Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— A man came looking for you, she said. — A peculiar man, Stella! Something about him — head down in his shoulders, like a bull charging; said he didn’t know where you lived, but that he’d found out where Fred had moved to, from the school. Very persistent. I told him I’d only known you vaguely, had no idea where you were now. I thought he might be a debt collector.

And she gave me Mac’s card, with something written on the back in pencil, in his big, wobbling, separated letters, with the hollow full stops. Mac had terrible handwriting — not scrawled or hasty so much as naively deliberate, as if, at school, in his impatience to be grown up, he had bypassed ever acquiring a cursive style. He was always angry writing anything by hand, preferred stabbing at a typewriter or a keyboard with one finger. I couldn’t read his message while Lizzie was there in the room with me. I pretended I had no idea who he was and kept tight hold of the card, its corners digging into my palm, while I went all the way downstairs with her and watched her put her umbrella up, crossing the street, rain fizzing on the taut red nylon and my heart straining painfully, impatiently.

— Call me, Mac wrote peremptorily. — I have news.

He’d given ‘news’ a capital N, and drawn a ring round his printed telephone number, his work number, in the same thick pencil. I hid the card in a pocket of my handbag and didn’t do anything. Sometimes I thought I could hardly remember Mac. He belonged to the past, when I was abject and dependent and hadn’t achieved anything.

Then he and I bumped into one another, quite by accident, only a few weeks after I got his card — at the Royal Infirmary, of all places. We had never met up accidentally before, in all those four years we were apart. I was at the hospital with Rowan, who had problems with persistent ear infections and needed grommets to equalise the pressure. Taking Rowan to his appointments was always fraught; he dreaded the examinations and reacted badly to the tedium of the waiting — although he was stoical when the doctors probed painfully in his ear (I knew how much it hurt because of how he stared ahead into nothing with a set face, and gripped my hand which he wouldn’t hold at any other time).

Mac had never seen either of my sons except in the photographs I’d had around in the flat. When we three were suddenly confronted in a corridor (I was lost and in the wrong place, Rowan was berating me), the encounter felt momentous. Luckily the corridor wasn’t busy. Mac seized me by the elbows, almost accusing me (‘Where have you been?’), and I was aware of Rowan transferring his resentment on to the stranger. I think Mac was surprised by Rowan in the flesh; I don’t think he’d taken in from the photographs how dark-skinned he was, or how striking. I loved seeing other people respond to his beauty — the skinny lithe length of him, the spatter of freckles of darker pigment across his nose, long hollow cheeks, lashes clotted as densely black as paint. He didn’t look like my child. I explained about our appointment and that we were lost; Mac said he was just visiting. He and Rowan stared at each other, calculating. I could hardly take Mac in, bulky in a beige raincoat with rain splashes on the shoulders, preoccupied and out of place. I had always expected that if I ever bumped into him I would be shocked by how old he was — but actually he seemed unchanged, utterly familiar: his vigour and willpower, the taut thick skin of his forehead and neck. I saw that his round head did sit on his shoulders like a bull’s. He was holding a greengrocer’s paper bag and I guessed he was bringing grapes for someone ill.

I thought all of a sudden that it must be Barbara who was ill, she must be dying. Perhaps that was why he’d come looking for me at Fred’s, why he was holding my arms now so tightly, as if I might try to escape. But Barbara was fine, Mac said. He realised his grip was embarrassing me and let go. At least, she was fine as far as he knew. He was visiting a nice chap who worked for him and had had an operation on a duodenal ulcer.

— What d’you mean, I said, — as far as you know?

— Come on, Mum, Rowan insisted.

Mac explained that Barbara had left him. She had found out about certain things — here he glanced severely at Rowan, cutting him out — and when she confronted him and he told her the whole truth, she’d gone. (She’d found, he told me later, a forgotten leaflet from the gallery at the bottom of his sock drawer, with my name written on it. — Something was funny, she’d said. — Because you’ve never liked that painting.) Mac had tried to reason with her — she’d been adamant. (Apparently Barbara had asked him whether he still felt anything for me, and when he had reflected, he’d said that he did, he loved me.) This had all happened a few months ago, and he’d been looking for me ever since.

— The axle has broken that keeps the stars, he said. — And all that.

But I had forgotten the Yeats poem and didn’t know at first what he was talking about. Anyway, now he’d found me, he wasn’t going to let me go again without a struggle — unless I told him where I lived, that is. Though probably he was too late, I’d made arrangements with someone else, hadn’t I, by now? I said I hadn’t. I asked about his daughters and he said one was married, the other at the Royal College of Music. We stood smiling at each other then (and he reached out to hold me by the elbow again) in the blandly lit pastel-painted corridor with its signs pointing to rheumatology and cardiology and the renal unit, its sickly suspect smell of antisepsis and hospital food; we moved aside for a nurse pushing a trolley of drugs. Rowan was tugging at my arm, dragging me away. I scrabbled in my pocket for a pen, I wrote down my telephone number on Mac’s paper bag. Our luck — it was luck, wasn’t it? we scarcely knew what to call it yet — seemed a vivid improbable hopeful flare against this background of subdued suffering, shut away behind the hospital walls.

OF COURSE I REGRETTED IT, MARRYING Mac Beresford. Often I regretted it. Oh, the violence of those early years! I don’t mean physical violence. (Mac would never, ever hit me — and I’ve only hit him a few times, not all that hard — though once I threw a hardback book which grazed his temple and drew blood.) I can remember cleaning my teeth in the en suite bathroom of the house he took me to when we first lived together — the same house where he’d lived with Barbara, at Sea Mills with fifteen acres (it’s not where we live now) — and spitting into the sink and saying to myself over and over between spits that I cursed the day I met him. Cursed the day! For that moment it was quite true. What was I doing there in that bathroom — which was not to my taste at all, with its pastel luxury, concealed strip lighting, seashells stencilled on the walls, fish-shaped stone soap dishes, painted seaweed climbing up the shower tiles? This was Barbara’s taste, we were haunted by Barbara. (What pangs of longing, for my plain old attic at Jude’s.) I couldn’t meet my own eyes in the mirror over the sink, for rage at myself, at what I’d let myself in for. How could we two, Mac and I — with our infinite complexities, and our so-divergent experiences, which had hardened into our natures — be forced to fit inside this shared circle of a marriage, curled up as tightly together as yin and yang? That’s what marriage is like, I think — this squeezing of two natures into one space which doesn’t fit either of them. At least, that’s how mine was for a long time — now, it’s settled down into tranquillity (which brings its own complications).

One night I ran away from Mac in my nightdress. This was only a few months after I’d moved in with him — before he was even divorced, before we were married in the Registry Office. Usually we quarrelled about the boys, but they were away: Luke was staying with friends (he was sixteen), Rowan was at my mother’s. For Mac’s sake, I tried to set up these occasions when he had me to himself. Our quarrel that night wasn’t about any subject in particular; it was about the way Mac talked at me. I’d cooked something special and we’d been drinking Mac’s good wine (he knows his wine). Mac loved to tell me about his ideas. All day long at the factory, in the intervals between all the practical things he had to plan and decide, he was working out his theories of everything. He said, for instance, that he needed to believe that our experiences weren’t lost in time but were all held somewhere, coexisting simultaneously — in God’s mind, or in an alternative dimension where time was a kind of perpetual present. But if that were so, he puzzled, then everything terrible must also be held for ever as it happened: suffering would have no end, there’d be no relief in oblivion.