Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I had to confess to the landlady eventually, when she came knocking on my door next day (I hadn’t made it down to breakfast), that I didn’t think I could get out of bed, let alone eat egg and sausage. She wasn’t enthusiastic about having a sick guest on her hands, but she did bring me cups of sweet tea and aspirins every few hours, which punctuated my delirium and seemed providential, life-saving. She offered to get me a doctor but I said I didn’t need one. From time to time when the coast was clear I crept — hunched as if something had broken inside me — across the landing to visit the lavatory: the giant fronds in the pattern of the carpet seemed to move, coiling under my bare feet. For three whole days and nights I never even phoned home. I’d left the boys that time with my Auntie Jean. It was the longest I ever stayed away — but really I wasn’t responsible, I hardly knew what I was doing. I don’t think my mother believed me when I tried to explain, though Jean didn’t seem to mind.

On the fourth day I woke up to the blessed sensation of convalescence — illness like a sweating devil had slipped out of me, leaving me weightless, weak, transparent as a shell. Relieved, the landlady brought me toast and cornflakes. Drinking my tea propped up against the pillows, I was washed through with a delicate, passionate happiness. This had no apparent cause inside me, didn’t seem to arise from the facts of my life or from my self — any more than the white sunlight did, burning in the raindrops trickling down the windowpane. Washing at the tiny sink, resting between efforts, putting back on the cold jeans and shirt and jumper I had taken off three days ago, I tried to prolong this happiness, or find a code I could store it in, so that it meant something even when I wasn’t feeling it. I imagined it as resembling the filmy skin of a bubble enclosing its sphere of ordinary air: impermanent yet also, for as long as it existed, flexible and resilient — real, a revelation.

When Fred tried to persuade me to read books and I told him I was too busy, it wasn’t the truth. Actually, I was reading all that time — in bed, or while Rowan napped in the afternoons, or on the sofa in the sitting room in the evening if Fred went out. At the art gallery, where sometimes there were no customers for hours at a time, I always had a novel on the go. For some reason I wanted to keep my reading secret from Fred: perhaps I just felt that too much of my life was already open to his view and I needed to hold something back. Or perhaps I dreaded his triumph if he saw me absorbed in a book — and his tactful disappointment if it was the wrong one. I didn’t want him to feel he’d won any argument. I didn’t want him making recommendations or trying to form me by giving me a reading list, or opening up critical discussions.

I’d stopped reading abruptly when I got pregnant with Luke and had to leave school and the whole plan for my life changed track; or rather fell into abeyance, where there was no track at all. I think I felt cheated, as if the books I’d loved had held out a promise of strong, bright, meaningful happenings they couldn’t deliver. If I’d read more carefully I’d have seen that falling off a track and nosing round and round unhappily in a tight circle was just what most books described. Yet for a long time, first when Luke was a baby and I worked at the school, and then when I lived in the commune and Rowan was born, my memory of the fiction I’d once read was tainted with a suspicion that it was written for somebody else, for someone initiated into a higher order of culture which shut me out. I’d once read Beckett and Burroughs — now I imagined these authors as my enemies because I thought they’d have despised the things I had no choice but to spend my life on: washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning.

Then not long after Nicky died and we moved back to Fred’s, Rowan fell asleep in my arms one afternoon while I was breastfeeding him. I was sitting in the corner of an old chaise longue: its black leather worn away in places, it was sprouting horsehair and the empty time seemed unbearable. A marble clock on Fred’s mantelpiece looked like a funerary monument and its tick in the silence was resonant, punishing. Fred was out teaching, Luke was at nursery. I reached over for a book, just so that I didn’t have to think; deliberately I chose one that I’d never heard of — The Cloister and the Hearth — from the neglected bottom corner of Fred’s shelves. Its thick pages were freckled with mould spots and smelled peppery with damp. I liked knowing that no one had opened it for a long time.

The Victorians saved me. Fred’s mother had left him quite a collection, inherited I think from her own mother, or grandmother. I read East Lynne, The Woman in White, The Water Babies, The Heir of Redclyffe, Lady Audley’s Secret, and much more. All those days of sickness in the B & B near Ludlow, I was wandering in my delirium in and out of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Of course I loved Middlemarch and Jane Eyre too. But in that phase of my life the less good novels fascinated and absorbed me, the ones that were fairly dead and desiccated, embalmed in their lost world with its ideals of womanly sacrifice and goodness. I didn’t read them with detached amusement; my imagination adapted to the alien forms and coloration of each book as I read like a life-saving camouflage. The very fact of these novels being so obliquely angled to my own life was part of the relief of my escape into them. And I didn’t condemn the ideals of sacrifice, I could see how they would work as a way of getting through the day, dressing drudgery up as a poignant adventure, putting the whole burden of freedom on to the poor men. Some of those novels seemed like nothing less than an extended punishment of their men, who were drunk and heinous and craven in exact proportion to how far their women abased and subordinated themselves.

I made up my mind, every so often, that it was silly not to tell Fred what I was doing. I wanted to talk with someone about how strange these novels were. The whole pretence was ridiculous; I had to go to some lengths to hide my reading from him and from the boys, I was shoving my books out of sight down the side of my bed at night, against the wall. Then just when I was on the point of spilling over with my confession, I’d catch sight of Fred flicking through the pages of something — frowning or smiling knowingly as if he was communing with the author, scoring down the side of a text with his pencil to emphasise significance, scribbling notes. I was irritated in those days by these exhibitions of his pouncing cleverness, and his possession of what he read. (Now that he’s gone I remember them with yearning.) So I shut my mouth and kept my secret.

The delicate first hour of morning hardened into prosaic day. I drove north. Traffic thickened, the Lotus got stuck, revving impatiently, in queues of people driving to work round Birmingham — as soon as I could I passed them, leaping on upstream, away from home, towards anywhere: even to Scotland, I thought in a mad moment. I was taking in the world spread out around me as I drove, less through my eyes, which had to be on the road, than through my whole awareness, through my skin, as if I’d emerged from a deep burrow underground. For long stretches where the conurbation was unbroken, there spread on either side of the motorway a dream landscape, smoke-blackened brick and corrugated iron, pastel-blank façades and rain-stained concrete, fat cooling towers, gasometers, the metal mesh of factory gates, tree trunks in a padlocked yard beside a scummy ditch. The land’s fabric seemed dragged down and tearing under the sheer weight of the built environment, which never ended and could surely never be undone and wasn’t even thriving: the monster machine was stalling, it had poisoned itself and now it had fallen into enemy hands (I was very political in those years): three million were unemployed, there was rioting in the cities. Because I was young, the ugliness didn’t defeat me, it made my heart beat faster, it was my birthright. Daniel Deronda and East Lynne hadn’t made me nostalgic. They made me know how we’re wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.