Living In Perhaps Page 4

  Then I heard voices, and saw Barbara, accompanied by two smaller children, wandering along the pavement in a careless, meandering way. I burst out of my hiding place, hysterical with relief.

  'Shouldn't you be there by now?' I asked.

  Barbara only shrugged, and said, 'Not really.'

  I stared at the little boys. Barbara didn't introduce them. They both had curly hair and neither of them had bothered to comb it that morning.

  'I'm Sebastian. He's Mattie,' the dark-haired, slightly taller one said, pointing at his brother. His voice was husky, which sounded odd, coming from such a small boy.

  Barbara was busy looking me up and down. Self-consciously, I pulled some dead leaves out of my hair.

  'Give us your woolly,' she instructed briskly.

  I was in my brown-and-white-check school dress and brown botany wool cardigan, with white socks and brown lace-ups. She was wearing lime-green nylon shorts.

  'Don't you have to wear school uniform?' I asked.

  'No. They don't like uniforms at the Wren. They wouldn't want to see us all looking the same.'

  We exchanged cardigans. Hers was made up of left-over wools crocheted into circles of different colours. Some of the colours hadn't even lasted a whole circle, and were finished off with something else. She pushed the sleeves of my school cardigan up to her elbows and buttoned it unevenly at the front. I thought I'd got much the better end of the bargain.

  When we reached the Wren, Barbara marched straight up the steps and pushed the front door open. Sebastian and Mattie ran off towards the back of the house and Barbara went into the front room. There were half a dozen children round a big table, painting on leaves and pressing the leaves down on to sheets of sugar paper.

  'Oh, hello there,' said the woman in charge, looking up and smiling in a vague, short-sighted way. She didn't seem annoyed at Barbara's lateness.

  We sat down at gaps round the table and joined in painting leaves. No one took a register or even glanced at me. There were two children who weren't doing anything much. One was poking a ruler in the fish tank and the other just looked out of the window for ages.

  In the middle of the table was a big tray of leaves from the garden, and we chose whichever we wanted, and painted them however we wanted, and stuck them down on paper to make patterns. I thought it was like something out of infant school, but I didn't say so. Barbara got the giggles and was painting on her hand and trying to stick it in other kids' faces. The boy next to me took a dry horse-chestnut leaf and crumbled it to pieces all over my sheet of paper, just to annoy me.

  After a very long time we were sent out to a sun-porch at the back of the house to wash the paint off our hands, and then we went into the garden and ran about under the trees. There was no playground, just worn-out grass covered with old beech mast. We ran hard, and shouted and screamed, but only for the sake of it. At my school, you rushed about and yelled at playtime for the sheer relief of being out of the classroom, but here you didn't feel the same need. I think I galloped around, bursting my lungs, to try and make some kind of impact on someone, but it didn't work.

  After a while, the woman in charge of our classroom came to the top of the steps and asked us to come in. Barbara took no notice, so I copied her. She had to come back several times before she succeeded in rounding all of us up. We stuck our mouths under the cold tap in the sun-porch. The water was warm and tasted green and metallic. Then we slouched back to our room.

  The other children were already sitting on the floor in a circle. Barbara and I flopped down with them. The woman – I couldn't call her a teacher, she lacked that glint of suspicion in the eye that marks a teacher out; in fact the only suspicious thing about the glint in her eye was its innocence and joyfulness – read a story aloud. There were cushions on the floor and you could lie back on them and lounge about while you listened. Afterwards we acted out parts of the story. Everyone joined in, except one boy who sat in the bay window and picked his nose in a leisurely sort of way.

  I looked at the woman in charge. Drilled my eyes into hers to see if she would look back and notice me. She had untidy red hair and big lips covered in peachy lipstick. Her upper lip was just like the lower one, completely unindented. She wore a black dress covered in swirly red roses, with a full skirt and a wide neckline that kept slipping, always showing one set of petticoat and bra straps or the other. Barbara said her name was Gail. Not Miss or Mrs anything. Just Gail.

  Needless to say, Gail didn't notice me.

  At lunchtime we went into the sun-porch, where there were two big wooden tables and assorted chairs. Barbara put her carrier bag on the table and I put my satchel on it. Barbara took out a plastic box and a thermos flask. I just sat there. 'Where's your lunch?' she said.

  'What lunch? We have school dinners.'

  'School dinners? This is school dinner.' Everyone around us was getting out paper bags and plastic boxes and greaseproof packages of food. 'Here, you'd better have some of mine if you haven't got anything.'

  And that was when I found out that you could have such things as grated cheese and lemon curd and sultanas in sandwiches.

  Barbara offered me some of her drink. The shiny lip of her flask was covered in slips of beige like tiny pieces of seaweed. I caught a whiff of the drink and felt sick.

  'It's only coffee. Don't you drink coffee?'

  I shook my head, and saw a look in her eyes that showed me I wasn't coming up to scratch. But afterwards she admitted that it did taste a bit of thermos. I settled for another drink from the cold-water tap.

  The day was strangely long. There was no clock on the wall in the front room, and I didn't have a watch. The sun came round into the front garden, and the boy picking his nose turned and faced the other way, so that it didn't shine in his eyes. Barbara and I made some pastry, using a pair of scales and a bag of flour and some rather hairy lard. Around the room, other children were sorting coloured marbles into jars, building things with bricks, and measuring the height of the bookcase. I thought it must be counting and measuring that we were learning now, but I didn't see why it had to be disguised as something else.

  Barbara and I took our grey dough out to the kitchen to put it in the oven. The kitchen was huge and old and smelly, and there was a pile of dirty teacups in the sink. A clock hung over the boiler in the defunct fireplace.

  'Is that the right time?'

  Barbara nodded. 'Think so.'

  'It's only five to two!'

  'So what?'

  'I thought it must be nearly home time.'

  Barbara found some matches in a drawer and lit the oven. It made a booming sound as the gas caught and she leaped back. We left our pastry resting straight on the oven shelf, as we couldn't find a baking tray for it. We knew that no one was counting the minutes until we came back, so we ran outside into the garden again.

  Barbara led the way to the end and we slipped behind some bushes. From there we could see through the slats in the fence into another garden beyond. There was a clothes line with underwear swaying on it, enormous flesh-coloured knickers and long-line brassieres with cups the size of balloons. We fell about laughing.

  I gulped for air. 'Have you ever seen the owner?'

  Barbara nodded violently. 'I've seen her asleep in a deckchair, wearing a swimming costume!' And she gestured eloquently with her hands to describe the voluptuous sight. I felt weak with laughter, and it was the happiest I had been all day.

  We went back and retrieved our pastry, which was brown at the edges but still grey in the middle. Gail said we could take it home. It was nearly half past two and people were picking up their jumpers and their lunch bags and drifting out.

  'Bye-bye, everyone,' Gail said cheerily, waving both hands in the air. 'See you all tomorrow.'

  We waited on the steps until Mattie and Sebastian came out and then set off for home.

  'I'm much too early,' I said to Barbara. 'We don't usually finish for another hour.'

  I thought she might invite me to
her house to wait out the interval, but she just said, 'Then you'll have to hide in the bushes again, won't you?'

  When I saw Barbara the following week at piano I said bravely, 'I didn't like your school much. I thought it was boring.'

  She blinked sleepily. 'That's why we don't bother to go all the time. You don't learn anything there. Except Izzy and Tom. And they're clever anyway, so they probably taught themselves.'

  School dinners cost a shilling, and I had missed a dinner that had been paid for because of going to the Wren. My mother always sent the right money at the beginning of each week, so at the end of term they gave me the shilling to give back to her. I kept it, of course. And that was how I learned that crime does pay.

  7

  Nearest and Dearest

  There's a lot I don't think about. Recent things.

  I'm only eighteen and already I'm living in the past. I'm like an old lady with nothing to fill her days and nothing to look forward to, who dwells continually in some lost golden age, before the war, when she was young. Either I think about right now, today, breakfast, dinner and tea. (Or breakfast, lunch and supper, as they call it here. I don't know what happened to dinner. It doesn't feature, not at midday or in the evening. Dinner is off the menu.) Or I think about way-back-when. When I was little.

  I'm only eighteen. I should be able to look to the future. If I was a Carolyn sort of girl my life would be full of things to look forward to: invitations, parties, the purchase of fashionable dresses that would fit me like a glove. Maybe an engagement ring. I bet a Carolyn sort of girl would have her wedding all planned out in her head by the time she hit puberty. She and her mother would smile at attractive small children when they were out and about, and remark to each other that Julie was a nice name for a girl and Mark a very good choice for a boy. All this long before there was any suitable man on the horizon. Because of course, for a Carolyn, there always would be, some day. No question. Simple as that.

  If I think about the future I see only a door slamming shut.

  *

  Lorna has been chipping away again. Or she tries to. She keeps asking about my mother. Frankly, the woman's obsessed with my mother.

  There are little gems, little jewels, I could hand her. But I don't.

  I could say how she would dry my hair with a towel, roughly, poking my scalp with her bony fingers and almost pulling my hair out as she rubbed it between the folds of towelling. I hated hair-washing day. But she didn't mean to hurt me.

  Or porridge. She could make it thin as gruel, or thick as rice pudding. Either way it had lumps in. Little blunt lumps which broke apart into dry oatmeal under your teeth. And then she'd nag us if we didn't eat it all up. Summer was better. In summer we had cornflakes instead.

  But does Lorna want little gems, or does she want facts and figures? Does she like stories – where there's the risk of fiction – or does she like the safe, calculable nature of maths? And why does she want them, anyway? She's got my precious file. She's not getting anything else.

  She sits down. She laces her fingers, and glances out of the window with great interest. She opens her mouth with an intake of breath, as if she's going to comment on the butterflies that flit past or the way the clouds have built up on the horizon, or, indeed, the shape of a gardener's bottom as he bends over the tulip beds.

  Instead, not quite looking at me, she says, 'Tell me about your mother.' And she swings her gaze over to mine, like a crane with a demolition ball wild on the end of its chain.

  Oh, no. You don't catch me that way, Lorna.

  I won't fall for such tricks. I tell her instead about a Carolyn sort of mother. I don't think she'll notice the difference.

  Of course, my mum is not my mother. Lorna forgets that. She forgets her question is a paradox. Who does she want to know about?

  My mum is a tall woman, not exactly thin but spare, nothing but muscle to cushion her bones. She stands and sits very upright, as if to relax would be to let something go. She is as tall as Dad, taller if she wears heels of any kind. Her short hair is always tightly waved. She does this herself, with curlers which go in at night and come out first thing in the morning. Dad's cousin Bettina is a hairdresser, but she's never been allowed to get her dye mixes near Mum's hair, which is the same shade of brown as it must have been all her life: middling brown, like milk chocolate, stippled with a few grey hairs. She doesn't wear make-up, only powder for special occasions. I can't see what this is meant to achieve as an aid to beauty, but it makes her feel respectable.

  She always dresses in the same way, whether she's visiting relations or cleaning the house. This is because she has standards. She wears a skirt and a blouse, and shoes and stockings. She owns a pair of slippers but only wears them for moving between bedroom and bathroom. A woman who pads around in bedroom slippers all day is, according to Mum, a slouch. (She probably means slut, but even the word itself is a step too far for Mum.) If it's cold, she puts a cardigan on over the blouse. In winter she wears a vest. She's a great advocate of sensible underwear. To do housework she puts a nylon overall on top of her skirt and blouse. To cook she wears a flowered apron with a bib. When she is serving the tea to guests – our relations – she ties on a perky little waist-apron with a frill round the edge. When she goes to church she wears a mackintosh, neatly buttoned up even in warm weather, and a hat.

  Hats are her weakness, if she could be said to have a weakness. When we went into town we would sometimes make a detour to the hat department in the big shops, and have a look, though not try anything on. I remember her owning four hats: a brown angora beret, a black pillbox (for funerals), a green velour bucket, and a red squashy shape with a small crimson feather. Most often she wears the beret. I never once saw her in the red hat.

  When she goes to church she carries a large handbag, and keeps her Bible inside it. A lot of people at church carry their Bibles in their hands. Some of them have normal little Bibles but with lots of texts and bookmarks and ribbons poking out. Some people have those big soft-covered black Bibles, with curled-out edges from constant pious use. My mother never carries her Bible in her hand, and thinks all those big flashy Bibles and ribbons are just a way of showing off. Needless to say, I longed to be given a big black Bible. Or, better still, a white one with gold lettering on the front, like a girl had in my Sunday school class.

  It was my mother who insisted on the church-going. She had to keep Brian and me up to scratch.

  'Well-brought-up people go to church,' she said. Well-broughtup people, she implied, did God the politeness of believing in Him.

  My father went along with it, though only so far. He managed Christmas and Easter, and showed some signs of actually enjoying Harvest Festival. The rest of the family, Gloria, Stella, Bettina, Bob, were very remiss in their devotions. They were fond of a lie-in on Sunday mornings, I suspect.

  My mother used to be a bookkeeper but when we were little she never had a job outside the home. She kept constantly busy with cooking and cleaning and knitting and sewing. She knitted all my jumpers, and Brian's, and she knitted thick winter socks for Dad. She sewed my dresses.

  'Isn't she clever, your mum?' my aunt Gloria often said to me, holding up an unrecognizable slab of knitting, destined to become a pocket or a sleeve. Another trick of hers was to lift the skirt of the dress I was wearing, to admire the tiny hem stitches. 'Auntie!' I pushed at my skirt, trying to hide my knickers from the company. 'Please!'

  'I could never do all that, Edie. I really couldn't. Such patience.'

  Gloria's humility was put on to increase the compliment, but I saw my mother's look: no, you couldn't.

  The only other child in our family was Mandy, Bettina's daughter. I envied Mandy her shop-bought dresses with their machine-finished buttonholes and narrow machine-stitched hems. Sometimes Mandy wore dresses identical to those I'd seen other girls in, flimsy checked frocks with gathered skirts and sashes, daisy prints with puffed sleeves. My dresses were never the same as anyone else's. My mother used pat
terns that had been around for years, and then gave them a twist of her own: lasting quality. They had big hems, with 'lots to let down'. They were never skimpy, and the buttonholes never came unravelled. But I longed for a frock that was up-to-the-minute, shoddy as only shop-bought products could be, and then tatty enough to be chucked away. Even Mandy's cardigans were made on a machine: the automated sheen of their surfaces was thrilling. I wished mine could be like hers.

  One day when we were going past our local wool shop I noticed in the window a pale green cable-knit jumper very like the one Mum was currently making at home. 'Look,' I said. 'That's just like the one you're knitting.'

  'It is,' she said. At first I thought she meant 'It's the pattern I'm using.' But when we got home, I noticed that the pale green wool had gone from her needles and been replaced by brown yarn for my next school cardigan.

  'Where's the green one?' I asked. 'Who's it for?'

  'At the shop,' she said. 'It's for whoever buys it.'

  And that was the start of her new job, her home knitting career.

  Mum liked us out of the way while she was doing this, concerned that our mucky fingers would spoil the goods. Just as she liked us off her clean kitchen floor, away from her plumped-up settee cushions and smoothed bedspreads. Just as Dad liked us out of the flower beds with that ball, and off the nice sharp edges of his lawn. We couldn't put a foot right.

  My new friend Hanny Gombrich is Jewish. That was the second thing she told me, after her name. We met in the gardens here, where we're allowed out for an hour in the morning (weather permitting), and again in the afternoon. I knew she wasn't a zombie that first time because I caught her eye. Everyone else here avoids meeting eyes. Or they're too drugged-up to be capable of noticing you. I caught her eye and she looked back at me for – it must have been – all of three seconds. It was such a relief. It was like a hand reaching out and pulling you up out of a deep, deep well.