I was supposed to clean their rooms while they were away in lessons but sometimes one of them came back while I was still wiping round the sink or vacuuming the carpet. I must have looked to them like a witch in a fairy tale: hair scraped back in a plait out of the way, no make-up, very thin, eyes burning up in my pale face. Or they might meet me coming out of the toilets or washing the floor in the corridor – I would stand holding my mop beside my bucket of filthy water, and stare down at my shoes, and they’d push past as if they didn’t see me, treading dirt across the wet floor. Perhaps they just saw a cleaner, made sexless and ancient by her function. Or perhaps they took in that I was young and female, but felt my ferocity; presuming I must be an enemy of their type and privilege, they were afraid of me. At any rate, I never exchanged more than a couple of words with a single one of them, the whole time I was there.
Though it wasn’t because I was a nun, or made of stone.
Mostly, I told myself I was glad I had cut through all the shams of love-dreaming and passion, to some bedrock where only Lukie mattered. Against my will, however, every so often while I was working a haze of need would come over me like a fit – so bewildering that I didn’t know where I was. One of the sixth-formers came in once while I was standing with my face pressed in his dressing gown, drinking in his smell, keening to myself; he was so shocked he walked straight out of the room again, and he always avoided me afterwards. He must have thought I had a crush on him; but the truth was I hardly even knew whose room it was. I had only wanted to breathe in his male teenage smell: I suppose it reminded me of Valentine. I still dreamed of Valentine sometimes, though I hadn’t forgiven him. The smell wasn’t good (not like Lukie’s sweet one): stale sweat and cigarettes and dirty hair. But it made me drunk, it made my knees sag, made all my intelligence drain down out of my mind until I thought I would fall on the floor with longing.
The driving lessons went well, I began to look forward to them. Because the rest of my life was so weighed down with responsibility and routine, in charge of the car I felt as if I was flying, I loved its power under my control. Soon I was out on busy roads, keeping up with the flow of traffic, turning left, turning right. — Good girl, Al said. — You’ve got a feeling for it. He had to touch the steering wheel sometimes, correcting my line, but he never needed to use his dual control. My wits – sluggish from housework and baby-minding – were strained taut, mastering new difficulties: holding the car in traffic in first gear, reversing round a corner.
I still couldn’t make my mind up about Al. It seemed incredible that this stranger and I, our relationship shaped so casually in the shared space of the car, might be connected by blood; the idea embarrassed me on Al’s behalf. On the other hand, our movements did seem fluidly alike sometimes, as if we were attuned. He told me he hated getting up in the mornings; well, so did I (and every morning Lukie woke me about half past five). There was something familiar – from my mirror, from inside my own skin? – in the way Al squeezed his eyes up when he smiled. But none of this was enough. I couldn’t be sure. I liked him, in spite of his dated lazy cowboy style (he got lazier, the more he saw that I was good): his slouchy walk, his missing tooth, his smell of beer and fags and man-talk about fast cars. I guessed that he fancied himself as a bit of a charmer, though with me he was steadily courteous, almost fraternal. He played electric bass in a blues band.
I put off saying anything to him. I didn’t want to spoil my own pleasure in our lessons, or Al’s pride in how well I did. I told him a few things about Lukie, pretending I was married.
— Do you have children? I did ask him once.
What if he replied that he’d had a little girl but he’d lost touch with her, and it was what he most regretted in his life?
— No, I’ve missed out on that, he said, cautiously, blandly.
Fred Harper took to calling at Dean’s in the afternoons whenever he had a free period, hoping the grown-up Tappers would be out. I wondered at first if he was coming because he was afraid of me, thinking I would tell his story to the school; but it seemed more likely he was just bereft and bored. And perhaps I was touched with glamour for him, because of our shared association with Valentine. I think he found my situation poignant, like something in a book.
Anyway, for a long time I wouldn’t speak to him. It began because of the milk bottle and the past; then my refusal became a thing in itself, almost a game. I would be playing with Lukie and working in the kitchen, tidying up, starting preparations for the evening meal; I’d make Fred cups of tea and set them in front of him at the table without a word. If I needed to get on with cooking, I’d shove Lukie down on Fred’s lap – he was good with babies, he had children of his own, a girl and a boy; he told me how he missed them, how depressed he was now that he only saw them every other weekend.
Fred was never deterred by my lack of response; he talked on and on, either about the school (which he claimed he hated) or about things I had no interest in any more – books and ideas and poetry. He had opinions about everything. Even under normal circumstances he was one of those men who hog more than their fair share of any conversation. Tactfully, though, he didn’t mention Valentine again for a long time. He spoke as if he and I were old friends and had always known each other, though we’d never actually exchanged a word before the Tappers’ dinner party. I’d heard him shouting and weeping to Valentine in the street, that awful night, but I hadn’t gone out to join them.
If Mrs Tapper came home and found Fred in the kitchen, she couldn’t repress her irritation – she was the opposite type to Fred with his operatic range of feeling. She liked to banter quickly backwards and forwards with her friends, she couldn’t bear Fred’s drawl and his air of being in for the long haul, conversationally. She said he had doggy eyes; he called her ‘the walking antique’. But Fred and Juliet had the same quirky humour; they entertained Lukie together or played baby games at the kitchen table, tiddlywinks or snakes and ladders, which they pretended to take deadly seriously (though Juliet wouldn’t let her father teach her chess). Fred made a joke to Juliet out of my silence, explaining to her that I wouldn’t forgive him for something he’d once done.
— What something?
— Ask her. Fred gave a doleful look.
It was unimportant, I said. It wasn’t worth mentioning.
While I was still living with the Tappers, I went home sometimes to spend a weekend with my mother and stepfather. I still quarrelled with Gerry: once, terribly, about independence for Angola of all things, concerning which I had heart-warming expectations though only a vague idea of where it was. But mostly it was OK. I liked my brother Philip, and Philip loved Lukie, he played with him for hours on end; at eleven months Lukie took his first steps towards Philip, who was holding out his hands, chirruping and coaxing. I was snoozing on the sofa, watching telly. I think my mum was sorry for me because of my hard life at Dean’s, though she wouldn’t say so. She pampered me in little ways that reminded me of long ago when I was a child and there had only been the two of us. She slipped money into my jeans pocket when Gerry wasn’t looking and made my favourite things for tea (cheese and potato pie with bacon on top, apple fritters). Gerry sulked, jealous. I asked her once, when we were alone, whether she had any photographs of my real father. (I didn’t say I’d guessed he wasn’t really dead; and I hadn’t mentioned the driving lessons to anyone.)
— Oh Stella, she complained. — Why d’you have to bring up that old story?
She swore she didn’t have any photographs, and I commented that this was a bit strange, for a widow. If I’d been married and my husband had died, I said, I wouldn’t have thrown away all his photographs. The next morning with an odd, ashamed face she pushed something at me wordlessly: an old manila envelope fuzzy at the corners. I locked myself in the bathroom to investigate, tipping out a few pictures on to my lap as I sat on the side of the avocado-coloured bath: they were black and white, and tiny as if they had shrunk as that old time receded. My mother, whose gaze at the cam
era was already forceful, had her thick hair chopped short; she wore big-skirted summer frocks and her figure was poignant with that post-war extreme thinness (there were none of her pregnant). My father in all of them was blurry, lean, attentive. There was one picture of him holding up in both hands, at arm’s length, a baby stolid and unsmiling – me, I suppose. He was more like a boy than a young man – hungry hollow cheeks, raw jawline, dark hair flopping forwards over his eyes. That boy just might have grown up into Al, but I couldn’t see for sure. When I tried to give the envelope back to my mother, she told me to keep it.
I took Lukie out in the afternoons sometimes, if the weather was nice. One day we met Fred Harper on our way to Brandon Hill, where I’d first met Mrs Tapper. Fred insisted on coming with us. I strode along beside him pretending not to see him, sealing my face up and pressing my lips tight shut, levering the heavy pram (which had been Jean’s) up and down the kerbs with my foot on the crossbar underneath; or chatting away with Lukie, cutting out Fred. The further I got from the school, the lighter I felt; I thought my young body was so strong I could walk for ever.
— I suppose he’s Valentine’s baby, Fred said: breathless, because he was out of condition, at the speed I was going. I suppose he felt he could broach this subject because we were outside the school’s orbit. — And that Valentine doesn’t know.
I wouldn’t answer.
— Dear girl, he said. — Dear Stella. It wouldn’t have worked out, you do realise, even if I’d never had anything to do with Valentine.
I knew that this was true.
— Why are you punishing yourself, slaving in that mausoleum? Come and live with me, you can keep the flat clean for me instead of paying rent. Come live with me, don’t be my love. There won’t be any problems on that score. I’m lonely. I’ll read to you, I’ll heal you. I’ll keep your secret.
The sky was blue and cloudless; we were passing in and out of the hot light, which was muffled under the thick-leaved trees and the striped shop awnings. The streets were ripe with the baked smells of dirt. Safely strapped in, sitting up and hanging on to the pram sides, Lukie beamed between us, trying to connect us up. The beauty of the day broke over me in a sensory wave, stronger than my will. — Maybe, I said suddenly, startling Fred: who’d probably forgotten I could actually hear him making his rash offers, getting carried away.
— I’ll think about it. I might take you up on that.
Well, serves him right, I thought. That’ll shut him up.
I didn’t mean it seriously that first time Fred suggested it, I was only teasing him. I had to get to know him first, before I could begin to unpick some of the tension and resentment that keyed me up for working at Dean’s House. I had to come slowly to believe that a better life was possible. I stayed on with the Tappers for a year altogether, more or less. A year and a day: like someone in a story under an enchantment. But however crazy it sounds, I did go to live with Fred Harper eventually. Fred’s dead now. But for a long time he was one of my good friends. And when I moved into his flat I cooked and cleaned for him instead of paying rent and bills, and on Saturdays he looked after Lukie, and Auntie Jean had Lukie three afternoons a week, and I took a part-time job working in a nice café where I liked the owners and they liked me. There was a bit of trouble with Fred’s wife, who got the wrong end of the stick (again); but we sorted that out, it didn’t mean anything. It was a happy time.
I passed my test first try, in August 1975. I hadn’t expected my driving lessons ever to get this far; perhaps that was why I was so calm. Smoothly I changed gear, went through the pantomime of ostentatiously checking in my mirror as Al had taught me, slowed down going into a curve and accelerated out of it, reversed around a corner in a tidy arc – all as if I was observing someone else doing it, some dummy automated so she couldn’t be caught out. Al was waiting for me outside the Test Centre when we got back – I caught one private glimpse of him before he saw us: abstracted, bored. Then he returned inside his smiling professional self, ground out his cigarette under his shoe, stepped forward while I got out of the car (my knees trembling belatedly), and embraced me. For a moment I was clasped (perhaps) against my father’s chest, smelling his smoke and aftershave.
— Now is that a good feeling, he said, — or is that a good feeling?
I expect he did this to all the women who passed: on a sliding scale, exacting a kiss within the bounds of propriety from the younger or good-looking ones, conferring it as a favour on the plain ones and the ones who were too old. But he did always imply that I was his special comrade, because I was a natural driver like him. He couldn’t get over my passing after only nine lessons, he said that he’d told everyone about me. He insisted on driving me back after the test; passing went to people’s heads, apparently, they got too careless. I didn’t know when I was ever going to drive a car again, anyway. I had no prospect of being able to afford one. I asked him to drop me off outside the school; I had a few hours free before I had to pick up Lukie from Jean’s house.
— Goodbye then, I said. — Thank you.
— Good luck, he said. — Good driving.
And this time we shook hands.
The school was a strange place in the summer holidays. Deserted, its Victorian Gothic spaces seemed more eloquent: as if the missing boys had all grown up or died – which of course generations of them had. It was only when the school was empty that I ever felt the power of that ideal of gilded, privileged youth, set apart for a different destiny, which the school and staff were always trying to put over. When the place was full of real boys, the ideal seemed a sham. I meant to lie down on my bed after my driving test, in my room that was all windows, and sleep in the afternoon sun. I hungered for my bed and dreamed of sinking down into that vacant time alone, with no responsibility. But every time I closed my eyes I seemed to be driving again – only this time it was a huge effort, fraught with dread and difficulty, gears grinding and smashing, swerving to avoid oncoming traffic and looming obstacles. My heart thudded so painfully that it forced my eyes open; then I was astonished, looking round me at the quiet room. Lights from the small yellow lozenge-shaped panes around the windows were spotted across the bare floorboards like honey; nothing moved.
Lukie started sleeping through the night, thanks to Mrs Tapper. Those night-time sessions with Lukie had been so awful. The trouble usually started around midnight when he woke up and I gave him a bottle; after that, he never really went off again into deep sleep. I loved him better than anyone, than my own life; but in those hours he was also my enemy. I felt I was defending the last spaces of myself, because he wanted them. Lukie at night was unlike his clear daytime self, he was fretful and spiteful; if I took him into bed with me he chattered extravagantly, with an edge of hysteria, as if he were drunk. If he fell asleep in my arms and I managed to lower him into the cot without waking him, all too soon he would begin surfacing again, twitching and grumbling, rubbing his fists into his eyes. Then he would scramble to his feet, reaching out his arms through the bars of the cot for me, babbling a low-level moaning complaint, ‘Mamamama . . .’, which I knew would crescendo into loud crying if I tried to ignore it. And I couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t risk waking the whole house. I had promised Vivien that he would sleep. I had to pick him up. I could be walking up and down that room with him for hours: stumbling, vindictive, exhausted.
I wasn’t good, in those long nights. Sometimes I was mad. I said some horrible things to Lukie while we were walking up and down together, hissed and whispered them; and afterwards I dreaded that even if he didn’t understand the words, the spirit of my madness might have seeped in at his ears and poisoned him for ever. (Although he’s never shown any signs of it, I must say. Somehow he’s managed to forgive me.) Then one night Vivien Tapper interrupted us. It was two o’clock in the morning. I’d never seen her in her long wool dressing gown before, her face bleached without make-up.
— Come on now, Stella, she said. — This is getting silly.
She
reached out for Lukie and I gave him to her; he was too astonished to protest. She was perfectly nice to him as she always was, but held him away from her body as though she was afraid of marks on her dressing gown (all my clothes were stained with baby dribble). Laying him down in his cot, in a firm voice she told him that it was sleep-time now. We left the room, with only the little night light on behind us. I could hear Lukie pulling himself up at once, rattling the cot bars even as we closed the door; then, after one long breath of shocked silence, the beginning of a wail of outrage.
— Won’t he wake Mr Tapper up? I said. — And Juliet?
— They’ll have to put up with it, Vivien said.
We went down together into the kitchen whose corners at night were cavernous and shadowy; a fluorescent tube-light under a metal shade was suspended on long chains over the table. Vivien switched on the electric fire and tuned the radio to the World Service, not too loud. Behind the radio voices Lukie’s desperation was just audible, seizing like a tiny vice on my thoughts and squeezing them.
— You just have to sit it out, she said. — You can go and check him every fifteen minutes, to reassure him you haven’t abandoned him. But don’t put the light on in there, don’t talk to him, just lay him down again, then go. Trust me, it works.
She poured two glasses of whisky and made tea for me, with sugar in; I watched the stuttering hand of the kitchen clock. When I went back after the first fifteen minutes, Lukie was smear-faced, blubbing, frantic, reaching up his arms for me; incredulous when I abandoned him again. In the kitchen, rummaging in one of the drawers of the dresser, under a pile of ironed tablecloths, Vivien brought out cigarettes and a crossword book.
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