Clever Girl

6

I OUGHT TO EXPLAIN, BEFORE I go on, that the father of my second son was killed — and in a horrible, stupid way — just a few weeks before our baby was born. So Rowan never knew his father, Nicky, although he’s always known his story and the story of his death. He used to make me tell it to him, over and over, when he was small; and I believed in those days that you should always answer children’s questions, tell them everything they want to know. (Well, not everything. There were hidden elements in the story which I held back.) Now, I wonder whether all that openness was healthy for Rowan. Perhaps there was something in the sad story which stuck to him, darkening his spirit and damaging his defences. He isn’t at all like Nicky in his personality. Nicky was sweet and happy and good; Rowan is a wonder but he isn’t any of those things. He does have Nicky’s eyes, though. I had a home birth in the commune, with all the women around me, and that’s what I saw as soon as they delivered Rowan up on to my stomach, slippery and bloody, before they’d even cut the cord: Nicky’s eyes staring up at me, dark as blueberries, singling me out, accusing me.

What have you done?

(Though Nicky would never have accused anyone, let alone me.)

— I didn’t ask to be born, Rowan used to sulk when he was a boy, long after we left the commune, if I asked him to tidy his room or dry the dishes. He was beautiful — strong limbs twisting out of my grasp, silky black curls and skin that burned dark chocolate-brown in the sunshine (Nicky’s father was mixed-race Brazilian, though Nicky grew up with his white mother in Glasgow). And I know it sounds foolish, but I took him seriously; his argument seemed a valid one, I was afraid of it. Rowan had never consented to existence: I had cheated him into it. Like a classical philosopher, like Oedipus, he would rather never have lived. What right had I to impose my laws on him?

— You have to play your part, I said. — Everyone has to do their share, and help each other.

(The words fake and tasteless as old gum in my mouth.)

— Why? Why should I? I don’t want to.

I met Nicky because students from the art college and the university used to come into the café where I worked. This café was part of a wholefoods shop on Park Row, painted pink and green and yellow. We sold mung beans and mate tea, stodgy slabs of cake flavoured with carob, organic vegetables crusted with earth, and olives from a huge tin on the floor; we made our own coleslaw and hummus and wholemeal bread, and believed we were getting in touch with a more authentic way of life — connected to the past, and vaguely to other cultures abroad. The style of the place — bare sanded boards, an odd assortment of wooden tables and chairs, blue and white striped china — was in itself a political statement. Posters were pinned on a noticeboard, advertising yoga classes or feminist reading groups or political meetings. The girls who worked there wore dungarees over stripy jumpers, or shapeless vintage print dresses and handmade flat leather shoes with straps across the instep like children’s sandals. They despised make-up, although they tolerated mine: I painted my eyes heavily with black eyeliner and mascara and brown eye-shadow. I was allowed to get away with it because I was a mother and because of the knocks I had taken.

I liked the art students best because they were less earnest. I didn’t single Nicky out at first, though you couldn’t help noticing him: he was exuberant and charming, with a Glasgow accent and brown skin and a mop of black curls. I liked him as an element in that whole crowd. In a way I suppose I fell in love with them all collectively, with their excitement as if they were at a perpetual party and their outfits like fancy dress (Nicky wore a miltary jacket with frogging and epaulettes). Jude, who moved into the commune with us later, was from the art college too. And so was Baz, a tall good-looking boy with dyed orange hair. I thought Baz was Jude’s boyfriend until Nicky explained to me that Jude was a lesbian and Baz was stalking her: he was obsessed with her and wouldn’t let her alone. At the time this just seemed like another part of the drama of that crowd. After my life at Dean’s House I couldn’t get enough drama. I loved all the little flares and upsets and scandals, but I didn’t take them seriously.

Nicky started to pay attention to me. He began by drawing me. I had presumed that all the art students would be able to draw — but it turned out that life drawing wasn’t part of their curriculum any longer, they weren’t encouraged to make their art look like things or people in real life. Nicky was almost embarrassed by his gift, which seemed to be a trick from an old-fashioned repertoire. He had been able to do these little sketches ever since he was small, and they were what had singled him out as a child and made him special — he had drawn his family and the characters in his neighbourhood, and had won prizes at school. I loved his pictures, which caught and exaggerated some essential quality or gesture in his subject and yet weren’t caricatures.

He drew me when I wasn’t conscious of him watching: I was making the coffees or collecting the china from the tables or tending to Lukie if he was with me — Lukie would sit happily for hours in the café while the students entertained him. Because Nicky was close to his own mother, he was attracted to an ideal of maternal tenderness (meanwhile I was chafing at the responsibility of motherhood and envying the freedom the other girls had). The drawings seemed to be glimpses into my secret life, which I thought no one else saw — though I couldn’t quite connect these glimpses with Nicky’s unsubtle outward persona. He was gregarious, noisy, popular: not beautiful, exactly, though plenty of girls found him attractive — his round sweet face, the shadow of silky hair on his upper lip, his nose that was crooked because he had broken it falling off his bike when he was a boy. Everyone liked Nicky, he had no enemies, and he liked everyone. He wasn’t suspicious or critical as I was. He was even kind to Baz, whom everyone else avoided because Baz was so dreary in his obsessive pursuit of Jude.

Nicky courted me and I went out with him, we slept together. This was exciting because it drew me deeper inside the set of my new friends. I never let on to them just how lonely my life had been before I met them; because I’d left school at seventeen and was a mother, they imagined I’d tasted more than they had of real life. I hid the self-doubt I felt because I hadn’t passed beyond the threshold of education. I don’t remember any one moment when I gave my consent to our becoming a couple, Nicky and I; he used to put his arm around me in public and then we began to be asked out together. He looked after Lukie for me and didn’t mind playing with him for hours in the park or with his toy cars; Lukie adored him. This made all the practicalities in my life so much easier. I allowed our connection to be established as a certainty — but I always knew that I was keeping something back, a cold stone hidden in my thoughts. I made up for my doubt by being competent and kind and reserved, which was what he liked. And it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being loved. I had been so abandoned and alone — and then all of a sudden this love was available to wrap round me, warm as a blanket. I got used to the warmth and forgot that I’d ever not had it.

Nicky believed that I was good, and innocently natural. Perhaps it was my inexperience that he misconstrued as innocence; he was the first boy I’d made love to properly, although I never told him this. I was lucky with him, he was a kind and easy lover and undid a lot of the rage from the beginning of my motherhood. He was a good beginning. That’s what I used to think, even at the time. Even when I was pregnant with his baby, I couldn’t be convinced that Nicky was the end of my story.

And so it turned out.

For a while after he died I actually forgot what he was like in bed, I blanked it. It wasn’t something you could ask anyone. No one else could know, and there weren’t any photographs or words or mementoes left as traces of those scenes, to act as clues. It used to torment me, trying to recreate the sensations of our intimacy and thinking I’d forfeited them through what I’d done, through my carelessness.

At first our relationship was fitted in around my life at the café and at Fred Harper’s. It had worked out well, the arrangement by which Lukie and I lived in Fred’s flat rent-free in return for housework. Fred got on well with my new set of friends and they were welcome at the flat, though I held back sometimes from inviting them because I was ashamed of letting them see too much of my daily routines of childcare and cleaning and shopping and cooking; these seemed so unlike the students’ improvised, dramatic lives which had no fixed framework apart from the lectures (which they often missed), and their exams and degree shows.

I presumed that the students’ freedom was temporary and would end when they graduated. When this time came, however, Nicky’s friends seemed to have no idea of moving away from Bristol or changing their lifestyle — it was as if they had embarked on an experiment which wasn’t finished yet. For a while it seemed possible that they wouldn’t ever return inside the world of grown-up responsibilities; they were inventing a new kind of life, stepping outside the old wrong, repressive patterns which their parents believed in. When some of them decided to live together holding everything in common, Nicky wanted me and Lukie to join them. If he’d wanted us to live in a threesome, as a family, I might have turned him down — the idea of living with a whole crowd of our friends persuaded me. In the end there were six of us: Nicky and me, Jude and her partner Daphne, Neil and Sheila. Seven, counting Lukie. Daphne and Neil had studied literature together at the university; Sheila had done classics.

The house was on a hill in Bishopston, in a red-brick Victorian terrace — the rent was low because it was half falling down and hadn’t been decorated in years. It suited us to live with bare boards, uncarpeted stairs, and walls showing their layers of faded wallpaper: we hung up Nicky’s paintings and Jude’s embroideries. We enjoyed how the spaces of the house were scarred and worn-out from long use, and fancied ourselves communing with the past inhabitants, furnishing it with odds and ends from the junk shops. I bought an old quilt for our bedroom, printed with faded pink roses, and I found a huge Victorian mirror in a gold frame chipped and damaged beyond repair, put out on the street with someone’s rubbish. I draped the mirror with my scarves and beads. I wanted the rooms of my life to be blurred and dreamy and suggestive — the opposite effect to the one my mother and Gerry aimed for, where everything was functioning and spotless and sealed against accidents.

Any money we earned, or anything we got on benefits, we pooled for rent and household expenses and bills. If decisions had to be made we sat round the kitchen table and talked them through. Daphne brought a perfectly round white piece of quartz from her parents’ holiday home by the sea, and we put it at the centre of the table; you picked it up if you wanted to speak and replaced it when you’d finished. Housework and cooking were supposed to be shared equally, regardless of gender. On summer nights we hung paper lanterns in the old plum and apple trees in the back garden and lay out in the uncut scented grass, drinking cheap wine and smoking dope, confessing our beliefs and our hopes and fears. I had to be careful not to talk too much: Sheila and Neil and Daphne would pounce if they thought something you said was wrong or showed false consciousness. They were tactful about my lack of education but the tact could be worse than the pouncing. Later, another element in the heady pleasure of those nights was the secrets I was holding back, burning me from inside.

The men did try to help with the housework. Neil — plump and softly shapeless, bearded — would do the vacuuming: frowning short-sightedly, cigarette uptilted at the corner of his mouth, poking the nozzle benevolently, vaguely into corners, dropping ash on the carpet behind him. Nicky washed up energetically, breaking things. But in the end Jude and I did most of it — and we didn’t mind, it only seemed fair, because the others were out at work all day, bringing in money. Anyway, we weren’t obsessed with cleaning like our mothers, victims of the ‘privatised family existence of late capitalism’. We discussed all these issues, using the white stone. There was a kind of glamour at first for the ones who found real jobs, joining the working classes. Nicky was working as a labourer, building a bypass; Sheila was in a little factory that made meat pies, Daphne helped on a play scheme for difficult children. Neil was the only one who was still a student, working on his PhD. He was a Marxist, dissecting everything down to its basis in class conflict and economics — cheerfully he saw through everyone’s illusions. He always had his working-class background on his side in his arguments against Daphne, because she came from a wealthy, arty family. Daphne was fiercely feminist: she believed that the nuclear family was an invention of capitalism to keep women oppressed, and that all men were conditioned by society to enjoy the idea of violence against women. Even when men thought they were being kind or loving or protecting women, Daphne said, really underneath it was a kind of violence against them because of its context in the wider world, where men had all the power. I was excited by her arguments. Sometimes they seemed triumphant truths which could be superimposed on every aspect of life, revealing its inner nature: they explained my stepfather and my whole history, they vindicated me. I was burning with zeal for a revolutionary breakthrough in my life.

I worked in the café in the mornings because that was when Lukie went to nursery: in the afternoons he fell asleep on our bed and I dozed beside him. When Lukie woke we had tea downstairs in the kitchen with Jude. She and I cooked vegetarian curries and pasta dishes while Lukie played with his cars and Playmobil. Jude was from Bolton, she blushed easily and was freckled and fair with a poised small figure like a child’s. Her embroidered pictures had been a great success at the art college; now she had an agent and was selling to London galleries. They were shocking raw scenes of threat and conflict: girls with slashes of red silk for their mouths and vaginas, stiff net sewn on for their skirts, bits of gold braid for their tiaras; stick-men sewn in waxed black thread, in long crude stitches. (These days they fetch astronomical prices. I owned one for a while — but I had to sell it one lean year.) Jude didn’t take politics as seriously as Daphne did. She thought everything was funny — her embroideries were funny too, in a zany, extreme sort of way.

She even thought Baz was funny, in his fixation on her. He was a tall skinny guy with a pretty, fine-boned face, startling under the shock of his orange hair. She’d slept with him once, apparently, in her first week at the art college, because she was too shy to tell him she was gay. — Trust me to choose the crazy one, she said. When Daphne called the police once because Baz followed them back to the house and broke a window trying to get in, Baz told the police that Jude was his wife and that she’d been abducted by a cult. You could see that they were half inclined to believe him.

Sheila had got a first in classics at the university, yet it was Neil who was studying for his PhD now, while she worked earning the money to support them both. When she got back from the pie factory in the evenings I could see from her bleached expression how it exhausted and disgusted her; once I found her in tears, scrubbing at her neck and arms in the bathroom, saying she couldn’t get rid of the meat smell (it was true, you could smell onions and gravy wherever she was). Because I’d worked that summer in the chocolate factory, I could guess how the other workers might resent her because she was different — but when I commiserated she turned on me. Sheila was tall, austerely judgmental, with white skin that made her face like a marble sculpture, and a mass of red-brown hair which she had to put up in a net for work.

— Other people have to spend their whole lives in these places, she said. — What’s so different about us, that we should be exempt? I’d despise myself if I couldn’t put up with it for a couple of years.

But I didn’t think that the self-sacrifice would last. There was something willed and exaggerated in how she dedicated herself to Neil, serving him as if his work was more important than anything in her own life. Often Neil didn’t even get out of bed to go to the university library until lunchtime, and she must know it; it was as if she was giving him as much scope as possible not to live up to her expectations.

Daphne and Sheila were always falling out. Sheila took Neil’s side in all the arguments, and she offended people with her blurted, stern remarks, though I didn’t mind them; I could see it was difficult for her to speak lightly about ordinary things. She found Daphne exasperating, and scarcely bothered to conceal it. Daphne was voluptuous, with creamy skin and chestnut hair and huge curvaceous calves (she’d played hockey at school). It was true that her assured, loud flow of talk was guilelessly self-centred, muddling together her outrage at patriarchy with her stomach cramps. Yet she was somehow at the commune’s heart; without her I’m not sure we’d have hung together. She was bossy and fearless, doggedly principled — it was Daphne who dealt with our landlord when the roof leaked or the immersion heater broke. Her confidence convinced the rest of us. But she couldn’t help nagging away at Sheila, wanting to make little scenes and nurse grudges, contrive tearful reconciliations.

Nicky was the peacemaker in our community. He had the gift of attention to other people; he could talk to anyone, and he never forgot what they told him. This wasn’t only with his friends: he got to know the men he worked with on the bypass, or locals he met in the pubs who remembered when the city docks were still in use and the dockers unloaded the timber carrying the long planks on their shoulders, or when the bombs fell on Newfoundland Road and destroyed the vinegar works. I marvelled at his practical knowledge of places and histories, which my mind shied away from, indolent. I knew it was admirable that he didn’t talk about himself. But something ruthless in me drew back sometimes even from our moments of most tender intimacy. I would think: he’s too simple for me. Then I’d be appalled at myself — it was me who was simple: narrow in my selfish, sticky fascination with my own feelings. I made up to him then with my affection and attention.

We gave a party for the summer solstice. There were always extra people at the house anyway, eating with us or staying over in sleeping bags on spare mattresses or on the floor: this sociability spilled over often into a party with music and dancing (it was the era of Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye, Bowie — we didn’t pay much attention to the beginnings of punk). The solstice was Daphne’s idea. She explained that pagans celebrated it as a fertility festival in honour of the female goddesses. She and Jude made wreaths out of the grasses that grew tall in our garden, woven with the garden flowers which someone had planted in the past and which had pushed up again without our having tended them: giant daisies and Linaria and an old-fashioned pink rose with frail petals which soon dropped. Even Neil wore a wreath. Nicky drew me wearing mine. I cooked a big pan of chilli con carne made with lentils instead of meat, Sheila made cornbread, Nicky made his Brazilian speciality, little cakes with cocoa and condensed milk.

In the folk cultures of Eastern Europe, according to Daphne, they bathed in open water at sunset; we didn’t have any open water, but someone got hold of an old inflatable paddling pool. Lukie was blissfully happy in the pool, splashing and pouring from a plastic bucket; he insisted on staying there until his nude little body was white and clammy with cold, though the evening was sultry. The weather had changed after a week of rain; the close heat under the fruit trees and the rank smells of the garden drying out made us all excitable. With uncharacteristic energy, Neil had spent the afternoon chopping down a tumbledown wooden shed in the garden and we burned this, though it spat nails and its layers of ancient paint blistered and fumed nastily. Daphne insisted there had to be fire and water. She wrapped potatoes in tinfoil and buried them in the embers to cook.

I put Lukie to bed eventually, when he had to be fished out from submerging in the pool — he was distraught and sobbing, not from his dousing but at being separated from the party. His cot was in a little cubbyhole separated off from the upstairs landing by a curtain. Nicky had a game he played to get him off to sleep, counting on his fingers and tickling in his palms — but Lukie was too tired and distraught even for that, so we had to leave him to cry. I stayed upstairs in our bedroom, moving around the room in the dusk and tidying it, waiting until Lukie stopped crying and fell asleep, aware of my reflection coming and going in the foggy depths of the mirror. I was breathless and expectant though I didn’t know what it was that I expected. By the time I returned downstairs the sun was setting. Daphne had decided that we should throw our wreaths in turn into the paddling pool, then kneel while she poured water over our heads out of her cupped hands. She recited words about the blessing of the goddess, who was ‘subtle, deep, and difficult to see’ (these were borrowed from something in Buddhism).

Jude submitted to the ritual: in her white cheesecloth dress she looked like a priestess in a play. Some of the other girls joined in but the men were making fun of it. Neil was fairly drunk and his wreath had slipped down across one eye; he had been flirting all evening with a blonde they knew from the university. His flirting wasn’t gallant, he was too lazy for flattery; he just directed all his usual conversation and his attention at one chosen person, determined like a pet animal wanting to climb into a lap. Women warmed to Neil’s cleverness, even though he was pudgy and flushed pink, with an indefinite beard. Sheila would never admit that she cared about his flirtations, or even when he occasionally slept with these other girls.

— Isn’t that bourgeois morality? she said.

Someone new had arrived at the party while I was waiting upstairs. He was sitting cross-legged in the grass beside Sheila: a big-shouldered rangy man in a dirty vest, hunched over his cigarette, long hair hanging forward over his face. He complained that Daphne’s ceremony was too decorous. — Like Girl Guides at a camp, he said. — Don’t you know those midsummer festivals are all about lust? They swim together, then they go off in the woods together to fuck. The ones wearing the wreaths are signalling that they’re available.

— I’m available, said Neil.

— At least you should get right under the water, the stranger said, — and not just wet your heads.

Someone added that it shouldn’t be just the girls.

Before the blonde could move from where she was sitting with Neil’s head on her shoulder, Sheila stood up and walked across to step into the pool, then lay down in it — you couldn’t stretch right out, so she lay with her knees pulled up, and then rolled over. I suppose the water was about a foot deep; in spite of the warm evening the cold must have been a shock. When she stood up the water poured off her dramatically; she was stuck all over with bits of twig and leaves, her hair in streaming rat-tails, her dress clinging to her body. After that, lots of us did it. I did it (and Nicky wrapped me in his jacket afterwards). Even Daphne did it in the end, though she was still sulking because her ceremony had been hijacked. Of course the men couldn’t do it solemnly, they had to pretend to be fooling around, falling into the water accidentally or chucking it at each other. Soon the pool was almost empty. I noticed that the stranger didn’t join in, the one who’d come up with the idea in the first place.

The stranger was Sheila’s brother. They came from a big family of nine children, brought up in a draughty Norfolk vicarage. (— Everything we ever owned was handed down, Sheila said. — It made us horribly materialistic. I prayed in church for patent leather shoes.) We had met some of her brothers and sisters before, but not this one: Andrew. He was older than Sheila, the oldest boy, and she hadn’t seen him for five years because he’d had an irrevocable row with his family — she couldn’t remember what the row was about. (His hair? His faith?) After the row he had dropped out from York University in his second year, and never contacted them. The family had refused to go after him, though they included him in their prayers. But Sheila and one of her sisters had made great efforts to trace him, writing to all Andrew’s old friends and teachers, listing him as a missing person with the police, even travelling by themselves on the coach to York to see if they could find him there.

When Andrew turned up at the party without any warning (he’d got Sheila’s address from the other sister), they hadn’t embraced or even touched each other. — It’s you! was all Sheila had said, when he dropped to sit on the grass beside her. And she had protested, joking, that he could at least have sent her a postcard. Andrew was tall — very tall, six foot four or five — and he looked as marked with damage — eyes extinguished, stale, unshaven grey-white face, lank draggled hair — as if he’d come back from the dead instead of, as it turned out, bumming around southern Europe. His eyes were chinks of blue in his long face: small, indifferent, retreated behind the craggy mass of his cheekbones. He had been playing his saxophone for money or labouring or working on the grape harvest; in jail for a while, waiting to be deported from Spain. When we asked him to play his saxophone, he said he’d sold it.

He stayed with us for a few weeks, in a sleeping bag on his bed-roll on the floor in the front room; then he moved to live in a squat in a filthy spindly old house in a Georgian crescent, where there was more drink and more drugs than at our place and less domesticity. Even after he’d moved out he seemed to spend a lot of time with us. I supposed at first that he came to see Sheila. My heart used to sink when he turned up because his presence had a dampening effect — he was too brooding and dogmatic. He was contemptuous of our commune, the sharing of possessions and decision-making; he said it was only tinkering behind closed doors, not changing anything real. Real revolution, he said, had to happen out on the street. He picked up our white stone one evening, laughing when we explained what we used it for, throwing it indifferently from hand to hand. Only Daphne protested — she was braver at quarrelling with him than anyone else. Andrew never talked much, it was as if you had to drag speech out of him; yet he dominated any conversation he was in. Despite this, people were drawn to him, they wanted his approval.

In the end, I wanted his approval too.

I can’t explain the power Andrew had over me, for a while.

That’s just what I said to him: — I can’t explain the power you have over me. Rashly — but he made me behave as if there was no point in self-preservation. And he said, — It’s biological. There’s nothing you feminists can do about it. You can tinker around with all the rest but you can’t change the shape of fucking, where you need me to overwhelm you. Don’t you? Unless you want a man to love you like a baby.

This racked me at the time, because it seemed unanswerably true: that you couldn’t reverse the male gesture of possession and penetration which was at the heart of sex. Part of Andrew’s attraction certainly was his huge, lean strength — I thought of his size as a force. I supposed it was what made him able to drink so much without losing himself. He drank wine, mostly; he’d picked up the habit abroad. When he was drunk he wasn’t garrulous. If he was ever sober, he was silent. His need for the drink and the drugs seemed to come out of a narrow concentration in him that was almost puritanical, some exacting demand he made on life that could not otherwise be met.

Andrew’s conscious attention mostly wasn’t on women; he only really warmed to the company of men. He described legendary drinkers, scoffers and fighters he’d met on his wanderings, in Thessaloniki, Chania, Barcelona. He sparred with Neil, sizing him up. And he liked Nicky. Everyone liked Nicky. Nicky talked to Andrew about his work building the bypass: he was a carpenter’s assistant, unloading hot sacks of cement fresh from the factory, putting together the wooden frames into which the mixed cement was poured. Andrew didn’t even mind Baz; he held him in long conversation at our kitchen table once, when Baz came looking for Jude while she hid upstairs. Baz was twitchy from whatever he was taking that had cranked him up so high, he looked harmless and foolish beside Andrew’s uncompromising bulk. All the time they were talking, Andrew was rolling up in his thick, deft fingers — sticking papers, dribbling a line of loose tobacco from his pouch, cooking the dope lump in his lighter flame, chipping into it with his thumbnail. The ritual absorbed Baz and calmed him. I was making supper at the stove and pretended to be taking no notice of them — I could see through the window that Lukie was safe, playing outside in the garden.

— How would you feel, Baz tried to explain (strained, focused on something deep inside which ate him up) — if she was your girl and they wouldn’t let you see her? Wouldn’t you worry? All I want is for her and me to talk. I need to talk to her.

— You’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, Andrew said almost jovially, sweeping up dropped shreds of tobacco into his palm. — The only person not wanting you to talk to Jude is Jude. I’m afraid she doesn’t like you, my friend.

Baz was only hurting himself, Andrew suggested, by chasing after her. He might as well give up and go home, find someone else. (At the time, Baz almost seemed to take it from him.) But Andrew never put on that teasing expansiveness with women. When Jude thanked him for fending off Baz, he only batted away his smoke with his hand, warning that she should be more careful what company she kept. He told me later that he thought her embroideries were the cheapest kind of sensationalist trick. Sheila was tolerated, a comrade left over from the childhood he had abandoned. And he dismissed Daphne’s organising energy, saying she made him think of a lady magistrate; he called her radical feminism ‘politics for girls’. I thought that Andrew must despise me because I was so ignorant and I hadn’t read anything. I never contributed to the kinds of conversation that he liked.

One evening while he was arguing with Neil, I went upstairs to check on Lukie, saying I thought I heard him cry out. Actually I was bored by their argument — about anarchy, which Neil was keen on and Andrew despised. Lukie was fast asleep, his face beautifully clear, emptied of the busy day, cheeks flushed, one arm thrown out across the pillow. I lingered out of reach of the raised voices, moving around in my bare feet between our empty rooms in the half-dark that was never complete because of the street lamps: the windows were all open, it was still summer. Outside it rained steadily and persuasively, drenching the gardens; the smells of wet grass, and rain steaming off the hot tar of the road, mingled with the incense we burned in the house and the musty carpets.

Andrew must have followed me upstairs. I was suddenly aware of him blocking my way when I tried to pass him on the landing; he stopped me clumsily but peremptorily, as though I must know what he wanted. Confused, I wondered if he was angry with me for some reason. Then — buried in the completed blackness against his sour heavy clothes, nose and throat full of new intimacy with the unknown of his body — I was more mystified and gratified than anything. Or, I felt as if I was falling through the lit surface of things, out into a new realm of experience where everything was upside-down, and darker. As soon as I guessed that this darker world existed, I wanted to enter it and try what was there. Honestly, until that moment, I hadn’t even liked him.

Of course, this way of telling the story — this stuff about the darkness — is also a romance, a dangerous romance. And looking back, I understand now that Andrew liked me because he made a mistake about me. Because I’d had a baby and hadn’t gone to university, and because I was shy in those days and painted my eyes and could cook and was wary of joining in the arguments, he misinterpreted my character: which was fair enough, all the signs were pretty misleading. In his mythology women ought to be intuitive and enigmatic and wholesome — a safe place in which the lights of male striving and intellect could heal themselves. Whereas I was hoping: now he’ll listen to what I think. To this man, I thought, I can tell the truth at last.

Each of us wanted the other to be the darkness, listening.

Nicky made drawings of the men he worked with on the bypass — I still have them. They are done in pencil in a notebook when they were taking a break, or whenever he wasn’t busy and the foreman wasn’t looking. He told me the men teased him for it but they gathered round to look at themselves: hunched against vibration, tamping the road surface with a rammer; or hunkered over the nub of a cigarette and a mug of tea, paging a thumbed-soft copy of some porn magazine; or craning, hands on levers, to see out of the cab of an excavator. Pages are torn out of the notebook where he gave sketches away. (These men also called him Blackie and gave him the dirtiest work to do, emptying the portable latrines.)

Nicky had lost his way at the art college; the teachers weren’t interested in his drawings from real life. The paintings he did — his final show was a series of repeated marks in thick acrylic, built into rectangular blocks — were quite striking and seemed to impress people. He took them very seriously and they got him good marks. But I don’t think he really knew why he was painting them or what they meant. He wasn’t clever, not in that way. Although I never said so, I could always see through those paintings to an emptiness behind. I can’t see through the little drawings in that notebook, or the ones in other notebooks which he did of me and Lukie and the others — so exact and sure and graceful. The surface of these drawings has its own interior which I can’t penetrate, no matter how hard I stare. (And I don’t stare, not all that often. All this happened long ago, it’s history now.)

I stopped him drawing me in those last months, I couldn’t bear it. (Pretending it was politics — ‘I don’t want to be your subject.’) There’s only one quickly scribbled sketch of me pregnant with Rowan. I’m in the bedroom, doing my hair in front of the mirror with my arms up, my mounded stomach a swelling line under the folds of a loose top. I’m probably wearing my jeans with the zip open, I went on wearing them long after I stopped being able to do them up. I’m not looking at Nicky. I probably didn’t even know that he was drawing me. I’m only looking at myself.

I didn’t know whose baby Rowan was until he was born and it was so obvious he was Nicky’s (his eyes, hair, skin — though he was pale at first; and something fluent and musical, almost feminine, in their limbs). And then afterwards when Rowan grew up so angry with everything and so intransigent, although I knew rationally this wasn’t possible, I couldn’t help thinking that because I had also been making love to Andrew all during the time when I conceived him, and through the months of my pregnancy afterwards, some bitterness from Andrew’s blood or sperm or spirit had got somehow into the mix that made Rowan up. (It’s obvious there’s a sounder explanation. The bitterness that got into him was me.)

And yet, during all that time when I was behaving so badly and no one knew, and when I was so guilty and full of foreboding, I was also often happy — happy in an unbalanced, ecstatic kind of way I’ve never experienced again in all my life. I was with Andrew once in the back garden out among the fruit trees and we weren’t kissing because anyone might have been watching from a window, but the not-kissing was more heady than kissing and I hardly knew what I was doing. He advanced on me, talking about how British society was winding down to its own destruction because of the treachery of the intelligentsia, and I retreated ahead of him, ducking between trees drowning under their foam of white and pink blossom; my ears were full of bee-sound and we crushed a fumy mulch of last year’s rotten plums and apples underfoot. The baby’s mystifying bulk inside me came between us, connecting and separating us. He broke off a whole branch of wet, scented apple blossom and gave it to me. It was a criminal thing; bees were still dangling, desirous, around the flowers’ stamen and stigma and their bulges of ovary which would now never grow into apples. The broken branch was an emblem of my too-much; it seemed more lordly not to refuse such bounty if it offered. What it was impossible to have without harm was also most to be desired. And after all, no one in the commune was supposed to own anyone else’s body, or their feelings. Why, then, was it my first and deepest instinct to keep what was happening with Andrew to myself, as my secret?

If there was apple blossom then that must have been April; and Rowan was born in May. So that scene happened very late, not long before the end. There’s another scene in my memory, from when it was still winter: we’re all bulky in our layers of warm clothes. Everyone’s there, Andrew too. (Not Baz.) Daphne has come back from an afternoon modelling at the art college. Sheila has given up at the pie factory, a burden of sacrifice has fallen from her, she’s buoyant and brittle (not much time left before she leaves Neil and goes off to South America). Jude and I have cooked and we’re in aprons, ladling food out of a couple of big pans; the others are all sitting round the table. I remember all this because I have a photograph of it, a Polaroid, its colours faded now to queasy green — there’s some dark mess on the plates in front of us which we haven’t begun to eat, we’re all looking up expectantly at the photographer. I can’t think who the photographer was. Some convenient outsider stepped into our story to record it.

What’s striking about Andrew in the photograph is how thoroughly his looks now seem to belong to that period. His dun-coloured hair, parted centrally and grown down almost to his waist, makes his face seem too long; he looks young and pasty and his ears stick out. The appeal he once had for me has dated, I can’t recover it. Whereas Nicky looks timeless and vividly alive, as if he could step so easily out of the photograph and across into the present. He has Lukie on his lap. Lukie isn’t looking at the camera, he’s twisting round to smile up at Nicky and touch his face. No wonder I don’t look at this photograph very often. When we’ve finished eating we fall into shouting, drunken, earnest discussion of what knowledge is, and how it is that we know what we know. Sheila’s been reading French philosophy and she says knowledge is only our struggle to have power over things and over each other. I am insisting that one form of knowledge is knowing what milk is like, say, as a baby knows, even before it has language. Andrew says that isn’t real knowledge, it’s only perception, which is different. Real knowledge is that water boils at 100 degrees. This shouting and arguing — all of us involved in it together — is a heady pleasure too, just like the loving in the garden.

And then I was a widow. I wasn’t legally a widow, as Nicky and I were never married, but it’s funny — especially under the complicated circumstances — how the word stuck to me right away in my own imagination. People were startled when I used it. I suppose I was formed by widows: my grandmother was one from before I was born, and my mother was supposed to be one until she married my stepfather. In the commune we believed we weren’t going to do anything the way our parents did — we didn’t want to conform to their types, we repudiated their categories. But when real trouble came those new hopes could look for a while like shallow scratches on a surface. I fell down, after Nicky died, into a very ancient hole. Widowhood didn’t have any glamour for me, it wasn’t a pose, I wasn’t picturing myself poignant or mournful in a black veil or anything. I certainly didn’t pity myself — not after what I’d done. But I recognised this stony place, this bedrock, as if I had been down here before. Somehow it was important to have a name for it, one of the old names.

His death broke up the commune. When I look back, I wonder if the rest of them didn’t stick together for so many months just for my sake: looking out for me with poor little Lukie and my new baby (born on time, three weeks after it happened), doing their best to comfort us. Forensics delayed for a cruelly long time; when they finally allowed us to clean up the kitchen, Daphne invented a beautiful purification ceremony, covering the place with roses and blossom from the garden, burning incense and propping up some of Nicky’s paintings against the wall, lighting candles in front of them. Each of us put something there in his memory, and spoke about him. Neil gave a full bottle of whisky, I remember; Jude gave one of her embroideries; Lukie made a card. Sheila brought the white-leather-covered testament she’d been given at her confirmation. Later we buried all these things in a hole in the garden, and then I had a horror of that place as if Nicky’s body was buried there — even though I’d been to his actual, Catholic burial in Glasgow, where his mother broke down and screamed at us, blaming our way of life (hippies and dropouts) for what had happened. (When Rowan was two or three years old I sent his grandmother photographs and she wrote back; I took him to visit her every so often and for a while, when he was sixteen and we weren’t getting on, he went to live with her.)

Daphne’s ceremony seems a beautiful idea to me now, when I remember it. At the time I just thought it was a fake; I seemed to see through everything, to a grey fake. I can’t even remember what I offered as my token. I think I chose perfunctorily — a bracelet or a pendant Nicky had given me which I hadn’t even liked — because I didn’t want to tempt fate by performing with too much conviction. I only began to cry after Rowan’s birth and then I couldn’t stop; but there was something fake about that too, this tap turned on full — spouting out its world-sorrows, soaking everything — which I couldn’t turn off. Only breastfeeding helped (I was doing it for the first time — I hadn’t even tried to breastfeed Lukie). For as long as the baby was sucking I could imagine myself connected almost impersonally into a great chain of life, one thing flowing into another. It wasn’t a hopeful feeling, just a sensation of continuity, and necessity.

Sheila was the first to leave the commune, after a row with Neil which began when he announced he was going to give up his PhD and do a law conversion course. And then once I’d gone back with the children to live at Fred Harper’s again, the others moved out quickly: that house must have been a dreadful place for all of them, we never got the stains out of the kitchen floorboards. I don’t know how I ended up with the white stone; it’s on my coffee table now, in a wide blue-glazed bowl by a ceramicist whose work I like, kept among other stones collected on family holidays later. Perhaps Lukie brought it with him. It would have seemed a powerful totem to him after he’d watched us passing it from hand to hand, adults so solemnly absorbed in the game they were playing.

None of the others ever knew about my relationship with Andrew; Sheila may have guessed something but she’s never asked me. About a year after Nicky died, Jude and I met up for a night out (she was renting a room from friends, Daphne had moved back temporarily to live with her parents). My mother had Luke and Rowan to stay: everyone was conspiring to cheer me up or take me out of myself. And somehow it happened that at the end of the evening Jude and I ended up in her bed together. We’d both had a lot to drink. It was the only time I ever made love to another woman. Jude hadn’t been harbouring a secret passion for me, the thing just came about out of her kindness; she was consoling me — and consoling herself. She felt responsible, because of Baz. She lit a scented candle in her room and her clean bed linen was patterned with ferns; it was easy touching the cool skin of her body which I knew because it was like my own but not quite like. We didn’t speak much but her light voice and northern vowels were caresses in themselves, inconsequent and soothing. In the dark under her duvet something was unblocked in me: a flood of responsive desiring, to begin with, which took me by surprise. I’d been quite numb and dry for a year, I’d thought sex could never touch me again.

And letting myself fall down into the slippery, brilliant whorls and corridors and intricacies of it, I got back my memories of Nicky too. I’d thought I’d lost these as my punishment — but they had been saved up all the time, in my body. Nicky had had a gift for sex, like his gift for drawing: attentive, inventive, easy, skilful. I think of him now like a shepherd boy in a poem, or a boy lover in a Watteau painting, with a lute. He had actually liked me — liked the clear, light, energetic person he saw in me. (I think over time I’ve become more like that person.) Sex with him hadn’t been at all like conquest; Andrew was wrong, it didn’t always have to do with submission and overwhelming. Actually Nicky was a better lover; or put it this way, he roused up more pleasure in my body than Andrew ever achieved. (But I have to reckon with the truth, too, that it was Andrew I had wanted more.)

I was packing to leave, to go and live with Andrew, when it happened. (Andrew had decided that living with me — and with Lukie and the coming baby — would save him from himself.) Lukie was at nursery. Nicky was hung-over, drinking coffee in the kitchen; he’d been out with his workmates the night before. I hadn’t told him, but I was going to tell him as soon as he came upstairs. The words were ready in my mouth (I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry); resolved, I was listening out for his quick step, taking two stairs at a time as he always did. Afterwards I went over and over this in my thoughts until I was nearly mad (because he was dead, I couldn’t help attributing omniscience to him): but really I don’t think he knew that I was going, or about Andrew. He knew that something was wrong, but not what it was. If I’d decided to tell him half an hour earlier, he’d have died knowing. We were separated from that different story by a tissue-thin sliver of time, mere accident.

Waiting, I confused my dread with the heavy child inside me making it so difficult to move around, reach down, get out my suitcases from under the bed, empty my clothes out of the drawers. Outside the windows the day was stifling hot under grey cloud; sweat ran on the back of my neck and under my arms and between my breasts. Someone arrived at the front door and Neil opened it: I thought it might be Andrew already but it was Baz, I recognised his voice — always reasonable and temporising to begin with. We’d all thought he’d left Bristol, he hadn’t bothered us for a while. Neil should have shut the door in his face. Baz pushed past him into the kitchen; Jude came running up into her bedroom. Hearing the raised voices from downstairs, and the remonstrating, made me more certain that I had to leave. I’d begun to take on some of Andrew’s opinions on communal living: it was an indulgent bourgeois whim and I couldn’t wait to get out of it, being mixed up in everybody else’s craziness and stupidity. The atmosphere in the house had soured. It even smelled bad that day, in the heat; we had a cellar that flooded periodically, according to mysterious tides in a river that had apparently been taken underground when the area was developed. Sometimes when we opened the cellar door, foul grey water would be lapping at the bottom of the brick staircase and our buckets and rubber gloves and dustpan would all be afloat.

No one screamed but some alteration in their voices must have alerted me; I went downstairs. The door which opened out of the back of the hall into the kitchen was closed, but it was half glass — the original Victorian glass with a ruby-red border and a clear star at each corner — so I saw most of what happened through that, unreal and stilted as if I was watching a peep show. Baz must have picked up our knife from where it was left on the draining board after washing up: it was only a vegetable knife, a Sabatier that Daphne had brought from home. He was threatening Neil with it, slashing it in the air (‘I’ve seen that sneering look on your face, you fat pussy’), and I remember Neil was pirouetting fastidiously with a tea towel, like a matador with his cape, to get out of its way. In another life, with a different outcome, it would have been funny. Daphne was holding her hand out, calmly and sensibly telling Baz to give the knife to her, and I think he might have done it except that he seemed to hear something — did I rattle the doorknob, was I trying to open the door? Or was it Jude coming downstairs? So instead he spun round to where Nicky must have been coming from behind to try to disarm him, and he stuck the knife into Nicky, between his ribs, with all his weight behind it.

— You all think you’re so bloody special, don’t you?

And that was it. That’s how disaster comes, without any fanfare — though none of us could take it quite seriously for a moment or two, even Nicky, who looked down at his jumper soaking with blood, more surprised than anything. Baz, still holding the knife, seemed as bewildered as the rest of us, and Daphne hit at his hand with the rolling pin which she’d snatched up from the draining board, kicking the knife away into a corner of the room before she and Neil tackled him to the floor. Sheila ran out to the phone box to call an ambulance and the police. Then before the ambulance men could arrive, Andrew was suddenly at the door — and by that time I knew already that Nicky was dead, I’d been kneeling with his head on my lap, holding his hand, and I’d felt the life go out of him. I sent Andrew to pick up Lukie from nursery and look after him while I went to the hospital. And then when I got back from the hospital I saw Andrew just that once more, when I collected Lukie. They’d spent the afternoon together at the zoo. I told Andrew I could never see him again, ever. Never. I wouldn’t listen when he tried to talk me out of it, I never responded when he phoned or wrote to me afterwards, not ever. And I never did see him again. I only had word of him from time to time, through Sheila.