Clever Girl (25 page)

Really Valentine’s return doesn’t seem to matter much. I reassure Madeleine that it’s most unlikely his path will ever cross with mine. As far as I’m concerned, I tell her, his being a thousand miles away or three makes no difference at all. We progress to talking about other things instead: she’s staying over at her mum’s for a week so we arrange to go shopping one afternoon, and to take both our mothers out to lunch together at the weekend. All this gives me a good excuse for staying on in town beyond the days when I’m actually at the Gatehouse. I confess to Madeleine that I find myself seeking out excuses so as not to spend too much time in our country house, though there’s nothing wrong between Mac and me.

— But I’m just not ready to settle down to country life, and he is.

— I don’t blame you. All those green wellies and Tories and garden fetes. Perfect for holidays, but you wouldn’t want to
live
there.

The country is more complicated than Madeleine thinks (she’s such a Londoner these days and can’t believe there’s real life anywhere else). Our country friends aren’t really Tories, they’re just not very interested in politics, they’re interested in other things. Our nearest neighbour, for instance, is an ecologist and expert in early music; the woman who helps Mac with the heavy work in the garden used to be in West End musicals. And I love my view of the church tower – its rooks rising like specks against the clouds – through the arched window on the staircase. Only I have the idea that moving down there permanently would be like passing through the quiver in the old glass to the other side, leaving something unfinished behind.

I do really, mostly, meanwhile, forget about Valentine; only every so often, underneath the surface of my conversation with Madeleine and then in the days that follow, at work and in the flat, I come upon the new knowledge of his nearness in the city – like knocking up against some disconcerting piece of loose flotsam. Funnily enough, if there had been even the remotest chance of some kind of romantic renewal between us, I think the idea of him would be less interesting. There’s something infantilising and shaming in those Friends Reunited stories of childhood sweethearts getting back together. But I’m not succumbing to any secret hope that Valentine will have changed his sexuality while he’s been away. Quite the contrary, in fact: it’s the absence of the sexual motive which makes the idea of him intriguing for me. I realise that I’m starting to exaggerate him in my mind, imagining him like the demigod on the Greek vase, set apart from mortals, initiated into mysteries, bestowing gifts. Bestowing them on me: gifts of wisdom, or some kind of absolution. How absurd. He did use to look a bit like a demigod, when he was seventeen. He had that swaggering air of careless luck and a blissful uncomplicated beauty, as if his face and body were drawn in a few clean lines.

But now he’ll be middle-aged, I tell myself.

He’ll probably be dissipated, raddled, awful.

I don’t know how much it matters, knowing your biological father. I’ve never known mine. A few years ago my mother suddenly became very agitated and conspiratorial: it turned out that, of all things, my real father had got in touch with her. He had got hold of my Uncle Ray through the Internet (Ray’s a computer enthusiast) and sent a message to him: the whole process was alien to Mum, who won’t have a computer in the house – though Luke has tried patiently to persuade her.

Anyway, he’d not only found out Mum’s whereabouts but was asking what had become of me, his daughter. After all this time, nearly half a century! I think Mum had even persuaded herself that he was dead, just through sticking to that story for so long, no matter how I pressed her for the truth (with other people, as far as I know, she never even discussed him). She fell out dreadfully over the whole business with Uncle Ray, who in the first flush of excitement had responded to the stranger, giving him Mum’s new married name and her telephone number. She and Ray didn’t speak for months, until my stepfather and Ray’s wife engineered a reconciliation.

I begged Mum to tell me what exactly my father had said to her: I was more interested in this fact of my parents’ contact than in any implications it had for me.

— Oh, I don’t know, Stella. We only spoke for a few minutes. The usual.

— What d’you mean, the usual? It can’t have been usual!

— I mean, just the usual sort of things that people say.

— How did he sound? Did you recognise his voice right away?

— Of course I did, I’m not senile. He wanted to know what you were doing and I told him. He’s going to ask Ray to pass his email whatsit on to you, so you can be in touch with him if you really want to.

I longed to have overheard how she reacted when she realised it was him: raw perhaps, for once, and startled, implicated. After all, she hadn’t put the phone down on him. Was she alone in the house when he called? She was. Had she asked him about his life, what it had been? That was none of her business, she said.

— But what was it like? How did you
feel
,
when you knew it was him?

— I was trying to think of a way to get rid of him.

In the end I took my cue from Mum: I decided I wasn’t eager to see my father. And of course I might have met him anyway, when I had driving lessons so long ago from a man with the same name. I still remembered how we had liked each other and how proud he had been of my driving. I was wary of spoiling it now: either finding out my instructor wasn’t my father after all, or, if he was, then muddling the decent clarity of our old contact with new overlays of guilt and effort. Ray gave me the email address, but I never did anything about getting in touch.

In the wake of the little drama of my father’s turning up, my mother was peculiar: cross and flattening, impatient with my stepfather if he was slow or forgot things. I felt sorry for Gerry, flinching under her brisk regime where everything personal and emotional had to be tidied out of sight – just when he might have liked to open up more expansively. He was still physically fit and energetic in his seventies and he was allowing himself new luxuries of feeling: listening to classical music, cooking, growing passionate over the birds visiting his garden. It felt for a while as if he and I were allied together against Mum and her lack of imagination, or her refusal of it. I made a point then of often taking Ester round to see them, because she and Gerry got on so well; he could occupy himself with her for hours, involving himself seriously in her games. He found something painfully poignant, I think, in her sweet looks and contained, fastidious manners: she was his bossy princess, he was her dedicated retainer. He asked me once, while we were watching her on the swing that he’d put up for her, how Sheila could bear to see her when she came visiting from Brazil.

— I’d have thought it would have been better for her to make a clean break, he said. — Never to set eyes on the child.

Defensive, I assumed that he was criticising our whole arrangement (my mother had predicted disaster when we first took Ester on). I was ready to be brash: no, why should she mind, so long as Ester was happy? When I realised he was genuinely interested, I told him what Sheila had said when we talked about it once: that she was surprised how far she was able to choose not to feel regretful. — Obviously she’s sad sometimes, for a while. But it surprises her, how most of the time it is all right. She says she’s come to the conclusion that the biology – the blood and genes and stuff – only means as much as you choose it to. You either confer that power, emotionally, on the genetic connection, or you don’t. Likewise, you could confer the power on someone who isn’t genetically related to you.

Then Gerry and I realised that we could be talking about ourselves, and my relation to him, so we were both uncomfortable and changed the subject.

It is fun and sinful, shopping with Madeleine. It’s supposed to be Christmas shopping even though it’s only late October; we have congratulated ourselves on our resourceful forward thinking. But the truth is that at least half of what we spend is on ourselves, on clothes and shoes and bits of jewellery. I don’t often shop so impulsively these days, spending so much at once: it feels like being drunk (actually we probably are slightly drunk, having shared a bottle of wine at lunch), caught up in heady anticipations, believing we can renew ourselves and be different by changing our clothes. All day I am greedily interested in owning things. I’m paying cash but Madeleine’s putting all her purchases on her credit card; I’m anxious about debt because of those long years when I had no money to spare, but she reassures me that she can pay it all off later. And after all it’s only a technicality, where the spending comes from: owning the money doesn’t make it more or less virtuous. The power of the bright flood of things in the shops is overwhelming, dazzling – and a triumph of taste, because there’s much more nice stuff to go around now than there used to be. It’s as if some ancient knot of material difficulty has come unfastened all at once, old puritan certainties have slipped away; but a residue of that grit makes me uncomfortable. (And Mac doesn’t like credit cards. He’s always on the side of manufacturing: he says we should be making things to sell, not buying things with money we don’t have.)

Madeleine is using her mother’s car and gives me a lift back to the flat afterwards. Alone there, surrounded by my carrier bags, I embark on an anxious session of trying the clothes I’ve bought, pulling them on with abandon, discarding them crumpled and inside out on the bed. When it’s over I feel guilty and cheated and I have to run a bath because I’m sticky with sweat. I’m not sure now whether anything I’ve bought really suits me; I’m afraid in case I’ve lost my good judgement, or don’t know any longer how I want to appear. Last summer when I was looking through clothes on a rail in a shop I saw a young girl’s glance slide over me, embarrassed by my mistake in thinking those fashions could be meant for anyone my age. I’m relieved that I’ve arranged to go round to Luke and Janine’s for supper; I don’t want to stay in the flat alone with my purchases. I put on one of the new blouses, gauzy and flowery, over new leggings, then I take these off again and put on my old jeans and a white shirt. I’ve bought presents for Luke and Janine – a jumper for him and a bag for her – and I decide not to keep them for Christmas but to give them away now, like an expiation.

Luke and Janine are both junior-school teachers. They’re buying a tiny terraced house on a steep street in Totterdown, which was where I brought Luke to live with my Auntie Jean when he was a new baby. Jean and Frank are still around the corner; Jean probably sees Luke as often as I do. It was a working-class district then; now it’s alternative middle-class as well, with lots of young families, some of the houses painted in bright colours as if it was the Mediterranean. Luke and Janine grow vegetables in the back garden and Luke wants to install solar panels on the roof; he’s good at all those practical kinds of things. They are pleased but bemused by my presents. Janine says that she has a bag already, but that she will save the new one until she needs it. I don’t explain to her that if you’re like Madeleine you don’t have just one handbag at a time but a whole cupboard full of different ones to choose from, to go with different outfits.

We eat vegetarian lasagne for supper; Janine’s a vegetarian so Luke’s become one too. She doesn’t put any salt in her food and I would like to add some to my plateful but I don’t, because it might seem like a criticism of her cooking; I don’t think Janine would mind but Luke might, he’s very protective of her. I notice him explaining me to her now and then, mediating what I say as if he’s afraid I may be too overbearing. They are gentle and conscientious and acutely attuned to one another. I wonder sometimes whether Luke has toned himself down too far to be in tune with Janine; when he gets together with his brother he’s more like his old self, scathing and funny. But perhaps this gentleness is what he’s always really wanted. When I first met Janine I was afraid that I was bound to offend her somehow; she’s mournful-eyed and graceful like a girl in a Burne-Jones painting. But she’s observant and clever too, and it turned out that she and I like each other, we’re tolerant of each other’s differences. I expect she has her own opinions about the kind of childhood that Luke had, and some of the chaos in it – but she keeps them to herself. Luke disappears upstairs after supper to the computer, and she and I wash up together.

We discuss Rowan and his music, the success he’s having and our worries about the new pressures on him: he’s been supporting headline acts at the big festivals this summer. Songs pour out of him. I have them on my iPod and I listen to them on the train and round the house: they are a miracle, they come from a place in my son that’s unknown to me. Janine has entered wholeheartedly into Luke’s attitude towards his brother, at once sceptical and protective. Rowan still picks fights with me when he comes home; he recounts episodes from the past to illustrate how I neglected him or carelessly put him in danger – sometimes in a calmly forgiving voice, as if he appreciates I was too ignorant to know what I was doing. What possessed me, for instance, allowing him to go off to live with his grandmother in Glasgow for a year? Did I have any idea of the kind of place I’d sent him to, how violent it was and how racist? I lie awake at night and go over and over these narratives, asking myself whether he’s right and I was wrong. I don’t remember allowing Rowan to go anywhere, exactly: he presented his move to Glasgow pretty much as a fait accompli at the time and I don’t think I could have stopped him – but perhaps I should have tried harder. I lose my confidence in my version of what happened. Luke is impatient if I try to talk these anxieties over with him, he says I ought to know better than to take Rowan’s complaints too seriously. He says Rowan talks nonsense about how bad it was in Glasgow; Nicky’s mother adored him and made a big fuss of him, the area they were in was perfectly friendly, Rowan was fine.

I think while I’m washing up with Janine that I might mention what Madeleine told me: that Valentine has come home. I could see what she thinks about my telling Luke. But in the end the words won’t form in my mouth; her steady competence makes me ashamed to raise this issue of my ancient mistakes, like dragging up some dirty mess out of the washing-up water. Janine has such an attractive way of doing everything: the rubber gloves are turned inside out and dried and hung by a peg on the draining board; then she makes us lotus blossom tea bought from a Vietnamese company online and we drink it out of the bone china teacups she found in a charity shop. Perhaps it’s best to leave all those old stories in the dark. Luke has always known that his father’s first name is Valentine and that he was in America: that’s just about all he knows. I also told him long ago, when he was a little boy and asked me, that his father was very good-looking and very intelligent. (— I loved him desperately, I said. — But he didn’t love me, not in that way. Though we were very good friends.) Nowadays Luke avoids the subject as if it embarrasses him. He calls Mac Dad (Rowan never does), even though he was a teenager by the time we all moved in together.