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

you believed that if you could somehow hold them firmly and tightly enough you could stop anything happening to them, physically hold the world still and whole for them against disaster.

Recendy, though, she'd found herself taking pleasure in how genuinely distracted and disorganised he was: it made her imagine a life so different to her life with the children, where thought had to be fitted into little discrete spaces inside her routine. She imagined the slow ripening of Tony's ideas in a rich vegetable chaos, uninterrupted by the petty necessities of mealtimes and housework.

What if she was doing this not, as she had believed, out of deep inner need, but in fact because she was following a pattern, a seductive and flattering and false suggestion that flowed at her on all sides from novels and films and advertising, about the importance, the paramount and endless intricate intriguing importance, of her own fulfilment?

What if she was leaving a good man and breaking up a family, not even for love, but just for curiosity, out of dissatisfaction?

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.

Marian's older daughter Clare was supposed to help too, but she had young children and moods and didn't regularly manage it; she was in that baffled, lean, wolfish phase of young motherhood Marian dimly remembered, when you feel you may have been cheated of too many pleasures in exchange for the burden of loved children you can't unwish.

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.