Clever Girl

by Hadley, Tessa

  As her children grew into teenagers, Lizzie underwent a kind of conversion – funnily enough, just around the same time Fred was converting to Catholicism – and started to talk very boldly and debunkingly about the facts of life. She took to drinking, too; not too much, but enough to unbind her and make her garrulous. Often she came to confide in me at Fred’s kitchen table. There were a couple of boyfriends, neither of whom came up to scratch. (One of them was a vicar; the other one, much nicer, she met when he came to fix her central heating boiler.) — I really didn’t want twelve red roses on my birthday, she complained. — Is that awful of me? I mean, he’s so nice. And when I’m in bed with him I can sort of see me, coldly, in the middle of all the excitement, as if I was looking down from the ceiling. Like a pink shrimp thing on the seabed.

  Lizzie asked Fred to go back when she discovered that Piers was smoking ‘pot’, as she called it. I reassured her that I’d smoked it, off and on, since I was fifteen. Her brown eyes fixed me in stern scrutiny. — Oh really, Stella? But you seem perfectly normal. When Piers took it he was a nightmare. His eyes were sort of rolled up in his head and he was hideously pleased with himself. Then afterwards puked up.

  I asked her if she would mind if Fred went off with men every so often.

  — Cripes, no. As long as they’re not actually doing it under my nose.

  I thought Fred ought to go back: I told him so. He really was better at dealing with Piers than Lizzie was. And he was very attached to Lizzie; he had a fixed belief, in spite of everything, in the sanctity of marriage. Fred wanted a family, he liked family life and couldn’t bear coming home after work to an empty flat. Luke and Rowan and I had been his family for a long time but this had changed, the ease had gone out of it – which had something to do with Mac and more to do with my new-found purpose in life, my academic work. It wasn’t Fred’s fault – he was delighted that I was studying, he had encouraged me more than anyone. It was my fault. He wanted to talk to me about the books on my courses and read my essays and advise me – and just because we had been intimate and he knew me so well I couldn’t bear the idea of his charging around familiarly among the things that were new and raw and fragile in my mind. I think I found it discouraging too that Fred was always so irreducibly himself – not transfigured by reading and thought as I was expecting to be transfigured. All this was ungenerous of me; and it did produce a mild sort of estrangement between us. After we parted and left the flat behind, I felt remote from him for a while. (In his fifties Fred got ill with cancer and we grew very close again through the years he lived with that. I grew close to Lizzie then as well.)

  Fred gave up the flat and I moved with the boys to live with Daphne and Jude. Jude had made a lot of money selling her embroidered pictures (prices way out of reach of Nigel’s gallery, and the embroideries too unsettling anyway for his kind of clients); with the proceeds she bought a tall handsome Georgian house in a state of dis-repair, hanging on to the side of a hill overlooking the docks and the steep wooded cliffs running down to the river. A skinny staircase, with a polished wood handrail and gaps where the banister rods were missing, wound up through four floors. On each draughty landing a long arched window was vivid with changeable sky and vertiginous cityscapes. Jude said we could live in the attic for nothing because we would stop it getting damp, but I insisted on paying a small rent. I wanted to do things properly this time. There was only one bathroom in the house but we had a toilet to ourselves on the top floor, and one of our four rooms was a quirky kitchen with gas rings and white-painted shelves for plates and mugs and a big Belfast sink and a rope fire escape with a sling (the house had at one point been a residence for girl students). There were gas fires in each room to keep us warm. We didn’t have much furniture but I was so happy to be up in the light, I felt myself weightless and free, sitting alone among the birds flying round outside the windows, losing myself in the airy delirium of my reading. It reminded me of the attic where I lay dreaming once with Valentine.

  I did very well at university. I got first-class marks for my essays and in exams almost from the beginning. My imagination grew bolder every day, I was buoyed up by praise and success and the sensation of my own newly unfolding power: sometimes I was drunk and ecstatic with the delight of it. I had no doubt that I had found a new direction for my life. At the end of my three years I would get a first-class degree (and indeed I did). Then I would apply for funding for research and I would work on a PhD. I didn’t look beyond that, not having much idea how an academic career was likely to proceed; but I suppose I vaguely imagined publication, an academic post. I carried my future around like a talisman inside me, warming me with its promise. We had had compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the first year and because I loved the words I learned the Lord’s Prayer off by heart, saying bits of it over to myself in the most unlikely places, cleaning the toilet or shopping in the supermarket. ‘Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, Si þin nama gehalgod . . . Forgyf us ure gyltas . . .’ The boys would nudge me. — You’re muttering that thing, they said. — It’s embarrassing.

  My lecturers were kind, encouraging my ambitions. I think I was exotic for them; they cherished me just because I wasn’t the usual kind of student who went on to graduate studies. I was a single parent, I’d worked for a living, I pinned political badges – Greenham Common, Solidarnos´c´, anti-apartheid – to the military jacket with brass buttons which I’d found in a memorabilia shop. I’m embarrassed now, remembering the badges. Not because I didn’t believe in all those things, but because the truth was that at that time I was absorbed in my inner life: novels and drama and poetry, the past. I went to a few demonstrations with Daphne and Jude, that’s all – and a day trip once to Greenham. In my third year I came across the French feminist critics, and then the American ones, and I suppose that counts as a kind of politics, though I was bored by Kristeva.

  For those three years at university, I felt a steely satisfaction in my singleness, as though I was sealed up and made self-sufficient by my work. My mother was very doubtful about my taking up my studies so late in the day – what was the point? But she hoped that at university at least I might meet someone responsible and hard-working (naturally, she knew nothing about Mac). I explained to her that they were all ten years younger than I was, and that I was the responsible and hard-working one. And it was true, I was hard-working. I was often exhausted, I wasn’t ecstatic all the time. I kept myself awake late into the night with caffeine tablets, to write my essays. My friends all helped generously. Fred didn’t want to lose touch with Luke and Rowan; they were often at his place. Daphne had a job as a social worker with youth offenders, she was good with kids and took the boys out at weekends; Jude let them loose in her studio, where she was sewing the life-size dolls that were her new project (Luke told me afterwards that he dreamed about those dolls for years). On fine summer evenings the boys went to play football after supper, in a scruffy park ten minutes’ walk away. I would wash the dishes then sit reading or writing at my desk beside the open window. When they came home at dusk with a gang of their friends, I could hear them before they turned the corner into our street – their voices echoing off the tall house fronts, Luke bouncing the football ahead of him along the pavement. Amazed at being out when it was almost dark, keyed up with the glamour of their headlong game, they lingered outside, calling poignant goodbyes to one another. Sometimes their voices were portentous with drama, some quarrel or injury. I didn’t worry while they were away, but as soon as I knew they were safely home I felt myself completed. They weighed down my life on the side of blood and warmth, where otherwise it might have floated too free.

  It’s important to get what happened next in the right order.

  First, I changed my mind about carrying on my academic work. That was all quite fixed and settled before any of the changes in my private life. There wasn’t any violent moment of disillusionment but imperceptibly, over the months leading up to my finals, two things – which had seemed for a while to be one thi
ng – separated out in my imagination. On the one hand there was the great world of literature and thought, and on the other the smaller world of the university and academic life. I began to be bored with the sound of my own tinny authority in essays. I didn’t like the idea of choosing a narrow specialism – I wanted to read everything. I was grateful to the university, it had made all the difference to me and been the gateway into my new intellectual life; but now I chafed inside its frame. Sometimes when I looked up from my books I was overwhelmed by the real moment in the air around me, its nothingness richly pregnant. My studies were still a path into mysteries; but I saw that the path could take you underground, if you weren’t vigilant. It could lead into substitute satisfactions, ersatz and second hand.

  From time to time we had postcards from Sheila, who was travelling in South America. The cards were laconic, with minimal information – ‘I am here’, or ‘I saw this’, or ‘it wasn’t really like this’. The pictures on the front were in brilliant kitsch colours, Mayan ruins or bougainvillea or smiling Guatemalan peasants in costume. We had no address for writing back to her. Daphne disapproved, she said that the whole backpacking thing was only another twist in the whole history of Western voyeurism and exploitation. I pinned the cards above my desk because Sheila’s adventures felt like a counterpoint to the adventures inside my head – as fantastical as anything I read about, yet in a real life, plotted on the earth’s solid surface.

  I decided I didn’t want to embark on an academic career and for a while I had no idea what to do instead. Then my brother Philip had an accident on his motorbike, breaking both legs, and an occupational therapist came to my mother’s house to measure the steps and examine the bathroom to see if he could manage at home on his crutches. I was casting about in my mind for the shape of my future life and something about that work appealed to me: its mix of imagination and practicality. I liked the fact that each case was something new, with a unique set of problems – material ones jumbled together with psychological ones, like in a story or a novel. I hoped that the work would take me out of myself and plunge me in the world, making me bolder and more generous; until I was tested, I didn’t know if I was capable of these qualities. Even before I’d taken my Literature finals, I applied to an Occupational Therapy Diploma course, and got a place. And OT was a good choice, it suited me; I have worked more or less in this field ever since. Of course there was a lot of idealism in my reasons for choosing it – the reality was bound to be more complex, less heroic.

  All this happened before Mac ever got back in touch. Sometimes he tells the story – not apologetically, but proudly – as though he interrupted my brilliant academic career, stormed into my life and carried me off when I was on my way to being a Professor of Anglo-Saxon or something. But it wasn’t so. At the time when I was making these plans for my future, I had put Mac entirely out of my mind – love had healed over behind him, like water swallowing that black stone I’d thrown into the pool. The first time I had any news of him was one afternoon in the summer, after I’d finished my last exam and before I started my Diploma. Lizzie came round and I made her tea; we sat drinking it with all the casement windows in the attic open to the falling rain, because the air was so hot and heavy. A horse chestnut which grew across the road was as tall as the tall houses; my room looked into its top branches and I could hear the intimate settling noises the rain made, soaking through the tree’s layers. Lizzie talked on to me about her children in that burrowing, persistent way she had – everything was Frances now, who played the cello; Piers was written off as rather a disaster. I wasn’t bored, exactly, but I wasn’t concentrating; the weather made me restless, as if I was expecting something to happen – or perhaps I only filled that in afterwards, after something did. When Lizzie was at the point of going, she remembered she had a message for me.

  — A man came looking for you, she said. — A peculiar man, Stella! Something about him – head down in his shoulders, like a bull charging; said he didn’t know where you lived, but that he’d found out where Fred had moved to, from the school. Very persistent. I told him I’d only known you vaguely, had no idea where you were now. I thought he might be a debt collector.

  And she gave me Mac’s card, with something written on the back in pencil, in his big, wobbling, separated letters, with the hollow full stops. Mac had terrible handwriting – not scrawled or hasty so much as naively deliberate, as if, at school, in his impatience to be grown up, he had bypassed ever acquiring a cursive style. He was always angry writing anything by hand, preferred stabbing at a typewriter or a keyboard with one finger. I couldn’t read his message while Lizzie was there in the room with me. I pretended I had no idea who he was and kept tight hold of the card, its corners digging into my palm, while I went all the way downstairs with her and watched her put her umbrella up, crossing the street, rain fizzing on the taut red nylon and my heart straining painfully, impatiently.

  — Call me, Mac wrote peremptorily. — I have news.

  He’d given ‘news’ a capital N, and drawn a ring round his printed telephone number, his work number, in the same thick pencil. I hid the card in a pocket of my handbag and didn’t do anything. Sometimes I thought I could hardly remember Mac. He belonged to the past, when I was abject and dependent and hadn’t achieved anything.

  Then he and I bumped into one another, quite by accident, only a few weeks after I got his card – at the Royal Infirmary, of all places. We had never met up accidentally before, in all those four years we were apart. I was at the hospital with Rowan, who had problems with persistent ear infections and needed grommets to equalise the pressure. Taking Rowan to his appointments was always fraught; he dreaded the examinations and reacted badly to the tedium of the waiting – although he was stoical when the doctors probed painfully in his ear (I knew how much it hurt because of how he stared ahead into nothing with a set face, and gripped my hand which he wouldn’t hold at any other time).

  Mac had never seen either of my sons except in the photographs I’d had around in the flat. When we three were suddenly confronted in a corridor (I was lost and in the wrong place, Rowan was berating me), the encounter felt momentous. Luckily the corridor wasn’t busy. Mac seized me by the elbows, almost accusing me (‘Where have you been?’), and I was aware of Rowan transferring his resentment on to the stranger. I think Mac was surprised by Rowan in the flesh; I don’t think he’d taken in from the photographs how dark-skinned he was, or how striking. I loved seeing other people respond to his beauty – the skinny lithe length of him, the spatter of freckles of darker pigment across his nose, long hollow cheeks, lashes clotted as densely black as paint. He didn’t look like my child. I explained about our appointment and that we were lost; Mac said he was just visiting. He and Rowan stared at each other, calculating. I could hardly take Mac in, bulky in a beige raincoat with rain splashes on the shoulders, preoccupied and out of place. I had always expected that if I ever bumped into him I would be shocked by how old he was – but actually he seemed unchanged, utterly familiar: his vigour and willpower, the taut thick skin of his forehead and neck. I saw that his round head did sit on his shoulders like a bull’s. He was holding a greengrocer’s paper bag and I guessed he was bringing grapes for someone ill.

  I thought all of a sudden that it must be Barbara who was ill, she must be dying. Perhaps that was why he’d come looking for me at Fred’s, why he was holding my arms now so tightly, as if I might try to escape. But Barbara was fine, Mac said. He realised his grip was embarrassing me and let go. At least, she was fine as far as he knew. He was visiting a nice chap who worked for him and had had an operation on a duodenal ulcer.

  — What d’you mean, I said, — as far as you know?

  — Come on, Mum, Rowan insisted.

  Mac explained that Barbara had left him. She had found out about certain things – here he glanced severely at Rowan, cutting him out – and when she confronted him and he told her the whole truth, she’d gone. (She’d found, he told me later, a forgo
tten leaflet from the gallery at the bottom of his sock drawer, with my name written on it. — Something was funny, she’d said. — Because you’ve never liked that painting.) Mac had tried to reason with her – she’d been adamant. (Apparently Barbara had asked him whether he still felt anything for me, and when he had reflected, he’d said that he did, he loved me.) This had all happened a few months ago, and he’d been looking for me ever since.

  — The axle has broken that keeps the stars, he said. — And all that.

  But I had forgotten the Yeats poem and didn’t know at first what he was talking about. Anyway, now he’d found me, he wasn’t going to let me go again without a struggle – unless I told him where I lived, that is. Though probably he was too late, I’d made arrangements with someone else, hadn’t I, by now? I said I hadn’t. I asked about his daughters and he said one was married, the other at the Royal College of Music. We stood smiling at each other then (and he reached out to hold me by the elbow again) in the blandly lit pastel-painted corridor with its signs pointing to rheumatology and cardiology and the renal unit, its sickly suspect smell of antisepsis and hospital food; we moved aside for a nurse pushing a trolley of drugs. Rowan was tugging at my arm, dragging me away. I scrabbled in my pocket for a pen, I wrote down my telephone number on Mac’s paper bag. Our luck – it was luck, wasn’t it? we scarcely knew what to call it yet – seemed a vivid improbable hopeful flare against this background of subdued suffering, shut away behind the hospital walls.