Clever Girl Read online

  — Dead, how? I insisted, and she looked down at me – bright and smart in her office outfit – with distaste, I’m sure.

  — A nasty accident, she said.

  I couldn’t ask, for shame: what accident? But the uncertainty squirmed in my imagination, taking on foul forms.

  — You’re not to repeat a word about it to anyone, is that clear? Not one word, or I’ll take my hand to you.

  She rarely smacked me, though she quite often threatened it; I was wounded that my mother could think I wanted to pass on our contaminating secret. Becoming the centre of one of those huddles of girls, darkly informed, didn’t appeal. I feared I wouldn’t carry it off, somehow the tables would be turned and the dirty story would stick to me, making me a pariah. I was too odd – too small and sexless, too good at English comprehension – for those girls to trust. My instinct in those days anyway was to smother any unpleasant truth, push it back into its hole. I was (rather abstractly) enthusiastic about dogs and horses, because the emotions these roused seemed to me clean, unproblematic: I had a dreamy image of myself running through long grass with a collie dog jumping up beside me, trying to lick my face (after long deliberation, I had elected collies as my favourites). This image was my idea of ‘nature’, and had in my private world a religious resonance.

  Determinedly, all that day at school I held Charlie at bay, inventing games to play with my couple of oddball friends. We lived together in an old farmhouse on an island. A portion of the playground was the sea and we couldn’t walk on it, only row across it when we needed to get to the shops to buy provisions. Sometimes there were dreadful storms.

  — Here boy!

  I whistled and clicked my tongue commandingly; fed imaginary sugar lumps to imaginary horses with my hand held out flat.

  What had happened to Charlie was worse than anything my fears could dredge up. It all came out in the trial. Needless to say I was never in the court, but my mother got as much time off from the office as she could to sit through it with Auntie Andy. (They were ‘very understanding’ at the office, even if that meant they didn’t pay her for the time she was out.) So she heard almost all of it; and over the years it filtered through to me. Also, Nana kept the newspaper cuttings and I found them when she died – though in those days the coverage wasn’t as lurid as it would be now, and not everything that came out in court got into the papers. It was a surprise to me that Nana had kept the cuttings. She had never let Mum talk about the case, and she certainly hadn’t manifested any prurient interest in the details. (What else to expect, anyway, from my father’s family?)

  Apparently, for years Uncle Derek had been hitting Auntie Andy (Andrea, she was, in the newspaper reports). His own mother admitted in court that he had a violent temper, though she also said that Andy ought to have known how to ‘get round’ him. (Perhaps Uncle Derek’s father had been a wife-beater too?) The defence tried to make out that Andy had goaded her husband with her ‘passivity’, her ‘unresponsiveness’. The whole topic of men’s violence against their families was kept better hidden in those days. People had mixed feelings about it: it was disgusting, but it was also, confusedly, part of the suffering essence of maleness, like the smell of tobacco and the beard-growth. I think that sexuality itself was sometimes understood, by the women in my family, as a kind of violence that must be submitted to, buried deep in the privacy of domestic life. Presumably the implication of the case for the defence was that Auntie Andy had driven her husband to murder out of sexual frustration.

  They made a great point of Derek’s sobriety (‘He never touched a drop,’ Auntie Andy loyally testified), and his good reputation at his place of work. He was a salesman in a car showroom, he ‘brought home very good money’. Who knows how Uncle Derek would have fared in court if he’d killed Auntie Andy? On the night in question, however, he didn’t. He arrived home from work at the usual time and his tea wasn’t ready. (‘Tea’, in this context, meaning meat and two veg, not Earl Grey and triangles of sandwich.) It wasn’t ready because Andy had been asked to go in to talk to Charlie’s teacher after school. (She hadn’t been planning to tell her husband this, but it came out as their row unravelled.) She had thought that perhaps Charlie was in trouble – he sometimes got into fights in the playground – but it turned out that the teacher was worried about his slowness in learning to read. (‘Because I don’t have any other children,’ Andy said in court, ‘I didn’t know that he was slow. I wish I’d known.’) Derek had had a bad day altogether. He’d been working on a deal to sell a fleet of cars to a driving school, and it had fallen through.

  My mother said they made Andy show them on a plan how he chased her around the house, punching and kicking her from room to room. — That’s why I ran out in the street, she said, — without my coat or my bag. And I couldn’t go back inside, because I didn’t have my key. He’d never have let me in. But I didn’t want the neighbours watching while I hung about out there in the cold. So I thought I’d better go to my sister’s, who only lives round the corner.

  She’d waited a couple of hours for him to cool down. She had gone to her sister’s before in the middle of one of these rows, and left Charlie with his father.

  — When police officers saw you later that evening, the defence objected, — they didn’t observe any signs of violence on your person.

  She said he never hit her where the marks would show.

  — Could you speak up, please?

  He’d said he didn’t want her flaunting it to everyone.

  Charlie’s body had been found in the bath (with no water in it). They asked Andy where her son had been when she left the house: as far as she knew he was in the living room, eating beans on toast (because the chops weren’t ready) off his lap in front of the television. He might or might not have been aware that his parents were quarrelling. They had both of them always tried to keep him out of it. Andy had been planning to get out his reading book later as the teacher had recommended, although she hadn’t been very hopeful that he would agree to work on his spellings with her. — He had a mind of his own, she said. She repeated that Derek had never hurt Charlie before. He wasn’t a bad father. He had been worried about his son’s problem with his eyes, he had even come with her to see the doctor. But she agreed with the defence: she shouldn’t have left Charlie alone with him that night. She would never forgive herself. She didn’t know, now, what she had been thinking of. They had arrested Derek in Nottingham. She had no idea why he’d gone there. He had no connection with the place.

  I really wished, at the time when Auntie Andy was staying with us, and then later during the trial when we saw a lot of her again, that I hadn’t known any of this (and I didn’t know all of it then, though I did know about the bath, and it haunted me). I tried not to listen when anyone talked about it (mostly my mother with Auntie Jean), but I couldn’t help being curious too, against my better judgement: as if amongst the details there was information that I needed for my own survival. Innocent-seeming fragments would get in past my defences (the reading book, Nottingham, chops for tea), then stick to my imagination like tar.

  Inevitably, they got to know at school about my connection with the case. A deputation of older girls came up to me with solemn faces one playtime, and presented me with a posy of flowers – probably picked out of the front gardens on their way to school – tied up in raffia from the craft cupboard. They wanted to say how sorry they were about ‘my little cousin’; one of them actually stroked my hair as if I moved her to spontaneous pity. I wanted to tell them that I’d hardly known Charlie, that he was a snotty-nosed kid and I’d hated him, and that he would have hated me back if he’d even deigned to notice my existence. But I didn’t dare; I knew they wouldn’t be able to forgive me if I cheated them of their syrupy pleasurable sorrowing. So I thanked them and said that I would give the flowers to my auntie. On my way home I buried them in a dustbin. For a couple of weeks I was accorded a kind of sepulchral respect at school, and then they forgot about me.

 
; From time to time when I was alone in a room I would suddenly have full chilling consciousness that Charlie had been alive inside his own head once, as I was at that moment inside mine. And also that this person which he really was had undergone those things I knew were factually true, in a present moment as real as this one, and continuous with mine because it had baked beans in it and a bathroom with a familiar boring sink and towels and a toilet. My mind expanded to take in new possibilities. This open-air recognition was what lay in wait behind all the gloating, smothering words (‘poor little chappie’).

  A blast of wind blowing through space, icy clean.

  Most of the time, naturally, when Auntie Andy wasn’t around I hardly thought about Charlie. I got on with my life.

  My mother used to say, in one of her set pieces, that she had never known what courage was until she saw how Andrea stood up to the lawyers in court. — She was so perfectly polite and patient, but she never let them get under her skin. I couldn’t have kept my composure the way she did.

  But once the trial was over the two of them didn’t see much of each other. Their lives took them in different directions, and they had never really had much in common. Andy didn’t become a new person after Charlie was killed, she never became one of the bright, quick, funny women Mum chose for her best friends. Andy was always rather sweet and blank and – what’s the word? Not conventional, because Mum was every bit as conventional. Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn’t been poured into her, she would have been happier – it goes without saying – but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think this is quite rare, this capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.

  And it wasn’t just a passive thing. I remember when Auntie Jean first came round while Andy was staying with us. Jean had a big forthright bust and piled-up black hair, she wore dangling earrings that were vaguely gypsyish. When Andy came out of the bedroom where she’d been lying down, Jean knelt on the floor in front of her, wrapping her arms around Andy’s knees, sobbing extravagantly.

  — I don’t know how you can bear it, she said. — I know I couldn’t.

  (Jean had three boys.)

  The murder had cleared a social space around Andy. People didn’t know how to address her; probably Jean was just trying to broach that space in her overblown way. You can’t deny that her gesture matched the extremity of what had happened. But Andy wasn’t either touched or embarrassed. She stood very still and unresponsive until Jean let go.

  — I’m sorry, I don’t like scenes, she coolly said.

  I’m sure that Uncle Derek was less interesting than his wife; he wasn’t interesting just because he had killed someone. As an adult I lived for a while in a house that had brick steps leading down into a narrow coal cellar like a passage to a dead end, where we kept the brooms and buckets and broken things we hadn’t got around to fixing. It used to flood with filthy water at certain times of year, and I imagine Uncle Derek’s inner life like that: cramped and musty-smelling, shut away from daylight, subject to the drag of tides of violence. The little despotism he installed inside the four walls of his home mattered only because it derived its authority from the whole towering, mahogany-coloured, tobacco-smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority in the world outside.

  And mattered, of course, because of its consequences in other lives.

  My mother reported that in court he said he ‘got the worst of a bad bargain’ in his wife. They did let him out of jail eventually, I believe, after he had served fifteen years of his sentence. He went to settle in some part of the country where he wasn’t known.

  During the time Auntie Andy was staying with us, Mum left me alone in the flat with her on Saturdays while she went out shopping. Sometimes Andy played dolls with me. This was a new experience; the adults I knew didn’t play with children, unless it was something organised like cricket. But Andy didn’t put on a childish voice, and she entered into the reality of the different dolls’ characters and sensitivities with what seemed like an authentic interest, almost naive – I checked her face to make sure she wasn’t teasing me. We undressed and dressed them in their tiny clothes, flipping them over to do up the poppers, skewering plastic boots on to hard pointing feet. (After the trial was over Andy made a dress for my teenage doll with layered skirts in orange nylon trimmed with minute roses made of satin ribbon: unbelievably pretty, though it was a bit tight and wouldn’t do up down the back.)

  Sometimes when she and I were alone in the flat, Auntie Andy went into the other room to lie down and I heard her crying, although Mum had told Jean that she never did. It didn’t occur to me to try to comfort her. I would pretend to carry on with my play, feeling miserably guilty. I was only a child, there was nothing I could offer, and I must have been a living reproach because I wasn’t Charlie: though Andy never made me feel this, by any word or sign.

  Auntie Andy had to find a job, she had to get a divorce and a place to live by herself. She couldn’t go back to that house, obviously.

  All of this worked out well for her.

  I think she must have come to our flat in the first place, not only out of a revulsion against everything to do with her old life, but also because my mother’s solitary cheerful style – frilly aprons and nail polish and lemon-yellow guest towels – had signalled to her, even before the disaster, a vision of possibilities different to the ones she knew. And Mum was honoured by Auntie Andy’s choosing us; it seemed a consecration of Mum’s situation as a single woman, managing bravely by herself. (Though Andy’s staying was an inconvenience and a strain too; my mother acquitted herself with exemplary generosity, she really did.) And then, within a couple of years, they both found themselves a man, as if that had been the whole point of the enterprise.

  Andy went to work on the factory floor of the chocolate manufacturers where Uncle Ray was in dispatch. She made a little face of apology when she told us about the job, as if she knew it was beneath her. But in fact she enjoyed the company of the women there, though she kept aloof from the roughest of their bantering and raucous kidding (I saw this because Ray got me a summer job at the factory when I was sixteen). She brought us paper bags of half-priced, imperfect chocolates whenever she visited: violet creams and Crunchies and Turkish delight, my favourite – I picked off flakes of the chocolate with my teeth and then ate the jelly. Even after she married, Andy went on working there.

  — Carrying on for the moment, she said suggestively.

  Her new husband, Phil, was lugubrious with faded good looks, stick-thin. Not long after their wedding Andy began hinting with proud smiles that she might be pregnant; she must have been forty-ish by then, she was a lot older than my mother. Some of this I picked up at the time from conversations between Mum and Auntie Jean: their twilight tones alerted me to the fact that they were talking about bodies. Apparently she suffered from real morning sickness, her stomach swelled, her breasts were sore. (They hardly ever used that word, ‘breasts’. It was reserved for medical matters, only uttered in lowered voices.) But in the end nothing came of it, it was a false alarm.

  — Doesn’t it just break your heart? Jean said.

  Andy never did have another baby, although that pattern of phantom pregnancy repeated itself over and over well into her fifties, by which time it had become a bit of a joke among the people who knew her, though not an unkind one. To Uncle Phil’s credit he never gave the least sign of scepticism about her symptoms; he was punctilious in his attentions, urging her to put her feet up, bringing the barley water with soda that she’d ‘suddenly taken a fancy to’. Andy talked about her ‘disappointments’ as if they were miscarriages, but Jean didn’t believe she ever really conceived in her second marriage. My mother said she didn’t know, it wasn’t any of her business. However painfully these disappointments were felt in private, nothing altered Andy’s queenly kindness and distance. And as far as I know, these phantoms were the only outward sign o
f continuing trauma from what had happened. I can’t help feeling, thinking about it now, that there was an element of histrionic performance in them, contrasting with Andy’s usual reserve. Exacting our sympathetic goodwill, under false pretences, she claimed some latitude, some indulgence: in return for the magnitude of what she had undergone, and what she had lost, which could never be restored.

  2

  I WAS STAYING OVER AT MY nana’s. I was ten. I woke miraculously early, which was unusual for me. The blankets at Nana’s were meagre, ex-army, in prickly grey wool with an oily smell. They would only stay tucked in if you kept unnaturally still, which I never could – in my sleep I had shifted and burrowed, the blankets had come untucked, and a little slit of freezing air was probing my warm body like a knife. Then I rolled over on to the inflexible hand of my plastic doll. Sometimes if I woke up I turned the bedding around and put the pillow at the foot, and to Nana’s dismay went back to sleep upside down – which was a revelation of a different room, another world order. But the doll’s hand that morning seemed to poke me with a message: ‘Arise!’ (I was reading a lot of books set in the past, which was grander and better.)

  It was Saturday. It was spring – yellow squares of light transformed the unlined curtains at the window, their pattern of purple bars wound with a clinging vine. Usually by the time I came to consciousness Nana was already busy downstairs with her mouse-activity, sweeping and wiping and soaking, smoothing out brown paper bags and saving them, un-knotting scraps of string and winding them into balls. But today I couldn’t hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on to the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape – trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones – was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night. Cats were dotted around the vantage points like sentinels; glass windows black with dirt were a shed’s eye pits. Nana’s lilies of the valley set out on a forced march down the cracks between the pavings.