I put off saying anything to him. I didn’t want to spoil my own pleasure in our lessons, or Al’s pride in how well I did. I told him a few things about Lukie, pretending I was married.
— Do you have children? I did ask him once.
What if he replied that he’d had a little girl but he’d lost touch with her, and it was what he most regretted in his life?
— No, I’ve missed out on that, he said, cautiously, blandly.
Fred Harper took to calling at Dean’s in the afternoons whenever he had a free period, hoping the grown-up Tappers would be out. I wondered at first if he was coming because he was afraid of me, thinking I would tell his story to the school; but it seemed more likely he was just bereft and bored. And perhaps I was touched with glamour for him, because of our shared association with Valentine. I think he found my situation poignant, like something in a book.
Anyway, for a long time I wouldn’t speak to him. It began because of the milk bottle and the past; then my refusal became a thing in itself, almost a game. I would be playing with Lukie and working in the kitchen, tidying up, starting preparations for the evening meal; I’d make Fred cups of tea and set them in front of him at the table without a word. If I needed to get on with cooking, I’d shove Lukie down on Fred’s lap — he was good with babies, he had children of his own, a girl and a boy; he told me how he missed them, how depressed he was now that he only saw them every other weekend.
Fred was never deterred by my lack of response; he talked on and on, either about the school (which he claimed he hated) or about things I had no interest in any more — books and ideas and poetry. He had opinions about everything. Even under normal circumstances he was one of those men who hog more than their fair share of any conversation. Tactfully, though, he didn’t mention Valentine again for a long time. He spoke as if he and I were old friends and had always known each other, though we’d never actually exchanged a word before the Tappers’ dinner party. I’d heard him shouting and weeping to Valentine in the street, that awful night, but I hadn’t gone out to join them.
If Mrs Tapper came home and found Fred in the kitchen, she couldn’t repress her irritation — she was the opposite type to Fred with his operatic range of feeling. She liked to banter quickly backwards and forwards with her friends, she couldn’t bear Fred’s drawl and his air of being in for the long haul, conversationally. She said he had doggy eyes; he called her ‘the walking antique’. But Fred and Juliet had the same quirky humour; they entertained Lukie together or played baby games at the kitchen table, tiddlywinks or snakes and ladders, which they pretended to take deadly seriously (though Juliet wouldn’t let her father teach her chess). Fred made a joke to Juliet out of my silence, explaining to her that I wouldn’t forgive him for something he’d once done.
— What something?
— Ask her. Fred gave a doleful look.
It was unimportant, I said. It wasn’t worth mentioning.
While I was still living with the Tappers, I went home sometimes to spend a weekend with my mother and stepfather. I still quarrelled with Gerry: once, terribly, about independence for Angola of all things, concerning which I had heart-warming expectations though only a vague idea of where it was. But mostly it was OK. I liked my brother Philip, and Philip loved Lukie, he played with him for hours on end; at eleven months Lukie took his first steps towards Philip, who was holding out his hands, chirruping and coaxing. I was snoozing on the sofa, watching telly. I think my mum was sorry for me because of my hard life at Dean’s, though she wouldn’t say so. She pampered me in little ways that reminded me of long ago when I was a child and there had only been the two of us. She slipped money into my jeans pocket when Gerry wasn’t looking and made my favourite things for tea (cheese and potato pie with bacon on top, apple fritters). Gerry sulked, jealous. I asked her once, when we were alone, whether she had any photographs of my real father. (I didn’t say I’d guessed he wasn’t really dead; and I hadn’t mentioned the driving lessons to anyone.)
— Oh Stella, she complained. — Why d’you have to bring up that old story?
She swore she didn’t have any photographs, and I commented that this was a bit strange, for a widow. If I’d been married and my husband had died, I said, I wouldn’t have thrown away all his photographs. The next morning with an odd, ashamed face she pushed something at me wordlessly: an old manila envelope fuzzy at the corners. I locked myself in the bathroom to investigate, tipping out a few pictures on to my lap as I sat on the side of the avocado-coloured bath: they were black and white, and tiny as if they had shrunk as that old time receded. My mother, whose gaze at the camera was already forceful, had her thick hair chopped short; she wore big-skirted summer frocks and her figure was poignant with that post-war extreme thinness (there were none of her pregnant). My father in all of them was blurry, lean, attentive. There was one picture of him holding up in both hands, at arm’s length, a baby stolid and unsmiling — me, I suppose. He was more like a boy than a young man — hungry hollow cheeks, raw jawline, dark hair flopping forwards over his eyes. That boy just might have grown up into Al, but I couldn’t see for sure. When I tried to give the envelope back to my mother, she told me to keep it.
I took Lukie out in the afternoons sometimes, if the weather was nice. One day we met Fred Harper on our way to Brandon Hill, where I’d first met Mrs Tapper. Fred insisted on coming with us. I strode along beside him pretending not to see him, sealing my face up and pressing my lips tight shut, levering the heavy pram (which had been Jean’s) up and down the kerbs with my foot on the crossbar underneath; or chatting away with Lukie, cutting out Fred. The further I got from the school, the lighter I felt; I thought my young body was so strong I could walk for ever.
— I suppose he’s Valentine’s baby, Fred said: breathless, because he was out of condition, at the speed I was going. I suppose he felt he could broach this subject because we were outside the school’s orbit. — And that Valentine doesn’t know.
I wouldn’t answer.
— Dear girl, he said. — Dear Stella. It wouldn’t have worked out, you do realise, even if I’d never had anything to do with Valentine.
I knew that this was true.
— Why are you punishing yourself, slaving in that mausoleum? Come and live with me, you can keep the flat clean for me instead of paying rent. Come live with me, don’t be my love. There won’t be any problems on that score. I’m lonely. I’ll read to you, I’ll heal you. I’ll keep your secret.
The sky was blue and cloudless; we were passing in and out of the hot light, which was muffled under the thick-leaved trees and the striped shop awnings. The streets were ripe with the baked smells of dirt. Safely strapped in, sitting up and hanging on to the pram sides, Lukie beamed between us, trying to connect us up. The beauty of the day broke over me in a sensory wave, stronger than my will. — Maybe, I said suddenly, startling Fred: who’d probably forgotten I could actually hear him making his rash offers, getting carried away.
— I’ll think about it. I might take you up on that.
Well, serves him right, I thought. That’ll shut him up.
I didn’t mean it seriously that first time Fred suggested it, I was only teasing him. I had to get to know him first, before I could begin to unpick some of the tension and resentment that keyed me up for working at Dean’s House. I had to come slowly to believe that a better life was possible. I stayed on with the Tappers for a year altogether, more or less. A year and a day: like someone in a story under an enchantment. But however crazy it sounds, I did go to live with Fred Harper eventually. Fred’s dead now. But for a long time he was one of my good friends. And when I moved into his flat I cooked and cleaned for him instead of paying rent and bills, and on Saturdays he looked after Lukie, and Auntie Jean had Lukie three afternoons a week, and I took a part-time job working in a nice café where I liked the owners and they liked me. There was a bit of trouble with Fred’s wife, who got the wrong end of the stick (again); but we sorted that out, it didn’t mean anything. It was a happy time.