Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I did very well at university. I got first-class marks for my essays and in exams almost from the beginning. My imagination grew bolder every day, I was buoyed up by praise and success and the sensation of my own newly unfolding power: sometimes I was drunk and ecstatic with the delight of it. I had no doubt that I had found a new direction for my life. At the end of my three years I would get a first-class degree (and indeed I did). Then I would apply for funding for research and I would work on a PhD. I didn’t look beyond that, not having much idea how an academic career was likely to proceed; but I suppose I vaguely imagined publication, an academic post. I carried my future around like a talisman inside me, warming me with its promise. We had had compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the first year and because I loved the words I learned the Lord’s Prayer off by heart, saying bits of it over to myself in the most unlikely places, cleaning the toilet or shopping in the supermarket. ‘Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, Si þin nama gehalgod… Forgyf us ure gyltas…’ The boys would nudge me. — You’re muttering that thing, they said. — It’s embarrassing.

My lecturers were kind, encouraging my ambitions. I think I was exotic for them; they cherished me just because I wasn’t the usual kind of student who went on to graduate studies. I was a single parent, I’d worked for a living, I pinned political badges — Greenham Common, Solidarnos´c´, anti-apartheid — to the military jacket with brass buttons which I’d found in a memorabilia shop. I’m embarrassed now, remembering the badges. Not because I didn’t believe in all those things, but because the truth was that at that time I was absorbed in my inner life: novels and drama and poetry, the past. I went to a few demonstrations with Daphne and Jude, that’s all — and a day trip once to Greenham. In my third year I came across the French feminist critics, and then the American ones, and I suppose that counts as a kind of politics, though I was bored by Kristeva.

For those three years at university, I felt a steely satisfaction in my singleness, as though I was sealed up and made self-sufficient by my work. My mother was very doubtful about my taking up my studies so late in the day — what was the point? But she hoped that at university at least I might meet someone responsible and hard-working (naturally, she knew nothing about Mac). I explained to her that they were all ten years younger than I was, and that I was the responsible and hard-working one. And it was true, I was hard-working. I was often exhausted, I wasn’t ecstatic all the time. I kept myself awake late into the night with caffeine tablets, to write my essays. My friends all helped generously. Fred didn’t want to lose touch with Luke and Rowan; they were often at his place. Daphne had a job as a social worker with youth offenders, she was good with kids and took the boys out at weekends; Jude let them loose in her studio, where she was sewing the life-size dolls that were her new project (Luke told me afterwards that he dreamed about those dolls for years). On fine summer evenings the boys went to play football after supper, in a scruffy park ten minutes’ walk away. I would wash the dishes then sit reading or writing at my desk beside the open window. When they came home at dusk with a gang of their friends, I could hear them before they turned the corner into our street — their voices echoing off the tall house fronts, Luke bouncing the football ahead of him along the pavement. Amazed at being out when it was almost dark, keyed up with the glamour of their headlong game, they lingered outside, calling poignant goodbyes to one another. Sometimes their voices were portentous with drama, some quarrel or injury. I didn’t worry while they were away, but as soon as I knew they were safely home I felt myself completed. They weighed down my life on the side of blood and warmth, where otherwise it might have floated too free.

It’s important to get what happened next in the right order.

First, I changed my mind about carrying on my academic work. That was all quite fixed and settled before any of the changes in my private life. There wasn’t any violent moment of disillusionment but imperceptibly, over the months leading up to my finals, two things — which had seemed for a while to be one thing — separated out in my imagination. On the one hand there was the great world of literature and thought, and on the other the smaller world of the university and academic life. I began to be bored with the sound of my own tinny authority in essays. I didn’t like the idea of choosing a narrow specialism — I wanted to read everything. I was grateful to the university, it had made all the difference to me and been the gateway into my new intellectual life; but now I chafed inside its frame. Sometimes when I looked up from my books I was overwhelmed by the real moment in the air around me, its nothingness richly pregnant. My studies were still a path into mysteries; but I saw that the path could take you underground, if you weren’t vigilant. It could lead into substitute satisfactions, ersatz and second hand.

From time to time we had postcards from Sheila, who was travelling in South America. The cards were laconic, with minimal information — ‘I am here’, or ‘I saw this’, or ‘it wasn’t really like this’. The pictures on the front were in brilliant kitsch colours, Mayan ruins or bougainvillea or smiling Guatemalan peasants in costume. We had no address for writing back to her. Daphne disapproved, she said that the whole backpacking thing was only another twist in the whole history of Western voyeurism and exploitation. I pinned the cards above my desk because Sheila’s adventures felt like a counterpoint to the adventures inside my head — as fantastical as anything I read about, yet in a real life, plotted on the earth’s solid surface.

I decided I didn’t want to embark on an academic career and for a while I had no idea what to do instead. Then my brother Philip had an accident on his motorbike, breaking both legs, and an occupational therapist came to my mother’s house to measure the steps and examine the bathroom to see if he could manage at home on his crutches. I was casting about in my mind for the shape of my future life and something about that work appealed to me: its mix of imagination and practicality. I liked the fact that each case was something new, with a unique set of problems — material ones jumbled together with psychological ones, like in a story or a novel. I hoped that the work would take me out of myself and plunge me in the world, making me bolder and more generous; until I was tested, I didn’t know if I was capable of these qualities. Even before I’d taken my Literature finals, I applied to an Occupational Therapy Diploma course, and got a place. And OT was a good choice, it suited me; I have worked more or less in this field ever since. Of course there was a lot of idealism in my reasons for choosing it — the reality was bound to be more complex, less heroic.

All this happened before Mac ever got back in touch. Sometimes he tells the story — not apologetically, but proudly — as though he interrupted my brilliant academic career, stormed into my life and carried me off when I was on my way to being a Professor of Anglo-Saxon or something. But it wasn’t so. At the time when I was making these plans for my future, I had put Mac entirely out of my mind — love had healed over behind him, like water swallowing that black stone I’d thrown into the pool. The first time I had any news of him was one afternoon in the summer, after I’d finished my last exam and before I started my Diploma. Lizzie came round and I made her tea; we sat drinking it with all the casement windows in the attic open to the falling rain, because the air was so hot and heavy. A horse chestnut which grew across the road was as tall as the tall houses; my room looked into its top branches and I could hear the intimate settling noises the rain made, soaking through the tree’s layers. Lizzie talked on to me about her children in that burrowing, persistent way she had — everything was Frances now, who played the cello; Piers was written off as rather a disaster. I wasn’t bored, exactly, but I wasn’t concentrating; the weather made me restless, as if I was expecting something to happen — or perhaps I only filled that in afterwards, after something did. When Lizzie was at the point of going, she remembered she had a message for me.