Clever Girl (18 page)

I made up my mind, every so often, that it was silly not to tell Fred what I was doing. I wanted to talk with someone about how strange these novels were. The whole pretence was ridiculous; I had to go to some lengths to hide my reading from him and from the boys, I was shoving my books out of sight down the side of my bed at night, against the wall. Then just when I was on the point of spilling over with my confession, I’d catch sight of Fred flicking through the pages of something – frowning or smiling knowingly as if he was communing with the author, scoring down the side of a text with his pencil to emphasise significance, scribbling notes. I was irritated in those days by these exhibitions of his pouncing cleverness, and his possession of what he read. (Now that he’s gone I remember them with yearning.) So I shut my mouth and kept my secret.

The delicate first hour of morning hardened into prosaic day. I drove north. Traffic thickened, the Lotus got stuck, revving impatiently, in queues of people driving to work round Birmingham – as soon as I could I passed them, leaping on upstream, away from home, towards anywhere: even to Scotland, I thought in a mad moment. I was taking in the world spread out around me as I drove, less through my eyes, which had to be on the road, than through my whole awareness, through my skin, as if I’d emerged from a deep burrow underground. For long stretches where the conurbation was unbroken, there spread on either side of the motorway a dream landscape, smoke-blackened brick and corrugated iron, pastel-blank façades and rain-stained concrete, fat cooling towers, gasometers, the metal mesh of factory gates, tree trunks in a padlocked yard beside a scummy ditch. The land’s fabric seemed dragged down and tearing under the sheer weight of the built environment, which never ended and could surely never be undone and wasn’t even thriving: the monster machine was stalling, it had poisoned itself and now it had fallen into enemy hands (I was very political in those years): three million were unemployed, there was rioting in the cities. Because I was young, the ugliness didn’t defeat me, it made my heart beat faster, it was my birthright.
Daniel Deronda
and
East Lynne
hadn’t made me nostalgic. They made me know how we’re wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.

I stopped at a service station for a sandwich and a coffee and to fill up again with petrol; when I climbed out of the Lotus my legs trembled with the effort of driving so far without a break. Fred kept a road atlas in the pocket behind my seat and I studied it while I ate. Scotland was too far away for one day’s journey – I chose Manchester instead, where I’d never been and knew no one. I drove on, following the signs, and made my way eventually into Manchester’s city centre, where I looked around to find a place to leave the Lotus safely. By this time it was lunchtime, one o’clock. The city’s exterior was more dour in those days than it is now; modern shops and billboards at street level looked perfunctory in the shadow of the old civic grandeur. Towering Victorian hotels and insurance offices were empty, with broken and boarded-up windows, as if a civilisation had fallen; and I suppose in some sense it had.

I was always frightened, all the time I was running away – not only by the big thing I had done, leaving home, but also by every small test of my inexperience. Even going into a strange branch of my bank, I quailed at having to speak to the cashier, handing my cheque over. I would never have dared go into a restaurant by myself – anyway, I’d hardly ever been to restaurants, I had no idea how to order or ask for a bill. (And a woman eating alone in a restaurant would have been conspicuous in those days.) I could just about manage a café, though I walked around for a long time before deciding on the right one. I stumbled upon Manchester Art Gallery by chance and felt the relief of refuge inside its quiet rooms which I had almost to myself, hung with jewel-coloured paintings, companion pieces to the novels I was reading. The warmth and sleepy backwater-hush reminded me of the library I had loved when I was a teenager.

It wasn’t robbery or violence I was afraid of – or certainly those weren’t at the forefront of my mind. But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, I couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed in my raw, unfinished ignorance. The expression on my face – frowning, spiky, defiant, I mostly think, in those days – was like a mask of closed competence which I wore and dreaded having torn away. I was twenty-five and it didn’t occur to me to use my youth as power, I only felt it as weakness. At least at home I was able to tell myself I was a mother, wrap myself round in all the responsibility and importance of that – although the way women used that importance sometimes felt to me like cheating, an illegitimate shortcut. (Also, I wasn’t sure that I was good at mothering.)

If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I?

What could I do; what could I become?

It was dusk, and the gallery had closed, and I hadn’t found anywhere to stay. I had wandered without meaning to away from the main drag; anyway, the shops had closed too and the cream and orange double-decker buses were packed with people going home. I found myself walking on a side road alongside a high wall overgrown with weeds; then where the wall ended a broad vista opened up across a stretch of wasteland overgrown with scrubby bushes and rugged with the flooring of vanished factories, the humped remains of brick outbuildings. Cranes stood up in the distance against a sky with a thin blue sheen like liquid metal, striated with pale cloud; puddles of water on the ground reflected the sky’s light as silver. The beauty of it took me by surprise. Dark skeins of birds detached themselves, shrilling, from the bushes and ruined buildings while I stood watching. They twisted in long ribbons of movement, rising up against the blue light then subsiding, and as their mass configured and reconfigured I thought of Nicky who had existed warm and alive in one moment, and now in this moment didn’t exist.

Ten minutes later I stood in the enclosed sour air of a phone box with my coins clutched in my fist, hearing my own breathing, dialling my mother’s number, my fingers fumbling anxiously in the dial-holes.

Mum didn’t like telephones. She answered warily and resentfully.

— Oh, it’s you, she said.

I’m sure she was relieved to hear from me. My mother was a great support to me, really, in all those years after Nicky died. But she couldn’t help herself trying to influence me and mould me; she wanted me to be disciplined in the collapse of my life as she had been in hers when I was a baby and her first marriage had failed.

— Are the boys all right?

She held back her reassurance as if I didn’t deserve it; but I heard them in the background, laughing with my brother Philip, who was thirteen, just the right age to enchant and entertain them. (Philip was naughty at school but charming at home, witty and maturely considerate.)

— Where are you, anyway? she said.

— Don’t worry, I said. — I’ll be fine.

— Gerry and I were going out tonight, we’ve had to cancel. He’s none too pleased.

— I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll iron his socks for you or something. (She really did iron socks and dusters.)

— It isn’t funny, Stella.

My mother must have been afraid, every time I ran off, that I wouldn’t come back. In the first hours of running, I was sometimes afraid of it too – holding on to the shape of myself that changed and struggled and almost got away. Someone tapped with a coin on the glass in the phone box door and I waved to them, signalling that I was nearly done. I told Mum I didn’t know when I’d be home. —Soon, soon, I said: which could have meant days, or even weeks. I didn’t want them to have me fixed in time or place.

Soon, soon. I drove through that night and arrived at my mother’s house about one in the morning. (It wasn’t my old home, they had moved since I lived with them.) The front of the house was dark, where my mother and stepfather slept; but at the back there was a light on in Philip’s bedroom. I got his attention by throwing gravel from the path up against the glass of his window; he came down to the kitchen door and let me in.

— What time d’you call this? he whispered with mock-severity. — Decent people are all in their beds.

— You’re not.

— I know. We’re so indecent. Where did our parents go wrong?

— I blame them for their moral turpitude, I said.

— So do I. Whatever it is, I blame them for it. Their moral turpentine.

Reprieved from his boredom in the sleeping house, he was comically eager to make tea for me. — Or have a whisky, he coaxed with a flourish. — Sherry, advocaat, Tia Maria. I’ll join you.

— No you won’t, daft oaf. I’m going straight to bed, I’m asleep on my feet here, I’ve been driving for hours. I’ll get in with the boys.

— Driving
where
?
Where’ve you been?

— Never you mind.

He shook his head sagely. — You’re in trouble in the morning.

— Maybe, maybe not. He won’t say anything.

— He’s been saying plenty.

— Yes, but not to me.

In the close darkness of the spare room, the boys slept one in each twin bed. Mum had made blackout curtains for the windows so that the light didn’t wake them in summer. Undressing down to my T-shirt and knickers, I climbed in beside Luke, trying to move him over without waking him. Heat, and the sweet-sour nutty smell of boy, rolled from his resisting limbs under the duvet; I could feel that he was in his old cotton pyjamas which buttoned down the front. Physical contact in the dark restored my vision of my sons – the intent, unguarded seriousness of their faces in sleep – as vividly as if I’d switched the light on. Their sleeping was always more urgent work than mere absence; they thrashed or snored or threw the duvet off with sudden purposeful violence. I felt relief, falling asleep at last. I wasn’t free, I was fastened to my children. At some point in the night I woke to Luke’s scrutiny, bent close over me. — Mum’s back, he said to himself in mild surprise, as if he saw the funny side of the whole thing.

8

I
FELL IN LOVE WITH
M
AC
Beresford, who came with his wife into the art gallery where I worked. He wasn’t my type at all. To begin with, the painting they bought was sickly, in my opinion – a fantasy with blue horses and a sort of arc of roses in the air above a snow scene, sleds and snowballs and peasant children in mittens. The gallery wasn’t cutting edge, it mostly sold the work of local artists to people who could afford original art but not the real thing. I liked working there because it was so easy after the café. Sometimes I could spend all morning reading my book while a few customers browsed.

Mac and his wife Barbara were tall and middle-aged. They both wore expensive long overcoats, his fawn and hers black with a big fake astrakhan collar; he was balding and stout, she had a big, sweet, pink face, made-up with pink powder and lipstick. She smelled sweet too, she was one of those women who moved in an aura of perfume and bath oils and hand cream. Her wavy blonde hair was fastened back in a black velvet clip and she was energetic, friendly, trusting. She had been into the gallery the day before; now she was bringing her husband to approve her choice before she paid for it.

— Doesn’t it cheer you up?

— I’m cheerful, he said. — How much is it?

— No, look at it properly, Mac. We have to live with this staring down at us for years. Do we really like it?

— I don’t know. Do we?

— Or are we just convincing ourselves we like it, and we’ll regret it later?

— It’s nice, we like it.

I guessed that they probably performed this double act often for the entertainment of their friends – his scepticism, her slightly scatty earnestness. I took them over a price list.

— My wife has to go a long way round sometimes, Mac explained to me, — talking herself into what she already knows she’s going to buy.

I thought that I never wanted anyone to claim to know me in that way – fond, tolerant, exasperated.

— What about this other one? Barbara said. — The village is asleep, there are fish floating in the night sky. I suppose they’re dreams. D’you like that better?

— I like them all, darling.

Waiting for her to make up her mind, he wandered over to the desk where I hadn’t picked up my book again, in case I seemed too indifferent to the gallery’s business. I was looking through the morning’s mail (I was supposed to sort the serious from the not-so-serious for Nigel, the gallery owner) and because I was vaguely annoyed with his attitude I didn’t look up. Mac told me afterwards that he guessed I was annoyed with him, and why, and that because of my not looking up he determined on the spot to make me change my mind and like him. He told me in fact that he had had a full-blown revelation, as he stood pretending to read the catalogue and really staring at the white skin of my neck under my ear, against my hair. (I was still dyeing my hair rusty henna-black, wearing it in a plait.) He said the sight of my neck washed him through with a physical pain which was his first ever panic at growing old; my disdain made him feel that life – savoury magnificent immoral life – was flowing away without his having had enough of it. He was imagining of course that I was an irresponsible girl; he had no idea I was the mother of two sons. By the time he found that out – he said – it was too late already, there was no going back.

I’m trying to remember all the things about Mac Beresford which were so overwhelming at the time, such a revelation. He had a degree in engineering from Salford and owned a successful business manufacturing precision instruments for surgery and medical research. He voted Liberal and read the
Financial Times
. He was opinionated, forceful, well-informed; inflexible sometimes, sentimental sometimes. He loved his wife, adored his two daughters and paid for them to go to private school, was an enthusiast for opera and W. B. Yeats and rugby union. He had inherited his eloquence and strong emotion from his dead father, an Anglican lay preacher – so all his stories seemed to have a hidden meaning, as if he was searching under their surface.

I looked up from the invoices and letters because Mac’s mass, in his expensive coat hanging open (Barbara chose his clothes, but he wasn’t indifferent to them), was blocking my light. His attention, fixed on me, was tangible and disconcerting. His head, I saw, was more interesting than I had realised when I only took him in as middle-aged – face broad and compressed, cheekbones not prominent, pale blue eyes protuberant, the skin tanned and tough and smooth, setting already in its firm folds at the neck. The last of his thinning hair was auburn, fox-coloured, light as down. I used to say, later, that he looked like a caricature of a plutocrat – he wasn’t insulted, he enjoyed the good health and strength of his body without vanity (or, his vanity was in his confidence that his looks didn’t matter). Barbara was still agonising between the paintings, and Mac was studying me so intently that when he asked which painting I liked best I had a feeling he saw past my prevarication (blandly, I said that it all depended on where it was going to hang) to the truth that I condemned all the paintings as trivial, which piqued and intrigued him. (— I guessed then that you were a little savage, a revolutionary, he teased me later. — Only waiting for your chance to tear down capitalism, and me with it.)

When the exhibition was over, it was Mac who came back to pick up the one they’d settled on. The gallery had been closed all day, its serene space disrupted by the chaos of dismantling. Nigel and I had been packing the paintings for sending and collection; Nigel had taken some of them in his car for local delivery. It was dusk on the street outside and I was tired. It was close to Christmas; the last shoppers were hurrying home, there were fairy lights in the shop windows and wound through the bare branches of the trees, the jeweller’s next door had been playing Christmas jingles all day until I’d stopped hearing them. I hadn’t thought about Mac once since I last saw him, and yet when he rapped on the window, peering in at me, I felt caught out and exposed as if the bare gallery were a lit fish tank. With clumsy fingers I unbolted the door.

— Look, come outside on the pavement for a moment, he said. — I want to show you something.

I was obedient because I was dazed – it was stuffy inside, we’d had the Calor gas heater on all day, boosting the central heating. Mac put his arm round my shoulders, pointing up at the sky between the buildings. His wool coat and scarf smelled of lanolin and cold night air trapped in the fibres.

— See the moon: just like the one in our picture.

It was true. The real moon was quarter full just like the one I had despised as whimsical in the painting they’d bought; silver-blue, curled like a comma or a tiny embryo, snug in its blurry ring of frost like a moon in a cave. When we had looked at it for a minute or two, he led me purposefully inside and closed the door behind us, not letting go of where he gripped my arm.

— Now. Why don’t you like our picture? he asked, frowning into my face in the bald indoor light, solemnly in earnest as if what I thought mattered. — You see it’s true to life. What have you got against it?

— I don’t mind it.

— Yes you do, don’t fib. You think it’s saccharine and mendacious. I’ve been working it out ever since we last met.

— Do you want to talk to Nigel? If you’ve changed your mind he may be able to come to some arrangement.

— I don’t want to come to any arrangement. I don’t care about the painting. I want to know what you think. I’ve been thinking about what you think, non-stop for two weeks. Won’t you come out to dinner with me?

— I don’t know, I said stupidly. What was I doing? Out of the two of them, I’d preferred his wife. — When?

— Tonight?

— I can’t, tonight. I’d have to get a babysitter.

This was a blow; he reeled from it and let go my arm. — A babysitter?

— I’ve got two boys. Fred’s picked them up from school because I knew I’d be working late. He’s finished already, he’s a teacher in a private school, they have shorter terms. Pay more, get less teaching.

— Fred? He’s your husband?

I said Fred was just a friend, and that the boys’ father had died. Mac looked baffled and unhappy. — Well actually, two separate fathers, except one just disappeared.

— Christ. You poor little kid.

— Oh, it’s OK. It was years ago.

He asked me just how old I was, exactly, and I said twenty-seven.

Somehow Mac was tangled in the thickets of my life already and I was tangled in his. Ten minutes before this I had forgotten all about him. It must have been physical, I suppose. Underneath all the complicated negotiations we still had to get through, all the painful rash precipitations and withdrawals, we’d had a tiny taste already, out on the street, of how it would be to yield to each other, to sink down together into the deep safety of each other’s flesh. No, that’s not it. Mac didn’t want to yield to me or anybody, he didn’t want safety. He wanted what men want from spiky, wiry girls twenty years younger (almost) than they are. But I wanted to yield. In that moment it’s what I wanted, anyway – to lean on his arm for ever, abandoning criticism, yearning up at the Christmas lights and the blurry moon.

We made love for the first time one afternoon in January at Fred’s – actually in Fred’s bed – while Fred was out teaching. It had to be Fred’s bed, although I felt bad about it, not only because my own bed was a narrow single one and Mac was a big man, but also because my bed was tucked like an afterthought alongside the bunks of my sons, in the midst of all the evidence of them which Mac found so difficult, their scattered toys and treasures, their pyjamas dropped where they’d dressed in the morning, their drawings Blu-Tacked on the wallpaper. Whereas the bed Fred had inherited from his mother was rhetorically perfect for the consummation of an adultery: mahogany, brooding, magnificent as a ship, with its scroll finial topping each of the four bedposts, creaking and swaying with us in tormented sympathy.

I know it’s not meant to be all that good the first time, but actually I think that it was good, for both of us. I was cruel in my youth and my assurance, knowing how painfully Mac wanted me. I hadn’t made love often in the years since Nicky died – once with Jude which didn’t count, a couple of times awkwardly with boys from the crowd I had known in the commune. (Once – very passionately and extravagantly, so that I didn’t know myself – with a stranger I met in a café when I’d done one of my runners away from home and the children; but he gave me something which shamed me and which I had to have treated at a clinic.) Mac, to my great surprise (I’d been attracted to the idea of him as a suavely experienced seducer), had never been unfaithful to Barbara before – he used that very word and I heard how the ‘faith’ in it was a substantial category for him. The first thing Mac said when we were finished was ‘Dear God’; I lay pinned under the dead weight of his body collapsed on me and didn’t know if he was actually praying, nor whether he meant remorse or thankfulness. I suspect now it was both at the same time. It seemed more momentous to me, making love to a much older man; not the act in itself but his presence in it, the heavy hinterland of his worldly experience driven in behind the fine point of the moment. I teased him that it felt like having sex with Winston Churchill or Bismarck. — I’m not that fat, he protested, but I think he was half flattered by the comparison, he didn’t mind.

He came to me in his spare hours when he could get away from work. I used to fantasise that I could smell the factory on him – he’d told me they did injection moulding of plastics and had their own sheet metal and electroplating facilities. Of course I couldn’t go there, I wasn’t even sure in those days where it was (somewhere off the Bath road). All my experience had been with young men – boys, really – who came and went following their own lights. I liked how Mac had to draw his mind with an effort round to me, from all the burden of his real life – not that he ever complained about the burden: he enjoyed it, it was what he was alive for. All that time during our affair (which lasted something less than a year) he was deciding whether to expand the medical-surgical business into precision defence equipment (which he did, eventually). When I accused him of wanting to kill innocent civilians for profit, and said he would have blood on his hands, he laughed at me, stroking back my hair under his broad hot palms, pulling it tight against my scalp – he liked to look into my face that way, as if he was stripping it naked to read something fundamental in it. What he wanted to develop, he reassured me, were explosive-detection and disposal devices; for saving lives, not harming them. There was a strong market for this because of the terrorist threat.

In the time after our affair, when I’d stopped seeing him, Mac grew in my imagination almost into a kind of beast, I repudiated him so ferociously. I told myself I’d had a lucky escape, made a terrible error of judgement – he was so fixed in his place in the world, so insensible to any counter-narrative. Where would the defence contracts end, once they had begun? How could I have allowed him to contaminate me, touching me? I had introduced him to Fred once, because I longed for someone else I knew to know Mac, as if that would anchor him in my real life. I thought fondly that they would like each other – weren’t they both knowledgeable, voluble, religious? But it was a disaster. I arranged an evening when the boys were at my mother’s and I cooked something special to impress Mac – boeuf bourguignon with julienne potatoes, followed by chocolate chestnut cream; though I didn’t have much idea of what he liked (we’d only eaten together a few times at the beginning, when we went for dinner in restaurants). Mac had told Barbara that he was dining out with clients. He ate with his shoulders hunched and his head bent over the plate, oblivious to the food, which offended Fred on my behalf; afterwards Mac felt in his pockets for his indigestion medicine. Fred held forth at high pitch – about literature, school, boys – as if the conversation was a lost cause; Mac was monosyllabic in response, though I was used to him eloquently ruminative in bed. I tried introducing the subject of Yeats but they both clammed up, not wanting any blundering into sacred territory.