Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

She stood for too long, hanging on to the pile of bedding, looking down at me, seeing me and not seeing me. There was something in her face that I didn’t like, crumbled and damp. Usually the mask of her brightness was securely in place: spirited, capable. My mother was quite tough. She could be brisk about other people’s troubles. She couldn’t afford to waste much sympathy; she had herself (and me) to look out for. No one else was looking out for us.

I was eight or nine, at the time this happened.

I could hardly remember at first who Auntie Andy was: she was a relative of my father’s, married to his cousin, and she was the only one in that family who’d made any effort to keep in touch. We probably saw her once or twice a year. At Christmas she dropped off a selection box of chocolate bars for me. She may have been moved to this kindness because she had a son about my age, Charlie. (Of course then Mum had to buy a selection box for Charlie too.) Andy wasn’t really Mum’s type. She was too indefinite: small and plump with faded gingery hair scraped back from her face in hairgrips, her skin blotchy, no make-up. She used to wear a little beige beret tilted to one side of her head, inappropriately jaunty. She was shy and never had much to say, sitting with a plate of our Christmas cake balanced on her lap, fat knees spread in her tweedy skirt, her feet crossed at the ankles, where her nylons wrinkled.

Once she’d remarked approvingly, looking round, ‘You’ve got it very nice here, Edna.’

Mum was still looming above my bed, gripping the pile of blankets.

— There’s just one thing, she warned. — When Auntie Andy comes, you mustn’t mention Charlie.

So something had happened to Charlie.

Charlie had only come in with Andy once: inches smaller than me, ginger like her but bursting unlike her with sly and hostile energy, ready with contempt for girls and women. He’d ignored his mother when she tried to pass him her handkerchief, and wiped his nose on his sleeve instead; in one of his eyes there was a blot as if black ink had spilled across the iris, and his stare was unnervingly off target. His brown lace-up shoes, polished like conkers, had made me think of the boys kicking in the queue for school dinner. I refused to ask my mother what had happened to him. I didn’t want to have unpacked for me whatever unseemly thing had made her face pulpy. I liked the scandals we read about in magazines, but they were safely glazed over with falsehood and repetition; glimpses of raw adult complications appalled me in the same way as I was appalled by the sight of an egg splatted in the pan with its yolk broken and leaking. (I hated eggs.)

Mum probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. She was inflexible in keeping secrets.

Almost as an afterthought, she added: — And don’t mention Uncle Derek, either.

I hadn’t even known his name was Derek. I’d never met him.

Andy was there when I got back from Nana’s. I always went to Nana’s after school. I was allowed to walk home on my own after Nana had given me my tea: Spam sandwiches, lettuce and tomatoes with vinegar shaken over them out of a cut-glass bottle. Nana already knew all about Auntie Andy’s coming but she wouldn’t say anything to me directly: not saying things was her speciality. She had a horror of any kind of publicity or exposure touching the family, however remotely.

— I only hope Edna knows what she’s doing, she fretted.

I was dreading that I would arrive home in the middle of a big fuss. I couldn’t bear crisis: the huddles of women, their lowered voices and smouldering glances shutting the children out and yet looping them in — tantalising them — to the dark, sticky, mucky centre. Girls practised huddling in the school playground. Mum didn’t like fuss any more than I did: whatever it was that had happened to Andy (and Charlie and Uncle whatshisname) had been bad enough to shock her out of her usual poise.

I had vowed to myself that I would never be looped in.

But when I got there Andy was sitting quietly at the end of the sofa, in the same tweed skirt that she had worn on her last visit. — How are you, Stella? she said kindly. — How was school?

She did look odd in some way — what?

I began gabbling about how well I had done in my mental arithmetic test, and how in our books we had drawn around plastic stencils of the United Kingdom with little holes to put your pencil where the cities were, and how I had to bring in something for the nature table next week, now that it was spring. I knew my mother was frowning at me urgently because by talking about school I was indirectly bringing up the subject of Charlie (although I couldn’t imagine Charlie ever shining at mental arithmetic or contributing to the nature table). But I didn’t want there to be any silences, out of which raw truths might tumble.

Auntie Andy commented admiringly that I must be very good at my lessons.

Her face was rather white. She reminded me of a girl at school who had been slapped for extreme insolence (they usually only hit the boys): when this girl walked back to her desk she was in a sort of smiling daze, vivid with shock. What was odd about Auntie Andy, I realised, was that her shyness had been blasted out of her by whatever had happened, the way an explosion can leave people deaf afterwards. When she had sat in the same place on our sofa eating cake, a few months earlier, she had been stuck for anything to say, apologetic, glancing round at the walls of our flat for inspiration. Mum had been imperiously, chillingly polite. (I suppose she’d chosen this as the right register for relations with my father’s family.) Andy had blushed and stumbled over her words, and I had guessed that her feet were hurting her in her stilettos. The time Charlie came in with her, she had been suffused with maternal pride and surprise (‘Can I really have made this?’), touching his hair and his shoulders surreptitiously, making him wriggle away; but she had also suffered, seeing his nose run in front of us.

Now she sat almost serenely, as if nothing ordinary could touch her.

Well, of course it couldn’t.

— I wanted to come here, she said to my mother, with no hint of worry that she might be an imposition. — I remembered how nicely you’d done it up. When they asked me if I had anyone to go to, I expect they thought I’d go to my sister’s. But to be honest, Edna, I don’t want anything to do with the whole lot of them, just now.

That first afternoon she must have been experiencing severe trauma, as we’d call it these days. I don’t suppose she knew what she was doing or saying. But her shyness never did come back. It wasn’t that she became bold or greedy for attention or anything like that, far from it. Her shyness transformed into something like itself, but different: reserve, or dignity.

The only outward sign of extremity was the fact that they were drinking sherry. Or Mum was drinking it, and smoking with hasty, nervous fingers: Auntie Andy’s glass, on the coffee table in front of her, looked untouched.

— Go on, Mum said tenderly. — It’ll do you good.

I’d never heard her tender like that before, with any adult; even our mutual appreciation was mostly chaffing and teasing. Obediently, Andy picked up the glass to sip, but something happened to it between the table and her mouth, as if her hand simply wasn’t under her control: her arm jerked helplessly and the sherry spilled over the top of the glass, a big gout of it, on to her skirt and our carpet. She wasn’t just shaking — it was something more violent, like an avalanche or a volcanic eruption. Andy’s old self would have been mortified; but she only put the sherry back carefully on the table and folded her hands in her lap again, while Mum knelt beside her, blinking in the smoke from her cigarette, blotting the mark out of Andy’s skirt with a tea towel. I saw that if anything it was Mum who was shy now: not shy of Andy in herself, but of whatever had happened to her, as if it were added on like an annexe to her personality for ever, exacting a kind of homage of respect and service.