Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— It’s your business, was all Fred said. — If you think he’s a good thing. He’s not what I expected. Isn’t he very square?

— He’s grown-up, I said, bristling. — If that’s what you mean. He’s a man with responsibilities in the real world.

— Oh, the real world. I see.

— He makes real things that help sick people. Do you disapprove?

— You know why he didn’t like me, don’t you? Because he doesn’t like queers.

Blushing and furious, I said Mac wasn’t like that, he was open-minded, and it was just Fred’s own prejudice because Mac was a businessman. But actually I wasn’t sure, when I thought about it. Mac had asked once whether Fred brought his boyfriends back to the bed where we were so happy together; when I said ‘not to my knowledge’ Mac seemed relieved, not having to imagine it. He was never vindictive towards what didn’t fit his moral compass; he wiped it out, rather, as if it didn’t exist. I’d never told Fred that we used his bed, and of course I always changed the sheets afterwards, but I suppose he’d guessed at it (he must have noticed all those clean sheets). Once Fred and Mac had actually met and disliked each other, our beautiful bed was impossible for us and we had nowhere else to go. Mac said that on my narrow mattress in the boys’ room he felt as if he was suffocating.

We went to a hotel in the city centre but it made us both miserable; I knew how out of place I looked at reception in my black jeans, with my scrap of chiffon tied in my hair and my cheap silver earrings. Mac said it was the only time he worried that people would think I was his daughter, and when I asked him what he’d be doing taking his daughter to a hotel room in the afternoon, he didn’t find it funny. Showing off, I paraded around naked on the thick carpets, behind stiff brocade drapes five flights up, with a view through nylon curtains over the misty city blown with rain. I insisted he get in the shower with me and soap me, though this wasn’t his kind of thing — nor mine really, though I did love the endless hot water and the thick towels (there was no shower in Fred’s flat, only a bath and a quirky gas geyser). I performed like the tart Mac might have picked up in a bar at lunchtime if he’d been different. But he wasn’t different, and there was something fake and self-conscious that afternoon in our love-making.

And then I met Barbara out shopping — she smiled as if she recognised me but couldn’t remember where she’d seen me. I was on my way home from my morning shift at the gallery, with an hour to spare before I picked up Rowan (Luke had started at secondary school; he came home on his own on the bus). Winter had come round again and she was wearing the same black coat, with the astrakhan collar turned up; her wide pleasant face was rosy and roughened with cold and hard lines showed up in her cheeks; her nose was red. She was only a few years younger than my mother. I followed her to the delicatessen then stood outside and pretended to be looking at the packets of sponge fingers and tins of cooked chestnuts and pimientos in the window. Inside, the shop assistant sliced and cut according to Barbara’s orders, I saw them laughing and chatting; she put out her gloved hand for packets of ham and salami and cheese, stowing them in the basket on her arm. I realised that I’d fallen into the wrong kind of love with Mac, a daylit, sensible love inappropriate to our circumstances. I felt shame, as keen as the scream of the meat slicer. Mac wouldn’t talk to me much about his family but I knew their house was big and Victorian, outside the city at Sea Mills, with fifteen acres of land where his daughters kept their horses. I knew that Barbara volunteered for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

I crossed the road to the supermarket and by the time I came out again Barbara had gone. I went into the delicatessen and bought expensive chocolate although I couldn’t afford it; at home I ate it piece by piece until I felt sick, standing at the kitchen table without even taking my coat off. Then I hurried out to wait among the other mothers in the school playground; nausea made a sweat break out on my forehead. Rowan was one of the last to appear, bad-tempered, struggling with his coat hanging off his shoulder, sugar-paper pictures unrolling under his arm, dragging his gym daps by the laces. I crouched on the asphalt to help him put on his coat — my hands were shaking too much at first to join the zip at the bottom. — What’s the matter with you? he asked suspiciously. — You look funny.

— It’s all right. I ate too much chocolate.

After school Rowan was always angry and empty, with pale smudges under his eyes against his brown skin; he wouldn’t ever eat his packed lunch, only the crisps. He was popular at school and he did well, but it took a great effort because he was naturally guarded and sceptical. Fumbling with his zip, leaning close into his restlessness and boy-smell, I was desolate suddenly because I would never pick up his brother from school again. From now on Luke would always arrive home under his own steam, jaunty and faintly feverish with the import of what he’d seen and couldn’t any longer tell me. I had hardly registered the momentous change, I had let it slide past on the surface of my life as a mere practicality, because my selfish dream of Mac had suffused me from hour to hour. Next it would be Rowan’s turn to go. My eyes filled with stupid tears and I was drenched in regret. (— What are you doing? Rowan protested, shifting aside indignantly from my kisses.) I recognised the whole sequence of my reactions to meeting Mac’s wife as a stock guilt that could have come out of one of my Victorian novels. But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion?

That evening I telephoned Mac at home (I looked the number up in the directory), and when Barbara answered I asked to speak to Mr Beresford. She said he was watching the rugby. I heard her rather musical voice, wholly unsuspicious, calling for him through the house I couldn’t see and couldn’t enter. (— Mac! It’s for you!) All I had to go on was the painting with the blue horses. I imagined golden lamplight pooled on the walls, fitted carpets, fat-stuffed comfortable fringed sofas and armchairs, the teenage daughters attending with religious seriousness to their split ends (Mac had never shown me a photograph, but I guessed they both had long hair). Perhaps I could hear a far-off television. Long before Mac picked up the receiver, I seemed to sense his approach through the invisible rooms — a dissenting male shadow cast against their brightness. He barked his name into the phone. I told him I’d seen Barbara at the shops, I said I thought we should stop doing what we were doing, it was too awful. — I’ll have a think about it and talk to you tomorrow, Mac responded, calmly but with suppressed distaste, as if I’d bothered him at home with a query about office paper clips. Of course he had to sound calm, because his wife was listening. (He told her I’d rung because there were some new paintings in the gallery I’d thought they’d like. I couldn’t believe that she’d believed this. — They must be desperate for trade, apparently she’d said.) When he spoke to me from his office the next day, at least I couldn’t hear the distaste.

Those calls didn’t end our affair immediately, but they were the beginning of the end. Mac sent me a letter where he copied out a Yeats poem about love’s impossibility: ‘Until the axle break / That keeps the stars in their round… / Your breast will not lie by the breast / Of your beloved in sleep’. He added a PS at the bottom of the page, pointing out that Yeats had had some pretty crazy millenarian ideas and probably believed all this might actually happen in real time, the axle breaking and the girdle of light being unbound and so on. So it wasn’t such a despairing poem as it first seemed.