Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

I supposed that as I soon as I was sent to bed the two women would talk, and I would hear the dramatic music of their murmured scandalising revelations and commiserations, penetrating the dividing wall. (I’d heard my mother talk like this with Auntie Jean, Frank’s wife, and had felt betrayed because usually we made fun of Jean. It was our joke that she knew the gossip before it even happened: ‘jungle telegraph’, Mum called it.) However, when Mum told me to get my pyjamas on, Auntie Andy announced that she would go to bed now too.

— The doctor’s given me some pills, she said. — So I should be all right. I didn’t get much sleep last night.

My mother didn’t try to explain about the sofa, and that this meant she too would have to go to bed, hours before her usual time: as a rule she never turned in before eleven or midnight. She made up the sofa for Andy with clean sheets, filled a hot-water bottle for her. Then Mum and I were shut in the bedroom alone together. It was strange to have her undressing in the room with me when I was still wide awake, tussling to take off her underwear under her nylon nightie, pulling out her brassiere through a sleeve, settling down beside me with her book and her glass of water. She couldn’t concentrate on what she was reading and her restlessness communicated itself. When she turned out the bedside light (I whined that I couldn’t sleep with the light on), I could feel the frustration of the long hours stretching out ahead of her in the dark, when she was so charged up with vitality and energy.

— So what happened to Charlie? I whispered.

— Oh Stella. Not now, for goodness’ sake.

Heaving the bedclothes over, she turned her back on me. For a while we both lay awake, listening for signs of whatever unimaginable reverie was unfolding in the next room: but there was nothing to hear. And in the morning when Mum got up, Auntie Andy was already dressed, sitting there on the sofa with her slapped face and vague smile, and all the sheets and blankets neatly folded.

On the way to school, Mum told me that Charlie was dead, flinging the word at me impatiently as if it was somehow my fault and I ought to have guessed by now: as indeed I had guessed, from the beginning. The actual word, spoken between us, worked its ravages nonetheless. I resented Charlie with a pure rage. Why couldn’t anyone else have been dead? He seemed a usurper in a realm that gave him a huge advantage of pity and terror: he surely didn’t belong there, with his ugly stamping feet. Only his squint (it had made its impression, that inky blot) had been a sign of difference, marking him apart.

— Dead, how? I insisted, and she looked down at me — bright and smart in her office outfit — with distaste, I’m sure.

— A nasty accident, she said.

I couldn’t ask, for shame: what accident? But the uncertainty squirmed in my imagination, taking on foul forms.

— You’re not to repeat a word about it to anyone, is that clear? Not one word, or I’ll take my hand to you.

She rarely smacked me, though she quite often threatened it; I was wounded that my mother could think I wanted to pass on our contaminating secret. Becoming the centre of one of those huddles of girls, darkly informed, didn’t appeal. I feared I wouldn’t carry it off, somehow the tables would be turned and the dirty story would stick to me, making me a pariah. I was too odd — too small and sexless, too good at English comprehension — for those girls to trust. My instinct in those days anyway was to smother any unpleasant truth, push it back into its hole. I was (rather abstractly) enthusiastic about dogs and horses, because the emotions these roused seemed to me clean, unproblematic: I had a dreamy image of myself running through long grass with a collie dog jumping up beside me, trying to lick my face (after long deliberation, I had elected collies as my favourites). This image was my idea of ‘nature’, and had in my private world a religious resonance.

Determinedly, all that day at school I held Charlie at bay, inventing games to play with my couple of oddball friends. We lived together in an old farmhouse on an island. A portion of the playground was the sea and we couldn’t walk on it, only row across it when we needed to get to the shops to buy provisions. Sometimes there were dreadful storms.

— Here boy!

I whistled and clicked my tongue commandingly; fed imaginary sugar lumps to imaginary horses with my hand held out flat.

What had happened to Charlie was worse than anything my fears could dredge up. It all came out in the trial. Needless to say I was never in the court, but my mother got as much time off from the office as she could to sit through it with Auntie Andy. (They were ‘very understanding’ at the office, even if that meant they didn’t pay her for the time she was out.) So she heard almost all of it; and over the years it filtered through to me. Also, Nana kept the newspaper cuttings and I found them when she died — though in those days the coverage wasn’t as lurid as it would be now, and not everything that came out in court got into the papers. It was a surprise to me that Nana had kept the cuttings. She had never let Mum talk about the case, and she certainly hadn’t manifested any prurient interest in the details. (What else to expect, anyway, from my father’s family?)

Apparently, for years Uncle Derek had been hitting Auntie Andy (Andrea, she was, in the newspaper reports). His own mother admitted in court that he had a violent temper, though she also said that Andy ought to have known how to ‘get round’ him. (Perhaps Uncle Derek’s father had been a wife-beater too?) The defence tried to make out that Andy had goaded her husband with her ‘passivity’, her ‘unresponsiveness’. The whole topic of men’s violence against their families was kept better hidden in those days. People had mixed feelings about it: it was disgusting, but it was also, confusedly, part of the suffering essence of maleness, like the smell of tobacco and the beard-growth. I think that sexuality itself was sometimes understood, by the women in my family, as a kind of violence that must be submitted to, buried deep in the privacy of domestic life. Presumably the implication of the case for the defence was that Auntie Andy had driven her husband to murder out of sexual frustration.

They made a great point of Derek’s sobriety (‘He never touched a drop,’ Auntie Andy loyally testified), and his good reputation at his place of work. He was a salesman in a car showroom, he ‘brought home very good money’. Who knows how Uncle Derek would have fared in court if he’d killed Auntie Andy? On the night in question, however, he didn’t. He arrived home from work at the usual time and his tea wasn’t ready. (‘Tea’, in this context, meaning meat and two veg, not Earl Grey and triangles of sandwich.) It wasn’t ready because Andy had been asked to go in to talk to Charlie’s teacher after school. (She hadn’t been planning to tell her husband this, but it came out as their row unravelled.) She had thought that perhaps Charlie was in trouble — he sometimes got into fights in the playground — but it turned out that the teacher was worried about his slowness in learning to read. (‘Because I don’t have any other children,’ Andy said in court, ‘I didn’t know that he was slow. I wish I’d known.’) Derek had had a bad day altogether. He’d been working on a deal to sell a fleet of cars to a driving school, and it had fallen through.

My mother said they made Andy show them on a plan how he chased her around the house, punching and kicking her from room to room. — That’s why I ran out in the street, she said, — without my coat or my bag. And I couldn’t go back inside, because I didn’t have my key. He’d never have let me in. But I didn’t want the neighbours watching while I hung about out there in the cold. So I thought I’d better go to my sister’s, who only lives round the corner.