You Must Be Sisters

by Deborah Moggach

  Another reason for her enjoyment was a letter from Laura. There had been no time to read it at breakfast, and no space on the bus (for Laura had the car this term), but now, with those bent heads in front of her, she had two whole hours.

  Wait for it. Tomorrow I move out of Hall! Before you collapse with shock I’ll tell you all. You know how I’ve been getting fed up with all its petty rules and things?

  Claire, amazed, read on. Apparently Laura knew a girl who was fed up with her digs and wanted to move into a Hall. So Laura had gone out and found an advertisement in a newsagent’s window – a bedsit. This other girl was going to pay the remainder of the Hall fees; a straight swop.

  Dead simple. It’ll be really easy moving, too, what with the car. Address: 18 Jacob’s Crescent, Bristol. And it’s furnished so I needn’t buy any stuff. Longing for you to see it! It’s a gorgeous room with its own little bathroom and an incredible view over the city. Hardly time to think of anything else, I’m so excited.

  Claire put the letter down and gazed at the rows of bent heads. What on earth were her parents going to say to all this? She, Claire, would have to explain it to them. They’d think Laura had gone absolutely mad.

  And they wouldn’t be one hundred per cent wrong. Fancy Laura moving out of that satisfying little room! With only a term and a half to go, why didn’t she stay? She was so very impulsive, that was her trouble. Suggestible too. If someone she admired like that rather feeble specimen in the overcoat – Andy, was it? – said something, then she’d go right ahead and do it. He was the one who had brought up the subject of Hall in the first place.

  Somewhere where I can be myself, Laura had said that day. It hadn’t sounded like her voice at all. Be myself; perhaps that was the trouble. Perhaps, when one had always been considered interesting and rebellious, to be suddenly plonked down amongst thousands of other interesting and rebellious people made one feel watered-down. Just one of a mass instead of one in particular; everyone the same, the same denim skirt, the same row of Penguin Classics on their shelves. So she goes and does something completely different. Mad.

  ‘Of course,’ boomed the lecturer’s voice, ‘the deprived child and the child of so-called low ability is often said, by and large, to have been given insufficient love by its mother. Mothers who handle their babies from an early age generate a security, through physical contact, with their offspring. A fulfilled and healthily-reciprocated physical relationship prepares the child, we are told, for a balanced and neurosis-free relationship with the opposite sex. But!’ He paused, stared at them, then thundered, ‘It this true? Can we take this so absolutely for granted? What, exactly, are the criteria involved?’

  Laura’s baby, pencilled on her sheet of paper under the lecture heading, had started to spawn its own varied offspring down the page. First, other babies, more or less human – some just blobs, other more successful ones shaded in. Once she tried to draw the physically-caring parents but couldn’t get those enfolding hands right; she could never do hands, they were inclined to end up as sort of flippers.

  But babies were too fat and similar to draw endlessly. Soon the page filled up with horses, which she was particularly good at – tiny horses garlanded round the babies, bigger horses for whose legs she couldn’t find space at the bottom of the page, horses that on elaboration became unicorns and zebras. The lecture heading What is Maladjustment? at the top of the page became encircled by a horse’s body and, when the horse turned out to be black, was finally engulfed.

  ‘You,’ boomed the voice, ‘as prospective practitioners in the field, must learn to distinguish the healthily-communicative subject, unable to repress his instincts for social interaction, from the genuinely disturbed subject who …’

  Laura’s page was full up now, but it was not worth starting another as the clock showed five to four. The lecturer’s final burst of rhetoric was rising to a climax. Wastepaper basket, she thought. Must buy a wastepaper basket. She wrote it down on the list that occupied the right-hand corner of her page … dustpan and brush, paint things, tea, cockroach powder … She gazed over the row of heads towards the window with its square of very bright blue sky.

  The clock hands, with that institutional jerk, moved to four. Synchronized perfectly, the lecturer stopped, gathered his papers and with a flourish disappeared down some steps.

  Outside in the street Laura hesitated. Across the road stood the library. What she really, what she honestly ought to do was to get out those two books he’d mentioned before she’d stopped listening and have a quick glance through them.

  Oh, but the sun shone and her room waited! Round on her heel she turned and up the hill she strode, up towards Jacob’s Crescent.

  Near the shops she met Mike.

  She said: ‘I’m going to make my bedsit so beautiful.’

  ‘Good. It’s grotty enough now.’

  ‘Mike! It’s lovely. I’m going to paint it yellow.’

  It had been four days since she’d moved in; he’d helped her. There was a silence. Was he going to offer to wield a brush?

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’d come along and slosh some on with you, but I’m rather busy with something we’re doing at Hall.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A sort of poetry recital with music.’

  ‘Sounds fun.’ Sounds corny, she thought. Much nicer to paint my room. Silly old Hall.

  Still, she did feel a pang as he went away.

  Down the hill she walked with her shopping, down towards Jacob’s Crescent. It was one of the humbler crescents that curved round the hill, at the top of which stood grandest Clifton with its tall balconied houses, at the bottom of which stood the less grand Clifton with its river, warehouses and shabby pubs.

  The front doors of Jacob’s Crescent led straight out on to the street; many of its windows were net-curtained. Some of the net curtains, as she walked past them, twitched. She wasn’t unnerved – no, of course not. It was fascinatingly real and working-class and unlike anything she’d ever known before. This was Life.

  Number 18 was shamefully run-down. Its owner lived elsewhere and had done nothing to it. The ground floor was empty, with boards across the windows. Upstairs on the first floor the front room was also empty; it was the back room, with its landing bathroom, that Laura inhabited. Above her on the second floor lived a family whose sounds were becoming familiar but whose faces were as yet unknown.

  She put her shopping on the floor and went to the window. The city was spread before her, its spires, its docks, its glittering office buildings and, faint on the horizon, its suburbs. Laura smiled to herself; she’d come a long way from suburbia now, hadn’t she!

  Down below she could see the strips of gardens that belonged to her neighbours. Number 18’s garden was full of junk tangled up amongst thistles. Obviously upstairs never used it; she would, though. She’d sort it out somehow; clear it a bit.

  She left the window and wandered round the room. How well she remembered those first few weeks at Hall and her feelings of freedom in her little room there. But this was a thousand times better. No more communal life, no more sheep-like shuffling from room to dining-hall, dining-hall to bar. Here she could really do what she wanted. No warden either.

  It must have been a gracious room once, with its slender window and its moulded plasterwork around the ceiling. Since then, she had to admit, it had rather declined. Its flowery wallpaper had faded but for scattered unfaded rectangles where past pictures had been. There was a large bed, whose stained mattress she had tried to forget once she had covered it with her blankets, and a soggy armchair, a bald patch on it where unknown heads had rested. The cooker in the recess was encrusted from many hundreds of unknown meals.

  She was still finding relics of the last tenant – a half-empty tube of toothpaste righteously squeezed from the bottom, a mouldy copy of Micky Spillane and (poignant, this, and slightly perplexing) one child’s shoe beneath the mattress. All these things made her feel curiously like tiptoeing.

&nbs
p; And today, cleaning out the sink drawer, she discovered a faded printed postcard saying, in red letters, We need YOU! Urgently. Your blood could save a life. Just write your address on the back, it told her, and pop it into the post; we will then make an appointment for you at the Bristol Blood Donor Centre. And why not? thought Laura, filling it in. To go and do something she’d never done before seemed apt.

  Outside the sky had clouded over and it had started to rain. Laura shivered. It was cold in the room when the sun went in. The rain rattled against the window. Beyond the gardens her view was disappearing; Bristol was reduced to a smudge.

  Someone upstairs coughed. How very silent it was in her room. She felt trapped in a spell of silence and was suddenly afraid to break it by moving. She didn’t want to take a step and hear the boards creak; for some reason they’d creak too loudly and that would – well, not frighten her of course, just make her jump.

  A gust of rain rattled against the window pane; she shook herself. She was being silly. There was much to be done. Before she started painting she ought to get rid of some of the more useless furniture, like that ugly little table with the cigarette burns round the edge and the small cupboard underneath. She could dump it in the passage downstairs to keep the prams and dismembered bits of iron company.

  She lifted it up but it was heavy. There must be something inside the cupboard, weighing it down. She pulled at the door which had warped shut. The silly little knob came off in her hand; she abandoned that and pulled with her fingernails at the edge of the door.

  Straining and scrabbling, she wrenched it open.

  Inside was a potty. Full.

  ‘Ugh!’ The hiss of her breath, the gasp, hung suspended in the silence.

  Laura sat down heavily on the bed. Upstairs they’d switched on the telly; she heard laughter and then applause. For some reason she suddenly felt – well, not lonely of course, but a little solitary. More solitary, in fact, than she remembered feeling for a very long time.

  She looked hopelessly at her half-unpacked suitcase, at the hideous carpet, at the empty fireplace which, if she didn’t want to freeze for the fourth night running, she ought to fill with some sort of fuel. She kept her eyes averted from the potty; there was a dusty film on the top – she’d seen it. How was she going to bear to empty it?

  It was the potty that made her feel lonely. No, solitary. Suddenly the room seemed a bit more than she could manage. Not dismal, not really; just more complicated than she’d bargained for. Had she realized just what she was facing? It had been so pleasant to sit in her Hall room with the candles lit and feel all individual. A comfortable solitude, with dinner waiting. Now she was here, and properly alone for the first time in her life.

  Enough of this! She shook her head at herself; perhaps soon she’d start actually talking to herself like a mad old woman. She got up and started laying newspapers on the carpet, prior to painting. She wished now that she’d dropped a few more hints to Mike about coming around and visiting; he’d take her off to the pub and it would be so jolly. But then he was busy with his poetry thing at Hall.

  If she were honest about it, that poetry thing did sound rather fun.

  nine

  WHAT A VERY flushed face! thought Claire, inspecting herself in the mirror. Funny how a mere four hours’ sleep always makes you look so radiant in the morning; have a blameless eight hours of it and you look all puffy and dissolute.

  She inspected herself with interest. She rubbed some eyeshadow on to her lids; she put the box down and continued the inspection. Not for ages had she looked at herself so thoroughly; she wasn’t in the habit of it. Nor was she in the habit of putting on eyeshadow, come to think of it.

  Yes, she did look quite becomingly pink and she didn’t feel at all hungover. Over the chair lay her dress, blue and crumpled. It looked far more weary than she felt. She gazed at it fondly. When she’d put it on last night she hadn’t even met him. Already, after such a short sleep, her party clothes had become filled with memories. He’d encircled that dress with his arms, after all. It had a history now.

  Can he possibly like me in daylight too? she wondered, rubbing foundation cream into her skin. On the other hand, will I like him? Perhaps he’ll be all ashen and grumpy. Perhaps he doesn’t like getting up at eight on a Sunday morning to take a girl he only met the night before down to Sussex. Perhaps – she stared back at her face, half powdered and half shiny – heavens, perhaps he won’t come at all!

  But that didn’t bear thinking about. Carefully, so she didn’t wake Yvonne, she eased her way out of the bedroom.

  In the kitchen the picnic things waited. She’d prepared them before the party last night, of course, so there was only enough for herself and Holly. Now that Geoff – marvellous, virile name – now that Geoff was coming she’d better make some more.

  As she stood looking at the food, looking at it through his eyes, she blushed. What would he think of it? None of the usual stuff was there; she and Holly never bothered about boring things like sandwiches. After all, when you were at boarding school there were certain things you craved; when you had a chance, then, you ought to devote all your energies to consuming as many of them as possible. It was a philosophy of which she, Claire, had become an expert interpreter and this Sunday she’d surpassed even herself. Home-made cake, two cream slices, jelly in a plastic container and – pièce de résistance – Gaz canister, bottle of oil, frying-pan and a tin of uncooked doughnuts. There seemed something very fascinating about those doughnuts. Claire actually forgot Geoff as she pictured Holly’s face when confronted by them.

  Still, grown men as debonair as Geoff seemed to be could hardly appreciate such things with Holly’s fervour, so Claire made some regulation sandwiches to supplement this exotica. Buttering the bread, she could think calmly about the night before. About the dark noisy room and Geoff’s sudden movement when she’d said she really ought to go home now as it was quarter to three. About the way he’d looked at her, a surprisingly intense look, and the way he’d kissed her right then and, almost better still, hugged her afterwards, both of them jammed against the kitchen door with people struggling past.

  And about how, back in the flat, she’d lain awake for hours, caring little for once that Yvonne was snoring again, while across the ceiling and down the wall had swung, shivering squares, the headlights from passing cars. Such an ordinary party it had seemed before she met him.

  A car stopped. She heard it in the street. One last throaty roar, then silence. Eight o’clock already; she felt quite trembly – she, Claire, usually so calm. Swiftly she threw everything into a carrier bag and ran into the hall.

  Already he was at the front door; she could see the smudge of his shape on the other side of the frosted glass. What sort of face could she arrange?

  She opened the door and thank goodness he was smiling.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m all ready. I didn’t really think you’d come.’

  ‘Why not? I’m looking forward to it.’ He opened the car door for her.

  Claire wondered if he remembered just what they were going to do. ‘I’m only visiting my little sister at school, you know. It’ll probably be agonizingly boring for you. I feel guilty about asking you to come at all.’

  How terribly dowdy the expedition must sound! Her parents’ Rover, borrowed for the occasion, stood on the other side of the road. Last night he hadn’t asked if she had a car already, and she’d never thought of telling him. Too late now, thank goodness.

  ‘I’ll be happy to go,’ he said. ‘Do me good to get out of London for a while.’

  ‘What a beautiful car!’ She eased herself into the bucket seat and gazed along its red bonnet.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said, squeezing himself in beside her. ‘Rather snappy, too.’

  At this time of day the streets were empty. Up the hill they roared and across Clapham Common. Claire couldn’t think what to talk about and yet felt, especially when they stopped at traffic lights and expectancy filled the c
ar, that she ought to say something. Last night they had talked non-stop, she was sure; all about the party and who else they knew there, and what a lot they all, including themselves, seemed to be drinking, and about how once he’d had an old Austin something that he’d put a lot of work into. Not thrilling, perhaps, but it had seemed so at the time. Now, in daylight (and greyish daylight too, unfortunately) she felt that a different kind of talk was needed; more of the cementing kind, like had he any brothers and sisters and where did he live. Things like that. Somehow it was difficult to start on that kind.

  Down Streatham High Street they roared, past shuttered Bingo Halls and shadowy Tescos. ‘By the way,’ asked Claire, ‘do you know where we’re going?’

  ‘Eastbourne, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but where in Eastbourne?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Cliffdean School.’

  ‘Right. Famous, isn’t it? You’ll have to direct me, though, when we get there.’

  Claire let out her breath in relief. One tiny hurdle over. He didn’t disapprove of Cliffdean, then, like most people. Laura and Laura’s friends, in particular, disapproved, what with it being so grand and expensive.

  It became silent again in the car. The engine, though loud, was not quite loud enough to drown a conversation if they cared to have one, but what could she say to this handsome and impassive stranger? It had been so easy last night, what with all that music and everything. But today, with this grey morning threatening rain and a street lined with discount stores, what on earth could she say to this profile sitting beside her and driving so capably? Wearing driving gloves, too; brand new pigskin, they rebuffed her. Was it the same man who had embraced her so suddenly and, now she thought of it, so boozily? The same man who had clattered down the stairs after her, calling out for her address?