Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

Each of us wanted the other to be the darkness, listening.

Nicky made drawings of the men he worked with on the bypass — I still have them. They are done in pencil in a notebook when they were taking a break, or whenever he wasn’t busy and the foreman wasn’t looking. He told me the men teased him for it but they gathered round to look at themselves: hunched against vibration, tamping the road surface with a rammer; or hunkered over the nub of a cigarette and a mug of tea, paging a thumbed-soft copy of some porn magazine; or craning, hands on levers, to see out of the cab of an excavator. Pages are torn out of the notebook where he gave sketches away. (These men also called him Blackie and gave him the dirtiest work to do, emptying the portable latrines.)

Nicky had lost his way at the art college; the teachers weren’t interested in his drawings from real life. The paintings he did — his final show was a series of repeated marks in thick acrylic, built into rectangular blocks — were quite striking and seemed to impress people. He took them very seriously and they got him good marks. But I don’t think he really knew why he was painting them or what they meant. He wasn’t clever, not in that way. Although I never said so, I could always see through those paintings to an emptiness behind. I can’t see through the little drawings in that notebook, or the ones in other notebooks which he did of me and Lukie and the others — so exact and sure and graceful. The surface of these drawings has its own interior which I can’t penetrate, no matter how hard I stare. (And I don’t stare, not all that often. All this happened long ago, it’s history now.)

I stopped him drawing me in those last months, I couldn’t bear it. (Pretending it was politics — ‘I don’t want to be your subject.’) There’s only one quickly scribbled sketch of me pregnant with Rowan. I’m in the bedroom, doing my hair in front of the mirror with my arms up, my mounded stomach a swelling line under the folds of a loose top. I’m probably wearing my jeans with the zip open, I went on wearing them long after I stopped being able to do them up. I’m not looking at Nicky. I probably didn’t even know that he was drawing me. I’m only looking at myself.

I didn’t know whose baby Rowan was until he was born and it was so obvious he was Nicky’s (his eyes, hair, skin — though he was pale at first; and something fluent and musical, almost feminine, in their limbs). And then afterwards when Rowan grew up so angry with everything and so intransigent, although I knew rationally this wasn’t possible, I couldn’t help thinking that because I had also been making love to Andrew all during the time when I conceived him, and through the months of my pregnancy afterwards, some bitterness from Andrew’s blood or sperm or spirit had got somehow into the mix that made Rowan up. (It’s obvious there’s a sounder explanation. The bitterness that got into him was me.)

And yet, during all that time when I was behaving so badly and no one knew, and when I was so guilty and full of foreboding, I was also often happy — happy in an unbalanced, ecstatic kind of way I’ve never experienced again in all my life. I was with Andrew once in the back garden out among the fruit trees and we weren’t kissing because anyone might have been watching from a window, but the not-kissing was more heady than kissing and I hardly knew what I was doing. He advanced on me, talking about how British society was winding down to its own destruction because of the treachery of the intelligentsia, and I retreated ahead of him, ducking between trees drowning under their foam of white and pink blossom; my ears were full of bee-sound and we crushed a fumy mulch of last year’s rotten plums and apples underfoot. The baby’s mystifying bulk inside me came between us, connecting and separating us. He broke off a whole branch of wet, scented apple blossom and gave it to me. It was a criminal thing; bees were still dangling, desirous, around the flowers’ stamen and stigma and their bulges of ovary which would now never grow into apples. The broken branch was an emblem of my too-much; it seemed more lordly not to refuse such bounty if it offered. What it was impossible to have without harm was also most to be desired. And after all, no one in the commune was supposed to own anyone else’s body, or their feelings. Why, then, was it my first and deepest instinct to keep what was happening with Andrew to myself, as my secret?

If there was apple blossom then that must have been April; and Rowan was born in May. So that scene happened very late, not long before the end. There’s another scene in my memory, from when it was still winter: we’re all bulky in our layers of warm clothes. Everyone’s there, Andrew too. (Not Baz.) Daphne has come back from an afternoon modelling at the art college. Sheila has given up at the pie factory, a burden of sacrifice has fallen from her, she’s buoyant and brittle (not much time left before she leaves Neil and goes off to South America). Jude and I have cooked and we’re in aprons, ladling food out of a couple of big pans; the others are all sitting round the table. I remember all this because I have a photograph of it, a Polaroid, its colours faded now to queasy green — there’s some dark mess on the plates in front of us which we haven’t begun to eat, we’re all looking up expectantly at the photographer. I can’t think who the photographer was. Some convenient outsider stepped into our story to record it.

What’s striking about Andrew in the photograph is how thoroughly his looks now seem to belong to that period. His dun-coloured hair, parted centrally and grown down almost to his waist, makes his face seem too long; he looks young and pasty and his ears stick out. The appeal he once had for me has dated, I can’t recover it. Whereas Nicky looks timeless and vividly alive, as if he could step so easily out of the photograph and across into the present. He has Lukie on his lap. Lukie isn’t looking at the camera, he’s twisting round to smile up at Nicky and touch his face. No wonder I don’t look at this photograph very often. When we’ve finished eating we fall into shouting, drunken, earnest discussion of what knowledge is, and how it is that we know what we know. Sheila’s been reading French philosophy and she says knowledge is only our struggle to have power over things and over each other. I am insisting that one form of knowledge is knowing what milk is like, say, as a baby knows, even before it has language. Andrew says that isn’t real knowledge, it’s only perception, which is different. Real knowledge is that water boils at 100 degrees. This shouting and arguing — all of us involved in it together — is a heady pleasure too, just like the loving in the garden.

And then I was a widow. I wasn’t legally a widow, as Nicky and I were never married, but it’s funny — especially under the complicated circumstances — how the word stuck to me right away in my own imagination. People were startled when I used it. I suppose I was formed by widows: my grandmother was one from before I was born, and my mother was supposed to be one until she married my stepfather. In the commune we believed we weren’t going to do anything the way our parents did — we didn’t want to conform to their types, we repudiated their categories. But when real trouble came those new hopes could look for a while like shallow scratches on a surface. I fell down, after Nicky died, into a very ancient hole. Widowhood didn’t have any glamour for me, it wasn’t a pose, I wasn’t picturing myself poignant or mournful in a black veil or anything. I certainly didn’t pity myself — not after what I’d done. But I recognised this stony place, this bedrock, as if I had been down here before. Somehow it was important to have a name for it, one of the old names.