Living In Perhaps Page 7

  But she knew. She already knew there was Brian. She had even seen me with him, out on his bike on the pavement.

  'Have you got a bike?' she asked, something else she knew the answer to. 'We've only got one. It doesn't matter because we don't like cycling very much. We used to have another but I think Eugene took it down to London with him, or maybe he left it somewhere and it got stolen. My mum's got a bike, too – it used to be my grandma's – but we don't ride that one. It weighs a ton. Does your mum ride a bike?'

  Tricky ground, now. I was less keen on this line of questioning. Was it suburban to ride a bike, or not to ride one? I shook my head.

  'My favourite colour's blue, too,' Barbara said. So I was saved from answering. I could have rolled over and embraced her for the flightiness of her brain, the way her thoughts short-circuited, flashing here and there and here again, like a butterfly flitting about a high-summer border, completely spoilt for choice.

  Her next question was 'What do you want to do when you're grown-up?'

  We were lying under the fruit trees at the end of their garden. I stared up through the thin curtain of leaves, floury and puckered and twisted with disease, to the pure blue sky beyond. We liked to chew on grass stems, something strictly forbidden by my mother. ('There are creatures in them. You swallow them and they get inside your body and ...' But she never followed up on this promising information.) So we lay and chewed the juiciest stems we could find and contemplated what we would do with our lives, should we survive the invasion of the grass-stem parasites.

  'I was going to be a famous dancer,' Barbara said, with her air of awful self-confidence, 'but Tillie said you have to start ballet classes when you're about four to be any good. And I haven't started at all yet. It was either piano lessons or ballet and at the time I had a verruca which really hurt.'

  I had never thought about the future. To me it wasn't a long and tempting gallery with intriguingly labelled doors leading off. With pictures of what might be at intervals along the walls, and every so often diamond-paned windows letting you peep outside at different views. The future was school stretching endlessly ahead, with maybe the treat of a half-term holiday in the offing, the final reward of the Christmas break miles on down the road. Right then the thought of the summer holidays coming to an end scared me. The future was new shoes to break in, a new class teacher to get used to. The thought that I would one day be a grown-up, out in the world, that I would wear shoes without socks, shoes with stockings, have a job, have a husband, was grotesque.

  'I'm not going to marry,' Barbara said, writhing to get a stone out from under her backbone.

  'Oh, nor am I!' I said, with relief, finding that this was an option. Of course it was an option; my aunt Stella was not married. But then Stella's whole purpose in life – leaving aside her career in the fish-and-chip line – was to Find A Man. A perfect, or, at a pinch, less than perfect M-A-N with whom to settle down. Settling down was what my mother called it, as if unmarried men and women were dangerous and erratic, liable to set off chain reactions of inconstancy in others, in settled married others. People who were not married were unanchored, brittle things, casting around hopelessly for a set of rules and regulations that applied to them, and were liable to get cracked and damaged in the process. More damaged as the years slipped by. The only way to stop the rot was by getting married. The rules for married people were quite clear. My mother felt happier when the rules were clear. So settling down seemed to be the ultimate end for everyone, no matter how old they got before it happened. I couldn't really see how you could avoid it.

  'I'll go to London and have fun,' Barbara said. 'I'll be a single girl. But I might have children, in the end.'

  'I won't have children,' I said, just to see if the sky would crack.

  'No, Isolde's not going to have any children,' Barbara went on, in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. 'She says she doesn't like them.'

  So all things were possible in the Hennessy world-view. In their best of all possible worlds.

  When I got home, nobody said anything. My mother was busy with the Hoover, then with the treadle sewing machine. So perhaps the roaring of one and the clattering of the other – and always in the background the cheerful musical tones of the wireless – covered up all evidence of my treachery.

  11

  Reading Matter

  Someone left a magazine in the front hall today. It was lying on a chair as I walked through. I could hardly believe my eyes. Some of the pages had come right off the staples at the back and I managed to pinch a couple and bring them up here. There's a quiz. It's that cheap kind of paper where the colour print comes off on your fingers. But you could starve for want of reading matter in this place. Anyway, I like doing quizzes.

  Question six. (Unfortunately questions one to five must have been on the facing page, which I didn't manage to get hold of, along with the title of the quiz. So I don't quite know what we're supposed to be finding out here. It could be 'Are You Huggable?', or 'Would Your Best Friend Recognize the Secret You?' It could be almost anything.) So – question six: 'When buying a pet would you choose (a) A cuddly Labrador puppy? (b) An elegant Siamese cat? (c) A flamboyant South American parrot? Or (d) A goldfish?'

  Well, it's obvious that you shouldn't go for the goldfish, not even granted an adjective. Who wants to be indescribable? Maybe the whole thing is entitled 'Are You Completely Lacking a Personality? Find out now by completing our simple quiz!'

  I'd definitely choose (a). Or (b). You can catch a disease from parrots. And goldfish swim happily around with great long ribbons of fish-shit trailing beneath them. Not very huggable.

  See, Lorna? See what your rules and regulations reduce us to in here?

  When, for days on end, for reasons I couldn't begin to imagine, Barbara failed to intercept me out in the street or on the way home from school, I took my courage in both hands and went to call on her. My passport was that phrase of hers: 'Just come round.' I hoped she truly meant it. My heart was beating hard. Her sister Isolde let me in. She showed me into the front room and sat me down. 'Barbara's busy at the moment. Would you like to wait in here?'

  She was only a year older than Barbara, but seemed terribly grown-up. Her well-shaped legs moved in a carelessly elegant way. She wore slip-on shoes with tiny heels, over bare skin. Her insteps were high and pale.

  I sat upright on the middle of the big settee. It had carved legs, a high back and scrolled arms. It was prickly and unyielding. Barbara had told me it was stuffed with horsehair. I imagined it stuffed with the taut flesh and hard bones of horses, too.

  'Would you like a book to read while you wait?' Isolde asked me. She was the perfect dental receptionist in embryo.

  I nodded.

  'Behind you.'

  I turned round and knelt up on the seat. Covering the wall behind me were two huge bookcases with glass fronts, and between them an alcove also filled with shelves that were stuffed with books.

  'I don't know what to choose,' I said, looking back over my shoulder for guidance.

  Isolde shrugged, a magnificent loose shrug. 'Take anything you like.'

  But it was like trying to find a particular headstone in an endless cemetery. There were no signposts and much of the writing was hard to make out. The titles meant nothing to me: A Tale of Two Cities, Antic Hay, Life of Marie Curie, Dr. Box's Book of Remedies, Tropic of Cancer, The Treasure Seekers, Saturday in My Garden, The Way of All Flesh. The bindings were mostly old and dull, some with flakes of gold or ornate patterns pressed into their spines. They looked like books picked up at secondhand shops and jumble sales, books that had sat unopened for years.

  I was about to reach for one called Birds of Northern Europe, which at least looked as if it must be about what it said, when Isolde pulled out Alice Through the Looking Glass. 'This is funny,' she said. 'Have you read it? Alice in Wonderland comes first, really, but it doesn't matter. You can borrow it if you like.' She shrugged her shoulders gracefully, and dropped the book in my
lap with the careless generosity of one who has far more of everything than they will ever need. And she left me to it. I was still reading when Barbara at long last came bouncing into the room.

  I treated their house like a public lending library after that. I carried Alice home and read it by the summer daylight that came through my bedroom curtains in the evening. It took me ages to finish. I was a slow reader. Barbara said it didn't matter how long I borrowed it for, nobody else wanted it. But the speed of my reading improved by leaps and bounds. I found you didn't have to sound every word in your head. You could breathe in the words, whole sentences, paragraphs, suck them off the page with your eyes. And reading was fun, it was good, it was a delight. I liked Alice, cussed, confused Alice, and I loved the talking Tiger Lily, and the wicked greedy Walrus and Carpenter.

  Next I took home not one but four books, in case what I had chosen (without Isolde's advice) turned out not to be interesting. I kept them under my bed so that I wouldn't have to explain them to Mum. I forgot that she vacuumed under there regularly. When she asked I said they came from the school library. I blushed as I said it. I worried that she might have known I was lying. But she didn't. She didn't notice my hot face or the artificial tone in my voice. It's weird how adults don't suspect the most obvious duplicities. I was only an apprentice liar at this stage, but even so she didn't notice anything. After that I didn't bother to worry about her finding them.

  And anyway, it was true: those first four books did have library cards inside the front covers. One had a page full of old date stamps, the others had little cardboard pockets for the slips to go in. I asked Barbara about this.

  'Oh, our books come from all over,' she said. 'Patrick picks them up when he's out and about. Anything that takes his fancy. Some of them are old books the libraries sell off. He says he's going to read them all one day, when he's an old, old man and has the time. And then Isolde and me used to play libraries,' she went on. 'Isolde had us make cards for all the books and we would check them in and out if people wanted to look at them. We sat at a table by the door of the front room, and she was going to charge fines if anyone didn't hand the books back pretty quick. It didn't work – nobody borrowed anything. And they wouldn't have paid up, anyway.'

  For all the books there were in the house – propping up the front-room walls, languishing in piles on the landing, sitting on the sill in the dining-room window under the damaging rays of the sun with the tasselled tails of other people's bookmarks hanging out – they were not a bookish family. I never saw any of them but Tillie with a book in her hands, and I'm sure she was just looking at the pictures. Barbara, to my knowledge, never opened anything but a magazine, and Tom thought of all books as school textbooks and therefore beneath his consideration. Sometimes to get up the stairs I had to squeeze past Sebastian, crouching on the bottom step, scanning that week's Beezer with great concentration. Mattie was very partial to individual letters, finding them everywhere – W in the house gable, Ls in the banister rails – but had trouble cementing them into words. Only Isolde impressed me with her knowledge of books, as with her knowledge of everything, which she seemed to gain by osmosis, extracting information with her X-ray eyes, like an alien invader who can suck your whole history out of your brain in less than a second.

  To say my tastes were catholic would be an understatement. At junior school there was one lesson a week when we could visit the school's library, a dank room next to the sickbay. Everyone fought over the Tintin books, which were just like comics only in book form and for some reason allowed in the library. To help the slow readers, I think; to encourage them that not all books were deadly books. Of course, I never got one. Never fought hard enough in the scuffle. I had to take out what was left, I got the deadly books – Children of the New Forest, The Old Curiosity Shop. They were printed on hard lavatory paper, in tiny writing, and smelled of must. I couldn't ever get beyond page one. There was nothing to interest me, and, anyway, what they really smelled of was school.

  But the books I borrowed from the Hennessys felt different. In that first armful I took there was a book called Scoop, which was sort of funny, and another called Tales from Shakespeare, where at least all the tales were fairly short. There was Emma, which I couldn't get on with at all, despite the title which attracted me, and a picture book, a book of paintings by an artist called Van Gogh. He seemed to use very thick layers of paint, and rather eggy colours, which I didn't much like. There was a horrible navy and yellow one with a field full of wavy lines, and another of an ugly man wearing a fur-trimmed cap and a bandage. Some of the paintings were only shown in black and white, which made them even worse. But the book itself, its heavy shiny paper, the layer of tissue in front of each colour plate, and its small blocks of print surrounded by acres of luxurious white space, fascinated me.

  Tillie caught me lugging this one back. 'Oh – do you like him?' she asked.

  I stopped dead in my tracks. Guilt suffused me, whatever Isolde had said about it being all right to borrow. I like to think that my mouth was not hanging open. I'd like to remember that I made some trenchant statement, but of course I didn't. I couldn't.

  But Tillie was kind, and said, 'I'll find you something else about painting, if you want.' I nodded. I might have whispered, 'Yes, please,' but only because I'd been brought up to be polite to adults.

  She looked out a huge book of Dutch paintings for me, which I took home and never wanted to bring back. There were flat white winter landscapes, and bowls of fruit and flowers and dead gamebirds which looked so lifelike, if a dead bird could be said to be lifelike. There were plump plain women corseted up to the eyeballs in voluminous plain dresses. I loved the light, the crystal clear images, the verisimilitude of these contentedly plain faces. No fat custard layers of paint here. No leaf-print splodges, but colour put on with a feather, stroked on so thin that daylight or candlelight could gleam through. Flesh-light. The gleam of expiring light in a gamebird's eye.

  Thus began my education.

  At the secondary school where I went when I was eleven we read bits of things. We read bits of Pride and Prejudice and I thought Elizabeth Bennet was shrill, and a snob. We read bits of Great Expectations: Pip seemed quite unsympathetic, a weedy, boring boy. We read a bit of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and I thought it was a ghost story. We read the whole of Scott Fitzgerald's A Diamond as Big as the Ritz and hadn't got a clue what it was about. We did a few scenes from Julius Caesar, pushing back the desks so that we could stand up and read aloud out of the abridged school version, the one with the interesting bits taken out. It was all nothing to me.

  But at home I read other things. Whole, undiscriminating. Carried home by the armload from the Hennessys', read in patches of sunlight on their staircase, read lying on Barbara's lumpy bed, posting my toes through the holes in her crocheted bedspread. I learned to read while around me Barbara carried on with whatever she was doing, to read and still make believable responses to her questions, and to filter out her running commentary. Sometimes she'd deliberately flick the book shut before I had a chance to mark the page, saying, 'Come on. Let's do something!' and then I wasn't able to resist her. But quite often she let me read. There were no hours the length of those hours. Time is much quicker these days.

  I read lots of books about sex, written by men, which was an eye-opener for a naive and virtuous girl of eleven. I got to know all about putting it in and then taking it out in time, about the way in which women had to be dismembered in order to be described – 'her eyes, her lips, her luscious breasts, her narrow waist' – about 'a clitoris the size of a boy's thumb'. What was a clitoris anyway? And how big was a boy's thumb? I looked at Brian, whose hands were large, and judged it to be about four inches in total. It was all information, but was it good information?

  Without guidance, I read anything and everything for fear of missing something – and still there were huge gaps. I came back to Eliza Bennet and her distant cousins and began to laugh at them and worry for them.
I thought Mr Elton seemed like a good catch for Emma until it proved otherwise. I read The Mill on the Floss and assumed that Maggie would come out all right because she was, after all, the heroine. I read Madcap of the Fourth Form and Tristram Shandy and A Pony for Patricia one after the other, without breaking stride. Without a pause for intellectual breath. This is how you read when no one tells you. I read like a great white shark, moving forward with my mouth open, eating porpoises and number plates and witch balls; I read like a giant whale with its krill-gleaning, ocean-cleaning grilles.

  12

  Hennessys

  I haven't really described them properly yet, the Hennessys.

  Ask about them, Lorna. Instead of harping on about my bloody family. You're barking up the wrong tree.

  I loved them all at first, indistinguishable, just the brilliant Hennessy-ness of them. So many, and so vibrant, and so loud! To think that they were tucked away just next door. All those long bored hours I'd spent kneeling up on my bed, elbows on the window sill, gazing out over the front path and the motionless sails of the miniature windmill, daydreaming. Surely a Hennessy must have strolled by at some point? Or a Hennessy vehicle chugged its way out of their tumbledown garage? Not that I could recall. Not one that had disturbed my imaginary worlds, anyway.

  And who did I come to love best? Well, darling Tillie, obviously. And then Tom. My fortune and misfortune. Ah well.

  Darling Tillie. It's the phrase that keeps sort of slipping into my head. I've never in my life called anyone darling out loud. It's a fussy kind of word, a word that fussy, over-fond mothers use to their children in the street. Or under-fond mothers use without thinking, like they use an ashtray without looking. 'Don't, darling.' But it suits her, it suits Tillie. Such a darling.

  Tillie was thin and fair. She wore faded jeans and a matted jumper which hung away from her sides like a bell. The sleeves were too short and showed her knobbly wrists. Or sometimes she wore an old checked shirt of Patrick's, with frayed cuffs and a tear at each elbow, and all the buttons hanging by a thread. I didn't think she looked like anyone's mother. She probably wasn't their real mother, I thought, at first. Not the mother of all those children. She certainly didn't look like any other mother that I knew. Barbara was three months older than me, and Isolde was a year above her. Tom was a year older again, and Eugene was so old that he didn't even live with them any more. He lived with friends of theirs in London for some reason that no one had yet told me. Tillie looked about eighteen, to my eyes. She wore no make-up and her whitish-fair hair was hardly ever combed, let alone styled. She even moved like a girl, forgetful of herself. She sat down with her knees wide apart and her bony elbows resting on them. Or she stood leaning on one hip and chewing at a hangnail. She had no interest in her appearance. In summer she wore a garish red and white striped dress, tight in the bodice and with a full skirt, like a little girl's dress. The gathers of the skirt were always squashed into flat creases, because she never ironed anything. Another outfit she had was a lemon-yellow sleeveless blouse, pierced all over with tiny eyelet holes, which made her skin look the colour of dirty washing-up water. She wore this with a skirt of shiny green material. I couldn't understand how someone who was supposed to be a painter, and was surrounded by paintings, could have so little awareness of how they looked.