Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

She’d waited a couple of hours for him to cool down. She had gone to her sister’s before in the middle of one of these rows, and left Charlie with his father.

— When police officers saw you later that evening, the defence objected, — they didn’t observe any signs of violence on your person.

She said he never hit her where the marks would show.

— Could you speak up, please?

He’d said he didn’t want her flaunting it to everyone.

Charlie’s body had been found in the bath (with no water in it). They asked Andy where her son had been when she left the house: as far as she knew he was in the living room, eating beans on toast (because the chops weren’t ready) off his lap in front of the television. He might or might not have been aware that his parents were quarrelling. They had both of them always tried to keep him out of it. Andy had been planning to get out his reading book later as the teacher had recommended, although she hadn’t been very hopeful that he would agree to work on his spellings with her. — He had a mind of his own, she said. She repeated that Derek had never hurt Charlie before. He wasn’t a bad father. He had been worried about his son’s problem with his eyes, he had even come with her to see the doctor. But she agreed with the defence: she shouldn’t have left Charlie alone with him that night. She would never forgive herself. She didn’t know, now, what she had been thinking of. They had arrested Derek in Nottingham. She had no idea why he’d gone there. He had no connection with the place.

I really wished, at the time when Auntie Andy was staying with us, and then later during the trial when we saw a lot of her again, that I hadn’t known any of this (and I didn’t know all of it then, though I did know about the bath, and it haunted me). I tried not to listen when anyone talked about it (mostly my mother with Auntie Jean), but I couldn’t help being curious too, against my better judgement: as if amongst the details there was information that I needed for my own survival. Innocent-seeming fragments would get in past my defences (the reading book, Nottingham, chops for tea), then stick to my imagination like tar.

Inevitably, they got to know at school about my connection with the case. A deputation of older girls came up to me with solemn faces one playtime, and presented me with a posy of flowers — probably picked out of the front gardens on their way to school — tied up in raffia from the craft cupboard. They wanted to say how sorry they were about ‘my little cousin’; one of them actually stroked my hair as if I moved her to spontaneous pity. I wanted to tell them that I’d hardly known Charlie, that he was a snotty-nosed kid and I’d hated him, and that he would have hated me back if he’d even deigned to notice my existence. But I didn’t dare; I knew they wouldn’t be able to forgive me if I cheated them of their syrupy pleasurable sorrowing. So I thanked them and said that I would give the flowers to my auntie. On my way home I buried them in a dustbin. For a couple of weeks I was accorded a kind of sepulchral respect at school, and then they forgot about me.

From time to time when I was alone in a room I would suddenly have full chilling consciousness that Charlie had been alive inside his own head once, as I was at that moment inside mine. And also that this person which he really was had undergone those things I knew were factually true, in a present moment as real as this one, and continuous with mine because it had baked beans in it and a bathroom with a familiar boring sink and towels and a toilet. My mind expanded to take in new possibilities. This open-air recognition was what lay in wait behind all the gloating, smothering words (‘poor little chappie’).

A blast of wind blowing through space, icy clean.

Most of the time, naturally, when Auntie Andy wasn’t around I hardly thought about Charlie. I got on with my life.

My mother used to say, in one of her set pieces, that she had never known what courage was until she saw how Andrea stood up to the lawyers in court. — She was so perfectly polite and patient, but she never let them get under her skin. I couldn’t have kept my composure the way she did.

But once the trial was over the two of them didn’t see much of each other. Their lives took them in different directions, and they had never really had much in common. Andy didn’t become a new person after Charlie was killed, she never became one of the bright, quick, funny women Mum chose for her best friends. Andy was always rather sweet and blank and — what’s the word? Not conventional, because Mum was every bit as conventional. Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn’t been poured into her, she would have been happier — it goes without saying — but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think this is quite rare, this capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.

And it wasn’t just a passive thing. I remember when Auntie Jean first came round while Andy was staying with us. Jean had a big forthright bust and piled-up black hair, she wore dangling earrings that were vaguely gypsyish. When Andy came out of the bedroom where she’d been lying down, Jean knelt on the floor in front of her, wrapping her arms around Andy’s knees, sobbing extravagantly.

— I don’t know how you can bear it, she said. — I know I couldn’t.

(Jean had three boys.)

The murder had cleared a social space around Andy. People didn’t know how to address her; probably Jean was just trying to broach that space in her overblown way. You can’t deny that her gesture matched the extremity of what had happened. But Andy wasn’t either touched or embarrassed. She stood very still and unresponsive until Jean let go.

— I’m sorry, I don’t like scenes, she coolly said.

I’m sure that Uncle Derek was less interesting than his wife; he wasn’t interesting just because he had killed someone. As an adult I lived for a while in a house that had brick steps leading down into a narrow coal cellar like a passage to a dead end, where we kept the brooms and buckets and broken things we hadn’t got around to fixing. It used to flood with filthy water at certain times of year, and I imagine Uncle Derek’s inner life like that: cramped and musty-smelling, shut away from daylight, subject to the drag of tides of violence. The little despotism he installed inside the four walls of his home mattered only because it derived its authority from the whole towering, mahogany-coloured, tobacco-smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority in the world outside.

And mattered, of course, because of its consequences in other lives.

My mother reported that in court he said he ‘got the worst of a bad bargain’ in his wife. They did let him out of jail eventually, I believe, after he had served fifteen years of his sentence. He went to settle in some part of the country where he wasn’t known.

During the time Auntie Andy was staying with us, Mum left me alone in the flat with her on Saturdays while she went out shopping. Sometimes Andy played dolls with me. This was a new experience; the adults I knew didn’t play with children, unless it was something organised like cricket. But Andy didn’t put on a childish voice, and she entered into the reality of the different dolls’ characters and sensitivities with what seemed like an authentic interest, almost naive — I checked her face to make sure she wasn’t teasing me. We undressed and dressed them in their tiny clothes, flipping them over to do up the poppers, skewering plastic boots on to hard pointing feet. (After the trial was over Andy made a dress for my teenage doll with layered skirts in orange nylon trimmed with minute roses made of satin ribbon: unbelievably pretty, though it was a bit tight and wouldn’t do up down the back.)