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.