Clever Girl (11 page)

Their family quarters were the tall cold rooms on the ground floor of Dean’s, a solid Edwardian house across the road from the main school buildings and the chapel and playing fields and statue of Field Marshal Haig. Upstairs in the same house were dorms for the younger boys. Rich parents in those days paid for their sons to sleep in long rooms with bare floorboards, on narrow iron bedsteads made up with the same kind of coarse blankets I’d slept under once at my nana’s. I didn’t have to tidy the boys’ beds, they tidied their own.

I was a good worker. Mrs Tapper said so. There is a bleak kind of satisfaction to be had from working till your hands are sore, till your calves and shoulders ache and you’re heavy with exhaustion. In the mornings when I tied on my apron I felt as if I was girding myself in armour. I was consumed in the discipline of housework and I thought of my mother often – not affectionately; more in a spirit of emulation. I thought of how she cracked the sheets in the air when she was folding them off the line, how she wielded her brush with the dustpan into every recalcitrant corner, how she scrubbed the kitchen lino on her knees and bleached the cloths and shook out the dusters and washed all her delicates by hand, rinsing in three changes of clean water. Of course I couldn’t be good at everything all at once. I wasn’t much of a cook – I could make cake all right (jam sponge, chocolate sponge, coffee and walnut sponge) but at first I didn’t know how to cook chops or make a stew. It was awful when Juliet pushed what I’d dished up to the side of her plate. (Hugo ate school meals with the other boys.)

And I made stupid mistakes. For instance, I used a vacuum cleaner when the back of the plug was broken, with all the contacts exposed, and then after I’d finished vacuuming I left it plugged in at the wall where anyone could have electrocuted themselves by poking a finger in – Juliet or Hugo or any of the boys. Or even Lukie, maybe, if he’d rolled over and reached out. Mrs Tapper gave me a little lecture when she found the broken plug in its socket, smiling, her pale plucked eyebrows raised incredulously. I squirmed in shame though I didn’t let her see it, my face was stony. I apologised. I could have killed someone. It would never happen again. Another time, I put a pale wash on in the machine, not noticing Mr Tapper’s black sock left inside the drum; all Vivien’s white blouses and underwear turned grey and she was furious. But mostly she was too grateful to be a hard taskmaster, exiting out of the front door every morning, snatching her bag and car keys in a show of hurry, sometimes hanging on to her breakfast triangle of toast between her teeth while she pulled on her coat.

At least I had my own room in Dean’s to retreat to, with its own lock and key. It was on the first floor, with windows all along two sides and lozenges of green and yellow glass set in around the clear panes; very light, but very cold in winter. I think in the past this room must have been used for laundering the boys’ clothes, because there were two huge enamel Belfast sinks in there – one of which I used for bathing Lukie in the evenings – and racks for drying washing, hoisted by ropes and a pulley up to the ceiling. I kept the place neat and clean. Mum gave me a bedspread Nana had knitted of coloured squares of wool sewn together, and an oil-filled electric heater. Our room was at the opposite end of the house to the kitchen, so that when I put Lukie to sleep in his cot in the day I couldn’t hear him if he cried; but the boys listened out for him, and he slept reliably for three hours in the morning, when I got most of the heavy work done, and all evening. It was only in the middle of the night that Lukie was inconsolable. In the evenings I watched television with Juliet or read to her before she went to sleep. In all the time that we were at Dean’s House, the only books I ever read – apart from recipe books – were the ones I read to her (P. L. Travers, Noel Streatfeild). I had once thought I couldn’t get through a day without reading. Well, now I had woken up out of that dream.

I did a funny thing one morning while I was tidying: I looked up my real father’s name in the telephone directory. I’d never done it before – because my parents had married in London and I was born there, I’d assumed he stayed on after they separated. But if my mother had moved back to Bristol then why not my father too? Anyway, I found someone who had his name, living in Bedminster. The someone was a driving instructor.

Mrs Tapper paid me extra to cook and wash up for her dinner parties. I was getting better at cooking, using the recipes I found in her cordon bleu books. I served at the table and took away the plates; Mrs Tapper carried in the food as if she’d made it herself. At these parties she tried to mix up the school staff with her own friends. The antiques women were very made-up and assured, with tanned, heavy-breasted cleavage, helping themselves to refills from the gin bottle; the men smoked between courses and put out their cigarettes in the remains of the food. Her friends weren’t ever hungry, while the teachers wolfed everything down. You could see the schoolteacher lot despising the antiques lot but also frightened of them, pretending to find them amusing, exchanging looks. Sometimes a political argument would flare up, because Vivien’s friends were all pretty rabid Tories; sometimes the teachers’ wives conspired with the outsiders against their husbands.

They gave a party to welcome a new English teacher to the staff. He was small and portly, vaguely familiar as if I’d seen him around, with longish hair and dandruff on the shoulders of his shiny jacket. I’d made chicken-liver pâté, pork cooked with prunes and Vouvray, and profiteroles (which didn’t swell up enough). The kitchen had been piled high with dirty dishes; it was difficult managing all that cooking alongside looking after Lukie. Now Lukie was in his cot, and by the time the guests were at the coffee stage I had broken the back of the washing-up. I sat resting in the quiet of the kitchen, listening to the tick as the minute hand on the wall-clock pushed round, aware of the rise and fall of voices in the dining room, shut away from me behind two closed doors. A row of soaking tea towels hung along the radiator like trophies, the room was limp from the assault of mess and heat. I was still tied into my dirty apron. It didn’t occur to me to mind that Mrs Tapper didn’t invite me to sit with her guests. I was burning up with scorn for all of them – and I dreaded them too, because their lives were achieved and full beside my thwarted unfinished one. My embrace of my solitude (my solitude with Lukie) was fierce during all that period. I didn’t want to see any of my old friends – though Madeleine did call round when she was home from university. She thought Lukie was adorable and she tried very hard to be kind to me; I asked flat, dutiful questions about her course, not commenting on her answers. I wouldn’t tell her what my life was like when she asked me. — I’m all right, I said. — No, I’m not lonely.

Sometimes I was all right.

I was drinking my own black coffee out of one of Mrs Tapper’s set of weightless tiny porcelain cups, blue and gold, with a slug of brandy added from the bottle kept for cooking. The wood of the kitchen table where I sat was three inches thick, bleached and scrubbed into soft hollows (I bleached and scrubbed it), the grain of the wood sticking up in ridges. Mrs Tapper had told me that the table was as old as the house. It was handed down to each housemaster’s wife, as it was too big to ever move out of the kitchen; the only way you could get it out was to saw it up. (She sounded as if she would quite like to do that.) There were huge built-in wooden dressers too, with sliding doors, all along one wall. I heard one of the guests come out from the dining room and cross the hall. Thinking they might be looking for the toilet, I braced myself for the intrusion, scowling, willing whoever it was not to try to make conversation with me out of condescension, or because they were bored with the scene next door. It was the new English teacher who looked around the door, balancing his coffee cup. He was plump and mournful; he might have been Italian with his hooded, prominent eyes.

— I know you, he said, closing the kitchen door behind him.

Occasionally a man at those parties (once an antiques man, once a games teacher) had come to try to pick me up in the kitchen; this might be a chat-up line. I fended him off, saying that I didn’t think so.

— You’re Valentine’s girlfriend. We did meet once.

Oh. I recognised him then: Valentine’s teacher, Mr Harper.

I knew his first name was Fred: that was what Val had always called him. But I couldn’t think of him as Fred now, in Dean’s House; even though, out of frustrated love for Val, he had thrown that milk bottle through our window. He sat down with his coffee at my table. — I’m thinking I’ve made a mistake leaving the Grammar School, he went on conversationally. — My marriage has broken up, naturally enough, and everything’s rather in ruins, and I thought it might help if I changed jobs. But this evening hasn’t been fun. What ghastly types. Do you work for them, in this pantomime kitchen? Do you hear from Val in the US – how he’s getting on? I never do. What a shock, when I caught sight of you carrying in the mashed potato. What are you doing with your young life, since Valentine left?

What was I going to tell him?

I remember sitting there frozen because this man from my past had found me out in the place where I was secret – and behind my silence there was building up a great clamour of complaint and rage which might come bursting out at him if I didn’t keep watch over it scrupulously. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t speak a word, I would glare at him and wait until he gave up and took himself away. I didn’t want Fred Harper, of all people, knowing one single thing about me. Just then the kitchen door opened and Mrs Tapper poked her head in; reluctantly, as if she preferred keeping her body out in the hall passage. Her voice was frigid, finding her guest and her servant shut up together. She told me that the baby was crying. She said she wished I’d remember to listen out for it; one of the boys had had to come down from the dorm because it was keeping them awake. She hoped none of them would go running to their parents with this story.

— It turns out Stella and I knew each other, in another existence, Fred explained.

Vivien didn’t like that, she pretended she wasn’t interested. She enticed him in her bored, bright hostess tone. — Come back and tell us more about Oxford. Dougie says he wants to take his class to see a play actually performed in Latin. What do you think – wouldn’t that be too awful to inflict on the poor boys? I’d rather die, wouldn’t you?

I hurried to fill the kettle for warming a bottle of formula, apologising that it was earlier than Lukie’s usual waking time. In Vivien’s assessing glance around the room, I saw her take in that I was using one of her precious old coffee cups. That had never been forbidden – after all, she trusted me to wash them up. Nonetheless, her powdery pale forehead creased in a quick frown, as if she was used to bearing up every day under other people’s carelessness. Or perhaps she could smell the brandy. I could hear Lukie’s wailing then, a desperate thread drawn thin across the cold distances of the house.

— Whose baby? Fred Harper asked, smiling from one of us to the other.

Working it all out.

The next week I had my first driving lesson. I had saved up to pay for these out of my wages – I didn’t have much else to spend money on, apart from the formula and nappy cream and so on for Lukie. (My mother sent him clothes, in brown paper parcels addressed in her crisp round writing: ‘Dean’s House’ fenced off inside a suspicious bristle of inverted commas. She never came there, though I did invite her.) It was my afternoon off; Auntie Jean was looking after Lukie. I hadn’t told anyone what I was doing. In my head I was perfectly calm about meeting this man who might turn out to be my father – but just before he turned up, while I was waiting round the corner from Jean’s house, I began to shake. All the time I was thinking coolly that I didn’t care if it was him or not, or what he was like. (Luckily the surname on my provisional licence was my stepfather’s.) When the car drew up and the instructor leaned over, calling to me, pushing open the passenger door, I could hardly cross the pavement to get in beside him. Of course he just put it down to nerves about the lesson.

I was better as soon as I was sitting in the car. Driving with deft, deliberate movements, demonstrating his technique, he explained that he was taking me to an industrial estate where we could practise basic manoeuvres safely. I kept my eyes on his hands, which could have been like mine – small, for a man, with rather shapeless fingers, freckles on the back. He introduced himself as Al; I knew my father’s name was Albert, but on the rare occasions she mentioned him my mother had always called him Bert. It was a good thing for me that he had to look out at the road ahead; every so often while he talked he turned to smile at me, to put me at ease. I’d been expecting him to be stolidly respectable, like my stepfather. But this man was skinny and rakish and teasing, with a thin, lined face and curving, dramatic nose, long hair curling on the collar of his striped shirt. He was the right age; but I couldn’t imagine my mother choosing him. We went to an industrial estate and he taught me all the elementary stuff, checking the mirrors and ignition and putting the car into gear; I hardly had time then to study him for clues because I had to concentrate on remembering the sequence of moves, releasing the clutch so that the car slid smoothly forward instead of kangaroo-jumping, steering slowly round a corner. I forgot what I had come for, lost myself in the driving. Before I could make up my mind about anything, my time was up.

Al offered me a cigarette before he drove me back. I didn’t often smoke but I took one: I thought maybe this was a sign, the way our two hands matched when he reached his lighter over for me and held the flame steady. I wondered what he made of me. I hardly cared in those days what I looked like: I always wore the same jeans or cord skirt, with a black jumper and no make-up, my hair pulled back. He might be disappointed – he would have looked forward to teaching a young girl, thinking she’d be flirty or sexy. We were parked at the back of a builder’s merchant’s; pavings and ceramic drainpipes were stacked behind high wire fencing overgrown with ivy.