Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

The driving lessons went well, I began to look forward to them. Because the rest of my life was so weighed down with responsibility and routine, in charge of the car I felt as if I was flying, I loved its power under my control. Soon I was out on busy roads, keeping up with the flow of traffic, turning left, turning right. — Good girl, Al said. — You’ve got a feeling for it. He had to touch the steering wheel sometimes, correcting my line, but he never needed to use his dual control. My wits — sluggish from housework and baby-minding — were strained taut, mastering new difficulties: holding the car in traffic in first gear, reversing round a corner.

I still couldn’t make my mind up about Al. It seemed incredible that this stranger and I, our relationship shaped so casually in the shared space of the car, might be connected by blood; the idea embarrassed me on Al’s behalf. On the other hand, our movements did seem fluidly alike sometimes, as if we were attuned. He told me he hated getting up in the mornings; well, so did I (and every morning Lukie woke me about half past five). There was something familiar — from my mirror, from inside my own skin? — in the way Al squeezed his eyes up when he smiled. But none of this was enough. I couldn’t be sure. I liked him, in spite of his dated lazy cowboy style (he got lazier, the more he saw that I was good): his slouchy walk, his missing tooth, his smell of beer and fags and man-talk about fast cars. I guessed that he fancied himself as a bit of a charmer, though with me he was steadily courteous, almost fraternal. He played electric bass in a blues band.

I put off saying anything to him. I didn’t want to spoil my own pleasure in our lessons, or Al’s pride in how well I did. I told him a few things about Lukie, pretending I was married.

— Do you have children? I did ask him once.

What if he replied that he’d had a little girl but he’d lost touch with her, and it was what he most regretted in his life?

— No, I’ve missed out on that, he said, cautiously, blandly.

Fred Harper took to calling at Dean’s in the afternoons whenever he had a free period, hoping the grown-up Tappers would be out. I wondered at first if he was coming because he was afraid of me, thinking I would tell his story to the school; but it seemed more likely he was just bereft and bored. And perhaps I was touched with glamour for him, because of our shared association with Valentine. I think he found my situation poignant, like something in a book.

Anyway, for a long time I wouldn’t speak to him. It began because of the milk bottle and the past; then my refusal became a thing in itself, almost a game. I would be playing with Lukie and working in the kitchen, tidying up, starting preparations for the evening meal; I’d make Fred cups of tea and set them in front of him at the table without a word. If I needed to get on with cooking, I’d shove Lukie down on Fred’s lap — he was good with babies, he had children of his own, a girl and a boy; he told me how he missed them, how depressed he was now that he only saw them every other weekend.

Fred was never deterred by my lack of response; he talked on and on, either about the school (which he claimed he hated) or about things I had no interest in any more — books and ideas and poetry. He had opinions about everything. Even under normal circumstances he was one of those men who hog more than their fair share of any conversation. Tactfully, though, he didn’t mention Valentine again for a long time. He spoke as if he and I were old friends and had always known each other, though we’d never actually exchanged a word before the Tappers’ dinner party. I’d heard him shouting and weeping to Valentine in the street, that awful night, but I hadn’t gone out to join them.

If Mrs Tapper came home and found Fred in the kitchen, she couldn’t repress her irritation — she was the opposite type to Fred with his operatic range of feeling. She liked to banter quickly backwards and forwards with her friends, she couldn’t bear Fred’s drawl and his air of being in for the long haul, conversationally. She said he had doggy eyes; he called her ‘the walking antique’. But Fred and Juliet had the same quirky humour; they entertained Lukie together or played baby games at the kitchen table, tiddlywinks or snakes and ladders, which they pretended to take deadly seriously (though Juliet wouldn’t let her father teach her chess). Fred made a joke to Juliet out of my silence, explaining to her that I wouldn’t forgive him for something he’d once done.

— What something?

— Ask her. Fred gave a doleful look.

It was unimportant, I said. It wasn’t worth mentioning.

While I was still living with the Tappers, I went home sometimes to spend a weekend with my mother and stepfather. I still quarrelled with Gerry: once, terribly, about independence for Angola of all things, concerning which I had heart-warming expectations though only a vague idea of where it was. But mostly it was OK. I liked my brother Philip, and Philip loved Lukie, he played with him for hours on end; at eleven months Lukie took his first steps towards Philip, who was holding out his hands, chirruping and coaxing. I was snoozing on the sofa, watching telly. I think my mum was sorry for me because of my hard life at Dean’s, though she wouldn’t say so. She pampered me in little ways that reminded me of long ago when I was a child and there had only been the two of us. She slipped money into my jeans pocket when Gerry wasn’t looking and made my favourite things for tea (cheese and potato pie with bacon on top, apple fritters). Gerry sulked, jealous. I asked her once, when we were alone, whether she had any photographs of my real father. (I didn’t say I’d guessed he wasn’t really dead; and I hadn’t mentioned the driving lessons to anyone.)

— Oh Stella, she complained. — Why d’you have to bring up that old story?

She swore she didn’t have any photographs, and I commented that this was a bit strange, for a widow. If I’d been married and my husband had died, I said, I wouldn’t have thrown away all his photographs. The next morning with an odd, ashamed face she pushed something at me wordlessly: an old manila envelope fuzzy at the corners. I locked myself in the bathroom to investigate, tipping out a few pictures on to my lap as I sat on the side of the avocado-coloured bath: they were black and white, and tiny as if they had shrunk as that old time receded. My mother, whose gaze at the camera was already forceful, had her thick hair chopped short; she wore big-skirted summer frocks and her figure was poignant with that post-war extreme thinness (there were none of her pregnant). My father in all of them was blurry, lean, attentive. There was one picture of him holding up in both hands, at arm’s length, a baby stolid and unsmiling — me, I suppose. He was more like a boy than a young man — hungry hollow cheeks, raw jawline, dark hair flopping forwards over his eyes. That boy just might have grown up into Al, but I couldn’t see for sure. When I tried to give the envelope back to my mother, she told me to keep it.

I took Lukie out in the afternoons sometimes, if the weather was nice. One day we met Fred Harper on our way to Brandon Hill, where I’d first met Mrs Tapper. Fred insisted on coming with us. I strode along beside him pretending not to see him, sealing my face up and pressing my lips tight shut, levering the heavy pram (which had been Jean’s) up and down the kerbs with my foot on the crossbar underneath; or chatting away with Lukie, cutting out Fred. The further I got from the school, the lighter I felt; I thought my young body was so strong I could walk for ever.

— I suppose he’s Valentine’s baby, Fred said: breathless, because he was out of condition, at the speed I was going. I suppose he felt he could broach this subject because we were outside the school’s orbit. — And that Valentine doesn’t know.