7
ONE DAY WHEN FRED CAME IN from school, before he’d even put down his briefcase or taken off his coat, he said he thought he’d found God. It was part of his style to make these pronouncements, like a character in grand opera. Sometimes he would even sing snatches of opera to accompany them. And I used to think how if I’d been his lover or his wife these pronouncements delivered with such oracular solemnity would have got under my skin and made me impatient with him. (I’d have been annoyed by knowing that under the ironic play, sending seriousness up, he actually took himself so seriously.) As it was, I was tolerant of him, and didn’t mind these games. The heavy black overcoat I’d found for him in a charity shop was too big, it swamped him like a cloak and added to the operatic effect, along with his big liquid eyes and drooping, doggy, olive-skinned long cheeks.
I was making a chicken pie, lifting the round of rolled-out pastry on to the dish full of pieces of chicken and ham in a creamy sauce flavoured with lemon.
— I didn’t know God was lost, I said, concentrating on centring the pastry correctly, so that the hole I’d cut came down over the uplifted beak of the china blackbird meant to hold the pastry up. — Where did you find him?
— Don’t mock, Stella. My life’s burdened with sin, I need to change. It can’t go on.
— You’re not in love again, are you? With the new chaplain or something?
He groaned. — You see? How it’s impossible to talk without joking about my spiritual life. I’m not blaming you.
My little boys, aged three years old and seven, were playing out in the garden. Fred’s flat was in the basement of a tall, wide Edwardian house built of red stone; the kitchen door opened on to a paved yard where I hung out the washing and grew a few flowers in pots – not very successfully because the yard only got the sun for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Stone steps led up into the garden proper which was a wild place, crazily overgrown. It was supposed to be the responsibility of the old lady who had once owned the whole house and now lived in the first floor flat, but she had given up bothering with it; when we offered to help she said she didn’t want us interfering. Judging by the state of her flat (her entrance was at the side of the house, up a metal staircase like a fire escape) she had given up bothering in there, too. Sometimes she was standing at her window and caught sight of the boys playing in the garden; then she rapped on the pane and shook her fist at them like a pantomime witch (Rowan showed me, screwing up his face and hunching his shoulders aggressively, growling).
The garden was surrounded with high walls built of the same red stone as the house; a portion at the end had been concreted over years ago to make a car park, which no one used because the gap where the drive ran between the side of the house and the wall was too narrow for the newer cars. The garden must have been handsome once. Massive boulders in the rockery were studded with fossils, roses still bloomed along a rusting arcade where ancient espalier apple trees had been trained. The roses and the apple trees sprouted in disorder, convolvulus smothered everything, brambles were invading over a wall, evergreen trees had grown too tall and cast long, blue shadows. The lawn and the flower beds were tangled with weeds and the drive was pitted with potholes; dock and buddleia sprouted through the asphalt. The boys had a den in the shrubbery. I knew that Luke sometimes climbed into a tree and sat on top of the wall, looking down into the ordered garden next door while Rowan waited obediently below, craning upwards to know what his brother saw. Luke led Rowan around everywhere by the hand, taking care he didn’t step in anything or get stung by nettles. He knew his brother better than anyone did, including me – how best to cushion him against disappointment.
From time to time they made their way back to me down the stone steps (usually because one of them needed the lavatory: Luke would question Rowan sternly, in order to avoid accidents). I loved the sight of them bare-chested in the sunshine, dirty-faced, scruffy because I cut their hair myself, not very well. They wore clothes handed on to me by friends whose children had outgrown them: I patched the knees of the trousers when they wore through, and let down the hems or sewed strips of different fabric around the bottom as the boys grew taller. I gave them picnics to take along on their adventures, packed into Rowan’s little red suitcase. I never spied on them but once when I was on my way to the dustbin I caught sight accidentally of them unwrapping the packets of biscuits in their den, sitting very seriously to eat them, side by side. Not wanting to break in on their secret, I crept away.
— I need a framework, Fred said, lifting the crust from the chicken pie with his knife and fork to sniff the steam. — I’m bewildered by too much freedom. That’s why I’m thinking of converting. It isn’t the chaplain – he’s very unattractive. And he’s a dreary Anglican, anyway.
— Do you have too much freedom? I said. — You’re always complaining about how school takes every moment of your time.
— In my moral life, I mean.
— Oh, in your moral life! I didn’t know you had one.
— What’s a moral life? Luke asked.
Fred began to explain, wiping his mouth on his napkin. Drinking in new information, Luke watched his face intently. — It’s the life you lead in the light of your conscience. Choosing whether to do right or wrong, trying to work out what right is.
— What’s your conscience?
— Well, that depends on whether you believe in God, or Freud. The question is: how does your conscience know what’s wrong?
Fred always answered the children’s questions fully and with scrupulous seriousness. They loved this, and would follow him round the flat interrogating him (‘Have you ever been in a war? Who invented writing?’), until he had to summon me to rescue him. I could imagine what kind of a teacher he was at the expensive private boys’ school he pretended to hate: satirical, calculatedly eccentric, inspiring, sometimes arbitrary; disliked by the sporty boys, worshipped by a few clever ones, and with deadly enemies on the staff. By that time his persona at the school was probably larger and more dramatic than anything really going on in his private life. I teased him, but he was chastened and wary and as far as I knew kept his desires mostly to himself. Occasionally he disappeared to town in the evening and came back very late, always alone.
Rowan of course didn’t like the chicken pie. I had to bargain with him. — Just four spoonfuls. Just three. Then you can leave the rest. I held up my three fingers so he could see I wasn’t cheating. Really, I was saving my own face. The spoonfuls were very tiny, they were only tokens. (How could I force him to eat, when I’d been such a difficult eater myself?) After supper, when the boys were in the bath, I cleared up while Fred recited poetry to me: mostly, during that period when he was flirting with religion, Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘earth her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm. . .’). I didn’t mind this. If he tried to help wash the dishes or put the toys away everything took twice as long. Anyway, our arrangement was that we lived with him rent-free in return for housekeeping: scrupulously I fulfilled my part.
There were times when I didn’t mind anything: the hazy yellow evening light, the midges swarming, the back door open into the yard where the boys’ bikes and plastic racquets lay where they had dropped them, the thrush singing in a hornbeam in the garden, the intimately known round of drudgery, the sound of the boys’ splashing in the bath and their absorbing games. And at the end of it lifting Rowan out of the bathwater gone too cold, his chattering teeth and wrinkled finger-ends, his snuggling close against me, seeping wet into the big bath towel, the fight between us quenched and dormant for an interval; while Luke pulled the plug and the water drained, leaving its flotsam and jetsam beached on the enamel: bath toys and garden grit. By the time I lay between them to read to them in my single bed (they slept in the same room as me, in bunks), I was so tired sometimes that I fell asleep mid-sentence. I half knew that I mumbled a few nonsense words before I lapsed. The boys would be lost in the story, incredulous and frustrated when it failed. Peering
in my face and nudging me in the ribs (— Mum! Wake up!) they would try to keep me afloat for long enough at least to arrive at the end of the chapter.
Fred was always trying to persuade me to read grown-up books. He said it would save me, and I said I didn’t need saving, that was him, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he the one supposed to be wrestling with angels or whatever? I had been a reader once, when I was a girl. But these days, with two young children – I said to him – where would I find the time? While Fred did his marking or groaned aloud in pleasure over his philosophy books and religious books (sometimes he brought in passages to read to me), I sorted out the washing. I put the television on, I stood in front of it to iron the children’s clothes and Fred’s shirts and my own things (I was working in the mornings in a small art gallery so I had to look tidy). I did my bits of mending. I made lists of what I had to do the next day. I was all right.
And then every so often, as if a switch flicked between two versions of myself, I suddenly wasn’t all right. That same night, the night of the chicken pie, I blundered up out of my bed when it was still dark. I couldn’t stay between the stifling sheets; the carpet was greasy under my bare feet, I trod on sharp fragments of toy. The boys were sound asleep, flush-faced, limbs flung out heedlessly, duvets kicked down to the bottom of their beds. I couldn’t recover my last night’s life with its ordered calm, one thing after another; I wasn’t that same person with her steady, sane perspectives. It seemed intolerable that in a few hours it would be Saturday and I’d be putting breakfast on the table once again, then eating it once again, then washing up after it, nagging the boys to get dressed, planning the shopping, putting clothes in the washing machine. These repetitions stood like a barrier I couldn’t pass, blocking the time ahead.
I went into Fred’s room and hunted in the dark for the car keys, feeling in the pockets of his jacket on its coat hanger. Confused, he reared up against the pillows and switched on the bedside light. The grandiose mahogany bed with its scrolled ends had belonged to his parents and had been his marital bed until his wife divorced him. Books were pressed open, spine up, one on top of another, on the floor beside the bed and on the bedside table – which was also crowded with cigarettes and full ashtray, empty whisky glass, bottles of tablets, alarm clock. He was incongruous in cream pyjamas – one of those men made to be fully dressed, his surface polished and finished.
— Please, let me have your keys, I said. — Don’t be mad with me. I just want them for today. Or for a couple of days.
— What kind of time is it? Christ, it’s the middle of the night, Stella. You might have been the secret police. You’re lucky I didn’t have a heart attack.
The car wasn’t really the main issue. Fred scrabbled on his table for cigarettes and lighter, upsetting the pile of books. The hair on the back of his head was muzzy from his pillows: he slept obediently on his back like a child in a storybook.
— Are you taking the boys?
— You can take them round to my mother’s. Is it all right? I’m sorry.
— But how will I take them, without the car?
— I don’t know. Get a taxi? I’ll pay you back.
I had found the keys spilt out from his pocket on to the dressing table along with a heap of change and some crumpled notes, nub ends of chalk; I gripped them so that they dug into my palm. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this: ‘done a runner’, as my Auntie Jean cheerfully described it. (I was surprised when Jean confessed to runners of her own, when she was a young mother.) I didn’t do it often – once or twice a year, perhaps. Fred knew me, he knew I wasn’t putting it on. It was part of his character to support his friends without criticism in whatever adventures they got into. He told me I’d have to put petrol in the car if I was going any distance, and to take his cash, which would tide me over until the banks opened.
Fred really did mean it about the religious thing; he went through a course of instruction and was received into the Catholic Church. He began going to mass on Sundays and taking communion and confessing. It made him happy, I think. Intellectually and in his tastes in art and writing he was so sceptical, questing, doubting; nothing shocked him. And yet in himself, in his person, there was something resigned, he accepted convention as the frame of his life. The church suited him just as the rituals of the school day suited him, imposing their pattern on the succession of minutes.
My daily life was conforming and unexciting, I knew next to nothing about politics or society. And yet I felt this strength like a knife inside me, anarchic and destructive, able to cut through whatever outward forms of authority I met – vicars or businessmen or headmasters in their grey suits, with their smooth arguments and dismissive irony, so confident in their unassailable rightness. I believed that I could see through them to their false core and their vanity. Some of the artists whose work was exhibited in the gallery were unassailable like this too, even if they didn’t wear suits – they hardly noticed me perched on my trendy high stool, paid to answer the telephone and bank the cheques. I hated the school where Fred taught, for instance, and where I had once worked as a cleaner. Sometimes when I was going on about the hypocrisy of the school – its high-toned preaching about enlightened values while it taught its pupils to be competitive and arrogant, just because they had money – Fred would look as if he was quite afraid of me. I expect that sometimes I ranted and exaggerated. I don’t really know, now, whether I was right.
The way out of Fred’s flat was up a short flight of concrete steps where shrubs grew thickly on either side: a yellow-spotted poisonous laurel and some dark evergreen with spiky leaves. It must have rained earlier because these were wet when I pushed through them in the dark; I saw the sepulchral night-face of the street, moonlight on the slate roofs and the lawns. The little white 1970 Lotus Elan smelled of its vinyl seat covers; I had encouraged Fred to buy it, I loved its sleek sumptuousness and the dirty snarl of its engine. (His ex-wife Lizzie blamed me for the frivolity and expense. She and I had a rather tortured relationship.) The moment I was behind the wheel, I was calmer. I turned on the lights, heard the engine bark into life. Driving, it was as if a spring uncoiled in me. At first I was careful not to go too fast around the sleeping streets. I drove out to the motorway, under the suspension bridge strung against the grey first light, alongside the river snaking between banks of glinting mud. I filled up at a service station, paying with Fred’s money. I drove north. Lights were still on in the windows of some factories; a white horse in a field seemed to race the car.
The traffic thickened. In the little Lotus I nipped in and out between the lorries, urgent as if I was forging on towards something. I hardly thought about the boys I’d left behind me, rousing in their beds and wondering where I was, Rowan stepping out of the parcel of his plastic pants and sodden ammoniac nappies, shaking Luke awake to play with him, Luke taking charge (‘Let’s go and tell Fred she’s gone’). I didn’t think about anything, I was transparent and alive, washed through with the present moment.
The first time I ran away, Rowan was only eighteen months old. I took the boys to my mother’s and when she came to the front door she was dressed up to go out shopping in her coat and silk scarf and clip earrings, her face freshly made up.
I said I was stuck and needed her help.
I saw how she opened her mouth to make some remark about how I’d better get used to being stuck at home and bored. She couldn’t help wanting to remind me that my difficulties were the consequence of the rash, headstrong life I had chosen, ignoring her warnings, mixing with the wrong kind of people.
— It’s an emergency, I lied. — Madeleine’s in some kind of trouble.
When she looked in my face she must have seen something that silenced her because resignedly she began unbuttoning her coat. Luke was already helping Rowan off with his shoes. Luke loved the ordered routines of his grandmother’s house, the fitted carpets and big telly and central heating. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to live that way. I slipped away before Rowan
could realise I was leaving. Madeleine was as good a destination as any other. I had her address, that was all, but no clear idea of how to find her. I hardly knew London. And this was in the days before the Lotus; I was in Fred’s old Hillman Imp, which overheated if it had to wait in traffic. Madeleine might have moved house since I’d last heard from her (she had written a kind letter when Rowan was born which I hadn’t replied to). Or she might be away on holiday, or have gone home to visit her mother in Bristol. I had a telephone number but when I called from the motorway service station there was no reply. None of this mattered, I thought. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t find her. I could always sleep the night in the back of the car.
When I found my way at last to where she lived, behind Seven Sisters Road, I was frightened by the street with its boarded-up shops and gaudy off-licences and by the grim block of flats with its intimidating entry phone – I almost gave up because I didn’t know how to use this. It seemed an improbable miracle when the real Madeleine was actually at home, both familiar and strange: the same yellow hair with its brassy glints, the same frank pink face, round baby-blue eyes staring.
Clever Girl Page 15