Clever Girl (20 page)

At first I didn’t try to make friends with the other students. I was shy as well as aloof. I took against the girls and boys with glossy hair and loudly assured voices who’d been to private school; I despised their pretence of slumming it for the three years of their degree. I sat pointedly alone in the high-ceilinged, white-painted classrooms; the faculty was housed in spacious red-brick Victorian houses along a tree-lined street. My hair was dyed orange or rusty black and screwed up in a studiedly careless knot, my eyes were thickly painted with black kohl; I retreated behind the mask of my difference. I didn’t have the money some of those girls spent on their clothes, but I didn’t want their kind of clothes anyway; I wore tight jeans and men’s shirts and suit waistcoats bought from the junk stalls in St Nicholas Market. When they found out that I was a mother too, that made a gulf between us; they didn’t know how to talk to me about the children so they didn’t talk to me at all. Meanwhile I was scathing, at least inwardly, when they didn’t bother to read the books in preparation for classes – what else did they have to do with their long hours of leisure? I had plenty to do (apart from home and the children, I was still working three mornings a week in the gallery, for the extra cash), but I was zealous – my ignorance ached in me and spurred me on, I made the time somehow to read everything.

All this was at first. As time passed I relaxed, and they got used to me; I made some friends among them. But I wasn’t there for the other students. I was there to find my way into another, higher order of meaning, behind the obvious one that lay around me every day. I worshipped my lecturers because they seemed to move at ease in this other world of light – when one of the younger ones made a pass at me in my second year I was startled and disappointed; I only wanted him to see my disembodied intelligence. I spent every hour I could, when the boys were at school, in the university library with its ordered monkish hush. The long desks were sectioned off into individual cells, each with its own light and leather inlay; arranging my books, I felt myself chosen, dedicated. If the weather outside the high windows was grey and indistinct, so much the better for my rich inward journey. Sometimes when I was looking into a page of text it seemed transparent, all its meaning and ironies and metaphorical thickness and musical arrangement showing themselves to me easily. What I wrote about the texts in my essays seemed almost obvious, it was just
there
– except that not everyone saw it. Excitedly, and with a new competitive zest, I took in that some of the critics who’d published books didn’t see it as clearly as I did. Nor did some of my lecturers.

When I lifted my head from my absorption – roused to a pitch of excitement, breathless and dizzy, because I’d been reading
Oedipus the King
or
Adonais
or Donne’s Holy Sonnets – I couldn’t believe that everything was going on unchanged around me in that quiet library, so muted and still that I could hear the pages turning and biros scribbling. In winter the daylight would even have drained away behind the windows without my noticing, and then I felt a niggling unease as if I’d missed something – although all I could have missed was my ordinary life with its prosaic clock-time, trundling from hour to hour.

There was upheaval during my second year because we had to move out of Fred’s flat. He and his wife Lizzie were trying to make a go of it again: he was moving back into the family home.

— Of course there won’t be any sex, Lizzie said to me. — But I mean, who cares? Who still wants boring old sex after they’ve been married to the same person for twenty years? I’d rather read a book in bed any day. Or just fall asleep, even better. (Fred had a French name for their arrangement, a
mariage blanc
,
making it sound sophisticated.)

Lizzie was one of those miniature women who go on looking like a child well into middle age: pretty, with brown eyes and russet colouring and an injured expression. She and I hadn’t always got on well, there had been some awful scenes in the past. The first time I moved in with Fred she thought I was his mistress and brought her disgruntled children round once in the middle of the night in their pyjamas, flaunting them to me like a tableau of wronged virtue. And later, when I moved back into the flat after Nicky died – even though she’d got the hang of Fred’s sexuality by that time, she was convinced I was after Fred’s money or his property. She insisted he make a will listing all the antiques he’d inherited from his mother, and she couldn’t bear it that I didn’t pay him rent. If the children were allowed to visit Fred they came with supplies of her home-made wholemeal bread because she believed shop bread was poison, along with crisps and sweets. She didn’t want their minds contaminated by watching television or reading comics. When I talked about them to my friends, I called them the Holy Family. She nagged in her regretful sing-song voice, explaining how much better it was for the children to be outdoors, learning the names of plants and birds. Piers and Frances exchanged looks; they seemed to communicate in coded ironies. They were sullen and secretive even when they were small, ungainly beside their tiny mother; they looked more like Fred, with big, pale, definite faces.

As her children grew into teenagers, Lizzie underwent a kind of conversion – funnily enough, just around the same time Fred was converting to Catholicism – and started to talk very boldly and debunkingly about the facts of life. She took to drinking, too; not too much, but enough to unbind her and make her garrulous. Often she came to confide in me at Fred’s kitchen table. There were a couple of boyfriends, neither of whom came up to scratch. (One of them was a vicar; the other one, much nicer, she met when he came to fix her central heating boiler.) — I really didn’t want twelve red roses on my birthday, she complained. — Is that awful of me? I mean, he’s so
nice.
And when I’m in bed with him I can sort of
see me
,
coldly, in the middle of all the excitement, as if I was looking down from the ceiling. Like a pink shrimp thing on the seabed.

Lizzie asked Fred to go back when she discovered that Piers was smoking ‘pot’, as she called it. I reassured her that I’d smoked it, off and on, since I was fifteen. Her brown eyes fixed me in stern scrutiny. — Oh really, Stella? But you seem perfectly normal. When Piers took it he was a nightmare. His eyes were sort of rolled up in his head and he was hideously pleased with himself. Then afterwards puked up.

I asked her if she would mind if Fred went off with men every so often.

— Cripes, no. As long as they’re not actually doing it under my nose.

I thought Fred ought to go back: I told him so. He really was better at dealing with Piers than Lizzie was. And he was very attached to Lizzie; he had a fixed belief, in spite of everything, in the sanctity of marriage. Fred wanted a family, he liked family life and couldn’t bear coming home after work to an empty flat. Luke and Rowan and I had been his family for a long time but this had changed, the ease had gone out of it – which had something to do with Mac and more to do with my new-found purpose in life, my academic work. It wasn’t Fred’s fault – he was delighted that I was studying, he had encouraged me more than anyone. It was my fault. He wanted to talk to me about the books on my courses and read my essays and advise me – and just because we had been intimate and he knew me so well I couldn’t bear the idea of his charging around familiarly among the things that were new and raw and fragile in my mind. I think I found it discouraging too that Fred was always so irreducibly himself – not transfigured by reading and thought as I was expecting to be transfigured. All this was ungenerous of me; and it did produce a mild sort of estrangement between us. After we parted and left the flat behind, I felt remote from him for a while. (In his fifties Fred got ill with cancer and we grew very close again through the years he lived with that. I grew close to Lizzie then as well.)

Fred gave up the flat and I moved with the boys to live with Daphne and Jude. Jude had made a lot of money selling her embroidered pictures (prices way out of reach of Nigel’s gallery, and the embroideries too unsettling anyway for his kind of clients); with the proceeds she bought a tall handsome Georgian house in a state of dis-repair, hanging on to the side of a hill overlooking the docks and the steep wooded cliffs running down to the river. A skinny staircase, with a polished wood handrail and gaps where the banister rods were missing, wound up through four floors. On each draughty landing a long arched window was vivid with changeable sky and vertiginous cityscapes. Jude said we could live in the attic for nothing because we would stop it getting damp, but I insisted on paying a small rent. I wanted to do things properly this time. There was only one bathroom in the house but we had a toilet to ourselves on the top floor, and one of our four rooms was a quirky kitchen with gas rings and white-painted shelves for plates and mugs and a big Belfast sink and a rope fire escape with a sling (the house had at one point been a residence for girl students). There were gas fires in each room to keep us warm. We didn’t have much furniture but I was so happy to be up in the light, I felt myself weightless and free, sitting alone among the birds flying round outside the windows, losing myself in the airy delirium of my reading. It reminded me of the attic where I lay dreaming once with Valentine.

I did very well at university. I got first-class marks for my essays and in exams almost from the beginning. My imagination grew bolder every day, I was buoyed up by praise and success and the sensation of my own newly unfolding power: sometimes I was drunk and ecstatic with the delight of it. I had no doubt that I had found a new direction for my life. At the end of my three years I would get a first-class degree (and indeed I did). Then I would apply for funding for research and I would work on a PhD. I didn’t look beyond that, not having much idea how an academic career was likely to proceed; but I suppose I vaguely imagined publication, an academic post. I carried my future around like a talisman inside me, warming me with its promise. We had had compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the first year and because I loved the words I learned the Lord’s Prayer off by heart, saying bits of it over to myself in the most unlikely places, cleaning the toilet or shopping in the supermarket. ‘Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, Si þin nama gehalgod . . . Forgyf us ure gyltas . . .’ The boys would nudge me. — You’re muttering that thing, they said. — It’s embarrassing.

My lecturers were kind, encouraging my ambitions. I think I was exotic for them; they cherished me just because I wasn’t the usual kind of student who went on to graduate studies. I was a single parent, I’d worked for a living, I pinned political badges – Greenham Common, Solidarnos´c´, anti-apartheid – to the military jacket with brass buttons which I’d found in a memorabilia shop. I’m embarrassed now, remembering the badges. Not because I didn’t believe in all those things, but because the truth was that at that time I was absorbed in my inner life: novels and drama and poetry, the past. I went to a few demonstrations with Daphne and Jude, that’s all – and a day trip once to Greenham. In my third year I came across the French feminist critics, and then the American ones, and I suppose that counts as a kind of politics, though I was bored by Kristeva.

For those three years at university, I felt a steely satisfaction in my singleness, as though I was sealed up and made self-sufficient by my work. My mother was very doubtful about my taking up my studies so late in the day – what was the point? But she hoped that at university at least I might meet someone responsible and hard-working (naturally, she knew nothing about Mac). I explained to her that they were all ten years younger than I was, and that I was the responsible and hard-working one. And it was true, I was hard-working. I was often exhausted, I wasn’t ecstatic all the time. I kept myself awake late into the night with caffeine tablets, to write my essays. My friends all helped generously. Fred didn’t want to lose touch with Luke and Rowan; they were often at his place. Daphne had a job as a social worker with youth offenders, she was good with kids and took the boys out at weekends; Jude let them loose in her studio, where she was sewing the life-size dolls that were her new project (Luke told me afterwards that he dreamed about those dolls for years). On fine summer evenings the boys went to play football after supper, in a scruffy park ten minutes’ walk away. I would wash the dishes then sit reading or writing at my desk beside the open window. When they came home at dusk with a gang of their friends, I could hear them before they turned the corner into our street – their voices echoing off the tall house fronts, Luke bouncing the football ahead of him along the pavement. Amazed at being out when it was almost dark, keyed up with the glamour of their headlong game, they lingered outside, calling poignant goodbyes to one another. Sometimes their voices were portentous with drama, some quarrel or injury. I didn’t worry while they were away, but as soon as I knew they were safely home I felt myself completed. They weighed down my life on the side of blood and warmth, where otherwise it might have floated too free.

It’s important to get what happened next in the right order.

First, I changed my mind about carrying on my academic work. That was all quite fixed and settled before any of the changes in my private life. There wasn’t any violent moment of disillusionment but imperceptibly, over the months leading up to my finals, two things – which had seemed for a while to be one thing – separated out in my imagination. On the one hand there was the great world of literature and thought, and on the other the smaller world of the university and academic life. I began to be bored with the sound of my own tinny authority in essays. I didn’t like the idea of choosing a narrow specialism – I wanted to read everything. I was grateful to the university, it had made all the difference to me and been the gateway into my new intellectual life; but now I chafed inside its frame. Sometimes when I looked up from my books I was overwhelmed by the real moment in the air around me, its nothingness richly pregnant. My studies were still a path into mysteries; but I saw that the path could take you underground, if you weren’t vigilant. It could lead into substitute satisfactions, ersatz and second hand.