Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

When we’d worked for a good hour Karen made us instant coffee and I shared the rest of my chocolate with her. I’d never actually drunk coffee before but I didn’t say so, I told her I took three sugars; I was excited and happy to see her stirring for me, there in the pavilion whose light was always heavy with dust motes, the inner sanctum of the stable-cult. From time to time I was visited by the knowledge that trouble waited for me at the end of this interlude of escape. No one knew where I was. I had begun something catastrophic when I slipped out of the routines of our life, to act by myself. I knew without thinking about it that what seemed plain to me — my dereliction’s existing in counterbalance with my mother’s — would never for one moment be admitted or discussed by her. But I wasn’t sorry. I was exulting — even though in my chest I felt a pain of postponed anxiety like a held breath.

Karen began to open up to me, complaining about Jilly and Budge. Jilly had been supposed to help with the mucking out but there was still no sign of her. — Sleeping it off, Karen said contemptuously. We went together to fetch the ponies up to the paddock, ready for the morning’s classes to begin; as we strolled she ripped off bits of wild clematis and sticky burs, lashing with them at the hedge in her indignation, rousing flurries of dust and papery moths. The air was warm and stuffy. The field was at the back of a new housing development; I had some inkling even then that this was not the real, deep countryside but something scruffy and indeterminate, washed up like a residue around the edge of the city.

I didn’t mistake Karen’s confidences for friendship — she would have unburdened herself to whoever was there. She was also the sort of talker who didn’t bother to fill you in on the background to what she was discussing, so that in order to follow I had to make great leaps of comprehension through a dense web of detail: dates and times, things done and words spoken, disputed interpretations of what had been promised. Her grudges were obscure and passionate. Budge she seemed to tolerate (‘He knows what’s going on and doesn’t like it’), but Jilly was ‘two-faced’ and ‘could be a right cow’. She dramatised their conversations, ventriloquising Jilly’s words in an exaggeratedly posh accent. ‘I’m not very happy with your attitude, Karen.’ In these duologues Karen had all the clinching and flattening ripostes, Jilly was lost for words. I gathered that Jilly was leaving more and more of the work at the stables up to Karen, paying her sometimes, but not on any agreed or regular basis. Sometimes she didn’t even turn up for the classes and Karen had to take them. I had imagined the world of the stables as a happy cohesion. Karen’s revelations were wrenching for me, but they also seemed an inevitable part of the initiations of this morning; I braced myself and grew into them.

— They’ve got me in a cleft stick, Karen said. — Because I love the horses, I won’t leave them.

When we opened the gate to the field the ponies lifted their heads from where they were cropping grass; I felt a pang at our intrusion but I knew better than to say so. Karen would think that was soppy. You wouldn’t have known that horses were her life unless you watched her carefully. She wasn’t tentative or tender as I was and she spoke about them as if they were comical, exasperating, a trial to be got through. But in the field they tolerated her approach when she came coaxingly towards them at an angle, holding the bridle out of sight behind her, making encouraging chirruping noises; whereas they wouldn’t let me get anywhere near them. She told me to ride Dozey up to the paddock; she would ride Chutney, leading Star, and we would go back for the others.

We mounted at the stile. I had never ridden without a saddle before, but as with the coffee I didn’t say anything. Dozey was the smallest of the ponies, only about ten hands. I pivoted awkwardly over the slippery broad barrel of her back, swinging my leg across, copying Karen’s movements; struggling not to slither immediately down the other side, I was hot in the face, knowing her assessing eye was on me. Because of her closed, blinkered perspective it was easy to think that she wasn’t noticing you, but in fact nothing escaped her.

— Grip harder with your knees, she advised offhandedly as if my incompetence were only a thing of the passing moment. — Sit up straight. Relax. You can do it.

Tears stung in my eyes, wrung out by the great kindness of her condescension. (When Karen taught the beginners’ classes she was merciless.) And I relaxed, I found my equilibrium. I felt the pony’s muscle and sinew moving under mine, I breathed her smell as if we were one hot flesh.

So it was that I came riding into the yard at the very moment my mother made her appearance at the stables (she probably didn’t even notice I was bareback). I think that I must have first turned up there at about nine — she arrived just before eleven, when morning lessons started. I saw her climb out of the passenger seat of a maroon-coloured car parked beyond the yard gate; she was wearing her heels, unsuitable in the mud, and her coat was hanging open with the silk scarf loose inside around her neck. She made an impression subtly different to the usual one, when she had toiled up with me on two buses: today she looked womanly, commanding and perfumed. At the same moment Jilly appeared out of the pavilion in wrinkled slacks and polo neck, sour-faced, dishevelled, hair scrunched in an elastic band, cigarette dangling off her lip. She raised an eyebrow in mild surprise at the sight of me on Dozey (her eyebrows were plucked to nothingness and had to be drawn back in brown pencil), but didn’t comment.

— Take the ponies through into the paddock, Karen, she drawled around her cigarette, as if she’d been in charge of the whole operation from the beginning.

I half expected Karen to break out angrily with her grievances, but she only clicked her tongue at Chutney and rode on, her face surly and suffering like a boy’s. Jilly unplugged the cigarette in a way she had, with a light popping noise, extending her free hand to my mother and putting on the caramel baritone charm she kept for parents. She obviously couldn’t remember my mother’s name. (I expect she thought Mum was a prole and a bore, beneath consideration. But she needed her money. And Mum would have been thinking that Jilly looked ‘a fright’.) Mum spoke politely in her most stand-offish, stilted public manner. Of course she didn’t make a scene about my being there, she never would. She saved the scene for later, in private.

— Come on, Stella, she said briskly, as if her collecting me had been planned all along. Awkwardly I slithered down from Dozey, landing somehow on my bottom on the cobbles. — Look at the state of you. I’m going to have to find something for you to sit on.

And we made our way to the maroon-coloured car.

Where in the driving seat a man was waiting.

Mum had called round at Nana’s at about half nine and no one had answered the door. Nana was inside (Mum had a key) but she had suffered a stroke. ‘A slight stroke,’ Mum said decisively, tidying it away. Uncle Frank had taken Nana to hospital. (So that was why I hadn’t heard Nana when I woke up. Unless — this troubled me for a while — she’d had the stroke because she found me missing. Nana recovered but she was never her old indefatigably busy self, she meandered into troughs of bewildered absence. She died when I was fourteen.)

Mum had guessed immediately where I might have gone. We never once spoke of the possibility that I had come home first and been inside the flat where she was sleeping, not alone. She never asked about the money I had taken, although she must have noticed it was missing, in that time when she had to count every penny. (I hid what was left of it at the bottom of my treasure box, spending it gradually on sweets.) Not long afterwards, when I was reading one evening on my bed, she came in and opened her hand, showing me the coral button and diamanté buckle.