Marina needs a job. She has a toddler son, Liam, and a husband, Gary, who is not doing too well. He works with his brother installing patios and other construction projects. With the recession, business is poor.
So Marina accepts the offer from a senior’s daughter, Wendy, to take care of Wendy’s father on weekdays. She’s not expected to be a full time caregiver, which would cost much more of course, but more of a housekeeper. Marina will be there on weekdays, making the old guy’s lunch and preparing something he can heat for dinner. And she’ll keep the place clean. Not that the gentleman, even at 89, is not independent. He’s not used to doing things for himself.
Hadley invokes Marina in a walk through the village park and churchyard to the old man’s stone house. It’s a choice village property. When she was growing up. Marina would walk past its stern facade of shuttered windows and wonder about the inside.
Marina walking to the house: through the churchyard the rooks squawked, scattered out of beech trees, unkempt grass blew around molehills, swallows were dark scratches against the light. I paused to register the description of those swallows. It was, for just a moment, like something out of Jane Eyre.
Marina’s in her trainers (sneakers to you peasants) and her pink puffy coat. She seems like an ordinary, harassed working class mother. But she’s an outsider, by temperament oblivious. Hadley says she doesn’t relate well to the other mothers in the village.
If a home is described in a Hadley story, it will be described so well that you will feel that you have stepped over the threshold yourself. Her fiction functions virtually as a shelter magazine.
The main floor is under-furnished with ratty leftovers from the former tenants. The upper floor is deserted. Wendy’s family has money. Her own home is a showplace. But her father doesn’t seem to care. He lives with the cast offs as if he’s a cast off himself.
Marina down on her knees scrubbing the ancient grime off the kitchen floor while she chats with the old gentleman.
Hadley has a genius for depicting the kind of relativizing moral ambiguity with which most of us conduct our lives. When the old guy starts touching Marina, she pulls back immediately and he goes into a long sulk of obsessive apologizing.
Her husband Gary warns her that old men can get funny ideas. But nothing ever happened that was wrong. But in the next sentence we get the old man’s wet lips kissing her in greeting every morning as if he were salivating over her.
Sad isolation of aging: you are not allowed to touch anybody. As for Marina, she and Gary and Liam are in physical contact so often that she often feels as if they are extensions of her body. Marina brings Liam over to play so the old guy can have the contact.
Hadley does a number on Wendy, the daughter. She calls her dumpy and says she has a closet full of beautiful clothes that she can no longer get into. Wendy brandishes her car keys around as if they were a coat of arms. She sells retro garden fittings to people who like to pretend that they’re gardeners.
But Hadley pulls back and says that Wendy is a fine gardener herself. TH distances the reader from the daughter, makes you pull up short in front of her, so that you can sympathize more with Marina. But Hadley is careful not to piss you off to Wendy totally. Wendy has three children, equally officious in their self important careers, their interest in their grandfather is nil. They are described as shedding their youthful glamour on a barbecue, which is great.
The old guy repairs a vacuum cleaner that breaks down on Marina. He has her put it on his desk, and with tremulous aging hands, he takes it apart, piece by piece, and puts it back together into working order. He beams up at Marina. That day, he eats more for lunch, his weak appetite much improved. Marina cuts his meat for him.
The old guy leaves Marina the house, cutting out Wendy and the rest of his family.
The interior lives of homes have their own emotional logic. From the inside of the old stone house, where we just see the old guy and Marina growing closer like a bowl with only two goldfish in it, it seems perfectly sensible that Marina has inherited.
But from the real world POV of Wendy and her children, the reality is that her father has left the family property to his housekeeper, for fuck’s sake. “The Stain” by Tessa Hadley appears in the November 7th New Yorker.
Tessa Hadley is amazing. I love her work. I read this story last night. The best story I’ve read in a long time.