Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

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,