Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

When Andrew turned up at the party without any warning (he’d got Sheila’s address from the other sister), they hadn’t embraced or even touched each other. — It’s you! was all Sheila had said, when he dropped to sit on the grass beside her. And she had protested, joking, that he could at least have sent her a postcard. Andrew was tall — very tall, six foot four or five — and he looked as marked with damage — eyes extinguished, stale, unshaven grey-white face, lank draggled hair — as if he’d come back from the dead instead of, as it turned out, bumming around southern Europe. His eyes were chinks of blue in his long face: small, indifferent, retreated behind the craggy mass of his cheekbones. He had been playing his saxophone for money or labouring or working on the grape harvest; in jail for a while, waiting to be deported from Spain. When we asked him to play his saxophone, he said he’d sold it.

He stayed with us for a few weeks, in a sleeping bag on his bed-roll on the floor in the front room; then he moved to live in a squat in a filthy spindly old house in a Georgian crescent, where there was more drink and more drugs than at our place and less domesticity. Even after he’d moved out he seemed to spend a lot of time with us. I supposed at first that he came to see Sheila. My heart used to sink when he turned up because his presence had a dampening effect — he was too brooding and dogmatic. He was contemptuous of our commune, the sharing of possessions and decision-making; he said it was only tinkering behind closed doors, not changing anything real. Real revolution, he said, had to happen out on the street. He picked up our white stone one evening, laughing when we explained what we used it for, throwing it indifferently from hand to hand. Only Daphne protested — she was braver at quarrelling with him than anyone else. Andrew never talked much, it was as if you had to drag speech out of him; yet he dominated any conversation he was in. Despite this, people were drawn to him, they wanted his approval.

In the end, I wanted his approval too.

I can’t explain the power Andrew had over me, for a while.

That’s just what I said to him: — I can’t explain the power you have over me. Rashly — but he made me behave as if there was no point in self-preservation. And he said, — It’s biological. There’s nothing you feminists can do about it. You can tinker around with all the rest but you can’t change the shape of fucking, where you need me to overwhelm you. Don’t you? Unless you want a man to love you like a baby.

This racked me at the time, because it seemed unanswerably true: that you couldn’t reverse the male gesture of possession and penetration which was at the heart of sex. Part of Andrew’s attraction certainly was his huge, lean strength — I thought of his size as a force. I supposed it was what made him able to drink so much without losing himself. He drank wine, mostly; he’d picked up the habit abroad. When he was drunk he wasn’t garrulous. If he was ever sober, he was silent. His need for the drink and the drugs seemed to come out of a narrow concentration in him that was almost puritanical, some exacting demand he made on life that could not otherwise be met.

Andrew’s conscious attention mostly wasn’t on women; he only really warmed to the company of men. He described legendary drinkers, scoffers and fighters he’d met on his wanderings, in Thessaloniki, Chania, Barcelona. He sparred with Neil, sizing him up. And he liked Nicky. Everyone liked Nicky. Nicky talked to Andrew about his work building the bypass: he was a carpenter’s assistant, unloading hot sacks of cement fresh from the factory, putting together the wooden frames into which the mixed cement was poured. Andrew didn’t even mind Baz; he held him in long conversation at our kitchen table once, when Baz came looking for Jude while she hid upstairs. Baz was twitchy from whatever he was taking that had cranked him up so high, he looked harmless and foolish beside Andrew’s uncompromising bulk. All the time they were talking, Andrew was rolling up in his thick, deft fingers — sticking papers, dribbling a line of loose tobacco from his pouch, cooking the dope lump in his lighter flame, chipping into it with his thumbnail. The ritual absorbed Baz and calmed him. I was making supper at the stove and pretended to be taking no notice of them — I could see through the window that Lukie was safe, playing outside in the garden.

— How would you feel, Baz tried to explain (strained, focused on something deep inside which ate him up) — if she was your girl and they wouldn’t let you see her? Wouldn’t you worry? All I want is for her and me to talk. I need to talk to her.

— You’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, Andrew said almost jovially, sweeping up dropped shreds of tobacco into his palm. — The only person not wanting you to talk to Jude is Jude. I’m afraid she doesn’t like you, my friend.

Baz was only hurting himself, Andrew suggested, by chasing after her. He might as well give up and go home, find someone else. (At the time, Baz almost seemed to take it from him.) But Andrew never put on that teasing expansiveness with women. When Jude thanked him for fending off Baz, he only batted away his smoke with his hand, warning that she should be more careful what company she kept. He told me later that he thought her embroideries were the cheapest kind of sensationalist trick. Sheila was tolerated, a comrade left over from the childhood he had abandoned. And he dismissed Daphne’s organising energy, saying she made him think of a lady magistrate; he called her radical feminism ‘politics for girls’. I thought that Andrew must despise me because I was so ignorant and I hadn’t read anything. I never contributed to the kinds of conversation that he liked.

One evening while he was arguing with Neil, I went upstairs to check on Lukie, saying I thought I heard him cry out. Actually I was bored by their argument — about anarchy, which Neil was keen on and Andrew despised. Lukie was fast asleep, his face beautifully clear, emptied of the busy day, cheeks flushed, one arm thrown out across the pillow. I lingered out of reach of the raised voices, moving around in my bare feet between our empty rooms in the half-dark that was never complete because of the street lamps: the windows were all open, it was still summer. Outside it rained steadily and persuasively, drenching the gardens; the smells of wet grass, and rain steaming off the hot tar of the road, mingled with the incense we burned in the house and the musty carpets.

Andrew must have followed me upstairs. I was suddenly aware of him blocking my way when I tried to pass him on the landing; he stopped me clumsily but peremptorily, as though I must know what he wanted. Confused, I wondered if he was angry with me for some reason. Then — buried in the completed blackness against his sour heavy clothes, nose and throat full of new intimacy with the unknown of his body — I was more mystified and gratified than anything. Or, I felt as if I was falling through the lit surface of things, out into a new realm of experience where everything was upside-down, and darker. As soon as I guessed that this darker world existed, I wanted to enter it and try what was there. Honestly, until that moment, I hadn’t even liked him.

Of course, this way of telling the story — this stuff about the darkness — is also a romance, a dangerous romance. And looking back, I understand now that Andrew liked me because he made a mistake about me. Because I’d had a baby and hadn’t gone to university, and because I was shy in those days and painted my eyes and could cook and was wary of joining in the arguments, he misinterpreted my character: which was fair enough, all the signs were pretty misleading. In his mythology women ought to be intuitive and enigmatic and wholesome — a safe place in which the lights of male striving and intellect could heal themselves. Whereas I was hoping: now he’ll listen to what I think. To this man, I thought, I can tell the truth at last.