Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

For a long time this blocked him, he admits, this perception that reflection and solitude were privileges reserved for a few. Eventually he realised that the block was inside himself, he was using it to excuse himself from the effort of change. The gracious thing to do was to accept the beauty of the opportunity if it was given. I ask him what it is that he’s writing, whether it’s poetry, and he says it’s sometimes poetry, but that he’s also working on a book which brings together ideas from the Platonic tradition with aspects of Hindu and Sufi thinking, about an unseen reality behind the surface of things. That’s extraordinary, I tell him, because I’ve been reading about those mysteries, too. And I explain about Triptolemos and the sheaf of corn. Valentine gets quite excited, he knows a lot about the cult at Eleusis, the latest thinking about its rites, the initiates conducted in search through the darkness, culminating in Demeter’s reconciliation with Persephone. I joke that this is proof that we are twins after all, even if he has forgotten all about me. Separated for thirty years, we’re still thinking in tandem. I don’t enquire whether he’s got any plans for publishing his book. Something tells me that it’s not that kind of project, with a fixed end in sight and a plan for its promotion in the outside world.

— You never wrote to me, I say. — You didn’t even tell me you were going. I waited to hear from you. For months I expected to get a letter.

What he does then is to take my two hands in his and hold them, looking into my face intently, searching me. The touch of his hands is the same as it was when we were young, it brings back the past and at first all the old electricity seems to flow out of him and into me, and the tears that pricked into my eyes downstairs when I thought he might be dying come flooding back. And then the next moment there’s a flood of resentment too, because he hasn’t asked me any questions about myself, or what’s become of me: how many children I’ve got, who my husband is, what I do for a living. Isn’t he even in the least interested? Why must the world of real things always be relegated to second place, as if it was a lesser order, as if everything abstract was higher and more meaningful? I’m seized by the impulse to force Valentine into relation with my real life. I’m on the brink of telling him my children’s names and their dates of birth, to see whether he notices anything. But just then we’re interrupted by the commotion of the supermarket delivery arriving downstairs and Hilda’s voice raised imperiously, directing operations.

— Oh, it’s spider-woman, Valentine says, dropping my hands. — Here she goes.

— I think she was worried they might not turn up.

— You don’t know what she’s like. She’s aiming to stop me finishing the book. She blocks it. Her spirit blocks it. She crouches down there in the shape of a black spider. I sometimes imagine that she isn’t really my mother, she’s been taken over by a demonic force. I can’t write if I have to think about her.

I’m frightened now. I calm down because I’m frightened.

I think I ought to go.

I don’t know if he’s being funny or not. Perhaps he’s just exaggerating his paranoia, sending his craziness up for my benefit in the same deadpan way he used to do when we were teenagers. But in any case I stand up and make excuses, pretending I have an appointment to get to. Valentine doesn’t protest, and when I say something stupid and false about how we ought to keep in touch, he just smiles the funny remote smile he used to use against my parents, as if he could hardly hear them when they spoke to him. I don’t kiss him in farewell, I don’t touch him again; something in the way he stands apart from me forbids it.

Downstairs in the hall the front door is wide open and there are plastic trays of groceries on the floor, milk and fruit and sliced bread, lots of ready-meals. I can hear Hilda in the kitchen, but I don’t stop to say goodbye to her. And I don’t wait for the bus, I walk into town, all the way across the Downs. I’m so relieved, on my way back, that I didn’t get carried away and tell Valentine about Luke. I won’t say anything to anyone about this visit, I decide, not even to Madeleine. Valentine is a crazy irrelevance, he’s pitiable and ridiculous. (I know that’s what Mac would think if he ever met him.) I try to conceive of him with detached kindness and sympathy, as if he were one of the service users at the Gatehouse. But my connection with him feels like a liability, it feels loose inside me, a door swinging open on to danger.

On the train going home, I can’t concentrate on my book. The carriage is crowded and my legs ache after my walk across the Downs, the glare of the low sun is in my eyes. I wish I’d upgraded to first class as Mac is always telling me to do (but if I spend my money on that, it seems to turn my time at the Gatehouse into playtime, a self-indulgence). I see Mac standing on the platform at Taunton station when the train draws in: he has Ester with him and one of Ester’s friends. I’m filled with a rush of gratitude for his waiting there so faithfully and reliably; I’m moved by the idea of his kindness and solidity, my dear companion. I thought I’d calmed down but in fact all the emotion left over from my reunion with Valentine is still washing round inside me, I’m brimming with feeling. They don’t see me at first when I get down, they’re looking in the wrong direction (towards first class). The girls are in the green-striped dresses which are their school uniform. (Mac insisted on all this, the private school, the violin lessons, the tennis coaching. He’s talking already about Oxbridge. We quarrelled over it to begin with — I wanted Ester to go to the local state school, I hate the pushy privilege of the private places. And then I decided I didn’t care where she went as long as she was happy.)

The girls come running towards me as soon as they see me — of course her friend is only running because Ester is; when Ester wraps her arms round me she stands waiting awkwardly. I’m glad the friend is there because her cool, appraising stranger’s glance steadies me, so that I don’t spill over with my tenderness. My children prefer me to be dry with them, slightly withheld. Ester’s showing off, she’s full of some story which she’s garbling deliberately, about how she and Amy are doing their science project together and how they nagged at Daddy until he agreed Amy could come and stay the night so they could work on it. Ester drapes herself round Amy’s neck, Amy looks self-conscious. In the company of her friends, Ester overdoes it as if she’s studied carefully how to be a gushing schoolgirl; alone with us she’s quite different, astute and watchful, almost prim in her reserve.

Mac’s putting on weight, I think: I notice because I’ve been away from him for a few days. He could easily be mistaken for Ester’s grandfather. On the whole, though, he’s not ageing too badly: he has that tough good skin which doesn’t collapse, there’s something appraising and sensual still in the heavy-lidded eyes, and he stands so perfectly upright that people think he must have been in the military. Picking up my bags he tells me about the science project and about the ice-cream the girls have wheedled him into buying. He loves this role as the doting, bemused father. I can’t enter into his wholeheartedness, I think. I’m not wholehearted. He makes some comment about having me back from doing my good works, and then I’m irritated even though it’s only a few minutes since I got down from the train overflowing with love for him.

The train leaves and the spacious red-brick station resumes its air of being under-used and sleepy. Carrying my bags to the car, Mac asks me how it’s been in Bristol and I’m disconcerted for a moment, thinking he must know somehow about Val; then I realise that he means the weather. Mac loves to talk about the weather, updating me frequently: not as the small change of conversation, but with deep interest in an unfolding story, as if it’s eternally surprising. He follows the forecasts on television with the same responsible seriousness as he follows the news; although he’s retired he hasn’t given up his old pattern of attending to the world as if real things depended on his being accurately informed.