not like you, Lottie said.

  This was one of her battle cries.

  — Of course, you’re not like anybody, sweetheart. You’re just yourself.

  — For a start, I happen to have religious beliefs. I believe that marriage is a holy sacrament.

  — No, you don’t, Rufus said. — You’ve never said anything about them before.

  — So when, exactly, are you getting married? Em asked sceptically. — And who to?

  — How could I possibly know yet when? That’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. I want to sort out a date. I want you all to be there. I want it to be a proper wedding. With a dress and everything. And bridesmaids, probably.

  — So you have got a boyfriend! Em said.

  Em was gracefully loose-jointed, with her mother’s hooded, poetic eyes; she worked in the toxicology department of the city hospital.

  — My husband, he’s going to be.

  Hattie put down her book and her coffee mug in concern. — Poppet, you’re so young. There’s no hurry about the marrying part. Of course, you can have a proper wedding one day if that’s what you want, but there’s no need to rush into anything.

  Sullen white dents appeared in Lottie’s cheeks where her jaw was set. — You forget that I have a whole life of my own now, as an adult, outside of this house, about which you know nothing, absolutely nothing. You don’t warn Emily not to rush into anything.

  — To be fair, Em said, — I’m not the one who just said I was getting married.

  — Have we met him? Hattie asked. — Is he on your course?

  — Is it the one with the stammer in your string quartet? asked Noah, Lottie’s younger brother, who was still at school. — Tristan?

  — How could you think I’d want to marry Tristan?

  — Personally, I’d warn against anyone in a string quartet, Rufus said.

  — Shut up, Rufus. It isn’t anything to do with Tristan.

  — So what’s his name, then? Noah persisted.

  Duncan, the children’s father, arrived from his morning ritual with the Guardian in the bathroom upstairs. He was shorter than Hattie, stocky, densely and neatly made, with a wrinkled, ugly, interesting head; she was vague and languid, elegant, beginning to be faded. He taught special-needs kids at a local comprehensive, though not the same one where Hattie taught. — What is whose name?

  Alarm took flight in Hattie. — Lottie, darling, you’re not pregnant, are you?

  — I just don’t believe this family, Lottie wailed. — There’s something horrible about the way your minds work.

  — Because if you’re pregnant we can deal with that. It doesn’t mean that you have to get married.

  — Is she pregnant? Duncan asked.

  — Of course I’m not.

  — She says she’s going to get married.

  — Whatever for?

  — Also that she has religious beliefs, all of a sudden.

  This seemed to bother Rufus more than the marrying. He was a
n ironic pragmatist; he worked as a research analyst for the Cabinet Office.

  — The reason, Lottie said, — is that I’ve met someone quite different from anyone I’ve ever known before, different from any of you. He’s a great man. He’s touched my life, and transformed it. I’m lucky he even noticed I exist.

  She had a gift of vehemence, the occasional lightning flash of vision so strong that it revealed to others, for a moment, the world as it was from her perspective.

  — And who is he? Em asked her, almost shyly.

  — I’m not going to tell you now, Lottie said. — Not after this. Not yet.

  — When you say ‘great man’, her father considered, — I get the feeling that you’re not talking about one of your fellow students.

  Hattie saw what he meant, after gaping at him for half a second. — One of your teachers! Is it?

  Lottie, blinking behind her glasses, turned her round white face towards her mother, precarious, defiant.

  — Does this teacher know that you feel this way about him?

  — You seriously think I’m making it all up? I told you, he loves me. He’s going to marry me.

  Duncan wondered if it wasn’t Edgar Lennox. — He’s some kind of High Anglican, isn’t he? I believe he writes religious music.

  — And so? Lottie challenged. — If it was him?

  — Oh, no! Hattie stood up out of her chair, uncharacteristically guttural, almost growling. — That’s out of the question. Edgar Lennox. That’s just not thinkable, in any way, shape or form.

  — I hate it when you use that phrase, Lottie shouted, standing up, too. — Way, shape or form. It’s so idiotic. It’s exactly the sort of thing you would say. It just goes to show your mediocrity.

  — Let’s try to talk about this calmly, Duncan said.

  Edgar Lennox was old enough to be Lottie’s grandfather. Forty years older than she was, Hattie shrieked; later, it turned out to be more like forty-five. His already being married, to his second wife, was a minor difficulty compared with this. Duncan and Hattie had met him twice: once when they went to the university Open Day with Lottie, and once before that, at a private view of paintings by one of Hattie’s friends. He had seemed at the time Hattie’s ideal of an elderly creative artist: tall, very thin, with a shock of upstanding white hair, a face whose hollows seemed to have been carved out by suffering, tanned skin as soft as leather, a charcoal-grey linen shirt.

  — When you say he’s touched your life, could we be quite specific about this? Duncan said. — Has he actually, in the ordinary, non-transcendent sense of the word, touched you?

  Em protested in disgust. — Dad, you can’t ask her that!

  Em had been crying; her eyelids were swollen and puffy, and her face was blotched. Hattie’s and Lottie’s eyes were hot and dry.

  Hattie turned on him. — How can you put it like that? How could you make it into one of your clever remarks?

  — If you’re asking, Lottie said, — whether we’ve consummated our relationship, then, yes, of course we have. What do you think we are? We’re lovers.

  — Naturally, I’m making a formal complaint to the university, Hattie said. — He’ll lose his job. There’s no question about that.

  — That’ll be sensible, won’t it? Em said. — Then if they are married he won’t be able to support her.

  — You’re sure she isn’t making all this up? Rufus suggested.

  — Think what you like, Lottie said. — You’ll soon know.

  She sat with her mouth primly shut, shining with a tragic light. Beyond the kitchen windows, veils of rain drove sideways into the sodden skirts of the horse chestnut tree, darkening the pink flowers. Hattie said that the whole thing reminded her of when she was at art college, and a friend of hers had heard suddenly that her sister was on the point of entering a convent, a closed order that allowed no contact with family or friends.

  — We all piled on to a train and went up to Leeds together on the spur of the moment, six or seven of us who were close then, and met this sister in a tea shop, and tried to convince her of everything in the world that was worth staying for.

  — Don’t be ridiculous, Mum. I’m not going into a convent.

  — Did it work? Noah asked. — Did you convince her?

  Hattie frowned and pressed her knuckles to her forehead. — I can’t remember whether she went into the convent or not in the end. Perhaps she did. I can only remember the tea shop, and after that a pub, and trying to think of all the things we couldn’t bear to leave behind, and getting gradually drunker and drunker.

  — This isn’t the same thing, Duncan said firmly. — And we aren’t at anything like that stage yet, anyway.

  Lottie stared at them in genuine bewilderment. — I don’t understand you all, she said. — How can you not want for me what I want?

  Noah saw his parents leave the house late in the evening. His bedroom was in the attic, he was sitting on the sill of his little casement window, his feet in the lead-lined gutter that ran like a trough the length of the Georgian terrace, looking down over the stone parapet into the street, four storeys below. Though it was strictly forbidden, he had liked to sit this way ever since he was given this bedroom when he was eight; he used to fit into the small space perfectly, but now he had to squeeze, and his knees were jackknifed up in front of his face. Rain was sluicing down the slate roof into the gutter. In the light of the street lamps, the road shone black; parked cars were plastered with wet leaves from the beeches and horse chestnuts in the muddy triangle of public garden opposite. His mother’s high heels scraped fiercely in the empty street as she crossed to the car: she must have dressed up in her teaching clothes for the occasion. She was hanging on tightly to the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. She and Duncan dithered around the car under the half-globes of their umbrellas, probably quarrelling about who should drive; they seemed as small as dolls from where he watched. He supposed they were going to try to find Edgar Lennox at his house; they had been calling him on the phone all day, without getting through. It was strange to think of the two households, more or less unknown to each other before tonight, connected by this drama, awake in the city when everyone else was getting ready for sleep.

  Hours later – he wasn’t sure how many hours, as he’d fallen asleep at his desk while revising for the geography GCSE exam he had on Monday morning – Noah woke to the sound of his mother’s voice in the house again. She sounded like she did when she’d had too much wine at parties: rash and loud, extravagantly righteous. He went out to listen, leaning over the banister and sliding noiselessly down, a few steps at a time. The steep and narrow staircase, the core of the skinny house, drew sound upward. Above his head, an ancient skylight as wide as the stairwell rattled under the rain, leaking into a strategically placed bucket. His parents and Rufus and Em were crowded at the foot of the stairs, in the hallway’s jumble of boots and bikes and baskets, junk mail, umbrellas dripping on the grey and white tiles. His mother still had her fawn mac on.

  — I thought he’d be ashamed, she was saying, — if I told him that Lottie was marrying him because she thinks he’s a great man. But it was obvious that he thinks he is one, too.

  — Is he one? Rufus asked.

  — Don’t be ridiculous. What would he be doing teaching in a second-rate music department at a provincial university?

  — I thought you said the department was something wonderful.

  — That was before this.

  — He does some film and television work if he can get it, Duncan said. — All fairly high-toned. And he writes for the cathedral choir. Anyway, greatness wouldn’t necessarily make him any better, as far as Lottie’s concerned.

  — He said that he could see how it must look from our point of view, from what he called ‘any ordinary perspective’.

  — How dare he think we’re ordinary? Em raged.

  — He said that the erotic drive was a creative force he felt he had to submit to.

  — Oh, yuck! Hideous!r />
  — Hattie, he didn’t say that, exactly.

  — And what was his wife like? Was she there? What’s her name?

  — Valerie. Val, he calls her. She was frosty. She said, ‘Whatever happens, I keep this house’, as if that were something we were after. The house wasn’t what you’d expect, anyway, not arty: stuffy and old-fashioned. I should think the wife’s about my age, but she’s let herself go – grey ponytail, no make-up, one of those dowdy skirts with an elastic waistband.

  — She was fierce, Duncan said. — I’d have been frightened of her, in his shoes.

  — She wouldn’t sit down; she stood up with her back against the wall, as if she were mounting guard over something. All she said was that Lottie would soon learn. They have a son, about the same age as Noah.

  — Did she know about it all already?

  — She hadn’t known for long – he’d just told her. She’d been crying.

  — We walked in on it all. We were the aftershock.

  — Where is Lottie, anyway?

  — It has to run its course, Duncan said. — We’re not in a position to prevent anything.

  — It can’t be allowed to run its course, Duncan! What if they actually went through with this crazy wedding?

  He groaned consolingly. — She’s an adult – she’s nineteen. Worse things happen at sea.

  Noah turned and saw that Lottie was standing in her nightdress on the stairs just behind him. She put her finger to her lips; her eyes behind her glasses were black pits. She was shaken with waves of violent trembling, gripping the banister to steady herself, probably because she had swallowed too many of the caffeine tablets she claimed she was addicted to; and no doubt also because she was exalted and frightened at her ability to raise this storm in adult lives. Noah felt a familiar irritation with her exaggerations, mixed with protectiveness. He and Lottie had grown up very close, adrift from the rest of the family in their bedrooms in the attic. He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won’t be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can’t stop now.