My stepfather wasn’t a big man, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety dark brows, a sensual mouth, and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I ever touched it, though sometimes, out of curiosity, I wanted to). His face was one of those whose features seem compacted, as if under pressure within a frame. He was energetic, intelligent, diligent, faithful—a stroke of luck for my mother, a lightning bolt of luck that had illuminated her grinding, narrow future and transformed it. They’d met at work, at the Board Mill, where the packets for Wills cigarettes were made; he was the manager of cost accounting. It was a real love match, much more than she could have hoped for, past her first youth and with a half-grown daughter as part of the package.
If I knew him now as he was then, what would I think of him? I can imagine watching him, restless in a group of his friends, jumping up to buy them drinks, fetching extra chairs: he is a charming man; they like him. He is eagerly indignant, as they are, over money, hierarchy, immigration, discipline. He doesn’t like dirty jokes but just shakes his head, disapproving, smiling. All the time, it’s as if he were 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, despite himself, lighting up his expression and his movements. His judgment—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 the center of Bristol to a suburb, to a house in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove, carved out by a developer where there had once been a little wood amid the rows of houses from the nineteen-thirties. Our 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.
Mum unpacked a bucket and a tub of Vim and began washing out the red mud. Norbert helped carry things in and made sure that 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; most of the furniture in the van was Nor’s. “It’ll do for the time being,” my mother said warningly, as if she had plans. Her “plans” were a flirtation between them, abrasive and teasing—her female conspiracy (shopping) vs. his tolerant resignation.
“Don’t get under our feet,” she said to me. “Why don’t you go out and play?”
“Can’t you find her something useful to do?” Nor said.
“You don’t know Stella.”
This was the first I’d heard that I wasn’t useful. But 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. Our new garden, which my window overlooked in blind indifference, was only a rectangle of clay, 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?” Nor had already asked.) At the far end of our rectangle were the stumps of two huge trees, cut down to make way for the development; they were the only feature breaking up the imposed symmetry, and I gravitated toward them. 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—lemon-colored, thinly clouded—seemed blanched and excessively empty; once, I supposed, its emptiness would have been full of trees. Carefully, I sat on the stump and 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 knitted blue-and-white ski suit.
A girl came out from the back door of the next house, picking her way 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 pretense, 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. 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, light-colored 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, seesawing 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, like an extra skin stretched taut and responsive, both in my mind and quite outside of me. Unlike my Teddy bear, who was capable of irony, this doll—her name was Teenager—was stiffly humorless. She 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 one. 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 at the end of her garden, too, 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?”
“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 had to be disingenuous. This was Madeleine’s performance, I learned later—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 what she actually knew or didn’t know.
“They shouldn’t have chopped down a grove of beech trees,” I said sternly, improvising. “It’s unlucky.”
“Why?”
“Because they were sacred. In the olden days, people worshipped them.”
She thought about this. “What d’you mean, worshipped?”
“Prayed to them. Believed that they were sacred—you know, like God.”
“God?”
Perhaps she’d never noticed whom she was praying to at school. I stood up carefully, respectfully, from the stump. “I hope the gods aren’t angry.”
“Is it alive now?” Madeleine asked warily.
“Kind of, in a way.”
I showed her where the tree was feebly sprouting. “It’s still trying to grow.”
“Ooh, I don’t like it,” she squealed, backing off in a pantomime of shuddering.
She looked like the kind of girl who would join in whenever there was squealing over something—blood, wasps, veins in school-dinner liver—although she wouldn’t quite mean it, would just be enjoying the noise and the distraction. She was too robust to be properly squeamish.
“You’d better not say you don’t like them,” I said. “They might hear.”
A gleam of inspiration pierced her vagueness. Taking me by surprise, she dropped onto her knees on the clay, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands together. “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she gabbled in the prescribed drone. “In the name of the ferrership of the spirit. O holy tree. Who art very nice; and we’re sorry that they’ve cut you down.”
I knew that this was mostly for my benefit. Nonetheless, I glanced involuntarily upward. A few fat drops of rain fell without warning or follow-through, darkening spots on the dried clay.
“See?” Madeleine said. “It doesn’t mind.”
That evening, my mother boiled eggs and warmed beans on a Primus; our gas stove wasn’t connected yet. We buttered sliced bread straight from the bag, and had the milk bottle on the table.
“Isn’t this an adventure?” she said excitedly.
I was suspicious of something new in her face: not romance, exactly (she was never soft), but as if some force had filled her out, carrying her forward in exhilaration. She must have been just waiting to be married, I realized. I tried intently to imagine my dead father taking up the space that Nor was filling now, but I had no clear picture of him—he’d been gone since I was eighteen months old—and Nor was too assertive. He was sweaty, naturally, after the work he’d done; his hair was wet because he’d doused his head under the tap in the bathroom. His bodily presence intruded every way I turned, making the new house seem crowded, when I ought to have felt its succession of spaces flowering ahead of me, after the two rooms that Mum and I had shared since I could remember. As twilight thickened outside, the house’s shell seemed too pervious, swelling with the electric light as if it were as insubstantial as the canvas tents at school camp.
Mum and Nor discussed with deep interest the economics of using the immersion heater. After he’d dried each cup and plate, he held it up to the light to inspect it. He complained that when I washed up I splashed water on the floor. Already I didn’t like living with him, and it had been only a matter of hours. I retreated to my cell-bedroom, where at least now a bed was installed—though it wasn’t the old double bed that I’d slept in since I outgrew my cot. That bed had never been ours, apparently; it had belonged to our old flat. On this new narrow one was a pile of ironed candy-striped sheets. With a martyred consciousness—Where did they think I was? Why didn’t they wonder?—I tucked them inexpertly over the mattress, then climbed between them in my knickers and vest. I could hear my mother and Nor talking downstairs. Though I couldn’t make out their words, I knew that they were deciding, with wholehearted adult seriousness, where to put each piece of furniture. The rumble of their dialogue was lulling, melancholy, remote. Then someone was running a bath; unfamiliar pipes groaned and eased too near at hand. There were no curtains for my window yet. In the dark, I missed the view from my old room intensely; I didn’t want to think about the non-trees I had conjured into being.
We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends that summer—we had nothing else to do. During holidays in the past, I had been left at my nana’s while Mum went to work; now I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother, Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine would have someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us. I think she felt sorry for me, being left alone, but, actually, I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguin biscuits in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey. For a tubby girl, she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to prevent me from starting with the chocolate, finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle; sometimes I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.
I moved around the new house in the adults’ absence, as if I were taking soundings. Madeleine and I clattered and screamed, flying down the stairs two or three at a time. The house’s air, one moment after we’d shattered it, was blandly restored. I picked up ornaments, poked in the miscellany of small things that had been put inside them for safekeeping, opened drawers. I had no criteria of taste with which to judge what was there (wood veneers, streamlined forms, tapering peg legs, fitted carpets, a television inside a cabinet with doors, curtains with a print of autumn leaves), and so I felt the impact of the rooms purely, their bright, brisk statement, their light and order, which aspired to weightlessness and dustlessness.
Nor’s desk drawers were boring, full of papers having to do with dull mysteries: mortgages and insurance. With a kitchen knife, I made a tiny nick in the wood at the back of the kneehole in the desk, near the floor. I was filled with trepidation the next time he sat down to do the accounts and pay the bills, but he never noticed; nor did he notice when I added new nicks in the years afterward, every time I was most incandescently angry with him. He did notice that I had been through his drawers, and also that we had bounced on the sofa, rucking the covers and denting the cushions. And although I washed up after my butter-and-sugar messes, like forensic scientists he and Mum somehow discovered traces of my cooking, stuck around the bottom of the pan.
“She’s got to learn,” Nor said. “She’s not a baby anymore.”
I was clumsy, easily distracted; I was “always in a dream.” Nor dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard. I wasn’t pretty or charming or malleable. I went around with a suffering face. I read my book with my fingers in my ears. I wouldn’t laugh at Nor’s jokes. I lost my door key, or I went out with Madeleine leaving the back door unlocked. I left the hot tap running in the bathroom, then I forgot my cardigan at the swimming pool. Nor rarely lost his temper with me, not in that early time. He never, ever hit me.
And, of course, days passed, even weeks sometimes, when he and I weren’t in any sort of outright conflict. Sometimes we were even all right together. Once, when he and Mum both had time off work, we went out for the day to Brean Down and Nor and I climbed the dunes in our flip-flops, sliding back one step for every two we took on the shifting sand; he held out his hand to me and pulled me up after him. His hands were brown and strong, with neat-trimmed nails as thick as horn. He always wore a watch on an expanding metal band, and a wedding ring, which men didn’t often do in those days. Mum stood below with her hair escaping from her scarf, whipping across her face in the wind, calling out to us to be careful, the dunes were treacherous, we could be buried alive. And Nor and I laughed together.
When I was in trouble, however, he sat opposite me in the lounge, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his forehead wrinkled: I felt the whole force of his personality bent upon me—thwarted, concentrated, blinkered. “You’ll find nothing’s handed to you on a plate,” he said. “It’s no good thinking you can stay wrapped up in your own little world. Do you have any idea how hard your mother has to work to earn the money to buy you food and clothes?” In a reasonable voice, he communicated his warnings about the meanness at the heart of things, which he understood and I, in my childishness, was refusing to acknowledge.
No doubt he really thought it was his duty, in my father’s place, to teach me to adapt. The trouble was that I hardly knew him. I didn’t exactly argue with him. I sometimes said, “I didn’t mean to,” in a flippant voice, or denied things that it was obvious I had done. If he asked me why I’d done them, I said I didn’t know. I put my hands under my thighs on the chair, swung my legs, and looked off into the corners of the room; my expression was a slippery mask clamped on my face. All my effort was directed at keeping my mouth curved upward in a grimacing smile, which I knew was my best weapon because it made Nor squeeze his fists and raise his voice.
Then Mum would appear from the kitchen. “That’s enough,” she would say, tactfully, as if she were saying it to me. “Go up to your room, Stella.” Tugging me backward and forward between them, she and Nor expressed the tension in their new life together. He wanted his wife to himself; he hadn’t reckoned on finding me his rival for her attentions. Mum, with her quick skepticism, must have seen how he deceived himself, dissimulating his resentment, pretending to be impartial. She must have remonstrated with him over how relentlessly he came in pursuit of me, though it was part of their code that she would never openly take my part against him. (And although I felt bitterly his taking her away from me, I also dreaded catching sight of any rift between them.)
Let’s be clear—our fight was mutual; I was set against Nor just as he was against me. Only I was a child, so he had power over me. That’s all tyranny is: it’s not in a personality; it’s in a set of circumstances. It’s being trapped with your enemy in a limited space—a country or a family—where the balance of power between you is unequal and the weaker one has no recourse.
Because the tree cult began in the shapeless days of summer, there was no drudging sanity of school at first to counteract its power. I came up with the idea of kissing the stumps and leaving offerings—salt, currants, sherbet. We smeared the resin on our foreheads. The three stumps in our gardens grew distinctive personalities, and we named them (Iskarion, Vedar, Mori). They were jealous, capricious, closely informed about our daily lives. More awesome and less easy to propitiate were the nameless stumps we had no access to, in other gardens. Madeleine used to dab the resin on her tongue and then groan and double up, clutching her stomach, making a great fuss over how it had poisoned her. It was her idea that we should cut ourselves and rub our blood into the bark.
I pushed myself, trying to receive intimations of the sacred trees’ living existence; occasionally, alone, I could fall into an ecstasy of belief. At other times, I watched myself, skeptical of the authenticity of my transports, knowing that I was only repeating the form of past emotions. Sometimes, after the sessions with Madeleine, I would be visited by a kind of Protestant disgust at our excesses; the more we thrilled and exaggerated, the more it was only a game. For a couple of days I wouldn’t play, no matter how much Madeleine pouted and sulked. Then—once, on a Sunday evening in my bath, when the late sunlight, reflecting off the bathwater, made restless patterns on the ceiling—I’d be visited by the balm of a vision of great trees, at the very moment when I least thought of asking for it. Outside time, after all, the vanished trees were still printed on the air somewhere.
At the end of the summer, when Madeleine and I went back to our different schools, the cult cooled down but didn’t die. Out of superstitious habit we still left offerings at the stumps for good luck, and carried bits of bark in our pockets, fingering them out of the teacher’s sight.
Nor insisted that I sit the entrance exam for the direct-grant secondary schools. I always had my head in a book, he argued. And not many of the children where we lived now went to the local comprehensive. Madeleine was taking the exam, too, but she didn’t have to do so well on it, because her parents could pay. I needed a scholarship place. I sat the exam. I didn’t care how I did, wasn’t frightened of it. School up to that point had left me unscathed. I didn’t make the connection that Nor did, between the power of what I read in books in my own time and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.
Consulting no one, I had promoted myself at our local library to adult books—which meant climbing three steps, covered in yellow lino, into the upper portion of the brick building, with its sensuous hush and beamed Arts and Crafts ceiling. I didn’t know where to begin; I was drawn to complete works in uniform bindings, because I thought they would be a series, like the ones I had loved in the children’s section: “Anne of Green Gables” or “The Naughtiest Girl in the School.” Often I hardly knew what was happening in the novels I fell upon by chance (Compton Mackenzie, Faulkner, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen), but I read absorbedly nonetheless, half disappointed, half revelling in the texture of these worlds jumbling in my ignorance: servants, telegrams, cavalry, race, guilt, dressing for dinner (what time was dinner and what did they wear?), and elliptical conversations unlike any I’d ever heard, signifying things that I could only guess at. I gave up on some, but the books were an initiation. I began piecing their worlds together in my comprehension.
I got a scholarship for the Girls High School. (Madeleine got in, too, without the scholarship.) Mum took me out to buy a briefcase; she was proud that I had proved myself at least good for something. Nor said, “She’ll have a lot more to live up to now.”
I can’t remember when or how I found out that Nor was brought up in the Homes—I suppose Mum must have told me. He didn’t speak to me about it until long afterward. (At the time he said only, “Not everyone has your opportunities.”) The Homes was an orphanage, a vast neoclassical gray stone building set back from a main road, its front as implacable as a hospital or a prison, a little kingdom. We said at junior school that the children who came from there smelled of wee and wore one another’s clothes. They didn’t have real mothers, only aunties.
This knowledge I had of Nor lodged in me like a stone. It didn’t make me like him any better. It seemed an extra twist to how arbitrarily he and I were fastened together: I had to bear the burden of his childhood sorrows. He had done heroically well, working his way up at the Board Mill, overcoming the handicap of his beginnings (his mother hadn’t been “able to look after him”). I was determined not to care. My own selfishness seemed to eat me up; I worked at being oblivious of all my advantages.
I hated high school. Madeleine and I hated it together, though differently. Her face, wiped clear of point or guile, goaded a couple of the more savage teachers, who mistook her blankness for insolence. At first, it seemed that I had the gift of invisibility. I stayed somewhere around the middle of the range of achievement. I kept my mouth shut in class and out of it. I absorbed obsessively the intricate system of prohibitions, so as not to attract anyone’s attention by transgressing: no fewer than five lace-holes in our outdoor shoes, no green ink, all textbooks to be covered in brown paper, girls not to use the toilet in twos (in junior school, we had crowded three or four into the little cubicles, to gossip), and so on. By the end of the first week, I knew that I’d found my way, through some terrible error, into enemy territory, where I must, as a matter of life or death, keep my true self concealed. The school was a mill, whose purpose was to grind you into its product. Every subject shrank to fit inside the exam questions, even—especially—the books we read in English class. We were supposed to be grateful to have been selected for this grinding, and most of the girls were grateful. Madeleine and I didn’t fit in. Our tree cult revived, garnered new passionate power. In addition to the bark fragments in our pockets, we had a code of words and signs to communicate our mockery and refusal.
Meanwhile, my mother began wearing looser dresses.
She never told me she was pregnant, only hinted at a significant change coming; I was slow to the point of stupidity in picking up her clues. Why was she putting her feet up every evening after supper, while Nor and I did the dishes in competitive silence? Some conspiracy surrounded her, which I recoiled from, as if I guessed that it had humiliation in it for me. One Saturday morning, watching from my bedroom window while she hung out washing on the metal clothes tree in the garden (which had finally been turfed), I saw what I had not allowed myself to see—the wet sheets billowed like fat sails filled with wind, and she billowed, too. Ducking out of sight behind my window, so that she wouldn’t know I knew, I crouched around my discovery in the tight space between the bed leg and the dolls’ cot, with my back to the pink-sprigged wallpaper I had chosen and Nor had cut and pasted and put up. (I picked at the edges of this paper sometimes, where he wouldn’t notice it, when I was in bed at night; sometimes I spat into the gap beside the bed and let my saliva trickle down the wall.)
Mum had betrayed herself, pretending to be complete and then letting this invasion into her body, as if she were not herself but another 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. Nor 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 exaggerated air of 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 refills frequently. Though he couldn’t have known it, I was doing my best.
I saw that I put him off his own food (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 this 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 placemats showing Old World coaching inns. 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 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 around 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 onto 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 balked. Nor looked in on me, bringing the cup of milky, sugary instant coffee that my mother usually brought. He really was trying very hard.
“What’s the matter? Are you stuck?”
Our voices startled us—they seemed to break a silence locked like rusting machinery. I knew how I looked, slumped in defeat at the table, pasty-faced with worry. (The teacher’s scorn did not distinguish between those who tried and failed and those who didn’t try.) I had no pride where my schoolwork was concerned—it occurred to me that Nor might be able to help me. He worked with numbers all day; I took it for granted that he would understand the problem.
“So long as it isn’t French,” he said cheerfully enough, and pulled up a chair beside me, striped shirtsleeves rolled businesslike up to the elbow. He radiated clean heat from those sessions in the bathroom that left the walls dripping and the mirrors cloudy. I explained that the hare was sleeping at a location twelve hundred metres from the finish line; the tortoise passed it at a steady speed of five centimetres per second. Six and a half hours later, the hare woke up. All of these elements had by now attained a hallucinatory meaninglessness in my head.
Nor read the problem over to himself, biting my pen, frowning down at the scrambled page of my homework book. What minimum acceleration (assumed constant) must the hare have in order to cross the finish line first? He worked out easily in his head how long it would take for the tortoise to get there, then went over and over the other elements, sketching a little diagram for himself, the hare’s trajectory cutting across the tortoise’s just before the finish line. I saw that he wanted it to be like one of the Dick and Harry problems, giving way to common sense or to a trick of thought.
“How do we calculate acceleration?” he asked. “Haven’t they taught you how? Have you done other problems like this one?”
I found in the back of my book a formula that the teacher had given us, expressing D in terms of O, V, T, and A, but I didn’t even know what those letters stood for. Nor thought that perhaps D was distance, but we already knew the distance. His hand began to leave sweat marks on the page, as mine had. He wondered just when the hare needed to pass the tortoise in order to get to the finish line ahead of it; how tiny might the difference between them be? His efforts snagged on this doubt, building up behind it. “You have to concentrate better in class,” he said. “She must have shown you how to do this. Can’t you remember?”
I shrugged, flinching. I should have known that I would be to blame.
“Physics is boring.”
He tried again, stating the elements of the problem in a reasonable, steadying voice. All the time, he must have been consumed with his real worries, about my mother’s condition and what lay ahead for them, about his responsibility for me.
“Write me a note,” I said. “Tell the teacher I was ill.”
“Don’t be silly. All you need to do is ask her to explain it to you.”
“You don’t understand what she’s like!” I wailed.
And then somehow we upset my coffee cup. It really wasn’t clear to me which one of us did it: I may have thrown out my hand rhetorically; he may have reached for a pencil without looking. Hot, milky, sugary coffee flooded everywhere, soaking instantly through the layers of newspaper, slewing into our laps, pooling on the precious polished surface of the table; we both threw ourselves backward. I snatched up my homework book—though not before a few splashes dashed across the page, elegant illustrations of the physics of liquid form. (The teacher, the following week, would ring these splashes in red Biro, writing “Disgusting & slovenly presentation,” but by then I didn’t care.) Nor grabbed at a heap of bills and Mum’s sewing—she was making things for the new baby. Too late; coffee stains had already seeped into the cut-out pieces of the little gingham romper suit.
“Stella! You idiot!” he yelled, shoving me roughly out of the way of the coffee dripping onto the carpet and onto my fawn socks.
I stumbled backward, genuinely confused. “Was it my fault?”
Nor ran to fetch tea towels from the kitchen to soak up the coffee, then filled a bucket with soapy water and set to work systematically, mopping and rubbing and wiping, just as my mother would have done, changing the water every so often. Spilled milk was one of the things that Mum and Nor dreaded above all else; if you failed to eradicate every trace, the smell as it soured came back to haunt you. While he wiped, I stood frowning at my homework.
“What are we going to do with that skirt?” Nor said, his voice embittered, doomsday-flat. “You’d better take it off. If I wash it out, it’ll never be dry for tomorrow. I’ll try to leach the worst of the coffee out of it without soaking it. At least you’ve got a clean shirt I can iron.”
I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happened; I could see all the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light. “Look,” I said, exulting. “D is distance. A must be acceleration. We need to rearrange the equation so that A is by itself on one side of the equal sign. OV must be original velocity, which is nought—the hare’s asleep—so that cancels out. Times both sides by two, divide by time squared. Acceleration equals two times distance over time squared.”
He didn’t even answer; naturally enough, at that moment he didn’t much care about my physics homework. He was too busy trying to sop spilled coffee from the carpet, while his sulky stepdaughter stood in her knickers, not lifting a finger to help him.
Or he hated his failure to know more than I did, be cleverer than I was.
That was how I got to know that I was clever. When I cleaned my teeth that night in the bathroom, my face was different in the mirror: as if a light had gone on behind my eyes, or an inner eye had been strained open. Every inch of my skin, every pore, every fixture in the bathroom was accessible to my vision pressing remorselessly onward, devouring the world’s substance, seeing through it. I could see my own face as if it weren’t mine. I pressed my nose to the mirror, baring my teeth at myself, misting the glass with my breath. At first, this cleverness was like a sensation of divinity; then, after a while, it ate itself and I couldn’t turn the mind-light off, couldn’t stop thinking through everything, couldn’t sleep. I saw Nor—and my mother and my school—as if they were tiny, in the remote distance. I believed that if I wanted to I could solve all the problems in the physics teacher’s book. When eventually sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees. I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once. ♦
