Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

Rowan of course didn’t like the chicken pie. I had to bargain with him. — Just four spoonfuls. Just three. Then you can leave the rest. I held up my three fingers so he could see I wasn’t cheating. Really, I was saving my own face. The spoonfuls were very tiny, they were only tokens. (How could I force him to eat, when I’d been such a difficult eater myself?) After supper, when the boys were in the bath, I cleared up while Fred recited poetry to me: mostly, during that period when he was flirting with religion, Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘earth her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm…’). I didn’t mind this. If he tried to help wash the dishes or put the toys away everything took twice as long. Anyway, our arrangement was that we lived with him rent-free in return for housekeeping: scrupulously I fulfilled my part.

There were times when I didn’t mind anything: the hazy yellow evening light, the midges swarming, the back door open into the yard where the boys’ bikes and plastic racquets lay where they had dropped them, the thrush singing in a hornbeam in the garden, the intimately known round of drudgery, the sound of the boys’ splashing in the bath and their absorbing games. And at the end of it lifting Rowan out of the bathwater gone too cold, his chattering teeth and wrinkled finger-ends, his snuggling close against me, seeping wet into the big bath towel, the fight between us quenched and dormant for an interval; while Luke pulled the plug and the water drained, leaving its flotsam and jetsam beached on the enamel: bath toys and garden grit. By the time I lay between them to read to them in my single bed (they slept in the same room as me, in bunks), I was so tired sometimes that I fell asleep mid-sentence. I half knew that I mumbled a few nonsense words before I lapsed. The boys would be lost in the story, incredulous and frustrated when it failed. Peering in my face and nudging me in the ribs (— Mum! Wake up!) they would try to keep me afloat for long enough at least to arrive at the end of the chapter.

Fred was always trying to persuade me to read grown-up books. He said it would save me, and I said I didn’t need saving, that was him, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he the one supposed to be wrestling with angels or whatever? I had been a reader once, when I was a girl. But these days, with two young children — I said to him — where would I find the time? While Fred did his marking or groaned aloud in pleasure over his philosophy books and religious books (sometimes he brought in passages to read to me), I sorted out the washing. I put the television on, I stood in front of it to iron the children’s clothes and Fred’s shirts and my own things (I was working in the mornings in a small art gallery so I had to look tidy). I did my bits of mending. I made lists of what I had to do the next day. I was all right.

And then every so often, as if a switch flicked between two versions of myself, I suddenly wasn’t all right. That same night, the night of the chicken pie, I blundered up out of my bed when it was still dark. I couldn’t stay between the stifling sheets; the carpet was greasy under my bare feet, I trod on sharp fragments of toy. The boys were sound asleep, flush-faced, limbs flung out heedlessly, duvets kicked down to the bottom of their beds. I couldn’t recover my last night’s life with its ordered calm, one thing after another; I wasn’t that same person with her steady, sane perspectives. It seemed intolerable that in a few hours it would be Saturday and I’d be putting breakfast on the table once again, then eating it once again, then washing up after it, nagging the boys to get dressed, planning the shopping, putting clothes in the washing machine. These repetitions stood like a barrier I couldn’t pass, blocking the time ahead.

I went into Fred’s room and hunted in the dark for the car keys, feeling in the pockets of his jacket on its coat hanger. Confused, he reared up against the pillows and switched on the bedside light. The grandiose mahogany bed with its scrolled ends had belonged to his parents and had been his marital bed until his wife divorced him. Books were pressed open, spine up, one on top of another, on the floor beside the bed and on the bedside table — which was also crowded with cigarettes and full ashtray, empty whisky glass, bottles of tablets, alarm clock. He was incongruous in cream pyjamas — one of those men made to be fully dressed, his surface polished and finished.

— Please, let me have your keys, I said. — Don’t be mad with me. I just want them for today. Or for a couple of days.

— What kind of time is it? Christ, it’s the middle of the night, Stella. You might have been the secret police. You’re lucky I didn’t have a heart attack.

The car wasn’t really the main issue. Fred scrabbled on his table for cigarettes and lighter, upsetting the pile of books. The hair on the back of his head was muzzy from his pillows: he slept obediently on his back like a child in a storybook.

— Are you taking the boys?

— You can take them round to my mother’s. Is it all right? I’m sorry.

— But how will I take them, without the car?

— I don’t know. Get a taxi? I’ll pay you back.

I had found the keys spilt out from his pocket on to the dressing table along with a heap of change and some crumpled notes, nub ends of chalk; I gripped them so that they dug into my palm. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this: ‘done a runner’, as my Auntie Jean cheerfully described it. (I was surprised when Jean confessed to runners of her own, when she was a young mother.) I didn’t do it often — once or twice a year, perhaps. Fred knew me, he knew I wasn’t putting it on. It was part of his character to support his friends without criticism in whatever adventures they got into. He told me I’d have to put petrol in the car if I was going any distance, and to take his cash, which would tide me over until the banks opened.

Fred really did mean it about the religious thing; he went through a course of instruction and was received into the Catholic Church. He began going to mass on Sundays and taking communion and confessing. It made him happy, I think. Intellectually and in his tastes in art and writing he was so sceptical, questing, doubting; nothing shocked him. And yet in himself, in his person, there was something resigned, he accepted convention as the frame of his life. The church suited him just as the rituals of the school day suited him, imposing their pattern on the succession of minutes.

My daily life was conforming and unexciting, I knew next to nothing about politics or society. And yet I felt this strength like a knife inside me, anarchic and destructive, able to cut through whatever outward forms of authority I met — vicars or businessmen or headmasters in their grey suits, with their smooth arguments and dismissive irony, so confident in their unassailable rightness. I believed that I could see through them to their false core and their vanity. Some of the artists whose work was exhibited in the gallery were unassailable like this too, even if they didn’t wear suits — they hardly noticed me perched on my trendy high stool, paid to answer the telephone and bank the cheques. I hated the school where Fred taught, for instance, and where I had once worked as a cleaner. Sometimes when I was going on about the hypocrisy of the school — its high-toned preaching about enlightened values while it taught its pupils to be competitive and arrogant, just because they had money — Fred would look as if he was quite afraid of me. I expect that sometimes I ranted and exaggerated. I don’t really know, now, whether I was right.

The way out of Fred’s flat was up a short flight of concrete steps where shrubs grew thickly on either side: a yellow-spotted poisonous laurel and some dark evergreen with spiky leaves. It must have rained earlier because these were wet when I pushed through them in the dark; I saw the sepulchral night-face of the street, moonlight on the slate roofs and the lawns. The little white 1970 Lotus Elan smelled of its vinyl seat covers; I had encouraged Fred to buy it, I loved its sleek sumptuousness and the dirty snarl of its engine. (His ex-wife Lizzie blamed me for the frivolity and expense. She and I had a rather tortured relationship.) The moment I was behind the wheel, I was calmer. I turned on the lights, heard the engine bark into life. Driving, it was as if a spring uncoiled in me. At first I was careful not to go too fast around the sleeping streets. I drove out to the motorway, under the suspension bridge strung against the grey first light, alongside the river snaking between banks of glinting mud. I filled up at a service station, paying with Fred’s money. I drove north. Lights were still on in the windows of some factories; a white horse in a field seemed to race the car.