Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

I knew he’d never talked about these things to anyone before. He had chosen me as the necessary listener, the one person on earth to whom he wanted — needed — to explain himself. He thought that no one else understood him as I could. (Barbara hadn’t ever wanted him to talk like this to her, she’d feared it. She had believed superstitiously, Mac said to me once, that talking about suffering could bring it on.) But when I tried to answer him and put in my part of the argument, it seemed to me that he waited kindly for me to finish then carried on regardless, uncoiling the tight-wound spool of his own thoughts. It might have been like this, I thought, if I’d been the wife of a great philosopher or a poet in the past; I would have sat at his feet and written down his ideas devotedly, then consoled him for them in the dark. Only Mac wasn’t a great philosopher, he was a factory owner, and it was me who had a humanities degree; I had read as much philosophy as he had (though he did remember more of what he read than I did, and was better at logical argument). Yet if I stopped speaking altogether — sat with my expression closed to him, rage in my heart — he didn’t even notice. (Perhaps it was a small thing to get mad about. Nowadays, when I love him steadily, I don’t want him to know my inmost thoughts.) Undressing in the bedroom that evening I felt I was smothering, because of the central heating and the fitted carpets everywhere. We didn’t bother to close the curtains in that room because the windows only looked towards the Portway and the river gorge, over the scrubland in front of the house where the horses grazed (these belonged to Lauren and Toni, Mac’s daughters). The windows were black and cold with night; I could see our lamps and our room reflected in the glass as if I was looking in from outside, and I saw myself moving around, putting away my clothes. Of course Mac wanted to end the evening with love-making.

— Don’t touch me! I snapped, pushing him away. I complained that he wasn’t interested in my opinions, he never asked me what I thought and only wanted me as his audience.

— It isn’t small talk, you know, Mac said, hurt, his forehead wrinkled and reddening with feeling. When I hated him I saw how his head was round and dense like a cannonball or a hard nut. — I’m telling you what’s really in my heart, things I’ve never shared with anyone. I’m talking to you freely: I thought you appreciated what that was worth. Would you rather I was polite, and paid you compliments and asked after your knitting?

I couldn’t believe he’d said that about knitting: martyred, exulting, I said I’d got a first-class mark for an essay on Bergson and T. S. Eliot. — Why would I want to talk about knitting? I can’t even knit! You don’t even know that about me.

Mac said I must be drunk (and probably I was — we often finished two bottles between us, sometimes we started on a third). He got into the shower and I ran downstairs, escaping outside. On my way out I picked up the keys to the little Peugeot he’d bought me for work and for running around in. I might have driven off, just as I was, barefoot in my 1940s vintage nightdress — and if I had, who knows whether I’d ever have come back again. But I saw in the light from the windows that the horses had come up to stand against the fence, and I went across to talk to them. Because I was cold, though the adrenaline from our fight was still surging in me, I nuzzled into their peppery smell and greasy, dusty heat — a secret life, rich with its own purposes, out there in the dark which had looked empty from inside the house. Misty was Lauren’s jaunty chestnut mare and my favourite; she jabbed at me with her nose, snorting and hoping for treats. (I cherished those horses partly as my way of making up to Lauren and Toni, who wouldn’t have anything to do with me at first.) Mac came out of the house behind me, calling my name, his towelling bathrobe tied over his pyjamas. He didn’t like the horses; he was afraid of them.

I climbed up over the gate and on to Misty, clinging to the tufts of her mane with both hands; then I set off riding across the field bareback. It was stupidly dangerous, I probably was drunker than I knew. (And on the way I lost the keys to the Peugeot, the only set: Mac was out early the next morning, eyes down, hunting for them everywhere. We never found them, and had to buy replacements.)

— Follow me, I yelled back over my shoulder. — If you want to keep me, follow me.

— You’re an idiot, Stella.

— I don’t care what you think. Follow me.

And he did follow — though not just obediently trotting after the horse, as I’d rather pictured it. (Misty shucked me off anyway, halfway across the field, not too roughly.) Mac went back inside first for a torch and wellingtons, and put one of the old picnic blankets over his shoulders, then set out to where I was waiting for him under the beeches. By the time he arrived all the anger had drained out of me. It was marvellous out there under the huge old trees soughing and groaning in the wind, dragging at their roots in the dark. Mac turned off his torch and on the blanket I clung to him passionately. — We could be in our comfortable bed, he said, bemused.

(I told him later that I believed there was a solution to the problem of time and suffering he’d proposed. It was only intractable if you came at it head on, wanting a single story; instead, you could try imagining that two time dimensions coexisted. In one, still moments were all held objectively for ever; in the other, time as experienced subjectively was always a flow, bringing the relief of endings. Nothing was added, in that model, to anyone’s suffering; on the other hand suffering — like happiness — wasn’t obliterated in the total sum of things, which it shouldn’t be if the sum of things is justice. I thought my idea was something like Bergson’s durée, but a proper philosopher explained to me years afterwards that I’d got this wrong.)

Mac was made to be the father of daughters. There’s a photograph of him holding Toni minutes after she was born: he looks astonished as a bear with a princess in a fairy tale, afraid of his own strength, dreading already the boyfriends she’ll bring home. The girls brought out a patriarchal, sentimental streak in him and in return he fostered in them an inward-turning femininity. Self-important with their father’s adoration, they were bruised and scandalised by his betrayal. Toni, rounded and blonde like her mother, was a teacher in a primary school, and married by the time Mac and I moved in together (though she’d had a wilder phase, and before I knew him Mac had fought off a succession of unsuitable boys). Lauren was moody, a talented clarinet player, a changeling who didn’t look like either parent — very white-skinned, tiny, gamine with black hair and glasses and a sharp little muzzle like a fox. Mac and Barbara had worried together — and out of all proportion, I thought — through the various phases of Lauren’s giftedness and restless dissatisfaction. Later, when Toni got pregnant (by which time the sisters were more or less reconciled to the idea of me) I was ready to be supportive through the difficulty of her young maternity — only she didn’t find it difficult, she loved it uncomplicatedly.

It seemed to me that I worked hard at building relations with Mac’s family, while he hardly tried with mine. This was our longest-lasting and worst fight. (Then in his mid-sixties he capitulated all at once, genially making friends with everyone.) Mac said that it was different because the boys were living with us and of course that was true; but he couldn’t see that there was an imbalance in the settled hostility between him and them — he was an adult, so ought to hold back the whole force of his scowling intolerance of their mess and mistakes and ignorance. He claimed he was protecting me from how they took advantage of me. It was obvious, though, that he was jealous of how I loved them, and I told him so — in front of the boys, which wasn’t a good idea. But I think Mac would have fought with his own sons too, if he’d had any. His was that touchy, growling kind of masculinity which can’t resist tussling with other males and testing them. (Yet he was tenderly solicitous towards the craftsmen who worked for him at the factory.)