Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

MY MOTHER AND I LIVED ALONE. My father was supposed to be dead, and I only found out years later that he’d left, walked out when I was eighteen months old. I should have guessed this — should have seen the signs, or the absence of them. Why hadn’t we kept any of his things to treasure? Why whenever he came up in conversation, which was hardly ever, did my mother’s face tighten, not in grief or regret but in disapproval — the same expression she had if she tasted some food or drink she didn’t like (she was fussy, we were both fussy, fussy together)? Why did none of our relatives or friends ever mention his name? (Which was Bert, unpoetically.) What had he died of, exactly? (‘Lungs,’ my mother said shortly. She had hated his smoking.)

But it didn’t really matter. We were pretty happy living à deux — at least I was.

This was in the 1950s and the early ’60s (I was born in 1956), so many things that seem quaint now were current and powerful then: shame, and secrecy, and the fear that other people would worm themselves into your weaknesses, and that their knowledge of how you had lapsed or failed would eat you from the inside. My mother used to wear white gloves to go to the shops in summer. She used to carry a basket on her arm, real willow, shaped like a segment of orange, with a tan leather flap and a fastener like a little brass barrel turning in a brass slot. Later on, when I was a teenager, I thought she was dowdy, in her boxy good coats and silk scarves and low-heeled court shoes. But looking at the photographs now, I see that it’s me who was a fright — I’m small, and I was pudgy in those days, with my eyes made up like black pits — and that she was elegant and even sexy, in a cautious, respectable kind of way.

She had to go out to work in an office, to support us. So I spent a lot of time with my nana, my mother’s mother, who lived just round the corner from our flat. (That’s another thing: didn’t I wonder why we never visited any grandparents on my father’s side?) Nana was miniature, with a tiny-featured face and black eyes, like a mouse or a shrew; on her cheeks there really was a kind of downy pale fur, if you caught her in a certain light, and when I was very young I liked to stroke it. She bought her clothes from the children’s department (cheaper), and went to the hairdresser’s every week to have her hair set in skimpy grey-brown rolls pinned to her scalp: not out of vanity, but as if it was her duty to submit to this punishing routine. There was a sticker on the underside of every piece of furniture in Nana’s house, saying who should have it in the event of her death: Edna (that was my mother), Uncle Frank, or Uncle Ray. This was when she was still in her early sixties. (‘That old junk! No thank you!’ Mum said, but only when Nana was out of earshot.) I had already decided what I wanted: a jewellery box that played music when the lid was opened.

Nana was also a widow (a real one). I can’t remember my grandpa. Her house was very bare and there wasn’t that much furniture in it to inherit. This was because she was poor, but also because she was continually in the process of clearing out, giving things away, as if she were trying to weigh less and less, as if life itself were a mess that she was gradually getting to the bottom of. In the summer, when it wasn’t too cold, I used to play upstairs in the bedrooms while Nana in her housecoat cleaned downstairs. (What was there to clean? She survived in that house as neatly as a mouse living on crumbs.) I played with the jewellery box, and with my dolls, and with a vanity set that Uncle Ray had given Nana one Christmas, pots made of soft thick plastic with blue screw tops. You were meant, I suppose, to transfer your assorted creams and unguents into these, to take away travelling with you: but Nana only used Nivea and never went anywhere. I can remember being flooded with happiness once, alone (apart from the dolls) in Nana’s bedroom. The floorboards were stained dark brown up to the edges of the rug. I was lying on the floor looking up at the underside of the bed — its springs and the flock mattress with its pompoms, turned each week. The dressing table had its back to the window, blocking the light. Silky mauve curtains were drawn part way across behind it, to keep out prying eyes or save the furniture from fading. The window was open three inches at the top for airing and a breeze was tickling the curtains; my chest swelled with the full awareness of the moment, as if I was breathing in a different medium, thick and heady. Dust motes swam in the air. I turned my hand in them and thought: I’m alive! In this world!

Was this before I went to school?

It must have been. I didn’t hate school but it put an end to that rich slow expansive time, when I was free.

Mum and I were close when I was a child. We deluded ourselves that we were alike and would always be the best of friends. We snuggled together with hot-water bottles under the eiderdown on the sofa to watch Compact on TV, or The Man from U.N.C.L.E . We were both strong-willed, and that was fine as long as we were pulling in tandem: both of us were fastidious and opinionated and ready to disapprove of other people’s tastes, though we kept these judgements diplomatically between us. (Later, our tastes diverged and we disapproved of each other.)

Nana said we should move in with her. She couldn’t see why we were wasting our money renting a separate place. I took no notice of this — I thought of Nana as harmless, lightweight, easy to brush away. My uncles teased her patiently, they found her comical. But I knew from my mother’s face that for her the idea of moving back into her old home was a living danger, the place was a trap that could close on her again at any time. If Mum smoked at Nana’s kitchen table (she’d hated my father’s smoking then took it up herself), Nana whisked the ashtray away the moment she’d finished, tipping the ash into the bin and rinsing the ashtray under the tap, wiping it first with the dishcloth and then with a tea towel. Without a husband Mum was vulnerably exposed. The only way for her to defend herself against Nana’s bleaching, purging world view was to defy it: to wear scent and lipstick every day (‘for the office’), not to bother to take up the carpet every time she cleaned. To treat me, for her birthday, at a Berni Inn. (Which was a waste, as Nana had predicted. Overawed and stubborn, I wouldn’t eat a thing.)

Mum came into my bedroom as usual one morning in her stockinged feet and petticoat, with the pile of sheets and blankets she had slept in neatly folded. We only had one bedroom, with a double bed in it and no space for any other furniture; I slept in there and Mum had the sofa. I liked to lie in bed listening to her getting ready in the next room, moving about quietly so as not to wake me. I’d close my eyes when she came in, pretending to stretch and yawn.

— Stella? I’ve had a telephone call, she said.

Telephone calls were a big event. The telephone belonged to the woman in the flat below ours, whose number we only gave out for emergencies. The call must have come very early — or very late the night before.

— Who from? I asked, suspicious.

Mum said that my Uncle Frank had called, because Auntie Andy needed somewhere to stay for a while. Andy had rung Frank, trying to get in touch with my mother.

— You’ll have to budge up, Mum said. — I’ll be in the bed with you tonight. We’ll give Andy the sofa.