Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

That was a silly fuss, it didn’t last. I’m very happy here now, I know how lucky I am. Though I’m not quite ready yet, to move in finally. I’m holding that day off. When I jump on the train at the last minute on work mornings, I still feel sometimes as if I’m running away, escaping from something coming up behind me.

In the evening after work I have dinner in the city with Madeleine: she’s home from London visiting her mother. We meet in a lively place I like which was the old river police station when the harbour was still for commerce and not just for leisure; the restaurant is all glass on the river side so that you can watch the boats and the swans passing, the water in its metamorphosis (through gold, mercury, steel) as the light goes. Madeleine is there first and finds a good place by the window; when I arrive and don’t see her for a moment she half stands up, tottering on high heels, calling and waving to me eagerly: blonde hair pinned up untidily, protuberant blue eyes, plump chest rounded as a pigeon’s, hot colour of tiny broken capillaries in her cheeks. She’s wearing a tight skirt and big earrings and she’s ordered cocktails already. Madeleine and I don’t meet often, but whenever we do we fall easily into our old companionableness. I talk to her more intimately than I ever talk to Mac, I can tell her anything and she tells me everything too, we spill over to each other eagerly. It’s better without the men (though she likes Mac and I like Donald, her partner). Madeleine doesn’t read and she doesn’t think about abstract things, but she takes in what she sees, without defensive judgement.

She’s Ester’s godmother (Mac insisted that Ester was christened, though the boys aren’t). She doesn’t have children but Donald has teenagers who live with them at weekends and she likes them and is kind to them and comically doleful about her relations with them. (— I think you have to be broken in first by babies, she says. — The teenage craziness comes as too much of a shock otherwise — just as you’ve settled down yourself, into being sensible.) Her job these days is something deep inside the intangibles of management: in public relations, for a company selling software to other companies for managing their systems — she’s not even conducting the public relations, just overseeing the process through which they’re conducted. When I ask her what fills up her day she says it’s too boring to talk about, but I don’t believe she hates it, I suspect she’s happy enough in keeping her fragment of the machinery turning over effectively. I think that I couldn’t bear to do something so null, but then I’m sorry for thinking it: what right have I to criticise? And in its different way that’s what my job is too, just making tiny adjustments to individual lives swept along in the flow. I don’t have all the ambitious ideas about OT I used to have, believing it was a lever for changing things. Mostly it’s just organising badminton or art classes for the service users, or trips to Butlin’s or the ice rink (we did go to Paris once). Madeleine loves my story of the young man in one of our Gatehouse flats who is autistic spectrum and not coping with venturing out anywhere; I’ve taken photographs of his bedroom, bathroom, hallway and kitchen, and laminated them for him, because he feels safer if he can look at them while he’s away from them.

— Oh, those are what I need, she says. — On a bad day, I could stare at the furniture in our spare room and take comfort from it.

— It’s not exactly building a new world, though, is it? Bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen…

— Who wants a new world?

Night falls while we are eating and the darkness outside presses greedily against the glass; an autumn moon swims up over the water, dowager-stately, trailing clouds like scarves, looming over its own reflection. The restaurant by this time is crowded and noisy. Somehow we get on to talking about coincidence: Madeleine believes in premonitions and synchronicity and ghosts and we quarrel about this amiably enough, not for the first time. She gives me examples of things that have happened to her which can’t have been accidental and I insist that this perception is only confirmation bias. She says there are patterns of energy we can tap into, if we allow ourselves to read the signs. We’re neither of us going to change our minds. I tell her how I’ve dreamed often about Fred since he died, but I don’t think that’s because he’s visiting me or sending me messages, it’s just because I miss him and feel sad about him. (One of these dreams was so horrible that I can’t recount it to Madeleine or to anyone, it’s safer if I keep it to myself. In this dream Fred came to stay with us and was just the same funny, exuberant, glum self that he had been when he was alive, except that he brought his dead body with him as if that was a normal thing to do, and kept leaving it carelessly lying about the place; this body was a disgusting thing, half opened up like a body in an autopsy. I was terrified all the time that the boys or Ester would come across it and be traumatised — often in my dreams the boys aren’t the grown men they are in real life, they’re still children and I’m still responsible for them.)

I’m happy in the restaurant with Madeleine. We’re genuinely hungry and everything tastes good and I like the way the night beyond the glass closes us in with the crowd of strangers also enjoying themselves. There’s a kind of freedom too, no doubt about it, in our being fifty. It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last. Although Madeleine insists at one point that some man or other is eyeing me up; I don’t really think he is, and I don’t fancy him in any case. Anyway, I say, I’m old enough to be his mother. Madeleine says that as I was a child bride I could be anybody’s mother, and I remind her that the one thing I wasn’t as a child was anyone’s bride. And then she breaks off and gives me an odd kind of glance as if that’s reminded her of something she ought to tell me, but doesn’t want to. It takes a bit of coaxing to get it out of her, but she’s hopeless at dissimulating and explains to me eventually that she’s heard news from her mother (who still lives in the house where Madeleine grew up, next door to me) that Valentine has come home.

Valentine! No! I’m surprised by how the news disturbs me, after all this time.

— Do you mean home from the States?

— I mean home to his old house, where he lived when we knew him. His mother’s still there; he’s staying with her, apparently. He’s been there for months. Mum says he’s ill. Or he’s been ill and he’s come home to get better, I’m not sure which. His mother must be a hundred and ten by now. She was ancient when we were teenagers. His father died, you knew that.

For as long as he’s been in America it’s as if Valentine stopped changing when I stopped seeing him — I’ve gone on imagining him as a boy of seventeen. He ages now all at once with a rush: Valentine’s the same age as we are — no, he’s a year older. And then I think that I can’t really remember him at all. I’m interested in the news of his return, of course, but I don’t know what it means: perhaps nothing. He’s been at home for months and hasn’t looked for me. The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can’t re-enter it. Actually I feel angry with him for returning. Of course Madeleine wants to ask me about Luke, whether Luke knows anything about his father. And I reply firmly, as if it’s not up for discussion, that he knows his biological father went away, that’s all. He knows that his father never knew anything about him. Mac is his father now and he loves Mac, Mac loves him. Nothing else matters.