Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

Sometimes when she and I were alone in the flat, Auntie Andy went into the other room to lie down and I heard her crying, although Mum had told Jean that she never did. It didn’t occur to me to try to comfort her. I would pretend to carry on with my play, feeling miserably guilty. I was only a child, there was nothing I could offer, and I must have been a living reproach because I wasn’t Charlie: though Andy never made me feel this, by any word or sign.

Auntie Andy had to find a job, she had to get a divorce and a place to live by herself. She couldn’t go back to that house, obviously.

All of this worked out well for her.

I think she must have come to our flat in the first place, not only out of a revulsion against everything to do with her old life, but also because my mother’s solitary cheerful style — frilly aprons and nail polish and lemon-yellow guest towels — had signalled to her, even before the disaster, a vision of possibilities different to the ones she knew. And Mum was honoured by Auntie Andy’s choosing us; it seemed a consecration of Mum’s situation as a single woman, managing bravely by herself. (Though Andy’s staying was an inconvenience and a strain too; my mother acquitted herself with exemplary generosity, she really did.) And then, within a couple of years, they both found themselves a man, as if that had been the whole point of the enterprise.

Andy went to work on the factory floor of the chocolate manufacturers where Uncle Ray was in dispatch. She made a little face of apology when she told us about the job, as if she knew it was beneath her. But in fact she enjoyed the company of the women there, though she kept aloof from the roughest of their bantering and raucous kidding (I saw this because Ray got me a summer job at the factory when I was sixteen). She brought us paper bags of half-priced, imperfect chocolates whenever she visited: violet creams and Crunchies and Turkish delight, my favourite — I picked off flakes of the chocolate with my teeth and then ate the jelly. Even after she married, Andy went on working there.

— Carrying on for the moment, she said suggestively.

Her new husband, Phil, was lugubrious with faded good looks, stick-thin. Not long after their wedding Andy began hinting with proud smiles that she might be pregnant; she must have been forty-ish by then, she was a lot older than my mother. Some of this I picked up at the time from conversations between Mum and Auntie Jean: their twilight tones alerted me to the fact that they were talking about bodies. Apparently she suffered from real morning sickness, her stomach swelled, her breasts were sore. (They hardly ever used that word, ‘breasts’. It was reserved for medical matters, only uttered in lowered voices.) But in the end nothing came of it, it was a false alarm.

— Doesn’t it just break your heart? Jean said.

Andy never did have another baby, although that pattern of phantom pregnancy repeated itself over and over well into her fifties, by which time it had become a bit of a joke among the people who knew her, though not an unkind one. To Uncle Phil’s credit he never gave the least sign of scepticism about her symptoms; he was punctilious in his attentions, urging her to put her feet up, bringing the barley water with soda that she’d ‘suddenly taken a fancy to’. Andy talked about her ‘disappointments’ as if they were miscarriages, but Jean didn’t believe she ever really conceived in her second marriage. My mother said she didn’t know, it wasn’t any of her business. However painfully these disappointments were felt in private, nothing altered Andy’s queenly kindness and distance. And as far as I know, these phantoms were the only outward sign of continuing trauma from what had happened. I can’t help feeling, thinking about it now, that there was an element of histrionic performance in them, contrasting with Andy’s usual reserve. Exacting our sympathetic goodwill, under false pretences, she claimed some latitude, some indulgence: in return for the magnitude of what she had undergone, and what she had lost, which could never be restored.

I WAS STAYING OVER AT MY nana’s. I was ten. I woke miraculously early, which was unusual for me. The blankets at Nana’s were meagre, ex-army, in prickly grey wool with an oily smell. They would only stay tucked in if you kept unnaturally still, which I never could — in my sleep I had shifted and burrowed, the blankets had come untucked, and a little slit of freezing air was probing my warm body like a knife. Then I rolled over on to the inflexible hand of my plastic doll. Sometimes if I woke up I turned the bedding around and put the pillow at the foot, and to Nana’s dismay went back to sleep upside down — which was a revelation of a different room, another world order. But the doll’s hand that morning seemed to poke me with a message: ‘Arise!’ (I was reading a lot of books set in the past, which was grander and better.)

It was Saturday. It was spring — yellow squares of light transformed the unlined curtains at the window, their pattern of purple bars wound with a clinging vine. Usually by the time I came to consciousness Nana was already busy downstairs with her mouse-activity, sweeping and wiping and soaking, smoothing out brown paper bags and saving them, un-knotting scraps of string and winding them into balls. But today I couldn’t hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on to the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape — trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones — was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night. Cats were dotted around the vantage points like sentinels; glass windows black with dirt were a shed’s eye pits. Nana’s lilies of the valley set out on a forced march down the cracks between the pavings.

If I got dressed, I thought, I could walk out into this — what could stop me? Because no one had ever thought of it, I’d never been forbidden to go out before anyone else was up. My latchkeys were warm on their ribbon against my chest, under my vest — though I wasn’t supposed to sleep in them in case I strangled myself. I could go home by myself without telling Nana, and surprise my mother. Gleefully I imagined the reversal of our roles: Mum’s tousled head raised, blinking and sleepy and astonished, from the pillow at the end of her sofa pulled into its night-position; my own bright wakefulness, airy and full of implications from its journey through the outdoors. For once, I would have the advantage of her. Pulling on my knickers and socks and slacks, buttoning my check shirt, diving into the V-neck of the jumper Nana had knitted in rust-brown stocking stitch, I was light-headed with sensations of freedom and power. All the time I was listening out for mouse-noises from Nana. Now I had started, I couldn’t bear to be prevented. I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up — how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day.

People forget that in 1966 there were still bomb sites: it took a long time to stitch back together that fabric of our cities ripped open by the war — or rather, not to stitch it back at all, but to tear the fabric out and throw it away and put something different in its place. Every time I made my way home from Nana’s I walked across an open area where bombs had fallen: you could still make out different wallpapers on the high standing walls, distinguishing the squares of vanished rooms, washed by the rain to faint ghosts of their former patterns. Traces of staircases climbed in zigzag patterns; doors opened on to nothing. Whatever desolation there must once have been was softened and naturalised after two decades; overgrown with buddleia and fireweed, the sites were as consoling as gardens. We played out there and boys rode their bikes round on the grass in the evenings.