Clever Girl (26 page)

And then on my last day in town, I go to find Valentine. Of course I do. How could I know that he was in town – my long-lost twin, the secret father of my child – and not want to set eyes on him even just once after all this time? I dress carefully in new wool trousers I’ve bought – midnight blue – and a cream silk shirt and Paul Smith jacket. I want to show him that I’ve done all right, that I’m powerful, I’m not nothing. In front of my mirror I’m full of trepidation, wishing I was taller. I could have taken a taxi out to Valentine’s old house but instead I catch the bus, which has a different number now but follows the same route as the one he and Madeleine and I used to get back from school together. I look overdressed for the bus, as if I was going to a business meeting; I regret my effort with the clothes now, and realise how provincial I will probably look anyway to Valentine, fresh from New York. As the bus penetrates deeper into the suburbs, it’s extraordinary how unchanged it all seems – the old stage-set bourgeois innocence, the heavy quiet in the empty streets, house-fronts bristling with tactful paint, autumn gardens tied and tidied, a few late roses blown and tangled in the bushes. Perhaps there are more parked cars than I remember and they make the roads seem narrower. I never liked it here, this peace was always my enemy. And the deep familiarity disorientates me, as if after all what separates me from the past is tissue thin.

Valentine’s house is detached, and different to most of the development around: older and gloomier and bigger, built in ugly blocks of red stone with a rough-hewn finish. The garden gate is off its hinges, propped inside the wall, and I wonder for a moment if the place isn’t abandoned: the paint on the woodwork is faded and flaking off, evergreen shrubs in the front garden have grown high up against the front windows, flyers advertising pizza take-aways, dropped in the porch, are sodden with rain. But there are reassuring expensive lined curtains at the windows, even if the lining’s ragged, and after I’ve pressed the bell I hear slow footsteps in the hall. Then Valentine’s mother opens the door to me. I’m surprised how easily I recognise her, though Hilda was in her fifties when we last met and now she’s an old lady; in her mid-eighties at least. Her shoulders are humped with arthritis and her heavy brown hair has turned iron-grey – but it is pinned in the same old French pleat, she wears the same dangling earrings. She is still daunting, elegant, ravaged; even fumbling with the latch her impatience has its old savagery, as if she’d like to break something. She doesn’t recognise me, naturally enough, because we haven’t met since I was seventeen. I tell her that I’m Stella, that I’m an old friend of Valentine’s; for a moment while she peers unfocusedly I think she’s forgotten me, and I’m relieved. She is disappointed because she thought I was the supermarket delivery.

— Who did you say you were?

And then when I tell her again, she does remember. — Oh, Stella. You used to live on the new estate.

I don’t know what she might have guessed, when she heard about my having to leave school because I was pregnant all those years ago, in the months after Valentine ran away to America. No doubt she heard about it, everybody did. Probably she just thought I was the kind of girl who was bound to get into trouble sooner or later, with some boy or another. She may have believed I was partly responsible for Val’s going; or she may have understood all along the mistake I’d made, imagining I could have him for my lover. Now I see calculation in her face behind the old frigid politeness.

— Your parents moved away. How are they?

I tell her that they’re well; then I enquire whether Val’s at home. Hilda is looking behind me all this time for the supermarket van. I can see she’s irritated that I’ve arrived because it’s distracting her from this delivery which has been at the centre of her day. — Val does the orders on the Internet, she explains crossly. — They give you a two-hour time slot but they’re awfully unreliable, and this one’s late already. Though sometimes he thinks he’s put an order in, and then it turns out he’s forgotten to press the final button or something. He gets mixed up. Perhaps he just pretends he got mixed up, when actually he couldn’t be bothered.

Then she says that he’s usually in, he doesn’t go out much.

She shrugs when I ask if I can come in; I say that I’d love to see him, though it will be very strange after such a long time. — You may as well go up, she says. — He hasn’t been in touch with his old friends. I suppose that most of them have moved away.

The hall is more or less as I remember it – spacious and shabby with a cold cellar-breath. It’s dark because of the feeble light bulb and the overgrown shrubs against the window; a gigantic sideboard carved in black wood takes up too much space – one of the things they brought with them from Malaya. Hilda explains that Valentine doesn’t live in the attic any longer, he’s moved down into his father’s room because the attic’s full of junk. Then she seizes my hand in an awkward grip, heavy as iron, her knuckles swollen and freckled with age. — You know he hasn’t been well?

And I think in that moment that it is AIDS, which would fit in with Valentine’s timing perfectly. She asks if I have sons and I say I have two, both grown up now; I dread – because of her bowed head and the drooping, tragic face – that she is going to say something significant and terrible, about her love for her son and the pain of losing Valentine, because he’s going to die. Stupid tears force their way into my eyes in readiness; she must see them. But after all she only talks on in her deprecating way about her various grandchildren (none of them Valentine’s, of course) who seem all to be in expensive private schools, or at Oxford or Cambridge. I’m not quite sure what message this is supposed to have for me. Perhaps she is reminding me that I was never really quite good enough for their family. Or perhaps she’s just rambling round familiar territory because she’s an old lady and she’s distracted, she’s forgotten what she meant to say.

She doesn’t come upstairs with me, she wants to keep looking out for the van; and I hesitate on the landing because I’ve no idea which room was Valentine’s father’s. I call out, but there’s no response so I try one of the doors, which opens into a bedroom that must be Hilda’s, at the front of the house: there’s a ghost in the air in here of her cosmetics and scent, a high bed with a pink candlewick cover, and a cheval mirror (carved in the same black wood as the sideboard) that seems to stand in for Hilda’s presence, pulled stiffly upright. I try another door. In this second room it’s dark because thick curtains are pulled across the windows, and there’s an Anglepoise light switched on above a desk where an old man with a shock of white hair is sitting with his back to me, writing. I think for a startled moment that Madeleine made a mistake, Valentine’s father isn’t dead after all. Then the old man turns round and I see that it’s Valentine.

He isn’t really an old man. It’s the white hair which is so disconcerting: and yet it’s that pure white which is quite beautiful in itself, silky and light as floss, seeming charged with static because it floats like a translucence round his head. And Val’s got a lot of it, he’s not balding, it’s just receding in a distinguished way at the temples. He doesn’t really look so very old, more like someone who’s been seriously sick and is just coming back to life. He’s gaunt, his skin is papery-dry, his eyes seem huge and the folds of flesh under them are puffy. (It isn’t AIDS – Val insists on that at some point in our conversation, as if he knows what people guess. I don’t know what happened to him, exactly – some kind of breakdown, physical and mental, a consequence I suppose of all the drink and the drugs, and the lifestyle. It could so easily have been AIDS, going to America and to the gay scene and sleeping around just when he did; but if he’d got it then he’d probably have been dead by now. So he was lucky in his own way, charmed.)

The old faun-face is still there, behind the mask of age and illness. After the first moment’s shock of non-recognition I find it: the heart-shape and defiant jaunty chin, the curious deeply curved eye sockets, a sardonic twist to the long mouth. He is still handsome; and his looks are more densely male and less androgynous after thirty years – their style that was poised and provisional is etched now deep into the flesh. The bruise-black eyes are suffering and eloquent against that white hair. He’s wearing an old shirt which I guess was his father’s, half buttoned and without cufflinks, so that the sleeves dangle off his forearms. I feel ashamed of my smart outfit. There’s a stillness and steadiness in him which is new. He used to be too restless to sit at a desk for very long; but now as I look around I get the feeling that he doesn’t venture much out of this room. It smells stale in here; the bed is unmade, clothes are lying on the floor where he has dropped them. The walls are pinned all over with pictures, postcards, things cut out of the newspapers, scraps of paper scribbled with writing. There’s a Mac laptop open on the bed, though at the desk he was writing by hand. Books – not novels but heavy reference books, numbered on the spine as if they’re borrowed from a library – are piled up on the floor and the chairs. I’m sure when he stands up from his desk, turning enquiringly towards me, that he’s sorry he’s been interrupted.

I know right away that Val has no idea who I am.

It’s not only that he’s stalled for a moment, as I was with him, by how I’ve aged and changed. Even when I’ve told him my name and explained who I am and how we were friends before he went away, his expression doesn’t register anything except a vaguely polite hopefulness. — I’m so sorry, he says. — It’s part of my illness. Or rather, it’s part of the drugs they gave me to cure the illness. I’ve lost whole chunks of my past, you’ll have to forgive me.

His accent is faintly transatlantic; but his voice is the same, I’d know it anywhere: not deep, a tenor voice with something cracked and teasing in it, creaky and smoky. It’s because of the old known voice speaking out of him that I don’t just back off and make my excuses and leave right away. I feel at home with him, I know him, even if he doesn’t know me. — Tell me about yourself, he says. — Perhaps some of it will come back to me. Stella. Maybe I do remember a Stella. Come in. Shut the door behind you. I’d ask my mother to make you coffee only she’s driving me insane, I can’t bring myself to speak to her. Did she let you in? Did she pounce, the black widow?

He’s smiling but it’s not quite his old tautly mocking smile; I wonder if illness has wiped some of his irony. When he lights a cigarette (he’s kept Hilda’s lighter, after all this time) his hands shake. He goes around the room tidying up, pulling the sheets straight on the bed, lifting some books off a chair so that I can sit in it – and then he’s at a loss because he can’t find anywhere to put them down. Opening the curtains, he lets in a grey daylight which shows up the thick dust. Valentine was always indifferent to his surroundings but the mess seems more of a risk now that he’s older, and ill. When you are young and strong you can be sure of springing free of your material envelope through your own vitality; later, any dinginess or fustiness may seep back into you.

— Do you remember Fred? I say encouragingly. The chair that Valentine cleared for me to sit in is an ugly heavy thing, elaborately carved and high-backed like a throne; he’s sitting on the side of the bed, opposite me. — He was your teacher, he loved you.

— Yes, something. I’m getting something. Fred. A nice guy. Little guy, dark hair, liked poetry.

— You studied poetry with him at school.

— Did I know you at that time?

I tell him about Fred. Then I try to explain to him how it was when he and I went everywhere together, spent all our time together, read the same books, even dressed in the same clothes. I tell him how I worshipped him, though I leave this worshipping ambiguous, because I don’t want to embarrass him by bringing up the subject of sex: there’s something in his fragile body and his demeanour that forbids me even joking about it – as if he was a monk or a saint. He’s touched and interested, listening to my stories. Some of it does come back to him as I talk: mostly places, and some people. He remembers that he had to leave in a hurry because someone was looking for him; he says he often used to get into that kind of trouble. Before his illness, he says, his life was a mess and his perceptions were clouded and obscure. He has wasted so much time. I want to insist that he hasn’t wasted it, nothing’s wasted; but then I shut up because it surely is wasted if you’ve forgotten it, if it’s just gone. Anyway, Valentine isn’t really listening to me now, he’s holding forth with a new urgency as if he’s found his way on to a well-worn track which interests him more than a past he scarcely recognises.

— You’ve got to use your time, he says. — That’s what I’ve learned. I think of my illness as a gateway into a new more authentic life. More disciplined. Not ‘use’ time: that’s not the right word – as if time could be digested through the machinery of production and consumption. That’s the mistake we make. You’ve got to inhabit time fully, dwell inside it, every minute of every hour – which mostly we dissipate in false consciousness. If you learn to dwell in every minute then the spirit will make itself at home in you, you’re opened up to knowledge of the truth.

I’m not thinking that he’s completely crazy as he comes out with this. Partly this is because while he’s saying it I seem to be in the presence of the old Valentine, excitable and convinced. But partly his words seem like the answer to an intimation which I have sometimes too. Visiting old churches in the country with Mac, a horrible urge comes over me to fall on my knees and pray: though I’d never really do it while Mac was with me. Instead I tease him with my sceptical remarks and he instructs me on the history and architectural features of the place. Mac’s not the kind of religious person who gives way to transports, though he climbs up into the pulpit to check whether they’re using his beloved King James Bible. But I’m half wishing all the time that I was alone and could yield to this heaviness dragging me down, this longing to fall on my knees and supplicate something, I don’t know what. It feels for a time as if the something is the only real thing and all the rest is fake.