Clever Girl Read Online Free

how Andrea stood up to the lawyers in court. — She was so perfectly polite and patient, but she never let them get under her skin. I couldn’t have kept my composure the way she did.
    But once the trial was over the two of them didn’t see much of each other. Their lives took them in different directions, and they had never really had much in common. Andy didn’t become a new person after Charlie was killed, she never became one of the bright, quick, funny women Mum chose for her best friends. Andy was always rather sweet and blank and – what’s the word? Not conventional, because Mum was every bit as conventional. Andy was receptive
,
like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn’t been poured into her, she would have been happier – it goes without saying – but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think this is quite rare, this capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.
    And it wasn’t just a passive thing. I remember when Auntie Jean first came round while Andy was staying with us. Jean had a big forthright bust and piled-up black hair, she wore dangling earrings that were vaguely gypsyish. When Andy came out of the bedroom where she’d been lying down, Jean knelt on the floor in front of her, wrapping her arms around Andy’s knees, sobbing extravagantly.
    — I don’t know how you can bear it, she said. — I know I couldn’t.
    (Jean had three boys.)
    The murder had cleared a social space around Andy. People didn’t know how to address her; probably Jean was just trying to broach that space in her overblown way. You can’t deny that her gesture matched the extremity of what had happened. But Andy wasn’t either touched or embarrassed. She stood very still and unresponsive until Jean let go.
    — I’m sorry, I don’t like scenes, she coolly said.
    I’m sure that Uncle Derek was less interesting than his wife; he wasn’t interesting just because he had killed someone. As an adult I lived for a while in a house that had brick steps leading down into a narrow coal cellar like a passage to a dead end, where we kept the brooms and buckets and broken things we hadn’t got around to fixing. It used to flood with filthy water at certain times of year, and I imagine Uncle Derek’s inner life like that: cramped and musty-smelling, shut away from daylight, subject to the drag of tides of violence. The little despotism he installed inside the four walls of his home mattered only because it derived its authority from the whole towering, mahogany-coloured, tobacco-smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority in the world outside.
    And mattered, of course, because of its consequences in other lives.
    My mother reported that in court he said he ‘got the worst of a bad bargain’ in his wife. They did let him out of jail eventually, I believe, after he had served fifteen years of his sentence. He went to settle in some part of the country where he wasn’t known.
    During the time Auntie Andy was staying with us, Mum left me alone in the flat with her on Saturdays while she went out shopping. Sometimes Andy played dolls with me. This was a new experience; the adults I knew didn’t play with children, unless it was something organised like cricket. But Andy didn’t put on a childish voice, and she entered into the reality of the different dolls’ characters and sensitivities with what seemed like an authentic interest, almost naive – I checked her face to make sure she wasn’t teasing me. We undressed and dressed them in their tiny clothes, flipping them over to do up the poppers, skewering plastic boots on to hard pointing feet. (After the trial was over Andy made a dress for my teenage doll with layered skirts in orange nylon trimmed with minute roses made of satin ribbon: unbelievably pretty, though it was a bit tight and wouldn’t do up down the back.)
    Sometimes when she and I were alone in the flat,