It was at a Christmas party in the 1980s. I was very young then, living with my first husband and our three children – the youngest still breastfeeding – in an oversized, dilapidated Victorian house with orange and purple wallpaper, and nylon carpets which gave the children electric shocks. We were supposed to be doing the house up, but that was a joke, partly because we didn’t have any money and partly because my husband was working all hours, trying to get his architectural practice off the ground. At the end of each day I was gratified if I’d managed to get meals on the table, the washing into the machine and out of it again, and all the children into bed. The doing-up anyhow was his idea; I hated DIY and was no good at it. In the evenings, when the children were asleep at last, I turned my back on the wallpaper’s swirling fronds, huddled for warmth under a blanket in one corner of our broken-springed sofa, and read books, which were my salvation. There was a theory in our marriage that I had a career too, as a journalist and reviewer, which I would at some point pick up again. But that was beginning to recede into myth, like the spires of a serene city on the horizon in a painting, ever more distant from the ship I’d sailed in.
This party was in another oversized dilapidated house, further down the same street, belonging to friends of ours, and I was counting on getting a lot out of it; I was wearing a new red stretch-jersey dress with a full skirt. I didn’t have any exaggerated idea of my attractiveness – I was like those birds the birdwatchers don’t count, a little brown job, and plumper after three children – but I thought that the red dress suited me. I’d had a couple of glasses of strong punch already, and was roaming the party in a state of anticipation that was almost predatory. I wanted life! I wanted to live more.
My husband was also at the party, probably also – when I think about it now, more kindly disposed toward him – roaming about and wanting to live more. But it was a big house, and there were a lot of people in it, making a hell of a mess, spilling red wine and stubbing out joints and cigarettes on the bare floorboards, leaving ends of curry and bread and brie and pickle on paper plates for somebody to step on; the mess didn’t matter because the house was in a transitional stage of being done up, like ours. So I hadn’t crossed paths with my husband for at least half an hour, and I didn’t care; in fact, I wanted to keep as far away from him as possible. The music was loudest in the front room: he was probably in there. He and I were at war at that time, frank and declared out-and-out war, the truly awful kind; we’d hardly really spoken in fact, except transactionally, for three or four days. So I suppose that the predictable truth – demeaning in retrospect – is that if I was predatory, what I was on the hunt for was another man. After all, I was still young. In linear clock-time, beyond the end of the party, there loomed the sheer inexorable slog of Christmas and all the rest of my life: shopping and cooking, over-excited squalling children, visits from parents and in-laws. But until the party was over, time was differently shaped – it was bottomless, it was voluptuously deep and opaque. Anything could happen in it, everything could change.
And then in a way it did.
***
I was in pursuit of one man in particular, Angus, friend of our friends, who ran a little bookshop in town; I’d fastened on him in my fantasies and convinced myself, although I didn’t really know him very well, that he and I had some uncanny mutual understanding, just because we were both clever and loved books. A few years down the line, as it happens, Angus did become my second husband: but that’s another story. At the party I came across him in the kitchen, where the booze was – no surprises there; he was perched puckishly on a stool, being witty and flirting. Angus was small and slight with a neat heart-shaped face, alert with malice and sweetness. It’s obvious now why he appealed to me. In those days my first husband was craggy and brooding and saturnine, still hoping that he’d turn out to be a genius, tangles of dark hair falling in his eyes.
– Hello Kay, Angus said to me, friendly enough; but all his efforts of charm, I saw at once, were directed toward the woman he was flirting with. I looked at her, prepared to be stricken with envy. And she was spectacular, leaning back against the broken old kitchen units, keeping a wary, teasing distance from Angus. Her tanned, flawless midriff – glimpsed whenever she gestured and made her cropped T-shirt ride up above the waistband of her tiered, flowered gypsy skirt – was tantalisingly in his eye line; she was tall, with a mass of waving chestnut hair and long, disdainful, handsome horse-face. Angus’s fixation on this woman hardly mattered, however, despite the hopes I’d had of him, because all my attention was fixed upon her too, from the moment I caught sight of her.
I knew her.
– Rosalind! I exclaimed, gushing, overwhelmed. – Rosalind, it’s you!
I hadn’t set eyes on Rosalind Dewey for 15 years, but I couldn’t be mistaken. I’d once known her better than anyone, or I thought I knew her. At school we’d been best friends, with all the passionate absorption of teenagers: I was formless and gauche then, and took the imprint of her forceful character like soft wax. Then she’d been torn away from me abruptly, with no explanation, and I’d never seen or heard of her since.
The woman at the party turned a blank look on me, not unkindly but indifferent.
– You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, she said. – I’m Alana.
***
We were crushed, at that girls’ grammar school, under the last throw of a repressive and puritanical ancien regime, overturned not long after I left. Rosalind was supposed to tie up that flamboyant mass of her chestnut curls, and sometimes she did, but at lunchtime she’d pull out the ribbon and shake her hair into its riot while we talked in our den, and then she’d forget to tie it up again for afternoon lessons. All of her disobedience was careless in that way: if it had been more calculated, the teachers would have known how to oppose and break her. She did badly in lessons and failed her exams, as if those things were of no importance. Our form teacher shook with rage because Rosalind’s winter mac was the wrong kind of green, but Rosalind only shrugged. She liked light green! They gave her detentions but she simply wouldn’t stay for them. What could they do, fight her? Once, there really was almost a physical stand-off, when the geography mistress seized Rosalind by the shoulders to shake her – Ros-a-lind-Dew-ey-take-that-smirk-off-your-face – and Rosalind, incredulous, laughing, dizzy with affront, pushed back at the geography mistress. This was all astonishing to me. I hated the school too, but I was afraid of it. I had a scholarship place, and came top in English and history.
Tessa Hadley is the author of eight novels, including Clever Girl, Late in the Day and Free Love. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. In 2016 she won both the Hawthornden prize and a Windham-Campbell prize, whose judges praised her “superbly controlled, psychologically acute and subtly powerful” prose. Born in Bristol in 1956, she was 46 when she published her first novel, Accidents in the Home, which she wrote while bringing up her three sons and studying for a PhD. Her writing focuses on women, families and relationships – what she has called “the intricate tangle of marriage, divorce, lovers, close friends, children and stepchildren – the web people create for themselves”.
They called in Mrs Dewey, Rosalind’s mother, but she was impervious too in her own way, staring around at the drabness of the school as if it were pitiable and comical, dimpled powdered pretty chin tucked into her fur collar, clip of her heels across the asphalt playground, forbidden aura of scent and cigarettes. She agreed cheerfully with the headmistress, according to Rosalind, that her daughter was a nightmare. But I’ve no idea how to manage her. I rather supposed that was what I was paying you for.
It wasn’t Rosalind’s mother, in fact, who paid her school fees; it was her mother’s boyfriend, whom Rosalind hated. I knew all this because we told each other everything, or I believed we did. Rosalind wanted to be an actress, but the boyfriend, whose name was Derek, thought the arts were a waste of time; he owned a garage and wore rings and stainless steel armbands; he had a moustache. We pretended to puke, at the idea of the moustache. I never met Derek. Rosalind only took me home once – it involved a long bus journey to a far-flung suburb, where Mrs Dewey fed us on sherry and cake and milky instant coffee in a little chintzy, dusty, rented villa which was damp at the back, looking out onto a steep bank grown with ferns. There was no sign of Derek that day. Rosalind behaved strangely the whole time, talking in a false hard voice, her expression glassy; we couldn’t settle into the closeness we had at school, or when she came to my house.
***
Usually our thoughts and feelings were so intimately twined together, when we mocked our teachers, or I complained that my mother wouldn’t let me wear makeup. But your mother’s a darling, Rosalind said. And she would share the latest Derek-scandal with me, how he flaunted the money in his wallet, left bad smells in the bathroom, put out his cigars in her mother’s cooking – mind you, her cooking’s awful. We binged in my bedroom on historical novels, reading passages aloud to each other, revelling in the excesses. The ominous birth of a child conceived in secret! He made the messenger eat his own shoe leather! She flouts the etiquette of the glittering court! We had nicknames for each other which came out of these novels: I was Katarina the Virgin Widow, Rosalind was Juana the Mad. Derek was Old Burst Belly, or the Old Enemy.
Rosalind had joined our school in the third year, and then halfway though the fourth year, when we were 15, she was gone, from one day to the next, with no explanation to me or anyone, not even a note or a telephone call. The teachers didn’t know where she was either, because they asked me. That suffering changed me, although I didn’t know it at the time: it hardened me. No one could comfort me, not even my mother; it gave me a new autonomy. Without telling anyone, I caught a bus one drizzly February Saturday, out to where Rosalind lived, all on my own initiative – I would never have dared do this before. I found my way to the chintzy villa and – pushing between sodden hydrangeas, shoes sinking in the soil of the wintry flowerbed – I peered in through the windows. What I saw, although it was just an ordinary empty house, stayed with me for years afterwards as an image of desolation, like the aftermath of some violence. Curtains at the window had been half-pulled off their rail onto the floor, and a few items lay forgotten on the bare carpet: a bottle of bubble bath, a broken sandal, a cheap straw basket on its side, that might have had flowers in it once.
I was so crushed, when Rosalind refused to recognise me at the party, that I felt the guilty pricking of milk in my breasts – though I’d fed the baby before I came out, and she was a good sleeper. The party was ruined and I only wanted to go home, cuddle up with a blanket on the sofa. I grabbed my coat from under a heap in one of the bedrooms, and pulling it over my shoulders hurried out into the street with its half-hearted thin covering of snow; the front door banged behind me, shutting off all the boozy noise and fun. Then I heard it open again, and was aware of someone following me.
– Hey! she called out. – Katarina the Virgin Widow! Where do you think you’re off to?
So it was her. – I knew it was you! I said.
We stood confronted under a streetlight, Rosalind laughing and hugging her bare arms, stamping her feet because it was freezing; wet snow fell limply in the blue light, onto her hair. She was blithe, and said she’d changed her name so often – Alana, Billie, Caro – that sometimes she forgot she’d ever been Rosalind. She hadn’t recognised me, she said, in those first moments. I knew she had though, and couldn’t stop myself sounding accusatory, plaintive. – Where did you go, all those years ago, when you left school? You could have left me a message, or a sign or something. It was awful. What happened? Was it Derek?
She laughed again – falsely, I thought – and threw back her curls. – Derek! God, I’d forgotten him.
– You hated him.
– Is that what I told you? I didn’t hate him: I was mad about him.
– No you weren’t.
– That was the trouble, that’s why we had to leave that house. When my mother found out I was sleeping with him too, everything blew up, she couldn’t forgive me.
– You’re kidding. Oh my god, so… And she took you away?
– Derek took me away, silly. We lived together for a while: in a nasty flat above his garage, to begin with, and then Bournemouth, of all places. Derek was weird, anyway. And then I fell in love with someone else, I went to Paris – I’ve been everywhere! You know how it is. Each time you think, this is it, this is the right one.
But I didn’t know how it was, not really. I felt like an innocent that night beside Rosalind, as though I’d hardly lived. I wondered if she’d ever got to be an actress, but she said she mostly worked temping in offices. When I asked her if she thought Angus was the right one, she was convincingly blank. – Who’s Angus?
– I live just down the road, I said. – Two minutes walk. You could come in, we could talk more. I’ll send the babysitter home.
***
Rosalind-Alana-Billie hesitated for a hair’s breadth: she might have come. But she was shivering in her T-shirt and gypsy skirt; she shook her head and said, best not, and went back inside, and the street was forsaken without her, soft snow turning to sleet and sputtering on the pavement. She also said, I knew you would have children. I knew you’d be OK. And afterwards I never saw her again, and no one – including Angus – seemed to know who she was, or who’d brought her along to the party. I didn’t believe, then, in Rosalind’s story about Derek. I suppose I thought that, because she’d once abandoned me, she was treacherous and mendacious, a drama queen. I believe in it now. I wish I’d asked her more, or taken her address or telephone number – but I didn’t. Because although I keep telling you how young I was, at the time of that party, young isn’t actually how I felt. I sometimes felt so old then, in my youth: so fatalistic and disenchanted.
• Free Love by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape) is out now
