Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

Then Gerry and I realised that we could be talking about ourselves, and my relation to him, so we were both uncomfortable and changed the subject.

It is fun and sinful, shopping with Madeleine. It’s supposed to be Christmas shopping even though it’s only late October; we have congratulated ourselves on our resourceful forward thinking. But the truth is that at least half of what we spend is on ourselves, on clothes and shoes and bits of jewellery. I don’t often shop so impulsively these days, spending so much at once: it feels like being drunk (actually we probably are slightly drunk, having shared a bottle of wine at lunch), caught up in heady anticipations, believing we can renew ourselves and be different by changing our clothes. All day I am greedily interested in owning things. I’m paying cash but Madeleine’s putting all her purchases on her credit card; I’m anxious about debt because of those long years when I had no money to spare, but she reassures me that she can pay it all off later. And after all it’s only a technicality, where the spending comes from: owning the money doesn’t make it more or less virtuous. The power of the bright flood of things in the shops is overwhelming, dazzling — and a triumph of taste, because there’s much more nice stuff to go around now than there used to be. It’s as if some ancient knot of material difficulty has come unfastened all at once, old puritan certainties have slipped away; but a residue of that grit makes me uncomfortable. (And Mac doesn’t like credit cards. He’s always on the side of manufacturing: he says we should be making things to sell, not buying things with money we don’t have.)

Madeleine is using her mother’s car and gives me a lift back to the flat afterwards. Alone there, surrounded by my carrier bags, I embark on an anxious session of trying the clothes I’ve bought, pulling them on with abandon, discarding them crumpled and inside out on the bed. When it’s over I feel guilty and cheated and I have to run a bath because I’m sticky with sweat. I’m not sure now whether anything I’ve bought really suits me; I’m afraid in case I’ve lost my good judgement, or don’t know any longer how I want to appear. Last summer when I was looking through clothes on a rail in a shop I saw a young girl’s glance slide over me, embarrassed by my mistake in thinking those fashions could be meant for anyone my age. I’m relieved that I’ve arranged to go round to Luke and Janine’s for supper; I don’t want to stay in the flat alone with my purchases. I put on one of the new blouses, gauzy and flowery, over new leggings, then I take these off again and put on my old jeans and a white shirt. I’ve bought presents for Luke and Janine — a jumper for him and a bag for her — and I decide not to keep them for Christmas but to give them away now, like an expiation.

Luke and Janine are both junior-school teachers. They’re buying a tiny terraced house on a steep street in Totterdown, which was where I brought Luke to live with my Auntie Jean when he was a new baby. Jean and Frank are still around the corner; Jean probably sees Luke as often as I do. It was a working-class district then; now it’s alternative middle-class as well, with lots of young families, some of the houses painted in bright colours as if it was the Mediterranean. Luke and Janine grow vegetables in the back garden and Luke wants to install solar panels on the roof; he’s good at all those practical kinds of things. They are pleased but bemused by my presents. Janine says that she has a bag already, but that she will save the new one until she needs it. I don’t explain to her that if you’re like Madeleine you don’t have just one handbag at a time but a whole cupboard full of different ones to choose from, to go with different outfits.

We eat vegetarian lasagne for supper; Janine’s a vegetarian so Luke’s become one too. She doesn’t put any salt in her food and I would like to add some to my plateful but I don’t, because it might seem like a criticism of her cooking; I don’t think Janine would mind but Luke might, he’s very protective of her. I notice him explaining me to her now and then, mediating what I say as if he’s afraid I may be too overbearing. They are gentle and conscientious and acutely attuned to one another. I wonder sometimes whether Luke has toned himself down too far to be in tune with Janine; when he gets together with his brother he’s more like his old self, scathing and funny. But perhaps this gentleness is what he’s always really wanted. When I first met Janine I was afraid that I was bound to offend her somehow; she’s mournful-eyed and graceful like a girl in a Burne-Jones painting. But she’s observant and clever too, and it turned out that she and I like each other, we’re tolerant of each other’s differences. I expect she has her own opinions about the kind of childhood that Luke had, and some of the chaos in it — but she keeps them to herself. Luke disappears upstairs after supper to the computer, and she and I wash up together.

We discuss Rowan and his music, the success he’s having and our worries about the new pressures on him: he’s been supporting headline acts at the big festivals this summer. Songs pour out of him. I have them on my iPod and I listen to them on the train and round the house: they are a miracle, they come from a place in my son that’s unknown to me. Janine has entered wholeheartedly into Luke’s attitude towards his brother, at once sceptical and protective. Rowan still picks fights with me when he comes home; he recounts episodes from the past to illustrate how I neglected him or carelessly put him in danger — sometimes in a calmly forgiving voice, as if he appreciates I was too ignorant to know what I was doing. What possessed me, for instance, allowing him to go off to live with his grandmother in Glasgow for a year? Did I have any idea of the kind of place I’d sent him to, how violent it was and how racist? I lie awake at night and go over and over these narratives, asking myself whether he’s right and I was wrong. I don’t remember allowing Rowan to go anywhere, exactly: he presented his move to Glasgow pretty much as a fait accompli at the time and I don’t think I could have stopped him — but perhaps I should have tried harder. I lose my confidence in my version of what happened. Luke is impatient if I try to talk these anxieties over with him, he says I ought to know better than to take Rowan’s complaints too seriously. He says Rowan talks nonsense about how bad it was in Glasgow; Nicky’s mother adored him and made a big fuss of him, the area they were in was perfectly friendly, Rowan was fine.

I think while I’m washing up with Janine that I might mention what Madeleine told me: that Valentine has come home. I could see what she thinks about my telling Luke. But in the end the words won’t form in my mouth; her steady competence makes me ashamed to raise this issue of my ancient mistakes, like dragging up some dirty mess out of the washing-up water. Janine has such an attractive way of doing everything: the rubber gloves are turned inside out and dried and hung by a peg on the draining board; then she makes us lotus blossom tea bought from a Vietnamese company online and we drink it out of the bone china teacups she found in a charity shop. Perhaps it’s best to leave all those old stories in the dark. Luke has always known that his father’s first name is Valentine and that he was in America: that’s just about all he knows. I also told him long ago, when he was a little boy and asked me, that his father was very good-looking and very intelligent. (— I loved him desperately, I said. — But he didn’t love me, not in that way. Though we were very good friends.) Nowadays Luke avoids the subject as if it embarrasses him. He calls Mac Dad (Rowan never does), even though he was a teenager by the time we all moved in together.