Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

Ester seemed to settle things between Mac and me. I know that usually it doesn’t work, having a baby to bring a couple together; but perhaps just because she came to us in a roundabout way, she seemed to set a seal on our marriage. Mac was lordly in his confidence that we were doing the right thing; I never caught him out in any petty panic, and I admired him for it almost dispassionately, as if I were admiring a stranger — though dispassionate isn’t the right word, because at that time the passion between us was running rather strongly again. (This was during the same period, too, as he steered through a crisis at work: when they were advised to diversify into calibration systems for long-range weaponry Mac decided against it on moral grounds. Some of the team thought the company would go under, but it didn’t.) The funny thing is how Ester’s grown to be so much like Mac — more like him than either of his actual daughters. Not that she looks anything like him, or like either of us — or like Sheila, for that matter (she’s vividly pretty; people think she’s Malaysian with her dead-straight black hair and neat shallow eyelids and clear brown skin — her skin is like Rowan’s). But Ester is stubborn, diligent, even-tempered, clever at sciences and with machinery. She steadies me when I’m restless or dissatisfied; she cools my heat and saves me from myself.

I WAKE UP FIRST, WHILE MAC is still asleep. This waking up early is new, it has something to do with my age (I’m fifty, with everything that brings). There’s a thin grey light in the room and the night is over, but that isn’t encouraging. Night suits me, with its depths like infinite rooms sprawling underground. The daylight is exposing, prosaic, bleak — although I don’t know why I’m afraid of its exposure, nothing’s the matter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. But something sour and dreadful seems to have collected, while I was sleeping, in the hollow under my breastbone: it’s both a physical sensation and a mental anguish at once and I have to sit suddenly upright so as not to succumb to it. Then I discover that I need to pee. Was that all it was, after all: the poison and the anguish? So I mutter something to Mac, and potter in bare feet in my pyjamas to the bathroom, trying to keep my mind shuttered against the light which presses into it. I don’t pull up the blind in the bathroom, I try to hold off the day which I can hear gathering its force outside the window: the breezes stirring in the garden, the birdsong in its slippery purity, the whole urgent, ordinary machinery of the present resuming its forward movement.

But I can’t hold it off. I prefer to wake up gradually, lingering half inside my dreams; but sometimes waking is as abrupt as falling over an edge of sleep, the doors to conscious awareness fly open involuntarily between one second and the next. I have a vision of despairing clarity then, as if my life were a featureless bland landscape stretching behind and ahead of me: all surface, all banal anxiety and difficulty, unredeemed nowadays by any promise or hidden content. It’s in these early mornings, if I were an Anglican like Mac, that I’d pray.

Then that passes over. I go downstairs in the quiet of the sleeping house. Usually Mac gets up first but this morning I don’t want to go back to bed, I know I’ll only lie there in the grip of this wakefulness. On the landing halfway down the staircase (this is the house which Mac and I bought together when we moved from Sea Mills), there’s a tall arched window, much taller than a person, with a narrow seat like a shelf across the bottom. I pause there as I always do, because I like the way the garden and the oak tree and the church tower beyond the trees all look mythic through the distorting old glass, like something in a film or a dream. Then my bare feet are cold on the stone-flagged kitchen floor, so I go into the boiler room where I keep a pair of old slippers, worn comfortably to shiny black hollows in the shapes of my heels and toes. I fill the kettle under the tap and put it on to boil. I open the back door and carry the teapot across the wet grass, soaking my slippers; I empty last night’s cold tea leaves into the bedraggled dahlias. Since Mac retired and sold the factory, he’s thrown himself into gardening with the same zeal he once put into business. It’s autumn, these dahlias are a velvety dark orange-red, smouldering in the cobwebby light. Silky floss is tangled amongst the seed heads in the herbaceous border, the plant stems are beginning to blacken and I can smell the frost: frowsty like rotten apples. Back in the kitchen I open the bread crock and get out the bread for toast. Mac makes all our bread, and our marmalade as well. I pour out glasses of orange juice. I go through the motions bringing in the morning, one ordinary thing after another.

Mac would like me to give up work and settle down with him here in the country, but I’m not ready yet. So we keep on our flat in the city, I stay there two or three nights a week when I’m working (I’m still at the Gatehouse). But Ester’s at school down here, Mac drives her back and forth every day and on the way he tests her on her homework — French and poetry and maths and science. I worry that this puts too much pressure on her but she loves it, she nags him to ask her questions; she seems to learn easily, picking things up as a pure pleasure. She learns poems by Herbert and Marvell and Yeats off by heart (‘Love Bade Me Welcome’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’), and she and Mac recite them in unison. I thought Mac would be bored at home but I understand now that he addresses himself to whatever room of his life he happens to be in with the same kind of serious absorption that doesn’t fail him.

When I’ve taken his breakfast upstairs I sit reading my book at the kitchen table with my legs tucked under me, refilling my mug with tea from the pot keeping warm in its cosy. The book is about the idea of Nature as it was imagined in classical philosophy and then as it developed under the Romantics; I’m reading a section on the Eleusinian mysteries. The last time I was in the British Museum, I saw a Greek red-figure vase which depicts an element of Eleusinian ritual: the demigod Triptolemos sits in his winged chariot with a sheaf of corn in his hand, preparing to descend and bestow it upon mankind. I’m searching all the time, in books and films and paintings, for signs of transcendent meaning like this that I can puzzle over. They excite me and elude me, escape ahead of me as I try to grasp them. And all the time that I’m reading, I’m watching the clock — at quarter past seven I’ll get Ester up and Mac can make her breakfast and then I’ll drive to the station to catch the ten to eight train. It’s unusual to have this interval of reading and abstract thought on a work day. Perhaps I’ll pay for it later and be tired: but for now my mind is racing, leaping from sentence to sentence. Everything’s momentous as if I’m looking through a magnifying lens in my mind, seeing through the words to the whole, to their core; sometimes I’m actually breathless and my heart is racing, in pursuit of the meaning emerging so close within my reach.

I needn’t go to work, we don’t need the money, I could stay here and read and think all day, every day. This house is the first home I’ve ever actually chosen for myself: a Georgian frontage, all light and air, tacked on to a much older farmhouse behind, with walls two foot thick and squint-eyed windows to keep the weather out. For a year after we bought it I devoted myself to doing the house up and buying furniture for it, trying to fulfil the soul I felt it had: subtle with its shadowy corners, poignantly haunted by its past. And then when the house was finished I couldn’t quite bear it: I felt as if I’d made it for someone else to live in and not me. Or it seemed like a bargain I’d made with middle age and the bargain sickened me; I was ashamed of all the money I’d spent, contriving an effect of spontaneity and accidental charm as if the place had been in my family for a hundred years. I thought that I’d bargained my youth away with this house, giving it away in return for a shell, the sordid trick of material things. (But of course youth was over anyway, whether I bargained or not.)