Of Human Telling

By Tanya van Hasselt

A sharp-eyed look at the mysteries of love and obsession. Wharton is the quintessential English town, home to a famous public school, sought after for its comfortable middle class values – and where three families live side by side, hiding their private terrors and desires... a teenage boy afraid to come out, a mother driven by OCD, a small child who won’t speak, a daughter leading a secret life, a guilty father waiting to leave. But there is also their music teacher Jane, a thirty-something innocent at large, struggling with jealousy, out of step with her old religious certainties.

An unspoken love affair begins, only to be blighted by Ellen, aged eleven, a knife scar running down her face, desperate to keep her father to herself. The attempted suicide of a bullied teenager brings Wharton’s disturbing undercurrents to the surface and relationships of all kinds must be re-negotiated if they are to survive.

From the prize-winning author of All Desires Known, a subtle examination of romantic and family conflict that is both devastating and funny, while all the time reminding us of the ultimate triumph of goodness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785897528

Tanya van Hasselt

Tanya van Hasselt writes novels under her Dutch maiden name. As Tanya Aydon her short stories have won awards across the country, including a Barbara Pym centenary prize.

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Copyright © 2017 Tanya van Hasselt

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781785897528

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To everyone at ninevoices.wordpress.com with gratitude for their help and friendship

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

One

It was a pity you couldn’t take a pill to make jealousy disappear, like you could for a headache.

It was almost a year since Stephen had got rid of her – not that he’d phrased it like this, being a man of nicely-edited and much-paraded principles – and watching him marry Beth should have been a cure. It wasn’t.

Jane stared up at the departures board at Charing Cross station, fighting an impulse to jump on a train to one of the unknown and strangely alluring destinations. For a moment she saw herself arriving at an unfamiliar town, a no-longer-young woman dressed in wedding finery, a novel filling up her handbag …

The heroine of her novel would have made a scene. As the Wharton train pulled out of the station Jane imagined the thrilled astonishment of the wedding guests, the crimson-faced groom, the weeping bride. But she couldn’t lose herself in the fantasy in the usual satisfying way. An hour ago she’d run away from the triumphant church service when the organ struck up Give me Joy in my Heart. This was not proper heroine behaviour.

Further down the carriage a trio of younger women began to pull open glossy carrier bags and giggle over designer-label underwear. If they hoped to attract the attention of the only man in sight they were disappointed. He continued to turn over the pages of a thick paperback, apparently unmoved.

Nor could they arouse any envy in Jane. Helpful friends had suggested she was the sort of woman a makeover programme or magazine ought to take in hand, for she had one of those unremarkable faces that are sometimes featured and then revolutionised with a new hairstyle and make-up. But Jane no longer had the confidence to believe in such transformations for herself and was contrary enough to prefer the before to the after.

A mobile shrilled. Neighbouring passengers were obliged to hear at high volume how a wife ought to know when to let her husband leave, and why should the feelings of children get in the way when two soul mates had found each other? The marriage had been dead for years …

By the time you are in your late thirties you will have learnt to be less certain, Jane wanted to say, watching the pretty face. When you have learnt about thwarted desire and disappointment and compromise. But then you may never have to.

The man who had been trying to read sprang to his feet, bolted down the aisle and now stood hesitating by one of the empty seats facing hers.

‘Would you mind – ?’

Jane shot him a fleeting smile of sympathy. The wedding reception would have been peppered with such talk. She opened her book to show him he was safe with her. Men always were.

A stream of schoolgirls crowded into the train. Voices rose in competition and hyped-up laughter; a celebrity magazine was displayed for all to see.

‘Angelo Arzano – a ten out of ten?’

‘No surface damage from that car crash – ’

Jane leaned forward, but could only make out a hazy image and vivid red captions. She looked back at the man opposite her, at the serious face that no schoolgirl would ever drool over. Although she guessed his height to be about average, his self-effacing manner made him appear shorter, and his well-cut suit looked new but was worn with the kind of shirt and tie chosen by a man who has little interest in clothes, or no devoted woman to choose them for him. Jane could more easily visualise him in an old tweed jacket and fraying collar. Where had he been or where was he going, looking uneasy in polished shoes and with an overnight suitcase at his feet?

She saw to her surprise that he was reading Wives and Daughters. Did men in the twenty-first century bother with Victorian novels with their old-fashioned social prejudices and morality? She’d thought it was only women who read Elizabeth Gaskell, or at least women like herself, without what those girls would call a life.

I read that book again last year, she wanted to say, for then he would look up and the sadness at the back of his eyes might lessen as they admitted to each other how they minded too much about what happened in books. Perhaps he too had broken down and wept at Osborne’s fate.

She blinked back angry tears that wanted to fall. Stephen never read novels; he didn’t need fiction to help him to understand life – or himself. He’d said it was more of a woman’s thing.

And she wasn’t a man’s thing. She stole a glance at what she could see of the cover of Wives and Daughters. It showed a photograph of the appealing young actress who had played the part of the heroine Molly in a television series. She had the must-have ingredient men wanted all right, there was no missing it.

God ought to have arranged matters better than this. She wasn’t the heroine in a modern novel or even a nineteenth century one, but more like Jane Austen’s Miss Bates two hundred years too late: a spinster approaching forty and all that the term had once implied. It made her sound almost unpleasant.

Jane settled her plump body further down in her seat and eased her feet out of the high-heeled shoes she should never have bought. Today she’d tried to be something she was not – and what was the use of that? She was, after all, one of those Excellent Women whom men relied on to melt away without complaint when they stopped being useful.

She watched the man’s hands. They were worn, like those of someone older, at home with holding a book. They had prominent veins and knuckles; reassuring, even attractive, in their ugliness.

*

She has hands like Verity. Square with strong fingers, roughened with work, how hands ought to look. Not like those other women with their blood-red painted nails and too many glittering rings.

Confused images of Artemis pursuing Actaeon, and Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon jostled through Austen’s head. He’d had to switch seats in a hurry. Women of that kind demanded something from him he couldn’t give.

He returned to his book. Verity’s paperback edition of Wives and Daughters. Books acted as barriers on public transport – and everywhere else.

The carriage fell silent as the last of the schoolgirls spilled out of the train. He breathed more easily, until he began to suspect that the woman opposite was watching him while he read. He couldn’t change his seat a second time. The familiar reluctance spread over him and spoilt his concentration. He didn’t want to get into conversation with this woman. He always found himself doing what he didn’t want to do, because he couldn’t manage things as other men did. Wharton was several stations further on, and the carriage was emptying.

It would be better to stop reading. He was beginning to feel dismayed by the account of the eligible widower Mr Gibson being successfully trapped by Mrs Kirkpatrick. He tucked his feet in a little closer. He would put his book away and spend the last part of the journey preparing for his coming interview at Wharton.

He’d been amazed to be invited to apply, you could almost say headhunted. He’d been certain they’d have some high-flyer in their sights already, someone they knew. It was a big jump from a smallish college in Dublin to one of England’s most famous public schools. The Wharton classics department was reputed to send more boys to Oxbridge than any other school in the country. To be head of it, to have the opportunity of inspiring others with a dedication to scholarship, this was something he knew would make his life worth living.

He glanced down at the bag packed by his mother and daughter. Was it fair to drag them all the way to a small town in Sussex where they knew nobody, just because he had to get out of Dublin?

She wasn’t watching him. He’d been wrong. She was deep in her book – and he wasn’t an eligible widower. He was a middle-aged classics teacher with a habit of withdrawal and a past he couldn’t get rid of.

But really, there was no need to fear her. She was prettily dressed but quietly so. Not covered in alarming make-up. He thought he remembered reading once – though it could hardly have been in a classical text – how women could be divided into those who spent too much time on themselves or too little. This woman didn’t appear to belong to either category. She might even be someone he’d like to talk to.

It was out of the question of course. He didn’t know where to begin.

The train slowed down as it approached Wharton station. He checked his watch. The woman was squeezing her book into her handbag. She must be getting out. He seized his case and scrambled to his feet.

She pressed the exit button before he could reach it, stepped out of the train and limped away from him to the ticket barriers.

Despair at his stupidity, his obstinacy, stabbed at him like an unexpectedly painful injection. He’d waited too long. He always waited too long.

He might have had a conversation with her – about books perhaps. He imagined asking if she liked Victorian novels. She’d probably read all of Dickens and Trollope too.

And she might have looked up with an interested, accepting face and said with unstudied simplicity, I need an author to speak to me and say things that help, they’re easier to take when they come in a book. Elizabeth Gaskell must have been a wise and good woman. People criticise the Victorians for going on a bit, but some things can’t be repeated too often, can they?

It might have happened like this.

But it hadn’t. Nothing much ever did happen to him.

Not since that day eight years ago when the police had come to his door to tell him that his wife was dead and their only child was lying in hospital with a knife slash down her face.

Two

She’d been promised she would be told the results this afternoon, but it was already past four. Kate perched on the edge of her kitchen table flicking through a celebrity magazine, making futile bargains with the other half of herself, even though she knew that the one couldn’t be trusted any more than the other.

Angelo Arzano brings his family back to the UK after the death of his son in Italy earlier this year, she read, but the words evaporated as she snatched up the telephone.

‘Mrs Gidding? Clement Hunstrete, headmaster of Wharton. My congratulations. Your son has been awarded our major academic scholarship …’

The washing machine clicked and changed to the spin cycle. Kate watched the swirl of brilliant colour through the glass. Now they could send Jonah to Wharton, and nobody would ever guess why she needed him to go there.

She flung open the French windows and stepped onto the tiny paved space which only estate agents would call a garden. Above her, wisps of cloud drifted across a sky the innocent blue of a Happy Families playing card. She should telephone Philip, but for this precious hour she wanted to relish her triumph, away from his forced enthusiasm and her unspoken guilt.

She’d tell the children first. Then there’d be no going back.

It’s almost seventeen years. I have three perfect children and a husband not given to suspicion. We shall get away from here, move to Wharton. A clean road ahead. I’ll be able to rid myself of the thoughts that invade my mind and the rituals I have to perform. I’ll turn into the wife and mother they ought to have.

Soon the children would return, trailing back sometimes separately from the bus stop and needing food immediately before they could recover their home selves. She went into the kitchen to make tea, heard the front door open and slam, shoes kicked off, then the front door again.

‘What did Dad say when you told him, did he sound pleased?’ Jonah pulled away from her hug, checking out her face.

Phoebe dumped her schoolbag onto the floor and opened the fridge.

‘So I’ll have to leave all my London friends and live in swanky Wharton and you’ll turn into a spoilt little rich boy. Mum, Gabby’s staying tonight, can you give us pizzas, or give me the money for takeaways?’

‘Can’t you put Gabby off? We ought to have a family celebration. Go out to dinner.’

‘What’s to celebrate? You all go. It’s a no from me.’

‘We could do something tomorrow night or even Sunday,’ said Teddy. ‘Dad’s always knackered on a Friday night. He’d enjoy it more when he hasn’t been at work all day. It’s brilliant Jonah, I’m really pleased.’ He gave his brother an awkward hug, knocking into the table, and upsetting Kate’s mug of tea.

Philip or Laurent? Sudden desolation lunged at Kate. It’s Philip’s niceness in Teddy which stops him saying Dad’s strung-up and silent after work, even though he knows it’s true. But he has Laurent’s eyes.

She wiped away the spilt tea with kitchen roll. Why must I go on having these thoughts? Those bloody shrinks. They don’t know anything.

‘Mum – are you sure you and Dad wouldn’t prefer us to stay here in London?’

Kate stared at her younger son, who was concentrating on biting around the edge of an apricot jam tart.

‘But of course we want to move! Wharton’s a brilliant town, it’s got everything. What on earth are you thinking about? You absolutely loved the school when you went to sit the scholarship exam.’

‘But I like it here as well. So it’s okay if you’ve changed your mind. I mean, the scholarship’s more for you and Dad.’

Kate stood quite still.

‘I don’t understand why you’re suddenly saying this now. Of all moments.’

Jonah shrugged.

‘It doesn’t matter. Can I have the piano right away or are you going to make Phoebe do her practice?’

‘Don’t be stupid, sit down at a piano straight after school?’ Phoebe grabbed her mug of tea. ‘I’m getting out of these shitty clothes. Can you tell Gabby to come to my room when she turns up? Shame I can’t go and live with her family instead of this one.’

Kate and Teddy listened to Phoebe’s feet clumping up the stairs and waited for the slam of her bedroom door as she kicked it shut. From the sitting room they could hear Jonah playing a scale too rapidly before abandoning it for the first difficult bars of a Shostakovich prelude.

‘You might as well let her give up piano, Mum, like you did me with the trombone.’

Kate didn’t answer. She stared out into the garden at that other self who had walked as light as air.

‘I think Jonah was worried about the cost – you know, the fees at Wharton, even with a scholarship.’

Kate dragged her mind back to Teddy. It was unfortunate she and Philip had rowed about money in front of the children, but it didn’t help to think about it now.

‘That’s all worked out. Anyway, it’s for Dad and me to manage.’

Teddy sighed. He said casually, ‘Well, if Phoebe gives up music lessons that’ll save a bit of cash. When’s supper?’

Three

Philip, returning home four hours later from a fraught meeting with a client, could hear the thump of music coming from his daughter’s bedroom. The door was tightly closed. She’d have her friends in there. She wouldn’t want her father embarrassing her.

‘Are all teenage girls like this?’ he’d once asked Kate.

‘Like what?’

Turning into strangers. That was what he wanted to say, but he shrank from the words.

‘Distant – ’

‘So? Why shouldn’t they have their own lives and their own friends?’

He thought of how Phoebe as a little girl used to run down the stairs to welcome him when he came home from the office at the end of a hard day.

‘The family’s still the most important thing.’

‘Philip, it’s the modern world. A far cry from your stiflingly conventional and oppressive upbringing.’

He couldn’t argue with her. His childhood had been conventional; all that living within your means and saving for a rainy day. As a boy he’d railed against its dullness and occasionally against his parents’ affection. But through it all he’d been conscious of security; years later he realised that what counted in the end was their fundamental honesty and decency, their sense of knowing where they belonged.

His wife and children – they constituted all the meaning in his life. He carried with him all the time an ideal of what a family should be; happy, growing, secure as a unit. He’d been given just that; he knew his luck. If only he wasn’t sometimes too tired to enjoy it.

‘Hi Dad! Want a beer? Mum’s put some in the fridge for you. She’s got something cool to tell you.’

Teddy. Always pleased to see you, always full of affection. Why was it that he was so much more loving than the others? Not that Jonah wasn’t warm-hearted too – he was, though he was getting to the age when boys stopped being cuddly. Yet he was, in his own way, self-contained. He loved his family all right but he didn’t need people the way Teddy did. He had so much else pouring into his life. Teddy was different – more vulnerable, devastatingly so at times, always stumbling over himself in clumsily affectionate gestures.

His wife was in the kitchen, ramming pizza cartons into the recycling bin.

‘Philip? Clement Hunstrete rang. Jonah’s won the top scholarship. Fifty per cent off the fees. Aren’t you proud of him?’

That still leaves fifty per cent to find, Philip found himself thinking, selecting a can of beer and putting it down again. Dear God, how many thousands a year was that?

Of course he was proud of Jonah. Proud – and glad for Kate. It ought to make her happy, and he longed for her to be so. Jonah deserved it, and no doubt Wharton would give him all sorts of advantages. He tried making a list of these in his head as he opened his beer. The chance to study the classics. State-of-the-art sports halls and theatres. Other things – but he couldn’t quite figure out what, at least not until he’d had a drink.

‘It’s wonderful news.’ He poured the beer down his throat with a touch of desperation. No turning round now.

He thought back to his own education. He’d been lucky. His timid Daily Express-reading parents, flustered and wrong-footed when he passed his eleven plus, escaping their enclosed values into the rigorous academic discipline of grammar school. Then a place at Cambridge, where they’d visited him with the air of alarmed storks who have hatched something altogether beyond their understanding. Over the years he’d left his parents behind, but now something stirred within him, some faint feeling of loss, a little boy’s homesickness.

‘It was all worth it, wasn’t it?’

Philip sensed the faint uncertainty in Kate’s voice. He struggled for words, wanting to say the right thing, in spite of a flickering resentment that made him maladroit. He swallowed the last of his beer, and put his arms around her, aware of the inadequacy of the gesture.

‘Without a doubt. It’s big changes ahead then. I must go and congratulate Jonah. Are the others pleased?’

She pulled away from him to straighten the chairs around the table.

‘You bet. Now we can finalise everything about the new house. Supper’s in five minutes, or do you want longer?’

Supporting a family – and now this move down to Wharton. In the hall, Philip held the banister for a long moment and then went upstairs to find his son. Sometimes he felt everything came down to him, that he carried it all. They ought to be getting some capital out of their house by selling up in London, but it wasn’t working out like this. Kate had seen an advertisement for a development of two new houses built on the site of an old mansion. Five bedrooms, walking distance to the station and the school. Perfect for them, she said.

Not so perfect in price. Philip hated the idea of a heavier than ever mortgage. Wharton was fast becoming one of the most desirable towns in East Sussex. Last weekend when they’d gone to have a look round, he’d lost his nerve and then his temper.

‘It’s a lovely house, granted. But why take such a risk? We’re happy and settled where we are.’

‘We could be even happier’ – she gave the word a strange emphasis – ‘in a much better house in Wharton.’

‘It’s too much money, darling, too big a bite at the cherry.’

‘Why are you always so cautious? Why can’t you want things and try and get them like anyone else?’

‘Because I’m the one who has to keep the show on the road,’ he said as patiently as he could. It was an unfair argument and he hated using it.

‘I could go back to working full-time.’

‘How could both of us commute to London each day? What kind of family life is that?’

‘I meant in Wharton. I could set up a freelance editing and translation service from home. Entice some of the company’s clients to follow me.’

‘Isn’t that a shabby thing to do to employers who’ve treated you well all these years?’

‘Philip, why do you always have to retreat to the moral high ground?’

Don’t go back to that, he wanted to snap. It’s not fair on the children. He gripped the steering wheel, allowed a tailgating Audi to overtake, and failed to keep his temper.

‘We can’t afford it, and I don’t want to afford it.’

They’d driven home with his hot words smouldering in the air between them, Kate staring stonily out of the window, the children blank-faced and mute in the back seat.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as they sat in a traffic jam on the South Circular. ‘I do understand you want the best for all of us. So do I. If Jonah does get his scholarship, we’ll go for it. Okay?’

I’ll have to work even harder, and I must do it willingly and uncomplainingly. In his tiredness he found himself thinking of Boxer, the old horse in Animal Farm. He recalled studying the book for his O Level English Literature, and again the pang of something surrendered crept over him. Hadn’t Boxer ended up being sent to the knacker’s yard? Well, the thing was done now. He would find the extra money somehow. He would have to.

Four

Jonah hadn’t said it was just for her. He’d said you and Dad. That should have helped, but it didn’t. He hadn’t meant it.

Kate undressed very slowly, folding clothes with meticulous care. Philip’s stricken look lingered. She tried to brush it away. Why had Jonah come out with that nonsense about the scholarship being for her and Philip?

She’d pushed for it because the rewards would be for the whole family. Schools like Wharton needed to keep up their image of academic excellence, and the government was stepping up the pressure on private schools to sponsor clever children from less privileged backgrounds. All three children would escape the lottery that made up the capital’s state system.

The extra coaching Jonah had needed in Latin and Greek had cost a fortune. She hadn’t admitted to Philip how much, but it had gobbled up a substantial whack of her earnings as a part-time editor for a publishing and translation company.

French was no problem; she was fluent in it, so she taught Jonah herself. An A grade at GCSE – scholarship boys must be at least this standard. She’d made sure he was way above it. Then there was music. Jonah had learnt the piano and clarinet from when he was seven, and played with easy competence and enjoyment. Last year she’d been able to write in their Christmas cards to friends that he’d gained a distinction in both instruments at grade six. Public schools wanted talented musicians for their choirs and orchestras.

For many hours she lay staring into the darkness, unable to sleep, her mind fast-forwarding a merciless kaleidoscope as Philip lay silent beside her. At last, early in the morning as the darkness was beginning to fade, she crept downstairs to the sitting room, and unlocked the top of the Victorian writing desk that Philip had given her on their first wedding anniversary.

One last letter. She’d be cured then.

My own Laurent,

She wrote, the pen a syringe in her fingers injecting the familiar release. She began to write faster, crouched over the desk in the half-light of the dawn.

This is the last letter I’ll ever write to you. It’s the deal I made with myself if we got the scholarship.

But I’m allowed to picture you, to live with you in a parallel world. The way you come into a room, the flash of recognition belonging to fellow travellers, the ebb and flow of expression on your face. It’s as if I am watching one of