Accidents in the Home Read Free Page A

flattened the pale mauve-green grass like a pelt and sent it racing in liquid waves; from time to time the sky shook out cold drops of rain. David was taking photographs. Bram left them to go and find his group of volunteers, who were counting lugworms farther on, around into the estuary. They climbed down some concrete steps with a rusted handrail onto a scrap of beach heaped up with stones and sticks and plastic rubbish and cans that the sea had bleached to the same opaque pale pastels.
    As soon as she saw water, Rose began to take her clothes off. She was an ironic, willful, huge-eyed baby with rolls of translucent pale flesh at her wrists and chin and waist, and she despised clothes. She stripped at every opportunity, winter and summer, streaking triumphantly just out of reach of pursuing adults, flashing in triumph the long tender crease of her vagina and the pink cheeks of her bottom. Clare worried that Rose’s taste for nakedness was outgrowing her innocence—she would be four in a few months—and she thought she needed to be taught to protect herself.
    Rose protested that this was the seaside.
    â€”No it’s not, it’s dirty water, and you’re not to go in it.
    Rose seemed to concede defeat.
    But a few minutes later she was suddenly nowhere to be seen, and there was a little pile of her clothes dropped down beside an oilcan with the bottom rusted out. It seemed impossible that she could have gone anywhere out of their sight in so short a time. Everyone began calling her name, looking for her along the beach and back up the steps. The crescendo of dismay, from the first exasperated flutter of worry ( What a pain she is! ) to hollowing uninhibited panic only took a few minutes: Clare screamed at the other two children to stay where they were and kicking off her shoes ran barefoot across the shingle and the potentially lethal debris of glass and tin, to stand soaking her skirt in the scummy edge of the water, shrieking along the shoreline to right and left, fumbling in the water with her arms to try and feel for anything pulled under and washing in that dirty tide of sluggish brown waves that hardly broke, hardly made spume. She couldn’t see the bottom, she couldn’t imagine what she ought to do next, whether she ought to somehow submerge herself in it and try to open her eyes: wasn’t this always how it was with accidents, that the parents tinkered grotesquely, futilely, in the wrong place, failing confusedly as you fail in dreams?
    David shouted for Helly to go one way and he ran the other, back up the steps. Clare felt a passionate revulsion from her guests. It was in her preoccupation with them that she had taken her attention off Rose; she had been talking to David, pretending she was interested in cameras. If Bram had been here this would never have happened. Frantically, puritanically, Clare linked up her moment’s neglect with other falsities, with her efforts to impress upon Helly and David the charms of family life, with the perfume she’d sprayed on, with their money, with Helly’s advertising contract, even with the scorched tinfoil in the bathroom.
    It occurred to her that there was a literary tradition of guilty women whose children pay for their mother’s momentary lapses of attention, their casual betrayals (in the mornings when Rose was at nursery she was writing a PhD thesis on George Sand). Wasn’t there a scene in Flaubert—or Balzac?—where an adulteress watches over the cot of a sick child, pledging the whole of her selfish future happiness against the few degrees his temperature must come down for him to live? At that moment she imagined such a scene, if it existed, quite without irony, the cheap irony that smirks at literary machinery. It seemed a revelation of a naked truth before which irony could only grovel.
    Also, she suddenly dimly remembered someone called Tim Dashwood and odd details of a party she had gone to at his flat