Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— I don’t know, I said stupidly. What was I doing? Out of the two of them, I’d preferred his wife. — When?

— Tonight?

— I can’t, tonight. I’d have to get a babysitter.

This was a blow; he reeled from it and let go my arm. — A babysitter?

— I’ve got two boys. Fred’s picked them up from school because I knew I’d be working late. He’s finished already, he’s a teacher in a private school, they have shorter terms. Pay more, get less teaching.

— Fred? He’s your husband?

I said Fred was just a friend, and that the boys’ father had died. Mac looked baffled and unhappy. — Well actually, two separate fathers, except one just disappeared.

— Christ. You poor little kid.

— Oh, it’s OK. It was years ago.

He asked me just how old I was, exactly, and I said twenty-seven.

Somehow Mac was tangled in the thickets of my life already and I was tangled in his. Ten minutes before this I had forgotten all about him. It must have been physical, I suppose. Underneath all the complicated negotiations we still had to get through, all the painful rash precipitations and withdrawals, we’d had a tiny taste already, out on the street, of how it would be to yield to each other, to sink down together into the deep safety of each other’s flesh. No, that’s not it. Mac didn’t want to yield to me or anybody, he didn’t want safety. He wanted what men want from spiky, wiry girls twenty years younger (almost) than they are. But I wanted to yield. In that moment it’s what I wanted, anyway — to lean on his arm for ever, abandoning criticism, yearning up at the Christmas lights and the blurry moon.

We made love for the first time one afternoon in January at Fred’s — actually in Fred’s bed — while Fred was out teaching. It had to be Fred’s bed, although I felt bad about it, not only because my own bed was a narrow single one and Mac was a big man, but also because my bed was tucked like an afterthought alongside the bunks of my sons, in the midst of all the evidence of them which Mac found so difficult, their scattered toys and treasures, their pyjamas dropped where they’d dressed in the morning, their drawings Blu-Tacked on the wallpaper. Whereas the bed Fred had inherited from his mother was rhetorically perfect for the consummation of an adultery: mahogany, brooding, magnificent as a ship, with its scroll finial topping each of the four bedposts, creaking and swaying with us in tormented sympathy.

I know it’s not meant to be all that good the first time, but actually I think that it was good, for both of us. I was cruel in my youth and my assurance, knowing how painfully Mac wanted me. I hadn’t made love often in the years since Nicky died — once with Jude which didn’t count, a couple of times awkwardly with boys from the crowd I had known in the commune. (Once — very passionately and extravagantly, so that I didn’t know myself — with a stranger I met in a café when I’d done one of my runners away from home and the children; but he gave me something which shamed me and which I had to have treated at a clinic.) Mac, to my great surprise (I’d been attracted to the idea of him as a suavely experienced seducer), had never been unfaithful to Barbara before — he used that very word and I heard how the ‘faith’ in it was a substantial category for him. The first thing Mac said when we were finished was ‘Dear God’; I lay pinned under the dead weight of his body collapsed on me and didn’t know if he was actually praying, nor whether he meant remorse or thankfulness. I suspect now it was both at the same time. It seemed more momentous to me, making love to a much older man; not the act in itself but his presence in it, the heavy hinterland of his worldly experience driven in behind the fine point of the moment. I teased him that it felt like having sex with Winston Churchill or Bismarck. — I’m not that fat, he protested, but I think he was half flattered by the comparison, he didn’t mind.

He came to me in his spare hours when he could get away from work. I used to fantasise that I could smell the factory on him — he’d told me they did injection moulding of plastics and had their own sheet metal and electroplating facilities. Of course I couldn’t go there, I wasn’t even sure in those days where it was (somewhere off the Bath road). All my experience had been with young men — boys, really — who came and went following their own lights. I liked how Mac had to draw his mind with an effort round to me, from all the burden of his real life — not that he ever complained about the burden: he enjoyed it, it was what he was alive for. All that time during our affair (which lasted something less than a year) he was deciding whether to expand the medical-surgical business into precision defence equipment (which he did, eventually). When I accused him of wanting to kill innocent civilians for profit, and said he would have blood on his hands, he laughed at me, stroking back my hair under his broad hot palms, pulling it tight against my scalp — he liked to look into my face that way, as if he was stripping it naked to read something fundamental in it. What he wanted to develop, he reassured me, were explosive-detection and disposal devices; for saving lives, not harming them. There was a strong market for this because of the terrorist threat.

In the time after our affair, when I’d stopped seeing him, Mac grew in my imagination almost into a kind of beast, I repudiated him so ferociously. I told myself I’d had a lucky escape, made a terrible error of judgement — he was so fixed in his place in the world, so insensible to any counter-narrative. Where would the defence contracts end, once they had begun? How could I have allowed him to contaminate me, touching me? I had introduced him to Fred once, because I longed for someone else I knew to know Mac, as if that would anchor him in my real life. I thought fondly that they would like each other — weren’t they both knowledgeable, voluble, religious? But it was a disaster. I arranged an evening when the boys were at my mother’s and I cooked something special to impress Mac — boeuf bourguignon with julienne potatoes, followed by chocolate chestnut cream; though I didn’t have much idea of what he liked (we’d only eaten together a few times at the beginning, when we went for dinner in restaurants). Mac had told Barbara that he was dining out with clients. He ate with his shoulders hunched and his head bent over the plate, oblivious to the food, which offended Fred on my behalf; afterwards Mac felt in his pockets for his indigestion medicine. Fred held forth at high pitch — about literature, school, boys — as if the conversation was a lost cause; Mac was monosyllabic in response, though I was used to him eloquently ruminative in bed. I tried introducing the subject of Yeats but they both clammed up, not wanting any blundering into sacred territory.

The whole set-up, I think, made Mac miserable: the lying to his wife like a cheating husband in a farce, the idea that he was being paraded for the approval of my friends — he wasn’t ever really interested in my friends. Anyway, he was one of those men only expansive on his own spacious ground — displaced on to alien territory he was diminished. After Mac had gone, Fred wouldn’t talk to me about him; I had looked forward to a gossipy dissection over the washing-up, Fred not drying anything much but waving the tea towel about to accompany his probing into how we met, and what was going to happen with us next. (I’d imagined myself saying stoically that I didn’t know what would happen next, and I didn’t care.) I’d hoped that Fred would see what I saw — the rarity of Mac, his compressed power like a burnished glow, something wholehearted in how he gave himself. Because he wasn’t my type, I had fallen for him too fast and too deep, with no markers to signal any way back. I melted when his heavy eyelids drooped in pleasure or humour, his careless authority dazzled and enveloped me.