Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley Page A

cavelike, dark, humming with freezers, thin on temptations, odorous with cauliflower. They only seemed to sell one flavor of crisps; when she wanted a pound bag of flour, they opened a three-pound bag in spite of her protests and weighed out a third for her; they sent presents of sweets up for the children every time. Usually Clare was exaggeratedly deferential on her holidays, scrupulously aware of her outsider’s ineptness. She knew enough about Irish history to have felt apologetic for her English yawing vowels and her problems understanding what was said to her, and to have felt wincingly what reverberations might be touched off by an English family renting a Big House, even a small Big House, for their holiday. But that summer she felt licensed in her privilege, lordly in her assumption of the pleasures of the place. (Because of it she was probably friendlier and better liked.) She imagined she was responsible for the fine weather, too.
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    G ENEVIEVE V EREY had been so disgusted by the burden of romance in the name her mother gave her that when it came to names for her own children she simply looked up surnames in the Times deaths column and chose something. So her son was Bramford and her two daughters (one older, one younger than Bram) were Tinsley and Opie. Clare could imagine Genny getting over the whole business of the births with the same pragmatism, the same slightly theatrical gestures of contempt for other people’s fuss. She had seen photographs of the young Genny, recognizable—in spite of the white hair and the thickened flesh that had come since—because of that bright scornful readiness in her expression. The old-fashioned kind of childbirth would have suited her, enema and shaved pubes, jollying injunctions to be a good girl and not make a row, new baby taken off to a nursery so mother could get a decent night’s sleep. It was impossible to imagine her in the midst of all the palaver of Clare’s generation, beanbags and water births, bonding and demand feeding; impossible to imagine hers as one of those middle-class households thrown into a kind of slack excruciated martyrdom for years on end by sleep problems and the crisis of belief in adult authority.
    While they were all on holiday together, Clare tried to keep out of sight that potential in her own family life for spilling over into martyrdom and hysteria. Coco worked droopingly through a whole sequence of symptoms from a sore throat to a sprained ankle, Lily made nightly scenes about spiders, Rose’s moaning and struggling ruined every day trip they tried to take her on, so that in the end Clare and Bram took it in turns to stay behind with her in the house. Clare was sure that when Tinsley and Bram and Opie were children they wouldn’t have wasted time quarreling about TV channels (the house had Sky) but would have escaped outdoors every possible minute to the lake and the woods and the ruined mill. Of course, she couldn’t have let her children do this even if they had wanted to; she would have thought it much too dangerous. That was a perception that had changed with the generations too.
    Whenever Bram and his sisters did tell stories from their childhood, which wasn’t often because they had been brought up to be shy and skeptical of talking about themselves, the stories were never about fights but about projects carried out as a little team of siblings, loyal, intimate, peculiar, with passions distributed conveniently between them: Bram with his birds, Tinsley with her rocks, Opie with her snakes. One summer they built a tree house in their back garden in Oxford and slept in it every fine night. One holiday in Northumberland they repaired an old boat they found by the river and caulked it and painted it and gave it a name and took it on leaky trips out on the water. (They named it Shimmershy: Clare wondered which one of the girls—it must have been one of the girls—had