Clever Girl (5 page)

Karen began to open up to me, complaining about Jilly and Budge. Jilly had been supposed to help with the mucking out but there was still no sign of her. — Sleeping it off, Karen said contemptuously. We went together to fetch the ponies up to the paddock, ready for the morning’s classes to begin; as we strolled she ripped off bits of wild clematis and sticky burs, lashing with them at the hedge in her indignation, rousing flurries of dust and papery moths. The air was warm and stuffy. The field was at the back of a new housing development; I had some inkling even then that this was not the real, deep countryside but something scruffy and indeterminate, washed up like a residue around the edge of the city.

I didn’t mistake Karen’s confidences for friendship – she would have unburdened herself to whoever was there. She was also the sort of talker who didn’t bother to fill you in on the background to what she was discussing, so that in order to follow I had to make great leaps of comprehension through a dense web of detail: dates and times, things done and words spoken, disputed interpretations of what had been promised. Her grudges were obscure and passionate. Budge she seemed to tolerate (‘He knows what’s going on and doesn’t like it’), but Jilly was ‘two-faced’ and ‘could be a right cow’. She dramatised their conversations, ventriloquising Jilly’s words in an exaggeratedly posh accent. ‘I’m not very happy with your attitude, Karen.’ In these duologues Karen had all the clinching and flattening ripostes, Jilly was lost for words. I gathered that Jilly was leaving more and more of the work at the stables up to Karen, paying her sometimes, but not on any agreed or regular basis. Sometimes she didn’t even turn up for the classes and Karen had to take them. I had imagined the world of the stables as a happy cohesion. Karen’s revelations were wrenching for me, but they also seemed an inevitable part of the initiations of this morning; I braced myself and grew into them.

— They’ve got me in a cleft stick, Karen said. — Because I love the horses, I won’t leave them.

When we opened the gate to the field the ponies lifted their heads from where they were cropping grass; I felt a pang at our intrusion but I knew better than to say so. Karen would think that was soppy. You wouldn’t have known that horses were her life unless you watched her carefully. She wasn’t tentative or tender as I was and she spoke about them as if they were comical, exasperating, a trial to be got through. But in the field they tolerated her approach when she came coaxingly towards them at an angle, holding the bridle out of sight behind her, making encouraging chirruping noises; whereas they wouldn’t let me get anywhere near them. She told me to ride Dozey up to the paddock; she would ride Chutney, leading Star, and we would go back for the others.

We mounted at the stile. I had never ridden without a saddle before, but as with the coffee I didn’t say anything. Dozey was the smallest of the ponies, only about ten hands. I pivoted awkwardly over the slippery broad barrel of her back, swinging my leg across, copying Karen’s movements; struggling not to slither immediately down the other side, I was hot in the face, knowing her assessing eye was on me. Because of her closed, blinkered perspective it was easy to think that she wasn’t noticing you, but in fact nothing escaped her.

— Grip harder with your knees, she advised offhandedly as if my incompetence were only a thing of the passing moment. — Sit up straight. Relax. You can do it.

Tears stung in my eyes, wrung out by the great kindness of her condescension. (When Karen taught the beginners’ classes she was merciless.) And I relaxed, I found my equilibrium. I felt the pony’s muscle and sinew moving under mine, I breathed her smell as if we were one hot flesh.

So it was that I came riding into the yard at the very moment my mother made her appearance at the stables (she probably didn’t even notice I was bareback). I think that I must have first turned up there at about nine – she arrived just before eleven, when morning lessons started. I saw her climb out of the passenger seat of a maroon-coloured car parked beyond the yard gate; she was wearing her heels, unsuitable in the mud, and her coat was hanging open with the silk scarf loose inside around her neck. She made an impression subtly different to the usual one, when she had toiled up with me on two buses: today she looked womanly, commanding and perfumed. At the same moment Jilly appeared out of the pavilion in wrinkled slacks and polo neck, sour-faced, dishevelled, hair scrunched in an elastic band, cigarette dangling off her lip. She raised an eyebrow in mild surprise at the sight of me on Dozey (her eyebrows were plucked to nothingness and had to be drawn back in brown pencil), but didn’t comment.

— Take the ponies through into the paddock, Karen, she drawled around her cigarette, as if she’d been in charge of the whole operation from the beginning.

I half expected Karen to break out angrily with her grievances, but she only clicked her tongue at Chutney and rode on, her face surly and suffering like a boy’s. Jilly unplugged the cigarette in a way she had, with a light popping noise, extending her free hand to my mother and putting on the caramel baritone charm she kept for parents. She obviously couldn’t remember my mother’s name. (I expect she thought Mum was a prole and a bore, beneath consideration. But she needed her money. And Mum would have been thinking that Jilly looked ‘a fright’.) Mum spoke politely in her most stand-offish, stilted public manner. Of course she didn’t make a scene about my being there, she never would. She saved the scene for later, in private.

— Come on, Stella, she said briskly, as if her collecting me had been planned all along. Awkwardly I slithered down from Dozey, landing somehow on my bottom on the cobbles. — Look at the state of you. I’m going to have to find something for you to sit on.

And we made our way to the maroon-coloured car.

Where in the driving seat a man was waiting.

Mum had called round at Nana’s at about half nine and no one had answered the door. Nana was inside (Mum had a key) but she had suffered a stroke. ‘A slight stroke,’ Mum said decisively, tidying it away. Uncle Frank had taken Nana to hospital. (So that was why I hadn’t heard Nana when I woke up. Unless – this troubled me for a while – she’d had the stroke because she found me missing. Nana recovered but she was never her old indefatigably busy self, she meandered into troughs of bewildered absence. She died when I was fourteen.)

Mum had guessed immediately where I might have gone. We never once spoke of the possibility that I had come home first and been inside the flat where she was sleeping, not alone. She never asked about the money I had taken, although she must have noticed it was missing, in that time when she had to count every penny. (I hid what was left of it at the bottom of my treasure box, spending it gradually on sweets.) Not long afterwards, when I was reading one evening on my bed, she came in and opened her hand, showing me the coral button and diamanté buckle.

— Are these yours?

I had forgotten about them. There had been too many other things to think about.

— Yes, I said. — I found them on my way home. On the bomb site.

— Pretty, she said. And gave them to me.

That was all.

3

M
Y STEPFATHER WASN’T A BIG MAN,
not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety black brows, a sensual mouth and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I ever touched it, though sometimes out of curiosity I wanted to). His face was one of those where the features seem compacted as if under pressure inside a frame. He was energetic, intelligent, diligent, faithful – a stroke of luck for my mother, a lightning bolt of luck, illuminating her grinding, narrow future and transforming it. They’d met at work, at the Board Mill where the packets for Wills cigarettes were made; he was the manager of cost accounting. It was a real love match, much more than she could have hoped for, past her first youth and with a half-grown daughter tagged on as part of the package.

If I knew him now as he was then, what would I think of him? I can imagine watching him, restless in a group of his friends, jumping up to buy them drinks, fetching extra chairs: he is a charming man, they like him. He is eagerly indignant, as they are, over money, hierarchy, immigration, discipline. He doesn’t like the dirty jokes but only shakes his head, disapproving, smiling. No doubt one or two of his older colleagues are in the Masons, which he views with wary amusement until he’s invited to join himself, a few years later. All the time, it’s as if he’s preoccupied with some inward effort which he thinks no one else sees – an effort of decency, of fitting in. There is a little flame burning in him, in spite of himself, lighting up his expression and his movements. His judgement – not of abstractions like immigration and taxes, but knowing how to hold himself, when to be still – is unexpectedly delicate and true. I can see it now, from this distance.

We moved from Kingsdown into Stoke Bishop: respectable, sleepy, leafy. Our house was in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove, carved out by a developer where there had once been a little wood among the rows of houses from the 1930s. Mum had promised me a bedroom of my own and I was looking forward to something pretty and pink. I had thought that perhaps this good luck of possessions was what you could get in exchange for the other changes you didn’t want. I calculated that I might get a horse, too, and jodhpurs and a hard hat of my own – I had only ever rented my hat from the stables. (I did get the jodhpurs and the hat, eventually.)

But when we drew up outside the new house in Gerry’s car, minutes before the removal van arrived, it wasn’t what I had bargained for. The house was so new it was raw. There were still labels stuck across the glass in the windows, so that it seemed to stare with lifeless eyes at a ruined landscape of red clay. The paving and the wood of the fence palings were stained red and filthy. Although there were people already living in the finished houses to one side up the Grove, in the other direction there were only half-built shells in the mud; monstrous machines snoozed among piles of breeze blocks and timber, bags of cement. We sat on in the car for a few moments after the engine died, and I thought Mum and Gerry must be thinking what I was thinking: that it was too bleak and ugly to bear, that we would have to give up and go home.

But they weren’t.

Mum must have been drinking in the newness in deep draughts.

How could she not want to get away from Mrs Walsh and Clive, and the old woman in the Victorian dress, and the broken windows? (And Nana, and her childhood past, and her failed marriage?) She tied her hair in a scarf and Gerry rolled up his sleeves; unpacking, directing the removal men, they made a team. Mum boiled water and unpacked a bucket and a tub of Vim, then she began washing out the red mud. Gerry helped carry things in and made sure every item went into the room it was labelled for. Though he wasn’t big, he was strong, and he always got on well with men who worked for him. Mum and I hadn’t brought much with us from the flat, most of the furniture in the van was Gerry’s. (He had been married before – until his first wife ‘ran off’, I found out later – so I suppose that these were things he’d bought with her.) — It’ll do for the time being, my mother said about this furniture warningly, as if she had plans. Her plans were a flirtation between them, abrasive and teasing – her female conspiracy (shopping) against his male suspicion and resignation.

— Don’t get under our feet, she said to me. — Why don’t you go out and play?

— Couldn’t you find her something useful to do? said Gerry.

— You don’t know Stella.

This was the first time I’d heard that I wasn’t useful. She’d never asked me to be useful, had she? Anyway I was glad, I didn’t want to help. My new bedroom was an empty cell smelling coldly of cement, not adapted to my shape or anyone’s. I wanted my old window back, surveying the familiar intricate wilderness – gardens overgrown with brambles, tottering garages, the tracery of fire escapes on the backs of houses, an old Wolseley up on bricks. Our new garden, which my new window overlooked in blind indifference, was only a rectangle of red clay, marked off with fence posts and wire from the clay rectangles belonging to the other houses.

I wandered out into it, taking my doll. (— Aren’t you too old for dolls? Gerry had asked already.) At the far end of our rectangle were the stumps of two huge trees cut down to make way for the new development. I gravitated towards these stumps as the only feature breaking up the new-made symmetry. Under my sandals the ridges and troughs of hardened clay were unforgiving. From the base of the tree stump little feelers of new growth were pushing up in doomed hope, waving their flags of leaves; sticky resin oozed from crevices on the cut surface. Even the sky out here – thinly clouded and tinged with lemon where the sun strained to break through – seemed blanched and excessively empty. Once, I supposed, its emptiness would have been full of tree. Carefully I sat on the stump, not wanting to get resin on my shorts; I put my doll beside me. Because she was jointed at the pelvis but not at the knee, she had to have her legs stretched out in front of her in a wide V. She was wearing a blue and white ski suit I had knitted, with Nana’s help. (Even when things went dark after her stroke, Nana knitted expertly as ever, and still won at cards.)

A girl came out from the back of the house next door, picking her way easily across the red clay. For a while she and I were intensely mutually aware without seeming to notice each other, behind the convenient fiction of the fence wire. When we outgrew that pretence she stepped across it and approached my stump.

— Hello, she said. — Have you moved in next door?

— It’s you who’s next door to us, I said logically. — Counting from here.

She didn’t notice that I’d corrected her perspective.

— Oh good. We can be friends. I hoped there’d be a girl.

Her threshold for friendship wasn’t exacting, then. I didn’t have high hopes of her: she seemed unsubtle and I was a wary, reluctant friend. At least because she was eager, it was easy for me to withhold my approval. She was pretty: breathy and bouncing, with round eyes like a puppy’s, a mass of fuzzy, fair hair, and a tummy that strained against her tight stretch-nylon dress. I liked her name, which was Madeleine. She picked up my doll and began to walk her in silly, jouncing steps around the stump, see-sawing her legs; I snatched her back. My belief in my dolls at that point was in a delicate balance. I knew that they were inert plastic and could be tumbled without consequences upside-down and half naked in the toy-box. At the same time, I seemed to feel the complex sensibility of each one as if it existed both in my mind and quite outside me. This doll – her name was Teenager – was stiffly humourless; my teddy bear on the other hand was capable of a tolerant irony. Teenager was outraged by Madeleine’s travesty of real play.

— I suppose these were the beeches, I said, to distract Madeleine’s attention.

She was blank. — What were what?

— These trees. The road is called Beech Grove. A beech is a kind of tree.

— What trees?

She was looking around as if she might have missed them. I explained that I meant the stump I was sitting on and the one next to it. I pointed out that there was a stump too at the end of her garden, and others all along behind the row of houses. — There must have been a little wood. A grove. That’s what a grove is.

My relationship to her began to take on an instructional form that was not unsatisfying. Madeleine looked down at the stump with dawning comprehension. — Oh, is that a tree? she said.

— What did you think it was?

— I didn’t think about it really. I s’pose I just thought they were part of the ground. Like rocks or something.

Her oblivion seemed so extreme that it might be disingenuous. This was Madeleine’s performance – eyes so wide open that she seemed to be finding her own obliviousness as amusing as you ever could. You never got to the bottom of what she actually knew, or didn’t know.

— They shouldn’t have chopped down a grove of beech trees, I said sternly, improvising. — It’s unlucky.

— Why?

— Because they were sacred. In the olden days, people worshipped them.

She thought about this. — What d’you mean, worshipped?

— Prayed to them. Believed that they were sacred – you know, like God.

— God?

Perhaps she’d never noticed who she was praying to at school. I stood up carefully, respectfully from the stump. — I hope the gods aren’t angry.

— Is it alive now? Madeleine asked warily.

— Kind of, in a way.

I showed her where the tree was feebly sprouting. — It’s still trying to grow.

— Ooh, I don’t like it, she squealed, backing off in a pantomime of shuddering.

She looked like the kind of girl who would join in when there was squealing over anything: blood, wasps, veins in school-dinner liver – although she wouldn’t quite mean it, would just be enjoying the noise and distraction. She was too robust to be properly squeamish.

— You’d better not say you don’t like them, I said. — They might hear.

A gleam of inspiration pierced her vagueness. Taking me by surprise, she dropped to her knees on the clay, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands together. — For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, she gabbled in the prescribed drone. — In the name of the ferrership of the spirit. (She meant fellowship.) Oh holy tree. Who art very nice; and we’re sorry that they’ve cut you down.

I knew that this was mostly for my benefit. Nonetheless, I glanced involuntarily upward. A few fat drops of rain fell without warning or follow-through, darkening spots on the dried clay.

— See? said Madeleine. — It doesn’t mind.

That evening my mother boiled eggs and warmed beans on a primus; our gas stove wasn’t connected yet. We buttered sliced bread straight from the bag and had the milk bottle on the table.

— Isn’t this an adventure? she said excitedly.

I was suspicious of something new in her face: not romance, exactly (she was never soft), but as if a force had filled her out, carrying her forward in exhilaration. She must have been just waiting to be married, I realised. I tried intently to imagine my father (missing, presumed dead) taking up the space that Gerry was filling now; but my picture of my father was too vague, Gerry was too assertive. He was sweaty, naturally, after the work he’d done; his hair was wet because he’d doused his head under the tap in the bathroom. His bodily presence intruded every way I turned, making the new house seem crowded when I ought to have felt its succession of spaces flowering ahead of me, after the two rooms that Mum and I had shared since I could remember. As twilight thickened outside, the house’s shell seemed too pervious, swelling with the electric light as if it were as insubstantial as the canvas tents at school camp.

Mum and Gerry discussed with deep interest the economics of using the immersion heater. After he’d dried each cup and plate he held it up to the light to inspect it. He complained that when I washed up I splashed water on the floor and used too much squeegee. Already I didn’t like living with him, and it had only been a matter of hours. I retreated to my cell-bedroom where at least now a bed was installed – though it wasn’t the old double bed that I’d slept in since I outgrew my cot. That bed had never been ours, apparently; it had belonged to the old flat. On this new narrow one was a pile of ironed candy-stripe sheets. With a martyred consciousness – where did they think I was? why didn’t they wonder? – I tucked them inexpertly over the mattress, then climbed between them in my knickers and vest. I heard my mother and Gerry talking downstairs. Though I couldn’t make out their words, I knew that they were deciding with wholehearted adult seriousness where to put each piece of furniture. The rumble of their dialogue was lulling, melancholy, remote. Then someone was running a bath; unfamiliar pipes groaned and eased too near at hand. There were no curtains at my window yet. In the dark I missed the view from my old room intensely, and I didn’t want to think about the non-trees I had conjured into being.

We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends over that summer – we had nothing else to do. During the holidays in the past, when Mum went to work I was left at Nana’s or at Auntie Jean’s. Now (Nana wasn’t capable any longer and Gerry didn’t like Jean) I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine had someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us; she sometimes took us swimming. I think she felt sorry for me, left all alone, but actually I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguins in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey: for a tubby girl she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to stop me beginning with chocolate and finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle, wiping its creamy moustache on to my sleeve; I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.