Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley Page A

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