Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I stopped at a service station for a sandwich and a coffee and to fill up again with petrol; when I climbed out of the Lotus my legs trembled with the effort of driving so far without a break. Fred kept a road atlas in the pocket behind my seat and I studied it while I ate. Scotland was too far away for one day’s journey — I chose Manchester instead, where I’d never been and knew no one. I drove on, following the signs, and made my way eventually into Manchester’s city centre, where I looked around to find a place to leave the Lotus safely. By this time it was lunchtime, one o’clock. The city’s exterior was more dour in those days than it is now; modern shops and billboards at street level looked perfunctory in the shadow of the old civic grandeur. Towering Victorian hotels and insurance offices were empty, with broken and boarded-up windows, as if a civilisation had fallen; and I suppose in some sense it had.

I was always frightened, all the time I was running away — not only by the big thing I had done, leaving home, but also by every small test of my inexperience. Even going into a strange branch of my bank, I quailed at having to speak to the cashier, handing my cheque over. I would never have dared go into a restaurant by myself — anyway, I’d hardly ever been to restaurants, I had no idea how to order or ask for a bill. (And a woman eating alone in a restaurant would have been conspicuous in those days.) I could just about manage a café, though I walked around for a long time before deciding on the right one. I stumbled upon Manchester Art Gallery by chance and felt the relief of refuge inside its quiet rooms which I had almost to myself, hung with jewel-coloured paintings, companion pieces to the novels I was reading. The warmth and sleepy backwater-hush reminded me of the library I had loved when I was a teenager.

It wasn’t robbery or violence I was afraid of — or certainly those weren’t at the forefront of my mind. But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, I couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed in my raw, unfinished ignorance. The expression on my face — frowning, spiky, defiant, I mostly think, in those days — was like a mask of closed competence which I wore and dreaded having torn away. I was twenty-five and it didn’t occur to me to use my youth as power, I only felt it as weakness. At least at home I was able to tell myself I was a mother, wrap myself round in all the responsibility and importance of that — although the way women used that importance sometimes felt to me like cheating, an illegitimate shortcut. (Also, I wasn’t sure that I was good at mothering.)

If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I?

What could I do; what could I become?

It was dusk, and the gallery had closed, and I hadn’t found anywhere to stay. I had wandered without meaning to away from the main drag; anyway, the shops had closed too and the cream and orange double-decker buses were packed with people going home. I found myself walking on a side road alongside a high wall overgrown with weeds; then where the wall ended a broad vista opened up across a stretch of wasteland overgrown with scrubby bushes and rugged with the flooring of vanished factories, the humped remains of brick outbuildings. Cranes stood up in the distance against a sky with a thin blue sheen like liquid metal, striated with pale cloud; puddles of water on the ground reflected the sky’s light as silver. The beauty of it took me by surprise. Dark skeins of birds detached themselves, shrilling, from the bushes and ruined buildings while I stood watching. They twisted in long ribbons of movement, rising up against the blue light then subsiding, and as their mass configured and reconfigured I thought of Nicky who had existed warm and alive in one moment, and now in this moment didn’t exist.

Ten minutes later I stood in the enclosed sour air of a phone box with my coins clutched in my fist, hearing my own breathing, dialling my mother’s number, my fingers fumbling anxiously in the dial-holes.

Mum didn’t like telephones. She answered warily and resentfully.

— Oh, it’s you, she said.

I’m sure she was relieved to hear from me. My mother was a great support to me, really, in all those years after Nicky died. But she couldn’t help herself trying to influence me and mould me; she wanted me to be disciplined in the collapse of my life as she had been in hers when I was a baby and her first marriage had failed.

— Are the boys all right?

She held back her reassurance as if I didn’t deserve it; but I heard them in the background, laughing with my brother Philip, who was thirteen, just the right age to enchant and entertain them. (Philip was naughty at school but charming at home, witty and maturely considerate.)

— Where are you, anyway? she said.

— Don’t worry, I said. — I’ll be fine.

— Gerry and I were going out tonight, we’ve had to cancel. He’s none too pleased.

— I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll iron his socks for you or something. (She really did iron socks and dusters.)

— It isn’t funny, Stella.

My mother must have been afraid, every time I ran off, that I wouldn’t come back. In the first hours of running, I was sometimes afraid of it too — holding on to the shape of myself that changed and struggled and almost got away. Someone tapped with a coin on the glass in the phone box door and I waved to them, signalling that I was nearly done. I told Mum I didn’t know when I’d be home. — Soon, soon, I said: which could have meant days, or even weeks. I didn’t want them to have me fixed in time or place.

Soon, soon. I drove through that night and arrived at my mother’s house about one in the morning. (It wasn’t my old home, they had moved since I lived with them.) The front of the house was dark, where my mother and stepfather slept; but at the back there was a light on in Philip’s bedroom. I got his attention by throwing gravel from the path up against the glass of his window; he came down to the kitchen door and let me in.

— What time d’you call this? he whispered with mock-severity. — Decent people are all in their beds.

— You’re not.

— I know. We’re so indecent. Where did our parents go wrong?

— I blame them for their moral turpitude, I said.

— So do I. Whatever it is, I blame them for it. Their moral turpentine.

Reprieved from his boredom in the sleeping house, he was comically eager to make tea for me. — Or have a whisky, he coaxed with a flourish. — Sherry, advocaat, Tia Maria. I’ll join you.

— No you won’t, daft oaf. I’m going straight to bed, I’m asleep on my feet here, I’ve been driving for hours. I’ll get in with the boys.

— Driving where? Where’ve you been?

— Never you mind.

He shook his head sagely. — You’re in trouble in the morning.

— Maybe, maybe not. He won’t say anything.

— He’s been saying plenty.

— Yes, but not to me.

In the close darkness of the spare room, the boys slept one in each twin bed. Mum had made blackout curtains for the windows so that the light didn’t wake them in summer. Undressing down to my T-shirt and knickers, I climbed in beside Luke, trying to move him over without waking him. Heat, and the sweet-sour nutty smell of boy, rolled from his resisting limbs under the duvet; I could feel that he was in his old cotton pyjamas which buttoned down the front. Physical contact in the dark restored my vision of my sons — the intent, unguarded seriousness of their faces in sleep — as vividly as if I’d switched the light on. Their sleeping was always more urgent work than mere absence; they thrashed or snored or threw the duvet off with sudden purposeful violence. I felt relief, falling asleep at last. I wasn’t free, I was fastened to my children. At some point in the night I woke to Luke’s scrutiny, bent close over me. — Mum’s back, he said to himself in mild surprise, as if he saw the funny side of the whole thing.