Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I presumed that the students’ freedom was temporary and would end when they graduated. When this time came, however, Nicky’s friends seemed to have no idea of moving away from Bristol or changing their lifestyle — it was as if they had embarked on an experiment which wasn’t finished yet. For a while it seemed possible that they wouldn’t ever return inside the world of grown-up responsibilities; they were inventing a new kind of life, stepping outside the old wrong, repressive patterns which their parents believed in. When some of them decided to live together holding everything in common, Nicky wanted me and Lukie to join them. If he’d wanted us to live in a threesome, as a family, I might have turned him down — the idea of living with a whole crowd of our friends persuaded me. In the end there were six of us: Nicky and me, Jude and her partner Daphne, Neil and Sheila. Seven, counting Lukie. Daphne and Neil had studied literature together at the university; Sheila had done classics.

The house was on a hill in Bishopston, in a red-brick Victorian terrace — the rent was low because it was half falling down and hadn’t been decorated in years. It suited us to live with bare boards, uncarpeted stairs, and walls showing their layers of faded wallpaper: we hung up Nicky’s paintings and Jude’s embroideries. We enjoyed how the spaces of the house were scarred and worn-out from long use, and fancied ourselves communing with the past inhabitants, furnishing it with odds and ends from the junk shops. I bought an old quilt for our bedroom, printed with faded pink roses, and I found a huge Victorian mirror in a gold frame chipped and damaged beyond repair, put out on the street with someone’s rubbish. I draped the mirror with my scarves and beads. I wanted the rooms of my life to be blurred and dreamy and suggestive — the opposite effect to the one my mother and Gerry aimed for, where everything was functioning and spotless and sealed against accidents.

Any money we earned, or anything we got on benefits, we pooled for rent and household expenses and bills. If decisions had to be made we sat round the kitchen table and talked them through. Daphne brought a perfectly round white piece of quartz from her parents’ holiday home by the sea, and we put it at the centre of the table; you picked it up if you wanted to speak and replaced it when you’d finished. Housework and cooking were supposed to be shared equally, regardless of gender. On summer nights we hung paper lanterns in the old plum and apple trees in the back garden and lay out in the uncut scented grass, drinking cheap wine and smoking dope, confessing our beliefs and our hopes and fears. I had to be careful not to talk too much: Sheila and Neil and Daphne would pounce if they thought something you said was wrong or showed false consciousness. They were tactful about my lack of education but the tact could be worse than the pouncing. Later, another element in the heady pleasure of those nights was the secrets I was holding back, burning me from inside.

The men did try to help with the housework. Neil — plump and softly shapeless, bearded — would do the vacuuming: frowning short-sightedly, cigarette uptilted at the corner of his mouth, poking the nozzle benevolently, vaguely into corners, dropping ash on the carpet behind him. Nicky washed up energetically, breaking things. But in the end Jude and I did most of it — and we didn’t mind, it only seemed fair, because the others were out at work all day, bringing in money. Anyway, we weren’t obsessed with cleaning like our mothers, victims of the ‘privatised family existence of late capitalism’. We discussed all these issues, using the white stone. There was a kind of glamour at first for the ones who found real jobs, joining the working classes. Nicky was working as a labourer, building a bypass; Sheila was in a little factory that made meat pies, Daphne helped on a play scheme for difficult children. Neil was the only one who was still a student, working on his PhD. He was a Marxist, dissecting everything down to its basis in class conflict and economics — cheerfully he saw through everyone’s illusions. He always had his working-class background on his side in his arguments against Daphne, because she came from a wealthy, arty family. Daphne was fiercely feminist: she believed that the nuclear family was an invention of capitalism to keep women oppressed, and that all men were conditioned by society to enjoy the idea of violence against women. Even when men thought they were being kind or loving or protecting women, Daphne said, really underneath it was a kind of violence against them because of its context in the wider world, where men had all the power. I was excited by her arguments. Sometimes they seemed triumphant truths which could be superimposed on every aspect of life, revealing its inner nature: they explained my stepfather and my whole history, they vindicated me. I was burning with zeal for a revolutionary breakthrough in my life.

I worked in the café in the mornings because that was when Lukie went to nursery: in the afternoons he fell asleep on our bed and I dozed beside him. When Lukie woke we had tea downstairs in the kitchen with Jude. She and I cooked vegetarian curries and pasta dishes while Lukie played with his cars and Playmobil. Jude was from Bolton, she blushed easily and was freckled and fair with a poised small figure like a child’s. Her embroidered pictures had been a great success at the art college; now she had an agent and was selling to London galleries. They were shocking raw scenes of threat and conflict: girls with slashes of red silk for their mouths and vaginas, stiff net sewn on for their skirts, bits of gold braid for their tiaras; stick-men sewn in waxed black thread, in long crude stitches. (These days they fetch astronomical prices. I owned one for a while — but I had to sell it one lean year.) Jude didn’t take politics as seriously as Daphne did. She thought everything was funny — her embroideries were funny too, in a zany, extreme sort of way.

She even thought Baz was funny, in his fixation on her. He was a tall skinny guy with a pretty, fine-boned face, startling under the shock of his orange hair. She’d slept with him once, apparently, in her first week at the art college, because she was too shy to tell him she was gay. — Trust me to choose the crazy one, she said. When Daphne called the police once because Baz followed them back to the house and broke a window trying to get in, Baz told the police that Jude was his wife and that she’d been abducted by a cult. You could see that they were half inclined to believe him.

Sheila had got a first in classics at the university, yet it was Neil who was studying for his PhD now, while she worked earning the money to support them both. When she got back from the pie factory in the evenings I could see from her bleached expression how it exhausted and disgusted her; once I found her in tears, scrubbing at her neck and arms in the bathroom, saying she couldn’t get rid of the meat smell (it was true, you could smell onions and gravy wherever she was). Because I’d worked that summer in the chocolate factory, I could guess how the other workers might resent her because she was different — but when I commiserated she turned on me. Sheila was tall, austerely judgmental, with white skin that made her face like a marble sculpture, and a mass of red-brown hair which she had to put up in a net for work.

— Other people have to spend their whole lives in these places, she said. — What’s so different about us, that we should be exempt? I’d despise myself if I couldn’t put up with it for a couple of years.

But I didn’t think that the self-sacrifice would last. There was something willed and exaggerated in how she dedicated herself to Neil, serving him as if his work was more important than anything in her own life. Often Neil didn’t even get out of bed to go to the university library until lunchtime, and she must know it; it was as if she was giving him as much scope as possible not to live up to her expectations.