Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

It was raining when we got outside. I pretended to be drunker than I was, leaning against the ticket machine in the car park and humming the music I’d been dancing to, while Mac hunted in his pockets for money. He said I was in no fit state to drive, when I offered. The excitement of the party dropped; stark recognitions blew round inside my emptiness in the cold car park. I thought that Mac and I were strangers joined by meaningless accident, unfathomable to one another and I caught sight of him, freshly with surprised dislike — middle-aged and preoccupied, with a thick wrinkled neck. Our intimacy had only ever been a delusion, monologues passing and missing in darkness — which was all that was possible anyway, with anyone. All this seemed open to the naked eye, as if I saw through everything. In the car Mac started up the heater and I hugged my apartness to the rhythm of the wipers clearing fan-shapes on the windscreen, watching the smudged wet grey-green suburban streets as they passed. At least Mac wasn’t nursing grudges; he didn’t care about me drinking or flirting, was only relieved to be on his way home. He asked cheerfully whether I knew that in the eighteenth century whalers had gone out from Sea Mills Dock for a few years, and blubber had been boiled there; I said I hadn’t known it. I tried to imagine all that scurrying filthy effort and activity, all the endeavour, the great distances and risks of danger, but I couldn’t believe in it. Everything seemed too far off and too tiny.

The rain was heavy, Mac had to put on the wipers at top speed. As we turned into the yard at home we saw that Sheila was standing outside in it: rain was streaming down her face and her clothes were sodden, clinging to her. She looked like a medieval saint again: tormented, and rigid as if she was carved in wood.

— I can’t do it, she announced to us over the noise of the rain as the car engine died.

— Do what?

— I give up.

She was deliberately flat and calm.

— What’s happened, Sheila?

Ester apparently had woken up and begun crying almost as soon as we left for the party (which was at about eleven; it was now almost five). Sheila had no idea what the matter was. Ester wouldn’t take her bottle, she screamed all the way through a nappy change. She wouldn’t be cajoled by Sheila putting her in the sling and walking round with her, which had always worked before. Sheila had tried everything she’d seen me try: the singing, the jogging up and down, the distracting her by carrying her in and out of different rooms; even the blowing on her tummy. But Ester only redoubled her paroxysms: she was swollen and purple with rage, throwing herself backwards in the sling, shuddering and howling. Sheila said she’d tried for a long time, and then she’d thought that the baby and her simply weren’t doing each other any good, she wasn’t making anything any better. So she might as well just walk away from her. She’d put her down in the carrycot, in the bedroom.

— It’s all right, Mac said, putting his arm round Sheila in all her soaking clothes. — You did the right thing.

— It’s so hard, I sympathised, — when you’re on your own.

— In fact I thought, if I stay in there with her, listening to her, I’m going to do something dreadful. So I came outside. And I’ve been out here ever since.

How long had she been outside, for goodness’ sake?

— Two hours? Three? Or perhaps that’s melodramatic. I don’t have my watch on. It’s felt like three hours. Actually it’s felt pretty much like an eternity. I’ve walked around some of the time. But mostly I’ve stood here because the rain splashing over from the gutter meant I couldn’t hear her crying. There didn’t seem any point in hearing it, as I wasn’t going to do anything about it. It’s all very exaggerated, isn’t it? I never knew anyone had that much crying in them.

— That bloody gutter, Mac said. — I keep meaning to clean it out.

— Shall I go and have a look? I said.

— I want you to keep her, said Sheila. — You two. Adopt her. Please, won’t you?

Mac was coaxing Sheila towards the back door, saying she needed to get into some dry clothes, to have a cup of tea or a stiff drink. When I went inside I couldn’t hear Ester at first. Sheila hadn’t switched the lights on; the rooms were almost dark because of the rain at the windows, and the white tiles in the chequerboard hall floor seemed to float in the gloom. I picked up the full bottle of formula abandoned on the hall table, and as I climbed the stairs I caught the tail end of a thread of noise, a thin remnant of exhausted sobbing. Sheila was staying in a spare room on the first floor at the back, papered in pale Chinese-green with a pattern of bamboo stems and white flowers. Coming into it in the dim light felt like stepping underwater — and the air in the room was heavy with baby-smell, animal and close. Everything was quiet. The carrycot was on the floor beside the bed; I slipped out of my shoes so as not to wake Ester if she’d fallen asleep at last, though when I tiptoed across to peer into the cot I was sure that she was awake, listening out for me, reciprocating my prickling consciousness of her. Sure enough, when I leaned over the cot her gaze was ready for me, wide-open eyes glassy in the shadows. Her silence seemed full of an awakened intelligence beyond her age. For a long moment of mutual exchange, before she resumed her crying, we stared and seemed to hover between possibilities: I might remain a convenient stranger, she might remain someone else’s baby, sweet but tedious. Or something different might come about.

Mac came into the room to get towels and a bathrobe for Sheila, while I was giving Ester her bottle. She was hungry, she had snatched eagerly at the teat as soon as I offered it. Now as she sucked she was gazing up at me in moist reproach, her breath still catching and snuffling in the aftermath of the long-drawn-out adventure of her sorrows. When Mac leaned over us she tugged away from her sucking, twisting her head to take him in; I thought she might begin to cry again but she only gave him the same slow, measuring look that she had given me, then slid back on to the teat luxuriantly.

— It’s a crazy idea, I said to Mac. — Sheila doesn’t mean it.

— We could do it, he said. — If she did mean it.

— You must be mad, I said.

But I had a vision in that moment of the three of us together in that room, remote as if seen from a very far off place — like the vision of Mac’s whaling ships. And I thought that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you.

And so we got our daughter. (Though we always told Ester that she was Sheila’s daughter; we were her foster parents.) I left my job at the adolescent unit to look after her. I’d been unhappy there anyway, I’d hated it when the nurses gave the girls their sedative injections and the girls fought against it, and then the nurses wrote down in their records that they ‘displayed paranoid symptoms’. I stopped working altogether for six months, staying at home with Ester. And after that I got a part-time job at the Gatehouse, a network of accommodation and services for adults with mental health problems, where I was much happier. The boys loved Ester; Rowan believed that he and she had an extra kinship through their Brazilian connection. Toni and Lauren made more fuss, but they came round to her in the end. Sheila returned to her teaching job, and after a year she came back and was still sure it was what she wanted, so we did all the necessary bureaucratic stuff, and were checked by social services, and became Ester’s legal guardians. (The bureaucracy wasn’t straightforward, it was horribly complicated, but Mac was good at fighting his way through all of that.) Without making any deliberate decision, we slipped into pronouncing her name the English way, Es-ter: it was easier, anyway, when the time for school came round. She keeps her other name, Esh-tair, as if it’s a clue to a different life running parallel to the one she’s actually had. Everything Sheila sends her from Brazil she keeps in a box under her bed, segregated from her ordinary possessions. When Sheila visits, they are mutually guarded and interested and polite; Ester treats Sheila like an eccentric aunt whose favour is flattering but faintly ridiculous and risky.