‘Why were you always so reasonable at home?’ she asked peevishly. ‘Why did you never quarrel?’
‘I was just more boring and obedient than you.’
‘But you weren’t. Underneath it all you were doing your own thing. You just didn’t go on about it all the time. I make such a muddle of everything.’
‘Still talking?’ asked Holly, coming up and sitting down on the pipe next to Claire. ‘You missed lots.’
‘What sort of things?’ asked Claire. Badger poked his nose into her hair and licked her ear thoroughly, leaving it wet. ‘What did you find?’
‘I got one window thing open but I couldn’t get down, so I had a jumping competition with Badger over some pipes. They were very high, right up to my waist.’
‘Who won?’
‘Me, of course. He kept going under them instead; and then he looked so smug, silly dog!’
‘Good old Badge! Shall we go back for tea?’
They both looked at Laura, who was sitting chin in hand. Badger went and sat in front of her, thumping his tail and gazing in his intent, flattering way into her eyes, but she was deep in thought.
‘Laura?’
She roused herself and they made their way back to the fire-escape. Badger’s claws made scrabbling noises as he followed them down.
In the street, Claire turned to Holly with a touch of the old spirit. ‘Show me where you start to canter and I’ll race you.’
‘OK,’ said Holly in the casual voice that showed she was pleased. ‘We start here, actually. Want to come, Laura?’
‘Not really,’ said Laura.
Up the lamp-lit road they went, two cantering sisters, one barking dog, and one sister who was walking, her eyes on the pavement, not because she was watching out for the cracks but because she was feeling introverted.
Rosemary had watched the girls disappear into the dusk. ‘Rum butter,’ she said to herself. ‘Sprouts, gravy mix.’ She counted them off on her fingers. Tap-tap; in her high heels she crossed the room, drawing the curtains. Then she straightened some holly that had slipped sideways behind a picture frame – one of Dan’s pictures. The house was full of his paintings now. They were mostly rather wavery still-lifes in watercolour and everyone was very polite about them. ‘Stuffing.’
She gazed at the red rotating glow of the electric logs in the fireplace. Dan had protested when she had got rid of the real fire. You can’t gaze into it any more, he’d said. But Rosemary had found it so dreadfully messy with all those bits of Coalite in the carpet.
‘Ah, Holly’s stocking! I knew there was something left.’ She turned. ‘Dan darling, could you be an angel and run up to the girls’ room? See if you can find a thick pair of tights or something; I haven’t filled Holly’s stocking yet and it’s a good time now she’s out with Claire.’
Dan got up. Not being Father Christmas had made him feel inadequate once, but Rosemary had so obviously been more efficient at it that he had given up and left it to her. It had its compensations, anyway, in the shape of that second glass of whisky he could have after dinner; no longer was there the peril of tripping up on Holly’s hearthrug and spilling a sackful of teddies and tangerines all over the floor.
Upstairs in Claire and Laura’s room he scrabbled through the cupboard. Some wicked-coloured platform-soles were lying there all jumbled up with the sandals he remembered Laura wearing to school. He took the sandals out and looked at them; they were scuffed round the edges and had poignant bumps where her toes had been.
His feeling of loss returned; it was a familiar feeling and he shook it aside. After all, in a little while the downstairs door would slam and Laura herself would burst in, her cheeks reddened by the wind and her hair tousled.
But it wasn’t quite the same Laura. Her hair seemed unacquainted with the touch of a brush, and she smoked. At least, he’d known she’d smoked before because he’d found her doing it sometimes, and he’d tried not to look too disapproving or she’d just have smoked all the more. But she’d never been so aggressive and open about it. And she was restless in the house, floppy yet irritable, lethargic yet pert, so very adolescent, criticizing everything yet never lifting a finger to help.
He stood up and went over to the chest of drawers. On the top was a pile of books, ‘Evaluations of Personality’, ‘The Meaning of Pain’, ‘Stress and Duality’. All of their authors had impressive Middle-European names. He inspected them with awe. It seemed only last week that Laura had been sucking her Biro over her homework and it had been himself, Dan, who had bent over her and shown her how to do it. In his own small way he’d been able to contribute, and very satisfying it had been too.
But what on earth could he tell her about Duality and Stress? She seemed very far away now. He found some long socks and paused for a moment, gazing at the room with its twin beds, Laura’s surrounded by suitcases and scattered clothes. She hadn’t even unpacked. How transient it looked! This grumpy, far-away girl had hardly come back home at all.
‘Dan!’
He jumped.
‘Dan darling!’ She must be in one of her Bothers. He could tell by the ‘darling’.
‘Darling, what are you doing? They’ll be back in a minute.’
‘I’ve only been a moment.’
‘You’ve been three-quarters of an hour.’
seven
WHEN HER PARENTS came down to Bristol Laura, as she’d suspected, didn’t quite know where to put them. They stood around awkwardly, her mother with her matching outfit and persistent voice, her father stooping from years of work. They seemed the wrong shape for the room. Restless too, and inquisitive.
‘Darling!’ cried her mother. ‘Do tell us all about your friends. You’ve hardly said anything yet.’
‘Ssh!’ Laura glanced towards the door. ‘Most of them are OK.’ What else could she say about them?
‘Shall we meet any?’
They should meet Mike, she thought. With his public school tweediness he was very suitable, and really she would like to please them if only they’d keep their voices down. He’d mentioned that on Sundays he often went to a pub called the White Hart; they’d go there and casually bump into him.
It was a bright January day near the beginning of term. They went out to the car and she got in beside her father. Seen from the passenger seat, Bristol took on the idealized glaze of a travelogue. They drove slowly, her mother stirring in the back seat. Always there seemed too much of her; too much hat, too many rings.
‘That’s the café we go to when we can’t stand any more Hall dinners … that’s the pub I wrote to you about that has the draught cider … behind those houses you can see the labs, and that’s where I buy my books …’ Pointing out each thing she felt it was simultaneously enshrined in her parents’ memory, Monuments of a Golden Youth, Our Daughter amidst the Dreaming Spires. ‘… that’s the fountain the cretins all fall into on Rag Day … and this is the Wills’ Building.’
Above them rose the Wills’ tower, huge, impressive, contoured with grime. Her father gazed up; then he looked at her. He wore the look he wore in church; soon he might say something embarrassing.
‘My own little girl,’ he said, ‘part of all this.’
She laughed; it filled the car. ‘Don’t be corny! Anyway,’ she added, knowing this was callous, ‘it’s all a sham. Built out of money from fags.’
They got out of the car and walked in the direction of the pub. The way took them along a curved street of peeling, beautiful terraces. There was no sound but the brisk tapping of her mother’s heels. Her cherry-pink suit made the houses look shabbier. All around them was a Sunday hush.
‘Where are they all?’ asked her mother.
Laura said: ‘During the week it’s full of students.’
Her father stopped and gazed down the road. Laura knew he was imagining them in their black gowns: they walked in two’s and three’s; some laughed, some discussed with furrowed brow; some, blithely bicycling, their gowns black and billowing sails, called t
o friends as they sped by. She wished that one, suitably gowned, would appear. He’d like that. Sometimes – this moment, for instance – she’d like to please him.
Just then a front door opened. The figure in the doorway blinked, stretched its arms into the air and yawned, revealing a large area of greyish stomach. Slowly it scratched its long, stiff hair. Then it stooped, picked up a milk bottle and disappeared back into the depths of the house.
‘That’s one,’ said Laura triumphantly, like a mammal-spotter.
There was a silence.
‘They don’t all look like that,’ asked her father at last. ‘Do they?’
‘Most of ’em.’
‘But you do wear gowns to lectures, don’t you?’
She laughed crushingly. ‘Heavens no! Hardly anyone does. It looks so silly.’
She heard him give a small grunt; a hurt sound. I like to please him, but I like shocking him even more, she thought. Why?
They walked around the corner and into another lovely street, all mouldings and balconies. From an open window Laura could hear a Bob Dylan song, as familiar as the thump of her pulse. Looking down into a basement window she could see rush matting and bookshelves. Looking up she could see, hanging from an upstairs ceiling, the sort of round white paper lampshade that no doubt she would buy when she left Hall and moved into a room of her own. The sense of a thousand identities the same as hers gave her that familiar obliterated feeling. If only she could talk to her parents about feelings like this! Then they wouldn’t be walking along in rather boring silence. How different from her walk through these same streets with Claire, Claire who understood everything. Her parents, by contrast, understood hardly anything at all. Then she thought with sudden honesty: partly because I don’t tell them.
They arrived at the pub. It was humming with voices; people spilled out on to the pavement. Mike was in there somewhere; he’d make up for that vision of grey stomach. She wanted to make up for it; there was something about that disappointed grunt that made her feel guilty.
‘It looks such fun!’ said her mother. ‘All these young people.’
Inside it was packed; thick with smoke, hot with bodies. Laura searched for Mike’s face but she couldn’t see it. The three of them edged their way to the bar.
‘Morning, Guv’nor!’ her father shouted in his hearty pub voice. In pubs he changed; he also for some reason liked to call the publican Guv’nor. Why did he?
‘What?’ The man leant forward as far as his belly and the counter would allow.
‘Anything on the old menu? Bristol specialities?’ It surprised even his family sometimes; they could forget how different he became in public places. Not at all his usual, meekish self. ‘Anything in the grub line?’ Facetious too, oh dear.
The man said, as if only idiots would ask: ‘No food on Sunday.’
‘Goodness, not even a packet of crisps?’ Oh how piercing her mother’s voice was! Laura felt ashamed of being ashamed of her, and still she blushed. Next to all the grubby T-shirts her mother’s hat looked so very cherry-pink.
‘Never mind, Guv’nor,’ said her father. ‘We’ll console ourselves somehow, won’t we, ladies?’
Half of Laura wanted to disown the Guv’nors and the cherry hat and obliterate herself amongst the T-shirts. Yet half felt threaded to these two, fused with them. It made things so complicated, the fact that she did love them. The way, for instance, that now it was acknowledged that she smoked, her father would offer her a cigarette as he was offering her one now with a certain grave courtesy that she found in no one else; as if, regrettable though it was, she would honour him if she took one. And the way he cupped her elbow and steered her through the crowd. Somehow he always made her feel special. She liked his little ceremonies, for there was none of this ceremony about her friends.
‘I must say, this is a charming place,’ said her mother. ‘So Olde Worlde.’ She took her glass of sherry and sat on the window ledge, like a practised hostess, including everyone in her smile. Laura shrank yet perversely she was touched. In the face of the barman’s indifference they were both so doggedly polite, so bright in the face of setback. How loyal she could feel towards them in sudden moments; yet she would rather die than ask that spotty specimen who was blocking her mother’s view and waving his cigarette smoke in her face to move over just a fraction so that they could all be more comfortable.
Laura sipped her drink, watching her mother looking composed amidst the smoke, the sunlight slanting through the window on to her hair, her legs crossed in instinctive refinement. Her eyes, bright and interested, rested on each of the faces around her. Oh why couldn’t she, Laura, be more sorted-out and just accept her fondly, without being so damned complicated about it?
She took a sip of cider, half of her tugging one way, half the other. Holly, she suddenly realized, was like this, too. Boarding-school had made two people of Holly; there was a Cliffdean one and a Harrow one. On the last day of the Christmas holidays the Harrow Holly had drained away; visibly it had drained away – Laura had watched, fascinated. By the time Holly had changed into her starchy school uniform, Sketchley labels still safety-pinned to the hem, the Harrow Holly had gone, leaving her face polite and absent. She had remained thus in limbo throughout the car journey across London and into Victoria Station. And there on the platform the absent face became inhabited again by a new Holly, the Cliffdean one. Her parents hugged her but her eyes had sought those of her friends, giggly friends wearing unbecoming school hats. And, unlocked by the sight of these faces, curious new words had appeared on Holly’s lips, words like ‘cripes’ and ‘nutcase’. Laura smiled. She wasn’t alone in this, then.
‘Anyone you know here, darling?’ called her mother.
‘There’s somebody I’d like you to meet,’ she answered. ‘Can’t see him, though.’
Her mother scanned the crowd. ‘Tall? Short? What’s he like, darling?’
Before Laura could reply her father said: ‘There’s somebody over there, Laura. He’s looking at you.’
‘Is it him?’ asked her mother. Laura craned over the heads.
And saw him. Sweat broke out all over her body. It was John.
Her mother smiled. ‘Yes, he’s looking very curious.’ Laura saw with horror that her mother was giving him an encouraging smile. Oh, it was dreadful. How could she ever introduce them? It was unthinkable. The very idea made the sweat turn cold. The combination of him and her parents was too grotesque to contemplate. The innocent questions!
Perhaps he’d forgotten who she was; after all, she hadn’t exchanged a word with him since that awful episode, though the Bosch book had been wordlessly returned to her pigeonhole. But no – he was easing his way towards them.
‘Got your shoes on today?’ he asked, half smiling.
Laura stared at him, mind busy. What was it he’d said about silly little girls running about barefoot?
John’s smile lingered. His chin was still stubbly; at any other moment she would have wondered how he managed to keep it like that, neither bearded nor shaved. Then thank goodness he left.
Her parents looked surprised. ‘What was that about, then?’ asked her father.
‘Oh …’ Her mind raced. Then she had a brainwave. ‘Oh, we, er, had a sort of barefoot race across the Downs once.’
Her parents laughed, pleased. Relief spread over all three of them.
‘What fun you have!’ said her mother. Her father smiled. The grey stomach had been forgotten, at last.
And why not, thought Laura. Far better like this.
Though they hadn’t seen Mike, there was less reason for his presence now so Laura didn’t make them wait for his arrival. Instead they wandered round Clifton, had some lunch and then returned to Hall, a slumbering Sunday-afternoon place. Passing the dining-room, Laura remembered her homesickness that first night. Never would she confess such a thing to her parents! Anyway, by now it was cured. Time had cured it, sheer familiarity had made it nothing more nor less than tame.
&nbs
p; ‘Look, darling,’ said her mother. ‘Supper’s laid.’
Branston Pickle and Salad Cream jars stood bunched in the exact centre of each table. Sunday nights meant cold meat and lettuce. ‘Isn’t it nice, to have everything done for you!’
‘No, it isn’t. I’m grown up now.’
‘Darling, don’t be silly.’
Laura looked at the jars, smug in their Sunday night routine. She knew the place so well, the people, the food. Nothing held tremor or excitement.
‘It’s such a lovely place,’ said her mother.
Yes, and her saying that made it so boring.
eight
CLAIRE ENJOYED GIVING exams simply because, after a lifetime of taking them, it was a pleasure to sit back and watch other people doing the work. Relaxed in her chair, she gazed across at the classroom with its twenty bent heads and its twenty hands that scribbled, hesitated, then scribbled again.
It was February and mock C.S.E. time. These rows of fifteen-year-olds she knew well; each had a name, each had a face, she’d taught them for many months now, but just for three hours all were silenced into twenty busy brains and twenty busy hands. There remained small signs of individuality – Joyce’s cheerful butterfly hairslide, Dave’s alarming two-tone boots with their stacked heels, Elaine’s chain bracelet that tinkled as she wrote and became silent as she thought – but so oblivious were their owners that such things were no more than emblems; poignant badges of personalities that, at twelve noon sharp, would return to them.
You Must Be Sisters Page 6
