Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

of his older colleagues are in the Masons, which he views with wary amusement until he’s invited to join himself, a few years later. All the time, it’s as if he’s preoccupied with some inward effort which he thinks no one else sees – an effort of decency, of fitting in. There is a little flame burning in him, in spite of himself, lighting up his expression and his movements. His judgement – not of abstractions like immigration and taxes, but knowing how to hold himself, when to be still – is unexpectedly delicate and true. I can see it now, from this distance.
     
    We moved from Kingsdown into Stoke Bishop: respectable, sleepy, leafy. Our house was in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove, carved out by a developer where there had once been a little wood among the rows of houses from the 1930s. Mum had promised me a bedroom of my own and I was looking forward to something pretty and pink. I had thought that perhaps this good luck of possessions was what you could get in exchange for the other changes you didn’t want. I calculated that I might get a horse, too, and jodhpurs and a hard hat of my own – I had only ever rented my hat from the stables. (I did get the jodhpurs and the hat, eventually.)
    But when we drew up outside the new house in Gerry’s car, minutes before the removal van arrived, it wasn’t what I had bargained for. The house was so new it was raw. There were still labels stuck across the glass in the windows, so that it seemed to stare with lifeless eyes at a ruined landscape of red clay. The paving and the wood of the fence palings were stained red and filthy. Although there were people already living in the finished houses to one side up the Grove, in the other direction there were only half-built shells in the mud; monstrous machines snoozed among piles of breeze blocks and timber, bags of cement. We sat on in the car for a few moments after the engine died, and I thought Mum and Gerry must be thinking what I was thinking: that it was too bleak and ugly to bear, that we would have to give up and go home.
    But they weren’t.
    Mum must have been drinking in the newness in deep draughts.
    How could she not want to get away from Mrs Walsh and Clive, and the old woman in the Victorian dress, and the broken windows? (And Nana, and her childhood past, and her failed marriage?) She tied her hair in a scarf and Gerry rolled up his sleeves; unpacking, directing the removal men, they made a team. Mum boiled water and unpacked a bucket and a tub of Vim, then she began washing out the red mud. Gerry helped carry things in and made sure every item went into the room it was labelled for. Though he wasn’t big, he was strong, and he always got on well with men who worked for him. Mum and I hadn’t brought much with us from the flat, most of the furniture in the van was Gerry’s. (He had been married before – until his first wife ‘ran off’, I found out later – so I suppose that these were things he’d bought with her.) — It’ll do for the time being, my mother said about this furniture warningly, as if she had plans. Her plans were a flirtation between them, abrasive and teasing – her female conspiracy (shopping) against his male suspicion and resignation.
    — Don’t get under our feet, she said to me. — Why don’t you go out and play?
    — Couldn’t you find her something useful to do? said Gerry.
    — You don’t know Stella.
    This was the first time I’d heard that I wasn’t useful. She’d never asked me to be useful, had she? Anyway I was glad, I didn’t want to help. My new bedroom was an empty cell smelling coldly of cement, not adapted to my shape or anyone’s. I wanted my old window back, surveying the familiar intricate wilderness – gardens overgrown with brambles, tottering garages, the tracery of fire escapes on the backs of houses, an old Wolseley up on bricks. Our new garden, which my new window overlooked in blind indifference, was only a rectangle of red clay,