Clever Girl

10

I WAKE UP FIRST, WHILE MAC is still asleep. This waking up early is new, it has something to do with my age (I’m fifty, with everything that brings). There’s a thin grey light in the room and the night is over, but that isn’t encouraging. Night suits me, with its depths like infinite rooms sprawling underground. The daylight is exposing, prosaic, bleak — although I don’t know why I’m afraid of its exposure, nothing’s the matter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. But something sour and dreadful seems to have collected, while I was sleeping, in the hollow under my breastbone: it’s both a physical sensation and a mental anguish at once and I have to sit suddenly upright so as not to succumb to it. Then I discover that I need to pee. Was that all it was, after all: the poison and the anguish? So I mutter something to Mac, and potter in bare feet in my pyjamas to the bathroom, trying to keep my mind shuttered against the light which presses into it. I don’t pull up the blind in the bathroom, I try to hold off the day which I can hear gathering its force outside the window: the breezes stirring in the garden, the birdsong in its slippery purity, the whole urgent, ordinary machinery of the present resuming its forward movement.

But I can’t hold it off. I prefer to wake up gradually, lingering half inside my dreams; but sometimes waking is as abrupt as falling over an edge of sleep, the doors to conscious awareness fly open involuntarily between one second and the next. I have a vision of despairing clarity then, as if my life were a featureless bland landscape stretching behind and ahead of me: all surface, all banal anxiety and difficulty, unredeemed nowadays by any promise or hidden content. It’s in these early mornings, if I were an Anglican like Mac, that I’d pray.

Then that passes over. I go downstairs in the quiet of the sleeping house. Usually Mac gets up first but this morning I don’t want to go back to bed, I know I’ll only lie there in the grip of this wakefulness. On the landing halfway down the staircase (this is the house which Mac and I bought together when we moved from Sea Mills), there’s a tall arched window, much taller than a person, with a narrow seat like a shelf across the bottom. I pause there as I always do, because I like the way the garden and the oak tree and the church tower beyond the trees all look mythic through the distorting old glass, like something in a film or a dream. Then my bare feet are cold on the stone-flagged kitchen floor, so I go into the boiler room where I keep a pair of old slippers, worn comfortably to shiny black hollows in the shapes of my heels and toes. I fill the kettle under the tap and put it on to boil. I open the back door and carry the teapot across the wet grass, soaking my slippers; I empty last night’s cold tea leaves into the bedraggled dahlias. Since Mac retired and sold the factory, he’s thrown himself into gardening with the same zeal he once put into business. It’s autumn, these dahlias are a velvety dark orange-red, smouldering in the cobwebby light. Silky floss is tangled amongst the seed heads in the herbaceous border, the plant stems are beginning to blacken and I can smell the frost: frowsty like rotten apples. Back in the kitchen I open the bread crock and get out the bread for toast. Mac makes all our bread, and our marmalade as well. I pour out glasses of orange juice. I go through the motions bringing in the morning, one ordinary thing after another.

Mac would like me to give up work and settle down with him here in the country, but I’m not ready yet. So we keep on our flat in the city, I stay there two or three nights a week when I’m working (I’m still at the Gatehouse). But Ester’s at school down here, Mac drives her back and forth every day and on the way he tests her on her homework — French and poetry and maths and science. I worry that this puts too much pressure on her but she loves it, she nags him to ask her questions; she seems to learn easily, picking things up as a pure pleasure. She learns poems by Herbert and Marvell and Yeats off by heart (‘Love Bade Me Welcome’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’), and she and Mac recite them in unison. I thought Mac would be bored at home but I understand now that he addresses himself to whatever room of his life he happens to be in with the same kind of serious absorption that doesn’t fail him.

When I’ve taken his breakfast upstairs I sit reading my book at the kitchen table with my legs tucked under me, refilling my mug with tea from the pot keeping warm in its cosy. The book is about the idea of Nature as it was imagined in classical philosophy and then as it developed under the Romantics; I’m reading a section on the Eleusinian mysteries. The last time I was in the British Museum, I saw a Greek red-figure vase which depicts an element of Eleusinian ritual: the demigod Triptolemos sits in his winged chariot with a sheaf of corn in his hand, preparing to descend and bestow it upon mankind. I’m searching all the time, in books and films and paintings, for signs of transcendent meaning like this that I can puzzle over. They excite me and elude me, escape ahead of me as I try to grasp them. And all the time that I’m reading, I’m watching the clock — at quarter past seven I’ll get Ester up and Mac can make her breakfast and then I’ll drive to the station to catch the ten to eight train. It’s unusual to have this interval of reading and abstract thought on a work day. Perhaps I’ll pay for it later and be tired: but for now my mind is racing, leaping from sentence to sentence. Everything’s momentous as if I’m looking through a magnifying lens in my mind, seeing through the words to the whole, to their core; sometimes I’m actually breathless and my heart is racing, in pursuit of the meaning emerging so close within my reach.

I needn’t go to work, we don’t need the money, I could stay here and read and think all day, every day. This house is the first home I’ve ever actually chosen for myself: a Georgian frontage, all light and air, tacked on to a much older farmhouse behind, with walls two foot thick and squint-eyed windows to keep the weather out. For a year after we bought it I devoted myself to doing the house up and buying furniture for it, trying to fulfil the soul I felt it had: subtle with its shadowy corners, poignantly haunted by its past. And then when the house was finished I couldn’t quite bear it: I felt as if I’d made it for someone else to live in and not me. Or it seemed like a bargain I’d made with middle age and the bargain sickened me; I was ashamed of all the money I’d spent, contriving an effect of spontaneity and accidental charm as if the place had been in my family for a hundred years. I thought that I’d bargained my youth away with this house, giving it away in return for a shell, the sordid trick of material things. (But of course youth was over anyway, whether I bargained or not.)

That was a silly fuss, it didn’t last. I’m very happy here now, I know how lucky I am. Though I’m not quite ready yet, to move in finally. I’m holding that day off. When I jump on the train at the last minute on work mornings, I still feel sometimes as if I’m running away, escaping from something coming up behind me.

In the evening after work I have dinner in the city with Madeleine: she’s home from London visiting her mother. We meet in a lively place I like which was the old river police station when the harbour was still for commerce and not just for leisure; the restaurant is all glass on the river side so that you can watch the boats and the swans passing, the water in its metamorphosis (through gold, mercury, steel) as the light goes. Madeleine is there first and finds a good place by the window; when I arrive and don’t see her for a moment she half stands up, tottering on high heels, calling and waving to me eagerly: blonde hair pinned up untidily, protuberant blue eyes, plump chest rounded as a pigeon’s, hot colour of tiny broken capillaries in her cheeks. She’s wearing a tight skirt and big earrings and she’s ordered cocktails already. Madeleine and I don’t meet often, but whenever we do we fall easily into our old companionableness. I talk to her more intimately than I ever talk to Mac, I can tell her anything and she tells me everything too, we spill over to each other eagerly. It’s better without the men (though she likes Mac and I like Donald, her partner). Madeleine doesn’t read and she doesn’t think about abstract things, but she takes in what she sees, without defensive judgement.

She’s Ester’s godmother (Mac insisted that Ester was christened, though the boys aren’t). She doesn’t have children but Donald has teenagers who live with them at weekends and she likes them and is kind to them and comically doleful about her relations with them. (— I think you have to be broken in first by babies, she says. — The teenage craziness comes as too much of a shock otherwise — just as you’ve settled down yourself, into being sensible.) Her job these days is something deep inside the intangibles of management: in public relations, for a company selling software to other companies for managing their systems — she’s not even conducting the public relations, just overseeing the process through which they’re conducted. When I ask her what fills up her day she says it’s too boring to talk about, but I don’t believe she hates it, I suspect she’s happy enough in keeping her fragment of the machinery turning over effectively. I think that I couldn’t bear to do something so null, but then I’m sorry for thinking it: what right have I to criticise? And in its different way that’s what my job is too, just making tiny adjustments to individual lives swept along in the flow. I don’t have all the ambitious ideas about OT I used to have, believing it was a lever for changing things. Mostly it’s just organising badminton or art classes for the service users, or trips to Butlin’s or the ice rink (we did go to Paris once). Madeleine loves my story of the young man in one of our Gatehouse flats who is autistic spectrum and not coping with venturing out anywhere; I’ve taken photographs of his bedroom, bathroom, hallway and kitchen, and laminated them for him, because he feels safer if he can look at them while he’s away from them.

— Oh, those are what I need, she says. — On a bad day, I could stare at the furniture in our spare room and take comfort from it.

— It’s not exactly building a new world, though, is it? Bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen…

— Who wants a new world?

Night falls while we are eating and the darkness outside presses greedily against the glass; an autumn moon swims up over the water, dowager-stately, trailing clouds like scarves, looming over its own reflection. The restaurant by this time is crowded and noisy. Somehow we get on to talking about coincidence: Madeleine believes in premonitions and synchronicity and ghosts and we quarrel about this amiably enough, not for the first time. She gives me examples of things that have happened to her which can’t have been accidental and I insist that this perception is only confirmation bias. She says there are patterns of energy we can tap into, if we allow ourselves to read the signs. We’re neither of us going to change our minds. I tell her how I’ve dreamed often about Fred since he died, but I don’t think that’s because he’s visiting me or sending me messages, it’s just because I miss him and feel sad about him. (One of these dreams was so horrible that I can’t recount it to Madeleine or to anyone, it’s safer if I keep it to myself. In this dream Fred came to stay with us and was just the same funny, exuberant, glum self that he had been when he was alive, except that he brought his dead body with him as if that was a normal thing to do, and kept leaving it carelessly lying about the place; this body was a disgusting thing, half opened up like a body in an autopsy. I was terrified all the time that the boys or Ester would come across it and be traumatised — often in my dreams the boys aren’t the grown men they are in real life, they’re still children and I’m still responsible for them.)

I’m happy in the restaurant with Madeleine. We’re genuinely hungry and everything tastes good and I like the way the night beyond the glass closes us in with the crowd of strangers also enjoying themselves. There’s a kind of freedom too, no doubt about it, in our being fifty. It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last. Although Madeleine insists at one point that some man or other is eyeing me up; I don’t really think he is, and I don’t fancy him in any case. Anyway, I say, I’m old enough to be his mother. Madeleine says that as I was a child bride I could be anybody’s mother, and I remind her that the one thing I wasn’t as a child was anyone’s bride. And then she breaks off and gives me an odd kind of glance as if that’s reminded her of something she ought to tell me, but doesn’t want to. It takes a bit of coaxing to get it out of her, but she’s hopeless at dissimulating and explains to me eventually that she’s heard news from her mother (who still lives in the house where Madeleine grew up, next door to me) that Valentine has come home.

Valentine! No! I’m surprised by how the news disturbs me, after all this time.

— Do you mean home from the States?

— I mean home to his old house, where he lived when we knew him. His mother’s still there; he’s staying with her, apparently. He’s been there for months. Mum says he’s ill. Or he’s been ill and he’s come home to get better, I’m not sure which. His mother must be a hundred and ten by now. She was ancient when we were teenagers. His father died, you knew that.

For as long as he’s been in America it’s as if Valentine stopped changing when I stopped seeing him — I’ve gone on imagining him as a boy of seventeen. He ages now all at once with a rush: Valentine’s the same age as we are — no, he’s a year older. And then I think that I can’t really remember him at all. I’m interested in the news of his return, of course, but I don’t know what it means: perhaps nothing. He’s been at home for months and hasn’t looked for me. The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can’t re-enter it. Actually I feel angry with him for returning. Of course Madeleine wants to ask me about Luke, whether Luke knows anything about his father. And I reply firmly, as if it’s not up for discussion, that he knows his biological father went away, that’s all. He knows that his father never knew anything about him. Mac is his father now and he loves Mac, Mac loves him. Nothing else matters.

Really Valentine’s return doesn’t seem to matter much. I reassure Madeleine that it’s most unlikely his path will ever cross with mine. As far as I’m concerned, I tell her, his being a thousand miles away or three makes no difference at all. We progress to talking about other things instead: she’s staying over at her mum’s for a week so we arrange to go shopping one afternoon, and to take both our mothers out to lunch together at the weekend. All this gives me a good excuse for staying on in town beyond the days when I’m actually at the Gatehouse. I confess to Madeleine that I find myself seeking out excuses so as not to spend too much time in our country house, though there’s nothing wrong between Mac and me.

— But I’m just not ready to settle down to country life, and he is.

— I don’t blame you. All those green wellies and Tories and garden fetes. Perfect for holidays, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

The country is more complicated than Madeleine thinks (she’s such a Londoner these days and can’t believe there’s real life anywhere else). Our country friends aren’t really Tories, they’re just not very interested in politics, they’re interested in other things. Our nearest neighbour, for instance, is an ecologist and expert in early music; the woman who helps Mac with the heavy work in the garden used to be in West End musicals. And I love my view of the church tower — its rooks rising like specks against the clouds — through the arched window on the staircase. Only I have the idea that moving down there permanently would be like passing through the quiver in the old glass to the other side, leaving something unfinished behind.

I do really, mostly, meanwhile, forget about Valentine; only every so often, underneath the surface of my conversation with Madeleine and then in the days that follow, at work and in the flat, I come upon the new knowledge of his nearness in the city — like knocking up against some disconcerting piece of loose flotsam. Funnily enough, if there had been even the remotest chance of some kind of romantic renewal between us, I think the idea of him would be less interesting. There’s something infantilising and shaming in those Friends Reunited stories of childhood sweethearts getting back together. But I’m not succumbing to any secret hope that Valentine will have changed his sexuality while he’s been away. Quite the contrary, in fact: it’s the absence of the sexual motive which makes the idea of him intriguing for me. I realise that I’m starting to exaggerate him in my mind, imagining him like the demigod on the Greek vase, set apart from mortals, initiated into mysteries, bestowing gifts. Bestowing them on me: gifts of wisdom, or some kind of absolution. How absurd. He did use to look a bit like a demigod, when he was seventeen. He had that swaggering air of careless luck and a blissful uncomplicated beauty, as if his face and body were drawn in a few clean lines.

But now he’ll be middle-aged, I tell myself.

He’ll probably be dissipated, raddled, awful.

I don’t know how much it matters, knowing your biological father. I’ve never known mine. A few years ago my mother suddenly became very agitated and conspiratorial: it turned out that, of all things, my real father had got in touch with her. He had got hold of my Uncle Ray through the Internet (Ray’s a computer enthusiast) and sent a message to him: the whole process was alien to Mum, who won’t have a computer in the house — though Luke has tried patiently to persuade her.

Anyway, he’d not only found out Mum’s whereabouts but was asking what had become of me, his daughter. After all this time, nearly half a century! I think Mum had even persuaded herself that he was dead, just through sticking to that story for so long, no matter how I pressed her for the truth (with other people, as far as I know, she never even discussed him). She fell out dreadfully over the whole business with Uncle Ray, who in the first flush of excitement had responded to the stranger, giving him Mum’s new married name and her telephone number. She and Ray didn’t speak for months, until my stepfather and Ray’s wife engineered a reconciliation.

I begged Mum to tell me what exactly my father had said to her: I was more interested in this fact of my parents’ contact than in any implications it had for me.

— Oh, I don’t know, Stella. We only spoke for a few minutes. The usual.

— What d’you mean, the usual? It can’t have been usual!

— I mean, just the usual sort of things that people say.

— How did he sound? Did you recognise his voice right away?

— Of course I did, I’m not senile. He wanted to know what you were doing and I told him. He’s going to ask Ray to pass his email whatsit on to you, so you can be in touch with him if you really want to.

I longed to have overheard how she reacted when she realised it was him: raw perhaps, for once, and startled, implicated. After all, she hadn’t put the phone down on him. Was she alone in the house when he called? She was. Had she asked him about his life, what it had been? That was none of her business, she said.

— But what was it like? How did you feel, when you knew it was him?

— I was trying to think of a way to get rid of him.

In the end I took my cue from Mum: I decided I wasn’t eager to see my father. And of course I might have met him anyway, when I had driving lessons so long ago from a man with the same name. I still remembered how we had liked each other and how proud he had been of my driving. I was wary of spoiling it now: either finding out my instructor wasn’t my father after all, or, if he was, then muddling the decent clarity of our old contact with new overlays of guilt and effort. Ray gave me the email address, but I never did anything about getting in touch.

In the wake of the little drama of my father’s turning up, my mother was peculiar: cross and flattening, impatient with my stepfather if he was slow or forgot things. I felt sorry for Gerry, flinching under her brisk regime where everything personal and emotional had to be tidied out of sight — just when he might have liked to open up more expansively. He was still physically fit and energetic in his seventies and he was allowing himself new luxuries of feeling: listening to classical music, cooking, growing passionate over the birds visiting his garden. It felt for a while as if he and I were allied together against Mum and her lack of imagination, or her refusal of it. I made a point then of often taking Ester round to see them, because she and Gerry got on so well; he could occupy himself with her for hours, involving himself seriously in her games. He found something painfully poignant, I think, in her sweet looks and contained, fastidious manners: she was his bossy princess, he was her dedicated retainer. He asked me once, while we were watching her on the swing that he’d put up for her, how Sheila could bear to see her when she came visiting from Brazil.

— I’d have thought it would have been better for her to make a clean break, he said. — Never to set eyes on the child.

Defensive, I assumed that he was criticising our whole arrangement (my mother had predicted disaster when we first took Ester on). I was ready to be brash: no, why should she mind, so long as Ester was happy? When I realised he was genuinely interested, I told him what Sheila had said when we talked about it once: that she was surprised how far she was able to choose not to feel regretful. — Obviously she’s sad sometimes, for a while. But it surprises her, how most of the time it is all right. She says she’s come to the conclusion that the biology — the blood and genes and stuff — only means as much as you choose it to. You either confer that power, emotionally, on the genetic connection, or you don’t. Likewise, you could confer the power on someone who isn’t genetically related to you.

Then Gerry and I realised that we could be talking about ourselves, and my relation to him, so we were both uncomfortable and changed the subject.

It is fun and sinful, shopping with Madeleine. It’s supposed to be Christmas shopping even though it’s only late October; we have congratulated ourselves on our resourceful forward thinking. But the truth is that at least half of what we spend is on ourselves, on clothes and shoes and bits of jewellery. I don’t often shop so impulsively these days, spending so much at once: it feels like being drunk (actually we probably are slightly drunk, having shared a bottle of wine at lunch), caught up in heady anticipations, believing we can renew ourselves and be different by changing our clothes. All day I am greedily interested in owning things. I’m paying cash but Madeleine’s putting all her purchases on her credit card; I’m anxious about debt because of those long years when I had no money to spare, but she reassures me that she can pay it all off later. And after all it’s only a technicality, where the spending comes from: owning the money doesn’t make it more or less virtuous. The power of the bright flood of things in the shops is overwhelming, dazzling — and a triumph of taste, because there’s much more nice stuff to go around now than there used to be. It’s as if some ancient knot of material difficulty has come unfastened all at once, old puritan certainties have slipped away; but a residue of that grit makes me uncomfortable. (And Mac doesn’t like credit cards. He’s always on the side of manufacturing: he says we should be making things to sell, not buying things with money we don’t have.)

Madeleine is using her mother’s car and gives me a lift back to the flat afterwards. Alone there, surrounded by my carrier bags, I embark on an anxious session of trying the clothes I’ve bought, pulling them on with abandon, discarding them crumpled and inside out on the bed. When it’s over I feel guilty and cheated and I have to run a bath because I’m sticky with sweat. I’m not sure now whether anything I’ve bought really suits me; I’m afraid in case I’ve lost my good judgement, or don’t know any longer how I want to appear. Last summer when I was looking through clothes on a rail in a shop I saw a young girl’s glance slide over me, embarrassed by my mistake in thinking those fashions could be meant for anyone my age. I’m relieved that I’ve arranged to go round to Luke and Janine’s for supper; I don’t want to stay in the flat alone with my purchases. I put on one of the new blouses, gauzy and flowery, over new leggings, then I take these off again and put on my old jeans and a white shirt. I’ve bought presents for Luke and Janine — a jumper for him and a bag for her — and I decide not to keep them for Christmas but to give them away now, like an expiation.

Luke and Janine are both junior-school teachers. They’re buying a tiny terraced house on a steep street in Totterdown, which was where I brought Luke to live with my Auntie Jean when he was a new baby. Jean and Frank are still around the corner; Jean probably sees Luke as often as I do. It was a working-class district then; now it’s alternative middle-class as well, with lots of young families, some of the houses painted in bright colours as if it was the Mediterranean. Luke and Janine grow vegetables in the back garden and Luke wants to install solar panels on the roof; he’s good at all those practical kinds of things. They are pleased but bemused by my presents. Janine says that she has a bag already, but that she will save the new one until she needs it. I don’t explain to her that if you’re like Madeleine you don’t have just one handbag at a time but a whole cupboard full of different ones to choose from, to go with different outfits.

We eat vegetarian lasagne for supper; Janine’s a vegetarian so Luke’s become one too. She doesn’t put any salt in her food and I would like to add some to my plateful but I don’t, because it might seem like a criticism of her cooking; I don’t think Janine would mind but Luke might, he’s very protective of her. I notice him explaining me to her now and then, mediating what I say as if he’s afraid I may be too overbearing. They are gentle and conscientious and acutely attuned to one another. I wonder sometimes whether Luke has toned himself down too far to be in tune with Janine; when he gets together with his brother he’s more like his old self, scathing and funny. But perhaps this gentleness is what he’s always really wanted. When I first met Janine I was afraid that I was bound to offend her somehow; she’s mournful-eyed and graceful like a girl in a Burne-Jones painting. But she’s observant and clever too, and it turned out that she and I like each other, we’re tolerant of each other’s differences. I expect she has her own opinions about the kind of childhood that Luke had, and some of the chaos in it — but she keeps them to herself. Luke disappears upstairs after supper to the computer, and she and I wash up together.

We discuss Rowan and his music, the success he’s having and our worries about the new pressures on him: he’s been supporting headline acts at the big festivals this summer. Songs pour out of him. I have them on my iPod and I listen to them on the train and round the house: they are a miracle, they come from a place in my son that’s unknown to me. Janine has entered wholeheartedly into Luke’s attitude towards his brother, at once sceptical and protective. Rowan still picks fights with me when he comes home; he recounts episodes from the past to illustrate how I neglected him or carelessly put him in danger — sometimes in a calmly forgiving voice, as if he appreciates I was too ignorant to know what I was doing. What possessed me, for instance, allowing him to go off to live with his grandmother in Glasgow for a year? Did I have any idea of the kind of place I’d sent him to, how violent it was and how racist? I lie awake at night and go over and over these narratives, asking myself whether he’s right and I was wrong. I don’t remember allowing Rowan to go anywhere, exactly: he presented his move to Glasgow pretty much as a fait accompli at the time and I don’t think I could have stopped him — but perhaps I should have tried harder. I lose my confidence in my version of what happened. Luke is impatient if I try to talk these anxieties over with him, he says I ought to know better than to take Rowan’s complaints too seriously. He says Rowan talks nonsense about how bad it was in Glasgow; Nicky’s mother adored him and made a big fuss of him, the area they were in was perfectly friendly, Rowan was fine.

I think while I’m washing up with Janine that I might mention what Madeleine told me: that Valentine has come home. I could see what she thinks about my telling Luke. But in the end the words won’t form in my mouth; her steady competence makes me ashamed to raise this issue of my ancient mistakes, like dragging up some dirty mess out of the washing-up water. Janine has such an attractive way of doing everything: the rubber gloves are turned inside out and dried and hung by a peg on the draining board; then she makes us lotus blossom tea bought from a Vietnamese company online and we drink it out of the bone china teacups she found in a charity shop. Perhaps it’s best to leave all those old stories in the dark. Luke has always known that his father’s first name is Valentine and that he was in America: that’s just about all he knows. I also told him long ago, when he was a little boy and asked me, that his father was very good-looking and very intelligent. (— I loved him desperately, I said. — But he didn’t love me, not in that way. Though we were very good friends.) Nowadays Luke avoids the subject as if it embarrasses him. He calls Mac Dad (Rowan never does), even though he was a teenager by the time we all moved in together.

And then on my last day in town, I go to find Valentine. Of course I do. How could I know that he was in town — my long-lost twin, the secret father of my child — and not want to set eyes on him even just once after all this time? I dress carefully in new wool trousers I’ve bought — midnight blue — and a cream silk shirt and Paul Smith jacket. I want to show him that I’ve done all right, that I’m powerful, I’m not nothing. In front of my mirror I’m full of trepidation, wishing I was taller. I could have taken a taxi out to Valentine’s old house but instead I catch the bus, which has a different number now but follows the same route as the one he and Madeleine and I used to get back from school together. I look overdressed for the bus, as if I was going to a business meeting; I regret my effort with the clothes now, and realise how provincial I will probably look anyway to Valentine, fresh from New York. As the bus penetrates deeper into the suburbs, it’s extraordinary how unchanged it all seems — the old stage-set bourgeois innocence, the heavy quiet in the empty streets, house-fronts bristling with tactful paint, autumn gardens tied and tidied, a few late roses blown and tangled in the bushes. Perhaps there are more parked cars than I remember and they make the roads seem narrower. I never liked it here, this peace was always my enemy. And the deep familiarity disorientates me, as if after all what separates me from the past is tissue thin.

Valentine’s house is detached, and different to most of the development around: older and gloomier and bigger, built in ugly blocks of red stone with a rough-hewn finish. The garden gate is off its hinges, propped inside the wall, and I wonder for a moment if the place isn’t abandoned: the paint on the woodwork is faded and flaking off, evergreen shrubs in the front garden have grown high up against the front windows, flyers advertising pizza take-aways, dropped in the porch, are sodden with rain. But there are reassuring expensive lined curtains at the windows, even if the lining’s ragged, and after I’ve pressed the bell I hear slow footsteps in the hall. Then Valentine’s mother opens the door to me. I’m surprised how easily I recognise her, though Hilda was in her fifties when we last met and now she’s an old lady; in her mid-eighties at least. Her shoulders are humped with arthritis and her heavy brown hair has turned iron-grey — but it is pinned in the same old French pleat, she wears the same dangling earrings. She is still daunting, elegant, ravaged; even fumbling with the latch her impatience has its old savagery, as if she’d like to break something. She doesn’t recognise me, naturally enough, because we haven’t met since I was seventeen. I tell her that I’m Stella, that I’m an old friend of Valentine’s; for a moment while she peers unfocusedly I think she’s forgotten me, and I’m relieved. She is disappointed because she thought I was the supermarket delivery.

— Who did you say you were?

And then when I tell her again, she does remember. — Oh, Stella. You used to live on the new estate.

I don’t know what she might have guessed, when she heard about my having to leave school because I was pregnant all those years ago, in the months after Valentine ran away to America. No doubt she heard about it, everybody did. Probably she just thought I was the kind of girl who was bound to get into trouble sooner or later, with some boy or another. She may have believed I was partly responsible for Val’s going; or she may have understood all along the mistake I’d made, imagining I could have him for my lover. Now I see calculation in her face behind the old frigid politeness.

— Your parents moved away. How are they?

I tell her that they’re well; then I enquire whether Val’s at home. Hilda is looking behind me all this time for the supermarket van. I can see she’s irritated that I’ve arrived because it’s distracting her from this delivery which has been at the centre of her day. — Val does the orders on the Internet, she explains crossly. — They give you a two-hour time slot but they’re awfully unreliable, and this one’s late already. Though sometimes he thinks he’s put an order in, and then it turns out he’s forgotten to press the final button or something. He gets mixed up. Perhaps he just pretends he got mixed up, when actually he couldn’t be bothered.

Then she says that he’s usually in, he doesn’t go out much.

She shrugs when I ask if I can come in; I say that I’d love to see him, though it will be very strange after such a long time. — You may as well go up, she says. — He hasn’t been in touch with his old friends. I suppose that most of them have moved away.

The hall is more or less as I remember it — spacious and shabby with a cold cellar-breath. It’s dark because of the feeble light bulb and the overgrown shrubs against the window; a gigantic sideboard carved in black wood takes up too much space — one of the things they brought with them from Malaya. Hilda explains that Valentine doesn’t live in the attic any longer, he’s moved down into his father’s room because the attic’s full of junk. Then she seizes my hand in an awkward grip, heavy as iron, her knuckles swollen and freckled with age. — You know he hasn’t been well?

And I think in that moment that it is AIDS, which would fit in with Valentine’s timing perfectly. She asks if I have sons and I say I have two, both grown up now; I dread — because of her bowed head and the drooping, tragic face — that she is going to say something significant and terrible, about her love for her son and the pain of losing Valentine, because he’s going to die. Stupid tears force their way into my eyes in readiness; she must see them. But after all she only talks on in her deprecating way about her various grandchildren (none of them Valentine’s, of course) who seem all to be in expensive private schools, or at Oxford or Cambridge. I’m not quite sure what message this is supposed to have for me. Perhaps she is reminding me that I was never really quite good enough for their family. Or perhaps she’s just rambling round familiar territory because she’s an old lady and she’s distracted, she’s forgotten what she meant to say.

She doesn’t come upstairs with me, she wants to keep looking out for the van; and I hesitate on the landing because I’ve no idea which room was Valentine’s father’s. I call out, but there’s no response so I try one of the doors, which opens into a bedroom that must be Hilda’s, at the front of the house: there’s a ghost in the air in here of her cosmetics and scent, a high bed with a pink candlewick cover, and a cheval mirror (carved in the same black wood as the sideboard) that seems to stand in for Hilda’s presence, pulled stiffly upright. I try another door. In this second room it’s dark because thick curtains are pulled across the windows, and there’s an Anglepoise light switched on above a desk where an old man with a shock of white hair is sitting with his back to me, writing. I think for a startled moment that Madeleine made a mistake, Valentine’s father isn’t dead after all. Then the old man turns round and I see that it’s Valentine.

He isn’t really an old man. It’s the white hair which is so disconcerting: and yet it’s that pure white which is quite beautiful in itself, silky and light as floss, seeming charged with static because it floats like a translucence round his head. And Val’s got a lot of it, he’s not balding, it’s just receding in a distinguished way at the temples. He doesn’t really look so very old, more like someone who’s been seriously sick and is just coming back to life. He’s gaunt, his skin is papery-dry, his eyes seem huge and the folds of flesh under them are puffy. (It isn’t AIDS — Val insists on that at some point in our conversation, as if he knows what people guess. I don’t know what happened to him, exactly — some kind of breakdown, physical and mental, a consequence I suppose of all the drink and the drugs, and the lifestyle. It could so easily have been AIDS, going to America and to the gay scene and sleeping around just when he did; but if he’d got it then he’d probably have been dead by now. So he was lucky in his own way, charmed.)

The old faun-face is still there, behind the mask of age and illness. After the first moment’s shock of non-recognition I find it: the heart-shape and defiant jaunty chin, the curious deeply curved eye sockets, a sardonic twist to the long mouth. He is still handsome; and his looks are more densely male and less androgynous after thirty years — their style that was poised and provisional is etched now deep into the flesh. The bruise-black eyes are suffering and eloquent against that white hair. He’s wearing an old shirt which I guess was his father’s, half buttoned and without cufflinks, so that the sleeves dangle off his forearms. I feel ashamed of my smart outfit. There’s a stillness and steadiness in him which is new. He used to be too restless to sit at a desk for very long; but now as I look around I get the feeling that he doesn’t venture much out of this room. It smells stale in here; the bed is unmade, clothes are lying on the floor where he has dropped them. The walls are pinned all over with pictures, postcards, things cut out of the newspapers, scraps of paper scribbled with writing. There’s a Mac laptop open on the bed, though at the desk he was writing by hand. Books — not novels but heavy reference books, numbered on the spine as if they’re borrowed from a library — are piled up on the floor and the chairs. I’m sure when he stands up from his desk, turning enquiringly towards me, that he’s sorry he’s been interrupted.

I know right away that Val has no idea who I am.

It’s not only that he’s stalled for a moment, as I was with him, by how I’ve aged and changed. Even when I’ve told him my name and explained who I am and how we were friends before he went away, his expression doesn’t register anything except a vaguely polite hopefulness. — I’m so sorry, he says. — It’s part of my illness. Or rather, it’s part of the drugs they gave me to cure the illness. I’ve lost whole chunks of my past, you’ll have to forgive me.

His accent is faintly transatlantic; but his voice is the same, I’d know it anywhere: not deep, a tenor voice with something cracked and teasing in it, creaky and smoky. It’s because of the old known voice speaking out of him that I don’t just back off and make my excuses and leave right away. I feel at home with him, I know him, even if he doesn’t know me. — Tell me about yourself, he says. — Perhaps some of it will come back to me. Stella. Maybe I do remember a Stella. Come in. Shut the door behind you. I’d ask my mother to make you coffee only she’s driving me insane, I can’t bring myself to speak to her. Did she let you in? Did she pounce, the black widow?

He’s smiling but it’s not quite his old tautly mocking smile; I wonder if illness has wiped some of his irony. When he lights a cigarette (he’s kept Hilda’s lighter, after all this time) his hands shake. He goes around the room tidying up, pulling the sheets straight on the bed, lifting some books off a chair so that I can sit in it — and then he’s at a loss because he can’t find anywhere to put them down. Opening the curtains, he lets in a grey daylight which shows up the thick dust. Valentine was always indifferent to his surroundings but the mess seems more of a risk now that he’s older, and ill. When you are young and strong you can be sure of springing free of your material envelope through your own vitality; later, any dinginess or fustiness may seep back into you.

— Do you remember Fred? I say encouragingly. The chair that Valentine cleared for me to sit in is an ugly heavy thing, elaborately carved and high-backed like a throne; he’s sitting on the side of the bed, opposite me. — He was your teacher, he loved you.

— Yes, something. I’m getting something. Fred. A nice guy. Little guy, dark hair, liked poetry.

— You studied poetry with him at school.

— Did I know you at that time?

I tell him about Fred. Then I try to explain to him how it was when he and I went everywhere together, spent all our time together, read the same books, even dressed in the same clothes. I tell him how I worshipped him, though I leave this worshipping ambiguous, because I don’t want to embarrass him by bringing up the subject of sex: there’s something in his fragile body and his demeanour that forbids me even joking about it — as if he was a monk or a saint. He’s touched and interested, listening to my stories. Some of it does come back to him as I talk: mostly places, and some people. He remembers that he had to leave in a hurry because someone was looking for him; he says he often used to get into that kind of trouble. Before his illness, he says, his life was a mess and his perceptions were clouded and obscure. He has wasted so much time. I want to insist that he hasn’t wasted it, nothing’s wasted; but then I shut up because it surely is wasted if you’ve forgotten it, if it’s just gone. Anyway, Valentine isn’t really listening to me now, he’s holding forth with a new urgency as if he’s found his way on to a well-worn track which interests him more than a past he scarcely recognises.

— You’ve got to use your time, he says. — That’s what I’ve learned. I think of my illness as a gateway into a new more authentic life. More disciplined. Not ‘use’ time: that’s not the right word — as if time could be digested through the machinery of production and consumption. That’s the mistake we make. You’ve got to inhabit time fully, dwell inside it, every minute of every hour — which mostly we dissipate in false consciousness. If you learn to dwell in every minute then the spirit will make itself at home in you, you’re opened up to knowledge of the truth.

I’m not thinking that he’s completely crazy as he comes out with this. Partly this is because while he’s saying it I seem to be in the presence of the old Valentine, excitable and convinced. But partly his words seem like the answer to an intimation which I have sometimes too. Visiting old churches in the country with Mac, a horrible urge comes over me to fall on my knees and pray: though I’d never really do it while Mac was with me. Instead I tease him with my sceptical remarks and he instructs me on the history and architectural features of the place. Mac’s not the kind of religious person who gives way to transports, though he climbs up into the pulpit to check whether they’re using his beloved King James Bible. But I’m half wishing all the time that I was alone and could yield to this heaviness dragging me down, this longing to fall on my knees and supplicate something, I don’t know what. It feels for a time as if the something is the only real thing and all the rest is fake.

— So, is that what you do in here? I say to Valentine. — Inhabit time?

He thinks, he says. Sometimes he sits and thinks for hours. He reads, he writes. When I ask if he gets any exercise, he says he walks for hours at night across the Downs and through the city. — I don’t sleep much. It’s probably another consequence of the drugs. So I walk instead.

— I wish I’d had your solitude.

It’s true that sometimes I’ve imagined a life lived for contemplation and inward striving with ideas. I explain that I haven’t had time for these, even if I’d wanted them, because I’ve been wrapped up in caring for my children and family, and I’ve always gone out to work. I’m overstating somewhat; because I did have that time when I studied for my degree, and gave myself over to literature for three whole years. And the truth is that I’m only working part-time now, and I could leave my job if I wanted to. Mac cooks most of our meals, we have a cleaner. If I stayed at home I could have as much time to contemplate things as I liked.

— The exterior life is just a shell, Valentine says. — It’s a distraction.

— Well, you’re lucky. You’re lucky you don’t have to go out every day to a distracting workplace.

For a long time this blocked him, he admits, this perception that reflection and solitude were privileges reserved for a few. Eventually he realised that the block was inside himself, he was using it to excuse himself from the effort of change. The gracious thing to do was to accept the beauty of the opportunity if it was given. I ask him what it is that he’s writing, whether it’s poetry, and he says it’s sometimes poetry, but that he’s also working on a book which brings together ideas from the Platonic tradition with aspects of Hindu and Sufi thinking, about an unseen reality behind the surface of things. That’s extraordinary, I tell him, because I’ve been reading about those mysteries, too. And I explain about Triptolemos and the sheaf of corn. Valentine gets quite excited, he knows a lot about the cult at Eleusis, the latest thinking about its rites, the initiates conducted in search through the darkness, culminating in Demeter’s reconciliation with Persephone. I joke that this is proof that we are twins after all, even if he has forgotten all about me. Separated for thirty years, we’re still thinking in tandem. I don’t enquire whether he’s got any plans for publishing his book. Something tells me that it’s not that kind of project, with a fixed end in sight and a plan for its promotion in the outside world.

— You never wrote to me, I say. — You didn’t even tell me you were going. I waited to hear from you. For months I expected to get a letter.

What he does then is to take my two hands in his and hold them, looking into my face intently, searching me. The touch of his hands is the same as it was when we were young, it brings back the past and at first all the old electricity seems to flow out of him and into me, and the tears that pricked into my eyes downstairs when I thought he might be dying come flooding back. And then the next moment there’s a flood of resentment too, because he hasn’t asked me any questions about myself, or what’s become of me: how many children I’ve got, who my husband is, what I do for a living. Isn’t he even in the least interested? Why must the world of real things always be relegated to second place, as if it was a lesser order, as if everything abstract was higher and more meaningful? I’m seized by the impulse to force Valentine into relation with my real life. I’m on the brink of telling him my children’s names and their dates of birth, to see whether he notices anything. But just then we’re interrupted by the commotion of the supermarket delivery arriving downstairs and Hilda’s voice raised imperiously, directing operations.

— Oh, it’s spider-woman, Valentine says, dropping my hands. — Here she goes.

— I think she was worried they might not turn up.

— You don’t know what she’s like. She’s aiming to stop me finishing the book. She blocks it. Her spirit blocks it. She crouches down there in the shape of a black spider. I sometimes imagine that she isn’t really my mother, she’s been taken over by a demonic force. I can’t write if I have to think about her.

I’m frightened now. I calm down because I’m frightened.

I think I ought to go.

I don’t know if he’s being funny or not. Perhaps he’s just exaggerating his paranoia, sending his craziness up for my benefit in the same deadpan way he used to do when we were teenagers. But in any case I stand up and make excuses, pretending I have an appointment to get to. Valentine doesn’t protest, and when I say something stupid and false about how we ought to keep in touch, he just smiles the funny remote smile he used to use against my parents, as if he could hardly hear them when they spoke to him. I don’t kiss him in farewell, I don’t touch him again; something in the way he stands apart from me forbids it.

Downstairs in the hall the front door is wide open and there are plastic trays of groceries on the floor, milk and fruit and sliced bread, lots of ready-meals. I can hear Hilda in the kitchen, but I don’t stop to say goodbye to her. And I don’t wait for the bus, I walk into town, all the way across the Downs. I’m so relieved, on my way back, that I didn’t get carried away and tell Valentine about Luke. I won’t say anything to anyone about this visit, I decide, not even to Madeleine. Valentine is a crazy irrelevance, he’s pitiable and ridiculous. (I know that’s what Mac would think if he ever met him.) I try to conceive of him with detached kindness and sympathy, as if he were one of the service users at the Gatehouse. But my connection with him feels like a liability, it feels loose inside me, a door swinging open on to danger.

On the train going home, I can’t concentrate on my book. The carriage is crowded and my legs ache after my walk across the Downs, the glare of the low sun is in my eyes. I wish I’d upgraded to first class as Mac is always telling me to do (but if I spend my money on that, it seems to turn my time at the Gatehouse into playtime, a self-indulgence). I see Mac standing on the platform at Taunton station when the train draws in: he has Ester with him and one of Ester’s friends. I’m filled with a rush of gratitude for his waiting there so faithfully and reliably; I’m moved by the idea of his kindness and solidity, my dear companion. I thought I’d calmed down but in fact all the emotion left over from my reunion with Valentine is still washing round inside me, I’m brimming with feeling. They don’t see me at first when I get down, they’re looking in the wrong direction (towards first class). The girls are in the green-striped dresses which are their school uniform. (Mac insisted on all this, the private school, the violin lessons, the tennis coaching. He’s talking already about Oxbridge. We quarrelled over it to begin with — I wanted Ester to go to the local state school, I hate the pushy privilege of the private places. And then I decided I didn’t care where she went as long as she was happy.)

The girls come running towards me as soon as they see me — of course her friend is only running because Ester is; when Ester wraps her arms round me she stands waiting awkwardly. I’m glad the friend is there because her cool, appraising stranger’s glance steadies me, so that I don’t spill over with my tenderness. My children prefer me to be dry with them, slightly withheld. Ester’s showing off, she’s full of some story which she’s garbling deliberately, about how she and Amy are doing their science project together and how they nagged at Daddy until he agreed Amy could come and stay the night so they could work on it. Ester drapes herself round Amy’s neck, Amy looks self-conscious. In the company of her friends, Ester overdoes it as if she’s studied carefully how to be a gushing schoolgirl; alone with us she’s quite different, astute and watchful, almost prim in her reserve.

Mac’s putting on weight, I think: I notice because I’ve been away from him for a few days. He could easily be mistaken for Ester’s grandfather. On the whole, though, he’s not ageing too badly: he has that tough good skin which doesn’t collapse, there’s something appraising and sensual still in the heavy-lidded eyes, and he stands so perfectly upright that people think he must have been in the military. Picking up my bags he tells me about the science project and about the ice-cream the girls have wheedled him into buying. He loves this role as the doting, bemused father. I can’t enter into his wholeheartedness, I think. I’m not wholehearted. He makes some comment about having me back from doing my good works, and then I’m irritated even though it’s only a few minutes since I got down from the train overflowing with love for him.

The train leaves and the spacious red-brick station resumes its air of being under-used and sleepy. Carrying my bags to the car, Mac asks me how it’s been in Bristol and I’m disconcerted for a moment, thinking he must know somehow about Val; then I realise that he means the weather. Mac loves to talk about the weather, updating me frequently: not as the small change of conversation, but with deep interest in an unfolding story, as if it’s eternally surprising. He follows the forecasts on television with the same responsible seriousness as he follows the news; although he’s retired he hasn’t given up his old pattern of attending to the world as if real things depended on his being accurately informed.

— Dull here, he says. — A lot of cloud over the estuary. Rained a couple of times, but nothing much. They’re saying it may brighten up tomorrow.

I can’t believe he never notices my lack of enthusiasm for these reports.

— I’ve no idea, I lie. — I was indoors all day. (Actually I put my face up into a bitter squall of rain, on my way home across the Downs.)

— Give me the car keys, I say. — Let me drive.

Mac doesn’t like driving through the country roads at twilight, but I feel better as soon as I’m behind the steering wheel. We get out of the town and I take the back route, though there’s always a risk of getting stuck behind farm vehicles: the road winds through apple orchards to begin with, then up between the hills. Under a low ceiling of blue-grey cloud a strip of paler light is stretched along the horizon like a ribbon of creamy satin. Birds seem to start up, as I squeeze round the narrow corners between the hedgerows, from under the very wheels of the car. I imagine Valentine reading absorbedly in his room, like a dedicated St Jerome in his cell in a medieval painting. Mac is giving me a detailed report, as he always does, on all the things he’s achieved while I’ve been away — he’s bought straw to put on the shrubs in case it’s a hard winter, he’s cleaned out the shower head, he’s made his special bolognese sauce with chicken livers, to go with the pasta tonight. (I wonder whether Amy will like chicken livers.) The girls are chattering in the back seat: Ester is courting Amy, fussing over her excitedly, holding on to Amy’s hand in her lap.

— I want to show you everything, Ester says. — You can hold the guinea pigs, I’ll show you my secret den. You can read my diary if you want to. You can find out all about me.

Amy is not ready to commit herself.

I know Mac is listening and smiling in the seat beside me, tense with protective love for Ester, fearing in case she gives herself away too easily. Some dark shape — a cat, or a fox — flows across the road for an instant ahead of us, then disappears into the hedge. I switch on the headlights and the car seems to leap forward into the night.