Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

The traffic thickened. In the little Lotus I nipped in and out between the lorries, urgent as if I was forging on towards something. I hardly thought about the boys I’d left behind me, rousing in their beds and wondering where I was, Rowan stepping out of the parcel of his plastic pants and sodden ammoniac nappies, shaking Luke awake to play with him, Luke taking charge (‘Let’s go and tell Fred she’s gone’). I didn’t think about anything, I was transparent and alive, washed through with the present moment.

The first time I ran away, Rowan was only eighteen months old. I took the boys to my mother’s and when she came to the front door she was dressed up to go out shopping in her coat and silk scarf and clip earrings, her face freshly made up.

I said I was stuck and needed her help.

I saw how she opened her mouth to make some remark about how I’d better get used to being stuck at home and bored. She couldn’t help wanting to remind me that my difficulties were the consequence of the rash, headstrong life I had chosen, ignoring her warnings, mixing with the wrong kind of people.

— It’s an emergency, I lied. — Madeleine’s in some kind of trouble.

When she looked in my face she must have seen something that silenced her because resignedly she began unbuttoning her coat. Luke was already helping Rowan off with his shoes. Luke loved the ordered routines of his grandmother’s house, the fitted carpets and big telly and central heating. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to live that way. I slipped away before Rowan could realise I was leaving. Madeleine was as good a destination as any other. I had her address, that was all, but no clear idea of how to find her. I hardly knew London. And this was in the days before the Lotus; I was in Fred’s old Hillman Imp, which overheated if it had to wait in traffic. Madeleine might have moved house since I’d last heard from her (she had written a kind letter when Rowan was born which I hadn’t replied to). Or she might be away on holiday, or have gone home to visit her mother in Bristol. I had a telephone number but when I called from the motorway service station there was no reply. None of this mattered, I thought. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t find her. I could always sleep the night in the back of the car.

When I found my way at last to where she lived, behind Seven Sisters Road, I was frightened by the street with its boarded-up shops and gaudy off-licences and by the grim block of flats with its intimidating entry phone — I almost gave up because I didn’t know how to use this. It seemed an improbable miracle when the real Madeleine was actually at home, both familiar and strange: the same yellow hair with its brassy glints, the same frank pink face, round baby-blue eyes staring.

— Stella! My God, how amazing! Is it really you?

— No, just someone else exactly like me, I said, as if I was picking up the tone of our old childhood friendship, where I was always one jump ahead.

Madeleine was wearing a vintage silky blouse and her hair was cut into a mop shape tied with a flowery ribbon; she looked glossy and competent and I was impressed and crushed. I imagined her belonging in a vivid round of parties and pubs and love affairs, all tinged with danger in the rough, dark city: this turned out to be more or less accurate and my envy never quite subsided during that whole visit. I stayed with Madeleine for two nights. I did telephone my mother to let her know where I was, and I telephoned the café where I was still working then, telling them that Rowan was ill and I couldn’t come in. Mum was short with me, but then she was often short with me; and she said the boys were fine, and of course they were. They played up for a while when I went back, but they didn’t sustain any lasting damage, of course they didn’t. People leave their children with their grandparents or with friends all the time, there’s no harm in it, it’s a good thing. Once or twice I left the children by pre-arrangement with Mum or Fred, and went off for some visit I’d organised properly (I went back to Madeleine); nobody minded that, they encouraged me to do it. But my unplanned escapes seemed catastrophic at the time. Catastrophic and necessary. I always thought while I was running away that I might never go back again, that I might just disappear and move into a new life.

Madeleine and I sat up until late, that first visit, talking and drinking wine, cross-legged on her bed; she made up a mattress for me on the floor and we played LPs we’d bought together when we were teenagers. Her room was full of reminders of those old days — the same red bulb in the light socket, the same collection of soft toys, the same regiments of bottles of make-up and nail polish on her dressing table. She didn’t give one hint that I’d inconvenienced her, turning up without warning; she seemed genuinely excited to see me. She still had her puppy-eagerness, slightly blank, adapting to whatever company she kept. We had to sit in the bedroom because she said her flatmate was ‘insane, really’ — apparently she was obsessive about cleanliness and Madeleine had to scrub all the surfaces she used with disinfectant. The girl complained if visitors smoked or were noisy or if their shoes left traces on the carpet. When we heard this flatmate come in we turned the stereo off and began talking in whispers. I told funny stories about the trials of motherhood — which did even begin to seem funny, at this remote distance. Madeleine told me about her latest boyfriend, who worked with her in their company producing promotional pop videos; but there was something going on as well with a man who worked in an office upstairs, though this was only at the stage of glances and snatches of conversation.

I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t have a lover, that since Nicky died there hadn’t been anyone else and I slept every night alone with my children. I made a big deal out of the drama of living with Fred, and told her about his reciting poetry and singing arias; about the huge pieces of mahogany furniture and the Turkish rugs that had belonged to his mother, about the difficulties with his children and my ongoing fight with Lizzie. I made the picture of our life in the flat deliberately Gothic and intellectual and adult so that hers seemed lightweight and everyday beside it. I even hinted that there was more between us than just friendship; when Madeleine said she’d always thought that Fred was queer, I reminded her that he’d been married and had two children. I was terribly ashamed about this silly story afterwards, though Madeleine never brought it up in conversation when I saw her again, so perhaps she hadn’t believed it anyway. (And eventually there were other lovers for me to tell her about: real ones.)

Madeleine tried to talk to me about Nicky, too. When she asked how I was feeling she put her hand on mine but I pulled away, snagging one of my Indian silver rings in the wool of her coloured crocheted bedspread. If anyone asked about Nicky, in those days, I told them the whole story — carefully, lightly, in a tone of poignant regret. I couldn’t tell them how I was feeling because I didn’t know.

Another time when I ran away I got ill with some kind of virus — I suppose I was incubating it even before I left. At first as I drove I thought the illness was only my misery and desperation, so overwhelming that they were manifesting physically, thickening my throat and blurring my mind with headache. I made it as far as a B & B outside Ludlow, in a grim village strung along a busy road with no pub or shop, only a concreted farmyard, cows up to their flanks in shit and black mud. I was burning up with fever by then and knew I shouldn’t go any further.

I hadn’t stayed in any kind of guest house or hotel since I was a little girl and my mother was in charge; I was worried when I took the room that I’d misunderstood the price, or that there would be extras on my bill I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t follow the rules for using the bathroom (there were no en suites in those days), or where I was supposed to go in the morning for my breakfast. I felt ashamed of being ill, I hid it from the landlady and dreaded encountering any of the other guests. And yet when I was alone at last, and had pulled the orange-flowered curtains across to shut out a dour view (muddy, steep fields, sheep bleakly shorn, stone walls black with wet), I lay down between the strange sheets, scalding and shuddering, in a submission to my doom that was almost voluptuous. The wallpaper was orange too, with a pattern like gourds swelling and shrivelling in perpetual motion round the walls.