The ritual half slaked a thirst I hadn’t known I had. I’d never been touched by religion at school, though we’d traced St Paul’s journeys in our scripture books and coloured in donkeys for Palm Sunday. Mum and Nana had only ever referred to the church suspiciously; it was good for children but also a conspiracy of certain social types, thinking themselves superior. I pushed myself, trying to receive intimations of the sacred trees’ living existence; occasionally, alone, I could fall into an ecstasy of belief. At other times I watched myself, sceptical of the authenticity of my transports. Sometimes, after the sessions with Madeleine, I was visited by a kind of Protestant disgust at our excesses; the more we thrilled and overdid it, the more it was only a game. For a couple of days I wouldn’t play, no matter how much Madeleine pouted and sulked. Then – once on a Sunday evening in my bath when late sunlight, reflected off the bathwater, made restless patterns on the ceiling – I’d be visited by the balm of a vision of great trees, at the very moment when I least thought of asking for it.
At the end of the summer, when Madeleine and I went back to our different schools, the cult cooled down but didn’t die. Out of superstitious habit we still left offerings at the stumps for good luck, and carried bits of bark around in our pockets, fingering them out of the teachers’ sight.
Gerry insisted I should sit the entrance exam for the direct-grant secondary schools. I got good marks in class and always had my head stuck in a book. Anyway, not many children in Stoke Bishop went to the local comprehensive. Madeleine was taking the exam, too – though she didn’t have to do so well in it, because her parents could pay. I needed a scholarship place. I sat the exam. I didn’t care how I did, I wasn’t frightened of it: school up to that point had left me unscathed. I didn’t make the connection that Gerry did between the power of what I read in books and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.
Consulting no one, I had promoted myself at our local library to adult books – which meant climbing three steps, covered in yellow lino, into the upper portion of the brick building with its sensuous hush and beamed Arts and Crafts ceiling. I didn’t know where to begin; I was drawn to complete works in uniform bindings because I thought they would be series like the ones I had loved in the children’s section: Anne of Green Gables and The Naughtiest Girl in the School. Often I hardly knew what was happening in the novels I fell upon by chance (Compton Mackenzie, Faulkner, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen), but I read absorbedly nonetheless, half disappointed, half revelling in the texture of these worlds jumbling in my ignorance: servants, telegrams, cavalry, race, guilt, dressing for dinner (what time was dinner? and were they still in their pyjamas?) – and elliptical conversations unlike any I’d ever heard, signifying things I could only guess at. I gave up on some, but the books were an initiation. I began piecing their worlds together in my comprehension.
I got a scholarship for the Girls’ High School (and Madeleine got in too, without the scholarship). Mum took me out to buy me a briefcase and we had lunch in British Home Stores. She was proud that I had proved myself at least good for something. Gerry said, — She’ll have a lot more to live up to, now.
I can’t remember how I found out that Gerry was brought up in the Homes – I suppose Mum must have told me. He didn’t speak to me about it until long afterwards. (At the time he only said, — Not everyone has your opportunities.) The Homes was an orphanage, a vast neoclassical grey stone building set back from a main road, its front implacable as a hospital or a prison. We said at junior school that the children who came from there smelled of wee and wore one another’s clothes. They didn’t have real mothers, only aunties.
This knowledge I had of Gerry lodged in me like a stone. It didn’t make me like him any better. It seemed an extra twist to how arbitrarily he and I were fastened together: I had to bear the burden of his childhood sorrows too. He had done heroically well, working his way up at the Board Mill, overcoming the handicap of his beginnings (his mother hadn’t been ‘able to look after him’). I was determined not to care. My own selfishness seemed to eat me up; I worked at being oblivious of all my advantages. I ran away from home and went to Nana’s. (‘Your mother’s been out of her mind with worry.’) Out at the stumps with Madeleine, I smoked cigarettes and threw up. I told my mother I was only happy at the stables. Madeleine came riding with me, bouncing unconvincingly on Boy, her smile uneasy, double chin squeezed in the too-tight strap of the brand-new hard hat Pam had bought her. She held her nose and pretended to retch when the ponies dropped their dung.
I hated the High School. Madeleine and I hated it together, though differently. Her face, wiped clear of guile, goaded one or two of the more savage teachers who mistook her blankness for insolence. At first it seemed that I had the gift of invisibility. I sank back into the middle of the range of achievement. I kept my mouth shut in class and out of it. I absorbed obsessively the intricate system of their prohibitions, so as not to attract attention by transgressing – no fewer than five lace-holes in our outdoor shoes, no green ink, all textbooks to be covered in brown paper, girls not to use the toilet in twos (in junior school we had often crowded three or four into the little cubicles, to gossip). By the end of the first week I knew that I’d found my way, through some terrible error, into enemy territory where I must as a matter of life or death keep my true self concealed. The school was a mill whose purpose was to grind you into its product. Every subject shrank to fit inside its exam questions; even – especially – the books we read in English lessons. We were supposed to be grateful, having been selected for this grinding; and most of the girls were grateful. Madeleine and I didn’t fit in. Our tree cult revived and garnered new passionate power through being driven into opposition – with our bark fragments in our pockets we were like Catholic recusants fingering hidden rosaries, and we had a code of words and signs to communicate our refusal and our mockery.
Meanwhile my mother began wearing looser dresses. It wasn’t the fashion for parents to explain themselves to their children. Mum never told me she was pregnant; only hinted at a significant change coming. I was slow to the point of stupidity in picking up her suggestions. Why was she putting her feet up every evening after supper, while Gerry and I did the dishes in competitive silence? Some conspiracy surrounded her, which I recoiled from as if I guessed it had humiliation in it for me. One Saturday morning, watching from my bedroom window while she hung out washing on the metal clothes tree in the garden (turfed at least by this time, if not yet the little paradise of planting it later became under Gerry’s green-fingered stewardship), I saw what I had not allowed myself to see: the wet sheets billowed like fat sails filled with the wind, and she billowed too. Ducking out of sight behind my window, so that she wouldn’t know I knew, I crouched around my discovery in the tight space between the bed leg and the dolls’ cot, with my back to the pink-sprigged wallpaper I had chosen and Gerry had cut and pasted and put up. (I picked at the edges of this paper sometimes, where he wouldn’t notice it, when I was in bed at night; sometimes I spat into the gap beside the bed and let my saliva trickle down the wall.)
My mother had betrayed herself, pretending to be complete and then letting this invasion inside her body as if she was not herself but any other woman. I’d never considered any relationship between my own mother and the not-quite-interesting mystery of prams and bibs and bottles. She was too sensible, too old, I had always thought. She had never even seemed to like babies, or made any fuss over them. Except me. Once upon a time she must have changed nappies and heated bottles of milk for me, fussed over me. But that was a lifetime ago.
My mother had to go into hospital for the last weeks of her pregnancy, because her blood pressure was too high. Gerry and I were left in a tense proximity at home. He made my tea when he came in from work, a procedure we both found painful. He tied Mum’s apron over his shirt and suit trousers, then with an air of weary duty set about producing fish fingers, baked beans, bacon, sausages, por
k chops, chips. For a man of that era he really wasn’t bad at it. In fact, he may have been a better cook than my mother was – she was pretty awful. Only he didn’t know the little foibles of my likes and dislikes the way she did. I ate everything he put in front of me. I think I was afraid of him, alone in the house without her – afraid at least of his contempt. But I didn’t eat it enthusiastically. I cut every piece of toast, or potato, or sausage laboriously into minute pieces before I even tasted them. Then one by one I swallowed these pieces, trying not to chew, washing them down with mouthfuls from my glass of water, asking for more water frequently. Though he couldn’t have known it, I was doing my best.
I saw that I put him off his own dinner (which he ate with the apron still on).
— Just eat it, for goodness’ sake, he said. — Chew it up.
He sat at an angle, hunched around his plate, so that he didn’t have to watch me. After tea, he made me do my homework on the dining-room table. We never used the dining room to eat in except at Christmas or on the rare occasions that we had guests, so it was chilly and transitional: papered olive-green, with doors at either end and a serving hatch, African violets on the windowsill, a memory of stale gravy in the air. Letters and paperwork and Mum’s sewing washed up on the repro rosewood dining table, among the place mats with scenes from old-world English villages. Miserably I cleared myself a space. I had to spread newspaper in case I made marks on the polished surface.
After long days of lessons, we were given two or three hours of homework every night. For most of that first year at the High School I aimed for average marks that would not draw anyone’s attention. I wasn’t consciously holding back – it hadn’t yet occurred to me to desire praise, prizes, distinctions. In science and maths I struggled anyway. The physics teacher was merciless. Handsome, tall, unmarried, with a rope of white hair twisted round her temples, she belonged to the generation of women who had sacrificed everything for their education. We were supposed to learn the principles of physics not by rote but through problem-solving. One evening I was wrestling with a question about acceleration: the hare catching up with the tortoise in a race. Actual tears splashed on to the page, blotting the blue ink of my workings; my mind ached with the effort. At junior school I had been good at problems: ‘If Harry and Dick together weigh nine stone four pounds, Dick and Tom together weigh eight stone twelve pounds . . .’, and so on – but those problems had been for beginners, I saw now. I urged my mind to take the intuitive leap into comprehension, but again and again it baulked. Gerry looked in on me, bringing the cup of milky, sugary, instant coffee my mother usually brought. He really was trying hard.
— What’s the matter? Are you stuck?
Our voices startled us, alone in the house without Mum – they seemed to break a silence locked like rusting machinery. I knew how I must look to him, slumped in defeat at the table, pasty-faced with worry. The teacher’s scorn made no distinction between those who tried and failed and those who didn’t try. I had no pride where my school work was concerned – it occurred to me that Gerry might be able to help me. He worked with numbers all day in the office; I took it for granted he would understand the problem.
— So long as it isn’t French, he said cheerfully enough, and pulled up a chair beside me, striped shirtsleeves rolled businesslike up to the elbow. He always radiated a clean heat, from those strenuous sessions in the bathroom which left the walls dripping and the mirrors cloudy. I explained that the hare was sleeping at a location twelve hundred metres from the finish line; the tortoise passed him at a steady speed of five centimetres per second. Six and a half hours later, the hare woke up. All of these elements by now had attained a hallucinatory meaninglessness in my head.
Gerry read the problem over to himself, biting my pen, frowning down at the worn-soft, scrambled page of my homework book. What minimum acceleration (assumed constant) must the hare have in order to cross the finish line first? He worked out easily in his head how long it would take for the tortoise to get there; then went over and over the other elements, sketching a little diagram for himself, the hare’s trajectory cutting across the tortoise’s just before the finish line. I saw that he wanted it to be like one of the Dick and Harry problems, giving way to common sense or to a trick of thought.
— How do we calculate acceleration? he asked. — Haven’t they taught you how? Have you done other problems like this one?
I found in the back of my book a formula that the teacher had given us, expressing D in terms of O, V, T and A, but I didn’t even know what those letters stood for. Gerry thought that perhaps D was distance, but we already knew the distance. His hand began to leave sweat marks on the page as mine had. He wondered just when the hare needed to pass the tortoise in order to get to the finish line ahead of it; how tiny might the difference between them be? His efforts snagged on this doubt, building up behind it. — You have to concentrate better in class, he said. — She must have shown you how to do this. Can’t you remember?
I shrugged, recoiling. I should have known that I would be to blame.
— Physics is boring.
He tried again, stating the elements of the problem over in a reasonable, steadying voice. All the time, he must have been consumed with his real worries about my mother’s condition and what lay ahead for them; about his responsibility for me.
— Write me a note, I said. — Tell the teacher I was ill.
— Don’t be silly. All you need to do is to ask her to explain it to you.
— You don’t understand what she’s like! I wailed.
And then somehow we upset my coffee cup. It really wasn’t clear to me which one of us did it: I may have thrown out my hand rhetorically; he may have reached for a pencil without looking. Hot, milky, sugary coffee flooded everywhere, soaking instantly through the layers of newspaper, slewing into our laps, pooling on the precious polished surface of the table. We both threw ourselves backwards. I snatched up my homework book – though not before a few splashes dashed across the page, elegant illustrations of the physics of liquid form. (The teacher, the following week, would ring these splashes in red biro, writing ‘Disgusting & slovenly presentation’ – but by then I didn’t care.) Gerry grabbed at a heap of bills, and Mum’s sewing – she was making things for the new baby. Too late; coffee stains had seeped already into the cut-out pieces of the little gingham romper suit.
— Stella! You idiot! he yelled, shoving me roughly out of the way of the coffee dripping on to the carpet, and on to my fawn socks.
I stumbled backwards, genuinely confused. — Was it my fault?
Gerry ran to fetch tea towels from the kitchen to soak up the coffee, then filled a bucket with soapy water and disinfectant. He set to work systematically, mopping and rubbing and wiping just as my mother would have done, changing the water every so often. Spilt milk was one of the things Mum and Gerry dreaded above all else; if you failed to eradicate every trace, the smell as it soured came back to haunt you. While he wiped, I stood frowning at my homework.
— What are we going to do with that skirt? Gerry said, his voice embittered, doomsday-flat. — You’d better take it off. If I wash it out, it’ll never be dry for tomorrow. I’ll try to leach the worst of the coffee out of it without soaking it. At least you’ve got a clean shirt I can iron.
I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happened; I could see all the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light. — Look, I said, exulting. — D is distance. A must be acceleration. We need to rearrange the equation so that A is by itself on one side of the equals sign. OV must be original velocity, which is nought – the hare’s asleep – so that cancels out. Times both sides by two, divide by time squared. Acceleration equals two times distance over time squared.
He didn’t even answer; naturally enough, at that moment he didn’t much care about my physics homework. He was too busy trying to sop spilt coffee from the carpet wh
ile his sulky stepdaughter stood in her knickers, not lifting a finger to help him.
Or he hated his failure to know more than I did, be cleverer than I was.
That was how I got to know that I was clever. When I cleaned my teeth that night in the bathroom, my face was different in the mirror: as if a light had gone on behind my eyes, or an inner eye had been strained open. Every inch of my skin, every pore, every fixture in the bathroom was accessible to my vision pressing remorselessly onward, devouring the world’s substance, seeing through it. I could see my own face as if it wasn’t mine. I pressed my nose to the mirror, baring my teeth at myself, misting the glass with breath. At first this cleverness was like a sensation of divinity; then after a while it ate itself and I couldn’t turn the mind-light off, couldn’t stop thinking through everything, couldn’t sleep. I saw Gerry – and my mother, and my school – all as if they were tiny, in the remote distance. I believed that if I wanted to I could solve all the problems in the physics teacher’s book. When eventually sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees, I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once.
Clever Girl Page 6