Free Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley Page A

and then letting this invasion inside her body as if she was not herself but any other woman. I’d never considered any relationship between my own mother and the not-quite-interesting mystery of prams and bibs and bottles. She was too sensible, too old, I had always thought. She had never even seemed to like babies, or made any fuss over them. Except me. Once upon a time she must have changed nappies and heated bottles of milk for me, fussed over me. But that was a lifetime ago.
     
    My mother had to go into hospital for the last weeks of her pregnancy, because her blood pressure was too high. Gerry and I were left in a tense proximity at home. He made my tea when he came in from work, a procedure we both found painful. He tied Mum’s apron over his shirt and suit trousers, then with an air of weary duty set about producing fish fingers, baked beans, bacon, sausages, pork chops, chips. For a man of that era he really wasn’t bad at it. In fact, he may have been a better cook than my mother was – she was pretty awful. Only he didn’t know the little foibles of my likes and dislikes the way she did. I ate everything he put in front of me. I think I was afraid of him, alone in the house without her – afraid at least of his contempt. But I didn’t eat it enthusiastically. I cut every piece of toast, or potato, or sausage laboriously into minute pieces before I even tasted them. Then one by one I swallowed these pieces, trying not to chew, washing them down with mouthfuls from my glass of water, asking for more water frequently. Though he couldn’t have known it, I was doing my best.
    I saw that I put him off his own dinner (which he ate with the apron still on).
    — Just eat it, for goodness’ sake, he said. — Chew it up.
    He sat at an angle, hunched around his plate, so that he didn’t have to watch me. After tea, he made me do my homework on the dining-room table. We never used the dining room to eat in except at Christmas or on the rare occasions that we had guests, so it was chilly and transitional: papered olive-green, with doors at either end and a serving hatch, African violets on the windowsill, a memory of stale gravy in the air. Letters and paperwork and Mum’s sewing washed up on the repro rosewood dining table, among the place mats with scenes from old-world English villages. Miserably I cleared myself a space. I had to spread newspaper in case I made marks on the polished surface.
    After long days of lessons, we were given two or three hours of homework every night. For most of that first year at the High School I aimed for average marks that would not draw anyone’s attention. I wasn’t consciously holding back – it hadn’t yet occurred to me to desire praise, prizes, distinctions. In science and maths I struggled anyway. The physics teacher was merciless. Handsome, tall, unmarried, with a rope of white hair twisted round her temples, she belonged to the generation of women who had sacrificed everything for their education. We were supposed to learn the principles of physics not by rote but through problem-solving. One evening I was wrestling with a question about acceleration: the hare catching up with the tortoise in a race. Actual tears splashed on to the page, blotting the blue ink of my workings; my mind ached with the effort. At junior school I had been good at problems: ‘If Harry and Dick together weigh nine stone four pounds, Dick and Tom together weigh eight stone twelve pounds . . .’, and so on – but those problems had been for beginners, I saw now. I urged my mind to take the intuitive leap into comprehension, but again and again it baulked. Gerry looked in on me, bringing the cup of milky, sugary, instant coffee my mother usually brought. He really was trying hard.
    — What’s the matter? Are you stuck?
    Our voices startled us, alone in the house without Mum – they seemed to break a silence locked like rusting machinery. I knew how I must look to him, slumped in defeat at