Andrew must have followed me upstairs. I was suddenly aware of him blocking my way when I tried to pass him on the landing; he stopped me clumsily but peremptorily, as though I must know what he wanted. Confused, I wondered if he was angry with me for some reason. Then – buried in the completed blackness against his sour heavy clothes, nose and throat full of new intimacy with the unknown of his body – I was more mystified and gratified than anything. Or, I felt as if I was falling through the lit surface of things, out into a new realm of experience where everything was upside-down, and darker. As soon as I guessed that this darker world existed, I wanted to enter it and try what was there. Honestly, until that moment, I hadn’t even liked him.
Of course, this way of telling the story – this stuff about the darkness – is also a romance, a dangerous romance. And looking back, I understand now that Andrew liked me because he made a mistake about me. Because I’d had a baby and hadn’t gone to university, and because I was shy in those days and painted my eyes and could cook and was wary of joining in the arguments, he misinterpreted my character: which was fair enough, all the signs were pretty misleading. In his mythology women ought to be intuitive and enigmatic and wholesome – a safe place in which the lights of male striving and intellect could heal themselves. Whereas I was hoping: now he’ll listen to what I think. To this man, I thought, I can tell the truth at last.
Each of us wanted the other to be the darkness, listening.
Nicky made drawings of the men he worked with on the bypass – I still have them. They are done in pencil in a notebook when they were taking a break, or whenever he wasn’t busy and the foreman wasn’t looking. He told me the men teased him for it but they gathered round to look at themselves: hunched against vibration, tamping the road surface with a rammer; or hunkered over the nub of a cigarette and a mug of tea, paging a thumbed-soft copy of some porn magazine; or craning, hands on levers, to see out of the cab of an excavator. Pages are torn out of the notebook where he gave sketches away. (These men also called him Blackie and gave him the dirtiest work to do, emptying the portable latrines.)
Nicky had lost his way at the art college; the teachers weren’t interested in his drawings from real life. The paintings he did – his final show was a series of repeated marks in thick acrylic, built into rectangular blocks – were quite striking and seemed to impress people. He took them very seriously and they got him good marks. But I don’t think he really knew why he was painting them or what they meant. He wasn’t clever, not in that way. Although I never said so, I could always see through those paintings to an emptiness behind. I can’t see through the little drawings in that notebook, or the ones in other notebooks which he did of me and Lukie and the others – so exact and sure and graceful. The surface of these drawings has its own interior which I can’t penetrate, no matter how hard I stare. (And I don’t stare, not all that often. All this happened long ago, it’s history now.)
I stopped him drawing me in those last months, I couldn’t bear it. (Pretending it was politics – ‘I don’t want to be your subject.’) There’s only one quickly scribbled sketch of me pregnant with Rowan. I’m in the bedroom, doing my hair in front of the mirror with my arms up, my mounded stomach a swelling line under the folds of a loose top. I’m probably wearing my jeans with the zip open, I went on wearing them long after I stopped being able to do them up. I’m not looking at Nicky. I probably didn’t even know that he was drawing me. I’m only looking at myself.
I didn’t know whose baby Rowan was until he was born and it was so obvious he was Nicky’s (his eyes, hair, skin – though he was pale at first; and something fluent and musical, almost feminine, in their limbs). And then afterwards when Rowan grew up so angry with everything and so intransigent, although I knew rationally this wasn’t possible, I couldn’t help thinking that because I had also been making love to Andrew all during the time when I conceived him, and through the months of my pregnancy afterwards, some bitterness from Andrew’s blood or sperm or spirit had got somehow into the mix that made Rowan up. (It’s obvious there’s a sounder explanation. The bitterness that got into him was me.)
And yet, during all that time when I was behaving so badly and no one knew, and when I was so guilty and full of foreboding, I was also often happy – happy in an unbalanced, ecstatic kind of way I’ve never experienced again in all my life. I was with Andrew once in the back garden out among the fruit trees and we weren’t kissing because anyone might have been watching from a window, but the not-kissing was more heady than kissing and I hardly knew what I was doing. He advanced on me, talking about how British society was winding down to its own destruction because of the treachery of the intelligentsia, and I retreated ahead of him, ducking between trees drowning under their foam of white and pink blossom; my ears were full of bee-sound and we crushed a fumy mulch of last year’s rotten plums and apples underfoot. The baby’s mystifying bulk inside me came between us, connecting and separating us. He broke off a whole branch of wet, scented apple blossom and gave it to me. It was a criminal thing; bees were still dangling, desirous, around the flowers’ stamen and stigma and their bulges of ovary which would now never grow into apples. The broken branch was an emblem of my too-much; it seemed more lordly not to refuse such bounty if it offered. What it was impossible to have without harm was also most to be desired. And after all, no one in the commune was supposed to own anyone else’s body, or their feelings. Why, then, was it my first and deepest instinct to keep what was happening with Andrew to myself, as my secret?
If there was apple blossom then that must have been April; and Rowan was born in May. So that scene happened very late, not long before the end. There’s another scene in my memory, from when it was still winter: we’re all bulky in our layers of warm clothes. Everyone’s there, Andrew too. (Not Baz.) Daphne has come back from an afternoon modelling at the art college. Sheila has given up at the pie factory, a burden of sacrifice has fallen from her, she’s buoyant and brittle (not much time left before she leaves Neil and goes off to South America). Jude and I have cooked and we’re in aprons, ladling food out of a couple of big pans; the others are all sitting round the table. I remember all this because I have a photograph of it, a Polaroid, its colours faded now to queasy green – there’s some dark mess on the plates in front of us which we haven’t begun to eat, we’re all looking up expectantly at the photographer. I can’t think who the photographer was. Some convenient outsider stepped into our story to record it.
What’s striking about Andrew in the photograph is how thoroughly his looks now seem to belong to that period. His dun-coloured hair, parted centrally and grown down almost to his waist, makes his face seem too long; he looks young and pasty and his ears stick out. The appeal he once had for me has dated, I can’t recover it. Whereas Nicky looks timeless and vividly alive, as if he could step so easily out of the photograph and across into the present. He has Lukie on his lap. Lukie isn’t looking at the camera, he’s twisting round to smile up at Nicky and touch his face. No wonder I don’t look at this photograph very often. When we’ve finished eating we fall into shouting, drunken, earnest discussion of what knowledge is, and how it is that we know what we know. Sheila’s been reading French philosophy and she says knowledge is only our struggle to have power over things and over each other. I am insisting that one form of knowledge is knowing what milk is like, say, as a baby knows, even before it has language. Andrew says that isn’t real knowledge, it’s only perception, which is different. Real knowledge is that water boils at 100 degrees. This shouting and arguing – all of us involved in it together – is a heady pleasure too, just like the loving in the garden.
And then I was a widow. I wasn’t legally a widow, as Nicky and I were never married, but it’s funny – especially under the complicated circumstances – how the word stuck to me right away in my own imagination. People were startled when I used it. I suppose I was formed by widows: my grandmother was one from before I was born, and my mother was supposed to be
one until she married my stepfather. In the commune we believed we weren’t going to do anything the way our parents did – we didn’t want to conform to their types, we repudiated their categories. But when real trouble came those new hopes could look for a while like shallow scratches on a surface. I fell down, after Nicky died, into a very ancient hole. Widowhood didn’t have any glamour for me, it wasn’t a pose, I wasn’t picturing myself poignant or mournful in a black veil or anything. I certainly didn’t pity myself – not after what I’d done. But I recognised this stony place, this bedrock, as if I had been down here before. Somehow it was important to have a name for it, one of the old names.
His death broke up the commune. When I look back, I wonder if the rest of them didn’t stick together for so many months just for my sake: looking out for me with poor little Lukie and my new baby (born on time, three weeks after it happened), doing their best to comfort us. Forensics delayed for a cruelly long time; when they finally allowed us to clean up the kitchen, Daphne invented a beautiful purification ceremony, covering the place with roses and blossom from the garden, burning incense and propping up some of Nicky’s paintings against the wall, lighting candles in front of them. Each of us put something there in his memory, and spoke about him. Neil gave a full bottle of whisky, I remember; Jude gave one of her embroideries; Lukie made a card. Sheila brought the white-leather-covered testament she’d been given at her confirmation. Later we buried all these things in a hole in the garden, and then I had a horror of that place as if Nicky’s body was buried there – even though I’d been to his actual, Catholic burial in Glasgow, where his mother broke down and screamed at us, blaming our way of life (hippies and dropouts) for what had happened. (When Rowan was two or three years old I sent his grandmother photographs and she wrote back; I took him to visit her every so often and for a while, when he was sixteen and we weren’t getting on, he went to live with her.)
Daphne’s ceremony seems a beautiful idea to me now, when I remember it. At the time I just thought it was a fake; I seemed to see through everything, to a grey fake. I can’t even remember what I offered as my token. I think I chose perfunctorily – a bracelet or a pendant Nicky had given me which I hadn’t even liked – because I didn’t want to tempt fate by performing with too much conviction. I only began to cry after Rowan’s birth and then I couldn’t stop; but there was something fake about that too, this tap turned on full – spouting out its world-sorrows, soaking everything – which I couldn’t turn off. Only breastfeeding helped (I was doing it for the first time – I hadn’t even tried to breastfeed Lukie). For as long as the baby was sucking I could imagine myself connected almost impersonally into a great chain of life, one thing flowing into another. It wasn’t a hopeful feeling, just a sensation of continuity, and necessity.
Sheila was the first to leave the commune, after a row with Neil which began when he announced he was going to give up his PhD and do a law conversion course. And then once I’d gone back with the children to live at Fred Harper’s again, the others moved out quickly: that house must have been a dreadful place for all of them, we never got the stains out of the kitchen floorboards. I don’t know how I ended up with the white stone; it’s on my coffee table now, in a wide blue-glazed bowl by a ceramicist whose work I like, kept among other stones collected on family holidays later. Perhaps Lukie brought it with him. It would have seemed a powerful totem to him after he’d watched us passing it from hand to hand, adults so solemnly absorbed in the game they were playing.
None of the others ever knew about my relationship with Andrew; Sheila may have guessed something but she’s never asked me. About a year after Nicky died, Jude and I met up for a night out (she was renting a room from friends, Daphne had moved back temporarily to live with her parents). My mother had Luke and Rowan to stay: everyone was conspiring to cheer me up or take me out of myself. And somehow it happened that at the end of the evening Jude and I ended up in her bed together. We’d both had a lot to drink. It was the only time I ever made love to another woman. Jude hadn’t been harbouring a secret passion for me, the thing just came about out of her kindness; she was consoling me – and consoling herself. She felt responsible, because of Baz. She lit a scented candle in her room and her clean bed linen was patterned with ferns; it was easy touching the cool skin of her body which I knew because it was like my own but not quite like. We didn’t speak much but her light voice and northern vowels were caresses in themselves, inconsequent and soothing. In the dark under her duvet something was unblocked in me: a flood of responsive desiring, to begin with, which took me by surprise. I’d been quite numb and dry for a year, I’d thought sex could never touch me again.
And letting myself fall down into the slippery, brilliant whorls and corridors and intricacies of it, I got back my memories of Nicky too. I’d thought I’d lost these as my punishment – but they had been saved up all the time, in my body. Nicky had had a gift for sex, like his gift for drawing: attentive, inventive, easy, skilful. I think of him now like a shepherd boy in a poem, or a boy lover in a Watteau painting, with a lute. He had actually liked me – liked the clear, light, energetic person he saw in me. (I think over time I’ve become more like that person.) Sex with him hadn’t been at all like conquest; Andrew was wrong, it didn’t always have to do with submission and overwhelming. Actually Nicky was a better lover; or put it this way, he roused up more pleasure in my body than Andrew ever achieved. (But I have to reckon with the truth, too, that it was Andrew I had wanted more.)
I was packing to leave, to go and live with Andrew, when it happened. (Andrew had decided that living with me – and with Lukie and the coming baby – would save him from himself.) Lukie was at nursery. Nicky was hung-over, drinking coffee in the kitchen; he’d been out with his workmates the night before. I hadn’t told him, but I was going to tell him as soon as he came upstairs. The words were ready in my mouth (I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry); resolved, I was listening out for his quick step, taking two stairs at a time as he always did. Afterwards I went over and over this in my thoughts until I was nearly mad (because he was dead, I couldn’t help attributing omniscience to him): but really I don’t think he knew that I was going, or about Andrew. He knew that something was wrong, but not what it was. If I’d decided to tell him half an hour earlier, he’d have died knowing. We were separated from that different story by a tissue-thin sliver of time, mere accident.
Waiting, I confused my dread with the heavy child inside me making it so difficult to move around, reach down, get out my suitcases from under the bed, empty my clothes out of the drawers. Outside the windows the day was stifling hot under grey cloud; sweat ran on the back of my neck and under my arms and between my breasts. Someone arrived at the front door and Neil opened it: I thought it might be Andrew already but it was Baz, I recognised his voice – always reasonable and temporising to begin with. We’d all thought he’d left Bristol, he hadn’t bothered us for a while. Neil should have shut the door in his face. Baz pushed past him into the kitchen; Jude came running up into her bedroom. Hearing the raised voices from downstairs, and the remonstrating, made me more certain that I had to leave. I’d begun to take on some of Andrew’s opinions on communal living: it was an indulgent bourgeois whim and I couldn’t wait to get out of it, being mixed up in everybody else’s craziness and stupidity. The atmosphere in the house had soured. It even smelled bad that day, in the heat; we had a cellar that flooded periodically, according to mysterious tides in a river that had apparently been taken underground when the area was developed. Sometimes when we opened the cellar door, foul grey water would be lapping at the bottom of the brick staircase and our buckets and rubber gloves and dustpan would all be afloat.
No one screamed but some alteration in their voices must have alerted me; I went downstairs. The door which opened out of the back of the hall into the kitchen was closed, but it was half glass – the original Victorian glass with a ruby-red border and a clear star at each corner – so I saw most of what happened thro
ugh that, unreal and stilted as if I was watching a peep show. Baz must have picked up our knife from where it was left on the draining board after washing up: it was only a vegetable knife, a Sabatier that Daphne had brought from home. He was threatening Neil with it, slashing it in the air (‘I’ve seen that sneering look on your face, you fat pussy’), and I remember Neil was pirouetting fastidiously with a tea towel, like a matador with his cape, to get out of its way. In another life, with a different outcome, it would have been funny. Daphne was holding her hand out, calmly and sensibly telling Baz to give the knife to her, and I think he might have done it except that he seemed to hear something – did I rattle the doorknob, was I trying to open the door? Or was it Jude coming downstairs? So instead he spun round to where Nicky must have been coming from behind to try to disarm him, and he stuck the knife into Nicky, between his ribs, with all his weight behind it.
— You all think you’re so bloody special, don’t you?
And that was it. That’s how disaster comes, without any fanfare – though none of us could take it quite seriously for a moment or two, even Nicky, who looked down at his jumper soaking with blood, more surprised than anything. Baz, still holding the knife, seemed as bewildered as the rest of us, and Daphne hit at his hand with the rolling pin which she’d snatched up from the draining board, kicking the knife away into a corner of the room before she and Neil tackled him to the floor. Sheila ran out to the phone box to call an ambulance and the police. Then before the ambulance men could arrive, Andrew was suddenly at the door – and by that time I knew already that Nicky was dead, I’d been kneeling with his head on my lap, holding his hand, and I’d felt the life go out of him. I sent Andrew to pick up Lukie from nursery and look after him while I went to the hospital. And then when I got back from the hospital I saw Andrew just that once more, when I collected Lukie. They’d spent the afternoon together at the zoo. I told Andrew I could never see him again, ever. Never. I wouldn’t listen when he tried to talk me out of it, I never responded when he phoned or wrote to me afterwards, not ever. And I never did see him again. I only had word of him from time to time, through Sheila.
Clever Girl Page 14