Clever Girl Read Online Free Page A

Auntie Andy went into the other room to lie down and I heard her crying, although Mum had told Jean that she never did. It didn’t occur to me to try to comfort her. I would pretend to carry on with my play, feeling miserably guilty. I was only a child, there was nothing I could offer, and I must have been a living reproach because I wasn’t Charlie: though Andy never made me feel this, by any word or sign.
     
    Auntie Andy had to find a job, she had to get a divorce and a place to live by herself. She couldn’t go back to that house, obviously.
    All of this worked out well for her.
    I think she must have come to our flat in the first place, not only out of a revulsion against everything to do with her old life, but also because my mother’s solitary cheerful style – frilly aprons and nail polish and lemon-yellow guest towels – had signalled to her, even before the disaster, a vision of possibilities different to the ones she knew. And Mum was honoured by Auntie Andy’s choosing us; it seemed a consecration of Mum’s situation as a single woman, managing bravely by herself. (Though Andy’s staying was an inconvenience and a strain too; my mother acquitted herself with exemplary generosity, she really did.) And then, within a couple of years, they both found themselves a man, as if that had been the whole point of the enterprise.
    Andy went to work on the factory floor of the chocolate manufacturers where Uncle Ray was in dispatch. She made a little face of apology when she told us about the job, as if she knew it was beneath her. But in fact she enjoyed the company of the women there, though she kept aloof from the roughest of their bantering and raucous kidding (I saw this because Ray got me a summer job at the factory when I was sixteen). She brought us paper bags of half-priced, imperfect chocolates whenever she visited: violet creams and Crunchies and Turkish delight, my favourite – I picked off flakes of the chocolate with my teeth and then ate the jelly. Even after she married, Andy went on working there.
    — Carrying on for the moment, she said suggestively.
    Her new husband, Phil, was lugubrious with faded good looks, stick-thin. Not long after their wedding Andy began hinting with proud smiles that she might be pregnant; she must have been forty-ish by then, she was a lot older than my mother. Some of this I picked up at the time from conversations between Mum and Auntie Jean: their twilight tones alerted me to the fact that they were talking about bodies. Apparently she suffered from real morning sickness, her stomach swelled, her breasts were sore. (They hardly ever used that word, ‘breasts’. It was reserved for medical matters, only uttered in lowered voices.) But in the end nothing came of it, it was a false alarm.
    — Doesn’t it just break your heart? Jean said.
    Andy never did have another baby, although that pattern of phantom pregnancy repeated itself over and over well into her fifties, by which time it had become a bit of a joke among the people who knew her, though not an unkind one. To Uncle Phil’s credit he never gave the least sign of scepticism about her symptoms; he was punctilious in his attentions, urging her to put her feet up, bringing the barley water with soda that she’d ‘suddenly taken a fancy to’. Andy talked about her ‘disappointments’ as if they were miscarriages, but Jean didn’t believe she ever really conceived in her second marriage. My mother said she didn’t know, it wasn’t any of her business. However painfully these disappointments were felt in private, nothing altered Andy’s queenly kindness and distance. And as far as I know, these phantoms were the only outward sign of continuing trauma from what had happened. I can’t help feeling, thinking about it now, that there was an element of histrionic performance in them, contrasting with Andy’s usual reserve. Exacting our sympathetic goodwill, under false pretences, she claimed some latitude,