Clever Girl (10 page)
I thought – when the whole truth came out, when at last I’d understood about the sex, and Ian was so fucked off with Val about the window and the milk and was looking for him everywhere, and Val got the money from his sister and went to the States, and it was all such a collapse of my hopes – I thought I could still go back, defeated, to my old life. Back home and back to school, and pick up where I left off, and be a clever girl again, and get to university. Even if I could never ever again, in my whole life, be happy.
But I wasn’t that clever, was I?
Had I forgotten everything they’d taught us at school? That you only had to do it once, just once, to get into trouble. We had even done it twice.
M
RS
T
APPER SAVED ME
. I
OUGHT
to be grateful to her. We met when I was sitting on a park bench on Brandon Hill and Lukie was asleep in his pram: I was eighteen and he was twelve weeks old. I’d been sitting there too long. It was late afternoon on an autumn day in 1974 and the wind was blowing dead leaves and black bits of twig down from the trees and into drifts on the wet grass littered with worm casts; the bench’s wooden slats were cold as metal against the underside of my thighs, my feet were numb in thin plimsolls, I was trying to keep my hands warm in my pockets. From time to time I reached out to push the pram back and forward if I thought I heard Lukie waking up. The chrome pram handle too was freezing cold – but he was snug inside in his cocoon of nappy and babygro suit and bonnet and bootees and blankets. I’d tested to make sure he was warm enough, pushing my own hand in there between the sheets, down beside his hot little body, damp and urgent in sleep. I wished that I could sleep, and be tucked up in a cocoon of blankets and rocked to and fro, and not have to think about anything except myself.
I did love him.
I’d loved him from the moment he arrived in that awful chaos in the foyer of the maternity hospital – they had to cut my knickers off, he came so quickly. Apparently this happens with young mothers. I still had my shoes on when they handed him to me to hold; the maternity dress my Auntie Andy had bought me, when I couldn’t fit into my jeans any longer, was a bloody rag wrapped up somewhere around my waist, it had to be thrown out (not that I cared – I didn’t need maternity dresses, I was never,
ever
,
going to go through that again). Lukie gazed into my eyes when they gave him to me with such a searching, surmising, reasonable, open look: surprised but not dismayed to find himself in existence. Now that I know my son Luke as an adult I can say that the whole of him was there in that first look, everything he’s ever done and been began from that. (My other son’s so different, so complicated.)
— My God, my mother had said as soon as she leaned over Lukie (not that soon – she didn’t come to see him for weeks after he was born, we were by no means reconciled by then). — He’s the spit of your father.
Now why did she say that? When for so many years we’d never mentioned my father. She was pushing the baby away, I knew it – she didn’t want it connected to her. Needless to say she hadn’t wanted me to have a baby. Never mind all the other stuff, about shame, and loss of face, and people asking ‘How’s Stella getting on at school?’ and my tripping up on my merry road to being so superior: not only that, but it was only a few years since my mother had her own second baby, she was bored with the whole fuss and the puking and crying, no cute little grandson was going to win her round. She had wanted me to triumph and prove something to my stepfather, and I had made a fool of myself instead. Her look at me was hard and flattened and lustreless, it had been for months: as if she’d let go of something. Let go of me, I suppose. But she did bring me some tiny vests, and a matinee jacket she’d knitted herself (she was hopeless at knitting, too impatient, it was full of dropped stitches). And money, most of which I gave to Jean.
I was living with my Auntie Jean and I didn’t know what to do.
Rock the pram, rock the pram. Mix up the baby’s bottles of formula, sterilise the bottles. Change his nappy, mix up the soaking solution in a plastic bucket, rinse the dirty nappies then soak them and then put them in Jean’s twin tub, heaving the scalding nappies in clouds of urine-smelling steam in wooden tongs between the washer and the spin dryer. Wash his clothes, wash mine. Help Jean make tea. (Jean worked in the afternoons, sewing for a Jewish tailor in Stokes Croft. She was a skilled tailoress, she could cut out and make a winter coat, a man’s suit jacket and trousers.) Feed the baby, rock him. (Jean loved to give him his bottle and nurse him. She was a natural. He slept content against the handsome mountain of her bosom.) Watch telly with my cousins in the evenings. Pick the baby up from his cot when he cried in the night and rock him.
Was that it, then?
We had a back room. It was my cousin Richard’s room, he was a trainee motor mechanic and he’d had to move in to sleep with his two brothers. At first he didn’t mind. They were that kind of family: generous and spontaneous, always giving shelter to refugees from some crisis or other among their friends or relations. But after a while, naturally, Richard would have liked his room back. Also, I wasn’t quite grateful enough: this was just a flaw in my character at that time in my life, I couldn’t help seeing things bitterly, looking at everything – even kindness – with irony. Where I should have had a heart, there was a dry husk. I loved my good-looking boy cousins, how they teased their mother, and their touchy loyalty and dignity as if they were a tribe set apart; but I couldn’t quite belong to the tribe. I should have talked more and made more effort – but I suppose I was making all the efforts I had in me, just to get through every day. There were pieces of motorbike lying around on the floor of Richard’s room and sometimes in the dark when I was walking up and down with Lukie because he wouldn’t sleep I stumbled over them in my bare feet, and cut my toes and bruised my shins. That back room seemed like the end of the world, some nights.
But where else could I go? I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, go home.
Anyway, at home they did not want me.
Some nights, if Lukie had been fretting on and off for hours my Auntie Jean came in, voluminous in her nightie. — Give him to me, Stella love, she said. — I’ll have him. You get some sleep. And I was too weak to refuse her: I handed my baby over. She knew just how to hold him, to comfort him; right away I heard him calming down in her arms out of his frenzy. I longed for my bed, I crept into it and embraced my pillow like an addict, sinking down and down into oblivion. I knew that Jean would take my baby permanently if I wanted her to. I could go away and possess myself again; Luke would grow up to be part of the tribe. Not that it would be easy for her (what about her job, sewing?). She had a thing about babies, though, and she loved Lukie. I knew that he’d have a good life with her – I didn’t know what kind of life he’d have with me. (I didn’t think about Valentine. I never even mentioned his name, after the moment I learned he’d left for the US. My mother never even asked me if he was the baby’s father; if anyone did ask me I wouldn’t answer them, nobody told his parents, he never knew.)
Some nights I stood in my pyjamas in the dark at the back window, my baby son dozing against my shoulder, breathing him in: yeasty, milky, eggy, sweet. Whatever my mind was busy with in those moments, my body calmed to be in tune with his; there was still an animal match between the smell of his sweat and mine. My aunt and uncle lived in Totterdown, on a terraced house on a precipitous hill: I could see all the lights of the city spread out below me on the river plain. I’m not dead yet, I thought in the middle of the night. This is my life. It’s not nothing. And my imagination was too passionately imprinted with Luke’s miniature features, it was already too late to leave him: the pearly globes of his closed eyelids, a swathe of shiny milk-rash spots across his cheek, the wrinkling frowns that passed over his face with wind, the dark blood-colour of his lips pressed so precisely together, his tiny decisively hooked nose (making me think of the ribs of an umbrella waiting to be unfurled later).
And then Mrs Tapper found me in the park. Brandon Hill wasn’t anywhere near my cousins’, it was in a much smarter part of the city. I’d pushed the pram on and on through the afternoon, not knowing where I was heading, until my feet were sore – and Lukie had slept all that time. I first spotted Mrs Tapper walking fast along the paths beside the frost-stricken flower beds, the heels of her shoes scraping assertively. She was dressed in a beautifully cut camel-hair coat, the collar turned up round her ears and her hands pushed deep into the pockets. Her face was lifted in that remote, sardonic way she had, avoiding meeting anyone’s eye; the colour of the coat didn’t suit her because her hair and her complexion were too close to the same yellowish fawn. She was fairly tall and very thin and middle-aged (older than my mother, I guessed); powder was stuck in the shallow wrinkles on her forehead and her hair was cut to shoulder length, pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. When I thought about it afterwards, once I knew her better – Vivien, she told me to call her Vivien and sometimes I remembered – I wondered if she’d come out to walk there that day after she’d had a row with her husband. They didn’t get on very well. She wasn’t the sort of woman who found the time for walks in the park by herself – her life was packed efficiently tight with important errands and busy-ness. It may have been an exceptional afternoon for her – if I was feeling desperate, then perhaps she was too.
All the benches along the path were empty but she sat down beside me. — Do you mind? she said. She asked me sympathetically all about Lukie, she said she had two children of her own, a girl and a boy, eight and fourteen.
— It’s such a shock, isn’t it? she said. — The responsibility, descending like that all at once out of the blue. I was much older than you are but I wasn’t prepared in the least. I know I thought I’d go under with it. But you don’t go under, you know.
I opened up to Mrs Tapper as I hadn’t opened up to anyone. Perhaps I had an instinct that in her dryness and measured analysis she was a more useful model to me just then than Jean with her instinctive mothering. I told her about my mother and stepfather, and giving up school. I told her about the back bedroom at Auntie Jean’s and the motorbike parts. I even told her that the baby’s father didn’t know about him. I could tell her anything, I thought, it wouldn’t matter – I’d never see her again afterwards.
— So you’re stuck, Mrs Tapper said. — I know how that feels.
It reassured me that she wasn’t the motherly type and yet she had children: so perhaps I might manage it after all. Her long legs in sheer nylons were crossed under her coat and she was swinging one foot restlessly, the shoe dangling, as if she wanted to jump up and take off somewhere.
— Actually I’m looking for a girl, she said abruptly. — I don’t suppose it’s a job that would interest you. But I want someone to come and live in, to help with the chores and the children. I’ve got my own business, selling antiques: it takes up more and more of my time. We live in the school where my husband works. (I thought at first she must mean he was some kind of caretaker, but of course he wasn’t, he was housemaster at an expensive private school.) — You could have your own room. And I’d pay you on top of that: say, thirty pounds a week. But probably the job isn’t what you want.
Her impulsive gesture wasn’t like her; mostly she was solitary and wary of commitment. She must have felt a momentary kinship with me, with my plight. She really had been looking for a girl – but she didn’t have to take one with a baby. Afterwards, I think she partly disliked me because of the rash gesture I had drawn her into; which was a shame, because we had genuinely opened up to one another for that twenty minutes in the park. After I worked for her we never spoke like that again, intimately as equals. But that was all right too. We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love.
I said that I was interested. I yearned at the thought of a room of my own.
— You’re not a smoker, are you? Can you clean a house? And can you make cake? If you’re a housemaster’s wife the boys expect you to feed them ghastly cake, day in day out.
I said I could make cake and it was true, I could produce a passable Victoria sponge. And my mother used to pay me pocket money for cleaning; she’d been a hard taskmaster. Mrs Tapper was frowning into the pram. She was probably already half regretting her offer. — Does he sleep through the night yet?
I lied. I said he did.
She said she would need references. I got references from one of my old teachers and from my Uncle Ray, because of the summer job in the chocolate factory.
So Mrs Tapper saved me. And I did the right thing, going to work for the Tappers: but that doesn’t mean I was happy there. At that point I had given up on happiness. I used to think back sometimes on the plans that Valentine and I had made – living together in Paris on French bread and coffee and writing – and I didn’t feel nostalgic or regretful, I only felt contempt for my deluded previous self. What a fake he was! I thought. And what a fake I was! I knew now how things really were. And I was better off at Dean’s House than at Auntie Jean’s because I didn’t have to feel grateful or guilty, and my cousin Richard could have his room back. At least this was my own life now, not anybody else’s. At the end of each week Vivien Tapper gave me six five-pound notes in a buff envelope. She handed them over in a funny way with her face averted, not saying anything, as if it was vaguely shaming that this was what kept me installed in the centre of their lives; and yet she was tough when it came to her own money. I heard her on the telephone to her partner in the antiques business, quibbling over small sums, sticking to her guns.
Mr Tapper was handsome, younger than his wife, with rosy skin, tight-curling charcoal-black hair and gold-rimmed glasses; he was always joking, nothing he said was what he really meant. I saw him holding up a dessert spoon once at the dinner table, making satirical remarks to that. He taught mathematics and bowed his head from the neck without moving his shoulders as if he was wearing some kind of inhibiting corset; if he spoke to me it was in an awkward innuendo, commenting on my legs or teasing me about imaginary boyfriends. I don’t think he was flirting; he simply had no other register for communicating with girls. Mrs Tapper got him to fetch up from the cellar the highchair and cot and playpen they had used years ago for their own children. Hugo – pale and plump, acting the clown to make his friends laugh – was a pupil at the school, belonging half to the institution, half to his family. Juliet went to a nearby girls’ prep school; she was subdued and sceptical with a flat, freckled face. I never told the Tappers where I’d gone to school, they never asked; I suppose they presumed I was a failed product of one of the comprehensives. They never asked much about anything – to ask would have been prying. This suited me.