Clever Girl (13 page)
— Now is that a good feeling, he said, — or is that a good feeling?
I expect he did this to all the women who passed: on a sliding scale, exacting a kiss within the bounds of propriety from the younger or good-looking ones, conferring it as a favour on the plain ones and the ones who were too old. But he did always imply that I was his special comrade, because I was a natural driver like him. He couldn’t get over my passing after only nine lessons, he said that he’d told everyone about me. He insisted on driving me back after the test; passing went to people’s heads, apparently, they got too careless. I didn’t know when I was ever going to drive a car again, anyway. I had no prospect of being able to afford one. I asked him to drop me off outside the school; I had a few hours free before I had to pick up Lukie from Jean’s house.
— Goodbye then, I said. — Thank you.
— Good luck, he said. — Good driving.
And this time we shook hands.
The school was a strange place in the summer holidays. Deserted, its Victorian Gothic spaces seemed more eloquent: as if the missing boys had all grown up or died – which of course generations of them had. It was only when the school was empty that I ever felt the power of that ideal of gilded, privileged youth, set apart for a different destiny, which the school and staff were always trying to put over. When the place was full of real boys, the ideal seemed a sham. I meant to lie down on my bed after my driving test, in my room that was all windows, and sleep in the afternoon sun. I hungered for my bed and dreamed of sinking down into that vacant time alone, with no responsibility. But every time I closed my eyes I seemed to be driving again – only this time it was a huge effort, fraught with dread and difficulty, gears grinding and smashing, swerving to avoid oncoming traffic and looming obstacles. My heart thudded so painfully that it forced my eyes open; then I was astonished, looking round me at the quiet room. Lights from the small yellow lozenge-shaped panes around the windows were spotted across the bare floorboards like honey; nothing moved.
Lukie started sleeping through the night, thanks to Mrs Tapper. Those night-time sessions with Lukie had been so awful. The trouble usually started around midnight when he woke up and I gave him a bottle; after that, he never really went off again into deep sleep. I loved him better than anyone, than my own life; but in those hours he was also my enemy. I felt I was defending the last spaces of myself, because he wanted them. Lukie at night was unlike his clear daytime self, he was fretful and spiteful; if I took him into bed with me he chattered extravagantly, with an edge of hysteria, as if he were drunk. If he fell asleep in my arms and I managed to lower him into the cot without waking him, all too soon he would begin surfacing again, twitching and grumbling, rubbing his fists into his eyes. Then he would scramble to his feet, reaching out his arms through the bars of the cot for me, babbling a low-level moaning complaint, ‘Mamamama . . .’, which I knew would crescendo into loud crying if I tried to ignore it. And I couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t risk waking the whole house. I had promised Vivien that he would sleep. I had to pick him up. I could be walking up and down that room with him for hours: stumbling, vindictive, exhausted.
I wasn’t good, in those long nights. Sometimes I was mad. I said some horrible things to Lukie while we were walking up and down together, hissed and whispered them; and afterwards I dreaded that even if he didn’t understand the words, the spirit of my madness might have seeped in at his ears and poisoned him for ever. (Although he’s never shown any signs of it, I must say. Somehow he’s managed to forgive me.) Then one night Vivien Tapper interrupted us. It was two o’clock in the morning. I’d never seen her in her long wool dressing gown before, her face bleached without make-up.
— Come on now, Stella, she said. — This is getting silly.
She reached out for Lukie and I gave him to her; he was too astonished to protest. She was perfectly nice to him as she always was, but held him away from her body as though she was afraid of marks on her dressing gown (all my clothes were stained with baby dribble). Laying him down in his cot, in a firm voice she told him that it was sleep-time now. We left the room, with only the little night light on behind us. I could hear Lukie pulling himself up at once, rattling the cot bars even as we closed the door; then, after one long breath of shocked silence, the beginning of a wail of outrage.
— Won’t he wake Mr Tapper up? I said. — And Juliet?
— They’ll have to put up with it, Vivien said.
We went down together into the kitchen whose corners at night were cavernous and shadowy; a fluorescent tube-light under a metal shade was suspended on long chains over the table. Vivien switched on the electric fire and tuned the radio to the World Service, not too loud. Behind the radio voices Lukie’s desperation was just audible, seizing like a tiny vice on my thoughts and squeezing them.
— You just have to sit it out, she said. — You can go and check him every fifteen minutes, to reassure him you haven’t abandoned him. But don’t put the light on in there, don’t talk to him, just lay him down again, then go. Trust me, it works.
She poured two glasses of whisky and made tea for me, with sugar in; I watched the stuttering hand of the kitchen clock. When I went back after the first fifteen minutes, Lukie was smear-faced, blubbing, frantic, reaching up his arms for me; incredulous when I abandoned him again. In the kitchen, rummaging in one of the drawers of the dresser, under a pile of ironed tablecloths, Vivien brought out cigarettes and a crossword book.
— I have to hide these from Robin, she confessed.
Mr Tapper did the
Times
cryptic more or less easily every day. The crosswords in her book were of a different species: ‘star-crossed lover (5)’ was Romeo, and ‘replace (10)’ was substitute. She lit a cigarette and I smoked one too; we worked through the crosswords one after another, looking up clues at the end of the book if we were ever stuck, as there was no particular honour in victory. I must have gone back in to Lukie five or six times; Vivien refilled our whisky glasses. We sat with our feet tucked up under us out of the way of the cold tiled floor. Then eventually, while we were trying to think of ‘something unpleasant to look at (7)’, she lifted her head up, listening, and signed to shush me, touching the back of my wrist with her hand.
— There, I think he’s gone, she said.
My hearing strained at the absence of what it had grown used to; a blessed silence hung across the house. We gave him a few minutes, to make sure; Vivien said I knew where the whisky was if he woke up again later. But he didn’t. It worked as easily as a miracle; and he was always a good sleeper afterwards. (It worked with my second son too, later.) The following night Lukie didn’t even wake for his usual feed at midnight. I slipped into bed, expecting to be roused to the struggle at any moment; the next thing I knew it was seven-thirty and Lukie was shouting cheerfully at me from his cot. I think he was as relieved as I was to be rid of the burden of those night-times. I’d given him power over his own sleep – I should have done it months before. I tried to express something like this to Vivien when I thanked her but she brushed it away, it wasn’t the kind of thing she liked to discuss. — Someone helped me out with Hugo, she explained dismissively, — at a time when I was going fairly bananas.
I don’t think Vivien Tapper and I could ever have been friends. Yet it’s surprising how often I’ve thought about her since those days – not particularly warmly nor resentfully, just aware of her existing somewhere, picking at the knot of her life in her own way. Some people accompany you like this in imagination, long after you’ve dropped any real connection with them. We used to bump into each other every so often for a while after I left, and she would ask what I was doing; it was always too complicated to tell her. If she’s still alive, she’s an old lady by now.
I was dusting the books one October morning in the Tappers’ study. Mr Tapper did his marking in there, Vivien did her accounts. Neither of them were really readers, not what I’d call readers: not like Valentine, say, or Fred Harper. But there were books on their shelves and once or twice already I’d had to take them down a few at a time, riffle through the pages, blowing the dust off, and then wipe the shelves clean. I was still suspicious of books through all those early years while Lukie was small – I didn’t trust them, they had led me too far astray. But my guard must have been down that morning; at any rate, one of the books fell open in my hand while my attention was elsewhere, dreaming – so that my eyes took in almost accidentally what they read. And then it was too late: a message shot directly into my heart, jolting and deflecting me, making me blind to my routines. I didn’t even really understand the words I was reading, I couldn’t have explained them to anyone: ‘lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west’. It wasn’t their meaning that affected me, it was the words themselves – the solidity of them, their being assembled together in that particular order and rhythm – which stopped my breath. They seemed a signal from another, bigger life than the one I was in, as if a smothering blanket had been torn through. I shut the book quickly and sat back on my heels, wiping my face sticky with sweat and dust, and thought that if I had to spend another winter at the Tappers, I would die. Rain eased and pressed outside against the windowpanes, a frond of dead clematis tapped the glass. Then I thought that I’d die if I had to spend another hour there.
The book was a poetry anthology; I saw that Vivien had won it as a prize at school. I’m sure she never opened it while I was there. Afterwards, when I started reading again, I did find that poem eventually but it never had that same effect on me; I expected too much of it, I’d worn it out before I really knew it (and I had no idea, for years, that it was about Abraham Lincoln). I did grow to love other poems of Whitman’s. Anyway, that morning I left the books in their pile on the floor and went upstairs to where Lukie was having his nap. The blinds were drawn down in our bedroom; I tiptoed around the cot in the dulled pink light, gathering our things together and packing them into a rucksack and an old suitcase I’d brought from home. I would have to leave our heavy luggage and pick it up later. Everything we needed for that night – nappies and changing kit, clean clothes for Lukie; money and knickers and a comb and toothbrush for me – I put in a bag I could carry over my shoulder. The sound of the falling rain was so dense in the quiet that my limbs seemed to be pushing against some resistance that made them roused and tingling. ‘Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west.’
Then I went downstairs and telephoned Mrs Tapper at the Antiques Market. I wept, I apologised for leaving so suddenly. She was exasperated because she’d have to shut up the stall early, to be home for Juliet. — Fred Harper’s? Out of the frying pan into the fire, she warned. (She was wrong about that.) And she made some complaining remark, out of the blue, about the electric radiator my mother had lent me for my room; she said I ought to have consulted her first, didn’t they use a lot of electricity? Then I put the phone down on her. There was no point in telephoning Fred yet, he would be teaching. I woke Lukie up and changed him and kissed him, gave him a biscuit and a bottle of juice; I put him in his pushchair (he’d grown too big for the pram) and we went out. It was pouring down – at least I had a plastic cover for the pushchair. It was a kind of madness, really. I had no idea what would happen next. We went into a café – the very one I got a job in later – where, when I’d got over dripping and steaming, I bought us both lunch. I sat proudly with my little son whose instinctive attentive courtesy charmed the waitresses – he sipped so responsibly, carefully from his feeder cup, studied the other customers with such steady curiosity. And as soon as school was over, I telephoned Fred Harper from a call box.
I
OUGHT TO EXPLAIN, BEFORE
I
go on, that the father of my second son was killed – and in a horrible, stupid way – just a few weeks before our baby was born. So Rowan never knew his father, Nicky, although he’s always known his story and the story of his death. He used to make me tell it to him, over and over, when he was small; and I believed in those days that you should always answer children’s questions, tell them everything they want to know. (Well, not everything. There were hidden elements in the story which I held back.) Now, I wonder whether all that openness was healthy for Rowan. Perhaps there was something in the sad story which stuck to him, darkening his spirit and damaging his defences. He isn’t at all like Nicky in his personality. Nicky was sweet and happy and good; Rowan is a wonder but he isn’t any of those things. He does have Nicky’s eyes, though. I had a home birth in the commune, with all the women around me, and that’s what I saw as soon as they delivered Rowan up on to my stomach, slippery and bloody, before they’d even cut the cord: Nicky’s eyes staring up at me, dark as blueberries, singling me out, accusing me.
What have you done?
(Though Nicky would never have accused anyone, let alone me.)
— I didn’t ask to be born, Rowan used to sulk when he was a boy, long after we left the commune, if I asked him to tidy his room or dry the dishes. He was beautiful – strong limbs twisting out of my grasp, silky black curls and skin that burned dark chocolate-brown in the sunshine (Nicky’s father was mixed-race Brazilian, though Nicky grew up with his white mother in Glasgow). And I know it sounds foolish, but I took him seriously; his argument seemed a valid one, I was afraid of it. Rowan had never consented to existence: I had cheated him into it. Like a classical philosopher, like Oedipus, he would rather never have lived. What right had I to impose my laws on him?
— You have to play your part, I said. — Everyone has to do their share, and help each other.
(The words fake and tasteless as old gum in my mouth.)
— Why? Why should I? I don’t want to.
I met Nicky because students from the art college and the university used to come into the café where I worked. This café was part of a wholefoods shop on Park Row, painted pink and green and yellow. We sold mung beans and mate tea, stodgy slabs of cake flavoured with carob, organic vegetables crusted with earth, and olives from a huge tin on the floor; we made our own coleslaw and hummus and wholemeal bread, and believed we were getting in touch with a more authentic way of life – connected to the past, and vaguely to other cultures abroad. The style of the place – bare sanded boards, an odd assortment of wooden tables and chairs, blue and white striped china – was in itself a political statement. Posters were pinned on a noticeboard, advertising yoga classes or feminist reading groups or political meetings. The girls who worked there wore dungarees over stripy jumpers, or shapeless vintage print dresses and handmade flat leather shoes with straps across the instep like children’s sandals. They despised make-up, although they tolerated mine: I painted my eyes heavily with black eyeliner and mascara and brown eye-shadow. I was allowed to get away with it because I was a mother and because of the knocks I had taken.
I liked the art students best because they were less earnest. I didn’t single Nicky out at first, though you couldn’t help noticing him: he was exuberant and charming, with a Glasgow accent and brown skin and a mop of black curls. I liked him as an element in that whole crowd. In a way I suppose I fell in love with them all collectively, with their excitement as if they were at a perpetual party and their outfits like fancy dress (Nicky wore a miltary jacket with frogging and epaulettes). Jude, who moved into the commune with us later, was from the art college too. And so was Baz, a tall good-looking boy with dyed orange hair. I thought Baz was Jude’s boyfriend until Nicky explained to me that Jude was a lesbian and Baz was stalking her: he was obsessed with her and wouldn’t let her alone. At the time this just seemed like another part of the drama of that crowd. After my life at Dean’s House I couldn’t get enough drama. I loved all the little flares and upsets and scandals, but I didn’t take them seriously.
Nicky started to pay attention to me. He began by drawing me. I had presumed that all the art students would be able to draw – but it turned out that life drawing wasn’t part of their curriculum any longer, they weren’t encouraged to make their art look like things or people in real life. Nicky was almost embarrassed by his gift, which seemed to be a trick from an old-fashioned repertoire. He had been able to do these little sketches ever since he was small, and they were what had singled him out as a child and made him special – he had drawn his family and the characters in his neighbourhood, and had won prizes at school. I loved his pictures, which caught and exaggerated some essential quality or gesture in his subject and yet weren’t caricatures.
He drew me when I wasn’t conscious of him watching: I was making the coffees or collecting the china from the tables or tending to Lukie if he was with me — Lukie would sit happily for hours in the café while the students entertained him. Because Nicky was close to his own mother, he was attracted to an ideal of maternal tenderness (meanwhile I was chafing at the responsibility of motherhood and envying the freedom the other girls had). The drawings seemed to be glimpses into my secret life, which I thought no one else saw – though I couldn’t quite connect these glimpses with Nicky’s unsubtle outward persona. He was gregarious, noisy, popular: not beautiful, exactly, though plenty of girls found him attractive – his round sweet face, the shadow of silky hair on his upper lip, his nose that was crooked because he had broken it falling off his bike when he was a boy. Everyone liked Nicky, he had no enemies, and he liked everyone. He wasn’t suspicious or critical as I was. He was even kind to Baz, whom everyone else avoided because Baz was so dreary in his obsessive pursuit of Jude.
Nicky courted me and I went out with him, we slept together. This was exciting because it drew me deeper inside the set of my new friends. I never let on to them just how lonely my life had been before I met them; because I’d left school at seventeen and was a mother, they imagined I’d tasted more than they had of real life. I hid the self-doubt I felt because I hadn’t passed beyond the threshold of education. I don’t remember any one moment when I gave my consent to our becoming a couple, Nicky and I; he used to put his arm around me in public and then we began to be asked out together. He looked after Lukie for me and didn’t mind playing with him for hours in the park or with his toy cars; Lukie adored him. This made all the practicalities in my life so much easier. I allowed our connection to be established as a certainty – but I always knew that I was keeping something back, a cold stone hidden in my thoughts. I made up for my doubt by being competent and kind and reserved, which was what he liked. And it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being loved. I had been so abandoned and alone – and then all of a sudden this love was available to wrap round me, warm as a blanket. I got used to the warmth and forgot that I’d ever not had it.
Nicky believed that I was good, and innocently natural. Perhaps it was my inexperience that he misconstrued as innocence; he was the first boy I’d made love to properly, although I never told him this. I was lucky with him, he was a kind and easy lover and undid a lot of the rage from the beginning of my motherhood. He was a good beginning. That’s what I used to think, even at the time. Even when I was pregnant with his baby, I couldn’t be convinced that Nicky was the end of my story.
And so it turned out.
For a while after he died I actually forgot what he was like in bed, I blanked it. It wasn’t something you could ask anyone. No one else could know, and there weren’t any photographs or words or mementoes left as traces of those scenes, to act as clues. It used to torment me, trying to recreate the sensations of our intimacy and thinking I’d forfeited them through what I’d done, through my carelessness.
At first our relationship was fitted in around my life at the café and at Fred Harper’s. It had worked out well, the arrangement by which Lukie and I lived in Fred’s flat rent-free in return for housework. Fred got on well with my new set of friends and they were welcome at the flat, though I held back sometimes from inviting them because I was ashamed of letting them see too much of my daily routines of childcare and cleaning and shopping and cooking; these seemed so unlike the students’ improvised, dramatic lives which had no fixed framework apart from the lectures (which they often missed), and their exams and degree shows.
I presumed that the students’ freedom was temporary and would end when they graduated. When this time came, however, Nicky’s friends seemed to have no idea of moving away from Bristol or changing their lifestyle – it was as if they had embarked on an experiment which wasn’t finished yet. For a while it seemed possible that they wouldn’t ever return inside the world of grown-up responsibilities; they were inventing a new kind of life, stepping outside the old wrong, repressive patterns which their parents believed in. When some of them decided to live together holding everything in common, Nicky wanted me and Lukie to join them. If he’d wanted us to live in a threesome, as a family, I might have turned him down – the idea of living with a whole crowd of our friends persuaded me. In the end there were six of us: Nicky and me, Jude and her partner Daphne, Neil and Sheila. Seven, counting Lukie. Daphne and Neil had studied literature together at the university; Sheila had done classics.
The house was on a hill in Bishopston, in a red-brick Victorian terrace – the rent was low because it was half falling down and hadn’t been decorated in years. It suited us to live with bare boards, uncarpeted stairs, and walls showing their layers of faded wallpaper: we hung up Nicky’s paintings and Jude’s embroideries. We enjoyed how the spaces of the house were scarred and worn-out from long use, and fancied ourselves communing with the past inhabitants, furnishing it with odds and ends from the junk shops. I bought an old quilt for our bedroom, printed with faded pink roses, and I found a huge Victorian mirror in a gold frame chipped and damaged beyond repair, put out on the street with someone’s rubbish. I draped the mirror with my scarves and beads. I wanted the rooms of my life to be blurred and dreamy and suggestive – the opposite effect to the one my mother and Gerry aimed for, where everything was functioning and spotless and sealed against accidents.
Any money we earned, or anything we got on benefits, we pooled for rent and household expenses and bills. If decisions had to be made we sat round the kitchen table and talked them through. Daphne brought a perfectly round white piece of quartz from her parents’ holiday home by the sea, and we put it at the centre of the table; you picked it up if you wanted to speak and replaced it when you’d finished. Housework and cooking were supposed to be shared equally, regardless of gender. On summer nights we hung paper lanterns in the old plum and apple trees in the back garden and lay out in the uncut scented grass, drinking cheap wine and smoking dope, confessing our beliefs and our hopes and fears. I had to be careful not to talk too much: Sheila and Neil and Daphne would pounce if they thought something you said was wrong or showed false consciousness. They were tactful about my lack of education but the tact could be worse than the pouncing. Later, another element in the heady pleasure of those nights was the secrets I was holding back, burning me from inside.
The men did try to help with the housework. Neil – plump and softly shapeless, bearded – would do the vacuuming: frowning short-sightedly, cigarette uptilted at the corner of his mouth, poking the nozzle benevolently, vaguely into corners, dropping ash on the carpet behind him. Nicky washed up energetically, breaking things. But in the end Jude and I did most of it – and we didn’t mind, it only seemed fair, because the others were out at work all day, bringing in money. Anyway, we weren’t obsessed with cleaning like our mothers, victims of the ‘privatised family existence of late capitalism’. We discussed all these issues, using the white stone. There was a kind of glamour at first for the ones who found real jobs, joining the working classes. Nicky was working as a labourer, building a bypass; Sheila was in a little factory that made meat pies, Daphne helped on a play scheme for difficult children. Neil was the only one who was still a student, working on his PhD. He was a Marxist, dissecting everything down to its basis in class conflict and economics – cheerfully he saw through everyone’s illusions. He always had his working-class background on his side in his arguments against Daphne, because she came from a wealthy, arty family. Daphne was fiercely feminist: she believed that the nuclear family was an invention of capitalism to keep women oppressed, and that all men were conditioned by society to enjoy the idea of violence against women. Even when men thought they were being kind or loving or protecting women, Daphne said, really underneath it was a kind of violence against them because of its context in the wider world, where men had all the power. I was excited by her arguments. Sometimes they seemed triumphant truths which could be superimposed on every aspect of life, revealing its inner nature: they explained my stepfather and my whole history, they vindicated me. I was burning with zeal for a revolutionary breakthrough in my life.
I worked in the café in the mornings because that was when Lukie went to nursery: in the afternoons he fell asleep on our bed and I dozed beside him. When Lukie woke we had tea downstairs in the kitchen with Jude. She and I cooked vegetarian curries and pasta dishes while Lukie played with his cars and Playmobil. Jude was from Bolton, she blushed easily and was freckled and fair with a poised small figure like a child’s. Her embroidered pictures had been a great success at the art college; now she had an agent and was selling to London galleries. They were shocking raw scenes of threat and conflict: girls with slashes of red silk for their mouths and vaginas, stiff net sewn on for their skirts, bits of gold braid for their tiaras; stick-men sewn in waxed black thread, in long crude stitches. (These days they fetch astronomical prices. I owned one for a while – but I had to sell it one lean year.) Jude didn’t take politics as seriously as Daphne did. She thought everything was funny – her embroideries were funny too, in a zany, extreme sort of way.