Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— You just have to sit it out, she said. — You can go and check him every fifteen minutes, to reassure him you haven’t abandoned him. But don’t put the light on in there, don’t talk to him, just lay him down again, then go. Trust me, it works.

She poured two glasses of whisky and made tea for me, with sugar in; I watched the stuttering hand of the kitchen clock. When I went back after the first fifteen minutes, Lukie was smear-faced, blubbing, frantic, reaching up his arms for me; incredulous when I abandoned him again. In the kitchen, rummaging in one of the drawers of the dresser, under a pile of ironed tablecloths, Vivien brought out cigarettes and a crossword book.

— I have to hide these from Robin, she confessed.

Mr Tapper did the Times cryptic more or less easily every day. The crosswords in her book were of a different species: ‘star-crossed lover (5)’ was Romeo, and ‘replace (10)’ was substitute. She lit a cigarette and I smoked one too; we worked through the crosswords one after another, looking up clues at the end of the book if we were ever stuck, as there was no particular honour in victory. I must have gone back in to Lukie five or six times; Vivien refilled our whisky glasses. We sat with our feet tucked up under us out of the way of the cold tiled floor. Then eventually, while we were trying to think of ‘something unpleasant to look at (7)’, she lifted her head up, listening, and signed to shush me, touching the back of my wrist with her hand.

— There, I think he’s gone, she said.

My hearing strained at the absence of what it had grown used to; a blessed silence hung across the house. We gave him a few minutes, to make sure; Vivien said I knew where the whisky was if he woke up again later. But he didn’t. It worked as easily as a miracle; and he was always a good sleeper afterwards. (It worked with my second son too, later.) The following night Lukie didn’t even wake for his usual feed at midnight. I slipped into bed, expecting to be roused to the struggle at any moment; the next thing I knew it was seven-thirty and Lukie was shouting cheerfully at me from his cot. I think he was as relieved as I was to be rid of the burden of those night-times. I’d given him power over his own sleep — I should have done it months before. I tried to express something like this to Vivien when I thanked her but she brushed it away, it wasn’t the kind of thing she liked to discuss. — Someone helped me out with Hugo, she explained dismissively, — at a time when I was going fairly bananas.

I don’t think Vivien Tapper and I could ever have been friends. Yet it’s surprising how often I’ve thought about her since those days — not particularly warmly nor resentfully, just aware of her existing somewhere, picking at the knot of her life in her own way. Some people accompany you like this in imagination, long after you’ve dropped any real connection with them. We used to bump into each other every so often for a while after I left, and she would ask what I was doing; it was always too complicated to tell her. If she’s still alive, she’s an old lady by now.

I was dusting the books one October morning in the Tappers’ study. Mr Tapper did his marking in there, Vivien did her accounts. Neither of them were really readers, not what I’d call readers: not like Valentine, say, or Fred Harper. But there were books on their shelves and once or twice already I’d had to take them down a few at a time, riffle through the pages, blowing the dust off, and then wipe the shelves clean. I was still suspicious of books through all those early years while Lukie was small — I didn’t trust them, they had led me too far astray. But my guard must have been down that morning; at any rate, one of the books fell open in my hand while my attention was elsewhere, dreaming — so that my eyes took in almost accidentally what they read. And then it was too late: a message shot directly into my heart, jolting and deflecting me, making me blind to my routines. I didn’t even really understand the words I was reading, I couldn’t have explained them to anyone: ‘lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west’. It wasn’t their meaning that affected me, it was the words themselves — the solidity of them, their being assembled together in that particular order and rhythm — which stopped my breath. They seemed a signal from another, bigger life than the one I was in, as if a smothering blanket had been torn through. I shut the book quickly and sat back on my heels, wiping my face sticky with sweat and dust, and thought that if I had to spend another winter at the Tappers, I would die. Rain eased and pressed outside against the windowpanes, a frond of dead clematis tapped the glass. Then I thought that I’d die if I had to spend another hour there.

The book was a poetry anthology; I saw that Vivien had won it as a prize at school. I’m sure she never opened it while I was there. Afterwards, when I started reading again, I did find that poem eventually but it never had that same effect on me; I expected too much of it, I’d worn it out before I really knew it (and I had no idea, for years, that it was about Abraham Lincoln). I did grow to love other poems of Whitman’s. Anyway, that morning I left the books in their pile on the floor and went upstairs to where Lukie was having his nap. The blinds were drawn down in our bedroom; I tiptoed around the cot in the dulled pink light, gathering our things together and packing them into a rucksack and an old suitcase I’d brought from home. I would have to leave our heavy luggage and pick it up later. Everything we needed for that night — nappies and changing kit, clean clothes for Lukie; money and knickers and a comb and toothbrush for me — I put in a bag I could carry over my shoulder. The sound of the falling rain was so dense in the quiet that my limbs seemed to be pushing against some resistance that made them roused and tingling. ‘Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west.’

Then I went downstairs and telephoned Mrs Tapper at the Antiques Market. I wept, I apologised for leaving so suddenly. She was exasperated because she’d have to shut up the stall early, to be home for Juliet. — Fred Harper’s? Out of the frying pan into the fire, she warned. (She was wrong about that.) And she made some complaining remark, out of the blue, about the electric radiator my mother had lent me for my room; she said I ought to have consulted her first, didn’t they use a lot of electricity? Then I put the phone down on her. There was no point in telephoning Fred yet, he would be teaching. I woke Lukie up and changed him and kissed him, gave him a biscuit and a bottle of juice; I put him in his pushchair (he’d grown too big for the pram) and we went out. It was pouring down — at least I had a plastic cover for the pushchair. It was a kind of madness, really. I had no idea what would happen next. We went into a café — the very one I got a job in later — where, when I’d got over dripping and steaming, I bought us both lunch. I sat proudly with my little son whose instinctive attentive courtesy charmed the waitresses — he sipped so responsibly, carefully from his feeder cup, studied the other customers with such steady curiosity. And as soon as school was over, I telephoned Fred Harper from a call box.

I OUGHT TO EXPLAIN, BEFORE I go on, that the father of my second son was killed — and in a horrible, stupid way — just a few weeks before our baby was born. So Rowan never knew his father, Nicky, although he’s always known his story and the story of his death. He used to make me tell it to him, over and over, when he was small; and I believed in those days that you should always answer children’s questions, tell them everything they want to know. (Well, not everything. There were hidden elements in the story which I held back.) Now, I wonder whether all that openness was healthy for Rowan. Perhaps there was something in the sad story which stuck to him, darkening his spirit and damaging his defences. He isn’t at all like Nicky in his personality. Nicky was sweet and happy and good; Rowan is a wonder but he isn’t any of those things. He does have Nicky’s eyes, though. I had a home birth in the commune, with all the women around me, and that’s what I saw as soon as they delivered Rowan up on to my stomach, slippery and bloody, before they’d even cut the cord: Nicky’s eyes staring up at me, dark as blueberries, singling me out, accusing me.