Clever Girl

by Hadley, Tessa

  I knew it mattered to Val that I looked right. I wore his shirts and his sleeveless vests and his Indian silk scarves, over the tight jeans he helped me to buy. I put kohl round my eyes, and so did he sometimes. We both dyed our hair the same dark liquorice colour (my mother was aghast, another scene – ‘whatever are they going to say at school?’). I paraded up and down the attic in different outfits for his approval, getting the effect just right – and yet when we went out we looked as if we didn’t care what anyone thought. Val’s idea of me was that I was single-minded, fiery, uncomplicated, without middle-class falsity (— But aren’t I middle-class? I asked, surprised). And I performed as his idea, became something like it.

  We made plans to live abroad together – Paris or New York. He’d been to both these places, I hadn’t been anywhere except Torquay and Salcombe. He described walking around the streets in those cities, buying French bread and coffee, and how we’d earn money and rent an apartment. I believed he could really make these dreamed-of things come about in real life: he had the imagination, the bravado, there was a rare blend in him of earnestness and recklessness. And he seemed to know instinctively what to read, where to go, what music to listen to. He was easily bored, and indifferent to anything he didn’t like, as if it didn’t exist. Psychological novels were dreary, he said. The Beatles were consumer culture. I didn’t talk to him about the old-fashioned books I used to love before I met him.

  — In New York I’ll work as a waitress, I said, — and you can write.

  — Sometimes I think I could do something with my life, he said. — But sometimes in the middle of the night, something awful happens.

  — What kind of awful?

  — I feel as if I’ve already done it, this important thing – writing a book, or whatever it is. I feel as if it was a mountain to climb, and I’ve toiled up the mountain and achieved the thing and then I’m coming down the other side and it’s behind me, and it’s nothing, it doesn’t alter anything in the world by one feather’s weight. And then when I wake up I panic that because I’ve dreamed the end of the work like that, now I’ll never be able to begin.

  More often Val’s mood was buoyant and exhilarated, he was impatient to get started. Everyone supposed he would take the Oxbridge entrance exam, go to university. For the moment he went along with them. — My English teacher at school, he said, — he’s invested a lot of hopes in me. He’s giving me special tuition. I don’t know how to tell him I’m leaving, not yet. Soon I will.

  — Wherever you go, I said, — I’ll follow you.

  It was often this English teacher who phoned him up.

  We ran into him once – the English teacher, Mr Harper. Val and I were arm in arm, walking down Park Street on a Saturday in the crowds of people milling and looking in the shops – jeans boutiques, bookshops, places selling Indian and Chinese knick-knacks and silver jewellery. A stubby middle-aged man was staring in at a shop window; he veered away from it as we passed, almost walking right into us and then recognising Val, putting on a show of surprise which seemed contrived, as if he’d actually seen us coming from miles off and prepared for this scene. I thought at the time that he must be socially inept because he was such an intellectual. I knew what respect Val had for him, and that it was he who had put Val on to reading Pound and Beckett and Burroughs. But I could see that Val wished we hadn’t met him – he looked shocked by this collision of the two worlds of school and home.

  — Hello Valentine, Mr Harper said. He was staring leeringly at me. — What a good way to spend your Saturdays. Aren’t you supposed to be revising?

  — We’re on our way to the reference library, Val said sulkily, blushing.

  — Oh – then, I mustn’t get in the way of virtue! God forbid. But I will see you Tuesday, after school?

  — Is it Tuesday? Val was vague. — I’m not sure.

  — You must come on Tuesday. We’re broaching the divine Marianne.

  I was disappointed. Val had talked about Fred Harper (the boys doing Oxbridge Entrance called him Fred) as if he was a portal to higher things – and here he was chaffing and prodding about work like any other teacher. Also, he was rumpled and pear-shaped, with pleading eyes, and a bald patch in his hair which was dark and soft like cat fur. He had a drawling posh voice. I knew there was a Mrs Harper and also children; and that Mrs Harper got bored if her husband and Val talked for hours about poetry. Sometimes she went to bed, leaving them to it.

  — Who’s the divine Marianne? I said jealously when we’d walked on.

  Valentine shrugged, irritated. — A poet in the A-level anthology.

  Mum and Gerry were afraid I was bringing contamination into their house. When I bought junk shop dresses Mum made me hang them outside in case of fleas. Val found an old homburg and wore it pulled down over his eyes.

  — What does he think he looks like? Gerry said.

  — What’s the matter with that boy? asked Mum. — What’s he hiding from?

  He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, improbable – in his collarless shirt, suit waistcoat, broken canvas shoes, scrap of vermilion scarf at his neck – as an exotic bird blown off course: immobile, silent, quivering, a smile playing along his lips that was not for their benefit. Even in those days when he was fresh and boyish the drugs did leave some kind of mark on him – not damage exactly, and not unattractive, more like a patina that darkened his skin to old gold, refining its texture so that minute wrinkles came at the corner of his lids when he frowned. His eyes were veiled and smoky. He smelled, if you got up close: an intricate musk, salty, faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter – delicious to me.

  — Hello? Anybody home behind that hair? my mother said.

  Val looked at me quickly, blissfully. He would imitate her for our friends, later. While he was with me everything was funny. Without him I was exposed, on a lonely pinnacle – afraid of tumbling. They were still strong, my parents, my enemies. Their judgement of what I loved (Val, books, freedom) I couldn’t, wouldn’t yield to – but it weighed on me nonetheless, monumental as a stone. If I tried to carelessly condescend to them then they found me out. I was clever, I was still doing well at school, but Gerry was clever too.

  — What’s so wrong with communism? I’d lightly say, trying to be amused at their naïve politics. I really was amused, I knew about so much – poets and visionaries – beyond their blinkered perspective. I’d read The Communist Manifesto. — Doesn’t it seem fairer, that everyone should start out equally, owning a share of the means of production?

  — It’s a nice idea, Stella, Gerry said. — Unfortunately it doesn’t work out in practice. People in those countries wouldn’t thank you for your high ideals; they’d rather be able to buy decent food in the shops. The trouble is, a command economy just isn’t efficient, wherever it’s been tried. Breaks down because of human nature in the end. Every man naturally wants to do better than his neighbour.

  Because he knew those words – ‘command economy’ – and I didn’t, how could I answer him? His knowledge was flawed, but substantial – an impregnable fortress. My attacks on it – so effective when we were apart and Gerry dwindled in imagination to a comic miniature – melted in his actual presence, so that I battered at the fortress with weak fists. In those days, even in the seventies, the establishment was not very much changed from the old order. Young people wore their hair long and had Afghan coats and went to music festivals – some young people did those things. But at the top, bearing down on everyone, there were still those ranks of sombre-suited men (and the occasional woman) – politicians, professors, policemen; inflexible, imperturbable in their confidence about what was to be taken seriously and what was not. You could jeer at them, but their influence was a fog you breathed every day, coiling into your home through their voices on radio and television and in newspapers. Gerry said that Africans suffering in a famine should know better than to have so many children, or that feminists did women no favours when they went around like tramps, or th
at there was no point in giving to charities because it was well known that they spent all the money on themselves.

  As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her.

  In my mind, I couldn’t bear her limited and conventional life: housework and childcare. But in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening – sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even then, when I was half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. No doubt she was very attractive then, in her late thirties, if I could have seen it – compact good figure, thick hair in a bouffant short cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, which didn’t occur to me. Being married to Gerry – and Stoke Bishop, and the baby – had given a high gloss to her demeanour, wiping away the hesitations I might have shared in once when there were just the two of us. And in her withholding and dismissive manner she seemed to communicate how women knew something prosaic and gritty and fundamental, underlying all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know too, or would have to come to know sooner or later.

  I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.

  The summer I got my O-level results (all As apart from Cs in physics and chemistry), Uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory. I wept to Val, about how the women there hated me and put me on to the worst tasks (I had to take the moulds off the hot puddings – at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered) because I was only a student worker and because I took in a book to read in my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up but he didn’t – I think that actually he liked the romance of my working there and having relatives who worked there – it was not ‘middle class’. He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so, my mother had always so strictly policed the way I spoke at home (‘I wasn’t doing anything’, Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’). Apparently, however, I said ‘reely’ for really, and ‘strawl’ for stroll.

  — Your mother has an accent too, he said. — Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.

  Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint – quickly in the fingers of one hand, as only he could – and we went outside to smoke. It was summer and a moon, watery-white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spreadeagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our finger-ends were touching – through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we emptied ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.

  Then I was sure someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared to ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbour and young fruit trees and a rockery which Gerry built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And I thought now that he was hidden in there, aware of Val and me. He did walk out in the garden in the dark sometimes; ‘to cool off’, he said. He must be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.

  — I don’t think that my real dad’s really dead, I said aloud to Val, the words spilling unexpectedly, making the thought actual for the first time although it felt at once as if I’d been preparing it for years. I didn’t know if Gerry could hear what I was saying from next door. — I think he just left my mum when I was a baby, before I had time to have any memories of him. The way people talk about him – or don’t – is all wrong, for a dead person: not polite enough. Not as if he’s finished. Perhaps she had to divorce him, before she married Gerry. Only they didn’t bother to tell me anything about it.

  Val turned his head in the grass towards where he couldn’t see me clearly. — That makes sense. I wondered why there weren’t photographs of him. Why don’t you ask her? Do you care?

  — Not really. Not if he didn’t ever care, to come and find me.

  — If he’s alive, he’s a cunt.

  I agreed. — Why exchange one cunt for another?

  Consoling me, Val began to stroke my hand, rubbing his thumb around my palm, then pushing it between my fingers, one by one, over and over, until I was sick with love for him, but knew better than to make any move towards him from where I lay dissolving. Val didn’t like me all over him. There was a rustling from among the shrubs next door; a head like a pale moon-blob rose above the top of the clematis mound, looking far-off.

  — Stella, come inside, the blob said. — You’ll catch your death. That grass is damp.

  Gerry’s voice in the night was sepulchral, ridiculous, tight with disapproval.

  Only when I heard it was I aware of myself sprawled so provocatively on my back with my legs spread wide apart, my arms flung open. Let him look, I thought. I didn’t move. I pretended I didn’t see him.

  — Did you hear something? I said to Val, squeezing his hand in mine.

  We were going to laugh, I knew we were.

  — Come inside, Stella, now, at once, Gerry said, but keeping his voice down as if he didn’t want my mother to know what he had to see. — I’m telling you. Get up!

  Pointedly he didn’t address Valentine, ignoring his existence.

  — I think I heard something, Valentine said. — Or was it cats?

  Leisurely Val sat up, crouching over the cold end of the joint, hand held up to shield it from the wind and hair falling forward, hiding his face. Then came the scratch and flare of the heavy, shapely silver lighter that had been his mother’s until she gave up smoking; fire bloomed momentarily in Valentine’s cave, I saw him aflame – devilish, roseate. I scrambled to my feet. I really was stoned, the garden swung in looping arcs around me.

  — Oh, I cried, exulting in it. — Oh . . . oh!

  We were laughing now. Under my soles, the world rocked, and steadied itself, and rocked again.

  — What’s the matter with you? Gerry hissed. He must have been balancing on something – a rock? or a box? – on the other side of the fence, because it was too tall ordinarily to see over; his two fists, hanging on, were smaller moon-blobs against the night. — Are you drunk?

  (They still didn’t get it, about what we were smoking.)

  — You’d better come back the front way. Come round by the front door.

  — Back the front way, Stella? Valentine imitated softly, looking at me, not at Gerry. — Front the back way? Which way d’you like?

  I had always had this gift to see myself as my stepfather saw me – only in this vision I used to be a small and thwarted thing, blocking him. Now in the moonlight I was transfigured: arms outstretched, veering like a yacht tacking, I was crossing the garden, flitting ahead of the wind, like a moth, weightless.

  Valentine and I looked so consummately right as a couple: stylish, easily intimate without fuss, his arm dropped casually across my shoulder, our clasped hands swinging together. We looked sexy. I knew that because I saw it in the others’ faces. Oh well. The truth was, we hadn’t had sex much. (I think Madeleine half guessed this.) All those times we lay down on his bed together (or, occasionally, mine) we hadn’t done an awful lot – apart from our talk – for Mum and Gerry to disapprove of.

  We did work ourselves up, there was some touching and fumbling. I touched him, mostly; if he touched me he turned it into a joke, put on a funny voice as if my breasts were little animals squeaking and crawling around on my chest. Kissing, he pecked dry kisses all over my face with a satirical, popping noise, smiling at me all the time with his eyes open. Then sometimes if his mother banged the gong for supper, or the phone rang and she called upstairs to say that Val was wanted, he grabbed my hand with sudden aggression, pushed it down inside
his jeans, used it to rub himself fiercely and greedily for a moment, before he flung off the bed and ran to the phone, zipping up as he went, cursing, pushing his erection away inside. Remember, I was wholly inexperienced, a virgin. I wasn’t disgusted; actually I’d say I was more fascinated, by my transgression into that crowded heat inside his stretched underpants, his smell on my fingers afterwards. But also I was confused – if that was desire, it was unmistakably urgent. So what was the matter?

  Who wants to remember the awful details of teenage sex, teenage idiocy?

  I loved him because he was my twin, inaccessible to me.

  One evening I was supposed to babysit while Mum and Gerry went out to a Masonic Ladies’ Night. My little brother Philip was four, I liked him very much (I still do): he was always an enthusiast, entertaining us with jokes and little performances, looking quickly from face to face for our approval. He had to sit on his hands to keep them from waving about and he swung his legs under his chair until it rocked (all of this got him into trouble at school later, where he also struggled with learning to read). When Mum came downstairs, perfumed and startling in her silver Lurex bodice and stiff white skirts, he and I were laughing at Dad’s Army on the telly. She stood clipping on her earrings by feel, giving us her instructions. This whole process of her transformation, she managed to convey, was only another duty to discharge.