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Clever Girl

Page 4

by Hadley, Tessa


  She must be asleep in my bedroom, next door. I hadn’t made much noise, unlocking and stumbling in on the end of my ribbon, but I imagined the effect of it rolling out from me like waves towards the bedroom door and pressing through it; the bed – my bed – creaked and sighed in its intimately known voice. Someone stirred, rolled over – the style was alien in our home, uninhibited and loose and large. Then a growling, deep-throated rumble, one of those satisfied private noises from the borders of sleep, was unmistakably a man’s. I was appalled, invaded. I might have thought he’d murdered my mother and taken her place if I hadn’t heard afterwards her own neat little squeak, sleepy and humorously protesting. He was in there with her; they were drifting together into wakefulness. But what life did my mother share with an unknown man? Who knew her this well, apart from me – to share her sleep with her? I had never thought of bed before as anything but an innocent place.

  In a daze of rage I stepped over to the table, felt in Mum’s handbag for her purse, slipped the worn clasp, and helped myself to her change – not all of it, two half-crowns and a sixpence and a few pennies and halfpence. I had never done such a thing before, or even dreamed of it. I couldn’t remember why my right hand was clenched awkwardly shut; when I unlocked my fingers my palm was grooved with the impress of the sharp edges of the buckle. I put back Mum’s purse, tipped the coral button and the buckle on to the table and left them there. Disgust made me deft and bold; I exited as soundlessly as if I’d never been inside the room.

  My hands tasted of hot copper from the pennies. I knew where to wait, five minutes’ walk along the road from our house, because I caught this bus with Mum every Saturday afternoon, to go to the stables where I had my riding lesson. Only the number 83 called at this stop outside the high wall, topped with broken glass stuck into cement, of a red-brick factory which made brake linings (I pictured these as brilliant coloured, silky). The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing, and I felt conspicuous though no one passed except the milkman, his bottles jostling and chiming.

  But an 83 did come. I paid the conductor and he didn’t question me, dropping the money in his leather bag and winding my ticket from the machine slung across his shoulder. I had to change in the city centre to go to Keynsham; for a long time this second bus sat without a driver while I waited inside, the only passenger, too agonised with shyness to get out and ask when it would leave. I was hungry by this time for my breakfast. We began our slow progress eventually, through the suburbs to the outskirts of the city. Everything I saw from my window at the front on the upper deck, where my mother never wanted to sit – boys setting out a cricket game on a recreation ground, the bombed-out shell of a church with the grass neatly mown around it, car showrooms with plate-glass windows – looked more real, dense with itself, because I saw it alone. When I stepped down at last at my destination from the platform of the bus, I snuffed up triumphantly the perfumes of manure and of clogged, rotten ditches overgrown with brambles, rejoicing at the crunch under my sandals of dried mud grown with sparse grass, set in its deep ruts and tyre tracks, whose forms I broke as I trod.

  What I’m thinking now is that it was a long way for my mother to bring me on the bus every Saturday, just for me to have the riding lessons I yearned and pleaded for. No doubt there was an element of snobbery and aspiration in her determination to get me to the lessons, and to pay for them – just as there was in her wanting me to go to the High School. (We fought about these aspirations, later.) For all I know she was imagining Elizabeth Taylor and National Velvet. But it was still a long way to Keynsham and back on her only free day of the week (on Sundays we went for dinner to one of my uncles’ houses). She had to get all her shopping done on Saturday mornings. What did she do while I lumbered around the paddock on the backs of the fat little ponies, Dozey and Boy and Melba and Star and Chutney? I think she brought her library book with her (Erle Stanley Gardner or Georgette Heyer or Harold Robbins). I think she boiled the stable girls’ electric kettle and made herself instant coffee, and that in fine weather she sat reading and smoking on one of those folding wooden chairs on the collapsing verandah that ran along the end of the pavilion (as we grandly called it – it was really more like an overgrown garden shed). Mostly it wasn’t fine weather, and she must have stayed inside where it stank of leather tack and pony nuts and where in winter they lit a fumy paraffin heater. She took no interest in the horses and wouldn’t go near them.

  She waited after the lesson when I was allowed to groom Star, going at him with the body brush, lifting his mane to work underneath, releasing the potent musk smell of his sweat, dusty and greasy. Kissing his nose I made contact, through the hot pelt grown close like stubbly chenille on the hard bone of his skull, with that urgent wordless horse life which moved me so inexpressibly. And then we set out home again on the two buses.

  The stables were at the back of a grand half-ruined old house where nobody lived; the couple who ran them had a ramshackle bungalow in the grounds. Jilly was fierce, lean and sun-dried; Budge (their surname was Budgen) tubby and uneasily jovial. They were both perpetually distracted in an aura of money-anxiety and failure; even though the place must have run itself, pretty much. They had to buy the feed and equipment but most of the work was done for free by a clique of girls fanatical about horses. The great prize was to be allowed to ride the ponies bareback to the field after the lessons were over. These girls were older than I was, thirteen or fourteen, and I was in awe of their swagger and their loud talk about feed supplements and gymkhanas (a lot of this was wishful thinking – we didn’t go to many gymkhanas). Their ringleader was Karen, decisive and devoid of humour, with a stubby neat figure, startling light blue eyes, and a stiff mass of curls the non-colour of straw. She lived locally and seemed to spend all her time at the stables, although I suppose she must have gone to school. It was impossible to imagine Karen compliant in a classroom – her independent competence seemed so sealed and completed.

  Karen was in charge by herself that Saturday morning when I arrived; she had taken the ponies down to the field and was in the middle of mucking out. Wiping sweat from her forehead on to her sleeve, she peered at me, frowning: I wasn’t supposed to arrive until hours later. And she must have registered that I came for the first time without my mother, though she didn’t comment. I babbled something about wanting to come up early, to help out; she swept me with her focused, narrow glance, summing me up.

  — You can help with this lot.

  She handed me one of the stiff brooms we used to clear out the filthy straw from the stalls. I didn’t have my stable clothes on but in the abandonment of today it didn’t matter. With Mum’s money I had bought chocolate and an orange drink at the shop across the road from where the bus stopped, so I wasn’t hungry any longer and I set to work energetically. Soon I stripped off my jumper. Karen and I settled into a companionable unspeaking rhythm of labour and procedure. I loved the noise of the bristles hissing against the cobbles in the wet from the hose. The forbidden nursery stench of horse shit and piss was gagging, overwhelming; there was a triumph in getting so deep into muck, then resurfacing into an order where all the stalls were spread with clean straw and all the hay-nets full. I suppose as little girls we were excited by the ponies’ shamelessness, which was also innocent; and by the matter-of-fact way we were thrust up against their gargantuan bodily functions, cheerfully chaffing and scolding them for it. We couldn’t help seeing the male ponies’ penises, sometimes extended in arousal – the older girls joked about their ‘willies’, but joking couldn’t encompass the naked enormity, appalling, stretching imagination and inhibition. Sometimes as you led the ponies back into a stall where you’d just put out clean bedding, they pissed into it voluptuously.

  When we’d worked for a good hour Karen made us instant coffee and I shared the rest of my chocolate with her. I’d never actually drunk coffee before but I didn’t say so, I told her I took three sugars; I was ex
cited and happy to see her stirring for me, there in the pavilion whose light was always heavy with dust motes, the inner sanctum of the stable-cult. From time to time I was visited by the knowledge that trouble waited for me at the end of this interlude of escape. No one knew where I was. I had begun something catastrophic when I slipped out of the routines of our life, to act by myself. I knew without thinking about it that what seemed plain to me – my dereliction’s existing in counterbalance with my mother’s – would never for one moment be admitted or discussed by her. But I wasn’t sorry. I was exulting – even though in my chest I felt a pain of postponed anxiety like a held breath.

  Karen began to open up to me, complaining about Jilly and Budge. Jilly had been supposed to help with the mucking out but there was still no sign of her. — Sleeping it off, Karen said contemptuously. We went together to fetch the ponies up to the paddock, ready for the morning’s classes to begin; as we strolled she ripped off bits of wild clematis and sticky burs, lashing with them at the hedge in her indignation, rousing flurries of dust and papery moths. The air was warm and stuffy. The field was at the back of a new housing development; I had some inkling even then that this was not the real, deep countryside but something scruffy and indeterminate, washed up like a residue around the edge of the city.

  I didn’t mistake Karen’s confidences for friendship – she would have unburdened herself to whoever was there. She was also the sort of talker who didn’t bother to fill you in on the background to what she was discussing, so that in order to follow I had to make great leaps of comprehension through a dense web of detail: dates and times, things done and words spoken, disputed interpretations of what had been promised. Her grudges were obscure and passionate. Budge she seemed to tolerate (‘He knows what’s going on and doesn’t like it’), but Jilly was ‘two-faced’ and ‘could be a right cow’. She dramatised their conversations, ventriloquising Jilly’s words in an exaggeratedly posh accent. ‘I’m not very happy with your attitude, Karen.’ In these duologues Karen had all the clinching and flattening ripostes, Jilly was lost for words. I gathered that Jilly was leaving more and more of the work at the stables up to Karen, paying her sometimes, but not on any agreed or regular basis. Sometimes she didn’t even turn up for the classes and Karen had to take them. I had imagined the world of the stables as a happy cohesion. Karen’s revelations were wrenching for me, but they also seemed an inevitable part of the initiations of this morning; I braced myself and grew into them.

  — They’ve got me in a cleft stick, Karen said. — Because I love the horses, I won’t leave them.

  When we opened the gate to the field the ponies lifted their heads from where they were cropping grass; I felt a pang at our intrusion but I knew better than to say so. Karen would think that was soppy. You wouldn’t have known that horses were her life unless you watched her carefully. She wasn’t tentative or tender as I was and she spoke about them as if they were comical, exasperating, a trial to be got through. But in the field they tolerated her approach when she came coaxingly towards them at an angle, holding the bridle out of sight behind her, making encouraging chirruping noises; whereas they wouldn’t let me get anywhere near them. She told me to ride Dozey up to the paddock; she would ride Chutney, leading Star, and we would go back for the others.

  We mounted at the stile. I had never ridden without a saddle before, but as with the coffee I didn’t say anything. Dozey was the smallest of the ponies, only about ten hands. I pivoted awkwardly over the slippery broad barrel of her back, swinging my leg across, copying Karen’s movements; struggling not to slither immediately down the other side, I was hot in the face, knowing her assessing eye was on me. Because of her closed, blinkered perspective it was easy to think that she wasn’t noticing you, but in fact nothing escaped her.

  — Grip harder with your knees, she advised offhandedly as if my incompetence were only a thing of the passing moment. — Sit up straight. Relax. You can do it.

  Tears stung in my eyes, wrung out by the great kindness of her condescension. (When Karen taught the beginners’ classes she was merciless.) And I relaxed, I found my equilibrium. I felt the pony’s muscle and sinew moving under mine, I breathed her smell as if we were one hot flesh.

  So it was that I came riding into the yard at the very moment my mother made her appearance at the stables (she probably didn’t even notice I was bareback). I think that I must have first turned up there at about nine – she arrived just before eleven, when morning lessons started. I saw her climb out of the passenger seat of a maroon-coloured car parked beyond the yard gate; she was wearing her heels, unsuitable in the mud, and her coat was hanging open with the silk scarf loose inside around her neck. She made an impression subtly different to the usual one, when she had toiled up with me on two buses: today she looked womanly, commanding and perfumed. At the same moment Jilly appeared out of the pavilion in wrinkled slacks and polo neck, sour-faced, dishevelled, hair scrunched in an elastic band, cigarette dangling off her lip. She raised an eyebrow in mild surprise at the sight of me on Dozey (her eyebrows were plucked to nothingness and had to be drawn back in brown pencil), but didn’t comment.

  — Take the ponies through into the paddock, Karen, she drawled around her cigarette, as if she’d been in charge of the whole operation from the beginning.

  I half expected Karen to break out angrily with her grievances, but she only clicked her tongue at Chutney and rode on, her face surly and suffering like a boy’s. Jilly unplugged the cigarette in a way she had, with a light popping noise, extending her free hand to my mother and putting on the caramel baritone charm she kept for parents. She obviously couldn’t remember my mother’s name. (I expect she thought Mum was a prole and a bore, beneath consideration. But she needed her money. And Mum would have been thinking that Jilly looked ‘a fright’.) Mum spoke politely in her most stand-offish, stilted public manner. Of course she didn’t make a scene about my being there, she never would. She saved the scene for later, in private.

  — Come on, Stella, she said briskly, as if her collecting me had been planned all along. Awkwardly I slithered down from Dozey, landing somehow on my bottom on the cobbles. — Look at the state of you. I’m going to have to find something for you to sit on.

  And we made our way to the maroon-coloured car.

  Where in the driving seat a man was waiting.

  Mum had called round at Nana’s at about half nine and no one had answered the door. Nana was inside (Mum had a key) but she had suffered a stroke. ‘A slight stroke,’ Mum said decisively, tidying it away. Uncle Frank had taken Nana to hospital. (So that was why I hadn’t heard Nana when I woke up. Unless – this troubled me for a while – she’d had the stroke because she found me missing. Nana recovered but she was never her old indefatigably busy self, she meandered into troughs of bewildered absence. She died when I was fourteen.)

  Mum had guessed immediately where I might have gone. We never once spoke of the possibility that I had come home first and been inside the flat where she was sleeping, not alone. She never asked about the money I had taken, although she must have noticed it was missing, in that time when she had to count every penny. (I hid what was left of it at the bottom of my treasure box, spending it gradually on sweets.) Not long afterwards, when I was reading one evening on my bed, she came in and opened her hand, showing me the coral button and diamanté buckle.

  — Are these yours?

  I had forgotten about them. There had been too many other things to think about.

  — Yes, I said. — I found them on my way home. On the bomb site.

  — Pretty, she said. And gave them to me.

  That was all.

  3

  MY STEPFATHER WASN’T A BIG MAN, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety black brows, a sensual mouth and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I ever touched it, though sometimes out of curiosity I wanted to). His face was one of those where the f
eatures seem compacted as if under pressure inside a frame. He was energetic, intelligent, diligent, faithful – a stroke of luck for my mother, a lightning bolt of luck, illuminating her grinding, narrow future and transforming it. They’d met at work, at the Board Mill where the packets for Wills cigarettes were made; he was the manager of cost accounting. It was a real love match, much more than she could have hoped for, past her first youth and with a half-grown daughter tagged on as part of the package.

  If I knew him now as he was then, what would I think of him? I can imagine watching him, restless in a group of his friends, jumping up to buy them drinks, fetching extra chairs: he is a charming man, they like him. He is eagerly indignant, as they are, over money, hierarchy, immigration, discipline. He doesn’t like the dirty jokes but only shakes his head, disapproving, smiling. No doubt one or two of his older colleagues are in the Masons, which he views with wary amusement until he’s invited to join himself, a few years later. All the time, it’s as if he’s preoccupied with some inward effort which he thinks no one else sees – an effort of decency, of fitting in. There is a little flame burning in him, in spite of himself, lighting up his expression and his movements. His judgement – not of abstractions like immigration and taxes, but knowing how to hold himself, when to be still – is unexpectedly delicate and true. I can see it now, from this distance.

 

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