Clever Girl

5

MRS TAPPER SAVED ME. I OUGHT to be grateful to her. We met when I was sitting on a park bench on Brandon Hill and Lukie was asleep in his pram: I was eighteen and he was twelve weeks old. I’d been sitting there too long. It was late afternoon on an autumn day in 1974 and the wind was blowing dead leaves and black bits of twig down from the trees and into drifts on the wet grass littered with worm casts; the bench’s wooden slats were cold as metal against the underside of my thighs, my feet were numb in thin plimsolls, I was trying to keep my hands warm in my pockets. From time to time I reached out to push the pram back and forward if I thought I heard Lukie waking up. The chrome pram handle too was freezing cold — but he was snug inside in his cocoon of nappy and babygro suit and bonnet and bootees and blankets. I’d tested to make sure he was warm enough, pushing my own hand in there between the sheets, down beside his hot little body, damp and urgent in sleep. I wished that I could sleep, and be tucked up in a cocoon of blankets and rocked to and fro, and not have to think about anything except myself.

I did love him.

I’d loved him from the moment he arrived in that awful chaos in the foyer of the maternity hospital — they had to cut my knickers off, he came so quickly. Apparently this happens with young mothers. I still had my shoes on when they handed him to me to hold; the maternity dress my Auntie Andy had bought me, when I couldn’t fit into my jeans any longer, was a bloody rag wrapped up somewhere around my waist, it had to be thrown out (not that I cared — I didn’t need maternity dresses, I was never, ever, going to go through that again). Lukie gazed into my eyes when they gave him to me with such a searching, surmising, reasonable, open look: surprised but not dismayed to find himself in existence. Now that I know my son Luke as an adult I can say that the whole of him was there in that first look, everything he’s ever done and been began from that. (My other son’s so different, so complicated.)

— My God, my mother had said as soon as she leaned over Lukie (not that soon — she didn’t come to see him for weeks after he was born, we were by no means reconciled by then). — He’s the spit of your father.

Now why did she say that? When for so many years we’d never mentioned my father. She was pushing the baby away, I knew it — she didn’t want it connected to her. Needless to say she hadn’t wanted me to have a baby. Never mind all the other stuff, about shame, and loss of face, and people asking ‘How’s Stella getting on at school?’ and my tripping up on my merry road to being so superior: not only that, but it was only a few years since my mother had her own second baby, she was bored with the whole fuss and the puking and crying, no cute little grandson was going to win her round. She had wanted me to triumph and prove something to my stepfather, and I had made a fool of myself instead. Her look at me was hard and flattened and lustreless, it had been for months: as if she’d let go of something. Let go of me, I suppose. But she did bring me some tiny vests, and a matinee jacket she’d knitted herself (she was hopeless at knitting, too impatient, it was full of dropped stitches). And money, most of which I gave to Jean.

I was living with my Auntie Jean and I didn’t know what to do.

Rock the pram, rock the pram. Mix up the baby’s bottles of formula, sterilise the bottles. Change his nappy, mix up the soaking solution in a plastic bucket, rinse the dirty nappies then soak them and then put them in Jean’s twin tub, heaving the scalding nappies in clouds of urine-smelling steam in wooden tongs between the washer and the spin dryer. Wash his clothes, wash mine. Help Jean make tea. (Jean worked in the afternoons, sewing for a Jewish tailor in Stokes Croft. She was a skilled tailoress, she could cut out and make a winter coat, a man’s suit jacket and trousers.) Feed the baby, rock him. (Jean loved to give him his bottle and nurse him. She was a natural. He slept content against the handsome mountain of her bosom.) Watch telly with my cousins in the evenings. Pick the baby up from his cot when he cried in the night and rock him.

Was that it, then?

We had a back room. It was my cousin Richard’s room, he was a trainee motor mechanic and he’d had to move in to sleep with his two brothers. At first he didn’t mind. They were that kind of family: generous and spontaneous, always giving shelter to refugees from some crisis or other among their friends or relations. But after a while, naturally, Richard would have liked his room back. Also, I wasn’t quite grateful enough: this was just a flaw in my character at that time in my life, I couldn’t help seeing things bitterly, looking at everything — even kindness — with irony. Where I should have had a heart, there was a dry husk. I loved my good-looking boy cousins, how they teased their mother, and their touchy loyalty and dignity as if they were a tribe set apart; but I couldn’t quite belong to the tribe. I should have talked more and made more effort — but I suppose I was making all the efforts I had in me, just to get through every day. There were pieces of motorbike lying around on the floor of Richard’s room and sometimes in the dark when I was walking up and down with Lukie because he wouldn’t sleep I stumbled over them in my bare feet, and cut my toes and bruised my shins. That back room seemed like the end of the world, some nights.

But where else could I go? I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, go home.

Anyway, at home they did not want me.

Some nights, if Lukie had been fretting on and off for hours my Auntie Jean came in, voluminous in her nightie. — Give him to me, Stella love, she said. — I’ll have him. You get some sleep. And I was too weak to refuse her: I handed my baby over. She knew just how to hold him, to comfort him; right away I heard him calming down in her arms out of his frenzy. I longed for my bed, I crept into it and embraced my pillow like an addict, sinking down and down into oblivion. I knew that Jean would take my baby permanently if I wanted her to. I could go away and possess myself again; Luke would grow up to be part of the tribe. Not that it would be easy for her (what about her job, sewing?). She had a thing about babies, though, and she loved Lukie. I knew that he’d have a good life with her — I didn’t know what kind of life he’d have with me. (I didn’t think about Valentine. I never even mentioned his name, after the moment I learned he’d left for the US. My mother never even asked me if he was the baby’s father; if anyone did ask me I wouldn’t answer them, nobody told his parents, he never knew.)

Some nights I stood in my pyjamas in the dark at the back window, my baby son dozing against my shoulder, breathing him in: yeasty, milky, eggy, sweet. Whatever my mind was busy with in those moments, my body calmed to be in tune with his; there was still an animal match between the smell of his sweat and mine. My aunt and uncle lived in Totterdown, on a terraced house on a precipitous hill: I could see all the lights of the city spread out below me on the river plain. I’m not dead yet, I thought in the middle of the night. This is my life. It’s not nothing. And my imagination was too passionately imprinted with Luke’s miniature features, it was already too late to leave him: the pearly globes of his closed eyelids, a swathe of shiny milk-rash spots across his cheek, the wrinkling frowns that passed over his face with wind, the dark blood-colour of his lips pressed so precisely together, his tiny decisively hooked nose (making me think of the ribs of an umbrella waiting to be unfurled later).

And then Mrs Tapper found me in the park. Brandon Hill wasn’t anywhere near my cousins’, it was in a much smarter part of the city. I’d pushed the pram on and on through the afternoon, not knowing where I was heading, until my feet were sore — and Lukie had slept all that time. I first spotted Mrs Tapper walking fast along the paths beside the frost-stricken flower beds, the heels of her shoes scraping assertively. She was dressed in a beautifully cut camel-hair coat, the collar turned up round her ears and her hands pushed deep into the pockets. Her face was lifted in that remote, sardonic way she had, avoiding meeting anyone’s eye; the colour of the coat didn’t suit her because her hair and her complexion were too close to the same yellowish fawn. She was fairly tall and very thin and middle-aged (older than my mother, I guessed); powder was stuck in the shallow wrinkles on her forehead and her hair was cut to shoulder length, pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. When I thought about it afterwards, once I knew her better — Vivien, she told me to call her Vivien and sometimes I remembered — I wondered if she’d come out to walk there that day after she’d had a row with her husband. They didn’t get on very well. She wasn’t the sort of woman who found the time for walks in the park by herself — her life was packed efficiently tight with important errands and busy-ness. It may have been an exceptional afternoon for her — if I was feeling desperate, then perhaps she was too.

All the benches along the path were empty but she sat down beside me. — Do you mind? she said. She asked me sympathetically all about Lukie, she said she had two children of her own, a girl and a boy, eight and fourteen.

— It’s such a shock, isn’t it? she said. — The responsibility, descending like that all at once out of the blue. I was much older than you are but I wasn’t prepared in the least. I know I thought I’d go under with it. But you don’t go under, you know.

I opened up to Mrs Tapper as I hadn’t opened up to anyone. Perhaps I had an instinct that in her dryness and measured analysis she was a more useful model to me just then than Jean with her instinctive mothering. I told her about my mother and stepfather, and giving up school. I told her about the back bedroom at Auntie Jean’s and the motorbike parts. I even told her that the baby’s father didn’t know about him. I could tell her anything, I thought, it wouldn’t matter — I’d never see her again afterwards.

— So you’re stuck, Mrs Tapper said. — I know how that feels.

It reassured me that she wasn’t the motherly type and yet she had children: so perhaps I might manage it after all. Her long legs in sheer nylons were crossed under her coat and she was swinging one foot restlessly, the shoe dangling, as if she wanted to jump up and take off somewhere.

— Actually I’m looking for a girl, she said abruptly. — I don’t suppose it’s a job that would interest you. But I want someone to come and live in, to help with the chores and the children. I’ve got my own business, selling antiques: it takes up more and more of my time. We live in the school where my husband works. (I thought at first she must mean he was some kind of caretaker, but of course he wasn’t, he was housemaster at an expensive private school.) — You could have your own room. And I’d pay you on top of that: say, thirty pounds a week. But probably the job isn’t what you want.

Her impulsive gesture wasn’t like her; mostly she was solitary and wary of commitment. She must have felt a momentary kinship with me, with my plight. She really had been looking for a girl — but she didn’t have to take one with a baby. Afterwards, I think she partly disliked me because of the rash gesture I had drawn her into; which was a shame, because we had genuinely opened up to one another for that twenty minutes in the park. After I worked for her we never spoke like that again, intimately as equals. But that was all right too. We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love.

I said that I was interested. I yearned at the thought of a room of my own.

— You’re not a smoker, are you? Can you clean a house? And can you make cake? If you’re a housemaster’s wife the boys expect you to feed them ghastly cake, day in day out.

I said I could make cake and it was true, I could produce a passable Victoria sponge. And my mother used to pay me pocket money for cleaning; she’d been a hard taskmaster. Mrs Tapper was frowning into the pram. She was probably already half regretting her offer. — Does he sleep through the night yet?

I lied. I said he did.

She said she would need references. I got references from one of my old teachers and from my Uncle Ray, because of the summer job in the chocolate factory.

So Mrs Tapper saved me. And I did the right thing, going to work for the Tappers: but that doesn’t mean I was happy there. At that point I had given up on happiness. I used to think back sometimes on the plans that Valentine and I had made — living together in Paris on French bread and coffee and writing — and I didn’t feel nostalgic or regretful, I only felt contempt for my deluded previous self. What a fake he was! I thought. And what a fake I was! I knew now how things really were. And I was better off at Dean’s House than at Auntie Jean’s because I didn’t have to feel grateful or guilty, and my cousin Richard could have his room back. At least this was my own life now, not anybody else’s. At the end of each week Vivien Tapper gave me six five-pound notes in a buff envelope. She handed them over in a funny way with her face averted, not saying anything, as if it was vaguely shaming that this was what kept me installed in the centre of their lives; and yet she was tough when it came to her own money. I heard her on the telephone to her partner in the antiques business, quibbling over small sums, sticking to her guns.

Mr Tapper was handsome, younger than his wife, with rosy skin, tight-curling charcoal-black hair and gold-rimmed glasses; he was always joking, nothing he said was what he really meant. I saw him holding up a dessert spoon once at the dinner table, making satirical remarks to that. He taught mathematics and bowed his head from the neck without moving his shoulders as if he was wearing some kind of inhibiting corset; if he spoke to me it was in an awkward innuendo, commenting on my legs or teasing me about imaginary boyfriends. I don’t think he was flirting; he simply had no other register for communicating with girls. Mrs Tapper got him to fetch up from the cellar the highchair and cot and playpen they had used years ago for their own children. Hugo — pale and plump, acting the clown to make his friends laugh — was a pupil at the school, belonging half to the institution, half to his family. Juliet went to a nearby girls’ prep school; she was subdued and sceptical with a flat, freckled face. I never told the Tappers where I’d gone to school, they never asked; I suppose they presumed I was a failed product of one of the comprehensives. They never asked much about anything — to ask would have been prying. This suited me.

Their family quarters were the tall cold rooms on the ground floor of Dean’s, a solid Edwardian house across the road from the main school buildings and the chapel and playing fields and statue of Field Marshal Haig. Upstairs in the same house were dorms for the younger boys. Rich parents in those days paid for their sons to sleep in long rooms with bare floorboards, on narrow iron bedsteads made up with the same kind of coarse blankets I’d slept under once at my nana’s. I didn’t have to tidy the boys’ beds, they tidied their own.

I was a good worker. Mrs Tapper said so. There is a bleak kind of satisfaction to be had from working till your hands are sore, till your calves and shoulders ache and you’re heavy with exhaustion. In the mornings when I tied on my apron I felt as if I was girding myself in armour. I was consumed in the discipline of housework and I thought of my mother often — not affectionately; more in a spirit of emulation. I thought of how she cracked the sheets in the air when she was folding them off the line, how she wielded her brush with the dustpan into every recalcitrant corner, how she scrubbed the kitchen lino on her knees and bleached the cloths and shook out the dusters and washed all her delicates by hand, rinsing in three changes of clean water. Of course I couldn’t be good at everything all at once. I wasn’t much of a cook — I could make cake all right (jam sponge, chocolate sponge, coffee and walnut sponge) but at first I didn’t know how to cook chops or make a stew. It was awful when Juliet pushed what I’d dished up to the side of her plate. (Hugo ate school meals with the other boys.)

And I made stupid mistakes. For instance, I used a vacuum cleaner when the back of the plug was broken, with all the contacts exposed, and then after I’d finished vacuuming I left it plugged in at the wall where anyone could have electrocuted themselves by poking a finger in — Juliet or Hugo or any of the boys. Or even Lukie, maybe, if he’d rolled over and reached out. Mrs Tapper gave me a little lecture when she found the broken plug in its socket, smiling, her pale plucked eyebrows raised incredulously. I squirmed in shame though I didn’t let her see it, my face was stony. I apologised. I could have killed someone. It would never happen again. Another time, I put a pale wash on in the machine, not noticing Mr Tapper’s black sock left inside the drum; all Vivien’s white blouses and underwear turned grey and she was furious. But mostly she was too grateful to be a hard taskmaster, exiting out of the front door every morning, snatching her bag and car keys in a show of hurry, sometimes hanging on to her breakfast triangle of toast between her teeth while she pulled on her coat.

At least I had my own room in Dean’s to retreat to, with its own lock and key. It was on the first floor, with windows all along two sides and lozenges of green and yellow glass set in around the clear panes; very light, but very cold in winter. I think in the past this room must have been used for laundering the boys’ clothes, because there were two huge enamel Belfast sinks in there — one of which I used for bathing Lukie in the evenings — and racks for drying washing, hoisted by ropes and a pulley up to the ceiling. I kept the place neat and clean. Mum gave me a bedspread Nana had knitted of coloured squares of wool sewn together, and an oil-filled electric heater. Our room was at the opposite end of the house to the kitchen, so that when I put Lukie to sleep in his cot in the day I couldn’t hear him if he cried; but the boys listened out for him, and he slept reliably for three hours in the morning, when I got most of the heavy work done, and all evening. It was only in the middle of the night that Lukie was inconsolable. In the evenings I watched television with Juliet or read to her before she went to sleep. In all the time that we were at Dean’s House, the only books I ever read — apart from recipe books — were the ones I read to her (P. L. Travers, Noel Streatfeild). I had once thought I couldn’t get through a day without reading. Well, now I had woken up out of that dream.

I did a funny thing one morning while I was tidying: I looked up my real father’s name in the telephone directory. I’d never done it before — because my parents had married in London and I was born there, I’d assumed he stayed on after they separated. But if my mother had moved back to Bristol then why not my father too? Anyway, I found someone who had his name, living in Bedminster. The someone was a driving instructor.

Mrs Tapper paid me extra to cook and wash up for her dinner parties. I was getting better at cooking, using the recipes I found in her cordon bleu books. I served at the table and took away the plates; Mrs Tapper carried in the food as if she’d made it herself. At these parties she tried to mix up the school staff with her own friends. The antiques women were very made-up and assured, with tanned, heavy-breasted cleavage, helping themselves to refills from the gin bottle; the men smoked between courses and put out their cigarettes in the remains of the food. Her friends weren’t ever hungry, while the teachers wolfed everything down. You could see the schoolteacher lot despising the antiques lot but also frightened of them, pretending to find them amusing, exchanging looks. Sometimes a political argument would flare up, because Vivien’s friends were all pretty rabid Tories; sometimes the teachers’ wives conspired with the outsiders against their husbands.

They gave a party to welcome a new English teacher to the staff. He was small and portly, vaguely familiar as if I’d seen him around, with longish hair and dandruff on the shoulders of his shiny jacket. I’d made chicken-liver pâté, pork cooked with prunes and Vouvray, and profiteroles (which didn’t swell up enough). The kitchen had been piled high with dirty dishes; it was difficult managing all that cooking alongside looking after Lukie. Now Lukie was in his cot, and by the time the guests were at the coffee stage I had broken the back of the washing-up. I sat resting in the quiet of the kitchen, listening to the tick as the minute hand on the wall-clock pushed round, aware of the rise and fall of voices in the dining room, shut away from me behind two closed doors. A row of soaking tea towels hung along the radiator like trophies, the room was limp from the assault of mess and heat. I was still tied into my dirty apron. It didn’t occur to me to mind that Mrs Tapper didn’t invite me to sit with her guests. I was burning up with scorn for all of them — and I dreaded them too, because their lives were achieved and full beside my thwarted unfinished one. My embrace of my solitude (my solitude with Lukie) was fierce during all that period. I didn’t want to see any of my old friends — though Madeleine did call round when she was home from university. She thought Lukie was adorable and she tried very hard to be kind to me; I asked flat, dutiful questions about her course, not commenting on her answers. I wouldn’t tell her what my life was like when she asked me. — I’m all right, I said. — No, I’m not lonely.

Sometimes I was all right.

I was drinking my own black coffee out of one of Mrs Tapper’s set of weightless tiny porcelain cups, blue and gold, with a slug of brandy added from the bottle kept for cooking. The wood of the kitchen table where I sat was three inches thick, bleached and scrubbed into soft hollows (I bleached and scrubbed it), the grain of the wood sticking up in ridges. Mrs Tapper had told me that the table was as old as the house. It was handed down to each housemaster’s wife, as it was too big to ever move out of the kitchen; the only way you could get it out was to saw it up. (She sounded as if she would quite like to do that.) There were huge built-in wooden dressers too, with sliding doors, all along one wall. I heard one of the guests come out from the dining room and cross the hall. Thinking they might be looking for the toilet, I braced myself for the intrusion, scowling, willing whoever it was not to try to make conversation with me out of condescension, or because they were bored with the scene next door. It was the new English teacher who looked around the door, balancing his coffee cup. He was plump and mournful; he might have been Italian with his hooded, prominent eyes.

— I know you, he said, closing the kitchen door behind him.

Occasionally a man at those parties (once an antiques man, once a games teacher) had come to try to pick me up in the kitchen; this might be a chat-up line. I fended him off, saying that I didn’t think so.

— You’re Valentine’s girlfriend. We did meet once.

Oh. I recognised him then: Valentine’s teacher, Mr Harper.

I knew his first name was Fred: that was what Val had always called him. But I couldn’t think of him as Fred now, in Dean’s House; even though, out of frustrated love for Val, he had thrown that milk bottle through our window. He sat down with his coffee at my table. — I’m thinking I’ve made a mistake leaving the Grammar School, he went on conversationally. — My marriage has broken up, naturally enough, and everything’s rather in ruins, and I thought it might help if I changed jobs. But this evening hasn’t been fun. What ghastly types. Do you work for them, in this pantomime kitchen? Do you hear from Val in the US — how he’s getting on? I never do. What a shock, when I caught sight of you carrying in the mashed potato. What are you doing with your young life, since Valentine left?

What was I going to tell him?

I remember sitting there frozen because this man from my past had found me out in the place where I was secret — and behind my silence there was building up a great clamour of complaint and rage which might come bursting out at him if I didn’t keep watch over it scrupulously. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t speak a word, I would glare at him and wait until he gave up and took himself away. I didn’t want Fred Harper, of all people, knowing one single thing about me. Just then the kitchen door opened and Mrs Tapper poked her head in; reluctantly, as if she preferred keeping her body out in the hall passage. Her voice was frigid, finding her guest and her servant shut up together. She told me that the baby was crying. She said she wished I’d remember to listen out for it; one of the boys had had to come down from the dorm because it was keeping them awake. She hoped none of them would go running to their parents with this story.

— It turns out Stella and I knew each other, in another existence, Fred explained.

Vivien didn’t like that, she pretended she wasn’t interested. She enticed him in her bored, bright hostess tone. — Come back and tell us more about Oxford. Dougie says he wants to take his class to see a play actually performed in Latin. What do you think — wouldn’t that be too awful to inflict on the poor boys? I’d rather die, wouldn’t you?

I hurried to fill the kettle for warming a bottle of formula, apologising that it was earlier than Lukie’s usual waking time. In Vivien’s assessing glance around the room, I saw her take in that I was using one of her precious old coffee cups. That had never been forbidden — after all, she trusted me to wash them up. Nonetheless, her powdery pale forehead creased in a quick frown, as if she was used to bearing up every day under other people’s carelessness. Or perhaps she could smell the brandy. I could hear Lukie’s wailing then, a desperate thread drawn thin across the cold distances of the house.

— Whose baby? Fred Harper asked, smiling from one of us to the other.

Working it all out.

The next week I had my first driving lesson. I had saved up to pay for these out of my wages — I didn’t have much else to spend money on, apart from the formula and nappy cream and so on for Lukie. (My mother sent him clothes, in brown paper parcels addressed in her crisp round writing: ‘Dean’s House’ fenced off inside a suspicious bristle of inverted commas. She never came there, though I did invite her.) It was my afternoon off; Auntie Jean was looking after Lukie. I hadn’t told anyone what I was doing. In my head I was perfectly calm about meeting this man who might turn out to be my father — but just before he turned up, while I was waiting round the corner from Jean’s house, I began to shake. All the time I was thinking coolly that I didn’t care if it was him or not, or what he was like. (Luckily the surname on my provisional licence was my stepfather’s.) When the car drew up and the instructor leaned over, calling to me, pushing open the passenger door, I could hardly cross the pavement to get in beside him. Of course he just put it down to nerves about the lesson.

I was better as soon as I was sitting in the car. Driving with deft, deliberate movements, demonstrating his technique, he explained that he was taking me to an industrial estate where we could practise basic manoeuvres safely. I kept my eyes on his hands, which could have been like mine — small, for a man, with rather shapeless fingers, freckles on the back. He introduced himself as Al; I knew my father’s name was Albert, but on the rare occasions she mentioned him my mother had always called him Bert. It was a good thing for me that he had to look out at the road ahead; every so often while he talked he turned to smile at me, to put me at ease. I’d been expecting him to be stolidly respectable, like my stepfather. But this man was skinny and rakish and teasing, with a thin, lined face and curving, dramatic nose, long hair curling on the collar of his striped shirt. He was the right age; but I couldn’t imagine my mother choosing him. We went to an industrial estate and he taught me all the elementary stuff, checking the mirrors and ignition and putting the car into gear; I hardly had time then to study him for clues because I had to concentrate on remembering the sequence of moves, releasing the clutch so that the car slid smoothly forward instead of kangaroo-jumping, steering slowly round a corner. I forgot what I had come for, lost myself in the driving. Before I could make up my mind about anything, my time was up.

Al offered me a cigarette before he drove me back. I didn’t often smoke but I took one: I thought maybe this was a sign, the way our two hands matched when he reached his lighter over for me and held the flame steady. I wondered what he made of me. I hardly cared in those days what I looked like: I always wore the same jeans or cord skirt, with a black jumper and no make-up, my hair pulled back. He might be disappointed — he would have looked forward to teaching a young girl, thinking she’d be flirty or sexy. We were parked at the back of a builder’s merchant’s; pavings and ceramic drainpipes were stacked behind high wire fencing overgrown with ivy.

— Was that so bad? he said gallantly. — Really your first time behind the wheel? You’re a natural.

It was true, the driving had come easily, I’d liked it. I’d only ever meant to have one lesson. I had imagined that at the end of it I’d either reveal to Al I was his long-lost daughter, or say I hadn’t liked the driving and didn’t want to take it any further. Instead I found myself arranging another lesson, for the week after.

I don’t think Mr Tapper had wanted me to come to Dean’s. Probably he and Vivien had quarrelled over it: they quarrelled often about all sorts of things. Once I heard him call her an ‘idiot’ and once I think she threw something at him; at any rate, when I came in the room a few moments after the crash, she was stooped, pink in the face, picking up the pieces of a china ornament. Anyway, Mr Tapper had given in and Vivien got me. I suppose he was anxious because I had a baby and no husband; I might be promiscuous and a danger to the boys. On the day I arrived she had announced smoothly, as if it wasn’t up for discussion, that I must call myself ‘Mrs’ and pretend I was married. I hadn’t objected, I was used to this already from the maternity hospital.

But he needn’t have worried. There wasn’t much chance of anything happening, ever, between me and any of those boys. The younger ones were nice to Lukie and sometimes they even came to me for comforting, not because I was particularly kind but just because I was a mother. The sixth-formers lived in an annexe next door to Dean’s, and I went in to clean their studies once a week. I used to forget that these were boys of my own age. I wasn’t jealous of them with their posters of Bob Marley, their piles of textbooks and their smelly socks, the braggadocio of their empty vodka bottles stuck with flags and peacock feathers — even though they were going to university and I wasn’t. I exulted in my hard new knowledge that made theirs innocent. I believed I had become an adult all at once in the passage of that hour of pain in the maternity hospital.

I was supposed to clean their rooms while they were away in lessons but sometimes one of them came back while I was still wiping round the sink or vacuuming the carpet. I must have looked to them like a witch in a fairy tale: hair scraped back in a plait out of the way, no make-up, very thin, eyes burning up in my pale face. Or they might meet me coming out of the toilets or washing the floor in the corridor — I would stand holding my mop beside my bucket of filthy water, and stare down at my shoes, and they’d push past as if they didn’t see me, treading dirt across the wet floor. Perhaps they just saw a cleaner, made sexless and ancient by her function. Or perhaps they took in that I was young and female, but felt my ferocity; presuming I must be an enemy of their type and privilege, they were afraid of me. At any rate, I never exchanged more than a couple of words with a single one of them, the whole time I was there.

Though it wasn’t because I was a nun, or made of stone.

Mostly, I told myself I was glad I had cut through all the shams of love-dreaming and passion, to some bedrock where only Lukie mattered. Against my will, however, every so often while I was working a haze of need would come over me like a fit — so bewildering that I didn’t know where I was. One of the sixth-formers came in once while I was standing with my face pressed in his dressing gown, drinking in his smell, keening to myself; he was so shocked he walked straight out of the room again, and he always avoided me afterwards. He must have thought I had a crush on him; but the truth was I hardly even knew whose room it was. I had only wanted to breathe in his male teenage smell: I suppose it reminded me of Valentine. I still dreamed of Valentine sometimes, though I hadn’t forgiven him. The smell wasn’t good (not like Lukie’s sweet one): stale sweat and cigarettes and dirty hair. But it made me drunk, it made my knees sag, made all my intelligence drain down out of my mind until I thought I would fall on the floor with longing.

The driving lessons went well, I began to look forward to them. Because the rest of my life was so weighed down with responsibility and routine, in charge of the car I felt as if I was flying, I loved its power under my control. Soon I was out on busy roads, keeping up with the flow of traffic, turning left, turning right. — Good girl, Al said. — You’ve got a feeling for it. He had to touch the steering wheel sometimes, correcting my line, but he never needed to use his dual control. My wits — sluggish from housework and baby-minding — were strained taut, mastering new difficulties: holding the car in traffic in first gear, reversing round a corner.

I still couldn’t make my mind up about Al. It seemed incredible that this stranger and I, our relationship shaped so casually in the shared space of the car, might be connected by blood; the idea embarrassed me on Al’s behalf. On the other hand, our movements did seem fluidly alike sometimes, as if we were attuned. He told me he hated getting up in the mornings; well, so did I (and every morning Lukie woke me about half past five). There was something familiar — from my mirror, from inside my own skin? — in the way Al squeezed his eyes up when he smiled. But none of this was enough. I couldn’t be sure. I liked him, in spite of his dated lazy cowboy style (he got lazier, the more he saw that I was good): his slouchy walk, his missing tooth, his smell of beer and fags and man-talk about fast cars. I guessed that he fancied himself as a bit of a charmer, though with me he was steadily courteous, almost fraternal. He played electric bass in a blues band.

I put off saying anything to him. I didn’t want to spoil my own pleasure in our lessons, or Al’s pride in how well I did. I told him a few things about Lukie, pretending I was married.

— Do you have children? I did ask him once.

What if he replied that he’d had a little girl but he’d lost touch with her, and it was what he most regretted in his life?

— No, I’ve missed out on that, he said, cautiously, blandly.

Fred Harper took to calling at Dean’s in the afternoons whenever he had a free period, hoping the grown-up Tappers would be out. I wondered at first if he was coming because he was afraid of me, thinking I would tell his story to the school; but it seemed more likely he was just bereft and bored. And perhaps I was touched with glamour for him, because of our shared association with Valentine. I think he found my situation poignant, like something in a book.

Anyway, for a long time I wouldn’t speak to him. It began because of the milk bottle and the past; then my refusal became a thing in itself, almost a game. I would be playing with Lukie and working in the kitchen, tidying up, starting preparations for the evening meal; I’d make Fred cups of tea and set them in front of him at the table without a word. If I needed to get on with cooking, I’d shove Lukie down on Fred’s lap — he was good with babies, he had children of his own, a girl and a boy; he told me how he missed them, how depressed he was now that he only saw them every other weekend.

Fred was never deterred by my lack of response; he talked on and on, either about the school (which he claimed he hated) or about things I had no interest in any more — books and ideas and poetry. He had opinions about everything. Even under normal circumstances he was one of those men who hog more than their fair share of any conversation. Tactfully, though, he didn’t mention Valentine again for a long time. He spoke as if he and I were old friends and had always known each other, though we’d never actually exchanged a word before the Tappers’ dinner party. I’d heard him shouting and weeping to Valentine in the street, that awful night, but I hadn’t gone out to join them.

If Mrs Tapper came home and found Fred in the kitchen, she couldn’t repress her irritation — she was the opposite type to Fred with his operatic range of feeling. She liked to banter quickly backwards and forwards with her friends, she couldn’t bear Fred’s drawl and his air of being in for the long haul, conversationally. She said he had doggy eyes; he called her ‘the walking antique’. But Fred and Juliet had the same quirky humour; they entertained Lukie together or played baby games at the kitchen table, tiddlywinks or snakes and ladders, which they pretended to take deadly seriously (though Juliet wouldn’t let her father teach her chess). Fred made a joke to Juliet out of my silence, explaining to her that I wouldn’t forgive him for something he’d once done.

— What something?

— Ask her. Fred gave a doleful look.

It was unimportant, I said. It wasn’t worth mentioning.

While I was still living with the Tappers, I went home sometimes to spend a weekend with my mother and stepfather. I still quarrelled with Gerry: once, terribly, about independence for Angola of all things, concerning which I had heart-warming expectations though only a vague idea of where it was. But mostly it was OK. I liked my brother Philip, and Philip loved Lukie, he played with him for hours on end; at eleven months Lukie took his first steps towards Philip, who was holding out his hands, chirruping and coaxing. I was snoozing on the sofa, watching telly. I think my mum was sorry for me because of my hard life at Dean’s, though she wouldn’t say so. She pampered me in little ways that reminded me of long ago when I was a child and there had only been the two of us. She slipped money into my jeans pocket when Gerry wasn’t looking and made my favourite things for tea (cheese and potato pie with bacon on top, apple fritters). Gerry sulked, jealous. I asked her once, when we were alone, whether she had any photographs of my real father. (I didn’t say I’d guessed he wasn’t really dead; and I hadn’t mentioned the driving lessons to anyone.)

— Oh Stella, she complained. — Why d’you have to bring up that old story?

She swore she didn’t have any photographs, and I commented that this was a bit strange, for a widow. If I’d been married and my husband had died, I said, I wouldn’t have thrown away all his photographs. The next morning with an odd, ashamed face she pushed something at me wordlessly: an old manila envelope fuzzy at the corners. I locked myself in the bathroom to investigate, tipping out a few pictures on to my lap as I sat on the side of the avocado-coloured bath: they were black and white, and tiny as if they had shrunk as that old time receded. My mother, whose gaze at the camera was already forceful, had her thick hair chopped short; she wore big-skirted summer frocks and her figure was poignant with that post-war extreme thinness (there were none of her pregnant). My father in all of them was blurry, lean, attentive. There was one picture of him holding up in both hands, at arm’s length, a baby stolid and unsmiling — me, I suppose. He was more like a boy than a young man — hungry hollow cheeks, raw jawline, dark hair flopping forwards over his eyes. That boy just might have grown up into Al, but I couldn’t see for sure. When I tried to give the envelope back to my mother, she told me to keep it.

I took Lukie out in the afternoons sometimes, if the weather was nice. One day we met Fred Harper on our way to Brandon Hill, where I’d first met Mrs Tapper. Fred insisted on coming with us. I strode along beside him pretending not to see him, sealing my face up and pressing my lips tight shut, levering the heavy pram (which had been Jean’s) up and down the kerbs with my foot on the crossbar underneath; or chatting away with Lukie, cutting out Fred. The further I got from the school, the lighter I felt; I thought my young body was so strong I could walk for ever.

— I suppose he’s Valentine’s baby, Fred said: breathless, because he was out of condition, at the speed I was going. I suppose he felt he could broach this subject because we were outside the school’s orbit. — And that Valentine doesn’t know.

I wouldn’t answer.

— Dear girl, he said. — Dear Stella. It wouldn’t have worked out, you do realise, even if I’d never had anything to do with Valentine.

I knew that this was true.

— Why are you punishing yourself, slaving in that mausoleum? Come and live with me, you can keep the flat clean for me instead of paying rent. Come live with me, don’t be my love. There won’t be any problems on that score. I’m lonely. I’ll read to you, I’ll heal you. I’ll keep your secret.

The sky was blue and cloudless; we were passing in and out of the hot light, which was muffled under the thick-leaved trees and the striped shop awnings. The streets were ripe with the baked smells of dirt. Safely strapped in, sitting up and hanging on to the pram sides, Lukie beamed between us, trying to connect us up. The beauty of the day broke over me in a sensory wave, stronger than my will. — Maybe, I said suddenly, startling Fred: who’d probably forgotten I could actually hear him making his rash offers, getting carried away.

— I’ll think about it. I might take you up on that.

Well, serves him right, I thought. That’ll shut him up.

I didn’t mean it seriously that first time Fred suggested it, I was only teasing him. I had to get to know him first, before I could begin to unpick some of the tension and resentment that keyed me up for working at Dean’s House. I had to come slowly to believe that a better life was possible. I stayed on with the Tappers for a year altogether, more or less. A year and a day: like someone in a story under an enchantment. But however crazy it sounds, I did go to live with Fred Harper eventually. Fred’s dead now. But for a long time he was one of my good friends. And when I moved into his flat I cooked and cleaned for him instead of paying rent and bills, and on Saturdays he looked after Lukie, and Auntie Jean had Lukie three afternoons a week, and I took a part-time job working in a nice café where I liked the owners and they liked me. There was a bit of trouble with Fred’s wife, who got the wrong end of the stick (again); but we sorted that out, it didn’t mean anything. It was a happy time.

I passed my test first try, in August 1975. I hadn’t expected my driving lessons ever to get this far; perhaps that was why I was so calm. Smoothly I changed gear, went through the pantomime of ostentatiously checking in my mirror as Al had taught me, slowed down going into a curve and accelerated out of it, reversed around a corner in a tidy arc — all as if I was observing someone else doing it, some dummy automated so she couldn’t be caught out. Al was waiting for me outside the Test Centre when we got back — I caught one private glimpse of him before he saw us: abstracted, bored. Then he returned inside his smiling professional self, ground out his cigarette under his shoe, stepped forward while I got out of the car (my knees trembling belatedly), and embraced me. For a moment I was clasped (perhaps) against my father’s chest, smelling his smoke and aftershave.

— Now is that a good feeling, he said, — or is that a good feeling?

I expect he did this to all the women who passed: on a sliding scale, exacting a kiss within the bounds of propriety from the younger or good-looking ones, conferring it as a favour on the plain ones and the ones who were too old. But he did always imply that I was his special comrade, because I was a natural driver like him. He couldn’t get over my passing after only nine lessons, he said that he’d told everyone about me. He insisted on driving me back after the test; passing went to people’s heads, apparently, they got too careless. I didn’t know when I was ever going to drive a car again, anyway. I had no prospect of being able to afford one. I asked him to drop me off outside the school; I had a few hours free before I had to pick up Lukie from Jean’s house.

— Goodbye then, I said. — Thank you.

— Good luck, he said. — Good driving.

And this time we shook hands.

The school was a strange place in the summer holidays. Deserted, its Victorian Gothic spaces seemed more eloquent: as if the missing boys had all grown up or died — which of course generations of them had. It was only when the school was empty that I ever felt the power of that ideal of gilded, privileged youth, set apart for a different destiny, which the school and staff were always trying to put over. When the place was full of real boys, the ideal seemed a sham. I meant to lie down on my bed after my driving test, in my room that was all windows, and sleep in the afternoon sun. I hungered for my bed and dreamed of sinking down into that vacant time alone, with no responsibility. But every time I closed my eyes I seemed to be driving again — only this time it was a huge effort, fraught with dread and difficulty, gears grinding and smashing, swerving to avoid oncoming traffic and looming obstacles. My heart thudded so painfully that it forced my eyes open; then I was astonished, looking round me at the quiet room. Lights from the small yellow lozenge-shaped panes around the windows were spotted across the bare floorboards like honey; nothing moved.

Lukie started sleeping through the night, thanks to Mrs Tapper. Those night-time sessions with Lukie had been so awful. The trouble usually started around midnight when he woke up and I gave him a bottle; after that, he never really went off again into deep sleep. I loved him better than anyone, than my own life; but in those hours he was also my enemy. I felt I was defending the last spaces of myself, because he wanted them. Lukie at night was unlike his clear daytime self, he was fretful and spiteful; if I took him into bed with me he chattered extravagantly, with an edge of hysteria, as if he were drunk. If he fell asleep in my arms and I managed to lower him into the cot without waking him, all too soon he would begin surfacing again, twitching and grumbling, rubbing his fists into his eyes. Then he would scramble to his feet, reaching out his arms through the bars of the cot for me, babbling a low-level moaning complaint, ‘Mamamama…’, which I knew would crescendo into loud crying if I tried to ignore it. And I couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t risk waking the whole house. I had promised Vivien that he would sleep. I had to pick him up. I could be walking up and down that room with him for hours: stumbling, vindictive, exhausted.

I wasn’t good, in those long nights. Sometimes I was mad. I said some horrible things to Lukie while we were walking up and down together, hissed and whispered them; and afterwards I dreaded that even if he didn’t understand the words, the spirit of my madness might have seeped in at his ears and poisoned him for ever. (Although he’s never shown any signs of it, I must say. Somehow he’s managed to forgive me.) Then one night Vivien Tapper interrupted us. It was two o’clock in the morning. I’d never seen her in her long wool dressing gown before, her face bleached without make-up.

— Come on now, Stella, she said. — This is getting silly.

She reached out for Lukie and I gave him to her; he was too astonished to protest. She was perfectly nice to him as she always was, but held him away from her body as though she was afraid of marks on her dressing gown (all my clothes were stained with baby dribble). Laying him down in his cot, in a firm voice she told him that it was sleep-time now. We left the room, with only the little night light on behind us. I could hear Lukie pulling himself up at once, rattling the cot bars even as we closed the door; then, after one long breath of shocked silence, the beginning of a wail of outrage.

— Won’t he wake Mr Tapper up? I said. — And Juliet?

— They’ll have to put up with it, Vivien said.

We went down together into the kitchen whose corners at night were cavernous and shadowy; a fluorescent tube-light under a metal shade was suspended on long chains over the table. Vivien switched on the electric fire and tuned the radio to the World Service, not too loud. Behind the radio voices Lukie’s desperation was just audible, seizing like a tiny vice on my thoughts and squeezing them.

— You just have to sit it out, she said. — You can go and check him every fifteen minutes, to reassure him you haven’t abandoned him. But don’t put the light on in there, don’t talk to him, just lay him down again, then go. Trust me, it works.

She poured two glasses of whisky and made tea for me, with sugar in; I watched the stuttering hand of the kitchen clock. When I went back after the first fifteen minutes, Lukie was smear-faced, blubbing, frantic, reaching up his arms for me; incredulous when I abandoned him again. In the kitchen, rummaging in one of the drawers of the dresser, under a pile of ironed tablecloths, Vivien brought out cigarettes and a crossword book.

— I have to hide these from Robin, she confessed.

Mr Tapper did the Times cryptic more or less easily every day. The crosswords in her book were of a different species: ‘star-crossed lover (5)’ was Romeo, and ‘replace (10)’ was substitute. She lit a cigarette and I smoked one too; we worked through the crosswords one after another, looking up clues at the end of the book if we were ever stuck, as there was no particular honour in victory. I must have gone back in to Lukie five or six times; Vivien refilled our whisky glasses. We sat with our feet tucked up under us out of the way of the cold tiled floor. Then eventually, while we were trying to think of ‘something unpleasant to look at (7)’, she lifted her head up, listening, and signed to shush me, touching the back of my wrist with her hand.

— There, I think he’s gone, she said.

My hearing strained at the absence of what it had grown used to; a blessed silence hung across the house. We gave him a few minutes, to make sure; Vivien said I knew where the whisky was if he woke up again later. But he didn’t. It worked as easily as a miracle; and he was always a good sleeper afterwards. (It worked with my second son too, later.) The following night Lukie didn’t even wake for his usual feed at midnight. I slipped into bed, expecting to be roused to the struggle at any moment; the next thing I knew it was seven-thirty and Lukie was shouting cheerfully at me from his cot. I think he was as relieved as I was to be rid of the burden of those night-times. I’d given him power over his own sleep — I should have done it months before. I tried to express something like this to Vivien when I thanked her but she brushed it away, it wasn’t the kind of thing she liked to discuss. — Someone helped me out with Hugo, she explained dismissively, — at a time when I was going fairly bananas.

I don’t think Vivien Tapper and I could ever have been friends. Yet it’s surprising how often I’ve thought about her since those days — not particularly warmly nor resentfully, just aware of her existing somewhere, picking at the knot of her life in her own way. Some people accompany you like this in imagination, long after you’ve dropped any real connection with them. We used to bump into each other every so often for a while after I left, and she would ask what I was doing; it was always too complicated to tell her. If she’s still alive, she’s an old lady by now.

I was dusting the books one October morning in the Tappers’ study. Mr Tapper did his marking in there, Vivien did her accounts. Neither of them were really readers, not what I’d call readers: not like Valentine, say, or Fred Harper. But there were books on their shelves and once or twice already I’d had to take them down a few at a time, riffle through the pages, blowing the dust off, and then wipe the shelves clean. I was still suspicious of books through all those early years while Lukie was small — I didn’t trust them, they had led me too far astray. But my guard must have been down that morning; at any rate, one of the books fell open in my hand while my attention was elsewhere, dreaming — so that my eyes took in almost accidentally what they read. And then it was too late: a message shot directly into my heart, jolting and deflecting me, making me blind to my routines. I didn’t even really understand the words I was reading, I couldn’t have explained them to anyone: ‘lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west’. It wasn’t their meaning that affected me, it was the words themselves — the solidity of them, their being assembled together in that particular order and rhythm — which stopped my breath. They seemed a signal from another, bigger life than the one I was in, as if a smothering blanket had been torn through. I shut the book quickly and sat back on my heels, wiping my face sticky with sweat and dust, and thought that if I had to spend another winter at the Tappers, I would die. Rain eased and pressed outside against the windowpanes, a frond of dead clematis tapped the glass. Then I thought that I’d die if I had to spend another hour there.

The book was a poetry anthology; I saw that Vivien had won it as a prize at school. I’m sure she never opened it while I was there. Afterwards, when I started reading again, I did find that poem eventually but it never had that same effect on me; I expected too much of it, I’d worn it out before I really knew it (and I had no idea, for years, that it was about Abraham Lincoln). I did grow to love other poems of Whitman’s. Anyway, that morning I left the books in their pile on the floor and went upstairs to where Lukie was having his nap. The blinds were drawn down in our bedroom; I tiptoed around the cot in the dulled pink light, gathering our things together and packing them into a rucksack and an old suitcase I’d brought from home. I would have to leave our heavy luggage and pick it up later. Everything we needed for that night — nappies and changing kit, clean clothes for Lukie; money and knickers and a comb and toothbrush for me — I put in a bag I could carry over my shoulder. The sound of the falling rain was so dense in the quiet that my limbs seemed to be pushing against some resistance that made them roused and tingling. ‘Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west.’

Then I went downstairs and telephoned Mrs Tapper at the Antiques Market. I wept, I apologised for leaving so suddenly. She was exasperated because she’d have to shut up the stall early, to be home for Juliet. — Fred Harper’s? Out of the frying pan into the fire, she warned. (She was wrong about that.) And she made some complaining remark, out of the blue, about the electric radiator my mother had lent me for my room; she said I ought to have consulted her first, didn’t they use a lot of electricity? Then I put the phone down on her. There was no point in telephoning Fred yet, he would be teaching. I woke Lukie up and changed him and kissed him, gave him a biscuit and a bottle of juice; I put him in his pushchair (he’d grown too big for the pram) and we went out. It was pouring down — at least I had a plastic cover for the pushchair. It was a kind of madness, really. I had no idea what would happen next. We went into a café — the very one I got a job in later — where, when I’d got over dripping and steaming, I bought us both lunch. I sat proudly with my little son whose instinctive attentive courtesy charmed the waitresses — he sipped so responsibly, carefully from his feeder cup, studied the other customers with such steady curiosity. And as soon as school was over, I telephoned Fred Harper from a call box.