Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her.

In my mind, I couldn’t bear her limited and conventional life: housework and childcare. But in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening — sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even then, when I was half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. No doubt she was very attractive then, in her late thirties, if I could have seen it — compact good figure, thick hair in a bouffant short cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, which didn’t occur to me. Being married to Gerry — and Stoke Bishop, and the baby — had given a high gloss to her demeanour, wiping away the hesitations I might have shared in once when there were just the two of us. And in her withholding and dismissive manner she seemed to communicate how women knew something prosaic and gritty and fundamental, underlying all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know too, or would have to come to know sooner or later.

I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.

The summer I got my O-level results (all As apart from Cs in physics and chemistry), Uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory. I wept to Val, about how the women there hated me and put me on to the worst tasks (I had to take the moulds off the hot puddings — at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered) because I was only a student worker and because I took in a book to read in my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up but he didn’t — I think that actually he liked the romance of my working there and having relatives who worked there — it was not ‘middle class’. He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so, my mother had always so strictly policed the way I spoke at home (‘I wasn’t doing anything’, Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’). Apparently, however, I said ‘reely’ for really, and ‘strawl’ for stroll.

— Your mother has an accent too, he said. — Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.

Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint — quickly in the fingers of one hand, as only he could — and we went outside to smoke. It was summer and a moon, watery-white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spreadeagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our finger-ends were touching — through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we emptied ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.

Then I was sure someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared to ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbour and young fruit trees and a rockery which Gerry built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And I thought now that he was hidden in there, aware of Val and me. He did walk out in the garden in the dark sometimes; ‘to cool off’, he said. He must be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.

— I don’t think that my real dad’s really dead, I said aloud to Val, the words spilling unexpectedly, making the thought actual for the first time although it felt at once as if I’d been preparing it for years. I didn’t know if Gerry could hear what I was saying from next door. — I think he just left my mum when I was a baby, before I had time to have any memories of him. The way people talk about him — or don’t — is all wrong, for a dead person: not polite enough. Not as if he’s finished. Perhaps she had to divorce him, before she married Gerry. Only they didn’t bother to tell me anything about it.

Val turned his head in the grass towards where he couldn’t see me clearly. — That makes sense. I wondered why there weren’t photographs of him. Why don’t you ask her? Do you care?

— Not really. Not if he didn’t ever care, to come and find me.

— If he’s alive, he’s a cunt.

I agreed. — Why exchange one cunt for another?

Consoling me, Val began to stroke my hand, rubbing his thumb around my palm, then pushing it between my fingers, one by one, over and over, until I was sick with love for him, but knew better than to make any move towards him from where I lay dissolving. Val didn’t like me all over him. There was a rustling from among the shrubs next door; a head like a pale moon-blob rose above the top of the clematis mound, looking far-off.

— Stella, come inside, the blob said. — You’ll catch your death. That grass is damp.

Gerry’s voice in the night was sepulchral, ridiculous, tight with disapproval.

Only when I heard it was I aware of myself sprawled so provocatively on my back with my legs spread wide apart, my arms flung open. Let him look, I thought. I didn’t move. I pretended I didn’t see him.

— Did you hear something? I said to Val, squeezing his hand in mine.

We were going to laugh, I knew we were.

— Come inside, Stella, now, at once, Gerry said, but keeping his voice down as if he didn’t want my mother to know what he had to see. — I’m telling you. Get up!

Pointedly he didn’t address Valentine, ignoring his existence.

— I think I heard something, Valentine said. — Or was it cats?

Leisurely Val sat up, crouching over the cold end of the joint, hand held up to shield it from the wind and hair falling forward, hiding his face. Then came the scratch and flare of the heavy, shapely silver lighter that had been his mother’s until she gave up smoking; fire bloomed momentarily in Valentine’s cave, I saw him aflame — devilish, roseate. I scrambled to my feet. I really was stoned, the garden swung in looping arcs around me.

— Oh, I cried, exulting in it. — Oh… oh!

We were laughing now. Under my soles, the world rocked, and steadied itself, and rocked again.

— What’s the matter with you? Gerry hissed. He must have been balancing on something — a rock? or a box? — on the other side of the fence, because it was too tall ordinarily to see over; his two fists, hanging on, were smaller moon-blobs against the night. — Are you drunk?

(They still didn’t get it, about what we were smoking.)

— You’d better come back the front way. Come round by the front door.

— Back the front way, Stella? Valentine imitated softly, looking at me, not at Gerry. — Front the back way? Which way d’you like?

I had always had this gift to see myself as my stepfather saw me — only in this vision I used to be a small and thwarted thing, blocking him. Now in the moonlight I was transfigured: arms outstretched, veering like a yacht tacking, I was crossing the garden, flitting ahead of the wind, like a moth, weightless.

Valentine and I looked so consummately right as a couple: stylish, easily intimate without fuss, his arm dropped casually across my shoulder, our clasped hands swinging together. We looked sexy. I knew that because I saw it in the others’ faces. Oh well. The truth was, we hadn’t had sex much. (I think Madeleine half guessed this.) All those times we lay down on his bed together (or, occasionally, mine) we hadn’t done an awful lot — apart from our talk — for Mum and Gerry to disapprove of.

We did work ourselves up, there was some touching and fumbling. I touched him, mostly; if he touched me he turned it into a joke, put on a funny voice as if my breasts were little animals squeaking and crawling around on my chest. Kissing, he pecked dry kisses all over my face with a satirical, popping noise, smiling at me all the time with his eyes open. Then sometimes if his mother banged the gong for supper, or the phone rang and she called upstairs to say that Val was wanted, he grabbed my hand with sudden aggression, pushed it down inside his jeans, used it to rub himself fiercely and greedily for a moment, before he flung off the bed and ran to the phone, zipping up as he went, cursing, pushing his erection away inside. Remember, I was wholly inexperienced, a virgin. I wasn’t disgusted; actually I’d say I was more fascinated, by my transgression into that crowded heat inside his stretched underpants, his smell on my fingers afterwards. But also I was confused — if that was desire, it was unmistakably urgent. So what was the matter?