Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I FELL IN LOVE WITH MAC Beresford, who came with his wife into the art gallery where I worked. He wasn’t my type at all. To begin with, the painting they bought was sickly, in my opinion — a fantasy with blue horses and a sort of arc of roses in the air above a snow scene, sleds and snowballs and peasant children in mittens. The gallery wasn’t cutting edge, it mostly sold the work of local artists to people who could afford original art but not the real thing. I liked working there because it was so easy after the café. Sometimes I could spend all morning reading my book while a few customers browsed.

Mac and his wife Barbara were tall and middle-aged. They both wore expensive long overcoats, his fawn and hers black with a big fake astrakhan collar; he was balding and stout, she had a big, sweet, pink face, made-up with pink powder and lipstick. She smelled sweet too, she was one of those women who moved in an aura of perfume and bath oils and hand cream. Her wavy blonde hair was fastened back in a black velvet clip and she was energetic, friendly, trusting. She had been into the gallery the day before; now she was bringing her husband to approve her choice before she paid for it.

— Doesn’t it cheer you up?

— I’m cheerful, he said. — How much is it?

— No, look at it properly, Mac. We have to live with this staring down at us for years. Do we really like it?

— I don’t know. Do we?

— Or are we just convincing ourselves we like it, and we’ll regret it later?

— It’s nice, we like it.

I guessed that they probably performed this double act often for the entertainment of their friends — his scepticism, her slightly scatty earnestness. I took them over a price list.

— My wife has to go a long way round sometimes, Mac explained to me, — talking herself into what she already knows she’s going to buy.

I thought that I never wanted anyone to claim to know me in that way — fond, tolerant, exasperated.

— What about this other one? Barbara said. — The village is asleep, there are fish floating in the night sky. I suppose they’re dreams. D’you like that better?

— I like them all, darling.

Waiting for her to make up her mind, he wandered over to the desk where I hadn’t picked up my book again, in case I seemed too indifferent to the gallery’s business. I was looking through the morning’s mail (I was supposed to sort the serious from the not-so-serious for Nigel, the gallery owner) and because I was vaguely annoyed with his attitude I didn’t look up. Mac told me afterwards that he guessed I was annoyed with him, and why, and that because of my not looking up he determined on the spot to make me change my mind and like him. He told me in fact that he had had a full-blown revelation, as he stood pretending to read the catalogue and really staring at the white skin of my neck under my ear, against my hair. (I was still dyeing my hair rusty henna-black, wearing it in a plait.) He said the sight of my neck washed him through with a physical pain which was his first ever panic at growing old; my disdain made him feel that life — savoury magnificent immoral life — was flowing away without his having had enough of it. He was imagining of course that I was an irresponsible girl; he had no idea I was the mother of two sons. By the time he found that out — he said — it was too late already, there was no going back.

I’m trying to remember all the things about Mac Beresford which were so overwhelming at the time, such a revelation. He had a degree in engineering from Salford and owned a successful business manufacturing precision instruments for surgery and medical research. He voted Liberal and read the Financial Times . He was opinionated, forceful, well-informed; inflexible sometimes, sentimental sometimes. He loved his wife, adored his two daughters and paid for them to go to private school, was an enthusiast for opera and W. B. Yeats and rugby union. He had inherited his eloquence and strong emotion from his dead father, an Anglican lay preacher — so all his stories seemed to have a hidden meaning, as if he was searching under their surface.

I looked up from the invoices and letters because Mac’s mass, in his expensive coat hanging open (Barbara chose his clothes, but he wasn’t indifferent to them), was blocking my light. His attention, fixed on me, was tangible and disconcerting. His head, I saw, was more interesting than I had realised when I only took him in as middle-aged — face broad and compressed, cheekbones not prominent, pale blue eyes protuberant, the skin tanned and tough and smooth, setting already in its firm folds at the neck. The last of his thinning hair was auburn, fox-coloured, light as down. I used to say, later, that he looked like a caricature of a plutocrat — he wasn’t insulted, he enjoyed the good health and strength of his body without vanity (or, his vanity was in his confidence that his looks didn’t matter). Barbara was still agonising between the paintings, and Mac was studying me so intently that when he asked which painting I liked best I had a feeling he saw past my prevarication (blandly, I said that it all depended on where it was going to hang) to the truth that I condemned all the paintings as trivial, which piqued and intrigued him. (— I guessed then that you were a little savage, a revolutionary, he teased me later. — Only waiting for your chance to tear down capitalism, and me with it.)

When the exhibition was over, it was Mac who came back to pick up the one they’d settled on. The gallery had been closed all day, its serene space disrupted by the chaos of dismantling. Nigel and I had been packing the paintings for sending and collection; Nigel had taken some of them in his car for local delivery. It was dusk on the street outside and I was tired. It was close to Christmas; the last shoppers were hurrying home, there were fairy lights in the shop windows and wound through the bare branches of the trees, the jeweller’s next door had been playing Christmas jingles all day until I’d stopped hearing them. I hadn’t thought about Mac once since I last saw him, and yet when he rapped on the window, peering in at me, I felt caught out and exposed as if the bare gallery were a lit fish tank. With clumsy fingers I unbolted the door.

— Look, come outside on the pavement for a moment, he said. — I want to show you something.

I was obedient because I was dazed — it was stuffy inside, we’d had the Calor gas heater on all day, boosting the central heating. Mac put his arm round my shoulders, pointing up at the sky between the buildings. His wool coat and scarf smelled of lanolin and cold night air trapped in the fibres.

— See the moon: just like the one in our picture.

It was true. The real moon was quarter full just like the one I had despised as whimsical in the painting they’d bought; silver-blue, curled like a comma or a tiny embryo, snug in its blurry ring of frost like a moon in a cave. When we had looked at it for a minute or two, he led me purposefully inside and closed the door behind us, not letting go of where he gripped my arm.

— Now. Why don’t you like our picture? he asked, frowning into my face in the bald indoor light, solemnly in earnest as if what I thought mattered. — You see it’s true to life. What have you got against it?

— I don’t mind it.

— Yes you do, don’t fib. You think it’s saccharine and mendacious. I’ve been working it out ever since we last met.

— Do you want to talk to Nigel? If you’ve changed your mind he may be able to come to some arrangement.

— I don’t want to come to any arrangement. I don’t care about the painting. I want to know what you think. I’ve been thinking about what you think, non-stop for two weeks. Won’t you come out to dinner with me?