Clever Girl (4 page)

— Don’t look, my mother snapped if she saw Clive busy in his trousers; she would close her expression tight shut as if it was my fault for shaming her. — Cross the road, Stella!

I ought to have been afraid of him that morning but I wasn’t. I had been relieved all along that it was Clive I met on the bomb site and not a stranger; in relation to Clive I was still powerful and not obliterated. When he stood looming over me I felt more outrage than fear, and rolled over, scrambling to my feet, dusting off my knees, which were not grazed but lightly stuck with bits of gravel and grass. I wasn’t hurt in the least, only shocked and humiliated.

— You’re not supposed to push me!

He took a step towards me, making a threatening gesture with his hand in the air like the one my mother made to me sometimes. I stepped backwards, deliberately insouciant. Then I turned and skipped away. How I used to love that skipping – two bounces on the one foot, then two on the other – which carried you as fast as seven-league boots, buoyant and flinging forwards, rebounding off the ground each time with double strength. What a loss when one day I wasn’t able to fly along like that any longer, ever again. I can’t remember what stopped me. Was it inhibition, because I grew older and reached the point where I wanted to be like the grown women who presented themselves with such poise? After I had a child, in any case (and I was very young when I had my first) something was physically unbound in me, so that if I jumped or ran for a bus my insides seemed to churn in a new disorder.

Clive came lumbering after me but I knew he couldn’t catch me. The smack of his heavy boots when he reached the pavement was loud as gunshots in the empty street. I stopped and waited for him by the grocer’s shop, where the beige sun-blinds, cracked and torn, were still drawn down inside the windows: between the glass and the blinds was stacked a pyramid of tins of peas, their labels faded almost to illegibility. I had looked at those peas a thousand times.

— Here, grunted Clive when he caught up with me, stopping at a respectful distance, holding out his big greeny-white fist.

I held out my open hand to him.

He gave me the coral rose and the diamanté buckle.

I still have them.

Before I turned the corner into our road I had put the encounter with Clive out of my mind – though not my new treasures, which I kept clenched tight in my hand. The only thought I spent on him was that I would tell my mother I had ‘found them’. Standing facing our front door – I had two keys, one for this and one for the door to our flat inside – I was daunted for the first time by my adventure. I had used my keys many times before; but then I had always been expected. Now, because I was not supposed to be there, the street seemed bleached and flattened by its unaccustomed emptiness – though the milkman’s float was working its way by now from the other end. The grandeur of our door was suddenly forbidding: elevated from the street up its flight of worn steps, with an iron boot scraper set into the stone and an ancient heavy iron knocker (no one needed to use the knocker because of the cracked row of plastic bell pushes to one side, where names were written in ink on slips of card). Inside the hall, its air sour with forgotten coats and shoes, the foggy light was freckled with ruby from the coloured glass in the back door, where steps led down into the garden.

There were two rooms on each floor, and for the whole house one bathroom, two toilets. Beside the front door lived old Tom with a cleft palate who was in the Salvation Army; behind him, the woman who worked in the fish and chip shop. On tiptoe I started up the staircase which wound around the deep well at the house’s core: the handrail was polished wood and the banister rods were shaky in their sockets, some of them missing (I had bad dreams in which they gave way and I fell down towards the bottom). There were still brass brackets for gas lamps on the wall; light sifted down through the dirty skylight set into the roof, which leaked when it rained. In the flat above us lived a couple with a baby I had knitted bootees for, and in the attic above them was reticent Geoffrey, who fed me spoonfuls of condensed milk from an opened tin in his cupboard, and painted huge abstracts in cream and brown and black (he left them behind when he flitted without paying his rent). From Geoffrey’s casement windows you could climb out into the lead-lined channel that ran the length of the terrace, eighteen inches deep, with a stone parapet between it and the street so far below. I had sat out there on the parapet more than once, with my back to the street and my feet in the gutter.

I was startled as I let myself into our flat – staggering slightly because the key was still on its ribbon round my neck, and the keyhole was rather high up on the door – to see the sofa untouched, pristine in its daytime identity. Mum couldn’t be up already, could she? But there was no sign of her – and we only had two rooms. Always, if she was up, she was busy: vacuuming, dusting, rinsing our clothes through in the sink – she called it ‘rinsing’ as though that made it a lighter and smarter job than washing, less like drudgery. And she couldn’t be out. Her handbag was on the table, her bright silk scarf flopped, plumy and exotic, between its handles. Beside the sink in the kitchen-end of our living room (the kitchenette, Mum called it determinedly), were two teacups and two glasses, filled with water to soak. I closed the door quietly behind me and stood taking in whatever extraordinary thing had happened. I knew I’d found my mother out in something, although I didn’t know what. Who had been here with her while I was away? Was it Auntie Jean? The glasses came out for Jean sometimes. I wanted to go stamping around the room, to assert my right to do it, but I kept stony still. Mum’s coat was on its hanger. Her high heels were kicked off beside the sofa; I knew how she eased her feet out of them, grimacing in relief. I could smell her perfume and the faint stale-biscuit smell of her nylons, which I liked, as if it was a secret weakness I kept safe for her.

She must be asleep in my bedroom, next door. I hadn’t made much noise, unlocking and stumbling in on the end of my ribbon, but I imagined the effect of it rolling out from me like waves towards the bedroom door and pressing through it; the bed – my bed – creaked and sighed in its intimately known voice. Someone stirred, rolled over – the style was alien in our home, uninhibited and loose and large. Then a growling, deep-throated rumble, one of those satisfied private noises from the borders of sleep, was unmistakably a man’s. I was appalled, invaded. I might have thought he’d murdered my mother and taken her place if I hadn’t heard afterwards her own neat little squeak, sleepy and humorously protesting. He was in there with her; they were drifting together into wakefulness. But what life did my mother share with an unknown man? Who knew her this well, apart from me – to share her sleep with her? I had never thought of bed before as anything but an innocent place.

In a daze of rage I stepped over to the table, felt in Mum’s handbag for her purse, slipped the worn clasp, and helped myself to her change – not all of it, two half-crowns and a sixpence and a few pennies and halfpence. I had never done such a thing before, or even dreamed of it. I couldn’t remember why my right hand was clenched awkwardly shut; when I unlocked my fingers my palm was grooved with the impress of the sharp edges of the buckle. I put back Mum’s purse, tipped the coral button and the buckle on to the table and left them there. Disgust made me deft and bold; I exited as soundlessly as if I’d never been inside the room.

My hands tasted of hot copper from the pennies. I knew where to wait, five minutes’ walk along the road from our house, because I caught this bus with Mum every Saturday afternoon, to go to the stables where I had my riding lesson. Only the number 83 called at this stop outside the high wall, topped with broken glass stuck into cement, of a red-brick factory which made brake linings (I pictured these as brilliant coloured, silky). The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing, and I felt conspicuous though no one passed except the milkman, his bottles jostling and chiming.

But an 83 did come. I paid the conductor and he didn’t question me, dropping the money in his leather bag and winding my ticket from the machine slung across his shoulder. I had to change in the city centre to go to Keynsham; for a long time this second bus sat without a driver while I waited inside, the only passenger, too agonised with shyness to get out and ask when it would leave. I was hungry by this time for my breakfast. We began our slow progress eventually, through the suburbs to the outskirts of the city. Everything I saw from my window at the front on the upper deck, where my mother never wanted to sit – boys setting out a cricket game on a recreation ground, the bombed-out shell of a church with the grass neatly mown around it, car showrooms with plate-glass windows – looked more real, dense with itself, because I saw it alone. When I stepped down at last at my destination from the platform of the bus, I snuffed up triumphantly the perfumes of manure and of clogged, rotten ditches overgrown with brambles, rejoicing at the crunch under my sandals of dried mud grown with sparse grass, set in its deep ruts and tyre tracks, whose forms I broke as I trod.

What I’m thinking now is that it was a long way for my mother to bring me on the bus every Saturday, just for me to have the riding lessons I yearned and pleaded for. No doubt there was an element of snobbery and aspiration in her determination to get me to the lessons, and to pay for them – just as there was in her wanting me to go to the High School. (We fought about these aspirations, later.) For all I know she was imagining Elizabeth Taylor and
National Velvet.
But it was still a long way to Keynsham and back on her only free day of the week (on Sundays we went for dinner to one of my uncles’ houses). She had to get all her shopping done on Saturday mornings. What did she do while I lumbered around the paddock on the backs of the fat little ponies, Dozey and Boy and Melba and Star and Chutney? I think she brought her library book with her (Erle Stanley Gardner or Georgette Heyer or Harold Robbins). I think she boiled the stable girls’ electric kettle and made herself instant coffee, and that in fine weather she sat reading and smoking on one of those folding wooden chairs on the collapsing verandah that ran along the end of the pavilion (as we grandly called it – it was really more like an overgrown garden shed). Mostly it wasn’t fine weather, and she must have stayed inside where it stank of leather tack and pony nuts and where in winter they lit a fumy paraffin heater. She took no interest in the horses and wouldn’t go near them.

She waited after the lesson when I was allowed to groom Star, going at him with the body brush, lifting his mane to work underneath, releasing the potent musk smell of his sweat, dusty and greasy. Kissing his nose I made contact, through the hot pelt grown close like stubbly chenille on the hard bone of his skull, with that urgent wordless horse life which moved me so inexpressibly. And then we set out home again on the two buses.

The stables were at the back of a grand half-ruined old house where nobody lived; the couple who ran them had a ramshackle bungalow in the grounds. Jilly was fierce, lean and sun-dried; Budge (their surname was Budgen) tubby and uneasily jovial. They were both perpetually distracted in an aura of money-anxiety and failure; even though the place must have run itself, pretty much. They had to buy the feed and equipment but most of the work was done for free by a clique of girls fanatical about horses. The great prize was to be allowed to ride the ponies bareback to the field after the lessons were over. These girls were older than I was, thirteen or fourteen, and I was in awe of their swagger and their loud talk about feed supplements and gymkhanas (a lot of this was wishful thinking – we didn’t go to many gymkhanas). Their ringleader was Karen, decisive and devoid of humour, with a stubby neat figure, startling light blue eyes, and a stiff mass of curls the non-colour of straw. She lived locally and seemed to spend all her time at the stables, although I suppose she must have gone to school. It was impossible to imagine Karen compliant in a classroom – her independent competence seemed so sealed and completed.

Karen was in charge by herself that Saturday morning when I arrived; she had taken the ponies down to the field and was in the middle of mucking out. Wiping sweat from her forehead on to her sleeve, she peered at me, frowning: I wasn’t supposed to arrive until hours later. And she must have registered that I came for the first time without my mother, though she didn’t comment. I babbled something about wanting to come up early, to help out; she swept me with her focused, narrow glance, summing me up.

— You can help with this lot.

She handed me one of the stiff brooms we used to clear out the filthy straw from the stalls. I didn’t have my stable clothes on but in the abandonment of today it didn’t matter. With Mum’s money I had bought chocolate and an orange drink at the shop across the road from where the bus stopped, so I wasn’t hungry any longer and I set to work energetically. Soon I stripped off my jumper. Karen and I settled into a companionable unspeaking rhythm of labour and procedure. I loved the noise of the bristles hissing against the cobbles in the wet from the hose. The forbidden nursery stench of horse shit and piss was gagging, overwhelming; there was a triumph in getting so deep into muck, then resurfacing into an order where all the stalls were spread with clean straw and all the hay-nets full. I suppose as little girls we were excited by the ponies’ shamelessness, which was also innocent; and by the matter-of-fact way we were thrust up against their gargantuan bodily functions, cheerfully chaffing and scolding them for it. We couldn’t help seeing the male ponies’ penises, sometimes extended in arousal – the older girls joked about their ‘willies’, but joking couldn’t encompass the naked enormity, appalling, stretching imagination and inhibition. Sometimes as you led the ponies back into a stall where you’d just put out clean bedding, they pissed into it voluptuously.

When we’d worked for a good hour Karen made us instant coffee and I shared the rest of my chocolate with her. I’d never actually drunk coffee before but I didn’t say so, I told her I took three sugars; I was excited and happy to see her stirring for me, there in the pavilion whose light was always heavy with dust motes, the inner sanctum of the stable-cult. From time to time I was visited by the knowledge that trouble waited for me at the end of this interlude of escape. No one knew where I was. I had begun something catastrophic when I slipped out of the routines of our life, to act by myself. I knew without thinking about it that what seemed plain to me – my dereliction’s existing in counterbalance with my mother’s – would never for one moment be admitted or discussed by her. But I wasn’t sorry. I was exulting – even though in my chest I felt a pain of postponed anxiety like a held breath.