Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

All the benches along the path were empty but she sat down beside me. — Do you mind? she said. She asked me sympathetically all about Lukie, she said she had two children of her own, a girl and a boy, eight and fourteen.

— It’s such a shock, isn’t it? she said. — The responsibility, descending like that all at once out of the blue. I was much older than you are but I wasn’t prepared in the least. I know I thought I’d go under with it. But you don’t go under, you know.

I opened up to Mrs Tapper as I hadn’t opened up to anyone. Perhaps I had an instinct that in her dryness and measured analysis she was a more useful model to me just then than Jean with her instinctive mothering. I told her about my mother and stepfather, and giving up school. I told her about the back bedroom at Auntie Jean’s and the motorbike parts. I even told her that the baby’s father didn’t know about him. I could tell her anything, I thought, it wouldn’t matter — I’d never see her again afterwards.

— So you’re stuck, Mrs Tapper said. — I know how that feels.

It reassured me that she wasn’t the motherly type and yet she had children: so perhaps I might manage it after all. Her long legs in sheer nylons were crossed under her coat and she was swinging one foot restlessly, the shoe dangling, as if she wanted to jump up and take off somewhere.

— Actually I’m looking for a girl, she said abruptly. — I don’t suppose it’s a job that would interest you. But I want someone to come and live in, to help with the chores and the children. I’ve got my own business, selling antiques: it takes up more and more of my time. We live in the school where my husband works. (I thought at first she must mean he was some kind of caretaker, but of course he wasn’t, he was housemaster at an expensive private school.) — You could have your own room. And I’d pay you on top of that: say, thirty pounds a week. But probably the job isn’t what you want.

Her impulsive gesture wasn’t like her; mostly she was solitary and wary of commitment. She must have felt a momentary kinship with me, with my plight. She really had been looking for a girl — but she didn’t have to take one with a baby. Afterwards, I think she partly disliked me because of the rash gesture I had drawn her into; which was a shame, because we had genuinely opened up to one another for that twenty minutes in the park. After I worked for her we never spoke like that again, intimately as equals. But that was all right too. We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love.

I said that I was interested. I yearned at the thought of a room of my own.

— You’re not a smoker, are you? Can you clean a house? And can you make cake? If you’re a housemaster’s wife the boys expect you to feed them ghastly cake, day in day out.

I said I could make cake and it was true, I could produce a passable Victoria sponge. And my mother used to pay me pocket money for cleaning; she’d been a hard taskmaster. Mrs Tapper was frowning into the pram. She was probably already half regretting her offer. — Does he sleep through the night yet?

I lied. I said he did.

She said she would need references. I got references from one of my old teachers and from my Uncle Ray, because of the summer job in the chocolate factory.

So Mrs Tapper saved me. And I did the right thing, going to work for the Tappers: but that doesn’t mean I was happy there. At that point I had given up on happiness. I used to think back sometimes on the plans that Valentine and I had made — living together in Paris on French bread and coffee and writing — and I didn’t feel nostalgic or regretful, I only felt contempt for my deluded previous self. What a fake he was! I thought. And what a fake I was! I knew now how things really were. And I was better off at Dean’s House than at Auntie Jean’s because I didn’t have to feel grateful or guilty, and my cousin Richard could have his room back. At least this was my own life now, not anybody else’s. At the end of each week Vivien Tapper gave me six five-pound notes in a buff envelope. She handed them over in a funny way with her face averted, not saying anything, as if it was vaguely shaming that this was what kept me installed in the centre of their lives; and yet she was tough when it came to her own money. I heard her on the telephone to her partner in the antiques business, quibbling over small sums, sticking to her guns.

Mr Tapper was handsome, younger than his wife, with rosy skin, tight-curling charcoal-black hair and gold-rimmed glasses; he was always joking, nothing he said was what he really meant. I saw him holding up a dessert spoon once at the dinner table, making satirical remarks to that. He taught mathematics and bowed his head from the neck without moving his shoulders as if he was wearing some kind of inhibiting corset; if he spoke to me it was in an awkward innuendo, commenting on my legs or teasing me about imaginary boyfriends. I don’t think he was flirting; he simply had no other register for communicating with girls. Mrs Tapper got him to fetch up from the cellar the highchair and cot and playpen they had used years ago for their own children. Hugo — pale and plump, acting the clown to make his friends laugh — was a pupil at the school, belonging half to the institution, half to his family. Juliet went to a nearby girls’ prep school; she was subdued and sceptical with a flat, freckled face. I never told the Tappers where I’d gone to school, they never asked; I suppose they presumed I was a failed product of one of the comprehensives. They never asked much about anything — to ask would have been prying. This suited me.

Their family quarters were the tall cold rooms on the ground floor of Dean’s, a solid Edwardian house across the road from the main school buildings and the chapel and playing fields and statue of Field Marshal Haig. Upstairs in the same house were dorms for the younger boys. Rich parents in those days paid for their sons to sleep in long rooms with bare floorboards, on narrow iron bedsteads made up with the same kind of coarse blankets I’d slept under once at my nana’s. I didn’t have to tidy the boys’ beds, they tidied their own.

I was a good worker. Mrs Tapper said so. There is a bleak kind of satisfaction to be had from working till your hands are sore, till your calves and shoulders ache and you’re heavy with exhaustion. In the mornings when I tied on my apron I felt as if I was girding myself in armour. I was consumed in the discipline of housework and I thought of my mother often — not affectionately; more in a spirit of emulation. I thought of how she cracked the sheets in the air when she was folding them off the line, how she wielded her brush with the dustpan into every recalcitrant corner, how she scrubbed the kitchen lino on her knees and bleached the cloths and shook out the dusters and washed all her delicates by hand, rinsing in three changes of clean water. Of course I couldn’t be good at everything all at once. I wasn’t much of a cook — I could make cake all right (jam sponge, chocolate sponge, coffee and walnut sponge) but at first I didn’t know how to cook chops or make a stew. It was awful when Juliet pushed what I’d dished up to the side of her plate. (Hugo ate school meals with the other boys.)

And I made stupid mistakes. For instance, I used a vacuum cleaner when the back of the plug was broken, with all the contacts exposed, and then after I’d finished vacuuming I left it plugged in at the wall where anyone could have electrocuted themselves by poking a finger in — Juliet or Hugo or any of the boys. Or even Lukie, maybe, if he’d rolled over and reached out. Mrs Tapper gave me a little lecture when she found the broken plug in its socket, smiling, her pale plucked eyebrows raised incredulously. I squirmed in shame though I didn’t let her see it, my face was stony. I apologised. I could have killed someone. It would never happen again. Another time, I put a pale wash on in the machine, not noticing Mr Tapper’s black sock left inside the drum; all Vivien’s white blouses and underwear turned grey and she was furious. But mostly she was too grateful to be a hard taskmaster, exiting out of the front door every morning, snatching her bag and car keys in a show of hurry, sometimes hanging on to her breakfast triangle of toast between her teeth while she pulled on her coat.