Clever Girl (14 page)

She even thought Baz was funny, in his fixation on her. He was a tall skinny guy with a pretty, fine-boned face, startling under the shock of his orange hair. She’d slept with him once, apparently, in her first week at the art college, because she was too shy to tell him she was gay. — Trust me to choose the crazy one, she said. When Daphne called the police once because Baz followed them back to the house and broke a window trying to get in, Baz told the police that Jude was his wife and that she’d been abducted by a cult. You could see that they were half inclined to believe him.

Sheila had got a first in classics at the university, yet it was Neil who was studying for his PhD now, while she worked earning the money to support them both. When she got back from the pie factory in the evenings I could see from her bleached expression how it exhausted and disgusted her; once I found her in tears, scrubbing at her neck and arms in the bathroom, saying she couldn’t get rid of the meat smell (it was true, you could smell onions and gravy wherever she was). Because I’d worked that summer in the chocolate factory, I could guess how the other workers might resent her because she was different – but when I commiserated she turned on me. Sheila was tall, austerely judgmental, with white skin that made her face like a marble sculpture, and a mass of red-brown hair which she had to put up in a net for work.

— Other people have to spend their whole lives in these places, she said. — What’s so different about us, that we should be exempt? I’d despise myself if I couldn’t put up with it for a couple of years.

But I didn’t think that the self-sacrifice would last. There was something willed and exaggerated in how she dedicated herself to Neil, serving him as if his work was more important than anything in her own life. Often Neil didn’t even get out of bed to go to the university library until lunchtime, and she must know it; it was as if she was giving him as much scope as possible not to live up to her expectations.

Daphne and Sheila were always falling out. Sheila took Neil’s side in all the arguments, and she offended people with her blurted, stern remarks, though I didn’t mind them; I could see it was difficult for her to speak lightly about ordinary things. She found Daphne exasperating, and scarcely bothered to conceal it. Daphne was voluptuous, with creamy skin and chestnut hair and huge curvaceous calves (she’d played hockey at school). It was true that her assured, loud flow of talk was guilelessly self-centred, muddling together her outrage at patriarchy with her stomach cramps. Yet she was somehow at the commune’s heart; without her I’m not sure we’d have hung together. She was bossy and fearless, doggedly principled – it was Daphne who dealt with our landlord when the roof leaked or the immersion heater broke. Her confidence convinced the rest of us. But she couldn’t help nagging away at Sheila, wanting to make little scenes and nurse grudges, contrive tearful reconciliations.

Nicky was the peacemaker in our community. He had the gift of attention to other people; he could talk to anyone, and he never forgot what they told him. This wasn’t only with his friends: he got to know the men he worked with on the bypass, or locals he met in the pubs who remembered when the city docks were still in use and the dockers unloaded the timber carrying the long planks on their shoulders, or when the bombs fell on Newfoundland Road and destroyed the vinegar works. I marvelled at his practical knowledge of places and histories, which my mind shied away from, indolent. I knew it was admirable that he didn’t talk about himself. But something ruthless in me drew back sometimes even from our moments of most tender intimacy. I would think: he’s too simple for me. Then I’d be appalled at myself – it was me who was simple: narrow in my selfish, sticky fascination with my own feelings. I made up to him then with my affection and attention.

We gave a party for the summer solstice. There were always extra people at the house anyway, eating with us or staying over in sleeping bags on spare mattresses or on the floor: this sociability spilled over often into a party with music and dancing (it was the era of Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye, Bowie – we didn’t pay much attention to the beginnings of punk). The solstice was Daphne’s idea. She explained that pagans celebrated it as a fertility festival in honour of the female goddesses. She and Jude made wreaths out of the grasses that grew tall in our garden, woven with the garden flowers which someone had planted in the past and which had pushed up again without our having tended them: giant daisies and Linaria and an old-fashioned pink rose with frail petals which soon dropped. Even Neil wore a wreath. Nicky drew me wearing mine. I cooked a big pan of chilli con carne made with lentils instead of meat, Sheila made cornbread, Nicky made his Brazilian speciality, little cakes with cocoa and condensed milk.

In the folk cultures of Eastern Europe, according to Daphne, they bathed in open water at sunset; we didn’t have any open water, but someone got hold of an old inflatable paddling pool. Lukie was blissfully happy in the pool, splashing and pouring from a plastic bucket; he insisted on staying there until his nude little body was white and clammy with cold, though the evening was sultry. The weather had changed after a week of rain; the close heat under the fruit trees and the rank smells of the garden drying out made us all excitable. With uncharacteristic energy, Neil had spent the afternoon chopping down a tumbledown wooden shed in the garden and we burned this, though it spat nails and its layers of ancient paint blistered and fumed nastily. Daphne insisted there had to be fire and water. She wrapped potatoes in tinfoil and buried them in the embers to cook.

I put Lukie to bed eventually, when he had to be fished out from submerging in the pool – he was distraught and sobbing, not from his dousing but at being separated from the party. His cot was in a little cubbyhole separated off from the upstairs landing by a curtain. Nicky had a game he played to get him off to sleep, counting on his fingers and tickling in his palms – but Lukie was too tired and distraught even for that, so we had to leave him to cry. I stayed upstairs in our bedroom, moving around the room in the dusk and tidying it, waiting until Lukie stopped crying and fell asleep, aware of my reflection coming and going in the foggy depths of the mirror. I was breathless and expectant though I didn’t know what it was that I expected. By the time I returned downstairs the sun was setting. Daphne had decided that we should throw our wreaths in turn into the paddling pool, then kneel while she poured water over our heads out of her cupped hands. She recited words about the blessing of the goddess, who was ‘subtle, deep, and difficult to see’ (these were borrowed from something in Buddhism).

Jude submitted to the ritual: in her white cheesecloth dress she looked like a priestess in a play. Some of the other girls joined in but the men were making fun of it. Neil was fairly drunk and his wreath had slipped down across one eye; he had been flirting all evening with a blonde they knew from the university. His flirting wasn’t gallant, he was too lazy for flattery; he just directed all his usual conversation and his attention at one chosen person, determined like a pet animal wanting to climb into a lap. Women warmed to Neil’s cleverness, even though he was pudgy and flushed pink, with an indefinite beard. Sheila would never admit that she cared about his flirtations, or even when he occasionally slept with these other girls.

— Isn’t that bourgeois morality? she said.

Someone new had arrived at the party while I was waiting upstairs. He was sitting cross-legged in the grass beside Sheila: a big-shouldered rangy man in a dirty vest, hunched over his cigarette, long hair hanging forward over his face. He complained that Daphne’s ceremony was too decorous. — Like Girl Guides at a camp, he said. — Don’t you know those midsummer festivals are all about lust? They swim together, then they go off in the woods together to fuck. The ones wearing the wreaths are signalling that they’re available.

— I’m available, said Neil.

— At least you should get right under the water, the stranger said, — and not just wet your heads.

Someone added that it shouldn’t be just the girls.

Before the blonde could move from where she was sitting with Neil’s head on her shoulder, Sheila stood up and walked across to step into the pool, then lay down in it – you couldn’t stretch right out, so she lay with her knees pulled up, and then rolled over. I suppose the water was about a foot deep; in spite of the warm evening the cold must have been a shock. When she stood up the water poured off her dramatically; she was stuck all over with bits of twig and leaves, her hair in streaming rat-tails, her dress clinging to her body. After that, lots of us did it. I did it (and Nicky wrapped me in his jacket afterwards). Even Daphne did it in the end, though she was still sulking because her ceremony had been hijacked. Of course the men couldn’t do it solemnly, they had to pretend to be fooling around, falling into the water accidentally or chucking it at each other. Soon the pool was almost empty. I noticed that the stranger didn’t join in, the one who’d come up with the idea in the first place.

The stranger was Sheila’s brother. They came from a big family of nine children, brought up in a draughty Norfolk vicarage. (— Everything we ever owned was handed down, Sheila said. — It made us horribly materialistic. I prayed in church for patent leather shoes.) We had met some of her brothers and sisters before, but not this one: Andrew. He was older than Sheila, the oldest boy, and she hadn’t seen him for five years because he’d had an irrevocable row with his family – she couldn’t remember what the row was about. (His hair? His faith?) After the row he had dropped out from York University in his second year, and never contacted them. The family had refused to go after him, though they included him in their prayers. But Sheila and one of her sisters had made great efforts to trace him, writing to all Andrew’s old friends and teachers, listing him as a missing person with the police, even travelling by themselves on the coach to York to see if they could find him there.

When Andrew turned up at the party without any warning (he’d got Sheila’s address from the other sister), they hadn’t embraced or even touched each other. — It’s you! was all Sheila had said, when he dropped to sit on the grass beside her. And she had protested, joking, that he could at least have sent her a postcard. Andrew was tall – very tall, six foot four or five – and he looked as marked with damage – eyes extinguished, stale, unshaven grey-white face, lank draggled hair – as if he’d come back from the dead instead of, as it turned out, bumming around southern Europe. His eyes were chinks of blue in his long face: small, indifferent, retreated behind the craggy mass of his cheekbones. He had been playing his saxophone for money or labouring or working on the grape harvest; in jail for a while, waiting to be deported from Spain. When we asked him to play his saxophone, he said he’d sold it.

He stayed with us for a few weeks, in a sleeping bag on his bed-roll on the floor in the front room; then he moved to live in a squat in a filthy spindly old house in a Georgian crescent, where there was more drink and more drugs than at our place and less domesticity. Even after he’d moved out he seemed to spend a lot of time with us. I supposed at first that he came to see Sheila. My heart used to sink when he turned up because his presence had a dampening effect – he was too brooding and dogmatic. He was contemptuous of our commune, the sharing of possessions and decision-making; he said it was only tinkering behind closed doors, not changing anything real. Real revolution, he said, had to happen out on the street. He picked up our white stone one evening, laughing when we explained what we used it for, throwing it indifferently from hand to hand. Only Daphne protested – she was braver at quarrelling with him than anyone else. Andrew never talked much, it was as if you had to drag speech out of him; yet he dominated any conversation he was in. Despite this, people were drawn to him, they wanted his approval.

In the end, I wanted his approval too.

I can’t explain the power Andrew had over me, for a while.

That’s just what I said to him: — I can’t explain the power you have over me. Rashly – but he made me behave as if there was no point in self-preservation. And he said, — It’s biological. There’s nothing you feminists can do about it. You can tinker around with all the rest but you can’t change the shape of fucking, where you need me to overwhelm you. Don’t you? Unless you want a man to love you like a baby.

This racked me at the time, because it seemed unanswerably true: that you couldn’t reverse the male gesture of possession and penetration which was at the heart of sex. Part of Andrew’s attraction certainly was his huge, lean strength – I thought of his size as a force. I supposed it was what made him able to drink so much without losing himself. He drank wine, mostly; he’d picked up the habit abroad. When he was drunk he wasn’t garrulous. If he was ever sober, he was silent. His need for the drink and the drugs seemed to come out of a narrow concentration in him that was almost puritanical, some exacting demand he made on life that could not otherwise be met.

Andrew’s conscious attention mostly wasn’t on women; he only really warmed to the company of men. He described legendary drinkers, scoffers and fighters he’d met on his wanderings, in Thessaloniki, Chania, Barcelona. He sparred with Neil, sizing him up. And he liked Nicky. Everyone liked Nicky. Nicky talked to Andrew about his work building the bypass: he was a carpenter’s assistant, unloading hot sacks of cement fresh from the factory, putting together the wooden frames into which the mixed cement was poured. Andrew didn’t even mind Baz; he held him in long conversation at our kitchen table once, when Baz came looking for Jude while she hid upstairs. Baz was twitchy from whatever he was taking that had cranked him up so high, he looked harmless and foolish beside Andrew’s uncompromising bulk. All the time they were talking, Andrew was rolling up in his thick, deft fingers – sticking papers, dribbling a line of loose tobacco from his pouch, cooking the dope lump in his lighter flame, chipping into it with his thumbnail. The ritual absorbed Baz and calmed him. I was making supper at the stove and pretended to be taking no notice of them – I could see through the window that Lukie was safe, playing outside in the garden.