Clever Girl

3

MY STEPFATHER WASN’T A BIG MAN, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety black brows, a sensual mouth and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I ever touched it, though sometimes out of curiosity I wanted to). His face was one of those where the features seem compacted as if under pressure inside a frame. He was energetic, intelligent, diligent, faithful — a stroke of luck for my mother, a lightning bolt of luck, illuminating her grinding, narrow future and transforming it. They’d met at work, at the Board Mill where the packets for Wills cigarettes were made; he was the manager of cost accounting. It was a real love match, much more than she could have hoped for, past her first youth and with a half-grown daughter tagged on as part of the package.

If I knew him now as he was then, what would I think of him? I can imagine watching him, restless in a group of his friends, jumping up to buy them drinks, fetching extra chairs: he is a charming man, they like him. He is eagerly indignant, as they are, over money, hierarchy, immigration, discipline. He doesn’t like the dirty jokes but only shakes his head, disapproving, smiling. No doubt one or two of his older colleagues are in the Masons, which he views with wary amusement until he’s invited to join himself, a few years later. All the time, it’s as if he’s preoccupied with some inward effort which he thinks no one else sees — an effort of decency, of fitting in. There is a little flame burning in him, in spite of himself, lighting up his expression and his movements. His judgement — not of abstractions like immigration and taxes, but knowing how to hold himself, when to be still — is unexpectedly delicate and true. I can see it now, from this distance.

We moved from Kingsdown into Stoke Bishop: respectable, sleepy, leafy. Our house was in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove, carved out by a developer where there had once been a little wood among the rows of houses from the 1930s. Mum had promised me a bedroom of my own and I was looking forward to something pretty and pink. I had thought that perhaps this good luck of possessions was what you could get in exchange for the other changes you didn’t want. I calculated that I might get a horse, too, and jodhpurs and a hard hat of my own — I had only ever rented my hat from the stables. (I did get the jodhpurs and the hat, eventually.)

But when we drew up outside the new house in Gerry’s car, minutes before the removal van arrived, it wasn’t what I had bargained for. The house was so new it was raw. There were still labels stuck across the glass in the windows, so that it seemed to stare with lifeless eyes at a ruined landscape of red clay. The paving and the wood of the fence palings were stained red and filthy. Although there were people already living in the finished houses to one side up the Grove, in the other direction there were only half-built shells in the mud; monstrous machines snoozed among piles of breeze blocks and timber, bags of cement. We sat on in the car for a few moments after the engine died, and I thought Mum and Gerry must be thinking what I was thinking: that it was too bleak and ugly to bear, that we would have to give up and go home.

But they weren’t.

Mum must have been drinking in the newness in deep draughts.

How could she not want to get away from Mrs Walsh and Clive, and the old woman in the Victorian dress, and the broken windows? (And Nana, and her childhood past, and her failed marriage?) She tied her hair in a scarf and Gerry rolled up his sleeves; unpacking, directing the removal men, they made a team. Mum boiled water and unpacked a bucket and a tub of Vim, then she began washing out the red mud. Gerry helped carry things in and made sure every item went into the room it was labelled for. Though he wasn’t big, he was strong, and he always got on well with men who worked for him. Mum and I hadn’t brought much with us from the flat, most of the furniture in the van was Gerry’s. (He had been married before — until his first wife ‘ran off’, I found out later — so I suppose that these were things he’d bought with her.) — It’ll do for the time being, my mother said about this furniture warningly, as if she had plans. Her plans were a flirtation between them, abrasive and teasing — her female conspiracy (shopping) against his male suspicion and resignation.

— Don’t get under our feet, she said to me. — Why don’t you go out and play?

— Couldn’t you find her something useful to do? said Gerry.

— You don’t know Stella.

This was the first time I’d heard that I wasn’t useful. She’d never asked me to be useful, had she? Anyway I was glad, I didn’t want to help. My new bedroom was an empty cell smelling coldly of cement, not adapted to my shape or anyone’s. I wanted my old window back, surveying the familiar intricate wilderness — gardens overgrown with brambles, tottering garages, the tracery of fire escapes on the backs of houses, an old Wolseley up on bricks. Our new garden, which my new window overlooked in blind indifference, was only a rectangle of red clay, marked off with fence posts and wire from the clay rectangles belonging to the other houses.

I wandered out into it, taking my doll. (— Aren’t you too old for dolls? Gerry had asked already.) At the far end of our rectangle were the stumps of two huge trees cut down to make way for the new development. I gravitated towards these stumps as the only feature breaking up the new-made symmetry. Under my sandals the ridges and troughs of hardened clay were unforgiving. From the base of the tree stump little feelers of new growth were pushing up in doomed hope, waving their flags of leaves; sticky resin oozed from crevices on the cut surface. Even the sky out here — thinly clouded and tinged with lemon where the sun strained to break through — seemed blanched and excessively empty. Once, I supposed, its emptiness would have been full of tree. Carefully I sat on the stump, not wanting to get resin on my shorts; I put my doll beside me. Because she was jointed at the pelvis but not at the knee, she had to have her legs stretched out in front of her in a wide V. She was wearing a blue and white ski suit I had knitted, with Nana’s help. (Even when things went dark after her stroke, Nana knitted expertly as ever, and still won at cards.)

A girl came out from the back of the house next door, picking her way easily across the red clay. For a while she and I were intensely mutually aware without seeming to notice each other, behind the convenient fiction of the fence wire. When we outgrew that pretence she stepped across it and approached my stump.

— Hello, she said. — Have you moved in next door?

— It’s you who’s next door to us, I said logically. — Counting from here.

She didn’t notice that I’d corrected her perspective.

— Oh good. We can be friends. I hoped there’d be a girl.

Her threshold for friendship wasn’t exacting, then. I didn’t have high hopes of her: she seemed unsubtle and I was a wary, reluctant friend. At least because she was eager, it was easy for me to withhold my approval. She was pretty: breathy and bouncing, with round eyes like a puppy’s, a mass of fuzzy, fair hair, and a tummy that strained against her tight stretch-nylon dress. I liked her name, which was Madeleine. She picked up my doll and began to walk her in silly, jouncing steps around the stump, see-sawing her legs; I snatched her back. My belief in my dolls at that point was in a delicate balance. I knew that they were inert plastic and could be tumbled without consequences upside-down and half naked in the toy-box. At the same time, I seemed to feel the complex sensibility of each one as if it existed both in my mind and quite outside me. This doll — her name was Teenager — was stiffly humourless; my teddy bear on the other hand was capable of a tolerant irony. Teenager was outraged by Madeleine’s travesty of real play.

— I suppose these were the beeches, I said, to distract Madeleine’s attention.

She was blank. — What were what?

— These trees. The road is called Beech Grove. A beech is a kind of tree.

— What trees?

She was looking around as if she might have missed them. I explained that I meant the stump I was sitting on and the one next to it. I pointed out that there was a stump too at the end of her garden, and others all along behind the row of houses. — There must have been a little wood. A grove. That’s what a grove is.

My relationship to her began to take on an instructional form that was not unsatisfying. Madeleine looked down at the stump with dawning comprehension. — Oh, is that a tree? she said.

— What did you think it was?

— I didn’t think about it really. I s’pose I just thought they were part of the ground. Like rocks or something.

Her oblivion seemed so extreme that it might be disingenuous. This was Madeleine’s performance — eyes so wide open that she seemed to be finding her own obliviousness as amusing as you ever could. You never got to the bottom of what she actually knew, or didn’t know.

— They shouldn’t have chopped down a grove of beech trees, I said sternly, improvising. — It’s unlucky.

— Why?

— Because they were sacred. In the olden days, people worshipped them.

She thought about this. — What d’you mean, worshipped?

— Prayed to them. Believed that they were sacred — you know, like God.

— God?

Perhaps she’d never noticed who she was praying to at school. I stood up carefully, respectfully from the stump. — I hope the gods aren’t angry.

— Is it alive now? Madeleine asked warily.

— Kind of, in a way.

I showed her where the tree was feebly sprouting. — It’s still trying to grow.

— Ooh, I don’t like it, she squealed, backing off in a pantomime of shuddering.

She looked like the kind of girl who would join in when there was squealing over anything: blood, wasps, veins in school-dinner liver — although she wouldn’t quite mean it, would just be enjoying the noise and distraction. She was too robust to be properly squeamish.

— You’d better not say you don’t like them, I said. — They might hear.

A gleam of inspiration pierced her vagueness. Taking me by surprise, she dropped to her knees on the clay, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands together. — For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, she gabbled in the prescribed drone. — In the name of the ferrership of the spirit. (She meant fellowship.) Oh holy tree. Who art very nice; and we’re sorry that they’ve cut you down.

I knew that this was mostly for my benefit. Nonetheless, I glanced involuntarily upward. A few fat drops of rain fell without warning or follow-through, darkening spots on the dried clay.

— See? said Madeleine. — It doesn’t mind.

That evening my mother boiled eggs and warmed beans on a primus; our gas stove wasn’t connected yet. We buttered sliced bread straight from the bag and had the milk bottle on the table.

— Isn’t this an adventure? she said excitedly.

I was suspicious of something new in her face: not romance, exactly (she was never soft), but as if a force had filled her out, carrying her forward in exhilaration. She must have been just waiting to be married, I realised. I tried intently to imagine my father (missing, presumed dead) taking up the space that Gerry was filling now; but my picture of my father was too vague, Gerry was too assertive. He was sweaty, naturally, after the work he’d done; his hair was wet because he’d doused his head under the tap in the bathroom. His bodily presence intruded every way I turned, making the new house seem crowded when I ought to have felt its succession of spaces flowering ahead of me, after the two rooms that Mum and I had shared since I could remember. As twilight thickened outside, the house’s shell seemed too pervious, swelling with the electric light as if it were as insubstantial as the canvas tents at school camp.

Mum and Gerry discussed with deep interest the economics of using the immersion heater. After he’d dried each cup and plate he held it up to the light to inspect it. He complained that when I washed up I splashed water on the floor and used too much squeegee. Already I didn’t like living with him, and it had only been a matter of hours. I retreated to my cell-bedroom where at least now a bed was installed — though it wasn’t the old double bed that I’d slept in since I outgrew my cot. That bed had never been ours, apparently; it had belonged to the old flat. On this new narrow one was a pile of ironed candy-stripe sheets. With a martyred consciousness — where did they think I was? why didn’t they wonder? — I tucked them inexpertly over the mattress, then climbed between them in my knickers and vest. I heard my mother and Gerry talking downstairs. Though I couldn’t make out their words, I knew that they were deciding with wholehearted adult seriousness where to put each piece of furniture. The rumble of their dialogue was lulling, melancholy, remote. Then someone was running a bath; unfamiliar pipes groaned and eased too near at hand. There were no curtains at my window yet. In the dark I missed the view from my old room intensely, and I didn’t want to think about the non-trees I had conjured into being.

We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends over that summer — we had nothing else to do. During the holidays in the past, when Mum went to work I was left at Nana’s or at Auntie Jean’s. Now (Nana wasn’t capable any longer and Gerry didn’t like Jean) I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine had someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us; she sometimes took us swimming. I think she felt sorry for me, left all alone, but actually I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguins in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey: for a tubby girl she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to stop me beginning with chocolate and finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle, wiping its creamy moustache on to my sleeve; I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.

I moved around the new house in the adults’ absence as if I were taking soundings. Sometimes Madeleine and I were experimentally raucous, clattering and screaming, flying down the stairs two or three at a time. The house’s air, one moment after we’d shattered it, was blandly restored. I picked up ornaments, poked in the miscellany of small things that had been put inside them for safe keeping, opened drawers. I had no criteria of taste by which to judge what was there (wood veneer, streamlined forms, tapering peg-legs, fitted carpets, a television inside a cabinet with doors, curtains with a print of autumn leaves); and so I felt the impact of the rooms purely, their bright brisk statement, their light and order which aspired to weightlessness and dustlessness.

Gerry’s desk drawers were boring, full of papers having to do with dull mysteries: mortgages and insurance. With a kitchen knife I made a tiny nick in the wood at the back of the kneehole in the desk, near the floor. I was filled with trepidation next time he sat down to do the accounts and pay the bills, but he never noticed — nor when I added new nicks in the years afterwards, every time I was most incandescently angry with him. He did notice that I had been through his drawers, and also that we had bounced on the sofa, rucking the covers and denting the cushions. And although I had washed up after my sugar-messes, like forensic scientists he and Mum somehow discovered traces of my cooking stuck around the bottom of the pan.

— She’s got to learn, Gerry said. — She’s not a baby any longer.

I was clumsy, easily distracted, I was ‘always in a dream’. Gerry dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard. I wasn’t pretty or charming or malleable. I went around with a suffering face. I read my book with my fingers in my ears. I wouldn’t laugh at Gerry’s jokes. I lost my door key or I went out with Madeleine leaving the back door unlocked. I left the hot tap running in the bathroom, then I forgot my cardigan at the swimming pool. Gerry rarely lost his temper with me; not in that early time. He never, ever hit me.

And of course days passed, even weeks sometimes, when he and I weren’t in any sort of outright conflict. Sometimes we were even all right together. Once, when he and Mum both had time off work, we went out for the day to Brean Down and Gerry and I climbed the dunes in our flip-flops, sliding back one step for every two we took on the shifting sand; he held out his hand to me and pulled me up after him. His hands were brown and strong with neat-trimmed nails as thick as horn. He always wore a watch with one of those expanding metal bands (I worried that it must catch in the curling black hairs on his arm), and a wedding ring, which men didn’t often do in those days. Mum stood below with her hair escaping from her headscarf, whipping across her face in the wind, calling out to us to be careful, that the dunes were treacherous, we could be buried alive. And Gerry and I laughed together.

When I was in trouble, however, he sat opposite me in the lounge, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his forehead wrinkled: I felt the whole force of his personality bent upon me — thwarted, concentrated, blinkered. (— You’ll find nothing’s handed to you on a plate, he said. — It’s no good thinking you can stay wrapped up in your own little world. Do you have any idea how hard your mother has to work, to earn the money to buy you food and clothes?) In a reasonable voice he communicated his warnings about the meanness at the heart of things, which he understood and I, in my childishness, was refusing to acknowledge.

No doubt he really thought it was his duty, in my father’s place, to teach me to adapt to the way things were. The trouble was, I hardly knew him. I didn’t exactly argue with him. I sometimes said, ‘I didn’t mean to’ in a flippant voice, or denied things it was obvious I had done. If he asked me why I’d done them I said I didn’t know. I put my hands under my thighs on the chair, swung my legs and looked off into the corners of the room; my expression was a slippery mask clamped on my face. All my effort was used to keep my mouth curved upward in a grimacing smile, which I knew was my best weapon because it made Gerry squeeze his fists and raise his voice.

Then Mum would appear from the kitchen. — That’s enough, she would say, tactfully as if she was saying it to me. — Go up to your room, Stella.

Tugging me backward and forward between them, she and Gerry expressed the tension in their new life together. He wanted his new wife to himself; he hadn’t reckoned on finding me his rival for her attentions. Mum, with her quick scepticism, must have seen how he deceived himself, dissimulating his resentment, pretending to be impartial. She must have remonstrated with him over how relentlessly he came in pursuit of me, though it was part of their code that she would never openly take my side against him. (And although I was wounded by his taking her away from me, I also dreaded catching sight of any rift between them.)

Let’s be clear — our fight was mutual. I was set against Gerry just as he was against me. Only I was a child, so he had power over me. That’s all tyranny is: it’s not in a personality, it’s in a set of circumstances. It’s being trapped with your enemy in a limited space — a country, or a family — where the balance of power between you is unequal, and the weaker one has no recourse.

Because the tree cult began in the shapeless days of summer, there was no drudging sanity of school at first to counteract its power. I came up with the idea of kissing the stumps and leaving offerings among the roots or pressed into the cracks — salt, currants, sherbet. We smeared the resin on our foreheads. (— You’re filthy, my mother said when she got home. — Go and wash your face.) The three stumps in our gardens grew distinctive personalities and we named them (Iskarion, Vedar, Mori). They were jealous, capricious, closely informed about our daily lives. More awesome and less easy to propitiate were the nameless stumps we had no access to, in other gardens. Madeleine used to dab the resin on her tongue and then groan and double up, clutching her stomach, making a great fuss over how it had poisoned her. It was her idea that we should cut ourselves and rub our blood into the bark.

The ritual half slaked a thirst I hadn’t known I had. I’d never been touched by religion at school, though we’d traced St Paul’s journeys in our scripture books and coloured in donkeys for Palm Sunday. Mum and Nana had only ever referred to the church suspiciously; it was good for children but also a conspiracy of certain social types, thinking themselves superior. I pushed myself, trying to receive intimations of the sacred trees’ living existence; occasionally, alone, I could fall into an ecstasy of belief. At other times I watched myself, sceptical of the authenticity of my transports. Sometimes, after the sessions with Madeleine, I was visited by a kind of Protestant disgust at our excesses; the more we thrilled and overdid it, the more it was only a game. For a couple of days I wouldn’t play, no matter how much Madeleine pouted and sulked. Then — once on a Sunday evening in my bath when late sunlight, reflected off the bathwater, made restless patterns on the ceiling — I’d be visited by the balm of a vision of great trees, at the very moment when I least thought of asking for it.

At the end of the summer, when Madeleine and I went back to our different schools, the cult cooled down but didn’t die. Out of superstitious habit we still left offerings at the stumps for good luck, and carried bits of bark around in our pockets, fingering them out of the teachers’ sight.

Gerry insisted I should sit the entrance exam for the direct-grant secondary schools. I got good marks in class and always had my head stuck in a book. Anyway, not many children in Stoke Bishop went to the local comprehensive. Madeleine was taking the exam, too — though she didn’t have to do so well in it, because her parents could pay. I needed a scholarship place. I sat the exam. I didn’t care how I did, I wasn’t frightened of it: school up to that point had left me unscathed. I didn’t make the connection that Gerry did between the power of what I read in books and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.

Consulting no one, I had promoted myself at our local library to adult books — which meant climbing three steps, covered in yellow lino, into the upper portion of the brick building with its sensuous hush and beamed Arts and Crafts ceiling. I didn’t know where to begin; I was drawn to complete works in uniform bindings because I thought they would be series like the ones I had loved in the children’s section: Anne of Green Gables and The Naughtiest Girl in the School. Often I hardly knew what was happening in the novels I fell upon by chance (Compton Mackenzie, Faulkner, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen), but I read absorbedly nonetheless, half disappointed, half revelling in the texture of these worlds jumbling in my ignorance: servants, telegrams, cavalry, race, guilt, dressing for dinner (what time was dinner? and were they still in their pyjamas?) — and elliptical conversations unlike any I’d ever heard, signifying things I could only guess at. I gave up on some, but the books were an initiation. I began piecing their worlds together in my comprehension.

I got a scholarship for the Girls’ High School (and Madeleine got in too, without the scholarship). Mum took me out to buy me a briefcase and we had lunch in British Home Stores. She was proud that I had proved myself at least good for something. Gerry said, — She’ll have a lot more to live up to, now.

I can’t remember how I found out that Gerry was brought up in the Homes — I suppose Mum must have told me. He didn’t speak to me about it until long afterwards. (At the time he only said, — Not everyone has your opportunities.) The Homes was an orphanage, a vast neoclassical grey stone building set back from a main road, its front implacable as a hospital or a prison. We said at junior school that the children who came from there smelled of wee and wore one another’s clothes. They didn’t have real mothers, only aunties.

This knowledge I had of Gerry lodged in me like a stone. It didn’t make me like him any better. It seemed an extra twist to how arbitrarily he and I were fastened together: I had to bear the burden of his childhood sorrows too. He had done heroically well, working his way up at the Board Mill, overcoming the handicap of his beginnings (his mother hadn’t been ‘able to look after him’). I was determined not to care. My own selfishness seemed to eat me up; I worked at being oblivious of all my advantages. I ran away from home and went to Nana’s. (‘Your mother’s been out of her mind with worry.’) Out at the stumps with Madeleine, I smoked cigarettes and threw up. I told my mother I was only happy at the stables. Madeleine came riding with me, bouncing unconvincingly on Boy, her smile uneasy, double chin squeezed in the too-tight strap of the brand-new hard hat Pam had bought her. She held her nose and pretended to retch when the ponies dropped their dung.

I hated the High School. Madeleine and I hated it together, though differently. Her face, wiped clear of guile, goaded one or two of the more savage teachers who mistook her blankness for insolence. At first it seemed that I had the gift of invisibility. I sank back into the middle of the range of achievement. I kept my mouth shut in class and out of it. I absorbed obsessively the intricate system of their prohibitions, so as not to attract attention by transgressing — no fewer than five lace-holes in our outdoor shoes, no green ink, all textbooks to be covered in brown paper, girls not to use the toilet in twos (in junior school we had often crowded three or four into the little cubicles, to gossip). By the end of the first week I knew that I’d found my way, through some terrible error, into enemy territory where I must as a matter of life or death keep my true self concealed. The school was a mill whose purpose was to grind you into its product. Every subject shrank to fit inside its exam questions; even — especially — the books we read in English lessons. We were supposed to be grateful, having been selected for this grinding; and most of the girls were grateful. Madeleine and I didn’t fit in. Our tree cult revived and garnered new passionate power through being driven into opposition — with our bark fragments in our pockets we were like Catholic recusants fingering hidden rosaries, and we had a code of words and signs to communicate our refusal and our mockery.

Meanwhile my mother began wearing looser dresses. It wasn’t the fashion for parents to explain themselves to their children. Mum never told me she was pregnant; only hinted at a significant change coming. I was slow to the point of stupidity in picking up her suggestions. Why was she putting her feet up every evening after supper, while Gerry and I did the dishes in competitive silence? Some conspiracy surrounded her, which I recoiled from as if I guessed it had humiliation in it for me. One Saturday morning, watching from my bedroom window while she hung out washing on the metal clothes tree in the garden (turfed at least by this time, if not yet the little paradise of planting it later became under Gerry’s green-fingered stewardship), I saw what I had not allowed myself to see: the wet sheets billowed like fat sails filled with the wind, and she billowed too. Ducking out of sight behind my window, so that she wouldn’t know I knew, I crouched around my discovery in the tight space between the bed leg and the dolls’ cot, with my back to the pink-sprigged wallpaper I had chosen and Gerry had cut and pasted and put up. (I picked at the edges of this paper sometimes, where he wouldn’t notice it, when I was in bed at night; sometimes I spat into the gap beside the bed and let my saliva trickle down the wall.)

My mother had betrayed herself, pretending to be complete and then letting this invasion inside her body as if she was not herself but any other woman. I’d never considered any relationship between my own mother and the not-quite-interesting mystery of prams and bibs and bottles. She was too sensible, too old, I had always thought. She had never even seemed to like babies, or made any fuss over them. Except me. Once upon a time she must have changed nappies and heated bottles of milk for me, fussed over me. But that was a lifetime ago.

My mother had to go into hospital for the last weeks of her pregnancy, because her blood pressure was too high. Gerry and I were left in a tense proximity at home. He made my tea when he came in from work, a procedure we both found painful. He tied Mum’s apron over his shirt and suit trousers, then with an air of weary duty set about producing fish fingers, baked beans, bacon, sausages, pork chops, chips. For a man of that era he really wasn’t bad at it. In fact, he may have been a better cook than my mother was — she was pretty awful. Only he didn’t know the little foibles of my likes and dislikes the way she did. I ate everything he put in front of me. I think I was afraid of him, alone in the house without her — afraid at least of his contempt. But I didn’t eat it enthusiastically. I cut every piece of toast, or potato, or sausage laboriously into minute pieces before I even tasted them. Then one by one I swallowed these pieces, trying not to chew, washing them down with mouthfuls from my glass of water, asking for more water frequently. Though he couldn’t have known it, I was doing my best.

I saw that I put him off his own dinner (which he ate with the apron still on).

— Just eat it, for goodness’ sake, he said. — Chew it up.

He sat at an angle, hunched around his plate, so that he didn’t have to watch me. After tea, he made me do my homework on the dining-room table. We never used the dining room to eat in except at Christmas or on the rare occasions that we had guests, so it was chilly and transitional: papered olive-green, with doors at either end and a serving hatch, African violets on the windowsill, a memory of stale gravy in the air. Letters and paperwork and Mum’s sewing washed up on the repro rosewood dining table, among the place mats with scenes from old-world English villages. Miserably I cleared myself a space. I had to spread newspaper in case I made marks on the polished surface.

After long days of lessons, we were given two or three hours of homework every night. For most of that first year at the High School I aimed for average marks that would not draw anyone’s attention. I wasn’t consciously holding back — it hadn’t yet occurred to me to desire praise, prizes, distinctions. In science and maths I struggled anyway. The physics teacher was merciless. Handsome, tall, unmarried, with a rope of white hair twisted round her temples, she belonged to the generation of women who had sacrificed everything for their education. We were supposed to learn the principles of physics not by rote but through problem-solving. One evening I was wrestling with a question about acceleration: the hare catching up with the tortoise in a race. Actual tears splashed on to the page, blotting the blue ink of my workings; my mind ached with the effort. At junior school I had been good at problems: ‘If Harry and Dick together weigh nine stone four pounds, Dick and Tom together weigh eight stone twelve pounds…’, and so on — but those problems had been for beginners, I saw now. I urged my mind to take the intuitive leap into comprehension, but again and again it baulked. Gerry looked in on me, bringing the cup of milky, sugary, instant coffee my mother usually brought. He really was trying hard.

— What’s the matter? Are you stuck?

Our voices startled us, alone in the house without Mum — they seemed to break a silence locked like rusting machinery. I knew how I must look to him, slumped in defeat at the table, pasty-faced with worry. The teacher’s scorn made no distinction between those who tried and failed and those who didn’t try. I had no pride where my school work was concerned — it occurred to me that Gerry might be able to help me. He worked with numbers all day in the office; I took it for granted he would understand the problem.

— So long as it isn’t French, he said cheerfully enough, and pulled up a chair beside me, striped shirtsleeves rolled businesslike up to the elbow. He always radiated a clean heat, from those strenuous sessions in the bathroom which left the walls dripping and the mirrors cloudy. I explained that the hare was sleeping at a location twelve hundred metres from the finish line; the tortoise passed him at a steady speed of five centimetres per second. Six and a half hours later, the hare woke up. All of these elements by now had attained a hallucinatory meaninglessness in my head.

Gerry read the problem over to himself, biting my pen, frowning down at the worn-soft, scrambled page of my homework book. What minimum acceleration (assumed constant) must the hare have in order to cross the finish line first? He worked out easily in his head how long it would take for the tortoise to get there; then went over and over the other elements, sketching a little diagram for himself, the hare’s trajectory cutting across the tortoise’s just before the finish line. I saw that he wanted it to be like one of the Dick and Harry problems, giving way to common sense or to a trick of thought.

— How do we calculate acceleration? he asked. — Haven’t they taught you how? Have you done other problems like this one?

I found in the back of my book a formula that the teacher had given us, expressing D in terms of O, V, T and A, but I didn’t even know what those letters stood for. Gerry thought that perhaps D was distance, but we already knew the distance. His hand began to leave sweat marks on the page as mine had. He wondered just when the hare needed to pass the tortoise in order to get to the finish line ahead of it; how tiny might the difference between them be? His efforts snagged on this doubt, building up behind it. — You have to concentrate better in class, he said. — She must have shown you how to do this. Can’t you remember?

I shrugged, recoiling. I should have known that I would be to blame.

— Physics is boring.

He tried again, stating the elements of the problem over in a reasonable, steadying voice. All the time, he must have been consumed with his real worries about my mother’s condition and what lay ahead for them; about his responsibility for me.

— Write me a note, I said. — Tell the teacher I was ill.

— Don’t be silly. All you need to do is to ask her to explain it to you.

— You don’t understand what she’s like! I wailed.

And then somehow we upset my coffee cup. It really wasn’t clear to me which one of us did it: I may have thrown out my hand rhetorically; he may have reached for a pencil without looking. Hot, milky, sugary coffee flooded everywhere, soaking instantly through the layers of newspaper, slewing into our laps, pooling on the precious polished surface of the table. We both threw ourselves backwards. I snatched up my homework book — though not before a few splashes dashed across the page, elegant illustrations of the physics of liquid form. (The teacher, the following week, would ring these splashes in red biro, writing ‘Disgusting & slovenly presentation’ — but by then I didn’t care.) Gerry grabbed at a heap of bills, and Mum’s sewing — she was making things for the new baby. Too late; coffee stains had seeped already into the cut-out pieces of the little gingham romper suit.

— Stella! You idiot! he yelled, shoving me roughly out of the way of the coffee dripping on to the carpet, and on to my fawn socks.

I stumbled backwards, genuinely confused. — Was it my fault?

Gerry ran to fetch tea towels from the kitchen to soak up the coffee, then filled a bucket with soapy water and disinfectant. He set to work systematically, mopping and rubbing and wiping just as my mother would have done, changing the water every so often. Spilt milk was one of the things Mum and Gerry dreaded above all else; if you failed to eradicate every trace, the smell as it soured came back to haunt you. While he wiped, I stood frowning at my homework.

— What are we going to do with that skirt? Gerry said, his voice embittered, doomsday-flat. — You’d better take it off. If I wash it out, it’ll never be dry for tomorrow. I’ll try to leach the worst of the coffee out of it without soaking it. At least you’ve got a clean shirt I can iron.

I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happened; I could see all the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light. — Look, I said, exulting. — D is distance. A must be acceleration. We need to rearrange the equation so that A is by itself on one side of the equals sign. OV must be original velocity, which is nought — the hare’s asleep — so that cancels out. Times both sides by two, divide by time squared. Acceleration equals two times distance over time squared.

He didn’t even answer; naturally enough, at that moment he didn’t much care about my physics homework. He was too busy trying to sop spilt coffee from the carpet while his sulky stepdaughter stood in her knickers, not lifting a finger to help him.

Or he hated his failure to know more than I did, be cleverer than I was.

That was how I got to know that I was clever. When I cleaned my teeth that night in the bathroom, my face was different in the mirror: as if a light had gone on behind my eyes, or an inner eye had been strained open. Every inch of my skin, every pore, every fixture in the bathroom was accessible to my vision pressing remorselessly onward, devouring the world’s substance, seeing through it. I could see my own face as if it wasn’t mine. I pressed my nose to the mirror, baring my teeth at myself, misting the glass with breath. At first this cleverness was like a sensation of divinity; then after a while it ate itself and I couldn’t turn the mind-light off, couldn’t stop thinking through everything, couldn’t sleep. I saw Gerry — and my mother, and my school — all as if they were tiny, in the remote distance. I believed that if I wanted to I could solve all the problems in the physics teacher’s book. When eventually sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees, I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once.