— Is it Tuesday? Val was vague. — I’m not sure.
— You must come on Tuesday. We’re broaching the divine Marianne.
I was disappointed. Val had talked about Fred Harper (the boys doing Oxbridge Entrance called him Fred) as if he was a portal to higher things — and here he was chaffing and prodding about work like any other teacher. Also, he was rumpled and pear-shaped, with pleading eyes, and a bald patch in his hair which was dark and soft like cat fur. He had a drawling posh voice. I knew there was a Mrs Harper and also children; and that Mrs Harper got bored if her husband and Val talked for hours about poetry. Sometimes she went to bed, leaving them to it.
— Who’s the divine Marianne? I said jealously when we’d walked on.
Valentine shrugged, irritated. — A poet in the A-level anthology.
Mum and Gerry were afraid I was bringing contamination into their house. When I bought junk shop dresses Mum made me hang them outside in case of fleas. Val found an old homburg and wore it pulled down over his eyes.
— What does he think he looks like? Gerry said.
— What’s the matter with that boy? asked Mum. — What’s he hiding from?
He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, improbable — in his collarless shirt, suit waistcoat, broken canvas shoes, scrap of vermilion scarf at his neck — as an exotic bird blown off course: immobile, silent, quivering, a smile playing along his lips that was not for their benefit. Even in those days when he was fresh and boyish the drugs did leave some kind of mark on him — not damage exactly, and not unattractive, more like a patina that darkened his skin to old gold, refining its texture so that minute wrinkles came at the corner of his lids when he frowned. His eyes were veiled and smoky. He smelled, if you got up close: an intricate musk, salty, faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter — delicious to me.
— Hello? Anybody home behind that hair? my mother said.
Val looked at me quickly, blissfully. He would imitate her for our friends, later. While he was with me everything was funny. Without him I was exposed, on a lonely pinnacle — afraid of tumbling. They were still strong, my parents, my enemies. Their judgement of what I loved (Val, books, freedom) I couldn’t, wouldn’t yield to — but it weighed on me nonetheless, monumental as a stone. If I tried to carelessly condescend to them then they found me out. I was clever, I was still doing well at school, but Gerry was clever too.
— What’s so wrong with communism? I’d lightly say, trying to be amused at their naïve politics. I really was amused, I knew about so much — poets and visionaries — beyond their blinkered perspective. I’d read The Communist Manifesto. — Doesn’t it seem fairer, that everyone should start out equally, owning a share of the means of production?
— It’s a nice idea, Stella, Gerry said. — Unfortunately it doesn’t work out in practice. People in those countries wouldn’t thank you for your high ideals; they’d rather be able to buy decent food in the shops. The trouble is, a command economy just isn’t efficient, wherever it’s been tried. Breaks down because of human nature in the end. Every man naturally wants to do better than his neighbour.
Because he knew those words — ‘command economy’ — and I didn’t, how could I answer him? His knowledge was flawed, but substantial — an impregnable fortress. My attacks on it — so effective when we were apart and Gerry dwindled in imagination to a comic miniature — melted in his actual presence, so that I battered at the fortress with weak fists. In those days, even in the seventies, the establishment was not very much changed from the old order. Young people wore their hair long and had Afghan coats and went to music festivals — some young people did those things. But at the top, bearing down on everyone, there were still those ranks of sombre-suited men (and the occasional woman) — politicians, professors, policemen; inflexible, imperturbable in their confidence about what was to be taken seriously and what was not. You could jeer at them, but their influence was a fog you breathed every day, coiling into your home through their voices on radio and television and in newspapers. Gerry said that Africans suffering in a famine should know better than to have so many children, or that feminists did women no favours when they went around like tramps, or that there was no point in giving to charities because it was well known that they spent all the money on themselves.
As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her.
In my mind, I couldn’t bear her limited and conventional life: housework and childcare. But in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening — sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even then, when I was half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. No doubt she was very attractive then, in her late thirties, if I could have seen it — compact good figure, thick hair in a bouffant short cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, which didn’t occur to me. Being married to Gerry — and Stoke Bishop, and the baby — had given a high gloss to her demeanour, wiping away the hesitations I might have shared in once when there were just the two of us. And in her withholding and dismissive manner she seemed to communicate how women knew something prosaic and gritty and fundamental, underlying all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know too, or would have to come to know sooner or later.
I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.
The summer I got my O-level results (all As apart from Cs in physics and chemistry), Uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory. I wept to Val, about how the women there hated me and put me on to the worst tasks (I had to take the moulds off the hot puddings — at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered) because I was only a student worker and because I took in a book to read in my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up but he didn’t — I think that actually he liked the romance of my working there and having relatives who worked there — it was not ‘middle class’. He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so, my mother had always so strictly policed the way I spoke at home (‘I wasn’t doing anything’, Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’). Apparently, however, I said ‘reely’ for really, and ‘strawl’ for stroll.
— Your mother has an accent too, he said. — Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.
Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint — quickly in the fingers of one hand, as only he could — and we went outside to smoke. It was summer and a moon, watery-white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spreadeagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our finger-ends were touching — through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we emptied ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.
Then I was sure someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared to ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbour and young fruit trees and a rockery which Gerry built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And I thought now that he was hidden in there, aware of Val and me. He did walk out in the garden in the dark sometimes; ‘to cool off’, he said. He must be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.