Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

— Are these yours?

I had forgotten about them. There had been too many other things to think about.

— Yes, I said. — I found them on my way home. On the bomb site.

— Pretty, she said. And gave them to me.

That was all.

MY STEPFATHER WASN’T A BIG MAN, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety black brows, a sensual mouth and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I ever touched it, though sometimes out of curiosity I wanted to). His face was one of those where the features seem compacted as if under pressure inside a frame. He was energetic, intelligent, diligent, faithful — a stroke of luck for my mother, a lightning bolt of luck, illuminating her grinding, narrow future and transforming it. They’d met at work, at the Board Mill where the packets for Wills cigarettes were made; he was the manager of cost accounting. It was a real love match, much more than she could have hoped for, past her first youth and with a half-grown daughter tagged on as part of the package.

If I knew him now as he was then, what would I think of him? I can imagine watching him, restless in a group of his friends, jumping up to buy them drinks, fetching extra chairs: he is a charming man, they like him. He is eagerly indignant, as they are, over money, hierarchy, immigration, discipline. He doesn’t like the dirty jokes but only shakes his head, disapproving, smiling. No doubt one or two of his older colleagues are in the Masons, which he views with wary amusement until he’s invited to join himself, a few years later. All the time, it’s as if he’s preoccupied with some inward effort which he thinks no one else sees — an effort of decency, of fitting in. There is a little flame burning in him, in spite of himself, lighting up his expression and his movements. His judgement — not of abstractions like immigration and taxes, but knowing how to hold himself, when to be still — is unexpectedly delicate and true. I can see it now, from this distance.

We moved from Kingsdown into Stoke Bishop: respectable, sleepy, leafy. Our house was in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove, carved out by a developer where there had once been a little wood among the rows of houses from the 1930s. Mum had promised me a bedroom of my own and I was looking forward to something pretty and pink. I had thought that perhaps this good luck of possessions was what you could get in exchange for the other changes you didn’t want. I calculated that I might get a horse, too, and jodhpurs and a hard hat of my own — I had only ever rented my hat from the stables. (I did get the jodhpurs and the hat, eventually.)

But when we drew up outside the new house in Gerry’s car, minutes before the removal van arrived, it wasn’t what I had bargained for. The house was so new it was raw. There were still labels stuck across the glass in the windows, so that it seemed to stare with lifeless eyes at a ruined landscape of red clay. The paving and the wood of the fence palings were stained red and filthy. Although there were people already living in the finished houses to one side up the Grove, in the other direction there were only half-built shells in the mud; monstrous machines snoozed among piles of breeze blocks and timber, bags of cement. We sat on in the car for a few moments after the engine died, and I thought Mum and Gerry must be thinking what I was thinking: that it was too bleak and ugly to bear, that we would have to give up and go home.

But they weren’t.

Mum must have been drinking in the newness in deep draughts.

How could she not want to get away from Mrs Walsh and Clive, and the old woman in the Victorian dress, and the broken windows? (And Nana, and her childhood past, and her failed marriage?) She tied her hair in a scarf and Gerry rolled up his sleeves; unpacking, directing the removal men, they made a team. Mum boiled water and unpacked a bucket and a tub of Vim, then she began washing out the red mud. Gerry helped carry things in and made sure every item went into the room it was labelled for. Though he wasn’t big, he was strong, and he always got on well with men who worked for him. Mum and I hadn’t brought much with us from the flat, most of the furniture in the van was Gerry’s. (He had been married before — until his first wife ‘ran off’, I found out later — so I suppose that these were things he’d bought with her.) — It’ll do for the time being, my mother said about this furniture warningly, as if she had plans. Her plans were a flirtation between them, abrasive and teasing — her female conspiracy (shopping) against his male suspicion and resignation.

— Don’t get under our feet, she said to me. — Why don’t you go out and play?

— Couldn’t you find her something useful to do? said Gerry.

— You don’t know Stella.

This was the first time I’d heard that I wasn’t useful. She’d never asked me to be useful, had she? Anyway I was glad, I didn’t want to help. My new bedroom was an empty cell smelling coldly of cement, not adapted to my shape or anyone’s. I wanted my old window back, surveying the familiar intricate wilderness — gardens overgrown with brambles, tottering garages, the tracery of fire escapes on the backs of houses, an old Wolseley up on bricks. Our new garden, which my new window overlooked in blind indifference, was only a rectangle of red clay, marked off with fence posts and wire from the clay rectangles belonging to the other houses.

I wandered out into it, taking my doll. (— Aren’t you too old for dolls? Gerry had asked already.) At the far end of our rectangle were the stumps of two huge trees cut down to make way for the new development. I gravitated towards these stumps as the only feature breaking up the new-made symmetry. Under my sandals the ridges and troughs of hardened clay were unforgiving. From the base of the tree stump little feelers of new growth were pushing up in doomed hope, waving their flags of leaves; sticky resin oozed from crevices on the cut surface. Even the sky out here — thinly clouded and tinged with lemon where the sun strained to break through — seemed blanched and excessively empty. Once, I supposed, its emptiness would have been full of tree. Carefully I sat on the stump, not wanting to get resin on my shorts; I put my doll beside me. Because she was jointed at the pelvis but not at the knee, she had to have her legs stretched out in front of her in a wide V. She was wearing a blue and white ski suit I had knitted, with Nana’s help. (Even when things went dark after her stroke, Nana knitted expertly as ever, and still won at cards.)

A girl came out from the back of the house next door, picking her way easily across the red clay. For a while she and I were intensely mutually aware without seeming to notice each other, behind the convenient fiction of the fence wire. When we outgrew that pretence she stepped across it and approached my stump.

— Hello, she said. — Have you moved in next door?

— It’s you who’s next door to us, I said logically. — Counting from here.

She didn’t notice that I’d corrected her perspective.

— Oh good. We can be friends. I hoped there’d be a girl.

Her threshold for friendship wasn’t exacting, then. I didn’t have high hopes of her: she seemed unsubtle and I was a wary, reluctant friend. At least because she was eager, it was easy for me to withhold my approval. She was pretty: breathy and bouncing, with round eyes like a puppy’s, a mass of fuzzy, fair hair, and a tummy that strained against her tight stretch-nylon dress. I liked her name, which was Madeleine. She picked up my doll and began to walk her in silly, jouncing steps around the stump, see-sawing her legs; I snatched her back. My belief in my dolls at that point was in a delicate balance. I knew that they were inert plastic and could be tumbled without consequences upside-down and half naked in the toy-box. At the same time, I seemed to feel the complex sensibility of each one as if it existed both in my mind and quite outside me. This doll — her name was Teenager — was stiffly humourless; my teddy bear on the other hand was capable of a tolerant irony. Teenager was outraged by Madeleine’s travesty of real play.