A Visitor by Tessa Hadley / Fiction / Untitled Books

"As soon as Emma was unpeeling her coat and stamping snow off her boots in the hall, it came back to me how she had been one of those children who make adults uneasy – as if they can’t be fobbed off, as if they’re waiting for more than just rock buns and sticking plasters. Those children always see too much."

A Visitor by Tessa Hadley

A young woman phoned me one morning. It was during that period when there was a lot of snow on the ground. It had fallen in a crazy dramatic blizzard and then hung around, freezing over, so that it was difficult getting about. It was difficult getting out of bed in the mornings, difficult getting into bed at nights: the days slid forwards a few hours, into the dark. Sometimes it snowed again. It seemed strange that she called me then, starting something new, when everything else was in suspension, waiting. She said her name as if I was bound to remember her - Emma Fenton. This happened to me quite often, because I'd been a school teacher for most of my working life: adult men and women came up to me and claimed me, calling me Mrs Avery (though I'd changed my name since Tom and I divorced), expecting me to recognise their baby selves behind the worn-in, worn-out faces they had now. Sometimes, these days, the ex-pupils wanting recognition have white hair, and grandchildren.
         But I couldn't place an Emma Fenton. I bluffed for a moment - oh, hello, how are you? I was standing at the window in my dressing gown, with the phone to my ear, looking out at the snow dragging down the twigs of the trees and piled like braid along the wires between the telegraph poles. Shrubs in the garden belonging to my block of flats were lost under the bland mounded shapes of snow; I was relieved that they weren't my business, I didn't have to worry over which ones might perish. Some of those snowy days I never even properly got dressed, I just pulled on track-suit bottoms and thick socks and woolly jumpers over my pyjamas. Because of the weather, all the ordinary decencies, which usually I'm good at - dressing respectably, cooking meals at the proper times, shopping for Christmas - fell away. My daughters phoned to make sure I was all right and I reassured them. I really was all right. I slept with the curtains open, not wanting to miss anything. When I woke in the mornings to the snow-light reflected on my bedroom walls, the muffled quiet in the streets, I felt excited, as if something was going to happen.
         And as it turned out, something was.
         Suddenly I remembered Emma - of course, she had nothing to do with school. Her parents had been our neighbours, years and years ago, in the street of Victorian semidetached houses I had lived in for most of my married life: Tom and I had moved into that street when we were young, and by the time we moved out (separately), we were middle aged, or even just about embarking on being old, depending on where you put the marker for old (further and further back, we fool ourselves, these days). I hadn't known the Fentons well - but we had lived together in that street for a long time, and seen each other's children grow up. Emma was younger than my youngest. She must have been in her mid-thirties, that day she called. Our children hadn't liked the Fenton children much. I remembered that they were skinny, pale, listless: a lot of fuss was made of them - their allergies, their education - but somehow it hadn't paid off and they'd always seemed undernourished, under-encouraged. Their house never seemed to be bursting with the normal, reassuring chaos of family that was perpetual in ours (perpetual, that is, until the children grew up, and Tom and I were left alone together).
         - I wish we could meet, Emma Fenton was saying on the phone.
         She explained that she'd bumped into Caro - my middle daughter - and got hold of my number from her. I couldn't imagine why this stranger from long ago wanted to see me. I didn't think I'd ever been especially kind to her, or singled her out in any way - though I often made rock buns or cheese on toast for a whole crowd of children, if they were playing in our garden; or I let them rampage around the playroom in our basement. Anyway, I invited the grown-up Emma for coffee, and she said she'd come round straight away. I hadn't wanted company, I had been enjoying my frozen solitude; but once I knew Emma was coming I was restless and curious, as if she was a visitor from the past. But she wouldn't remember my past: I must have been forty when she was born.
         When she rang the front door bell, I looked at her before I opened it, through the spy-hole: I wanted to see her before she saw me. She was so familiar, instantly, even in the foreshortened picture you get through those lenses, even in her shapeless outdoor clothes: thin blonde hair, energetically anxious, with the same cramped face as her mother, narrow like a greyhound's, intelligent, earnest. The recognition felt strong as a blow on my breastbone: I hadn't thought about those old days for a long time. As soon as Emma was unpeeling her coat and stamping snow off her boots in the hall, it came back to me how she had been one of those children who make adults uneasy - as if they can't be fobbed off, as if they're waiting for more than just rock buns and sticking plasters. Those children always see too much. Now, her blue eyes fixed on me with the same smiling hungry expression.
         She hadn't told me on the phone that she was pregnant. I made her some kind of special fruit tea - she'd brought the tea-bag with her specially - and she blurted out her story, as if she'd been longing to tell me. It was her first baby, she had been desperate for a baby, she had only met her partner a year ago. She had met Caro at the ante-natal clinic (Caro was also pregnant, with my fifth grandchild), and recognised her at once. She'd always had a thing about our family: we'd seemed so lucky, we seemed to have such fun.
         - My mother's ill, she said. -She's going off her head. She says all sorts of things. She talks about you both, especially Tom.
         I told her Tom was dead, and that we had been separated for years before he died. -I know, Emma Fenton said. -I wish that I'd known him.
         Which was odd, because she must have known Tom at least as well as she ever knew me. She sat nursing her hands round her mug of tea, breathing its steam, looking out of my picture window at the garden under snow, hanging on for the moment to whatever news it was she really wanted to bring me. I didn't want her to say anything. I didn't want to know.

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Tessa Hadley is the author of three highly acclaimed novels, including Accidents in the Home, and a short story collection. Her stories regularly appear in Granta and the New Yorker.

Her latest novel The London Train is published by Jonathan Cape.
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Thursday, 20 January, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012