Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley

brought.
    â€”Too small! said Tinsley.
    â€”No, this is fine for filling in, said Bram equably. Good girl, Rose.
    â€”How deep is it going to get? Coco asked Tinsley; he pushed his glasses up on his nose and stood with his hands on his hips surveying the work. Clare feared he was more like her than like his father, whose every gesture he slavishly copied (except the one with the glasses, which Bram didn’t need).
    â€”How deep d’you want it?
    â€”Deep enough to sail the inflatable dinghy? Coco shrugged his skinny shoulders.
    â€”Put your back into it then.
    Clare had thought the children would lose interest after fifteen minutes, but an hour later Coco and Lily were still doggedly, silently working, lost in the task, all their awareness focused on supplying the steady line of stones advancing across the burbling evasive water. Rose was filtering dirt through her fingers at the river’s edge, imagining she was part of the project because she was in its orbit. Conversation had narrowed to a soothing transactional minimum.
    â€”We need a good one to go in here.
    â€”Alert! Alert! We have a collapse.
    â€”Pass me that one, quick.
    â€”Help me with this, Daddy?
    Clare thought, They will remember this, when they think about why they love their father.
    It was what she had loved him for too: his quiet competence, a remote unassailable presumption of the one way to do things, a right way. She watched his hands, placing stones, helping Lily pick her way in the current, pushing back his tangled hair from his hot forehead. He had that kind of fine fair hair that separates naturally into curling strands, like a Renaissance painting. He let it grow too long because he didn’t care about it; she wished he would have it clipped fashionably close. His hands were like his father’s, brown and small and firm. In the evenings these hands moved chess pieces patiently, teaching Coco or losing to Tinsley (she played in the station in the arctic); or they chose cards in family games of solo whist where the Vereys could not completely disguise their relief that Clare didn’t want to make an awkward fifth player (Opie didn’t play either). Of course Bram was talking to the children all the time as well; he probably talked to them more than she did, explaining how things worked, explaining why it was better to do things in a certain way, explaining to them what was dangerous. He sometimes told Clare off, for driving with her tire pressures crazily low, or using a vacuum with a broken plug whose live wires were exposed.
    She couldn’t think how to complain of him. She ought to have a complaint, oughtn’t she, for an alibi? He was uncommunicative sometimes. And he didn’t like many people, much; he was always friendly and polite, but in private he was unforgiving if he found out anyone’s vanity or pretension. He knew things but he didn’t invent things. Those didn’t sound like accusations; they sounded like goodness.
    When the dam was built there was a little lip of captured water behind it, and they did just manage to skull the play dinghy across it amid shrieks of triumph; the children splashed and scooped the water with large exaggerated gestures as if the pool they had made were deeper and more miraculous than it actually was. After tea there was consternation because Lily found three little dark fishes swimming up and down in it. She was dismayed at the idea of the bewilderment of the little fish and she haunted the bank, coaxing them with chirruping calls to a place where they could swim over; eventually Bram (who might even in his calm way have also been concerned for the fish) broke down the dam and made a channel for them to escape through. Coco and Tinsley disapproved, and the evening ended on a sour note. The fish stayed swimming around in the pool anyway, although they were gone by morning.
    *   *   *
    THE SISTER of the woman who ran the mini-market