Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

Really Valentine’s return doesn’t seem to matter much. I reassure Madeleine that it’s most unlikely his path will ever cross with mine. As far as I’m concerned, I tell her, his being a thousand miles away or three makes no difference at all. We progress to talking about other things instead: she’s staying over at her mum’s for a week so we arrange to go shopping one afternoon, and to take both our mothers out to lunch together at the weekend. All this gives me a good excuse for staying on in town beyond the days when I’m actually at the Gatehouse. I confess to Madeleine that I find myself seeking out excuses so as not to spend too much time in our country house, though there’s nothing wrong between Mac and me.

— But I’m just not ready to settle down to country life, and he is.

— I don’t blame you. All those green wellies and Tories and garden fetes. Perfect for holidays, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

The country is more complicated than Madeleine thinks (she’s such a Londoner these days and can’t believe there’s real life anywhere else). Our country friends aren’t really Tories, they’re just not very interested in politics, they’re interested in other things. Our nearest neighbour, for instance, is an ecologist and expert in early music; the woman who helps Mac with the heavy work in the garden used to be in West End musicals. And I love my view of the church tower — its rooks rising like specks against the clouds — through the arched window on the staircase. Only I have the idea that moving down there permanently would be like passing through the quiver in the old glass to the other side, leaving something unfinished behind.

I do really, mostly, meanwhile, forget about Valentine; only every so often, underneath the surface of my conversation with Madeleine and then in the days that follow, at work and in the flat, I come upon the new knowledge of his nearness in the city — like knocking up against some disconcerting piece of loose flotsam. Funnily enough, if there had been even the remotest chance of some kind of romantic renewal between us, I think the idea of him would be less interesting. There’s something infantilising and shaming in those Friends Reunited stories of childhood sweethearts getting back together. But I’m not succumbing to any secret hope that Valentine will have changed his sexuality while he’s been away. Quite the contrary, in fact: it’s the absence of the sexual motive which makes the idea of him intriguing for me. I realise that I’m starting to exaggerate him in my mind, imagining him like the demigod on the Greek vase, set apart from mortals, initiated into mysteries, bestowing gifts. Bestowing them on me: gifts of wisdom, or some kind of absolution. How absurd. He did use to look a bit like a demigod, when he was seventeen. He had that swaggering air of careless luck and a blissful uncomplicated beauty, as if his face and body were drawn in a few clean lines.

But now he’ll be middle-aged, I tell myself.

He’ll probably be dissipated, raddled, awful.

I don’t know how much it matters, knowing your biological father. I’ve never known mine. A few years ago my mother suddenly became very agitated and conspiratorial: it turned out that, of all things, my real father had got in touch with her. He had got hold of my Uncle Ray through the Internet (Ray’s a computer enthusiast) and sent a message to him: the whole process was alien to Mum, who won’t have a computer in the house — though Luke has tried patiently to persuade her.

Anyway, he’d not only found out Mum’s whereabouts but was asking what had become of me, his daughter. After all this time, nearly half a century! I think Mum had even persuaded herself that he was dead, just through sticking to that story for so long, no matter how I pressed her for the truth (with other people, as far as I know, she never even discussed him). She fell out dreadfully over the whole business with Uncle Ray, who in the first flush of excitement had responded to the stranger, giving him Mum’s new married name and her telephone number. She and Ray didn’t speak for months, until my stepfather and Ray’s wife engineered a reconciliation.

I begged Mum to tell me what exactly my father had said to her: I was more interested in this fact of my parents’ contact than in any implications it had for me.

— Oh, I don’t know, Stella. We only spoke for a few minutes. The usual.

— What d’you mean, the usual? It can’t have been usual!

— I mean, just the usual sort of things that people say.

— How did he sound? Did you recognise his voice right away?

— Of course I did, I’m not senile. He wanted to know what you were doing and I told him. He’s going to ask Ray to pass his email whatsit on to you, so you can be in touch with him if you really want to.

I longed to have overheard how she reacted when she realised it was him: raw perhaps, for once, and startled, implicated. After all, she hadn’t put the phone down on him. Was she alone in the house when he called? She was. Had she asked him about his life, what it had been? That was none of her business, she said.

— But what was it like? How did you feel, when you knew it was him?

— I was trying to think of a way to get rid of him.

In the end I took my cue from Mum: I decided I wasn’t eager to see my father. And of course I might have met him anyway, when I had driving lessons so long ago from a man with the same name. I still remembered how we had liked each other and how proud he had been of my driving. I was wary of spoiling it now: either finding out my instructor wasn’t my father after all, or, if he was, then muddling the decent clarity of our old contact with new overlays of guilt and effort. Ray gave me the email address, but I never did anything about getting in touch.

In the wake of the little drama of my father’s turning up, my mother was peculiar: cross and flattening, impatient with my stepfather if he was slow or forgot things. I felt sorry for Gerry, flinching under her brisk regime where everything personal and emotional had to be tidied out of sight — just when he might have liked to open up more expansively. He was still physically fit and energetic in his seventies and he was allowing himself new luxuries of feeling: listening to classical music, cooking, growing passionate over the birds visiting his garden. It felt for a while as if he and I were allied together against Mum and her lack of imagination, or her refusal of it. I made a point then of often taking Ester round to see them, because she and Gerry got on so well; he could occupy himself with her for hours, involving himself seriously in her games. He found something painfully poignant, I think, in her sweet looks and contained, fastidious manners: she was his bossy princess, he was her dedicated retainer. He asked me once, while we were watching her on the swing that he’d put up for her, how Sheila could bear to see her when she came visiting from Brazil.

— I’d have thought it would have been better for her to make a clean break, he said. — Never to set eyes on the child.

Defensive, I assumed that he was criticising our whole arrangement (my mother had predicted disaster when we first took Ester on). I was ready to be brash: no, why should she mind, so long as Ester was happy? When I realised he was genuinely interested, I told him what Sheila had said when we talked about it once: that she was surprised how far she was able to choose not to feel regretful. — Obviously she’s sad sometimes, for a while. But it surprises her, how most of the time it is all right. She says she’s come to the conclusion that the biology — the blood and genes and stuff — only means as much as you choose it to. You either confer that power, emotionally, on the genetic connection, or you don’t. Likewise, you could confer the power on someone who isn’t genetically related to you.