Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

So we had some awful confrontations. Mac had never had to deal with anything like Rowan’s scenes before; Lauren had only ever slammed doors and sulked. He thought each row with Rowan was terminal — which was what Rowan thought too; in his tantrums he was desperate with self-destruction, provoking you to say the worst thing possible to hurt him, reaching as a simplification for the last unforgivable gesture which would pull down the whole edifice of his life. I can remember Mac holding Rowan at arm’s length by the shoulders, bellowing (‘How dare you speak to me like that?’), while Rowan kicked at Mac’s knees and Luke tried to intervene physically between them; or Rowan punching through a door panel; or Mac locking Rowan outside one night and Rowan appearing ghoul-like at the downstairs windows with his face flattened against the glass, smearing the panes with tears and snot. It all seems fairly absurd, in retrospect. What I can’t recover is what the rows were actually about, what small seeds of daily cause gave rise to those hurricane effects.

Mac managed to pick quarrels with Luke too — for smoking weed, for sleeping late, for missing school — though he was such an easy teenager and only ever did these things in moderation. Mac went berserk when he found that Luke had taken the Mercedes out one night while we were away (without a licence or insurance or driving lessons: like me, Luke was a natural driver). I had the dream-sensation sometimes that I was closeted again with the stepfather I’d spent my life getting away from. (‘Do you think the world owes you a living?’) When Rowan and Luke developed a comic parody of Mac’s outrage, I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed: was he ridiculous? Perhaps that was the mistake I’d made, I’d married a fool: not the more interesting one, of marrying a monster. I knew Mac blamed Rowan’s behaviour on the way I’d brought him up. And no doubt it partly was because of the way I’d brought him up, but I wasn’t going to concede that. The trouble was that Mac took him on as an equal, refusing to see the suffering child with his white face and inchoate despair. (Though in the long run it may be that Mac’s refusal was better for Rowan than my sympathetic penetration. When Rowan came home at seventeen after living for a year with his grandmother in Glasgow, he and Mac were suddenly close, conspiring in glum distaste against my interrogations: ‘How are you feeling now? Are you happy?’)

I used to console myself, when things were at their worst, by spending Mac’s money. He didn’t mind me doing this, in fact he liked it; I suppose he thought my shopping expeditions were a sign that I acquiesced in the outward conditions of our life together. But I came closest to leaving him when I was using my credit card; I defied his logic, that his money was a power over me. I’d never had money in my life before. All through my twenties and early thirties I’d bought my jeans and shirts from charity shops and vintage stalls; it was strange to be in a position to choose whatever I liked — it was almost inhibiting, I didn’t know where to start. Mac joked that although some of the clothes I bought cost a fortune, they looked as if I might have picked them up at a jumble sale after all: silky slinky scraps, faded prints, torn bits of net and lace with velvet trimmings. That waif look was fashionable and it suited me — I even adapted it for work with plain black cashmere jumpers and flat shoes. I had my hair cut off short and spiky at Vidal Sassoon’s; I was still very thin. (Some of the women I worked with in my first job as an occupational therapist, attached to the adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital, couldn’t forgive me for the cashmere and the thinness. But they didn’t like me anyway, they thought I was arrogant and aloof because I didn’t join in their gossip. I was out of my depth all the time I was at that unit — and I identified too sympathetically with the teenagers who were our patients.)

I think what I felt about my appearance at that time in my mid-thirties was elegiac. It seems comical, looking back from the age I am now: but I believed then that I was at the end of my youth, on the brink of leaving certain experiences behind, losing my old freedoms inside the substantial middle-aged categories of a career and marriage. The clothes and the hair and the way I still painted my eyes, that whole look with its sexy bitter twist — I entered into it as though it was a last flare of possibility, before youth vanished for ever.

In the early nineties, when Mac and I had been living together for about four years — and before Rowan went to Glasgow — I had a visit from my old friend, Sheila. I hadn’t seen her since the break-up of our commune; the last I’d heard of her was that she was settled in Brazil and teaching English. She arrived one Bank Holiday weekend when we were all at home. Everyone who called at our Sea Mills house came to the side door into the kitchen, but she turned up in a taxi without warning at the front and used the heavy knocker — which seemed significant when I thought about it later, because her entry into the house brought a momentous change. I struggled to drag back the bolts in the dusty porch, which depressed me because it was heaped with cast-off coats and boots (I wasn’t tidy like Barbara), and by the time I got the door open the taxi was just driving off. For a moment I didn’t recognise who was standing there. When she was twenty-four, Sheila had looked like a saint in a medieval painting: austerely stately, pale with long auburn hair which was wiry and burnished like threads in an old embroidery. Now, her hair was cut short and bleached dry by the sun, her skin was tanned and roughened: she looked rakish and unsettled, challenging. She was wearing some kind of long bedraggled print skirt, and hoop earrings. In those first moments I hardly took in that she had a baby slung in a tie-dyed vermilion cloth against her breast — a little girl, asleep, with a tiny closed perfect face and thick black hair.

— Is it yours? I exclaimed.

— Of course it’s mine. Did you think I’d borrowed it?

We were awkward together at first — or perhaps it was just that she’d always been angular and abrupt. She seemed to find it funny that our house from outside looked like a child’s drawing: rectangular and red-brick with a chimney at each end, planted bang in the middle of its flat garden which was really just the same scrubby field as outside the garden walls (Barbara had grown things but I’d neglected them). Mac wandered across the hall, pretending to be preoccupied, taking flight from introductions behind his air of being a hundred years older than any of my friends. Inside the house, Sheila went around touching everything, exclaiming that she couldn’t believe I owned all this. I thought she was criticising me — because of the world of poverty she’d come from, or out of the returned traveller’s disdain for everything they’d left behind and forgotten — and I felt weighed down by the settled, responsible life I’d taken on. It was mid-autumn and a gloomy light, muddled with damp from the river, seemed to have got everywhere indoors; we had all our lamps switched on in the middle of the day, and the wind was tugging round the house, teasing it.

In the kitchen, Sheila wouldn’t take off her coat; she really wasn’t dressed for the English climate. She snuggled with a groan of relief close to the Aga, unwrapping the sleeping baby on her lap. I bent over to make a fuss of it: it was the most satisfying, perfect creature, clear-skinned, the eyelids closed in straight black lines, the brows tiny upward brush strokes, purplish lips pressed shut as if in repudiation. Her name was Ester, Sheila said, pronouncing it the Brazilian way, as Esh-tair. She was three months old, born in Recife. Sheila talked about motherhood with a stiffly comical air, avoiding my eyes. No one had told her that you couldn’t send the baby back if you weren’t enjoying it. The Indian women seemed to have a completely different kind of baby; they slept all day, you could take them to work in the fields. She’d wanted one of those. I suggested that Ester looked like an Indian baby anyway, but Sheila wouldn’t give anything away about the father. She explained that she had six months’ unpaid leave from the language school where she worked, and that she’d come home to show the baby to her family, then after a week couldn’t bear being at home — she was hoping I would let her stay for a few days. When Ester began to stir on her lap, she seemed immediately strained and anxious. There was a bottle of formula mixed up in her bag; would I warm it up in a pan of water? — I suppose you think it’s awful that I’m not breastfeeding, she said accusingly.