Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

His death broke up the commune. When I look back, I wonder if the rest of them didn’t stick together for so many months just for my sake: looking out for me with poor little Lukie and my new baby (born on time, three weeks after it happened), doing their best to comfort us. Forensics delayed for a cruelly long time; when they finally allowed us to clean up the kitchen, Daphne invented a beautiful purification ceremony, covering the place with roses and blossom from the garden, burning incense and propping up some of Nicky’s paintings against the wall, lighting candles in front of them. Each of us put something there in his memory, and spoke about him. Neil gave a full bottle of whisky, I remember; Jude gave one of her embroideries; Lukie made a card. Sheila brought the white-leather-covered testament she’d been given at her confirmation. Later we buried all these things in a hole in the garden, and then I had a horror of that place as if Nicky’s body was buried there — even though I’d been to his actual, Catholic burial in Glasgow, where his mother broke down and screamed at us, blaming our way of life (hippies and dropouts) for what had happened. (When Rowan was two or three years old I sent his grandmother photographs and she wrote back; I took him to visit her every so often and for a while, when he was sixteen and we weren’t getting on, he went to live with her.)

Daphne’s ceremony seems a beautiful idea to me now, when I remember it. At the time I just thought it was a fake; I seemed to see through everything, to a grey fake. I can’t even remember what I offered as my token. I think I chose perfunctorily — a bracelet or a pendant Nicky had given me which I hadn’t even liked — because I didn’t want to tempt fate by performing with too much conviction. I only began to cry after Rowan’s birth and then I couldn’t stop; but there was something fake about that too, this tap turned on full — spouting out its world-sorrows, soaking everything — which I couldn’t turn off. Only breastfeeding helped (I was doing it for the first time — I hadn’t even tried to breastfeed Lukie). For as long as the baby was sucking I could imagine myself connected almost impersonally into a great chain of life, one thing flowing into another. It wasn’t a hopeful feeling, just a sensation of continuity, and necessity.

Sheila was the first to leave the commune, after a row with Neil which began when he announced he was going to give up his PhD and do a law conversion course. And then once I’d gone back with the children to live at Fred Harper’s again, the others moved out quickly: that house must have been a dreadful place for all of them, we never got the stains out of the kitchen floorboards. I don’t know how I ended up with the white stone; it’s on my coffee table now, in a wide blue-glazed bowl by a ceramicist whose work I like, kept among other stones collected on family holidays later. Perhaps Lukie brought it with him. It would have seemed a powerful totem to him after he’d watched us passing it from hand to hand, adults so solemnly absorbed in the game they were playing.

None of the others ever knew about my relationship with Andrew; Sheila may have guessed something but she’s never asked me. About a year after Nicky died, Jude and I met up for a night out (she was renting a room from friends, Daphne had moved back temporarily to live with her parents). My mother had Luke and Rowan to stay: everyone was conspiring to cheer me up or take me out of myself. And somehow it happened that at the end of the evening Jude and I ended up in her bed together. We’d both had a lot to drink. It was the only time I ever made love to another woman. Jude hadn’t been harbouring a secret passion for me, the thing just came about out of her kindness; she was consoling me — and consoling herself. She felt responsible, because of Baz. She lit a scented candle in her room and her clean bed linen was patterned with ferns; it was easy touching the cool skin of her body which I knew because it was like my own but not quite like. We didn’t speak much but her light voice and northern vowels were caresses in themselves, inconsequent and soothing. In the dark under her duvet something was unblocked in me: a flood of responsive desiring, to begin with, which took me by surprise. I’d been quite numb and dry for a year, I’d thought sex could never touch me again.

And letting myself fall down into the slippery, brilliant whorls and corridors and intricacies of it, I got back my memories of Nicky too. I’d thought I’d lost these as my punishment — but they had been saved up all the time, in my body. Nicky had had a gift for sex, like his gift for drawing: attentive, inventive, easy, skilful. I think of him now like a shepherd boy in a poem, or a boy lover in a Watteau painting, with a lute. He had actually liked me — liked the clear, light, energetic person he saw in me. (I think over time I’ve become more like that person.) Sex with him hadn’t been at all like conquest; Andrew was wrong, it didn’t always have to do with submission and overwhelming. Actually Nicky was a better lover; or put it this way, he roused up more pleasure in my body than Andrew ever achieved. (But I have to reckon with the truth, too, that it was Andrew I had wanted more.)

I was packing to leave, to go and live with Andrew, when it happened. (Andrew had decided that living with me — and with Lukie and the coming baby — would save him from himself.) Lukie was at nursery. Nicky was hung-over, drinking coffee in the kitchen; he’d been out with his workmates the night before. I hadn’t told him, but I was going to tell him as soon as he came upstairs. The words were ready in my mouth (I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry); resolved, I was listening out for his quick step, taking two stairs at a time as he always did. Afterwards I went over and over this in my thoughts until I was nearly mad (because he was dead, I couldn’t help attributing omniscience to him): but really I don’t think he knew that I was going, or about Andrew. He knew that something was wrong, but not what it was. If I’d decided to tell him half an hour earlier, he’d have died knowing. We were separated from that different story by a tissue-thin sliver of time, mere accident.

Waiting, I confused my dread with the heavy child inside me making it so difficult to move around, reach down, get out my suitcases from under the bed, empty my clothes out of the drawers. Outside the windows the day was stifling hot under grey cloud; sweat ran on the back of my neck and under my arms and between my breasts. Someone arrived at the front door and Neil opened it: I thought it might be Andrew already but it was Baz, I recognised his voice — always reasonable and temporising to begin with. We’d all thought he’d left Bristol, he hadn’t bothered us for a while. Neil should have shut the door in his face. Baz pushed past him into the kitchen; Jude came running up into her bedroom. Hearing the raised voices from downstairs, and the remonstrating, made me more certain that I had to leave. I’d begun to take on some of Andrew’s opinions on communal living: it was an indulgent bourgeois whim and I couldn’t wait to get out of it, being mixed up in everybody else’s craziness and stupidity. The atmosphere in the house had soured. It even smelled bad that day, in the heat; we had a cellar that flooded periodically, according to mysterious tides in a river that had apparently been taken underground when the area was developed. Sometimes when we opened the cellar door, foul grey water would be lapping at the bottom of the brick staircase and our buckets and rubber gloves and dustpan would all be afloat.

No one screamed but some alteration in their voices must have alerted me; I went downstairs. The door which opened out of the back of the hall into the kitchen was closed, but it was half glass — the original Victorian glass with a ruby-red border and a clear star at each corner — so I saw most of what happened through that, unreal and stilted as if I was watching a peep show. Baz must have picked up our knife from where it was left on the draining board after washing up: it was only a vegetable knife, a Sabatier that Daphne had brought from home. He was threatening Neil with it, slashing it in the air (‘I’ve seen that sneering look on your face, you fat pussy’), and I remember Neil was pirouetting fastidiously with a tea towel, like a matador with his cape, to get out of its way. In another life, with a different outcome, it would have been funny. Daphne was holding her hand out, calmly and sensibly telling Baz to give the knife to her, and I think he might have done it except that he seemed to hear something — did I rattle the doorknob, was I trying to open the door? Or was it Jude coming downstairs? So instead he spun round to where Nicky must have been coming from behind to try to disarm him, and he stuck the knife into Nicky, between his ribs, with all his weight behind it.