Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— I suppose these were the beeches, I said, to distract Madeleine’s attention.

She was blank. — What were what?

— These trees. The road is called Beech Grove. A beech is a kind of tree.

— What trees?

She was looking around as if she might have missed them. I explained that I meant the stump I was sitting on and the one next to it. I pointed out that there was a stump too at the end of her garden, and others all along behind the row of houses. — There must have been a little wood. A grove. That’s what a grove is.

My relationship to her began to take on an instructional form that was not unsatisfying. Madeleine looked down at the stump with dawning comprehension. — Oh, is that a tree? she said.

— What did you think it was?

— I didn’t think about it really. I s’pose I just thought they were part of the ground. Like rocks or something.

Her oblivion seemed so extreme that it might be disingenuous. This was Madeleine’s performance — eyes so wide open that she seemed to be finding her own obliviousness as amusing as you ever could. You never got to the bottom of what she actually knew, or didn’t know.

— They shouldn’t have chopped down a grove of beech trees, I said sternly, improvising. — It’s unlucky.

— Why?

— Because they were sacred. In the olden days, people worshipped them.

She thought about this. — What d’you mean, worshipped?

— Prayed to them. Believed that they were sacred — you know, like God.

— God?

Perhaps she’d never noticed who she was praying to at school. I stood up carefully, respectfully from the stump. — I hope the gods aren’t angry.

— Is it alive now? Madeleine asked warily.

— Kind of, in a way.

I showed her where the tree was feebly sprouting. — It’s still trying to grow.

— Ooh, I don’t like it, she squealed, backing off in a pantomime of shuddering.

She looked like the kind of girl who would join in when there was squealing over anything: blood, wasps, veins in school-dinner liver — although she wouldn’t quite mean it, would just be enjoying the noise and distraction. She was too robust to be properly squeamish.

— You’d better not say you don’t like them, I said. — They might hear.

A gleam of inspiration pierced her vagueness. Taking me by surprise, she dropped to her knees on the clay, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands together. — For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, she gabbled in the prescribed drone. — In the name of the ferrership of the spirit. (She meant fellowship.) Oh holy tree. Who art very nice; and we’re sorry that they’ve cut you down.

I knew that this was mostly for my benefit. Nonetheless, I glanced involuntarily upward. A few fat drops of rain fell without warning or follow-through, darkening spots on the dried clay.

— See? said Madeleine. — It doesn’t mind.

That evening my mother boiled eggs and warmed beans on a primus; our gas stove wasn’t connected yet. We buttered sliced bread straight from the bag and had the milk bottle on the table.

— Isn’t this an adventure? she said excitedly.

I was suspicious of something new in her face: not romance, exactly (she was never soft), but as if a force had filled her out, carrying her forward in exhilaration. She must have been just waiting to be married, I realised. I tried intently to imagine my father (missing, presumed dead) taking up the space that Gerry was filling now; but my picture of my father was too vague, Gerry was too assertive. He was sweaty, naturally, after the work he’d done; his hair was wet because he’d doused his head under the tap in the bathroom. His bodily presence intruded every way I turned, making the new house seem crowded when I ought to have felt its succession of spaces flowering ahead of me, after the two rooms that Mum and I had shared since I could remember. As twilight thickened outside, the house’s shell seemed too pervious, swelling with the electric light as if it were as insubstantial as the canvas tents at school camp.

Mum and Gerry discussed with deep interest the economics of using the immersion heater. After he’d dried each cup and plate he held it up to the light to inspect it. He complained that when I washed up I splashed water on the floor and used too much squeegee. Already I didn’t like living with him, and it had only been a matter of hours. I retreated to my cell-bedroom where at least now a bed was installed — though it wasn’t the old double bed that I’d slept in since I outgrew my cot. That bed had never been ours, apparently; it had belonged to the old flat. On this new narrow one was a pile of ironed candy-stripe sheets. With a martyred consciousness — where did they think I was? why didn’t they wonder? — I tucked them inexpertly over the mattress, then climbed between them in my knickers and vest. I heard my mother and Gerry talking downstairs. Though I couldn’t make out their words, I knew that they were deciding with wholehearted adult seriousness where to put each piece of furniture. The rumble of their dialogue was lulling, melancholy, remote. Then someone was running a bath; unfamiliar pipes groaned and eased too near at hand. There were no curtains at my window yet. In the dark I missed the view from my old room intensely, and I didn’t want to think about the non-trees I had conjured into being.

We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends over that summer — we had nothing else to do. During the holidays in the past, when Mum went to work I was left at Nana’s or at Auntie Jean’s. Now (Nana wasn’t capable any longer and Gerry didn’t like Jean) I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine had someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us; she sometimes took us swimming. I think she felt sorry for me, left all alone, but actually I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguins in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey: for a tubby girl she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to stop me beginning with chocolate and finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle, wiping its creamy moustache on to my sleeve; I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.

I moved around the new house in the adults’ absence as if I were taking soundings. Sometimes Madeleine and I were experimentally raucous, clattering and screaming, flying down the stairs two or three at a time. The house’s air, one moment after we’d shattered it, was blandly restored. I picked up ornaments, poked in the miscellany of small things that had been put inside them for safe keeping, opened drawers. I had no criteria of taste by which to judge what was there (wood veneer, streamlined forms, tapering peg-legs, fitted carpets, a television inside a cabinet with doors, curtains with a print of autumn leaves); and so I felt the impact of the rooms purely, their bright brisk statement, their light and order which aspired to weightlessness and dustlessness.

Gerry’s desk drawers were boring, full of papers having to do with dull mysteries: mortgages and insurance. With a kitchen knife I made a tiny nick in the wood at the back of the kneehole in the desk, near the floor. I was filled with trepidation next time he sat down to do the accounts and pay the bills, but he never noticed — nor when I added new nicks in the years afterwards, every time I was most incandescently angry with him. He did notice that I had been through his drawers, and also that we had bounced on the sofa, rucking the covers and denting the cushions. And although I had washed up after my sugar-messes, like forensic scientists he and Mum somehow discovered traces of my cooking stuck around the bottom of the pan.