Clever Girl (3 page)

— I’m sorry, I don’t like scenes, she coolly said.

I’m sure that Uncle Derek was less interesting than his wife; he wasn’t interesting just because he had killed someone. As an adult I lived for a while in a house that had brick steps leading down into a narrow coal cellar like a passage to a dead end, where we kept the brooms and buckets and broken things we hadn’t got around to fixing. It used to flood with filthy water at certain times of year, and I imagine Uncle Derek’s inner life like that: cramped and musty-smelling, shut away from daylight, subject to the drag of tides of violence. The little despotism he installed inside the four walls of his home mattered only because it derived its authority from the whole towering, mahogany-coloured, tobacco-smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority in the world outside.

And mattered, of course, because of its consequences in other lives.

My mother reported that in court he said he ‘got the worst of a bad bargain’ in his wife. They did let him out of jail eventually, I believe, after he had served fifteen years of his sentence. He went to settle in some part of the country where he wasn’t known.

During the time Auntie Andy was staying with us, Mum left me alone in the flat with her on Saturdays while she went out shopping. Sometimes Andy played dolls with me. This was a new experience; the adults I knew didn’t play with children, unless it was something organised like cricket. But Andy didn’t put on a childish voice, and she entered into the reality of the different dolls’ characters and sensitivities with what seemed like an authentic interest, almost naive – I checked her face to make sure she wasn’t teasing me. We undressed and dressed them in their tiny clothes, flipping them over to do up the poppers, skewering plastic boots on to hard pointing feet. (After the trial was over Andy made a dress for my teenage doll with layered skirts in orange nylon trimmed with minute roses made of satin ribbon: unbelievably pretty, though it was a bit tight and wouldn’t do up down the back.)

Sometimes when she and I were alone in the flat, Auntie Andy went into the other room to lie down and I heard her crying, although Mum had told Jean that she never did. It didn’t occur to me to try to comfort her. I would pretend to carry on with my play, feeling miserably guilty. I was only a child, there was nothing I could offer, and I must have been a living reproach because I wasn’t Charlie: though Andy never made me feel this, by any word or sign.

Auntie Andy had to find a job, she had to get a divorce and a place to live by herself. She couldn’t go back to that house, obviously.

All of this worked out well for her.

I think she must have come to our flat in the first place, not only out of a revulsion against everything to do with her old life, but also because my mother’s solitary cheerful style – frilly aprons and nail polish and lemon-yellow guest towels – had signalled to her, even before the disaster, a vision of possibilities different to the ones she knew. And Mum was honoured by Auntie Andy’s choosing us; it seemed a consecration of Mum’s situation as a single woman, managing bravely by herself. (Though Andy’s staying was an inconvenience and a strain too; my mother acquitted herself with exemplary generosity, she really did.) And then, within a couple of years, they both found themselves a man, as if that had been the whole point of the enterprise.

Andy went to work on the factory floor of the chocolate manufacturers where Uncle Ray was in dispatch. She made a little face of apology when she told us about the job, as if she knew it was beneath her. But in fact she enjoyed the company of the women there, though she kept aloof from the roughest of their bantering and raucous kidding (I saw this because Ray got me a summer job at the factory when I was sixteen). She brought us paper bags of half-priced, imperfect chocolates whenever she visited: violet creams and Crunchies and Turkish delight, my favourite – I picked off flakes of the chocolate with my teeth and then ate the jelly. Even after she married, Andy went on working there.

— Carrying on for the moment, she said suggestively.

Her new husband, Phil, was lugubrious with faded good looks, stick-thin. Not long after their wedding Andy began hinting with proud smiles that she might be pregnant; she must have been forty-ish by then, she was a lot older than my mother. Some of this I picked up at the time from conversations between Mum and Auntie Jean: their twilight tones alerted me to the fact that they were talking about bodies. Apparently she suffered from real morning sickness, her stomach swelled, her breasts were sore. (They hardly ever used that word, ‘breasts’. It was reserved for medical matters, only uttered in lowered voices.) But in the end nothing came of it, it was a false alarm.

— Doesn’t it just break your heart? Jean said.

Andy never did have another baby, although that pattern of phantom pregnancy repeated itself over and over well into her fifties, by which time it had become a bit of a joke among the people who knew her, though not an unkind one. To Uncle Phil’s credit he never gave the least sign of scepticism about her symptoms; he was punctilious in his attentions, urging her to put her feet up, bringing the barley water with soda that she’d ‘suddenly taken a fancy to’. Andy talked about her ‘disappointments’ as if they were miscarriages, but Jean didn’t believe she ever really conceived in her second marriage. My mother said she didn’t know, it wasn’t any of her business. However painfully these disappointments were felt in private, nothing altered Andy’s queenly kindness and distance. And as far as I know, these phantoms were the only outward sign of continuing trauma from what had happened. I can’t help feeling, thinking about it now, that there was an element of histrionic performance in them, contrasting with Andy’s usual reserve. Exacting our sympathetic goodwill, under false pretences, she claimed some latitude, some indulgence: in return for the magnitude of what she had undergone, and what she had lost, which could never be restored.

2

I
WAS STAYING OVER AT MY
nana’s. I was ten. I woke miraculously early, which was unusual for me. The blankets at Nana’s were meagre, ex-army, in prickly grey wool with an oily smell. They would only stay tucked in if you kept unnaturally still, which I never could – in my sleep I had shifted and burrowed, the blankets had come untucked, and a little slit of freezing air was probing my warm body like a knife. Then I rolled over on to the inflexible hand of my plastic doll. Sometimes if I woke up I turned the bedding around and put the pillow at the foot, and to Nana’s dismay went back to sleep upside down – which was a revelation of a different room, another world order. But the doll’s hand that morning seemed to poke me with a message: ‘Arise!’ (I was reading a lot of books set in the past, which was grander and better.)

It was Saturday. It was spring – yellow squares of light transformed the unlined curtains at the window, their pattern of purple bars wound with a clinging vine. Usually by the time I came to consciousness Nana was already busy downstairs with her mouse-activity, sweeping and wiping and soaking, smoothing out brown paper bags and saving them, un-knotting scraps of string and winding them into balls. But today I couldn’t hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on to the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape – trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones – was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night. Cats were dotted around the vantage points like sentinels; glass windows black with dirt were a shed’s eye pits. Nana’s lilies of the valley set out on a forced march down the cracks between the pavings.

If I got dressed, I thought, I could walk out into this – what could stop me? Because no one had ever thought of it, I’d never been forbidden to go out before anyone else was up. My latchkeys were warm on their ribbon against my chest, under my vest – though I wasn’t supposed to sleep in them in case I strangled myself. I could go home by myself without telling Nana, and surprise my mother. Gleefully I imagined the reversal of our roles: Mum’s tousled head raised, blinking and sleepy and astonished, from the pillow at the end of her sofa pulled into its night-position; my own bright wakefulness, airy and full of implications from its journey through the outdoors. For once, I would have the advantage of her. Pulling on my knickers and socks and slacks, buttoning my check shirt, diving into the V-neck of the jumper Nana had knitted in rust-brown stocking stitch, I was light-headed with sensations of freedom and power. All the time I was listening out for mouse-noises from Nana. Now I had started, I couldn’t bear to be prevented. I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up – how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day.

People forget that in 1966 there were still bomb sites: it took a long time to stitch back together that fabric of our cities ripped open by the war – or rather, not to stitch it back at all, but to tear the fabric out and throw it away and put something different in its place. Every time I made my way home from Nana’s I walked across an open area where bombs had fallen: you could still make out different wallpapers on the high standing walls, distinguishing the squares of vanished rooms, washed by the rain to faint ghosts of their former patterns. Traces of staircases climbed in zigzag patterns; doors opened on to nothing. Whatever desolation there must once have been was softened and naturalised after two decades; overgrown with buddleia and fireweed, the sites were as consoling as gardens. We played out there and boys rode their bikes round on the grass in the evenings.

Our flat was on the first floor of a spindly Georgian terrace in Kingsdown, Bristol; because it was on a high bluff, from our back windows we surveyed the plain of Broadmead sprawling below, punctuated then by the spires of churches, ruined and otherwise, and only just beginning to be drowned under a tide of office blocks and shopping centres, a new world. These Georgian houses were five storeys tall if you counted the basements which were at garden level at the back; they were mostly raddled and neglected, broken up into flats and bedsits, showing up on their exterior – like intricate dirty embroidery – the layers of complex arrangements for living inside. There was broken glass in some of the windows; at others filthy torn lace curtains, or bedspreads hooked up to keep out the light. A frightening old woman next door wore a long black dress like a Victorian. Mrs Walsh – kindly but with a goitrous bulge on her neck I couldn’t bear to look at – lived in our basement with her elderly son (she used to say, ‘Can you believe it, he was my little boy?). Beneath that basement was a windowless cellar, its mineral cold air as dense as water, where stalactites grew down from the vaulted ceiling (I knew what they were because we’d been on a school trip to Wookey Hole caves). They used to say there were iron rings where they chained the slaves in some of the Bristol cellars – and secret tunnels leading to the docks. In Bristol stories there were always slaves and sugar and tobacco.

You should see our old road these days. I shouldn’t think those houses change hands for much less than a million. Everyone now covets the ‘original features’, the spindly height, the long walled gardens, the view. Those places sing with money and improvement. Nana’s little Victorian box around the corner, which we used to think was so much ‘better’, can’t compare. Sometimes I’m nostalgic now for that old intricate decay, as if it was a vanished subtler style, overlaid by the banality of making over and smartening up that came later. My mother never was nostalgic. She got out the minute she had the chance.

I pulled Nana’s front door shut behind me. From somewhere far off came the ruminative stop–start of the milkman’s electric float, but still I had the morning more or less to myself. I could hear the crêpe-soled creak of my sandals on the pavement and the jangled clang of the gate as it closed with finality after me, as if these sounds bounced off the silent houses opposite. I could almost see my surprising self, setting out about my own business in the streets, my windcheater zipped up and my hands in its pockets; I fancied I walked with a masculine casual bravado, brown hair chopped off in a clean line at shoulder length. I wasn’t interested at that point of my life in being girlish – what I admired were horses and the boyish girls who hung around horses.

Turning the corner at the end of Nana’s street, I started along the path across the bomb site. When I saw a man sitting facing away from me on one of the broken low walls, it was too late to go back, but my heart beat with shy anxiety: I hated the idea of any strange adult speaking to me, perhaps telling me off. Wearing a dark overcoat, the man was bent over with his head in his hands. The path ran close behind where he sat, and hurrying past I could make out the black cloth of his coat worn to gingery brown across the shoulders, freckled with scurf from his greasy hair. I thought it was strange that an adult man came out to sit alone on a pile of stones: I couldn’t imagine either of my uncles doing it. I didn’t know much about men but in my experience they were always purposefully on their way somewhere. Then I realised that the man was Mrs Walsh’s son Clive. I hadn’t recognised him because it was the first time I’d ever seen him beyond the end of our street. He lifted his head and peered over his shoulder at me: doleful long face, unshaven cheeks and chin, the beard-growth specked with silver. The inner rim of his lower eyelids was lined in sore, wet red.

— Come and look at this, he said.

Clive was strange. One of his boots was made up with a special thick sole because of his sloping, dragging walk; he had had meningitis when he was three and his twin sister had died of it. We had lived in the same house since I could remember, but he and I had an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge each other, except when our connection was mediated by our mothers. — Can you believe he had yellow curls once? Mrs Walsh would sigh. — Say hello to Stella, Clive.

— Say hello to Clive, my mother would order, shoving me sharply in the small of the back. She was full of ostentatious pity for the ‘poor thing’, but also thought it might be better for everyone if he was ‘put away’, whatever that meant. — It’s not much of a life, she said.

I’m not sure whether Clive really recognised me that morning; we never spoke about it afterwards. I might just have been any passing little girl.

— Look what I’ve found, he said.

Warily I stepped over the wall into the interior of the vanished house. Swallows were flitting and shrieking inside the space, they nested there. Against the wall where Clive was sitting, fallen into the cracks in the stones and rolled into the grass, was an improbable slew of buttons of all sorts – thousands of buttons, much more than a handful or even a tinful. I crouched down to them, wondering, not touching yet.

— Who do they belong to? How did they get here?

Clive said he had known the woman who once lived here and they must be hers. I’d played here often and I’d never seen the buttons before, but I began to believe him because he was so certain. Did he mean a woman who’d lived in this house before it was bombed? Some of these buttons were old: carved jet ones, brass ones with military insignia, cream cloth-covered ones for shirts. Others looked modern: coloured plastic ones, like the ones my Nana put on my cardigans, were still sewn on to the cards they’d been bought on. Some were fastened into sets – miniature mother-of-pearl buttons for baby clothes, pink glass drops – but most of them were loose, jumbled chaotically together: ordinary black and brown and white ones, a coral rose, wooden toggles, a diamanté buckle, big yellow bone squares, toggles made of bamboo.

Something about the sheer multiplicity of the buttons – the fact that you couldn’t get to the bottom of them – started an ache of desire in my chest. I thought that Clive was feeling the same thing. He breathed through his mouth noisily. His cheeks under their strong beard-growth were dramatic, hollow as if they’d been carved out with something clumsy like an axe; the raw mask of a man’s face was overlaid on his life which was more like the life of a child. Every afternoon Clive was allowed to wander out along our road. He always stopped at one particular lamp post, as if it was a limit his mother had set him; he would be standing there when the children came home from school, hunched over, smoking and watching us, wearing his overcoat in winter, a short grey mac in summer. We squealed and ran past him – even I did, pretending I didn’t know him. Every teatime Mrs Walsh came out to bring him back, pulling him coaxingly by the hand; a small, bent, fat old woman tugging at a tall, scowling, resisting man, showing her patient smile around to anyone who might see them.

— We could take them home for your mother, I suggested.

But I wanted the coral rose for myself, or the buckle. I put my hand out to pick them up; angrily Clive pushed it away, scuffing some of the buttons into the dirt with his normal boot.

— Don’t touch them. Leave them, he scolded.

Close up, I could smell his familiar smell, the same as in their flat: stale like damp feather cushions or mouldy bread, mixed with something perfumed he put on his hair (or his mother did). Reasonably, I pointed out that if anyone wanted them they shouldn’t have thrown them away but he didn’t listen, he was preoccupied, sorting through the buttons with clumsy yellow-stained fingers as if he was searching for one in particular. Clear snot glistened on the curves of his upper lip. I watched jealously, crouched on my haunches, balancing on the balls of my feet with my hands on my knees. Really, where could so many buttons have come from? Someone might have had a button shop and given it up: but then, why pour out the cornucopia here? I was frustrated that Clive was not a real adult who could offer answers – though often they only dismissed my questions. (— Oh Stella. Don’t be silly. Whatever for?) Clive held a big button up to the light: it was pearly white, so translucent it was almost green, carved with a leggy bird with a long beak, perhaps a heron. I had never thought with any interest about clothes before, but I had a heady vision in that instant of a black velvet cape, full-length, dragging behind me along the smooth floor of a place I’d never been. — Behold, I thought to myself, out of the books I was reading. — She cometh.

I couldn’t help reaching out to take the bird-button.

Clive smacked at my hand.

— They’re not yours, I said indignantly. — They’re anybody’s.

Then he pushed me hard on the knee so that I overbalanced and fell backwards. Standing up, he towered over me; it was a surprise to be reminded of how wholly he filled out his big man’s body. Because of the child’s life he led, traipsing everywhere after his mother, it was easy to discount his grown-up shape as if he’d only borrowed it, the way girls dressed up in their mothers’ shoes and lipstick. Now I saw that Clive’s size fitted as inevitably around him as mine did around me, and that he was at home in it. In fact, because he walked sloppily and mumbled to himself, he was more deeply burrowed away inside his body than other grown-ups were. Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world.

Sometimes when Clive stood under the lamp post and watched the children coming home from school you could see he was rubbing himself with his hand down in his trousers – not in any kind of sinful frenzy, more as if he was only half aware of doing it, comforting and reassuring himself. There was an old man who did something like this at the swimming baths too, sitting on the edge of the pool, staring at the girls squealing and splashing, rocking himself in a rolling movement back and forwards against the pool’s rim, taking his weight on his hands. If you caught the pool-man’s eye he was jeering and slippery whereas if Clive ever looked at you he was contemptuous, as if you had nothing for him. I knew it comforted men to touch themselves. I had seen Uncle Ray and Uncle Frank putting their hands down there, adjusting themselves inside their underwear, sniffing their fingers afterwards. My mother would make a little face of distaste at it, clicking her tongue. Auntie Jean would dig her elbow in Frank’s ribs, reminding him he was in company.