Tatevik’s Reviews > Accidents in the Home > Status Update

There was just the sense of want in her like a tiger, a great rapacious cat; want not need; want like a reflex, the strong tension of slack muscles collecting themselves to spring: unmoralised. And she rejoiced in this rapacious cat in herself, shamelessly, as if might was right.

This wasn't what she'd meant to say, and wasn't even strictly true - after lunch she'd fallen asleep in the armchair, then she'd sat down and watched television peaceably with the children for an hour in the afternoon. She had meant to commiserate with Bram; often this happened, that the kind thing she'd meant to say turned in his actual presence into an unstoppable spurt of protest, grey and shaming.

Partly, it was precisely the singleness of Helly's life that Clare most envied. […] The idea of such empty acres of solitude was a cooling balm against the promiscuous itch of Clare and Bram's crowded little house where every surface was greasy with touching and there was no lock on the toilet door and at night the children wandered from bed to bed.

She imagined a morning for Helly, a parallel place in the world where Helly moved with lightness between free choices, taking a long shower, picking out clothes from her wardrobe, drinking filter coffee, eating a croissant and then a peach from a shallow ceramic fruit bowl on a glass table, looking over a script for a rehearsal she was going to in the afternoon.

Bram got up and went to work. Since then Clare had made breakfast for the children, washed up the dishes, got them all dressed, tidied the beds. She had sorted out a wash for the machine, and hung it out when it was finished on one of the two drooping wooden clothes horses she had to use to dry the clothes in a corner of the kitchen when it wasn't fine enough to hang them outdoors.

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.

People who don't read often imagine that a life lived with books is serenely truthful, perhaps rather idealistic, elevated to a higher sphere above the trickeries and treacheries of real life. Combined with the children, and the little house without television, and the making of her own bread and the salting of lemons, the books may make him think she is wholesome and sane.