We moved from Kingsdown into Stoke Bishop: respectable, sleepy, leafy. Our house was in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove, carved out by a developer where there had once been a little wood among the rows of houses from the 1930s. Mum had promised me a bedroom of my own and I was looking forward to something pretty and pink. I had thought that perhaps this good luck of possessions was what you could get in exchange for the other changes you didn’t want. I calculated that I might get a horse, too, and jodhpurs and a hard hat of my own – I had only ever rented my hat from the stables. (I did get the jodhpurs and the hat, eventually.)
But when we drew up outside the new house in Gerry’s car, minutes before the removal van arrived, it wasn’t what I had bargained for. The house was so new it was raw. There were still labels stuck across the glass in the windows, so that it seemed to stare with lifeless eyes at a ruined landscape of red clay. The paving and the wood of the fence palings were stained red and filthy. Although there were people already living in the finished houses to one side up the Grove, in the other direction there were only half-built shells in the mud; monstrous machines snoozed among piles of breeze blocks and timber, bags of cement. We sat on in the car for a few moments after the engine died, and I thought Mum and Gerry must be thinking what I was thinking: that it was too bleak and ugly to bear, that we would have to give up and go home.
But they weren’t.
Mum must have been drinking in the newness in deep draughts.
How could she not want to get away from Mrs Walsh and Clive, and the old woman in the Victorian dress, and the broken windows? (And Nana, and her childhood past, and her failed marriage?) She tied her hair in a scarf and Gerry rolled up his sleeves; unpacking, directing the removal men, they made a team. Mum boiled water and unpacked a bucket and a tub of Vim, then she began washing out the red mud. Gerry helped carry things in and made sure every item went into the room it was labelled for. Though he wasn’t big, he was strong, and he always got on well with men who worked for him. Mum and I hadn’t brought much with us from the flat, most of the furniture in the van was Gerry’s. (He had been married before – until his first wife ‘ran off’, I found out later – so I suppose that these were things he’d bought with her.) — It’ll do for the time being, my mother said about this furniture warningly, as if she had plans. Her plans were a flirtation between them, abrasive and teasing – her female conspiracy (shopping) against his male suspicion and resignation.
— Don’t get under our feet, she said to me. — Why don’t you go out and play?
— Couldn’t you find her something useful to do? said Gerry.
— You don’t know Stella.
This was the first time I’d heard that I wasn’t useful. She’d never asked me to be useful, had she? Anyway I was glad, I didn’t want to help. My new bedroom was an empty cell smelling coldly of cement, not adapted to my shape or anyone’s. I wanted my old window back, surveying the familiar intricate wilderness – gardens overgrown with brambles, tottering garages, the tracery of fire escapes on the backs of houses, an old Wolseley up on bricks. Our new garden, which my new window overlooked in blind indifference, was only a rectangle of red clay, marked off with fence posts and wire from the clay rectangles belonging to the other houses.
I wandered out into it, taking my doll. (— Aren’t you too old for dolls? Gerry had asked already.) At the far end of our rectangle were the stumps of two huge trees cut down to make way for the new development. I gravitated towards these stumps as the only feature breaking up the new-made symmetry. Under my sandals the ridges and troughs of hardened clay were unforgiving. From the base of the tree stump little feelers of new growth were pushing up in doomed hope, waving their flags of leaves; sticky resin oozed from crevices on the cut surface. Even the sky out here – thinly clouded and tinged with lemon where the sun strained to break through – seemed blanched and excessively empty. Once, I supposed, its emptiness would have been full of tree. Carefully I sat on the stump, not wanting to get resin on my shorts; I put my doll beside me. Because she was jointed at the pelvis but not at the knee, she had to have her legs stretched out in front of her in a wide V. She was wearing a blue and white ski suit I had knitted, with Nana’s help. (Even when things went dark after her stroke, Nana knitted expertly as ever, and still won at cards.)
A girl came out from the back of the house next door, picking her way easily across the red clay. For a while she and I were intensely mutually aware without seeming to notice each other, behind the convenient fiction of the fence wire. When we outgrew that pretence she stepped across it and approached my stump.
— Hello, she said. — Have you moved in next door?
— It’s you who’s next door to us, I said logically. — Counting from here.
She didn’t notice that I’d corrected her perspective.
— Oh good. We can be friends. I hoped there’d be a girl.
Her threshold for friendship wasn’t exacting, then. I didn’t have high hopes of her: she seemed unsubtle and I was a wary, reluctant friend. At least because she was eager, it was easy for me to withhold my approval. She was pretty: breathy and bouncing, with round eyes like a puppy’s, a mass of fuzzy, fair hair, and a tummy that strained against her tight stretch-nylon dress. I liked her name, which was Madeleine. She picked up my doll and began to walk her in silly, jouncing steps around the stump, see-sawing her legs; I snatched her back. My belief in my dolls at that point was in a delicate balance. I knew that they were inert plastic and could be tumbled without consequences upside-down and half naked in the toy-box. At the same time, I seemed to feel the complex sensibility of each one as if it existed both in my mind and quite outside me. This doll – her name was Teenager – was stiffly humourless; my teddy bear on the other hand was capable of a tolerant irony. Teenager was outraged by Madeleine’s travesty of real play.
— I suppose these were the beeches, I said, to distract Madeleine’s attention.
She was blank. — What were what?
— These trees. The road is called Beech Grove. A beech is a kind of tree.
— What trees?
She was looking around as if she might have missed them. I explained that I meant the stump I was sitting on and the one next to it. I pointed out that there was a stump too at the end of her garden, and others all along behind the row of houses. — There must have been a little wood. A grove. That’s what a grove is.
My relationship to her began to take on an instructional form that was not unsatisfying. Madeleine looked down at the stump with dawning comprehension. — Oh, is that a tree? she said.
— What did you think it was?
— I didn’t think about it really. I s’pose I just thought they were part of the ground. Like rocks or something.
Her oblivion seemed so extreme that it might be disingenuous. This was Madeleine’s performance – eyes so wide open that she seemed to be finding her own obliviousness as amusing as you ever could. You never got to the bottom of what she actually knew, or didn’t know.
— They shouldn’t have chopped down a grove of beech trees, I said sternly, improvising. — It’s unlucky.
— Why?
— Because they were sacred. In the olden days, people worshipped them.
She thought about this. — What d’you mean, worshipped?
— Prayed to them. Believed that they were sacred – you know, like God.
— God?
Perhaps she’d never noticed who she was praying to at school. I stood up carefully, respectfully from the stump. — I hope the gods aren’t angry.
— Is it alive now? Madeleine asked warily.
— Kind of, in a way.
I showed her where the tree was feebly sprouting. — It’s still trying to grow.
— Ooh, I don’t like it, she squealed, backing off in a pantomime of shuddering.
She looked like the kind of girl who would join in when there was squealing over anything: blood, wasps, veins in school-dinner liver – although
she wouldn’t quite mean it, would just be enjoying the noise and distraction. She was too robust to be properly squeamish.
— You’d better not say you don’t like them, I said. — They might hear.
A gleam of inspiration pierced her vagueness. Taking me by surprise, she dropped to her knees on the clay, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands together. — For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, she gabbled in the prescribed drone. — In the name of the ferrership of the spirit. (She meant fellowship.) Oh holy tree. Who art very nice; and we’re sorry that they’ve cut you down.
I knew that this was mostly for my benefit. Nonetheless, I glanced involuntarily upward. A few fat drops of rain fell without warning or follow-through, darkening spots on the dried clay.
— See? said Madeleine. — It doesn’t mind.
That evening my mother boiled eggs and warmed beans on a primus; our gas stove wasn’t connected yet. We buttered sliced bread straight from the bag and had the milk bottle on the table.
— Isn’t this an adventure? she said excitedly.
I was suspicious of something new in her face: not romance, exactly (she was never soft), but as if a force had filled her out, carrying her forward in exhilaration. She must have been just waiting to be married, I realised. I tried intently to imagine my father (missing, presumed dead) taking up the space that Gerry was filling now; but my picture of my father was too vague, Gerry was too assertive. He was sweaty, naturally, after the work he’d done; his hair was wet because he’d doused his head under the tap in the bathroom. His bodily presence intruded every way I turned, making the new house seem crowded when I ought to have felt its succession of spaces flowering ahead of me, after the two rooms that Mum and I had shared since I could remember. As twilight thickened outside, the house’s shell seemed too pervious, swelling with the electric light as if it were as insubstantial as the canvas tents at school camp.
Mum and Gerry discussed with deep interest the economics of using the immersion heater. After he’d dried each cup and plate he held it up to the light to inspect it. He complained that when I washed up I splashed water on the floor and used too much squeegee. Already I didn’t like living with him, and it had only been a matter of hours. I retreated to my cell-bedroom where at least now a bed was installed – though it wasn’t the old double bed that I’d slept in since I outgrew my cot. That bed had never been ours, apparently; it had belonged to the old flat. On this new narrow one was a pile of ironed candy-stripe sheets. With a martyred consciousness – where did they think I was? why didn’t they wonder? – I tucked them inexpertly over the mattress, then climbed between them in my knickers and vest. I heard my mother and Gerry talking downstairs. Though I couldn’t make out their words, I knew that they were deciding with wholehearted adult seriousness where to put each piece of furniture. The rumble of their dialogue was lulling, melancholy, remote. Then someone was running a bath; unfamiliar pipes groaned and eased too near at hand. There were no curtains at my window yet. In the dark I missed the view from my old room intensely, and I didn’t want to think about the non-trees I had conjured into being.
We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends over that summer – we had nothing else to do. During the holidays in the past, when Mum went to work I was left at Nana’s or at Auntie Jean’s. Now (Nana wasn’t capable any longer and Gerry didn’t like Jean) I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine had someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us; she sometimes took us swimming. I think she felt sorry for me, left all alone, but actually I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguins in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey: for a tubby girl she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to stop me beginning with chocolate and finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle, wiping its creamy moustache on to my sleeve; I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.
I moved around the new house in the adults’ absence as if I were taking soundings. Sometimes Madeleine and I were experimentally raucous, clattering and screaming, flying down the stairs two or three at a time. The house’s air, one moment after we’d shattered it, was blandly restored. I picked up ornaments, poked in the miscellany of small things that had been put inside them for safe keeping, opened drawers. I had no criteria of taste by which to judge what was there (wood veneer, streamlined forms, tapering peg-legs, fitted carpets, a television inside a cabinet with doors, curtains with a print of autumn leaves); and so I felt the impact of the rooms purely, their bright brisk statement, their light and order which aspired to weightlessness and dustlessness.
Gerry’s desk drawers were boring, full of papers having to do with dull mysteries: mortgages and insurance. With a kitchen knife I made a tiny nick in the wood at the back of the kneehole in the desk, near the floor. I was filled with trepidation next time he sat down to do the accounts and pay the bills, but he never noticed – nor when I added new nicks in the years afterwards, every time I was most incandescently angry with him. He did notice that I had been through his drawers, and also that we had bounced on the sofa, rucking the covers and denting the cushions. And although I had washed up after my sugar-messes, like forensic scientists he and Mum somehow discovered traces of my cooking stuck around the bottom of the pan.
— She’s got to learn, Gerry said. — She’s not a baby any longer.
I was clumsy, easily distracted, I was ‘always in a dream’. Gerry dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard. I wasn’t pretty or charming or malleable. I went around with a suffering face. I read my book with my fingers in my ears. I wouldn’t laugh at Gerry’s jokes. I lost my door key or I went out with Madeleine leaving the back door unlocked. I left the hot tap running in the bathroom, then I forgot my cardigan at the swimming pool. Gerry rarely lost his temper with me; not in that early time. He never, ever hit me.
And of course days passed, even weeks sometimes, when he and I weren’t in any sort of outright conflict. Sometimes we were even all right together. Once, when he and Mum both had time off work, we went out for the day to Brean Down and Gerry and I climbed the dunes in our flip-flops, sliding back one step for every two we took on the shifting sand; he held out his hand to me and pulled me up after him. His hands were brown and strong with neat-trimmed nails as thick as horn. He always wore a watch with one of those expanding metal bands (I worried that it must catch in the curling black hairs on his arm), and a wedding ring, which men didn’t often do in those days. Mum stood below with her hair escaping from her headscarf, whipping across her face in the wind, calling out to us to be careful, that the dunes were treacherous, we could be buried alive. And Gerry and I laughed together.
When I was in trouble, however, he sat opposite me in the lounge, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his forehead wrinkled: I felt the whole force of his personality bent upon me – thwarted, concentrated, blinkered. (— You’ll find nothing’s handed to you on a plate, he said. — It’s no good thinking you can stay wrapped up in your own little world. Do you have any idea how hard your mother has to work, to earn the money to buy you food and clothes?) In a reasonable voice he communicated his warnings about the meanness at the heart of things, which he understood and I, in my childishness, was refusing to acknowledge.
No doubt he really thought it was his duty, in my father’s place, to teach me to adapt to the way things were. The trouble was, I hardly knew him. I didn’t exactly argue with him. I sometimes said, ‘I didn’t mean to’ in a flippant voice, or denied things it was obvious I had done. If he asked me why I’d done them I said I didn’t know. I p
ut my hands under my thighs on the chair, swung my legs and looked off into the corners of the room; my expression was a slippery mask clamped on my face. All my effort was used to keep my mouth curved upward in a grimacing smile, which I knew was my best weapon because it made Gerry squeeze his fists and raise his voice.
Then Mum would appear from the kitchen. — That’s enough, she would say, tactfully as if she was saying it to me. — Go up to your room, Stella.
Tugging me backward and forward between them, she and Gerry expressed the tension in their new life together. He wanted his new wife to himself; he hadn’t reckoned on finding me his rival for her attentions. Mum, with her quick scepticism, must have seen how he deceived himself, dissimulating his resentment, pretending to be impartial. She must have remonstrated with him over how relentlessly he came in pursuit of me, though it was part of their code that she would never openly take my side against him. (And although I was wounded by his taking her away from me, I also dreaded catching sight of any rift between them.)
Let’s be clear – our fight was mutual. I was set against Gerry just as he was against me. Only I was a child, so he had power over me. That’s all tyranny is: it’s not in a personality, it’s in a set of circumstances. It’s being trapped with your enemy in a limited space – a country, or a family – where the balance of power between you is unequal, and the weaker one has no recourse.
Because the tree cult began in the shapeless days of summer, there was no drudging sanity of school at first to counteract its power. I came up with the idea of kissing the stumps and leaving offerings among the roots or pressed into the cracks – salt, currants, sherbet. We smeared the resin on our foreheads. (— You’re filthy, my mother said when she got home. — Go and wash your face.) The three stumps in our gardens grew distinctive personalities and we named them (Iskarion, Vedar, Mori). They were jealous, capricious, closely informed about our daily lives. More awesome and less easy to propitiate were the nameless stumps we had no access to, in other gardens. Madeleine used to dab the resin on her tongue and then groan and double up, clutching her stomach, making a great fuss over how it had poisoned her. It was her idea that we should cut ourselves and rub our blood into the bark.
Clever Girl Page 5