Clever Girl

7

ONE DAY WHEN FRED CAME IN from school, before he’d even put down his briefcase or taken off his coat, he said he thought he’d found God. It was part of his style to make these pronouncements, like a character in grand opera. Sometimes he would even sing snatches of opera to accompany them. And I used to think how if I’d been his lover or his wife these pronouncements delivered with such oracular solemnity would have got under my skin and made me impatient with him. (I’d have been annoyed by knowing that under the ironic play, sending seriousness up, he actually took himself so seriously.) As it was, I was tolerant of him, and didn’t mind these games. The heavy black overcoat I’d found for him in a charity shop was too big, it swamped him like a cloak and added to the operatic effect, along with his big liquid eyes and drooping, doggy, olive-skinned long cheeks.

I was making a chicken pie, lifting the round of rolled-out pastry on to the dish full of pieces of chicken and ham in a creamy sauce flavoured with lemon.

— I didn’t know God was lost, I said, concentrating on centring the pastry correctly, so that the hole I’d cut came down over the uplifted beak of the china blackbird meant to hold the pastry up. — Where did you find him?

— Don’t mock, Stella. My life’s burdened with sin, I need to change. It can’t go on.

— You’re not in love again, are you? With the new chaplain or something?

He groaned. — You see? How it’s impossible to talk without joking about my spiritual life. I’m not blaming you.

My little boys, aged three years old and seven, were playing out in the garden. Fred’s flat was in the basement of a tall, wide Edwardian house built of red stone; the kitchen door opened on to a paved yard where I hung out the washing and grew a few flowers in pots — not very successfully because the yard only got the sun for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Stone steps led up into the garden proper which was a wild place, crazily overgrown. It was supposed to be the responsibility of the old lady who had once owned the whole house and now lived in the first floor flat, but she had given up bothering with it; when we offered to help she said she didn’t want us interfering. Judging by the state of her flat (her entrance was at the side of the house, up a metal staircase like a fire escape) she had given up bothering in there, too. Sometimes she was standing at her window and caught sight of the boys playing in the garden; then she rapped on the pane and shook her fist at them like a pantomime witch (Rowan showed me, screwing up his face and hunching his shoulders aggressively, growling).

The garden was surrounded with high walls built of the same red stone as the house; a portion at the end had been concreted over years ago to make a car park, which no one used because the gap where the drive ran between the side of the house and the wall was too narrow for the newer cars. The garden must have been handsome once. Massive boulders in the rockery were studded with fossils, roses still bloomed along a rusting arcade where ancient espalier apple trees had been trained. The roses and the apple trees sprouted in disorder, convolvulus smothered everything, brambles were invading over a wall, evergreen trees had grown too tall and cast long, blue shadows. The lawn and the flower beds were tangled with weeds and the drive was pitted with potholes; dock and buddleia sprouted through the asphalt. The boys had a den in the shrubbery. I knew that Luke sometimes climbed into a tree and sat on top of the wall, looking down into the ordered garden next door while Rowan waited obediently below, craning upwards to know what his brother saw. Luke led Rowan around everywhere by the hand, taking care he didn’t step in anything or get stung by nettles. He knew his brother better than anyone did, including me — how best to cushion him against disappointment.

From time to time they made their way back to me down the stone steps (usually because one of them needed the lavatory: Luke would question Rowan sternly, in order to avoid accidents). I loved the sight of them bare-chested in the sunshine, dirty-faced, scruffy because I cut their hair myself, not very well. They wore clothes handed on to me by friends whose children had outgrown them: I patched the knees of the trousers when they wore through, and let down the hems or sewed strips of different fabric around the bottom as the boys grew taller. I gave them picnics to take along on their adventures, packed into Rowan’s little red suitcase. I never spied on them but once when I was on my way to the dustbin I caught sight accidentally of them unwrapping the packets of biscuits in their den, sitting very seriously to eat them, side by side. Not wanting to break in on their secret, I crept away.

— I need a framework, Fred said, lifting the crust from the chicken pie with his knife and fork to sniff the steam. — I’m bewildered by too much freedom. That’s why I’m thinking of converting. It isn’t the chaplain — he’s very unattractive. And he’s a dreary Anglican, anyway.

— Do you have too much freedom? I said. — You’re always complaining about how school takes every moment of your time.

— In my moral life, I mean.

— Oh, in your moral life! I didn’t know you had one.

— What’s a moral life? Luke asked.

Fred began to explain, wiping his mouth on his napkin. Drinking in new information, Luke watched his face intently. — It’s the life you lead in the light of your conscience. Choosing whether to do right or wrong, trying to work out what right is.

— What’s your conscience?

— Well, that depends on whether you believe in God, or Freud. The question is: how does your conscience know what’s wrong?

Fred always answered the children’s questions fully and with scrupulous seriousness. They loved this, and would follow him round the flat interrogating him (‘Have you ever been in a war? Who invented writing?’), until he had to summon me to rescue him. I could imagine what kind of a teacher he was at the expensive private boys’ school he pretended to hate: satirical, calculatedly eccentric, inspiring, sometimes arbitrary; disliked by the sporty boys, worshipped by a few clever ones, and with deadly enemies on the staff. By that time his persona at the school was probably larger and more dramatic than anything really going on in his private life. I teased him, but he was chastened and wary and as far as I knew kept his desires mostly to himself. Occasionally he disappeared to town in the evening and came back very late, always alone.

Rowan of course didn’t like the chicken pie. I had to bargain with him. — Just four spoonfuls. Just three. Then you can leave the rest. I held up my three fingers so he could see I wasn’t cheating. Really, I was saving my own face. The spoonfuls were very tiny, they were only tokens. (How could I force him to eat, when I’d been such a difficult eater myself?) After supper, when the boys were in the bath, I cleared up while Fred recited poetry to me: mostly, during that period when he was flirting with religion, Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘earth her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm…’). I didn’t mind this. If he tried to help wash the dishes or put the toys away everything took twice as long. Anyway, our arrangement was that we lived with him rent-free in return for housekeeping: scrupulously I fulfilled my part.

There were times when I didn’t mind anything: the hazy yellow evening light, the midges swarming, the back door open into the yard where the boys’ bikes and plastic racquets lay where they had dropped them, the thrush singing in a hornbeam in the garden, the intimately known round of drudgery, the sound of the boys’ splashing in the bath and their absorbing games. And at the end of it lifting Rowan out of the bathwater gone too cold, his chattering teeth and wrinkled finger-ends, his snuggling close against me, seeping wet into the big bath towel, the fight between us quenched and dormant for an interval; while Luke pulled the plug and the water drained, leaving its flotsam and jetsam beached on the enamel: bath toys and garden grit. By the time I lay between them to read to them in my single bed (they slept in the same room as me, in bunks), I was so tired sometimes that I fell asleep mid-sentence. I half knew that I mumbled a few nonsense words before I lapsed. The boys would be lost in the story, incredulous and frustrated when it failed. Peering in my face and nudging me in the ribs (— Mum! Wake up!) they would try to keep me afloat for long enough at least to arrive at the end of the chapter.

Fred was always trying to persuade me to read grown-up books. He said it would save me, and I said I didn’t need saving, that was him, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he the one supposed to be wrestling with angels or whatever? I had been a reader once, when I was a girl. But these days, with two young children — I said to him — where would I find the time? While Fred did his marking or groaned aloud in pleasure over his philosophy books and religious books (sometimes he brought in passages to read to me), I sorted out the washing. I put the television on, I stood in front of it to iron the children’s clothes and Fred’s shirts and my own things (I was working in the mornings in a small art gallery so I had to look tidy). I did my bits of mending. I made lists of what I had to do the next day. I was all right.

And then every so often, as if a switch flicked between two versions of myself, I suddenly wasn’t all right. That same night, the night of the chicken pie, I blundered up out of my bed when it was still dark. I couldn’t stay between the stifling sheets; the carpet was greasy under my bare feet, I trod on sharp fragments of toy. The boys were sound asleep, flush-faced, limbs flung out heedlessly, duvets kicked down to the bottom of their beds. I couldn’t recover my last night’s life with its ordered calm, one thing after another; I wasn’t that same person with her steady, sane perspectives. It seemed intolerable that in a few hours it would be Saturday and I’d be putting breakfast on the table once again, then eating it once again, then washing up after it, nagging the boys to get dressed, planning the shopping, putting clothes in the washing machine. These repetitions stood like a barrier I couldn’t pass, blocking the time ahead.

I went into Fred’s room and hunted in the dark for the car keys, feeling in the pockets of his jacket on its coat hanger. Confused, he reared up against the pillows and switched on the bedside light. The grandiose mahogany bed with its scrolled ends had belonged to his parents and had been his marital bed until his wife divorced him. Books were pressed open, spine up, one on top of another, on the floor beside the bed and on the bedside table — which was also crowded with cigarettes and full ashtray, empty whisky glass, bottles of tablets, alarm clock. He was incongruous in cream pyjamas — one of those men made to be fully dressed, his surface polished and finished.

— Please, let me have your keys, I said. — Don’t be mad with me. I just want them for today. Or for a couple of days.

— What kind of time is it? Christ, it’s the middle of the night, Stella. You might have been the secret police. You’re lucky I didn’t have a heart attack.

The car wasn’t really the main issue. Fred scrabbled on his table for cigarettes and lighter, upsetting the pile of books. The hair on the back of his head was muzzy from his pillows: he slept obediently on his back like a child in a storybook.

— Are you taking the boys?

— You can take them round to my mother’s. Is it all right? I’m sorry.

— But how will I take them, without the car?

— I don’t know. Get a taxi? I’ll pay you back.

I had found the keys spilt out from his pocket on to the dressing table along with a heap of change and some crumpled notes, nub ends of chalk; I gripped them so that they dug into my palm. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this: ‘done a runner’, as my Auntie Jean cheerfully described it. (I was surprised when Jean confessed to runners of her own, when she was a young mother.) I didn’t do it often — once or twice a year, perhaps. Fred knew me, he knew I wasn’t putting it on. It was part of his character to support his friends without criticism in whatever adventures they got into. He told me I’d have to put petrol in the car if I was going any distance, and to take his cash, which would tide me over until the banks opened.

Fred really did mean it about the religious thing; he went through a course of instruction and was received into the Catholic Church. He began going to mass on Sundays and taking communion and confessing. It made him happy, I think. Intellectually and in his tastes in art and writing he was so sceptical, questing, doubting; nothing shocked him. And yet in himself, in his person, there was something resigned, he accepted convention as the frame of his life. The church suited him just as the rituals of the school day suited him, imposing their pattern on the succession of minutes.

My daily life was conforming and unexciting, I knew next to nothing about politics or society. And yet I felt this strength like a knife inside me, anarchic and destructive, able to cut through whatever outward forms of authority I met — vicars or businessmen or headmasters in their grey suits, with their smooth arguments and dismissive irony, so confident in their unassailable rightness. I believed that I could see through them to their false core and their vanity. Some of the artists whose work was exhibited in the gallery were unassailable like this too, even if they didn’t wear suits — they hardly noticed me perched on my trendy high stool, paid to answer the telephone and bank the cheques. I hated the school where Fred taught, for instance, and where I had once worked as a cleaner. Sometimes when I was going on about the hypocrisy of the school — its high-toned preaching about enlightened values while it taught its pupils to be competitive and arrogant, just because they had money — Fred would look as if he was quite afraid of me. I expect that sometimes I ranted and exaggerated. I don’t really know, now, whether I was right.

The way out of Fred’s flat was up a short flight of concrete steps where shrubs grew thickly on either side: a yellow-spotted poisonous laurel and some dark evergreen with spiky leaves. It must have rained earlier because these were wet when I pushed through them in the dark; I saw the sepulchral night-face of the street, moonlight on the slate roofs and the lawns. The little white 1970 Lotus Elan smelled of its vinyl seat covers; I had encouraged Fred to buy it, I loved its sleek sumptuousness and the dirty snarl of its engine. (His ex-wife Lizzie blamed me for the frivolity and expense. She and I had a rather tortured relationship.) The moment I was behind the wheel, I was calmer. I turned on the lights, heard the engine bark into life. Driving, it was as if a spring uncoiled in me. At first I was careful not to go too fast around the sleeping streets. I drove out to the motorway, under the suspension bridge strung against the grey first light, alongside the river snaking between banks of glinting mud. I filled up at a service station, paying with Fred’s money. I drove north. Lights were still on in the windows of some factories; a white horse in a field seemed to race the car.

The traffic thickened. In the little Lotus I nipped in and out between the lorries, urgent as if I was forging on towards something. I hardly thought about the boys I’d left behind me, rousing in their beds and wondering where I was, Rowan stepping out of the parcel of his plastic pants and sodden ammoniac nappies, shaking Luke awake to play with him, Luke taking charge (‘Let’s go and tell Fred she’s gone’). I didn’t think about anything, I was transparent and alive, washed through with the present moment.

The first time I ran away, Rowan was only eighteen months old. I took the boys to my mother’s and when she came to the front door she was dressed up to go out shopping in her coat and silk scarf and clip earrings, her face freshly made up.

I said I was stuck and needed her help.

I saw how she opened her mouth to make some remark about how I’d better get used to being stuck at home and bored. She couldn’t help wanting to remind me that my difficulties were the consequence of the rash, headstrong life I had chosen, ignoring her warnings, mixing with the wrong kind of people.

— It’s an emergency, I lied. — Madeleine’s in some kind of trouble.

When she looked in my face she must have seen something that silenced her because resignedly she began unbuttoning her coat. Luke was already helping Rowan off with his shoes. Luke loved the ordered routines of his grandmother’s house, the fitted carpets and big telly and central heating. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to live that way. I slipped away before Rowan could realise I was leaving. Madeleine was as good a destination as any other. I had her address, that was all, but no clear idea of how to find her. I hardly knew London. And this was in the days before the Lotus; I was in Fred’s old Hillman Imp, which overheated if it had to wait in traffic. Madeleine might have moved house since I’d last heard from her (she had written a kind letter when Rowan was born which I hadn’t replied to). Or she might be away on holiday, or have gone home to visit her mother in Bristol. I had a telephone number but when I called from the motorway service station there was no reply. None of this mattered, I thought. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t find her. I could always sleep the night in the back of the car.

When I found my way at last to where she lived, behind Seven Sisters Road, I was frightened by the street with its boarded-up shops and gaudy off-licences and by the grim block of flats with its intimidating entry phone — I almost gave up because I didn’t know how to use this. It seemed an improbable miracle when the real Madeleine was actually at home, both familiar and strange: the same yellow hair with its brassy glints, the same frank pink face, round baby-blue eyes staring.

— Stella! My God, how amazing! Is it really you?

— No, just someone else exactly like me, I said, as if I was picking up the tone of our old childhood friendship, where I was always one jump ahead.

Madeleine was wearing a vintage silky blouse and her hair was cut into a mop shape tied with a flowery ribbon; she looked glossy and competent and I was impressed and crushed. I imagined her belonging in a vivid round of parties and pubs and love affairs, all tinged with danger in the rough, dark city: this turned out to be more or less accurate and my envy never quite subsided during that whole visit. I stayed with Madeleine for two nights. I did telephone my mother to let her know where I was, and I telephoned the café where I was still working then, telling them that Rowan was ill and I couldn’t come in. Mum was short with me, but then she was often short with me; and she said the boys were fine, and of course they were. They played up for a while when I went back, but they didn’t sustain any lasting damage, of course they didn’t. People leave their children with their grandparents or with friends all the time, there’s no harm in it, it’s a good thing. Once or twice I left the children by pre-arrangement with Mum or Fred, and went off for some visit I’d organised properly (I went back to Madeleine); nobody minded that, they encouraged me to do it. But my unplanned escapes seemed catastrophic at the time. Catastrophic and necessary. I always thought while I was running away that I might never go back again, that I might just disappear and move into a new life.

Madeleine and I sat up until late, that first visit, talking and drinking wine, cross-legged on her bed; she made up a mattress for me on the floor and we played LPs we’d bought together when we were teenagers. Her room was full of reminders of those old days — the same red bulb in the light socket, the same collection of soft toys, the same regiments of bottles of make-up and nail polish on her dressing table. She didn’t give one hint that I’d inconvenienced her, turning up without warning; she seemed genuinely excited to see me. She still had her puppy-eagerness, slightly blank, adapting to whatever company she kept. We had to sit in the bedroom because she said her flatmate was ‘insane, really’ — apparently she was obsessive about cleanliness and Madeleine had to scrub all the surfaces she used with disinfectant. The girl complained if visitors smoked or were noisy or if their shoes left traces on the carpet. When we heard this flatmate come in we turned the stereo off and began talking in whispers. I told funny stories about the trials of motherhood — which did even begin to seem funny, at this remote distance. Madeleine told me about her latest boyfriend, who worked with her in their company producing promotional pop videos; but there was something going on as well with a man who worked in an office upstairs, though this was only at the stage of glances and snatches of conversation.

I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t have a lover, that since Nicky died there hadn’t been anyone else and I slept every night alone with my children. I made a big deal out of the drama of living with Fred, and told her about his reciting poetry and singing arias; about the huge pieces of mahogany furniture and the Turkish rugs that had belonged to his mother, about the difficulties with his children and my ongoing fight with Lizzie. I made the picture of our life in the flat deliberately Gothic and intellectual and adult so that hers seemed lightweight and everyday beside it. I even hinted that there was more between us than just friendship; when Madeleine said she’d always thought that Fred was queer, I reminded her that he’d been married and had two children. I was terribly ashamed about this silly story afterwards, though Madeleine never brought it up in conversation when I saw her again, so perhaps she hadn’t believed it anyway. (And eventually there were other lovers for me to tell her about: real ones.)

Madeleine tried to talk to me about Nicky, too. When she asked how I was feeling she put her hand on mine but I pulled away, snagging one of my Indian silver rings in the wool of her coloured crocheted bedspread. If anyone asked about Nicky, in those days, I told them the whole story — carefully, lightly, in a tone of poignant regret. I couldn’t tell them how I was feeling because I didn’t know.

Another time when I ran away I got ill with some kind of virus — I suppose I was incubating it even before I left. At first as I drove I thought the illness was only my misery and desperation, so overwhelming that they were manifesting physically, thickening my throat and blurring my mind with headache. I made it as far as a B & B outside Ludlow, in a grim village strung along a busy road with no pub or shop, only a concreted farmyard, cows up to their flanks in shit and black mud. I was burning up with fever by then and knew I shouldn’t go any further.

I hadn’t stayed in any kind of guest house or hotel since I was a little girl and my mother was in charge; I was worried when I took the room that I’d misunderstood the price, or that there would be extras on my bill I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t follow the rules for using the bathroom (there were no en suites in those days), or where I was supposed to go in the morning for my breakfast. I felt ashamed of being ill, I hid it from the landlady and dreaded encountering any of the other guests. And yet when I was alone at last, and had pulled the orange-flowered curtains across to shut out a dour view (muddy, steep fields, sheep bleakly shorn, stone walls black with wet), I lay down between the strange sheets, scalding and shuddering, in a submission to my doom that was almost voluptuous. The wallpaper was orange too, with a pattern like gourds swelling and shrivelling in perpetual motion round the walls.

I had to confess to the landlady eventually, when she came knocking on my door next day (I hadn’t made it down to breakfast), that I didn’t think I could get out of bed, let alone eat egg and sausage. She wasn’t enthusiastic about having a sick guest on her hands, but she did bring me cups of sweet tea and aspirins every few hours, which punctuated my delirium and seemed providential, life-saving. She offered to get me a doctor but I said I didn’t need one. From time to time when the coast was clear I crept — hunched as if something had broken inside me — across the landing to visit the lavatory: the giant fronds in the pattern of the carpet seemed to move, coiling under my bare feet. For three whole days and nights I never even phoned home. I’d left the boys that time with my Auntie Jean. It was the longest I ever stayed away — but really I wasn’t responsible, I hardly knew what I was doing. I don’t think my mother believed me when I tried to explain, though Jean didn’t seem to mind.

On the fourth day I woke up to the blessed sensation of convalescence — illness like a sweating devil had slipped out of me, leaving me weightless, weak, transparent as a shell. Relieved, the landlady brought me toast and cornflakes. Drinking my tea propped up against the pillows, I was washed through with a delicate, passionate happiness. This had no apparent cause inside me, didn’t seem to arise from the facts of my life or from my self — any more than the white sunlight did, burning in the raindrops trickling down the windowpane. Washing at the tiny sink, resting between efforts, putting back on the cold jeans and shirt and jumper I had taken off three days ago, I tried to prolong this happiness, or find a code I could store it in, so that it meant something even when I wasn’t feeling it. I imagined it as resembling the filmy skin of a bubble enclosing its sphere of ordinary air: impermanent yet also, for as long as it existed, flexible and resilient — real, a revelation.

When Fred tried to persuade me to read books and I told him I was too busy, it wasn’t the truth. Actually, I was reading all that time — in bed, or while Rowan napped in the afternoons, or on the sofa in the sitting room in the evening if Fred went out. At the art gallery, where sometimes there were no customers for hours at a time, I always had a novel on the go. For some reason I wanted to keep my reading secret from Fred: perhaps I just felt that too much of my life was already open to his view and I needed to hold something back. Or perhaps I dreaded his triumph if he saw me absorbed in a book — and his tactful disappointment if it was the wrong one. I didn’t want him to feel he’d won any argument. I didn’t want him making recommendations or trying to form me by giving me a reading list, or opening up critical discussions.

I’d stopped reading abruptly when I got pregnant with Luke and had to leave school and the whole plan for my life changed track; or rather fell into abeyance, where there was no track at all. I think I felt cheated, as if the books I’d loved had held out a promise of strong, bright, meaningful happenings they couldn’t deliver. If I’d read more carefully I’d have seen that falling off a track and nosing round and round unhappily in a tight circle was just what most books described. Yet for a long time, first when Luke was a baby and I worked at the school, and then when I lived in the commune and Rowan was born, my memory of the fiction I’d once read was tainted with a suspicion that it was written for somebody else, for someone initiated into a higher order of culture which shut me out. I’d once read Beckett and Burroughs — now I imagined these authors as my enemies because I thought they’d have despised the things I had no choice but to spend my life on: washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning.

Then not long after Nicky died and we moved back to Fred’s, Rowan fell asleep in my arms one afternoon while I was breastfeeding him. I was sitting in the corner of an old chaise longue: its black leather worn away in places, it was sprouting horsehair and the empty time seemed unbearable. A marble clock on Fred’s mantelpiece looked like a funerary monument and its tick in the silence was resonant, punishing. Fred was out teaching, Luke was at nursery. I reached over for a book, just so that I didn’t have to think; deliberately I chose one that I’d never heard of — The Cloister and the Hearth — from the neglected bottom corner of Fred’s shelves. Its thick pages were freckled with mould spots and smelled peppery with damp. I liked knowing that no one had opened it for a long time.

The Victorians saved me. Fred’s mother had left him quite a collection, inherited I think from her own mother, or grandmother. I read East Lynne, The Woman in White, The Water Babies, The Heir of Redclyffe, Lady Audley’s Secret, and much more. All those days of sickness in the B & B near Ludlow, I was wandering in my delirium in and out of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Of course I loved Middlemarch and Jane Eyre too. But in that phase of my life the less good novels fascinated and absorbed me, the ones that were fairly dead and desiccated, embalmed in their lost world with its ideals of womanly sacrifice and goodness. I didn’t read them with detached amusement; my imagination adapted to the alien forms and coloration of each book as I read like a life-saving camouflage. The very fact of these novels being so obliquely angled to my own life was part of the relief of my escape into them. And I didn’t condemn the ideals of sacrifice, I could see how they would work as a way of getting through the day, dressing drudgery up as a poignant adventure, putting the whole burden of freedom on to the poor men. Some of those novels seemed like nothing less than an extended punishment of their men, who were drunk and heinous and craven in exact proportion to how far their women abased and subordinated themselves.

I made up my mind, every so often, that it was silly not to tell Fred what I was doing. I wanted to talk with someone about how strange these novels were. The whole pretence was ridiculous; I had to go to some lengths to hide my reading from him and from the boys, I was shoving my books out of sight down the side of my bed at night, against the wall. Then just when I was on the point of spilling over with my confession, I’d catch sight of Fred flicking through the pages of something — frowning or smiling knowingly as if he was communing with the author, scoring down the side of a text with his pencil to emphasise significance, scribbling notes. I was irritated in those days by these exhibitions of his pouncing cleverness, and his possession of what he read. (Now that he’s gone I remember them with yearning.) So I shut my mouth and kept my secret.

The delicate first hour of morning hardened into prosaic day. I drove north. Traffic thickened, the Lotus got stuck, revving impatiently, in queues of people driving to work round Birmingham — as soon as I could I passed them, leaping on upstream, away from home, towards anywhere: even to Scotland, I thought in a mad moment. I was taking in the world spread out around me as I drove, less through my eyes, which had to be on the road, than through my whole awareness, through my skin, as if I’d emerged from a deep burrow underground. For long stretches where the conurbation was unbroken, there spread on either side of the motorway a dream landscape, smoke-blackened brick and corrugated iron, pastel-blank façades and rain-stained concrete, fat cooling towers, gasometers, the metal mesh of factory gates, tree trunks in a padlocked yard beside a scummy ditch. The land’s fabric seemed dragged down and tearing under the sheer weight of the built environment, which never ended and could surely never be undone and wasn’t even thriving: the monster machine was stalling, it had poisoned itself and now it had fallen into enemy hands (I was very political in those years): three million were unemployed, there was rioting in the cities. Because I was young, the ugliness didn’t defeat me, it made my heart beat faster, it was my birthright. Daniel Deronda and East Lynne hadn’t made me nostalgic. They made me know how we’re wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.

I stopped at a service station for a sandwich and a coffee and to fill up again with petrol; when I climbed out of the Lotus my legs trembled with the effort of driving so far without a break. Fred kept a road atlas in the pocket behind my seat and I studied it while I ate. Scotland was too far away for one day’s journey — I chose Manchester instead, where I’d never been and knew no one. I drove on, following the signs, and made my way eventually into Manchester’s city centre, where I looked around to find a place to leave the Lotus safely. By this time it was lunchtime, one o’clock. The city’s exterior was more dour in those days than it is now; modern shops and billboards at street level looked perfunctory in the shadow of the old civic grandeur. Towering Victorian hotels and insurance offices were empty, with broken and boarded-up windows, as if a civilisation had fallen; and I suppose in some sense it had.

I was always frightened, all the time I was running away — not only by the big thing I had done, leaving home, but also by every small test of my inexperience. Even going into a strange branch of my bank, I quailed at having to speak to the cashier, handing my cheque over. I would never have dared go into a restaurant by myself — anyway, I’d hardly ever been to restaurants, I had no idea how to order or ask for a bill. (And a woman eating alone in a restaurant would have been conspicuous in those days.) I could just about manage a café, though I walked around for a long time before deciding on the right one. I stumbled upon Manchester Art Gallery by chance and felt the relief of refuge inside its quiet rooms which I had almost to myself, hung with jewel-coloured paintings, companion pieces to the novels I was reading. The warmth and sleepy backwater-hush reminded me of the library I had loved when I was a teenager.

It wasn’t robbery or violence I was afraid of — or certainly those weren’t at the forefront of my mind. But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, I couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed in my raw, unfinished ignorance. The expression on my face — frowning, spiky, defiant, I mostly think, in those days — was like a mask of closed competence which I wore and dreaded having torn away. I was twenty-five and it didn’t occur to me to use my youth as power, I only felt it as weakness. At least at home I was able to tell myself I was a mother, wrap myself round in all the responsibility and importance of that — although the way women used that importance sometimes felt to me like cheating, an illegitimate shortcut. (Also, I wasn’t sure that I was good at mothering.)

If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I?

What could I do; what could I become?

It was dusk, and the gallery had closed, and I hadn’t found anywhere to stay. I had wandered without meaning to away from the main drag; anyway, the shops had closed too and the cream and orange double-decker buses were packed with people going home. I found myself walking on a side road alongside a high wall overgrown with weeds; then where the wall ended a broad vista opened up across a stretch of wasteland overgrown with scrubby bushes and rugged with the flooring of vanished factories, the humped remains of brick outbuildings. Cranes stood up in the distance against a sky with a thin blue sheen like liquid metal, striated with pale cloud; puddles of water on the ground reflected the sky’s light as silver. The beauty of it took me by surprise. Dark skeins of birds detached themselves, shrilling, from the bushes and ruined buildings while I stood watching. They twisted in long ribbons of movement, rising up against the blue light then subsiding, and as their mass configured and reconfigured I thought of Nicky who had existed warm and alive in one moment, and now in this moment didn’t exist.

Ten minutes later I stood in the enclosed sour air of a phone box with my coins clutched in my fist, hearing my own breathing, dialling my mother’s number, my fingers fumbling anxiously in the dial-holes.

Mum didn’t like telephones. She answered warily and resentfully.

— Oh, it’s you, she said.

I’m sure she was relieved to hear from me. My mother was a great support to me, really, in all those years after Nicky died. But she couldn’t help herself trying to influence me and mould me; she wanted me to be disciplined in the collapse of my life as she had been in hers when I was a baby and her first marriage had failed.

— Are the boys all right?

She held back her reassurance as if I didn’t deserve it; but I heard them in the background, laughing with my brother Philip, who was thirteen, just the right age to enchant and entertain them. (Philip was naughty at school but charming at home, witty and maturely considerate.)

— Where are you, anyway? she said.

— Don’t worry, I said. — I’ll be fine.

— Gerry and I were going out tonight, we’ve had to cancel. He’s none too pleased.

— I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll iron his socks for you or something. (She really did iron socks and dusters.)

— It isn’t funny, Stella.

My mother must have been afraid, every time I ran off, that I wouldn’t come back. In the first hours of running, I was sometimes afraid of it too — holding on to the shape of myself that changed and struggled and almost got away. Someone tapped with a coin on the glass in the phone box door and I waved to them, signalling that I was nearly done. I told Mum I didn’t know when I’d be home. — Soon, soon, I said: which could have meant days, or even weeks. I didn’t want them to have me fixed in time or place.

Soon, soon. I drove through that night and arrived at my mother’s house about one in the morning. (It wasn’t my old home, they had moved since I lived with them.) The front of the house was dark, where my mother and stepfather slept; but at the back there was a light on in Philip’s bedroom. I got his attention by throwing gravel from the path up against the glass of his window; he came down to the kitchen door and let me in.

— What time d’you call this? he whispered with mock-severity. — Decent people are all in their beds.

— You’re not.

— I know. We’re so indecent. Where did our parents go wrong?

— I blame them for their moral turpitude, I said.

— So do I. Whatever it is, I blame them for it. Their moral turpentine.

Reprieved from his boredom in the sleeping house, he was comically eager to make tea for me. — Or have a whisky, he coaxed with a flourish. — Sherry, advocaat, Tia Maria. I’ll join you.

— No you won’t, daft oaf. I’m going straight to bed, I’m asleep on my feet here, I’ve been driving for hours. I’ll get in with the boys.

— Driving where? Where’ve you been?

— Never you mind.

He shook his head sagely. — You’re in trouble in the morning.

— Maybe, maybe not. He won’t say anything.

— He’s been saying plenty.

— Yes, but not to me.

In the close darkness of the spare room, the boys slept one in each twin bed. Mum had made blackout curtains for the windows so that the light didn’t wake them in summer. Undressing down to my T-shirt and knickers, I climbed in beside Luke, trying to move him over without waking him. Heat, and the sweet-sour nutty smell of boy, rolled from his resisting limbs under the duvet; I could feel that he was in his old cotton pyjamas which buttoned down the front. Physical contact in the dark restored my vision of my sons — the intent, unguarded seriousness of their faces in sleep — as vividly as if I’d switched the light on. Their sleeping was always more urgent work than mere absence; they thrashed or snored or threw the duvet off with sudden purposeful violence. I felt relief, falling asleep at last. I wasn’t free, I was fastened to my children. At some point in the night I woke to Luke’s scrutiny, bent close over me. — Mum’s back, he said to himself in mild surprise, as if he saw the funny side of the whole thing.