Clever Girl

8

I FELL IN LOVE WITH MAC Beresford, who came with his wife into the art gallery where I worked. He wasn’t my type at all. To begin with, the painting they bought was sickly, in my opinion — a fantasy with blue horses and a sort of arc of roses in the air above a snow scene, sleds and snowballs and peasant children in mittens. The gallery wasn’t cutting edge, it mostly sold the work of local artists to people who could afford original art but not the real thing. I liked working there because it was so easy after the café. Sometimes I could spend all morning reading my book while a few customers browsed.

Mac and his wife Barbara were tall and middle-aged. They both wore expensive long overcoats, his fawn and hers black with a big fake astrakhan collar; he was balding and stout, she had a big, sweet, pink face, made-up with pink powder and lipstick. She smelled sweet too, she was one of those women who moved in an aura of perfume and bath oils and hand cream. Her wavy blonde hair was fastened back in a black velvet clip and she was energetic, friendly, trusting. She had been into the gallery the day before; now she was bringing her husband to approve her choice before she paid for it.

— Doesn’t it cheer you up?

— I’m cheerful, he said. — How much is it?

— No, look at it properly, Mac. We have to live with this staring down at us for years. Do we really like it?

— I don’t know. Do we?

— Or are we just convincing ourselves we like it, and we’ll regret it later?

— It’s nice, we like it.

I guessed that they probably performed this double act often for the entertainment of their friends — his scepticism, her slightly scatty earnestness. I took them over a price list.

— My wife has to go a long way round sometimes, Mac explained to me, — talking herself into what she already knows she’s going to buy.

I thought that I never wanted anyone to claim to know me in that way — fond, tolerant, exasperated.

— What about this other one? Barbara said. — The village is asleep, there are fish floating in the night sky. I suppose they’re dreams. D’you like that better?

— I like them all, darling.

Waiting for her to make up her mind, he wandered over to the desk where I hadn’t picked up my book again, in case I seemed too indifferent to the gallery’s business. I was looking through the morning’s mail (I was supposed to sort the serious from the not-so-serious for Nigel, the gallery owner) and because I was vaguely annoyed with his attitude I didn’t look up. Mac told me afterwards that he guessed I was annoyed with him, and why, and that because of my not looking up he determined on the spot to make me change my mind and like him. He told me in fact that he had had a full-blown revelation, as he stood pretending to read the catalogue and really staring at the white skin of my neck under my ear, against my hair. (I was still dyeing my hair rusty henna-black, wearing it in a plait.) He said the sight of my neck washed him through with a physical pain which was his first ever panic at growing old; my disdain made him feel that life — savoury magnificent immoral life — was flowing away without his having had enough of it. He was imagining of course that I was an irresponsible girl; he had no idea I was the mother of two sons. By the time he found that out — he said — it was too late already, there was no going back.

I’m trying to remember all the things about Mac Beresford which were so overwhelming at the time, such a revelation. He had a degree in engineering from Salford and owned a successful business manufacturing precision instruments for surgery and medical research. He voted Liberal and read the Financial Times. He was opinionated, forceful, well-informed; inflexible sometimes, sentimental sometimes. He loved his wife, adored his two daughters and paid for them to go to private school, was an enthusiast for opera and W. B. Yeats and rugby union. He had inherited his eloquence and strong emotion from his dead father, an Anglican lay preacher — so all his stories seemed to have a hidden meaning, as if he was searching under their surface.

I looked up from the invoices and letters because Mac’s mass, in his expensive coat hanging open (Barbara chose his clothes, but he wasn’t indifferent to them), was blocking my light. His attention, fixed on me, was tangible and disconcerting. His head, I saw, was more interesting than I had realised when I only took him in as middle-aged — face broad and compressed, cheekbones not prominent, pale blue eyes protuberant, the skin tanned and tough and smooth, setting already in its firm folds at the neck. The last of his thinning hair was auburn, fox-coloured, light as down. I used to say, later, that he looked like a caricature of a plutocrat — he wasn’t insulted, he enjoyed the good health and strength of his body without vanity (or, his vanity was in his confidence that his looks didn’t matter). Barbara was still agonising between the paintings, and Mac was studying me so intently that when he asked which painting I liked best I had a feeling he saw past my prevarication (blandly, I said that it all depended on where it was going to hang) to the truth that I condemned all the paintings as trivial, which piqued and intrigued him. (— I guessed then that you were a little savage, a revolutionary, he teased me later. — Only waiting for your chance to tear down capitalism, and me with it.)

When the exhibition was over, it was Mac who came back to pick up the one they’d settled on. The gallery had been closed all day, its serene space disrupted by the chaos of dismantling. Nigel and I had been packing the paintings for sending and collection; Nigel had taken some of them in his car for local delivery. It was dusk on the street outside and I was tired. It was close to Christmas; the last shoppers were hurrying home, there were fairy lights in the shop windows and wound through the bare branches of the trees, the jeweller’s next door had been playing Christmas jingles all day until I’d stopped hearing them. I hadn’t thought about Mac once since I last saw him, and yet when he rapped on the window, peering in at me, I felt caught out and exposed as if the bare gallery were a lit fish tank. With clumsy fingers I unbolted the door.

— Look, come outside on the pavement for a moment, he said. — I want to show you something.

I was obedient because I was dazed — it was stuffy inside, we’d had the Calor gas heater on all day, boosting the central heating. Mac put his arm round my shoulders, pointing up at the sky between the buildings. His wool coat and scarf smelled of lanolin and cold night air trapped in the fibres.

— See the moon: just like the one in our picture.

It was true. The real moon was quarter full just like the one I had despised as whimsical in the painting they’d bought; silver-blue, curled like a comma or a tiny embryo, snug in its blurry ring of frost like a moon in a cave. When we had looked at it for a minute or two, he led me purposefully inside and closed the door behind us, not letting go of where he gripped my arm.

— Now. Why don’t you like our picture? he asked, frowning into my face in the bald indoor light, solemnly in earnest as if what I thought mattered. — You see it’s true to life. What have you got against it?

— I don’t mind it.

— Yes you do, don’t fib. You think it’s saccharine and mendacious. I’ve been working it out ever since we last met.

— Do you want to talk to Nigel? If you’ve changed your mind he may be able to come to some arrangement.

— I don’t want to come to any arrangement. I don’t care about the painting. I want to know what you think. I’ve been thinking about what you think, non-stop for two weeks. Won’t you come out to dinner with me?

— I don’t know, I said stupidly. What was I doing? Out of the two of them, I’d preferred his wife. — When?

— Tonight?

— I can’t, tonight. I’d have to get a babysitter.

This was a blow; he reeled from it and let go my arm. — A babysitter?

— I’ve got two boys. Fred’s picked them up from school because I knew I’d be working late. He’s finished already, he’s a teacher in a private school, they have shorter terms. Pay more, get less teaching.

— Fred? He’s your husband?

I said Fred was just a friend, and that the boys’ father had died. Mac looked baffled and unhappy. — Well actually, two separate fathers, except one just disappeared.

— Christ. You poor little kid.

— Oh, it’s OK. It was years ago.

He asked me just how old I was, exactly, and I said twenty-seven.

Somehow Mac was tangled in the thickets of my life already and I was tangled in his. Ten minutes before this I had forgotten all about him. It must have been physical, I suppose. Underneath all the complicated negotiations we still had to get through, all the painful rash precipitations and withdrawals, we’d had a tiny taste already, out on the street, of how it would be to yield to each other, to sink down together into the deep safety of each other’s flesh. No, that’s not it. Mac didn’t want to yield to me or anybody, he didn’t want safety. He wanted what men want from spiky, wiry girls twenty years younger (almost) than they are. But I wanted to yield. In that moment it’s what I wanted, anyway — to lean on his arm for ever, abandoning criticism, yearning up at the Christmas lights and the blurry moon.

We made love for the first time one afternoon in January at Fred’s — actually in Fred’s bed — while Fred was out teaching. It had to be Fred’s bed, although I felt bad about it, not only because my own bed was a narrow single one and Mac was a big man, but also because my bed was tucked like an afterthought alongside the bunks of my sons, in the midst of all the evidence of them which Mac found so difficult, their scattered toys and treasures, their pyjamas dropped where they’d dressed in the morning, their drawings Blu-Tacked on the wallpaper. Whereas the bed Fred had inherited from his mother was rhetorically perfect for the consummation of an adultery: mahogany, brooding, magnificent as a ship, with its scroll finial topping each of the four bedposts, creaking and swaying with us in tormented sympathy.

I know it’s not meant to be all that good the first time, but actually I think that it was good, for both of us. I was cruel in my youth and my assurance, knowing how painfully Mac wanted me. I hadn’t made love often in the years since Nicky died — once with Jude which didn’t count, a couple of times awkwardly with boys from the crowd I had known in the commune. (Once — very passionately and extravagantly, so that I didn’t know myself — with a stranger I met in a café when I’d done one of my runners away from home and the children; but he gave me something which shamed me and which I had to have treated at a clinic.) Mac, to my great surprise (I’d been attracted to the idea of him as a suavely experienced seducer), had never been unfaithful to Barbara before — he used that very word and I heard how the ‘faith’ in it was a substantial category for him. The first thing Mac said when we were finished was ‘Dear God’; I lay pinned under the dead weight of his body collapsed on me and didn’t know if he was actually praying, nor whether he meant remorse or thankfulness. I suspect now it was both at the same time. It seemed more momentous to me, making love to a much older man; not the act in itself but his presence in it, the heavy hinterland of his worldly experience driven in behind the fine point of the moment. I teased him that it felt like having sex with Winston Churchill or Bismarck. — I’m not that fat, he protested, but I think he was half flattered by the comparison, he didn’t mind.

He came to me in his spare hours when he could get away from work. I used to fantasise that I could smell the factory on him — he’d told me they did injection moulding of plastics and had their own sheet metal and electroplating facilities. Of course I couldn’t go there, I wasn’t even sure in those days where it was (somewhere off the Bath road). All my experience had been with young men — boys, really — who came and went following their own lights. I liked how Mac had to draw his mind with an effort round to me, from all the burden of his real life — not that he ever complained about the burden: he enjoyed it, it was what he was alive for. All that time during our affair (which lasted something less than a year) he was deciding whether to expand the medical-surgical business into precision defence equipment (which he did, eventually). When I accused him of wanting to kill innocent civilians for profit, and said he would have blood on his hands, he laughed at me, stroking back my hair under his broad hot palms, pulling it tight against my scalp — he liked to look into my face that way, as if he was stripping it naked to read something fundamental in it. What he wanted to develop, he reassured me, were explosive-detection and disposal devices; for saving lives, not harming them. There was a strong market for this because of the terrorist threat.

In the time after our affair, when I’d stopped seeing him, Mac grew in my imagination almost into a kind of beast, I repudiated him so ferociously. I told myself I’d had a lucky escape, made a terrible error of judgement — he was so fixed in his place in the world, so insensible to any counter-narrative. Where would the defence contracts end, once they had begun? How could I have allowed him to contaminate me, touching me? I had introduced him to Fred once, because I longed for someone else I knew to know Mac, as if that would anchor him in my real life. I thought fondly that they would like each other — weren’t they both knowledgeable, voluble, religious? But it was a disaster. I arranged an evening when the boys were at my mother’s and I cooked something special to impress Mac — boeuf bourguignon with julienne potatoes, followed by chocolate chestnut cream; though I didn’t have much idea of what he liked (we’d only eaten together a few times at the beginning, when we went for dinner in restaurants). Mac had told Barbara that he was dining out with clients. He ate with his shoulders hunched and his head bent over the plate, oblivious to the food, which offended Fred on my behalf; afterwards Mac felt in his pockets for his indigestion medicine. Fred held forth at high pitch — about literature, school, boys — as if the conversation was a lost cause; Mac was monosyllabic in response, though I was used to him eloquently ruminative in bed. I tried introducing the subject of Yeats but they both clammed up, not wanting any blundering into sacred territory.

The whole set-up, I think, made Mac miserable: the lying to his wife like a cheating husband in a farce, the idea that he was being paraded for the approval of my friends — he wasn’t ever really interested in my friends. Anyway, he was one of those men only expansive on his own spacious ground — displaced on to alien territory he was diminished. After Mac had gone, Fred wouldn’t talk to me about him; I had looked forward to a gossipy dissection over the washing-up, Fred not drying anything much but waving the tea towel about to accompany his probing into how we met, and what was going to happen with us next. (I’d imagined myself saying stoically that I didn’t know what would happen next, and I didn’t care.) I’d hoped that Fred would see what I saw — the rarity of Mac, his compressed power like a burnished glow, something wholehearted in how he gave himself. Because he wasn’t my type, I had fallen for him too fast and too deep, with no markers to signal any way back. I melted when his heavy eyelids drooped in pleasure or humour, his careless authority dazzled and enveloped me.

— It’s your business, was all Fred said. — If you think he’s a good thing. He’s not what I expected. Isn’t he very square?

— He’s grown-up, I said, bristling. — If that’s what you mean. He’s a man with responsibilities in the real world.

— Oh, the real world. I see.

— He makes real things that help sick people. Do you disapprove?

— You know why he didn’t like me, don’t you? Because he doesn’t like queers.

Blushing and furious, I said Mac wasn’t like that, he was open-minded, and it was just Fred’s own prejudice because Mac was a businessman. But actually I wasn’t sure, when I thought about it. Mac had asked once whether Fred brought his boyfriends back to the bed where we were so happy together; when I said ‘not to my knowledge’ Mac seemed relieved, not having to imagine it. He was never vindictive towards what didn’t fit his moral compass; he wiped it out, rather, as if it didn’t exist. I’d never told Fred that we used his bed, and of course I always changed the sheets afterwards, but I suppose he’d guessed at it (he must have noticed all those clean sheets). Once Fred and Mac had actually met and disliked each other, our beautiful bed was impossible for us and we had nowhere else to go. Mac said that on my narrow mattress in the boys’ room he felt as if he was suffocating.

We went to a hotel in the city centre but it made us both miserable; I knew how out of place I looked at reception in my black jeans, with my scrap of chiffon tied in my hair and my cheap silver earrings. Mac said it was the only time he worried that people would think I was his daughter, and when I asked him what he’d be doing taking his daughter to a hotel room in the afternoon, he didn’t find it funny. Showing off, I paraded around naked on the thick carpets, behind stiff brocade drapes five flights up, with a view through nylon curtains over the misty city blown with rain. I insisted he get in the shower with me and soap me, though this wasn’t his kind of thing — nor mine really, though I did love the endless hot water and the thick towels (there was no shower in Fred’s flat, only a bath and a quirky gas geyser). I performed like the tart Mac might have picked up in a bar at lunchtime if he’d been different. But he wasn’t different, and there was something fake and self-conscious that afternoon in our love-making.

And then I met Barbara out shopping — she smiled as if she recognised me but couldn’t remember where she’d seen me. I was on my way home from my morning shift at the gallery, with an hour to spare before I picked up Rowan (Luke had started at secondary school; he came home on his own on the bus). Winter had come round again and she was wearing the same black coat, with the astrakhan collar turned up; her wide pleasant face was rosy and roughened with cold and hard lines showed up in her cheeks; her nose was red. She was only a few years younger than my mother. I followed her to the delicatessen then stood outside and pretended to be looking at the packets of sponge fingers and tins of cooked chestnuts and pimientos in the window. Inside, the shop assistant sliced and cut according to Barbara’s orders, I saw them laughing and chatting; she put out her gloved hand for packets of ham and salami and cheese, stowing them in the basket on her arm. I realised that I’d fallen into the wrong kind of love with Mac, a daylit, sensible love inappropriate to our circumstances. I felt shame, as keen as the scream of the meat slicer. Mac wouldn’t talk to me much about his family but I knew their house was big and Victorian, outside the city at Sea Mills, with fifteen acres of land where his daughters kept their horses. I knew that Barbara volunteered for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

I crossed the road to the supermarket and by the time I came out again Barbara had gone. I went into the delicatessen and bought expensive chocolate although I couldn’t afford it; at home I ate it piece by piece until I felt sick, standing at the kitchen table without even taking my coat off. Then I hurried out to wait among the other mothers in the school playground; nausea made a sweat break out on my forehead. Rowan was one of the last to appear, bad-tempered, struggling with his coat hanging off his shoulder, sugar-paper pictures unrolling under his arm, dragging his gym daps by the laces. I crouched on the asphalt to help him put on his coat — my hands were shaking too much at first to join the zip at the bottom. — What’s the matter with you? he asked suspiciously. — You look funny.

— It’s all right. I ate too much chocolate.

After school Rowan was always angry and empty, with pale smudges under his eyes against his brown skin; he wouldn’t ever eat his packed lunch, only the crisps. He was popular at school and he did well, but it took a great effort because he was naturally guarded and sceptical. Fumbling with his zip, leaning close into his restlessness and boy-smell, I was desolate suddenly because I would never pick up his brother from school again. From now on Luke would always arrive home under his own steam, jaunty and faintly feverish with the import of what he’d seen and couldn’t any longer tell me. I had hardly registered the momentous change, I had let it slide past on the surface of my life as a mere practicality, because my selfish dream of Mac had suffused me from hour to hour. Next it would be Rowan’s turn to go. My eyes filled with stupid tears and I was drenched in regret. (— What are you doing? Rowan protested, shifting aside indignantly from my kisses.) I recognised the whole sequence of my reactions to meeting Mac’s wife as a stock guilt that could have come out of one of my Victorian novels. But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion?

That evening I telephoned Mac at home (I looked the number up in the directory), and when Barbara answered I asked to speak to Mr Beresford. She said he was watching the rugby. I heard her rather musical voice, wholly unsuspicious, calling for him through the house I couldn’t see and couldn’t enter. (— Mac! It’s for you!) All I had to go on was the painting with the blue horses. I imagined golden lamplight pooled on the walls, fitted carpets, fat-stuffed comfortable fringed sofas and armchairs, the teenage daughters attending with religious seriousness to their split ends (Mac had never shown me a photograph, but I guessed they both had long hair). Perhaps I could hear a far-off television. Long before Mac picked up the receiver, I seemed to sense his approach through the invisible rooms — a dissenting male shadow cast against their brightness. He barked his name into the phone. I told him I’d seen Barbara at the shops, I said I thought we should stop doing what we were doing, it was too awful. — I’ll have a think about it and talk to you tomorrow, Mac responded, calmly but with suppressed distaste, as if I’d bothered him at home with a query about office paper clips. Of course he had to sound calm, because his wife was listening. (He told her I’d rung because there were some new paintings in the gallery I’d thought they’d like. I couldn’t believe that she’d believed this. — They must be desperate for trade, apparently she’d said.) When he spoke to me from his office the next day, at least I couldn’t hear the distaste.

Those calls didn’t end our affair immediately, but they were the beginning of the end. Mac sent me a letter where he copied out a Yeats poem about love’s impossibility: ‘Until the axle break / That keeps the stars in their round… / Your breast will not lie by the breast / Of your beloved in sleep’. He added a PS at the bottom of the page, pointing out that Yeats had had some pretty crazy millenarian ideas and probably believed all this might actually happen in real time, the axle breaking and the girdle of light being unbound and so on. So it wasn’t such a despairing poem as it first seemed.

I was on holiday in Somerset with the boys and Madeleine. We were climbing up a steep incline where there had once been a railway line transporting iron ore eight hundred feet down from the Brendon Hills to the valley bottom below: the weight of the ore going down had hauled up the empty trucks. Luke found a rusted iron bolt but most of the evidence of the railway was long gone, apart from the winding house at the top and the incline itself, descending through thick woods, cut in places into the red sandstone. Rowan had been dragging his feet ever since we left the rented cottage, complaining that he was bored, tired, thirsty; now he was revived by the tough scramble and out in front, bare-chested and lithe, pulling himself up by hanging on to the saplings that colonised the stony slope. Luke was climbing more slowly behind him, scanning the ground for trophies.

I was talking to Madeleine intently, whenever I could catch my breath and the boys were out of earshot, about my affair with Mac, which had been over for months. I knew that I sounded fanatical and was boring even Madeleine, who was an absorbent listener, questioning and commenting dutifully. My fixation was unworthy of the fresh summer sky and the tranquil wood, where we hadn’t encountered any other walkers — but I was shut out from loveliness, my grievance twisted and turned in its small space. Madeleine was the only one of my friends apart from Fred who knew about Mac; she’d met him once when I went with her to the theatre in London, on a day I’d arranged to coincide with Mac having dinner there with clients. After his dinner he had come to meet us in a pub near the theatre. (That had been the only other time he and I went to a hotel, and the only time we spent a whole night together.)

Picking over Mac’s character and behaviour, I was full of scorn. I claimed I couldn’t see now why I’d ever succumbed to him. He wasn’t even good-looking, he was middle-aged; for goodness’ sake, he read the Financial Times! He had contracts with the Ministry of Defence! I pretended to analyse dispassionately the flaws in both of us, which had made a fatal combination — had I fallen for a father figure because I’d never had a father of my own? My neediness, I said, was worse because I hadn’t been prepared for it, because I’d thought that as a feminist I’d seen through all that mechanism of power in attraction. There was some truth in all of this. But it was also true that I couldn’t help returning compulsively to talk about Mac, shucking off every other subject with a shudder of impatience or a few perfunctory words. Even my contempt, licking around his edges, connected me to him, gave me the illusion that an electric current went sparking and surging between us. At night in the holiday cottage, in my damp bed with its sagging middle, I wrote him passionate letters on a pad of lined file paper which by the end of the week was also damp — indicting him or imploring him, it didn’t matter which, page after page. I tore the letters up in the morning.

— But I liked him, Madeleine said. — He was nice.

We had paused to rest halfway up the slope, while the boys forged ahead. Tendrils of Madeleine’s wiry yellow hair, darkened with sweat, were stuck to her forehead. We were both in cut-off jeans and sleeveless vests; she was rounded everywhere I was angular.

— Nice, really? I doubted.

She shrugged. — He seemed nice to me. There was something about him… She searched for the word, uneasy under my scrutiny but determined. — When he came into the pub that time, I thought he was — nice. Because I wasn’t expecting him to be, from your description; even though you liked him then. I was thinking I’d better hurry off as soon as he arrived, and leave you two alone together, but — do you remember? He persuaded me to sit down again and bought me a glass of wine. He made them open a new bottle, of something better. I mean, when he might have had (she put on a mocking voice here, fooling in her embarrassment) ‘eyes only for you’.

— I don’t remember.

— I got the impression he was kind. I could imagine you two together.

I lay back, thinking of the old railway with its inferno of noise and dirt, trucks wheezing up and clanking down, miners suffering underground, the earth ripped open, effort and ingenuity on a scale that seemed so disproportionate to its ends — the iron ore? the money? Now the tree trunks rose in peace, like pillars, into their leafy tops blotched against a sky mildly blue. There was shrill birdsong: goldcrest, Madeleine surprisingly knew. She told me they liked the tops of the Douglas firs in mixed woodland. I floated above my loss of Mac for the first time, as if it was poignantly sad but it was finished, as if there were other possibilities. A spring burbled and trickled among ferns nearby, into a pool lined with pebbles the clear colours of humbugs, bedded in red silt. Fred said that people threw coins into water for luck because in primitive religions water sources were believed to be openings between the upper and lower worlds. I had no money on me, so I threw a satisfactory small stone — black, shaped like a fat nub of charcoal. When the pool dimpled glassily and swallowed it, I made a wish: the choice presented itself as if it had been lying in wait all along. Men, or books?

With relief, I chose books.

I let something go and I felt very empty without it, and very clear.

I enrolled in evening classes in September and did my A levels (English Literature, History, French) in a year. I got As in all of them and also grade ones at S level, which was a supplementary exam in the same subjects, for good candidates. With these good grades I applied to the university, and although this was in the days before the big rush of mature students, I got in to study English Literature. I was thirty at the beginning of my first year, the oldest in my cohort. This age difference didn’t matter, in fact it was a kind of convenience, because it set me apart from the other students’ chaos of self-discovery, their hungry interest in one another. Compared to them, I felt my motivations purely: for all the three years of my degree, I seemed to see myself clearly as if from a distance, through a thick lens. It was such a relief to be clever at last. For years I had had to keep my cleverness cramped and concealed — not because it was dangerous or forbidden, but because it had no useful function in my daily life. In the wrong contexts, cleverness is just an inhibiting clumsiness.

At first I didn’t try to make friends with the other students. I was shy as well as aloof. I took against the girls and boys with glossy hair and loudly assured voices who’d been to private school; I despised their pretence of slumming it for the three years of their degree. I sat pointedly alone in the high-ceilinged, white-painted classrooms; the faculty was housed in spacious red-brick Victorian houses along a tree-lined street. My hair was dyed orange or rusty black and screwed up in a studiedly careless knot, my eyes were thickly painted with black kohl; I retreated behind the mask of my difference. I didn’t have the money some of those girls spent on their clothes, but I didn’t want their kind of clothes anyway; I wore tight jeans and men’s shirts and suit waistcoats bought from the junk stalls in St Nicholas Market. When they found out that I was a mother too, that made a gulf between us; they didn’t know how to talk to me about the children so they didn’t talk to me at all. Meanwhile I was scathing, at least inwardly, when they didn’t bother to read the books in preparation for classes — what else did they have to do with their long hours of leisure? I had plenty to do (apart from home and the children, I was still working three mornings a week in the gallery, for the extra cash), but I was zealous — my ignorance ached in me and spurred me on, I made the time somehow to read everything.

All this was at first. As time passed I relaxed, and they got used to me; I made some friends among them. But I wasn’t there for the other students. I was there to find my way into another, higher order of meaning, behind the obvious one that lay around me every day. I worshipped my lecturers because they seemed to move at ease in this other world of light — when one of the younger ones made a pass at me in my second year I was startled and disappointed; I only wanted him to see my disembodied intelligence. I spent every hour I could, when the boys were at school, in the university library with its ordered monkish hush. The long desks were sectioned off into individual cells, each with its own light and leather inlay; arranging my books, I felt myself chosen, dedicated. If the weather outside the high windows was grey and indistinct, so much the better for my rich inward journey. Sometimes when I was looking into a page of text it seemed transparent, all its meaning and ironies and metaphorical thickness and musical arrangement showing themselves to me easily. What I wrote about the texts in my essays seemed almost obvious, it was just there — except that not everyone saw it. Excitedly, and with a new competitive zest, I took in that some of the critics who’d published books didn’t see it as clearly as I did. Nor did some of my lecturers.

When I lifted my head from my absorption — roused to a pitch of excitement, breathless and dizzy, because I’d been reading Oedipus the King or Adonais or Donne’s Holy Sonnets — I couldn’t believe that everything was going on unchanged around me in that quiet library, so muted and still that I could hear the pages turning and biros scribbling. In winter the daylight would even have drained away behind the windows without my noticing, and then I felt a niggling unease as if I’d missed something — although all I could have missed was my ordinary life with its prosaic clock-time, trundling from hour to hour.

There was upheaval during my second year because we had to move out of Fred’s flat. He and his wife Lizzie were trying to make a go of it again: he was moving back into the family home.

— Of course there won’t be any sex, Lizzie said to me. — But I mean, who cares? Who still wants boring old sex after they’ve been married to the same person for twenty years? I’d rather read a book in bed any day. Or just fall asleep, even better. (Fred had a French name for their arrangement, a mariage blanc, making it sound sophisticated.)

Lizzie was one of those miniature women who go on looking like a child well into middle age: pretty, with brown eyes and russet colouring and an injured expression. She and I hadn’t always got on well, there had been some awful scenes in the past. The first time I moved in with Fred she thought I was his mistress and brought her disgruntled children round once in the middle of the night in their pyjamas, flaunting them to me like a tableau of wronged virtue. And later, when I moved back into the flat after Nicky died — even though she’d got the hang of Fred’s sexuality by that time, she was convinced I was after Fred’s money or his property. She insisted he make a will listing all the antiques he’d inherited from his mother, and she couldn’t bear it that I didn’t pay him rent. If the children were allowed to visit Fred they came with supplies of her home-made wholemeal bread because she believed shop bread was poison, along with crisps and sweets. She didn’t want their minds contaminated by watching television or reading comics. When I talked about them to my friends, I called them the Holy Family. She nagged in her regretful sing-song voice, explaining how much better it was for the children to be outdoors, learning the names of plants and birds. Piers and Frances exchanged looks; they seemed to communicate in coded ironies. They were sullen and secretive even when they were small, ungainly beside their tiny mother; they looked more like Fred, with big, pale, definite faces.

As her children grew into teenagers, Lizzie underwent a kind of conversion — funnily enough, just around the same time Fred was converting to Catholicism — and started to talk very boldly and debunkingly about the facts of life. She took to drinking, too; not too much, but enough to unbind her and make her garrulous. Often she came to confide in me at Fred’s kitchen table. There were a couple of boyfriends, neither of whom came up to scratch. (One of them was a vicar; the other one, much nicer, she met when he came to fix her central heating boiler.) — I really didn’t want twelve red roses on my birthday, she complained. — Is that awful of me? I mean, he’s so nice. And when I’m in bed with him I can sort of see me, coldly, in the middle of all the excitement, as if I was looking down from the ceiling. Like a pink shrimp thing on the seabed.

Lizzie asked Fred to go back when she discovered that Piers was smoking ‘pot’, as she called it. I reassured her that I’d smoked it, off and on, since I was fifteen. Her brown eyes fixed me in stern scrutiny. — Oh really, Stella? But you seem perfectly normal. When Piers took it he was a nightmare. His eyes were sort of rolled up in his head and he was hideously pleased with himself. Then afterwards puked up.

I asked her if she would mind if Fred went off with men every so often.

— Cripes, no. As long as they’re not actually doing it under my nose.

I thought Fred ought to go back: I told him so. He really was better at dealing with Piers than Lizzie was. And he was very attached to Lizzie; he had a fixed belief, in spite of everything, in the sanctity of marriage. Fred wanted a family, he liked family life and couldn’t bear coming home after work to an empty flat. Luke and Rowan and I had been his family for a long time but this had changed, the ease had gone out of it — which had something to do with Mac and more to do with my new-found purpose in life, my academic work. It wasn’t Fred’s fault — he was delighted that I was studying, he had encouraged me more than anyone. It was my fault. He wanted to talk to me about the books on my courses and read my essays and advise me — and just because we had been intimate and he knew me so well I couldn’t bear the idea of his charging around familiarly among the things that were new and raw and fragile in my mind. I think I found it discouraging too that Fred was always so irreducibly himself — not transfigured by reading and thought as I was expecting to be transfigured. All this was ungenerous of me; and it did produce a mild sort of estrangement between us. After we parted and left the flat behind, I felt remote from him for a while. (In his fifties Fred got ill with cancer and we grew very close again through the years he lived with that. I grew close to Lizzie then as well.)

Fred gave up the flat and I moved with the boys to live with Daphne and Jude. Jude had made a lot of money selling her embroidered pictures (prices way out of reach of Nigel’s gallery, and the embroideries too unsettling anyway for his kind of clients); with the proceeds she bought a tall handsome Georgian house in a state of dis-repair, hanging on to the side of a hill overlooking the docks and the steep wooded cliffs running down to the river. A skinny staircase, with a polished wood handrail and gaps where the banister rods were missing, wound up through four floors. On each draughty landing a long arched window was vivid with changeable sky and vertiginous cityscapes. Jude said we could live in the attic for nothing because we would stop it getting damp, but I insisted on paying a small rent. I wanted to do things properly this time. There was only one bathroom in the house but we had a toilet to ourselves on the top floor, and one of our four rooms was a quirky kitchen with gas rings and white-painted shelves for plates and mugs and a big Belfast sink and a rope fire escape with a sling (the house had at one point been a residence for girl students). There were gas fires in each room to keep us warm. We didn’t have much furniture but I was so happy to be up in the light, I felt myself weightless and free, sitting alone among the birds flying round outside the windows, losing myself in the airy delirium of my reading. It reminded me of the attic where I lay dreaming once with Valentine.

I did very well at university. I got first-class marks for my essays and in exams almost from the beginning. My imagination grew bolder every day, I was buoyed up by praise and success and the sensation of my own newly unfolding power: sometimes I was drunk and ecstatic with the delight of it. I had no doubt that I had found a new direction for my life. At the end of my three years I would get a first-class degree (and indeed I did). Then I would apply for funding for research and I would work on a PhD. I didn’t look beyond that, not having much idea how an academic career was likely to proceed; but I suppose I vaguely imagined publication, an academic post. I carried my future around like a talisman inside me, warming me with its promise. We had had compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the first year and because I loved the words I learned the Lord’s Prayer off by heart, saying bits of it over to myself in the most unlikely places, cleaning the toilet or shopping in the supermarket. ‘Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, Si þin nama gehalgod… Forgyf us ure gyltas…’ The boys would nudge me. — You’re muttering that thing, they said. — It’s embarrassing.

My lecturers were kind, encouraging my ambitions. I think I was exotic for them; they cherished me just because I wasn’t the usual kind of student who went on to graduate studies. I was a single parent, I’d worked for a living, I pinned political badges — Greenham Common, Solidarnos´c´, anti-apartheid — to the military jacket with brass buttons which I’d found in a memorabilia shop. I’m embarrassed now, remembering the badges. Not because I didn’t believe in all those things, but because the truth was that at that time I was absorbed in my inner life: novels and drama and poetry, the past. I went to a few demonstrations with Daphne and Jude, that’s all — and a day trip once to Greenham. In my third year I came across the French feminist critics, and then the American ones, and I suppose that counts as a kind of politics, though I was bored by Kristeva.

For those three years at university, I felt a steely satisfaction in my singleness, as though I was sealed up and made self-sufficient by my work. My mother was very doubtful about my taking up my studies so late in the day — what was the point? But she hoped that at university at least I might meet someone responsible and hard-working (naturally, she knew nothing about Mac). I explained to her that they were all ten years younger than I was, and that I was the responsible and hard-working one. And it was true, I was hard-working. I was often exhausted, I wasn’t ecstatic all the time. I kept myself awake late into the night with caffeine tablets, to write my essays. My friends all helped generously. Fred didn’t want to lose touch with Luke and Rowan; they were often at his place. Daphne had a job as a social worker with youth offenders, she was good with kids and took the boys out at weekends; Jude let them loose in her studio, where she was sewing the life-size dolls that were her new project (Luke told me afterwards that he dreamed about those dolls for years). On fine summer evenings the boys went to play football after supper, in a scruffy park ten minutes’ walk away. I would wash the dishes then sit reading or writing at my desk beside the open window. When they came home at dusk with a gang of their friends, I could hear them before they turned the corner into our street — their voices echoing off the tall house fronts, Luke bouncing the football ahead of him along the pavement. Amazed at being out when it was almost dark, keyed up with the glamour of their headlong game, they lingered outside, calling poignant goodbyes to one another. Sometimes their voices were portentous with drama, some quarrel or injury. I didn’t worry while they were away, but as soon as I knew they were safely home I felt myself completed. They weighed down my life on the side of blood and warmth, where otherwise it might have floated too free.

It’s important to get what happened next in the right order.

First, I changed my mind about carrying on my academic work. That was all quite fixed and settled before any of the changes in my private life. There wasn’t any violent moment of disillusionment but imperceptibly, over the months leading up to my finals, two things — which had seemed for a while to be one thing — separated out in my imagination. On the one hand there was the great world of literature and thought, and on the other the smaller world of the university and academic life. I began to be bored with the sound of my own tinny authority in essays. I didn’t like the idea of choosing a narrow specialism — I wanted to read everything. I was grateful to the university, it had made all the difference to me and been the gateway into my new intellectual life; but now I chafed inside its frame. Sometimes when I looked up from my books I was overwhelmed by the real moment in the air around me, its nothingness richly pregnant. My studies were still a path into mysteries; but I saw that the path could take you underground, if you weren’t vigilant. It could lead into substitute satisfactions, ersatz and second hand.

From time to time we had postcards from Sheila, who was travelling in South America. The cards were laconic, with minimal information — ‘I am here’, or ‘I saw this’, or ‘it wasn’t really like this’. The pictures on the front were in brilliant kitsch colours, Mayan ruins or bougainvillea or smiling Guatemalan peasants in costume. We had no address for writing back to her. Daphne disapproved, she said that the whole backpacking thing was only another twist in the whole history of Western voyeurism and exploitation. I pinned the cards above my desk because Sheila’s adventures felt like a counterpoint to the adventures inside my head — as fantastical as anything I read about, yet in a real life, plotted on the earth’s solid surface.

I decided I didn’t want to embark on an academic career and for a while I had no idea what to do instead. Then my brother Philip had an accident on his motorbike, breaking both legs, and an occupational therapist came to my mother’s house to measure the steps and examine the bathroom to see if he could manage at home on his crutches. I was casting about in my mind for the shape of my future life and something about that work appealed to me: its mix of imagination and practicality. I liked the fact that each case was something new, with a unique set of problems — material ones jumbled together with psychological ones, like in a story or a novel. I hoped that the work would take me out of myself and plunge me in the world, making me bolder and more generous; until I was tested, I didn’t know if I was capable of these qualities. Even before I’d taken my Literature finals, I applied to an Occupational Therapy Diploma course, and got a place. And OT was a good choice, it suited me; I have worked more or less in this field ever since. Of course there was a lot of idealism in my reasons for choosing it — the reality was bound to be more complex, less heroic.

All this happened before Mac ever got back in touch. Sometimes he tells the story — not apologetically, but proudly — as though he interrupted my brilliant academic career, stormed into my life and carried me off when I was on my way to being a Professor of Anglo-Saxon or something. But it wasn’t so. At the time when I was making these plans for my future, I had put Mac entirely out of my mind — love had healed over behind him, like water swallowing that black stone I’d thrown into the pool. The first time I had any news of him was one afternoon in the summer, after I’d finished my last exam and before I started my Diploma. Lizzie came round and I made her tea; we sat drinking it with all the casement windows in the attic open to the falling rain, because the air was so hot and heavy. A horse chestnut which grew across the road was as tall as the tall houses; my room looked into its top branches and I could hear the intimate settling noises the rain made, soaking through the tree’s layers. Lizzie talked on to me about her children in that burrowing, persistent way she had — everything was Frances now, who played the cello; Piers was written off as rather a disaster. I wasn’t bored, exactly, but I wasn’t concentrating; the weather made me restless, as if I was expecting something to happen — or perhaps I only filled that in afterwards, after something did. When Lizzie was at the point of going, she remembered she had a message for me.

— A man came looking for you, she said. — A peculiar man, Stella! Something about him — head down in his shoulders, like a bull charging; said he didn’t know where you lived, but that he’d found out where Fred had moved to, from the school. Very persistent. I told him I’d only known you vaguely, had no idea where you were now. I thought he might be a debt collector.

And she gave me Mac’s card, with something written on the back in pencil, in his big, wobbling, separated letters, with the hollow full stops. Mac had terrible handwriting — not scrawled or hasty so much as naively deliberate, as if, at school, in his impatience to be grown up, he had bypassed ever acquiring a cursive style. He was always angry writing anything by hand, preferred stabbing at a typewriter or a keyboard with one finger. I couldn’t read his message while Lizzie was there in the room with me. I pretended I had no idea who he was and kept tight hold of the card, its corners digging into my palm, while I went all the way downstairs with her and watched her put her umbrella up, crossing the street, rain fizzing on the taut red nylon and my heart straining painfully, impatiently.

— Call me, Mac wrote peremptorily. — I have news.

He’d given ‘news’ a capital N, and drawn a ring round his printed telephone number, his work number, in the same thick pencil. I hid the card in a pocket of my handbag and didn’t do anything. Sometimes I thought I could hardly remember Mac. He belonged to the past, when I was abject and dependent and hadn’t achieved anything.

Then he and I bumped into one another, quite by accident, only a few weeks after I got his card — at the Royal Infirmary, of all places. We had never met up accidentally before, in all those four years we were apart. I was at the hospital with Rowan, who had problems with persistent ear infections and needed grommets to equalise the pressure. Taking Rowan to his appointments was always fraught; he dreaded the examinations and reacted badly to the tedium of the waiting — although he was stoical when the doctors probed painfully in his ear (I knew how much it hurt because of how he stared ahead into nothing with a set face, and gripped my hand which he wouldn’t hold at any other time).

Mac had never seen either of my sons except in the photographs I’d had around in the flat. When we three were suddenly confronted in a corridor (I was lost and in the wrong place, Rowan was berating me), the encounter felt momentous. Luckily the corridor wasn’t busy. Mac seized me by the elbows, almost accusing me (‘Where have you been?’), and I was aware of Rowan transferring his resentment on to the stranger. I think Mac was surprised by Rowan in the flesh; I don’t think he’d taken in from the photographs how dark-skinned he was, or how striking. I loved seeing other people respond to his beauty — the skinny lithe length of him, the spatter of freckles of darker pigment across his nose, long hollow cheeks, lashes clotted as densely black as paint. He didn’t look like my child. I explained about our appointment and that we were lost; Mac said he was just visiting. He and Rowan stared at each other, calculating. I could hardly take Mac in, bulky in a beige raincoat with rain splashes on the shoulders, preoccupied and out of place. I had always expected that if I ever bumped into him I would be shocked by how old he was — but actually he seemed unchanged, utterly familiar: his vigour and willpower, the taut thick skin of his forehead and neck. I saw that his round head did sit on his shoulders like a bull’s. He was holding a greengrocer’s paper bag and I guessed he was bringing grapes for someone ill.

I thought all of a sudden that it must be Barbara who was ill, she must be dying. Perhaps that was why he’d come looking for me at Fred’s, why he was holding my arms now so tightly, as if I might try to escape. But Barbara was fine, Mac said. He realised his grip was embarrassing me and let go. At least, she was fine as far as he knew. He was visiting a nice chap who worked for him and had had an operation on a duodenal ulcer.

— What d’you mean, I said, — as far as you know?

— Come on, Mum, Rowan insisted.

Mac explained that Barbara had left him. She had found out about certain things — here he glanced severely at Rowan, cutting him out — and when she confronted him and he told her the whole truth, she’d gone. (She’d found, he told me later, a forgotten leaflet from the gallery at the bottom of his sock drawer, with my name written on it. — Something was funny, she’d said. — Because you’ve never liked that painting.) Mac had tried to reason with her — she’d been adamant. (Apparently Barbara had asked him whether he still felt anything for me, and when he had reflected, he’d said that he did, he loved me.) This had all happened a few months ago, and he’d been looking for me ever since.

— The axle has broken that keeps the stars, he said. — And all that.

But I had forgotten the Yeats poem and didn’t know at first what he was talking about. Anyway, now he’d found me, he wasn’t going to let me go again without a struggle — unless I told him where I lived, that is. Though probably he was too late, I’d made arrangements with someone else, hadn’t I, by now? I said I hadn’t. I asked about his daughters and he said one was married, the other at the Royal College of Music. We stood smiling at each other then (and he reached out to hold me by the elbow again) in the blandly lit pastel-painted corridor with its signs pointing to rheumatology and cardiology and the renal unit, its sickly suspect smell of antisepsis and hospital food; we moved aside for a nurse pushing a trolley of drugs. Rowan was tugging at my arm, dragging me away. I scrabbled in my pocket for a pen, I wrote down my telephone number on Mac’s paper bag. Our luck — it was luck, wasn’t it? we scarcely knew what to call it yet — seemed a vivid improbable hopeful flare against this background of subdued suffering, shut away behind the hospital walls.