Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley Page B

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.
    The summer I got my O-level results (all As apart from Cs in physics and chemistry), Uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory. I wept to Val, about how the women there hated me and put me on to the worst tasks (I had to take the moulds off the hot puddings – at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered) because I was only a student worker and because I took in a book to read in my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up but he didn’t – I think that actually he liked the romance of my working there and having relatives who worked there – it was not ‘middle class’. He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so, my mother had always so strictly policed the way I spoke at home (‘I wasn’t doing anything’, Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’). Apparently, however, I said ‘reely’ for really, and ‘strawl’ for stroll.
    — Your mother has an accent too, he said. — Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.
     
    Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint – quickly in the fingers of one hand, as only he could – and we went outside to smoke. It was summer and a moon, watery-white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spreadeagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our finger-ends were touching – through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we emptied ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.
    Then I was sure someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared to ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbour and young fruit trees and a rockery which Gerry built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And I thought now that he was hidden in there, aware of Val and me. He did walk out in the garden in the dark sometimes; ‘to cool off’, he said. He must be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.
    — I don’t think that my real dad’s really dead, I said aloud to Val, the words spilling unexpectedly, making the thought actual for the first time although it felt at once as if I’d been preparing it for years. I didn’t know if Gerry could hear what I was saying from next door. — I think he just left my mum when I was a baby, before I had time to have any memories of him. The way people talk about him – or don’t – is all wrong, for a dead person: not polite enough. Not as if he’s finished. Perhaps she had to divorce him, before she married Gerry. Only they didn’t bother to tell me anything about it.
    Val turned his head in the grass towards where he couldn’t see me clearly. — That makes sense. I wondered why there weren’t photographs of him. Why don’t you ask her? Do you care?
    — Not really. Not if he didn’t ever care, to come and find me.
    — If he’s alive, he’s a cunt.
    I agreed. — Why exchange one cunt for another?
    Consoling me, Val began to stroke my hand, rubbing his thumb around my palm, then pushing it between my fingers, one by one, over and over, until I was sick with love for him, but knew better than to make any move towards him