Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

Luke brought Sheila the white quartz stone I’d always kept, which we had used in our discussions in the commune, passing it round between the speakers. Sheila hesitated to take it from his hand. — I’m afraid to touch it, she said.

— Why? he asked with interest. — Because it all ended badly?

— It wasn’t our fault, I insisted. It felt so important, that they didn’t carry the wrong story forward. — You do know that, boys? Nicky’s death was just the most terrible accident. The man who killed him was ill.

— It’s not that, Sheila said. — It’s because I hate the idea of my youth. I was so wrong about everything, and so sure I was right. I’m frightened when I remember myself. I worked in a factory making meat pies, out of solidarity with the working classes.

— What’s wrong with meat pies? Luke protested.

— That was quite honourable, I said. — I liked you for it.

— It wasn’t honourable, it was insufferable. How dared I, play-acting other people’s real lives? And of course the women who had no choice about working there hated me, and I didn’t know how to talk to them. It was such a sham.

Rowan remarked that his father had worked building a road.

— That was different. Nicky was different, everything he did was graceful and the right thing. Anyway, he wasn’t doing it out of politics, he just needed the money. I needed the money too; but I could have earned it doing something less ostentatious, something I was actually good at. I was so hopeless, with the pies. I made such a mess of it, I was always dropping them.

We had to go to a family party one Sunday lunchtime: my Auntie Andy’s silver wedding anniversary. Mac complained ungraciously. He thought he was reasonable, and didn’t see any point in submitting to an occasion so utterly against his nature. Wouldn’t it be awful? Weren’t Phil and Andy boring? Couldn’t we just send a cheque? I explained how these obligations weren’t optional, they were the ritual that bound my family together. We weren’t connected because we found one another interesting. Offence was taken even if you forgot to send a birthday card or write a thank-you letter, and my mother and stepfather were always too ready anyway to be offended by Mac; they didn’t really like him, he frightened them. Mum put on an arch, unnatural voice when she was talking to him, as if she was flirting; Gerry was hollowly hearty, hot inside the neck of his shirt. Gerry wasn’t much older than Mac, and yet with his strained good manners and fading handsomeness (inky smudged features, thick head of iron grey hair) he seemed to belong to a different era. He and Mac couldn’t even discuss sport, because Gerry liked football and Mac was a rugby man. The complication was that my parents would expect to be superior themselves, at Phil and Andy’s party. They thought of themselves as having moved into a quite different social tranche — golf, the Masons, even dinner parties; whereas Andy had worked on the production line at the chocolate factory until she retired. Mac blundered across the subtlety of all this, not even noticing he was condescending.

The party was in a function room in a hotel in town, a stuffy low-ceilinged basement with florid carpets and gold drapes arranged across blank walls. Before we arrived Mac was already martyred, because we’d had to drive around for twenty minutes before he found anywhere to park. The boys were chafing to be free of our tension. I threw myself into the occasion and drank a couple of glasses of wine quickly. (Mac took one look at the wine and stuck to beer.) Circulating round the family I hugged and chattered, probably overdoing it.

— Why are you talking like that? Mac asked me at one point.

— Like what?

— Putting on that Bristol accent.

— This is my accent, I said. — It’s the other one I’m putting on.

I was wearing a mauve top over black jeans, with green silk tied in my hair: my mother said the top reminded her of a bedspread she once had. These days, she said with a jollying air to make it seem as if she was joking, couldn’t I have afforded something smarter? (Her attitude to Mac’s money was peculiar: partly complacent on my behalf, partly affronted, as if it was an offence to moderation. If I’d told her how much my top cost she’d have been horrified.)

I made a fuss of Auntie Andy, whom I’d always liked: she was small and fat and cheerful, with her hair dyed orange and a short dress patterned with enormous roses. Clumsily tender, she tucked my arm into hers and introduced me to her friends from work, telling them I’d been close to her little boy who died (which wasn’t strictly true). These women were formidable, raucous, enormous; their talk was very blue, and already their table was in a fug of cigarette smoke. Now Andrea was retired, she lamented, she missed the comradeship of the factory. — Stella, I don’t know what to do with myself all day. Phil does all the housework, because he knows how I hate it. (Queenly, she took for granted the devotions of her stooping, spindly, hypochondriac husband.) Her friends had better suggestions for how Phil could save her from boredom; Andy wagged a finger at them, telling them to be on best behaviour.

— We ’an’t got started yet, they said.

— They’re good girls, Andy confided tipsily in my ear. — Only a bit rough around the edges.

Although there was a buffet, there were place names at every table, written out in Phil’s anxious copperplate: he must have fretted for weeks over the nuances of family feuds and precedence. He panicked now when Andrea insisted on sitting just anywhere among her guests, waving away his remonstrations with her cigarette and gin glass. I was relieved that Mac and I were separated; I sat next to my cousin Richard, Auntie Jean’s oldest son, the one who’d lent me his bedroom when I first left home: he still had a motorbike and he made money as a builder, buying old houses and doing them up to sell, putting back all the original features people had taken out in the 1960s. Skinny and attractive, Richard always flirted with me: husky from all the weed he smoked, with a ponytail, a dreamy, narrow face and grey eyes. (My brother Philip was supplying the weed at the anniversary party; I noticed my sons disappearing outside with him at regular intervals.) Richard’s girlfriend had been segregated at another table. I knew he and I were bending too intimately towards each other, conferring too exclusively, but I’d drunk enough not to care. Jean complained that we hardly touched our food: — No wonder you’re a pair of scarecrows! Richard told me about his dream of going to live in Spain, when he’d made enough money from the houses: not among the expats and English pubs, but somewhere unspoiled in the mountains, with land and a well in the courtyard. You could pick up a medieval farmhouse there, he assured me, for next to nothing.

— How about it, Stella?

— I’d love that, I said. — I’ve never lived anywhere except this city. I’d like to live on a mountain top. I’d like to drink water from a well.

— Come with me. Seriously. I’d like that.

Of course it wasn’t serious, it was just a joke, it was a game: I knew that when I lifted my head and looked around me. I had two sons and a job and a husband, I was not free; probably Richard was not really free either. (Although, later, he did go and live on a mountain top in Spain.) When everyone had finished eating, the disco started up: pounding, and with flashing lights. Mac wouldn’t be able to stand the noise for long. The women from the factory danced in a line together, they knew a set of moves for all the songs. Richard and I slow-danced to ‘Killing Me Softly’, though he wasn’t much of a dancer; he touched me on the waist to steer me and I saved his touches up to remember later. Luke and Rowan were showing off, learning dance moves from the factory girls. I was aware of Richard’s girlfriend, and of Mac looming, bored and restless, on the periphery of the party. I couldn’t forgive him in that moment for not being able to belong inside this world — though I had spent so much of my own life trying to escape from it. He came to claim me, frowning at his watch, saying he had paperwork to do at home. Philip suggested that the boys could stay behind and sleep over at his place; I arranged to drop Rowan’s school things off on my way to work.