Clever Girl

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MY MOTHER AND I LIVED ALONE. My father was supposed to be dead, and I only found out years later that he’d left, walked out when I was eighteen months old. I should have guessed this — should have seen the signs, or the absence of them. Why hadn’t we kept any of his things to treasure? Why whenever he came up in conversation, which was hardly ever, did my mother’s face tighten, not in grief or regret but in disapproval — the same expression she had if she tasted some food or drink she didn’t like (she was fussy, we were both fussy, fussy together)? Why did none of our relatives or friends ever mention his name? (Which was Bert, unpoetically.) What had he died of, exactly? (‘Lungs,’ my mother said shortly. She had hated his smoking.)

But it didn’t really matter. We were pretty happy living à deux — at least I was.

This was in the 1950s and the early ’60s (I was born in 1956), so many things that seem quaint now were current and powerful then: shame, and secrecy, and the fear that other people would worm themselves into your weaknesses, and that their knowledge of how you had lapsed or failed would eat you from the inside. My mother used to wear white gloves to go to the shops in summer. She used to carry a basket on her arm, real willow, shaped like a segment of orange, with a tan leather flap and a fastener like a little brass barrel turning in a brass slot. Later on, when I was a teenager, I thought she was dowdy, in her boxy good coats and silk scarves and low-heeled court shoes. But looking at the photographs now, I see that it’s me who was a fright — I’m small, and I was pudgy in those days, with my eyes made up like black pits — and that she was elegant and even sexy, in a cautious, respectable kind of way.

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