Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

Vivien didn’t like that, she pretended she wasn’t interested. She enticed him in her bored, bright hostess tone. — Come back and tell us more about Oxford. Dougie says he wants to take his class to see a play actually performed in Latin. What do you think — wouldn’t that be too awful to inflict on the poor boys? I’d rather die, wouldn’t you?

I hurried to fill the kettle for warming a bottle of formula, apologising that it was earlier than Lukie’s usual waking time. In Vivien’s assessing glance around the room, I saw her take in that I was using one of her precious old coffee cups. That had never been forbidden — after all, she trusted me to wash them up. Nonetheless, her powdery pale forehead creased in a quick frown, as if she was used to bearing up every day under other people’s carelessness. Or perhaps she could smell the brandy. I could hear Lukie’s wailing then, a desperate thread drawn thin across the cold distances of the house.

— Whose baby? Fred Harper asked, smiling from one of us to the other.

Working it all out.

The next week I had my first driving lesson. I had saved up to pay for these out of my wages — I didn’t have much else to spend money on, apart from the formula and nappy cream and so on for Lukie. (My mother sent him clothes, in brown paper parcels addressed in her crisp round writing: ‘Dean’s House’ fenced off inside a suspicious bristle of inverted commas. She never came there, though I did invite her.) It was my afternoon off; Auntie Jean was looking after Lukie. I hadn’t told anyone what I was doing. In my head I was perfectly calm about meeting this man who might turn out to be my father — but just before he turned up, while I was waiting round the corner from Jean’s house, I began to shake. All the time I was thinking coolly that I didn’t care if it was him or not, or what he was like. (Luckily the surname on my provisional licence was my stepfather’s.) When the car drew up and the instructor leaned over, calling to me, pushing open the passenger door, I could hardly cross the pavement to get in beside him. Of course he just put it down to nerves about the lesson.

I was better as soon as I was sitting in the car. Driving with deft, deliberate movements, demonstrating his technique, he explained that he was taking me to an industrial estate where we could practise basic manoeuvres safely. I kept my eyes on his hands, which could have been like mine — small, for a man, with rather shapeless fingers, freckles on the back. He introduced himself as Al; I knew my father’s name was Albert, but on the rare occasions she mentioned him my mother had always called him Bert. It was a good thing for me that he had to look out at the road ahead; every so often while he talked he turned to smile at me, to put me at ease. I’d been expecting him to be stolidly respectable, like my stepfather. But this man was skinny and rakish and teasing, with a thin, lined face and curving, dramatic nose, long hair curling on the collar of his striped shirt. He was the right age; but I couldn’t imagine my mother choosing him. We went to an industrial estate and he taught me all the elementary stuff, checking the mirrors and ignition and putting the car into gear; I hardly had time then to study him for clues because I had to concentrate on remembering the sequence of moves, releasing the clutch so that the car slid smoothly forward instead of kangaroo-jumping, steering slowly round a corner. I forgot what I had come for, lost myself in the driving. Before I could make up my mind about anything, my time was up.

Al offered me a cigarette before he drove me back. I didn’t often smoke but I took one: I thought maybe this was a sign, the way our two hands matched when he reached his lighter over for me and held the flame steady. I wondered what he made of me. I hardly cared in those days what I looked like: I always wore the same jeans or cord skirt, with a black jumper and no make-up, my hair pulled back. He might be disappointed — he would have looked forward to teaching a young girl, thinking she’d be flirty or sexy. We were parked at the back of a builder’s merchant’s; pavings and ceramic drainpipes were stacked behind high wire fencing overgrown with ivy.

— Was that so bad? he said gallantly. — Really your first time behind the wheel? You’re a natural.

It was true, the driving had come easily, I’d liked it. I’d only ever meant to have one lesson. I had imagined that at the end of it I’d either reveal to Al I was his long-lost daughter, or say I hadn’t liked the driving and didn’t want to take it any further. Instead I found myself arranging another lesson, for the week after.

I don’t think Mr Tapper had wanted me to come to Dean’s. Probably he and Vivien had quarrelled over it: they quarrelled often about all sorts of things. Once I heard him call her an ‘idiot’ and once I think she threw something at him; at any rate, when I came in the room a few moments after the crash, she was stooped, pink in the face, picking up the pieces of a china ornament. Anyway, Mr Tapper had given in and Vivien got me. I suppose he was anxious because I had a baby and no husband; I might be promiscuous and a danger to the boys. On the day I arrived she had announced smoothly, as if it wasn’t up for discussion, that I must call myself ‘Mrs’ and pretend I was married. I hadn’t objected, I was used to this already from the maternity hospital.

But he needn’t have worried. There wasn’t much chance of anything happening, ever, between me and any of those boys. The younger ones were nice to Lukie and sometimes they even came to me for comforting, not because I was particularly kind but just because I was a mother. The sixth-formers lived in an annexe next door to Dean’s, and I went in to clean their studies once a week. I used to forget that these were boys of my own age. I wasn’t jealous of them with their posters of Bob Marley, their piles of textbooks and their smelly socks, the braggadocio of their empty vodka bottles stuck with flags and peacock feathers — even though they were going to university and I wasn’t. I exulted in my hard new knowledge that made theirs innocent. I believed I had become an adult all at once in the passage of that hour of pain in the maternity hospital.

I was supposed to clean their rooms while they were away in lessons but sometimes one of them came back while I was still wiping round the sink or vacuuming the carpet. I must have looked to them like a witch in a fairy tale: hair scraped back in a plait out of the way, no make-up, very thin, eyes burning up in my pale face. Or they might meet me coming out of the toilets or washing the floor in the corridor — I would stand holding my mop beside my bucket of filthy water, and stare down at my shoes, and they’d push past as if they didn’t see me, treading dirt across the wet floor. Perhaps they just saw a cleaner, made sexless and ancient by her function. Or perhaps they took in that I was young and female, but felt my ferocity; presuming I must be an enemy of their type and privilege, they were afraid of me. At any rate, I never exchanged more than a couple of words with a single one of them, the whole time I was there.

Though it wasn’t because I was a nun, or made of stone.

Mostly, I told myself I was glad I had cut through all the shams of love-dreaming and passion, to some bedrock where only Lukie mattered. Against my will, however, every so often while I was working a haze of need would come over me like a fit — so bewildering that I didn’t know where I was. One of the sixth-formers came in once while I was standing with my face pressed in his dressing gown, drinking in his smell, keening to myself; he was so shocked he walked straight out of the room again, and he always avoided me afterwards. He must have thought I had a crush on him; but the truth was I hardly even knew whose room it was. I had only wanted to breathe in his male teenage smell: I suppose it reminded me of Valentine. I still dreamed of Valentine sometimes, though I hadn’t forgiven him. The smell wasn’t good (not like Lukie’s sweet one): stale sweat and cigarettes and dirty hair. But it made me drunk, it made my knees sag, made all my intelligence drain down out of my mind until I thought I would fall on the floor with longing.