Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley Page A

marked off with fence posts and wire from the clay rectangles belonging to the other houses.
     
    I wandered out into it, taking my doll. (— Aren’t you too old for dolls? Gerry had asked already.) At the far end of our rectangle were the stumps of two huge trees cut down to make way for the new development. I gravitated towards these stumps as the only feature breaking up the new-made symmetry. Under my sandals the ridges and troughs of hardened clay were unforgiving. From the base of the tree stump little feelers of new growth were pushing up in doomed hope, waving their flags of leaves; sticky resin oozed from crevices on the cut surface. Even the sky out here – thinly clouded and tinged with lemon where the sun strained to break through – seemed blanched and excessively empty. Once, I supposed, its emptiness would have been full of tree. Carefully I sat on the stump, not wanting to get resin on my shorts; I put my doll beside me. Because she was jointed at the pelvis but not at the knee, she had to have her legs stretched out in front of her in a wide V. She was wearing a blue and white ski suit I had knitted, with Nana’s help. (Even when things went dark after her stroke, Nana knitted expertly as ever, and still won at cards.)
    A girl came out from the back of the house next door, picking her way easily across the red clay. For a while she and I were intensely mutually aware without seeming to notice each other, behind the convenient fiction of the fence wire. When we outgrew that pretence she stepped across it and approached my stump.
    — Hello, she said. — Have you moved in next door?
    — It’s you who’s next door to us, I said logically. — Counting from here.
    She didn’t notice that I’d corrected her perspective.
    — Oh good. We can be friends. I hoped there’d be a girl.
    Her threshold for friendship wasn’t exacting, then. I didn’t have high hopes of her: she seemed unsubtle and I was a wary, reluctant friend. At least because she was eager, it was easy for me to withhold my approval. She was pretty: breathy and bouncing, with round eyes like a puppy’s, a mass of fuzzy, fair hair, and a tummy that strained against her tight stretch-nylon dress. I liked her name, which was Madeleine. She picked up my doll and began to walk her in silly, jouncing steps around the stump, see-sawing her legs; I snatched her back. My belief in my dolls at that point was in a delicate balance. I knew that they were inert plastic and could be tumbled without consequences upside-down and half naked in the toy-box. At the same time, I seemed to feel the complex sensibility of each one as if it existed both in my mind and quite outside me. This doll – her name was Teenager – was stiffly humourless; my teddy bear on the other hand was capable of a tolerant irony. Teenager was outraged by Madeleine’s travesty of real play.
    — I suppose these were the beeches, I said, to distract Madeleine’s attention.
    She was blank. — What were what?
    — These trees. The road is called Beech Grove. A beech is a kind of tree.
    — What trees?
    She was looking around as if she might have missed them. I explained that I meant the stump I was sitting on and the one next to it. I pointed out that there was a stump too at the end of her garden, and others all along behind the row of houses. — There must have been a little wood. A grove. That’s what a grove is.
    My relationship to her began to take on an instructional form that was not unsatisfying. Madeleine looked down at the stump with dawning comprehension. — Oh, is that a tree? she said.
    — What did you think it was?
    — I didn’t think about it really. I s’pose I just thought they were part of the ground. Like rocks or something.
    Her oblivion seemed so extreme that it might be disingenuous. This was Madeleine’s performance – eyes so wide open that she seemed to be finding her own obliviousness as amusing as you ever could. You never got to the bottom of