Clever Girl (8 page)

We were talking in his bedroom, so unlike my little pink cell: a draughty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkey carpet grey with cigarette ash. (When I asked if his mother never cleaned in there he said she didn’t clean anywhere, they had a woman in.) His attitude towards his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them, I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling big house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned: his father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, thinning white hair; his mother had a ruined face and watery huge eyes, she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings (unlike us, they actually ate in their dining room). The arrangement of their furniture – elegant, shabby, mixed with exotica from the East – seemed provisional; they had only just moved in, and might move on. They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as anything in my house – yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.

Val had older sisters and brothers who had left home but often came visiting, or taking refuge from some drama in their complicated lives: all good-looking and dauntingly confident, even if they seemed conventional beside Val. They called their parents Mummy and Daddy (Val didn’t call them anything, in my hearing). His sister Diana – next to him in age, excitable, with dark hair cut in a thick fringe and very white teeth – chatted to me about horses and somehow I knew not to give away too much detail about Budge’s ramshackle stables. When I asked if Diana had been to university, she laughed at me. — Darling, I can hardly read. I’ve never passed an exam in my life, I’m virtually an idiot.

When he was bantering with his sister, petulant, I got a glimpse for a moment of a different Valentine: less sublimely solitary, more a type – their type, mannered and competitive. Valentine was the baby of the family; conceived at an age when his parents ought to have known better, he said disgustedly. — I’m the painful reminder of lost virility.

— Don’t take any notice of him, Diana said. — He’s Mummy’s little pet.

He chucked a cushion at her head. — Di’s a dirty slut, he said. — She thinks through her yoni.

— My what? she giggled. — Yogi Bear?

— Ignoramus.

Apart from Diana, Val’s family never came up to his attic room (nor did the cleaner). Sometimes his mother shouted up the stairs, if a meal was ready or Val was wanted on the telephone. We were private up there. I loved the evening shadows in the complex angles of the sloping ceiling. In summer the heat under the roof was dense; in winter we cuddled up for warmth under the blankets on his bed. Our bodies fitted perfectly together – my knees curved into the backs of his, my breath in the nape of his neck, his fingers knotted into mine against his chest, under his shirt; we lay talking about everything, or listening to Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Dylan. The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open to everything. I couldn’t believe the long strides he’d made in his mind, all by himself. Sometimes, depending on the pills, he would talk and talk without stopping.

— How do you know that I really exist, outside you? he asked me urgently. — I might be a figment of your imagination.

Our heads were side by side then on his pillow. How lucky I was to lie like that, so intimate with his lovely looks that I couldn’t see them whole: teasing green eyes, down on his upper lip, curving high hollows in his cheeks. I longed for him to begin kissing me, as he sometimes did – but I had learned that I must not try to initiate this. — But I just know! I insisted, stroking his face as if the feeling in my fingers was proof. — And I’m not a figment of yours either. I’m really here, I promise.

— I believe in you. I’m not so sure about me. You’re solid. You’re fierce.

I wasn’t as solid as I had been. Since I met Val, I’d stopped bothering to eat. I couldn’t bear my mother’s gluey gravy any longer, I drank black (instant) coffee and gave up sugar; the weight had flown off me. Although I was small and Val was taller, we nonetheless came to look like a matching pair: skinny and striking. By this time we were on the fringes of a set who gathered at weekends in a sleazy bar behind a cinema in town. Val had a good instinct for the people worth getting to know – a man with freckled hands and a mane of red hair who sold him speed and other things; a clever art student, half-Greek, who played in a band (they sounded like art-punk before punk had really happened). These men were older and powerful and a lot of people were eager to be their friends, but Val was able to impress them. He was good company, with his quick wit and the cultural know-how he carried off gracefully.

I knew it mattered to Val that I looked right. I wore his shirts and his sleeveless vests and his Indian silk scarves, over the tight jeans he helped me to buy. I put kohl round my eyes, and so did he sometimes. We both dyed our hair the same dark liquorice colour (my mother was aghast, another scene – ‘whatever are they going to say at school?’). I paraded up and down the attic in different outfits for his approval, getting the effect just right – and yet when we went out we looked as if we didn’t care what anyone thought. Val’s idea of me was that I was single-minded, fiery, uncomplicated, without middle-class falsity (— But aren’t I middle-class? I asked, surprised). And I performed as his idea, became something like it.

We made plans to live abroad together – Paris or New York. He’d been to both these places, I hadn’t been anywhere except Torquay and Salcombe. He described walking around the streets in those cities, buying French bread and coffee, and how we’d earn money and rent an apartment. I believed he could really make these dreamed-of things come about in real life: he had the imagination, the bravado, there was a rare blend in him of earnestness and recklessness. And he seemed to know instinctively what to read, where to go, what music to listen to. He was easily bored, and indifferent to anything he didn’t like, as if it didn’t exist. Psychological novels were dreary, he said. The Beatles were consumer culture. I didn’t talk to him about the old-fashioned books I used to love before I met him.

— In New York I’ll work as a waitress, I said, — and you can write.

— Sometimes I think I could do something with my life, he said. — But sometimes in the middle of the night, something awful happens.

— What kind of awful?

— I feel as if I’ve already done it, this important thing – writing a book, or whatever it is. I feel as if it was a mountain to climb, and I’ve toiled up the mountain and achieved the thing and then I’m coming down the other side and it’s behind me, and it’s nothing, it doesn’t alter anything in the world by one feather’s weight. And then when I wake up I panic that because I’ve dreamed the end of the work like that, now I’ll never be able to begin.

More often Val’s mood was buoyant and exhilarated, he was impatient to get started. Everyone supposed he would take the Oxbridge entrance exam, go to university. For the moment he went along with them. — My English teacher at school, he said, — he’s invested a lot of hopes in me. He’s giving me special tuition. I don’t know how to tell him I’m leaving, not yet. Soon I will.

— Wherever you go, I said, — I’ll follow you.

It was often this English teacher who phoned him up.

We ran into him once – the English teacher, Mr Harper. Val and I were arm in arm, walking down Park Street on a Saturday in the crowds of people milling and looking in the shops – jeans boutiques, bookshops, places selling Indian and Chinese knick-knacks and silver jewellery. A stubby middle-aged man was staring in at a shop window; he veered away from it as we passed, almost walking right into us and then recognising Val, putting on a show of surprise which seemed contrived, as if he’d actually seen us coming from miles off and prepared for this scene. I thought at the time that he must be socially inept because he was such an intellectual. I knew what respect Val had for him, and that it was he who had put Val on to reading Pound and Beckett and Burroughs. But I could see that Val wished we hadn’t met him – he looked shocked by this collision of the two worlds of school and home.

— Hello Valentine, Mr Harper said. He was staring leeringly at me. — What a good way to spend your Saturdays. Aren’t you supposed to be revising?

— We’re on our way to the reference library, Val said sulkily, blushing.

— Oh – then, I mustn’t get in the way of virtue! God forbid. But I will see you Tuesday, after school?

— Is it Tuesday? Val was vague. — I’m not sure.

— You must come on Tuesday. We’re broaching the divine Marianne.

I was disappointed. Val had talked about Fred Harper (the boys doing Oxbridge Entrance called him Fred) as if he was a portal to higher things – and here he was chaffing and prodding about work like any other teacher. Also, he was rumpled and pear-shaped, with pleading eyes, and a bald patch in his hair which was dark and soft like cat fur. He had a drawling posh voice. I knew there was a Mrs Harper and also children; and that Mrs Harper got bored if her husband and Val talked for hours about poetry. Sometimes she went to bed, leaving them to it.

— Who’s the divine Marianne? I said jealously when we’d walked on.

Valentine shrugged, irritated. — A poet in the A-level anthology.

Mum and Gerry were afraid I was bringing contamination into their house. When I bought junk shop dresses Mum made me hang them outside in case of fleas. Val found an old homburg and wore it pulled down over his eyes.

— What does he think he looks like? Gerry said.

— What’s the matter with that boy? asked Mum. — What’s he hiding from?

He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, improbable – in his collarless shirt, suit waistcoat, broken canvas shoes, scrap of vermilion scarf at his neck – as an exotic bird blown off course: immobile, silent, quivering, a smile playing along his lips that was not for their benefit. Even in those days when he was fresh and boyish the drugs did leave some kind of mark on him – not damage exactly, and not unattractive, more like a patina that darkened his skin to old gold, refining its texture so that minute wrinkles came at the corner of his lids when he frowned. His eyes were veiled and smoky. He smelled, if you got up close: an intricate musk, salty, faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter – delicious to me.

— Hello? Anybody home behind that hair? my mother said.

Val looked at me quickly, blissfully. He would imitate her for our friends, later. While he was with me everything was funny. Without him I was exposed, on a lonely pinnacle – afraid of tumbling. They were still strong, my parents, my enemies. Their judgement of what I loved (Val, books, freedom) I couldn’t, wouldn’t yield to – but it weighed on me nonetheless, monumental as a stone. If I tried to carelessly condescend to them then they found me out. I was clever, I was still doing well at school, but Gerry was clever too.

— What’s so wrong with communism? I’d lightly say, trying to be amused at their naïve politics. I really was amused, I knew about so much – poets and visionaries – beyond their blinkered perspective. I’d read
The Communist Manifesto
. — Doesn’t it seem fairer, that everyone should start out equally, owning a share of the means of production?

— It’s a nice idea, Stella, Gerry said. — Unfortunately it doesn’t work out in practice. People in those countries wouldn’t thank you for your high ideals; they’d rather be able to buy decent food in the shops. The trouble is, a command economy just isn’t efficient, wherever it’s been tried. Breaks down because of human nature in the end. Every man naturally wants to do better than his neighbour.

Because he knew those words – ‘command economy’ – and I didn’t, how could I answer him? His knowledge was flawed, but substantial – an impregnable fortress. My attacks on it – so effective when we were apart and Gerry dwindled in imagination to a comic miniature – melted in his actual presence, so that I battered at the fortress with weak fists. In those days, even in the seventies, the establishment was not very much changed from the old order. Young people wore their hair long and had Afghan coats and went to music festivals – some young people did those things. But at the top, bearing down on everyone, there were still those ranks of sombre-suited men (and the occasional woman) – politicians, professors, policemen; inflexible, imperturbable in their confidence about what was to be taken seriously and what was not. You could jeer at them, but their influence was a fog you breathed every day, coiling into your home through their voices on radio and television and in newspapers. Gerry said that Africans suffering in a famine should know better than to have so many children, or that feminists did women no favours when they went around like tramps, or that there was no point in giving to charities because it was well known that they spent all the money on themselves.

As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her.

In my mind, I couldn’t bear her limited and conventional life: housework and childcare. But in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening – sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even then, when I was half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. No doubt she was very attractive then, in her late thirties, if I could have seen it – compact good figure, thick hair in a bouffant short cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, which didn’t occur to me. Being married to Gerry – and Stoke Bishop, and the baby – had given a high gloss to her demeanour, wiping away the hesitations I might have shared in once when there were just the two of us. And in her withholding and dismissive manner she seemed to communicate how women knew something prosaic and gritty and fundamental, underlying all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know too, or would have to come to know sooner or later.

I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.