Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I wouldn’t answer.

— Dear girl, he said. — Dear Stella. It wouldn’t have worked out, you do realise, even if I’d never had anything to do with Valentine.

I knew that this was true.

— Why are you punishing yourself, slaving in that mausoleum? Come and live with me, you can keep the flat clean for me instead of paying rent. Come live with me, don’t be my love. There won’t be any problems on that score. I’m lonely. I’ll read to you, I’ll heal you. I’ll keep your secret.

The sky was blue and cloudless; we were passing in and out of the hot light, which was muffled under the thick-leaved trees and the striped shop awnings. The streets were ripe with the baked smells of dirt. Safely strapped in, sitting up and hanging on to the pram sides, Lukie beamed between us, trying to connect us up. The beauty of the day broke over me in a sensory wave, stronger than my will. — Maybe, I said suddenly, startling Fred: who’d probably forgotten I could actually hear him making his rash offers, getting carried away.

— I’ll think about it. I might take you up on that.

Well, serves him right, I thought. That’ll shut him up.

I didn’t mean it seriously that first time Fred suggested it, I was only teasing him. I had to get to know him first, before I could begin to unpick some of the tension and resentment that keyed me up for working at Dean’s House. I had to come slowly to believe that a better life was possible. I stayed on with the Tappers for a year altogether, more or less. A year and a day: like someone in a story under an enchantment. But however crazy it sounds, I did go to live with Fred Harper eventually. Fred’s dead now. But for a long time he was one of my good friends. And when I moved into his flat I cooked and cleaned for him instead of paying rent and bills, and on Saturdays he looked after Lukie, and Auntie Jean had Lukie three afternoons a week, and I took a part-time job working in a nice café where I liked the owners and they liked me. There was a bit of trouble with Fred’s wife, who got the wrong end of the stick (again); but we sorted that out, it didn’t mean anything. It was a happy time.

I passed my test first try, in August 1975. I hadn’t expected my driving lessons ever to get this far; perhaps that was why I was so calm. Smoothly I changed gear, went through the pantomime of ostentatiously checking in my mirror as Al had taught me, slowed down going into a curve and accelerated out of it, reversed around a corner in a tidy arc — all as if I was observing someone else doing it, some dummy automated so she couldn’t be caught out. Al was waiting for me outside the Test Centre when we got back — I caught one private glimpse of him before he saw us: abstracted, bored. Then he returned inside his smiling professional self, ground out his cigarette under his shoe, stepped forward while I got out of the car (my knees trembling belatedly), and embraced me. For a moment I was clasped (perhaps) against my father’s chest, smelling his smoke and aftershave.

— Now is that a good feeling, he said, — or is that a good feeling?

I expect he did this to all the women who passed: on a sliding scale, exacting a kiss within the bounds of propriety from the younger or good-looking ones, conferring it as a favour on the plain ones and the ones who were too old. But he did always imply that I was his special comrade, because I was a natural driver like him. He couldn’t get over my passing after only nine lessons, he said that he’d told everyone about me. He insisted on driving me back after the test; passing went to people’s heads, apparently, they got too careless. I didn’t know when I was ever going to drive a car again, anyway. I had no prospect of being able to afford one. I asked him to drop me off outside the school; I had a few hours free before I had to pick up Lukie from Jean’s house.

— Goodbye then, I said. — Thank you.

— Good luck, he said. — Good driving.

And this time we shook hands.

The school was a strange place in the summer holidays. Deserted, its Victorian Gothic spaces seemed more eloquent: as if the missing boys had all grown up or died — which of course generations of them had. It was only when the school was empty that I ever felt the power of that ideal of gilded, privileged youth, set apart for a different destiny, which the school and staff were always trying to put over. When the place was full of real boys, the ideal seemed a sham. I meant to lie down on my bed after my driving test, in my room that was all windows, and sleep in the afternoon sun. I hungered for my bed and dreamed of sinking down into that vacant time alone, with no responsibility. But every time I closed my eyes I seemed to be driving again — only this time it was a huge effort, fraught with dread and difficulty, gears grinding and smashing, swerving to avoid oncoming traffic and looming obstacles. My heart thudded so painfully that it forced my eyes open; then I was astonished, looking round me at the quiet room. Lights from the small yellow lozenge-shaped panes around the windows were spotted across the bare floorboards like honey; nothing moved.

Lukie started sleeping through the night, thanks to Mrs Tapper. Those night-time sessions with Lukie had been so awful. The trouble usually started around midnight when he woke up and I gave him a bottle; after that, he never really went off again into deep sleep. I loved him better than anyone, than my own life; but in those hours he was also my enemy. I felt I was defending the last spaces of myself, because he wanted them. Lukie at night was unlike his clear daytime self, he was fretful and spiteful; if I took him into bed with me he chattered extravagantly, with an edge of hysteria, as if he were drunk. If he fell asleep in my arms and I managed to lower him into the cot without waking him, all too soon he would begin surfacing again, twitching and grumbling, rubbing his fists into his eyes. Then he would scramble to his feet, reaching out his arms through the bars of the cot for me, babbling a low-level moaning complaint, ‘Mamamama…’, which I knew would crescendo into loud crying if I tried to ignore it. And I couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t risk waking the whole house. I had promised Vivien that he would sleep. I had to pick him up. I could be walking up and down that room with him for hours: stumbling, vindictive, exhausted.

I wasn’t good, in those long nights. Sometimes I was mad. I said some horrible things to Lukie while we were walking up and down together, hissed and whispered them; and afterwards I dreaded that even if he didn’t understand the words, the spirit of my madness might have seeped in at his ears and poisoned him for ever. (Although he’s never shown any signs of it, I must say. Somehow he’s managed to forgive me.) Then one night Vivien Tapper interrupted us. It was two o’clock in the morning. I’d never seen her in her long wool dressing gown before, her face bleached without make-up.

— Come on now, Stella, she said. — This is getting silly.

She reached out for Lukie and I gave him to her; he was too astonished to protest. She was perfectly nice to him as she always was, but held him away from her body as though she was afraid of marks on her dressing gown (all my clothes were stained with baby dribble). Laying him down in his cot, in a firm voice she told him that it was sleep-time now. We left the room, with only the little night light on behind us. I could hear Lukie pulling himself up at once, rattling the cot bars even as we closed the door; then, after one long breath of shocked silence, the beginning of a wail of outrage.

— Won’t he wake Mr Tapper up? I said. — And Juliet?

— They’ll have to put up with it, Vivien said.

We went down together into the kitchen whose corners at night were cavernous and shadowy; a fluorescent tube-light under a metal shade was suspended on long chains over the table. Vivien switched on the electric fire and tuned the radio to the World Service, not too loud. Behind the radio voices Lukie’s desperation was just audible, seizing like a tiny vice on my thoughts and squeezing them.