Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— She’s got to learn, Gerry said. — She’s not a baby any longer.

I was clumsy, easily distracted, I was ‘always in a dream’. Gerry dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard. I wasn’t pretty or charming or malleable. I went around with a suffering face. I read my book with my fingers in my ears. I wouldn’t laugh at Gerry’s jokes. I lost my door key or I went out with Madeleine leaving the back door unlocked. I left the hot tap running in the bathroom, then I forgot my cardigan at the swimming pool. Gerry rarely lost his temper with me; not in that early time. He never, ever hit me.

And of course days passed, even weeks sometimes, when he and I weren’t in any sort of outright conflict. Sometimes we were even all right together. Once, when he and Mum both had time off work, we went out for the day to Brean Down and Gerry and I climbed the dunes in our flip-flops, sliding back one step for every two we took on the shifting sand; he held out his hand to me and pulled me up after him. His hands were brown and strong with neat-trimmed nails as thick as horn. He always wore a watch with one of those expanding metal bands (I worried that it must catch in the curling black hairs on his arm), and a wedding ring, which men didn’t often do in those days. Mum stood below with her hair escaping from her headscarf, whipping across her face in the wind, calling out to us to be careful, that the dunes were treacherous, we could be buried alive. And Gerry and I laughed together.

When I was in trouble, however, he sat opposite me in the lounge, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his forehead wrinkled: I felt the whole force of his personality bent upon me — thwarted, concentrated, blinkered. (— You’ll find nothing’s handed to you on a plate, he said. — It’s no good thinking you can stay wrapped up in your own little world. Do you have any idea how hard your mother has to work, to earn the money to buy you food and clothes?) In a reasonable voice he communicated his warnings about the meanness at the heart of things, which he understood and I, in my childishness, was refusing to acknowledge.

No doubt he really thought it was his duty, in my father’s place, to teach me to adapt to the way things were. The trouble was, I hardly knew him. I didn’t exactly argue with him. I sometimes said, ‘I didn’t mean to’ in a flippant voice, or denied things it was obvious I had done. If he asked me why I’d done them I said I didn’t know. I put my hands under my thighs on the chair, swung my legs and looked off into the corners of the room; my expression was a slippery mask clamped on my face. All my effort was used to keep my mouth curved upward in a grimacing smile, which I knew was my best weapon because it made Gerry squeeze his fists and raise his voice.

Then Mum would appear from the kitchen. — That’s enough, she would say, tactfully as if she was saying it to me. — Go up to your room, Stella.

Tugging me backward and forward between them, she and Gerry expressed the tension in their new life together. He wanted his new wife to himself; he hadn’t reckoned on finding me his rival for her attentions. Mum, with her quick scepticism, must have seen how he deceived himself, dissimulating his resentment, pretending to be impartial. She must have remonstrated with him over how relentlessly he came in pursuit of me, though it was part of their code that she would never openly take my side against him. (And although I was wounded by his taking her away from me, I also dreaded catching sight of any rift between them.)

Let’s be clear — our fight was mutual. I was set against Gerry just as he was against me. Only I was a child, so he had power over me. That’s all tyranny is: it’s not in a personality, it’s in a set of circumstances. It’s being trapped with your enemy in a limited space — a country, or a family — where the balance of power between you is unequal, and the weaker one has no recourse.

Because the tree cult began in the shapeless days of summer, there was no drudging sanity of school at first to counteract its power. I came up with the idea of kissing the stumps and leaving offerings among the roots or pressed into the cracks — salt, currants, sherbet. We smeared the resin on our foreheads. (— You’re filthy, my mother said when she got home. — Go and wash your face.) The three stumps in our gardens grew distinctive personalities and we named them (Iskarion, Vedar, Mori). They were jealous, capricious, closely informed about our daily lives. More awesome and less easy to propitiate were the nameless stumps we had no access to, in other gardens. Madeleine used to dab the resin on her tongue and then groan and double up, clutching her stomach, making a great fuss over how it had poisoned her. It was her idea that we should cut ourselves and rub our blood into the bark.

The ritual half slaked a thirst I hadn’t known I had. I’d never been touched by religion at school, though we’d traced St Paul’s journeys in our scripture books and coloured in donkeys for Palm Sunday. Mum and Nana had only ever referred to the church suspiciously; it was good for children but also a conspiracy of certain social types, thinking themselves superior. I pushed myself, trying to receive intimations of the sacred trees’ living existence; occasionally, alone, I could fall into an ecstasy of belief. At other times I watched myself, sceptical of the authenticity of my transports. Sometimes, after the sessions with Madeleine, I was visited by a kind of Protestant disgust at our excesses; the more we thrilled and overdid it, the more it was only a game. For a couple of days I wouldn’t play, no matter how much Madeleine pouted and sulked. Then — once on a Sunday evening in my bath when late sunlight, reflected off the bathwater, made restless patterns on the ceiling — I’d be visited by the balm of a vision of great trees, at the very moment when I least thought of asking for it.

At the end of the summer, when Madeleine and I went back to our different schools, the cult cooled down but didn’t die. Out of superstitious habit we still left offerings at the stumps for good luck, and carried bits of bark around in our pockets, fingering them out of the teachers’ sight.

Gerry insisted I should sit the entrance exam for the direct-grant secondary schools. I got good marks in class and always had my head stuck in a book. Anyway, not many children in Stoke Bishop went to the local comprehensive. Madeleine was taking the exam, too — though she didn’t have to do so well in it, because her parents could pay. I needed a scholarship place. I sat the exam. I didn’t care how I did, I wasn’t frightened of it: school up to that point had left me unscathed. I didn’t make the connection that Gerry did between the power of what I read in books and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.

Consulting no one, I had promoted myself at our local library to adult books — which meant climbing three steps, covered in yellow lino, into the upper portion of the brick building with its sensuous hush and beamed Arts and Crafts ceiling. I didn’t know where to begin; I was drawn to complete works in uniform bindings because I thought they would be series like the ones I had loved in the children’s section: Anne of Green Gables and The Naughtiest Girl in the School . Often I hardly knew what was happening in the novels I fell upon by chance (Compton Mackenzie, Faulkner, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen), but I read absorbedly nonetheless, half disappointed, half revelling in the texture of these worlds jumbling in my ignorance: servants, telegrams, cavalry, race, guilt, dressing for dinner (what time was dinner? and were they still in their pyjamas?) — and elliptical conversations unlike any I’d ever heard, signifying things I could only guess at. I gave up on some, but the books were an initiation. I began piecing their worlds together in my comprehension.