Clever Girl
To Sam
The word adventures carries in it so free and licentious a sound . . . that it can hardly with propriety be applied to those few and natural incidents which compose the history of a woman of honour.
Charlotte Lennox,
The Female Quixote
,
1752
Contents
M
Y 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.
She stood for too long, hanging on to the pile of bedding, looking down at me, seeing me and not seeing me. There was something in her face that I didn’t like, crumbled and damp. Usually the mask of her brightness was securely in place: spirited, capable. My mother was quite tough. She could be brisk about other people’s troubles. She couldn’t afford to waste much sympathy; she had herself (and me) to look out for. No one else was looking out for us.
I was eight or nine, at the time this happened.
I could hardly remember at first who Auntie Andy was: she was a relative of my father’s, married to his cousin, and she was the only one in that family who’d made any effort to keep in touch. We probably saw her once or twice a year. At Christmas she dropped off a selection box of chocolate bars for me. She may have been moved to this kindness because she had a son about my age, Charlie. (Of course then Mum had to buy a selection box for Charlie too.) Andy wasn’t really Mum’s type. She was too indefinite: small and plump with faded gingery hair scraped back from her face in hairgrips, her skin blotchy, no make-up. She used to wear a little beige beret tilted to one side of her head, inappropriately jaunty. She was shy and never had much to say, sitting with a plate of our Christmas cake balanced on her lap, fat knees spread in her tweedy skirt, her feet crossed at the ankles, where her nylons wrinkled.
Once she’d remarked approvingly, looking round, ‘You’ve got it very nice here, Edna.’
Mum was still looming above my bed, gripping the pile of blankets.
— There’s just one thing, she warned. — When Auntie Andy comes, you mustn’t mention Charlie.
So something had happened to Charlie.
Charlie had only come in with Andy once: inches smaller than me, ginger like her but bursting unlike her with sly and hostile energy, ready with contempt for girls and women. He’d ignored his mother when she tried to pass him her handkerchief, and wiped his nose on his sleeve instead; in one of his eyes there was a blot as if black ink had spilled across the iris, and his stare was unnervingly off target. His brown lace-up shoes, polished like conkers, had made me think of the boys kicking in the queue for school dinner. I refused to ask my mother what had happened to him. I didn’t want to have unpacked for me whatever unseemly thing had made her face pulpy. I liked the scandals we read about in magazines, but they were safely glazed over with falsehood and repetition; glimpses of raw adult complications appalled me in the same way as I was appalled by the sight of an egg splatted in the pan with its yolk broken and leaking. (I hated eggs.)
Mum probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. She was inflexible in keeping secrets.
Almost as an afterthought, she added: — And don’t mention Uncle Derek, either.
I hadn’t even known his name was Derek. I’d never met him.
Andy was there when I got back from Nana’s. I always went to Nana’s after school. I was allowed to walk home on my own after Nana had given me my tea: Spam sandwiches, lettuce and tomatoes with vinegar shaken over them out of a cut-glass bottle. Nana already knew all about Auntie Andy’s coming but she wouldn’t say anything to me directly: not saying things was her speciality. She had a horror of any kind of publicity or exposure touching the family, however remotely.
— I only hope Edna knows what she’s doing, she fretted.
I was dreading that I would arrive home in the middle of a big fuss. I couldn’t bear crisis: the huddles of women, their lowered voices and smouldering glances shutting the children out and yet looping them in – tantalising them – to the dark, sticky, mucky centre. Girls practised huddling in the school playground. Mum didn’t like fuss any more than I did: whatever it was that had happened to Andy (and Charlie and Uncle whatshisname) had been bad enough to shock her out of her usual poise.
I had vowed to myself that I would never be looped in.
But when I got there Andy was sitting quietly at the end of the sofa, in the same tweed skirt that she had worn on her last visit. — How are you, Stella? she said kindly. — How was school?
She did look odd in some way – what?
I began gabbling about how well I had done in my mental arithmetic test, and how in our books we had drawn around plastic stencils of the United Kingdom with little holes to put your pencil where the cities were, and how I had to bring in something for the nature table next week, now that it was spring. I knew my mother was frowning at me urgently because by talking about school I was indirectly bringing up the subject of Charlie (although I couldn’t imagine Charlie ever shining at mental arithmetic or contributing to the nature table). But I didn’t want there to be any silences, out of which raw truths might tumble.
Auntie Andy commented admiringly that I must be very good at my lessons.
Her face was rather white. She reminded me of a girl at school who had been slapped for extreme insolence (they usually only hit the boys): when this girl walked back to her desk she was in a sort of smiling daze, vivid with shock. What was odd about Auntie Andy, I realised, was that her shyness had been blasted out of her by whatever had happened, the way an explosion can leave people deaf afterwards. When she had sat in the same place on our sofa eating cake, a few months earlier, she had been stuck for anything to say, apologetic, glancing round at the walls of our flat for inspiration. Mum had been imperiously, chillingly polite. (I suppose she’d chosen this as the right register for relations with my father’s family.) Andy had blushed and stumbled over her words, and I had guessed that her feet were hurting her in her stilettos. The time Charlie came in with her, she had been suffused with maternal pride and surprise (‘Can I really have made this?’), touching his hair and his shoulders surreptitiously, making him wriggle away; but she had also suffered, seeing his nose run in front of us.
Now she sat almost serenely, as if nothing ordinary could touch her.
Well, of course it couldn’t.
— I wanted to come here, she said to my mother, with no hint of worry that she might be an imposition. — I remembered how nicely you’d done it up. When they asked me if I had anyone to go to, I expect they thought I’d go to my sister’s. But to be honest, Edna, I don’t want anything to do with the whole lot of them, just now.
That first afternoon she must have been experiencing severe trauma, as we’d call it these days. I don’t suppose she knew what she was doing or saying. But her shyness never did come back. It wasn’t that she became bold or greedy for attention or anything like that, far from it. Her shyness transformed into something like itself, but different: reserve, or dignity.
The only outward sign of extremity was the fact that they were drinking sherry. Or Mum was drinking it, and smoking with hasty, nervous fingers: Auntie Andy’s glass, on the coffee table in front of her, looked untouched.