Clever Girl

by Hadley, Tessa

  — Stella! My God, how amazing! Is it really you?

  — No, just someone else exactly like me, I said, as if I was picking up the tone of our old childhood friendship, where I was always one jump ahead.

  Madeleine was wearing a vintage silky blouse and her hair was cut into a mop shape tied with a flowery ribbon; she looked glossy and competent and I was impressed and crushed. I imagined her belonging in a vivid round of parties and pubs and love affairs, all tinged with danger in the rough, dark city: this turned out to be more or less accurate and my envy never quite subsided during that whole visit. I stayed with Madeleine for two nights. I did telephone my mother to let her know where I was, and I telephoned the café where I was still working then, telling them that Rowan was ill and I couldn’t come in. Mum was short with me, but then she was often short with me; and she said the boys were fine, and of course they were. They played up for a while when I went back, but they didn’t sustain any lasting damage, of course they didn’t. People leave their children with their grandparents or with friends all the time, there’s no harm in it, it’s a good thing. Once or twice I left the children by pre-arrangement with Mum or Fred, and went off for some visit I’d organised properly (I went back to Madeleine); nobody minded that, they encouraged me to do it. But my unplanned escapes seemed catastrophic at the time. Catastrophic and necessary. I always thought while I was running away that I might never go back again, that I might just disappear and move into a new life.

  Madeleine and I sat up until late, that first visit, talking and drinking wine, cross-legged on her bed; she made up a mattress for me on the floor and we played LPs we’d bought together when we were teenagers. Her room was full of reminders of those old days – the same red bulb in the light socket, the same collection of soft toys, the same regiments of bottles of make-up and nail polish on her dressing table. She didn’t give one hint that I’d inconvenienced her, turning up without warning; she seemed genuinely excited to see me. She still had her puppy-eagerness, slightly blank, adapting to whatever company she kept. We had to sit in the bedroom because she said her flatmate was ‘insane, really’ – apparently she was obsessive about cleanliness and Madeleine had to scrub all the surfaces she used with disinfectant. The girl complained if visitors smoked or were noisy or if their shoes left traces on the carpet. When we heard this flatmate come in we turned the stereo off and began talking in whispers. I told funny stories about the trials of motherhood – which did even begin to seem funny, at this remote distance. Madeleine told me about her latest boyfriend, who worked with her in their company producing promotional pop videos; but there was something going on as well with a man who worked in an office upstairs, though this was only at the stage of glances and snatches of conversation.

  I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t have a lover, that since Nicky died there hadn’t been anyone else and I slept every night alone with my children. I made a big deal out of the drama of living with Fred, and told her about his reciting poetry and singing arias; about the huge pieces of mahogany furniture and the Turkish rugs that had belonged to his mother, about the difficulties with his children and my ongoing fight with Lizzie. I made the picture of our life in the flat deliberately Gothic and intellectual and adult so that hers seemed lightweight and everyday beside it. I even hinted that there was more between us than just friendship; when Madeleine said she’d always thought that Fred was queer, I reminded her that he’d been married and had two children. I was terribly ashamed about this silly story afterwards, though Madeleine never brought it up in conversation when I saw her again, so perhaps she hadn’t believed it anyway. (And eventually there were other lovers for me to tell her about: real ones.)

  Madeleine tried to talk to me about Nicky, too. When she asked how I was feeling she put her hand on mine but I pulled away, snagging one of my Indian silver rings in the wool of her coloured crocheted bedspread. If anyone asked about Nicky, in those days, I told them the whole story – carefully, lightly, in a tone of poignant regret. I couldn’t tell them how I was feeling because I didn’t know.

  Another time when I ran away I got ill with some kind of virus – I suppose I was incubating it even before I left. At first as I drove I thought the illness was only my misery and desperation, so overwhelming that they were manifesting physically, thickening my throat and blurring my mind with headache. I made it as far as a B & B outside Ludlow, in a grim village strung along a busy road with no pub or shop, only a concreted farmyard, cows up to their flanks in shit and black mud. I was burning up with fever by then and knew I shouldn’t go any further.

  I hadn’t stayed in any kind of guest house or hotel since I was a little girl and my mother was in charge; I was worried when I took the room that I’d misunderstood the price, or that there would be extras on my bill I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t follow the rules for using the bathroom (there were no en suites in those days), or where I was supposed to go in the morning for my breakfast. I felt ashamed of being ill, I hid it from the landlady and dreaded encountering any of the other guests. And yet when I was alone at last, and had pulled the orange-flowered curtains across to shut out a dour view (muddy, steep fields, sheep bleakly shorn, stone walls black with wet), I lay down between the strange sheets, scalding and shuddering, in a submission to my doom that was almost voluptuous. The wallpaper was orange too, with a pattern like gourds swelling and shrivelling in perpetual motion round the walls.

  I had to confess to the landlady eventually, when she came knocking on my door next day (I hadn’t made it down to breakfast), that I didn’t think I could get out of bed, let alone eat egg and sausage. She wasn’t enthusiastic about having a sick guest on her hands, but she did bring me cups of sweet tea and aspirins every few hours, which punctuated my delirium and seemed providential, life-saving. She offered to get me a doctor but I said I didn’t need one. From time to time when the coast was clear I crept – hunched as if something had broken inside me – across the landing to visit the lavatory: the giant fronds in the pattern of the carpet seemed to move, coiling under my bare feet. For three whole days and nights I never even phoned home. I’d left the boys that time with my Auntie Jean. It was the longest I ever stayed away – but really I wasn’t responsible, I hardly knew what I was doing. I don’t think my mother believed me when I tried to explain, though Jean didn’t seem to mind.

  On the fourth day I woke up to the blessed sensation of convalescence – illness like a sweating devil had slipped out of me, leaving me weightless, weak, transparent as a shell. Relieved, the landlady brought me toast and cornflakes. Drinking my tea propped up against the pillows, I was washed through with a delicate, passionate happiness. This had no apparent cause inside me, didn’t seem to arise from the facts of my life or from my self – any more than the white sunlight did, burning in the raindrops trickling down the windowpane. Washing at the tiny sink, resting between efforts, putting back on the cold jeans and shirt and jumper I had taken off three days ago, I tried to prolong this happiness, or find a code I could store it in, so that it meant something even when I wasn’t feeling it. I imagined it as resembling the filmy skin of a bubble enclosing its sphere of ordinary air: impermanent yet also, for as long as it existed, flexible and resilient – real, a revelation.

  When Fred tried to persuade me to read books and I told him I was too busy, it wasn’t the truth. Actually, I was reading all that time – in bed, or while Rowan napped in the afternoons, or on the sofa in the sitting room in the evening if Fred went out. At the art gallery, where sometimes there were no customers for hours at a time, I always had a novel on the go. For some reason I wanted to keep my reading secret from Fred: perhaps I just felt that too much of my life was already open to his view and I needed to hold something back. Or perhaps I dreaded his triumph if he saw me absorbed in a book – and his tactful disappointment if it was the wrong one. I didn’t want him to feel he’d won any argument. I didn’t want him making recommendations or trying to form me by giving me a readin
g list, or opening up critical discussions.

  I’d stopped reading abruptly when I got pregnant with Luke and had to leave school and the whole plan for my life changed track; or rather fell into abeyance, where there was no track at all. I think I felt cheated, as if the books I’d loved had held out a promise of strong, bright, meaningful happenings they couldn’t deliver. If I’d read more carefully I’d have seen that falling off a track and nosing round and round unhappily in a tight circle was just what most books described. Yet for a long time, first when Luke was a baby and I worked at the school, and then when I lived in the commune and Rowan was born, my memory of the fiction I’d once read was tainted with a suspicion that it was written for somebody else, for someone initiated into a higher order of culture which shut me out. I’d once read Beckett and Burroughs – now I imagined these authors as my enemies because I thought they’d have despised the things I had no choice but to spend my life on: washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning.

  Then not long after Nicky died and we moved back to Fred’s, Rowan fell asleep in my arms one afternoon while I was breastfeeding him. I was sitting in the corner of an old chaise longue: its black leather worn away in places, it was sprouting horsehair and the empty time seemed unbearable. A marble clock on Fred’s mantelpiece looked like a funerary monument and its tick in the silence was resonant, punishing. Fred was out teaching, Luke was at nursery. I reached over for a book, just so that I didn’t have to think; deliberately I chose one that I’d never heard of – The Cloister and the Hearth – from the neglected bottom corner of Fred’s shelves. Its thick pages were freckled with mould spots and smelled peppery with damp. I liked knowing that no one had opened it for a long time.

  The Victorians saved me. Fred’s mother had left him quite a collection, inherited I think from her own mother, or grandmother. I read East Lynne, The Woman in White, The Water Babies, The Heir of Redclyffe, Lady Audley’s Secret, and much more. All those days of sickness in the B & B near Ludlow, I was wandering in my delirium in and out of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Of course I loved Middlemarch and Jane Eyre too. But in that phase of my life the less good novels fascinated and absorbed me, the ones that were fairly dead and desiccated, embalmed in their lost world with its ideals of womanly sacrifice and goodness. I didn’t read them with detached amusement; my imagination adapted to the alien forms and coloration of each book as I read like a life-saving camouflage. The very fact of these novels being so obliquely angled to my own life was part of the relief of my escape into them. And I didn’t condemn the ideals of sacrifice, I could see how they would work as a way of getting through the day, dressing drudgery up as a poignant adventure, putting the whole burden of freedom on to the poor men. Some of those novels seemed like nothing less than an extended punishment of their men, who were drunk and heinous and craven in exact proportion to how far their women abased and subordinated themselves.

  I made up my mind, every so often, that it was silly not to tell Fred what I was doing. I wanted to talk with someone about how strange these novels were. The whole pretence was ridiculous; I had to go to some lengths to hide my reading from him and from the boys, I was shoving my books out of sight down the side of my bed at night, against the wall. Then just when I was on the point of spilling over with my confession, I’d catch sight of Fred flicking through the pages of something – frowning or smiling knowingly as if he was communing with the author, scoring down the side of a text with his pencil to emphasise significance, scribbling notes. I was irritated in those days by these exhibitions of his pouncing cleverness, and his possession of what he read. (Now that he’s gone I remember them with yearning.) So I shut my mouth and kept my secret.

  The delicate first hour of morning hardened into prosaic day. I drove north. Traffic thickened, the Lotus got stuck, revving impatiently, in queues of people driving to work round Birmingham – as soon as I could I passed them, leaping on upstream, away from home, towards anywhere: even to Scotland, I thought in a mad moment. I was taking in the world spread out around me as I drove, less through my eyes, which had to be on the road, than through my whole awareness, through my skin, as if I’d emerged from a deep burrow underground. For long stretches where the conurbation was unbroken, there spread on either side of the motorway a dream landscape, smoke-blackened brick and corrugated iron, pastel-blank façades and rain-stained concrete, fat cooling towers, gasometers, the metal mesh of factory gates, tree trunks in a padlocked yard beside a scummy ditch. The land’s fabric seemed dragged down and tearing under the sheer weight of the built environment, which never ended and could surely never be undone and wasn’t even thriving: the monster machine was stalling, it had poisoned itself and now it had fallen into enemy hands (I was very political in those years): three million were unemployed, there was rioting in the cities. Because I was young, the ugliness didn’t defeat me, it made my heart beat faster, it was my birthright. Daniel Deronda and East Lynne hadn’t made me nostalgic. They made me know how we’re wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.

  I stopped at a service station for a sandwich and a coffee and to fill up again with petrol; when I climbed out of the Lotus my legs trembled with the effort of driving so far without a break. Fred kept a road atlas in the pocket behind my seat and I studied it while I ate. Scotland was too far away for one day’s journey – I chose Manchester instead, where I’d never been and knew no one. I drove on, following the signs, and made my way eventually into Manchester’s city centre, where I looked around to find a place to leave the Lotus safely. By this time it was lunchtime, one o’clock. The city’s exterior was more dour in those days than it is now; modern shops and billboards at street level looked perfunctory in the shadow of the old civic grandeur. Towering Victorian hotels and insurance offices were empty, with broken and boarded-up windows, as if a civilisation had fallen; and I suppose in some sense it had.

  I was always frightened, all the time I was running away – not only by the big thing I had done, leaving home, but also by every small test of my inexperience. Even going into a strange branch of my bank, I quailed at having to speak to the cashier, handing my cheque over. I would never have dared go into a restaurant by myself – anyway, I’d hardly ever been to restaurants, I had no idea how to order or ask for a bill. (And a woman eating alone in a restaurant would have been conspicuous in those days.) I could just about manage a café, though I walked around for a long time before deciding on the right one. I stumbled upon Manchester Art Gallery by chance and felt the relief of refuge inside its quiet rooms which I had almost to myself, hung with jewel-coloured paintings, companion pieces to the novels I was reading. The warmth and sleepy backwater-hush reminded me of the library I had loved when I was a teenager.

  It wasn’t robbery or violence I was afraid of – or certainly those weren’t at the forefront of my mind. But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, I couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed in my raw, unfinished ignorance. The expression on my face – frowning, spiky, defiant, I mostly think, in those days – was like a mask of closed competence which I wore and dreaded having torn away. I was twenty-five and it didn’t occur to me to use my youth as power, I only felt it as weakness. At least at home I was able to tell myself I was a mother, wrap myself round in all the responsibility and importance of that – although the way women used that importance sometimes felt to me like cheating, an illegitimate shortcut. (Also, I wasn’t sure that I was good at mothering.)

  If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I?

  What could I do; what could I become?

  It was dusk, and the gallery had closed, and I hadn’t found anywhere to stay. I had wandered without meaning to away from the main drag; anyway, the shops had closed too and the cream and orange double-decker buses were packed with people going home. I found myself walking on a side road alongside a high wall overgrown with weeds; then where the wall ended a broad vista opened up across a stretch of wasteland overgrown with scrubby bushes and rugged with the floo
ring of vanished factories, the humped remains of brick outbuildings. Cranes stood up in the distance against a sky with a thin blue sheen like liquid metal, striated with pale cloud; puddles of water on the ground reflected the sky’s light as silver. The beauty of it took me by surprise. Dark skeins of birds detached themselves, shrilling, from the bushes and ruined buildings while I stood watching. They twisted in long ribbons of movement, rising up against the blue light then subsiding, and as their mass configured and reconfigured I thought of Nicky who had existed warm and alive in one moment, and now in this moment didn’t exist.

  Ten minutes later I stood in the enclosed sour air of a phone box with my coins clutched in my fist, hearing my own breathing, dialling my mother’s number, my fingers fumbling anxiously in the dial-holes.

  Mum didn’t like telephones. She answered warily and resentfully.

  — Oh, it’s you, she said.

  I’m sure she was relieved to hear from me. My mother was a great support to me, really, in all those years after Nicky died. But she couldn’t help herself trying to influence me and mould me; she wanted me to be disciplined in the collapse of my life as she had been in hers when I was a baby and her first marriage had failed.

  — Are the boys all right?

  She held back her reassurance as if I didn’t deserve it; but I heard them in the background, laughing with my brother Philip, who was thirteen, just the right age to enchant and entertain them. (Philip was naughty at school but charming at home, witty and maturely considerate.)