Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

The old faun-face is still there, behind the mask of age and illness. After the first moment’s shock of non-recognition I find it: the heart-shape and defiant jaunty chin, the curious deeply curved eye sockets, a sardonic twist to the long mouth. He is still handsome; and his looks are more densely male and less androgynous after thirty years — their style that was poised and provisional is etched now deep into the flesh. The bruise-black eyes are suffering and eloquent against that white hair. He’s wearing an old shirt which I guess was his father’s, half buttoned and without cufflinks, so that the sleeves dangle off his forearms. I feel ashamed of my smart outfit. There’s a stillness and steadiness in him which is new. He used to be too restless to sit at a desk for very long; but now as I look around I get the feeling that he doesn’t venture much out of this room. It smells stale in here; the bed is unmade, clothes are lying on the floor where he has dropped them. The walls are pinned all over with pictures, postcards, things cut out of the newspapers, scraps of paper scribbled with writing. There’s a Mac laptop open on the bed, though at the desk he was writing by hand. Books — not novels but heavy reference books, numbered on the spine as if they’re borrowed from a library — are piled up on the floor and the chairs. I’m sure when he stands up from his desk, turning enquiringly towards me, that he’s sorry he’s been interrupted.

I know right away that Val has no idea who I am.

It’s not only that he’s stalled for a moment, as I was with him, by how I’ve aged and changed. Even when I’ve told him my name and explained who I am and how we were friends before he went away, his expression doesn’t register anything except a vaguely polite hopefulness. — I’m so sorry, he says. — It’s part of my illness. Or rather, it’s part of the drugs they gave me to cure the illness. I’ve lost whole chunks of my past, you’ll have to forgive me.

His accent is faintly transatlantic; but his voice is the same, I’d know it anywhere: not deep, a tenor voice with something cracked and teasing in it, creaky and smoky. It’s because of the old known voice speaking out of him that I don’t just back off and make my excuses and leave right away. I feel at home with him, I know him, even if he doesn’t know me. — Tell me about yourself, he says. — Perhaps some of it will come back to me. Stella. Maybe I do remember a Stella. Come in. Shut the door behind you. I’d ask my mother to make you coffee only she’s driving me insane, I can’t bring myself to speak to her. Did she let you in? Did she pounce, the black widow?

He’s smiling but it’s not quite his old tautly mocking smile; I wonder if illness has wiped some of his irony. When he lights a cigarette (he’s kept Hilda’s lighter, after all this time) his hands shake. He goes around the room tidying up, pulling the sheets straight on the bed, lifting some books off a chair so that I can sit in it — and then he’s at a loss because he can’t find anywhere to put them down. Opening the curtains, he lets in a grey daylight which shows up the thick dust. Valentine was always indifferent to his surroundings but the mess seems more of a risk now that he’s older, and ill. When you are young and strong you can be sure of springing free of your material envelope through your own vitality; later, any dinginess or fustiness may seep back into you.

— Do you remember Fred? I say encouragingly. The chair that Valentine cleared for me to sit in is an ugly heavy thing, elaborately carved and high-backed like a throne; he’s sitting on the side of the bed, opposite me. — He was your teacher, he loved you.

— Yes, something. I’m getting something. Fred. A nice guy. Little guy, dark hair, liked poetry.

— You studied poetry with him at school.

— Did I know you at that time?

I tell him about Fred. Then I try to explain to him how it was when he and I went everywhere together, spent all our time together, read the same books, even dressed in the same clothes. I tell him how I worshipped him, though I leave this worshipping ambiguous, because I don’t want to embarrass him by bringing up the subject of sex: there’s something in his fragile body and his demeanour that forbids me even joking about it — as if he was a monk or a saint. He’s touched and interested, listening to my stories. Some of it does come back to him as I talk: mostly places, and some people. He remembers that he had to leave in a hurry because someone was looking for him; he says he often used to get into that kind of trouble. Before his illness, he says, his life was a mess and his perceptions were clouded and obscure. He has wasted so much time. I want to insist that he hasn’t wasted it, nothing’s wasted; but then I shut up because it surely is wasted if you’ve forgotten it, if it’s just gone. Anyway, Valentine isn’t really listening to me now, he’s holding forth with a new urgency as if he’s found his way on to a well-worn track which interests him more than a past he scarcely recognises.

— You’ve got to use your time, he says. — That’s what I’ve learned. I think of my illness as a gateway into a new more authentic life. More disciplined. Not ‘use’ time: that’s not the right word — as if time could be digested through the machinery of production and consumption. That’s the mistake we make. You’ve got to inhabit time fully, dwell inside it, every minute of every hour — which mostly we dissipate in false consciousness. If you learn to dwell in every minute then the spirit will make itself at home in you, you’re opened up to knowledge of the truth.

I’m not thinking that he’s completely crazy as he comes out with this. Partly this is because while he’s saying it I seem to be in the presence of the old Valentine, excitable and convinced. But partly his words seem like the answer to an intimation which I have sometimes too. Visiting old churches in the country with Mac, a horrible urge comes over me to fall on my knees and pray: though I’d never really do it while Mac was with me. Instead I tease him with my sceptical remarks and he instructs me on the history and architectural features of the place. Mac’s not the kind of religious person who gives way to transports, though he climbs up into the pulpit to check whether they’re using his beloved King James Bible. But I’m half wishing all the time that I was alone and could yield to this heaviness dragging me down, this longing to fall on my knees and supplicate something, I don’t know what. It feels for a time as if the something is the only real thing and all the rest is fake.

— So, is that what you do in here? I say to Valentine. — Inhabit time?

He thinks, he says. Sometimes he sits and thinks for hours. He reads, he writes. When I ask if he gets any exercise, he says he walks for hours at night across the Downs and through the city. — I don’t sleep much. It’s probably another consequence of the drugs. So I walk instead.

— I wish I’d had your solitude.

It’s true that sometimes I’ve imagined a life lived for contemplation and inward striving with ideas. I explain that I haven’t had time for these, even if I’d wanted them, because I’ve been wrapped up in caring for my children and family, and I’ve always gone out to work. I’m overstating somewhat; because I did have that time when I studied for my degree, and gave myself over to literature for three whole years. And the truth is that I’m only working part-time now, and I could leave my job if I wanted to. Mac cooks most of our meals, we have a cleaner. If I stayed at home I could have as much time to contemplate things as I liked.

— The exterior life is just a shell, Valentine says. — It’s a distraction.

— Well, you’re lucky. You’re lucky you don’t have to go out every day to a distracting workplace.