Helly said she didn’t believe in anything. She thought life was just a cruel accident, a freak of chemicals in an empty universe. (This was what her father thought too.) Clare said she thought you couldn’t know what the meaning of things was and she didn’t believe in anything “out there,” but you ought to plunge yourself into life and taste every kind of experience you possibly could. Helly loved Alistair first and then he loved Helly. But as soon as he did, Helly was suspicious and bored, so it was Clare he first kissed and for a while “went out with,” and then later after he’d finished with her Clare discovered that Helly had all the time resented her taking Alistair away, and then Helly and Alistair got back together, and it was obvious he had wanted Helly all along.
Then there was Danny. Danny was the older brother of one of Tamsin’s friends from the state school, and Clare loved him from the first moment she saw him, as people do in books; only this was probably the straightest, purest desire she ever felt, absolutely unmuddied by literature. He was tall, lean, olive-skinned, with a narrow mouth that smiled at the corners, and a face rapt in a kind of deliberate sleepy sensual attentiveness. Tamsin knew Danny because she bought dope and other things from a friend of his; he was friends with some of the bikers too. But he was a talented boy; he was staying on at school to do art in the sixth form. He lived off and on with his divorced mother in a flat on the twenty-first floor of a tower block in Churchtown, circled at its foot by great orange-lit dual carriageways like broad rivers, eerie in the dark, uncrossable. After the vandalized lift and the shadowy urine-smelling concrete stairwell, the flat was brilliant like the crystal interior of a stone struck open: flock wallpaper, gilt lamp brackets, a lit fish tank, a leather sofa, and a zebra-skin rug. Clare loved the flat with her strong inverted snobbery of that period, although she rather feared Danny’s mother, who had his fine bones but was ironic and haggard with black-dyed hair. When Danny gave his jeans to his mother to mend, Clare envied her.
Clare loved Danny: desperately. Through her he met Helly and he loved Helly, and Helly went out with him for a while, only always holding something in reserve, an implication that while he was very sweet he just slightly bored her. This gave her an advantage in relation to Clare, who was abject. Then Helly finished with Danny to go out with somebody else (her Italian — which was another story), and a couple of times after parties or when parents were away for the weekend Clare and Danny ended up together, and she overflowed with blessedness. She lay beside him, ran her finger ends across his narrow hairless chest, dark-olive skin stretched across bone like the ribs of some beautiful little boat, a coracle, and underneath his heart beating.
She said, I’m so lucky.
He said, I’m not doing so badly either, am I?
And she was grateful for that.
But the last time it happened, he and Helly were already supposed to be back together again, and Clare found out months afterward that Helly knew what had happened between her and Danny, and it was another tangle between them, in which both of them claimed to feel betrayed, although in the end surely whatever justice one claimed was only straw in the blast of the jungle law of sex attraction that had nothing to do with justice.
Always, in that teenage time, Clare had to submit to this cruel law that poured all the kingdoms of the earth, it seemed, into the already overflowing laps of the beautiful ones. Helly found herself tall and blond and slender and golden-skinned with a wide astonishing red mouth, and Clare found herself short and round-shouldered with black hair that wasn’t sleek but frizzy: and from those accidents all their lives unfolded. The inexorable operation of that law was a thing almost too terrible to directly contemplate, so there was always a muffled hopefulness one lived in, and then certain long nights of searing recognition that in fact worse than the worst one had dreaded was true. Once, in an elaborate solitary ceremony, Clare, dressed in the Victorian cotton nightdress Naomi had given her for Christmas, burned in a candle a list of the names of the boys she had loved (and a couple of men, including the French teacher still), renouncing all hopes of them and of any imaginable lover. She kept the ashes in a little silver pillbox. It was a long list, for age seventeen. She had a gift for loving boys. It was Helly who had the gift for being loved.
You didn’t get both gifts at once, it seemed.
It was Helly (in spite of her belief in the guardian of the stump) who seemed to keep a perpetual reserve of irony and disdain in relation to male qualities. Clare (in spite of having the Greenham Common protests in her background) loved the expertise and seriousness of boys, their deep real interest in other things: vehicles, politics, machines, music, drugs even. You knew when girls weren’t there boys felt relieved at being able to talk undistractedly. Male seriousness was authentic, Clare believed then, in a way female seriousness wasn’t. Most interests girls had seemed to be pretenses put on and off to attract boys; their abject fascination with sex relationships sapped the truth from every other subject. Her own passionate love for books did not count for freedom, it was too muddled with her life, she was searching too feverishly in her reading to learn how to live and what to be: things boys just knew without searching. The best you could hope for was to be able to break in on male objectivity and bathe in it cleansingly: what you desired was that the authenticating look of male seriousness would actually come to rest on all you were and make you real.
* * *
AND NOW, because adulthood turned out to offer all kinds of redress to the inexorable teenage law, Clare was arriving on the train at Paddington. Inside her carefully chosen adulterous costume — her loose black crepe jacket, charity-shop pink silky shirt, and baggy black trousers — her new underwear slithered strangely. When she shifted on the seat she smelled her own warmed body and wafts of the orangey perfume she had sprayed on her wrists and her neck in the bedroom at home that morning. She had sat as far away as she could from any families with small children; she had unpacked her book from her briefcase — she was rereading L’Éducation Sentimentale—and then couldn’t concentrate on her reading but looked out of the window all the way. She had thought about Rosanette telling Frederic as they drove in the forests of Fontainebleau how she was first sold to a man when she was fifteen; she had thought about Flaubert telling Louise Colet in a letter that he had just finished writing the “Big Fuck” between Emma and Rodolphe in Madame Bovary, among the trees while their horses waited. She had fallen asleep once. The sky outside the train window was powder blue with faint drifts of cloud as though it had milk stirred in; she filled with the imagined embraces of lovers all the woody dells, tipped with the first bronzes of autumn, of the resplendent sunlit England that rolled to the horizon on either side from where the train divided it, straight and speeding as an arrow. She had sat deliberately at a table of men — a student and a businessman with a laptop — because she didn’t want to be drawn into the kind of conversation friendly women had, offering little hostages from family and home in an exchange of decencies, flying the safe white flag.