Clever Girl by Hadley Tessa

Author:Hadley, Tessa [Hadley, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

The stranger was Sheila’s brother. They came from a big family of nine children, brought up in a draughty Norfolk vicarage. (— Everything we ever owned was handed down, Sheila said. — It made us horribly materialistic. I prayed in church for patent leather shoes.) We had met some of her brothers and sisters before, but not this one: Andrew. He was older than Sheila, the oldest boy, and she hadn’t seen him for five years because he’d had an irrevocable row with his family – she couldn’t remember what the row was about. (His hair? His faith?) After the row he had dropped out from York University in his second year, and never contacted them. The family had refused to go after him, though they included him in their prayers. But Sheila and one of her sisters had made great efforts to trace him, writing to all Andrew’s old friends and teachers, listing him as a missing person with the police, even travelling by themselves on the coach to York to see if they could find him there.

When Andrew turned up at the party without any warning (he’d got Sheila’s address from the other sister), they hadn’t embraced or even touched each other. — It’s you! was all Sheila had said, when he dropped to sit on the grass beside her. And she had protested, joking, that he could at least have sent her a postcard. Andrew was tall – very tall, six foot four or five – and he looked as marked with damage – eyes extinguished, stale, unshaven grey-white face, lank draggled hair – as if he’d come back from the dead instead of, as it turned out, bumming around southern Europe. His eyes were chinks of blue in his long face: small, indifferent, retreated behind the craggy mass of his cheekbones. He had been playing his saxophone for money or labouring or working on the grape harvest; in jail for a while, waiting to be deported from Spain. When we asked him to play his saxophone, he said he’d sold it.

He stayed with us for a few weeks, in a sleeping bag on his bed-roll on the floor in the front room; then he moved to live in a squat in a filthy spindly old house in a Georgian crescent, where there was more drink and more drugs than at our place and less domesticity. Even after he’d moved out he seemed to spend a lot of time with us. I supposed at first that he came to see Sheila. My heart used to sink when he turned up because his presence had a dampening effect – he was too brooding and dogmatic. He was contemptuous of our commune, the sharing of possessions and decision-making; he said it was only tinkering behind closed doors, not changing anything real. Real revolution, he said, had to happen out on the street. He picked up our white stone one evening, laughing when we explained what we used it for, throwing it indifferently from hand to hand.

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