— You never wrote to me, I say. — You didn’t even tell me you were going. I waited to hear from you. For months I expected to get a letter.
What he does then is to take my two hands in his and hold them, looking into my face intently, searching me. The touch of his hands is the same as it was when we were young, it brings back the past and at first all the old electricity seems to flow out of him and into me, and the tears that pricked into my eyes downstairs when I thought he might be dying come flooding back. And then the next moment there’s a flood of resentment too, because he hasn’t asked me any questions about myself, or what’s become of me: how many children I’ve got, who my husband is, what I do for a living. Isn’t he even in the least interested? Why must the world of real things always be relegated to second place, as if it was a lesser order, as if everything abstract was higher and more meaningful? I’m seized by the impulse to force Valentine into relation with my real life. I’m on the brink of telling him my children’s names and their dates of birth, to see whether he notices anything. But just then we’re interrupted by the commotion of the supermarket delivery arriving downstairs and Hilda’s voice raised imperiously, directing operations.
— Oh, it’s spider-woman, Valentine says, dropping my hands. — Here she goes.
— I think she was worried they might not turn up.
— You don’t know what she’s like. She’s aiming to stop me finishing the book. She blocks it. Her spirit blocks it. She crouches down there in the shape of a black spider. I sometimes imagine that she isn’t really my mother, she’s been taken over by a demonic force. I can’t write if I have to think about her.
I’m frightened now. I calm down because I’m frightened.
I think I ought to go.
I don’t know if he’s being funny or not. Perhaps he’s just exaggerating his paranoia, sending his craziness up for my benefit in the same deadpan way he used to do when we were teenagers. But in any case I stand up and make excuses, pretending I have an appointment to get to. Valentine doesn’t protest, and when I say something stupid and false about how we ought to keep in touch, he just smiles the funny remote smile he used to use against my parents, as if he could hardly hear them when they spoke to him. I don’t kiss him in farewell, I don’t touch him again; something in the way he stands apart from me forbids it.
Downstairs in the hall the front door is wide open and there are plastic trays of groceries on the floor, milk and fruit and sliced bread, lots of ready-meals. I can hear Hilda in the kitchen, but I don’t stop to say goodbye to her. And I don’t wait for the bus, I walk into town, all the way across the Downs. I’m so relieved, on my way back, that I didn’t get carried away and tell Valentine about Luke. I won’t say anything to anyone about this visit, I decide, not even to Madeleine. Valentine is a crazy irrelevance, he’s pitiable and ridiculous. (I know that’s what Mac would think if he ever met him.) I try to conceive of him with detached kindness and sympathy, as if he were one of the service users at the Gatehouse. But my connection with him feels like a liability, it feels loose inside me, a door swinging open on to danger.
On the train going home, I can’t concentrate on my book. The carriage is crowded and my legs ache after my walk across the Downs, the glare of the low sun is in my eyes. I wish I’d upgraded to first class as Mac is always telling me to do (but if I spend my money on that, it seems to turn my time at the Gatehouse into playtime, a self-indulgence). I see Mac standing on the platform at Taunton station when the train draws in: he has Ester with him and one of Ester’s friends. I’m filled with a rush of gratitude for his waiting there so faithfully and reliably; I’m moved by the idea of his kindness and solidity, my dear companion. I thought I’d calmed down but in fact all the emotion left over from my reunion with Valentine is still washing round inside me, I’m brimming with feeling. They don’t see me at first when I get down, they’re looking in the wrong direction (towards first class). The girls are in the green-striped dresses which are their school uniform. (Mac insisted on all this, the private school, the violin lessons, the tennis coaching. He’s talking already about Oxbridge. We quarrelled over it to begin with – I wanted Ester to go to the local state school, I hate the pushy privilege of the private places. And then I decided I didn’t care where she went as long as she was happy.)
The girls come running towards me as soon as they see me – of course her friend is only running because Ester is; when Ester wraps her arms round me she stands waiting awkwardly. I’m glad the friend is there because her cool, appraising stranger’s glance steadies me, so that I don’t spill over with my tenderness. My children prefer me to be dry with them, slightly withheld. Ester’s showing off, she’s full of some story which she’s garbling deliberately, about how she and Amy are doing their science project together and how they nagged at Daddy until he agreed Amy could come and stay the night so they could work on it. Ester drapes herself round Amy’s neck, Amy looks self-conscious. In the company of her friends, Ester overdoes it as if she’s studied carefully how to be a gushing schoolgirl; alone with us she’s quite different, astute and watchful, almost prim in her reserve.
Mac’s putting on weight, I think: I notice because I’ve been away from him for a few days. He could easily be mistaken for Ester’s grandfather. On the whole, though, he’s not ageing too badly: he has that tough good skin which doesn’t collapse, there’s something appraising and sensual still in the heavy-lidded eyes, and he stands so perfectly upright that people think he must have been in the military. Picking up my bags he tells me about the science project and about the ice-cream the girls have wheedled him into buying. He loves this role as the doting, bemused father. I can’t enter into his wholeheartedness, I think. I’m not wholehearted. He makes some comment about having me back from doing my good works, and then I’m irritated even though it’s only a few minutes since I got down from the train overflowing with love for him.
The train leaves and the spacious red-brick station resumes its air of being under-used and sleepy. Carrying my bags to the car, Mac asks me how it’s been in Bristol and I’m disconcerted for a moment, thinking he must know somehow about Val; then I realise that he means the weather. Mac loves to talk about the weather, updating me frequently: not as the small change of conversation, but with deep interest in an unfolding story, as if it’s eternally surprising. He follows the forecasts on television with the same responsible seriousness as he follows the news; although he’s retired he hasn’t given up his old pattern of attending to the world as if real things depended on his being accurately informed.
— Dull here, he says. — A lot of cloud over the estuary. Rained a couple of times, but nothing much. They’re saying it may brighten up tomorrow.
I can’t believe he never notices my lack of enthusiasm for these reports.
— I’ve no idea, I lie. — I was indoors all day. (Actually I put my face up into a bitter squall of rain, on my way home across the Downs.)
— Give me the car keys, I say. — Let me drive.
Mac doesn’t like driving through the country roads at twilight, but I feel better as soon as I’m behind the steering wheel. We get out of the town and I take the back route, though there’s always a risk of getting stuck behind farm vehicles: the road winds through apple orchards to begin with, then up between the hills. Under a low ceiling of blue-grey cloud a strip of paler light is stretched along the horizon like a ribbon of creamy satin. Birds seem to start up, as I squeeze round the narrow corners between the hedgerows, from under the very wheels of the car. I imagine Valentine reading absorbedly in his room, like a dedicated St Jerome in his cell in a medieval painting. Mac is giving me a detailed report, as he always does, on all the things he’s achieved while I’ve been away – he’s bought straw to put on the shrubs in case it’s a hard winter, he’s cleaned out the shower head, he’s made his special bolognese sauce with chicken livers, to go with the pasta tonight. (I wonder whether Amy will like chicken livers.) The girls are chattering in
the back seat: Ester is courting Amy, fussing over her excitedly, holding on to Amy’s hand in her lap.
— I want to show you everything, Ester says. – You can hold the guinea pigs, I’ll show you my secret den. You can read my diary if you want to. You can find out all about me.
Amy is not ready to commit herself.
I know Mac is listening and smiling in the seat beside me, tense with protective love for Ester, fearing in case she gives herself away too easily. Some dark shape – a cat, or a fox – flows across the road for an instant ahead of us, then disappears into the hedge. I switch on the headlights and the car seems to leap forward into the night.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Dan Franklin and Jennifer Barth, Caroline Dawnay and Joy Harris. Thanks to Deborah Treisman (versions of three chapters in Clever Girl first appeared as short stories in the New Yorker). Thanks to Shelagh Weeks and Stephen Gregg, for inspirations.
About the Author
Tessa Hadley is the author of the four previous novels, including Accidents in the Home, which was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, and The London Train, which was a New York Times Notable Book along with her short story collections Sunstroke and Married Love. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in London.
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Also by Tessa Hadley
ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME
EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT
SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES
THE MASTER BEDROOM
THE LONDON TRAIN
MARRIED LOVE
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images
Copyright
CLEVER GIRL. Copyright © 2013 by Tessa Hadley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Chapters one, three, and four first appeared in different forms in the New Yorker.
Originally published in a slightly different form in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2013.
FIRST U.S. EDITION PUBLISHED 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hadley, Tessa.
Clever girl : a novel / Tessa Hadley. — First U.S. Edition.
pages cm
“Originally published in a slightly different form in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2013.”
ISBN 978-0-06-227039-9
1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Families—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR6108.A35C54 2013
823’.92—dc23
2013026034
EPUB Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN 9780062270405
14 15 16 17 18 OFF/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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