Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley Page B

when they looked into the room they called the library, Genny was sitting up in all her clothes in front of the embers of the peat fire. She must have heard the noise of their arrival and crazy progress around the house: there was something prepared, theatrical, in the way she lowered her book and frowned over the top of it.
    â€”What on earth is going on? she exclaimed.
    â€”Stay where y’are, missus, soothed the crumple-faced man. We’ve no need to disturb you.
    â€”Jesus, Michael, where the hell is it? Mrs. Tierney focused for a moment in perplexity.
    â€”Cast your mind back now, Michael coaxed her.
    â€”Could you possibly meditate elsewhere? said Genny. I’m trying to read.
    When Bram eventually found the meter in a cupboard in the kitchen, they then had to find a pen and paper for Mrs. Tierney. Michael called out the numbers and she wrote them down with breathy concentration, then shoved the paper carelessly into her handbag. The party raggedly departed, calling farewells that might or might not have been mocking, their extravagance a blare that hung on the night behind them after the sound of the car engine had nosed its way far down toward the village.
    â€”Why is Mum up? asked Opie.
    â€”Couldn’t sleep, said Ray.
    â€”But she’s in her clothes.
    â€”She’s not been sleeping well.
    Clare felt a thickening of meaning around this exchange, a familial alert that excluded her. In the library Genny sat holding her book on her knee, keeping her finger in her place.
    â€”Weren’t we just wonderfully po-faced! exclaimed Tinsley. They must have been delighted!
    â€”Insufferably rude. Whatever did they think they were playing at, at this time of night? Have they woken the children?
    â€”You were up. Why didn’t you answer the door?
    â€”Didn’t hear it. Until they came bursting in here.
    â€”Are you going to bed now?
    â€”Mum! said Opie. You’ve hurt yourself.
    In surprise Genny turned the back of her hand toward herself, where three parallel weals trickled drips of blood.
    â€”Blast, she said. I didn’t realize I’d made such a mess. I did it on the metal tape around the peat brickettes, just now. I should get some tissue or something. But she didn’t move. In fact, she sat in her chair with a strange heaviness as if she couldn’t move, her head collapsed back and her mouth slightly open; there was an effortful delay each time before she spoke, although when she did she sounded sensible and normal.
    Silently Tinsley handed her a tissue from her sleeve.
    Ray offered to make tea. His pajamas flapped emptily over the hollows of his skinny chest and legs; he didn’t make eye contact with his wife but looked hopefully at his children.
    â€”I suppose now we’re up, said Bram, we might as well.
    â€”I don’t want tea, hissed Genny, with an intensity that was a moment’s glimpse of something hidden, lethal, gleaming. Why don’t you all go back to bed? Leave me alone. I don’t know why you let those people in in the first place. In the baggy skin of her weathered face, the pouches under her eyes were purple thumbprints from lack of sleep.
    â€”You’re probably right, said Ray. It’s too late for tea. But we could hardly have left them hammering away at the door.
    Clare thought that one of them would ask Genny what was the matter. That was what would have happened in her own messy family, with its rich history of betrayals and divorces, and then there would have been recriminations, counteraccusations, raised voices, tears. But instead the Vereys did quietly what Genny asked and filed off to bed and left her alone, and Clare, for the moment, went along with that.
    â€”Good night, Mum, Opie said. Don’t stay down too long.
    Perhaps this was the way that families managed to stay together. There weren’t any guarantees, anyway, that what came out in tears and recriminations was any more truthful than this