Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

Our flat was on the first floor of a spindly Georgian terrace in Kingsdown, Bristol; because it was on a high bluff, from our back windows we surveyed the plain of Broadmead sprawling below, punctuated then by the spires of churches, ruined and otherwise, and only just beginning to be drowned under a tide of office blocks and shopping centres, a new world. These Georgian houses were five storeys tall if you counted the basements which were at garden level at the back; they were mostly raddled and neglected, broken up into flats and bedsits, showing up on their exterior — like intricate dirty embroidery — the layers of complex arrangements for living inside. There was broken glass in some of the windows; at others filthy torn lace curtains, or bedspreads hooked up to keep out the light. A frightening old woman next door wore a long black dress like a Victorian. Mrs Walsh — kindly but with a goitrous bulge on her neck I couldn’t bear to look at — lived in our basement with her elderly son (she used to say, ‘Can you believe it, he was my little boy?). Beneath that basement was a windowless cellar, its mineral cold air as dense as water, where stalactites grew down from the vaulted ceiling (I knew what they were because we’d been on a school trip to Wookey Hole caves). They used to say there were iron rings where they chained the slaves in some of the Bristol cellars — and secret tunnels leading to the docks. In Bristol stories there were always slaves and sugar and tobacco.

You should see our old road these days. I shouldn’t think those houses change hands for much less than a million. Everyone now covets the ‘original features’, the spindly height, the long walled gardens, the view. Those places sing with money and improvement. Nana’s little Victorian box around the corner, which we used to think was so much ‘better’, can’t compare. Sometimes I’m nostalgic now for that old intricate decay, as if it was a vanished subtler style, overlaid by the banality of making over and smartening up that came later. My mother never was nostalgic. She got out the minute she had the chance.

I pulled Nana’s front door shut behind me. From somewhere far off came the ruminative stop — start of the milkman’s electric float, but still I had the morning more or less to myself. I could hear the crêpe-soled creak of my sandals on the pavement and the jangled clang of the gate as it closed with finality after me, as if these sounds bounced off the silent houses opposite. I could almost see my surprising self, setting out about my own business in the streets, my windcheater zipped up and my hands in its pockets; I fancied I walked with a masculine casual bravado, brown hair chopped off in a clean line at shoulder length. I wasn’t interested at that point of my life in being girlish — what I admired were horses and the boyish girls who hung around horses.

Turning the corner at the end of Nana’s street, I started along the path across the bomb site. When I saw a man sitting facing away from me on one of the broken low walls, it was too late to go back, but my heart beat with shy anxiety: I hated the idea of any strange adult speaking to me, perhaps telling me off. Wearing a dark overcoat, the man was bent over with his head in his hands. The path ran close behind where he sat, and hurrying past I could make out the black cloth of his coat worn to gingery brown across the shoulders, freckled with scurf from his greasy hair. I thought it was strange that an adult man came out to sit alone on a pile of stones: I couldn’t imagine either of my uncles doing it. I didn’t know much about men but in my experience they were always purposefully on their way somewhere. Then I realised that the man was Mrs Walsh’s son Clive. I hadn’t recognised him because it was the first time I’d ever seen him beyond the end of our street. He lifted his head and peered over his shoulder at me: doleful long face, unshaven cheeks and chin, the beard-growth specked with silver. The inner rim of his lower eyelids was lined in sore, wet red.

— Come and look at this, he said.

Clive was strange. One of his boots was made up with a special thick sole because of his sloping, dragging walk; he had had meningitis when he was three and his twin sister had died of it. We had lived in the same house since I could remember, but he and I had an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge each other, except when our connection was mediated by our mothers. — Can you believe he had yellow curls once? Mrs Walsh would sigh. — Say hello to Stella, Clive.

— Say hello to Clive, my mother would order, shoving me sharply in the small of the back. She was full of ostentatious pity for the ‘poor thing’, but also thought it might be better for everyone if he was ‘put away’, whatever that meant. — It’s not much of a life, she said.

I’m not sure whether Clive really recognised me that morning; we never spoke about it afterwards. I might just have been any passing little girl.

— Look what I’ve found, he said.

Warily I stepped over the wall into the interior of the vanished house. Swallows were flitting and shrieking inside the space, they nested there. Against the wall where Clive was sitting, fallen into the cracks in the stones and rolled into the grass, was an improbable slew of buttons of all sorts — thousands of buttons, much more than a handful or even a tinful. I crouched down to them, wondering, not touching yet.

— Who do they belong to? How did they get here?

Clive said he had known the woman who once lived here and they must be hers. I’d played here often and I’d never seen the buttons before, but I began to believe him because he was so certain. Did he mean a woman who’d lived in this house before it was bombed? Some of these buttons were old: carved jet ones, brass ones with military insignia, cream cloth-covered ones for shirts. Others looked modern: coloured plastic ones, like the ones my Nana put on my cardigans, were still sewn on to the cards they’d been bought on. Some were fastened into sets — miniature mother-of-pearl buttons for baby clothes, pink glass drops — but most of them were loose, jumbled chaotically together: ordinary black and brown and white ones, a coral rose, wooden toggles, a diamanté buckle, big yellow bone squares, toggles made of bamboo.

Something about the sheer multiplicity of the buttons — the fact that you couldn’t get to the bottom of them — started an ache of desire in my chest. I thought that Clive was feeling the same thing. He breathed through his mouth noisily. His cheeks under their strong beard-growth were dramatic, hollow as if they’d been carved out with something clumsy like an axe; the raw mask of a man’s face was overlaid on his life which was more like the life of a child. Every afternoon Clive was allowed to wander out along our road. He always stopped at one particular lamp post, as if it was a limit his mother had set him; he would be standing there when the children came home from school, hunched over, smoking and watching us, wearing his overcoat in winter, a short grey mac in summer. We squealed and ran past him — even I did, pretending I didn’t know him. Every teatime Mrs Walsh came out to bring him back, pulling him coaxingly by the hand; a small, bent, fat old woman tugging at a tall, scowling, resisting man, showing her patient smile around to anyone who might see them.

— We could take them home for your mother, I suggested.

But I wanted the coral rose for myself, or the buckle. I put my hand out to pick them up; angrily Clive pushed it away, scuffing some of the buttons into the dirt with his normal boot.

— Don’t touch them. Leave them, he scolded.

Close up, I could smell his familiar smell, the same as in their flat: stale like damp feather cushions or mouldy bread, mixed with something perfumed he put on his hair (or his mother did). Reasonably, I pointed out that if anyone wanted them they shouldn’t have thrown them away but he didn’t listen, he was preoccupied, sorting through the buttons with clumsy yellow-stained fingers as if he was searching for one in particular. Clear snot glistened on the curves of his upper lip. I watched jealously, crouched on my haunches, balancing on the balls of my feet with my hands on my knees. Really, where could so many buttons have come from? Someone might have had a button shop and given it up: but then, why pour out the cornucopia here? I was frustrated that Clive was not a real adult who could offer answers — though often they only dismissed my questions. (— Oh Stella. Don’t be silly. Whatever for?) Clive held a big button up to the light: it was pearly white, so translucent it was almost green, carved with a leggy bird with a long beak, perhaps a heron. I had never thought with any interest about clothes before, but I had a heady vision in that instant of a black velvet cape, full-length, dragging behind me along the smooth floor of a place I’d never been. — Behold, I thought to myself, out of the books I was reading. — She cometh.