Then, we did not really question where she was. We ate breakfast in a daze. I was angry with Jenny. She was the one who had insisted on telling. I knew it was better to pretend it hadn’t happened. I knew no good would come of telling.
‘I told you, Jenny,’ I accused her, coldly.
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did so!’
‘Didn’t.’
‘Did.’
‘Didn’t.’
‘Did.’
‘Did.’
‘Didn’t.’
‘Ha, see!’ She always had the last word.
‘Anyway, she’ll come back and say she’s sorry, you just wait.’
Was she trying to convince me or herself?
Mrs Hoyes bustled in from next door, telling us not to worry, that everything would be fine. Jenny and I stared at each other, feeling naked. Was this what ‘telling’ meant. Would everyone know at school? Would Mr Jackson know at the post office? Of course, Mother had concocted some quite different story for our neighbour about Frank having a stroke, but in her careless and probably not very lucid haste, she had failed to tell us this. We learnt in that moment, under the magnifying glass of Mrs Hoyes’ sympathy, the feeling of guilt that the victim suffers, the feeling that you are somehow sullied –and implicated – in what has been done to you by another human being.
Mother finally returned, and there was something hard in her face. There were no embraces, no tears, no soothing pats of reassurance and comfort. She sat us down and seemed to look through us.
‘Now listen very carefully, girls. I know things have been difficult for you. I know I haven’t been a very good mother to you in lots of ways. I know you miss Nana. Pippa, sweetheart, try not to cry. We have to speak about this.’
I couldn’t help the tears. I could feel myself shaking. I willed her to hold me, but it was Jenny who took my hand. She looked straight ahead and sat totally still, and it struck me through my tears that she looked a little like Mother. We had always assumed, because Mother had told us so, that it was our mysterious father we both resembled. I looked up and saw the tears in Mother’s own eyes.
‘You have never had a father around and I know that I’ve always said your father was evil. That’s because he did a very bad thing. He walked out on me the day he discovered I was pregnant. We had been married for less than a year, but he was a child – a sick, rich, spoilt child who ran back to Greece the moment the word marriage turned into something real.’ She paused and sucked on her cigarette. ‘But sweethearts, not all men are bad. I know it can’t have been easy for you with Frank. You have no concept of what a father figure is and you see us together and you miss Nana and you feel threatened. You feel isolated.’
Perhaps Mother had been at one of her dramatherapy sessions. I squirmed with embarrassment. I looked at Jenny, but I couldn’t penetrate her thoughts. I kicked her under the kitchen table, but she simply squeezed my hand and stared. What made her so ‘adult’ all of a sudden? I withdrew my hand. Did we have to grow up now and start going to dramatherapy like Mother? Were we going to have to ‘confront our demons’? When I was little I used to imagine a witch lived under my bed and that witch had a cauldron in which she cooked a broth of snakes and spiders and unsuspecting children’s feet. I was always nervous about getting up and putting my legs on the floor at night. Now I imagined ‘confronting my demons’ and looking into the witch’s broth to see Frank’s eyes swimming at the surface.
I realised that Mother was still speaking. I had drifted off, as I often did at school, as I often did in the company of adults.
‘But what you did was a very bad thing, a very bad thing indeed.’
What thing? What was she talking about? I looked at the wall of Jenny’s face.
‘Maybe you didn’t do this on purpose. Maybe you’re too young to know the damage you’ve done. Maybe you had a nightmare or something and got confused. I don’t know where you learnt about these things. Yes, they do happen, but not here, not in our house, sweethearts. I know you were angry with me for going away. I know you resent Frank for coming into our lives. Sometimes I think you blame him for Nana leaving, but it was nothing to do with Frank. If you don’t know that now you will realise it one day.’
What was she talking about?
‘To be honest, I don’t know whether you just imagined this or whether you made it up, but I do know one thing: it didn’t happen. We will never speak about it again. It didn’t happen.’
It didn’t happen. You see, that’s what you get for telling. It didn’t happen.
Chapter 36
Of all the institutions mankind has created, two of the most dangerous are prisons and single-sex boarding schools. Both serve a similar purpose: one saves society from having to deal with the criminals it has produced; the other saves parents from having to deal with the children they have produced. One turns delinquents into criminals; the other turns emotionally deprived children into emotionally depraved adults. Well, that was Jenny’s take on it anyway.
Mother’s solution, the solution that would enable her to live the lie, was to send us to boarding school. Frank was supportive; he paid the fees. Was this guilt? Or just a price worth paying? I was wrong to think that he didn’t love Mother. He must have loved her to stay with her after what he did. Unless he was so sick that the fact she was our mother gave him a thrill.
Boarding school concealed everything that was abnormal in our life and heightened it by turns. Term time established us as equals among peers, removed alike from parents and the context of family, all subject to the same rules and routines. But half-terms and visiting days stranded us, along with the occasional overseas student from Nigeria, in the care of a skeleton staff, while the majority returned to their homes or enjoyed lavish days out with smiling mothers and fathers and younger brothers and sisters. Holiday breaks meant enforced reunions with Mother and Frank, when we carefully avoided one-to-one or two- to-one contact with Frank. And something – perhaps subconscious – stopped Mother from leaving us in the house alone with him.
But boarding school did something else to make us feel abnormal. It tried to separate us. It put us into different classes, different dormitories, different activity groups. My reaction was physical: I could not eat. Jenny’s was wilful: she would not eat. The result was that, as usual, we were treated the same way and punished for being difficult. We were given detentions and lines, we lost weight, we found ways and places to meet like lovers, we shunned authority and those who tried to be friendly, and we wrote long letters to Nana which were never sent.
I was described in school reports as sullen, Jenny as defiant. The other kids called us the twin twiggies, because we were so thin. There were phone calls from the headmistress to Mother, an impassioned visit by Mother pleading with us to behave, visits by a child psychologist. We resorted to fantasy, invented personas for our father and memories that never happened. He would arrive one day, our knight in shining armour, and whisk us away to a land where unicorns roamed the streets.
We never spoke about ‘the thing’. One afternoon, alone in a patch of bracken and woodland that lay within the school grounds, we invented a ritual to cleanse ourselves. We wrote Frank’s name on a piece of paper, folded it inside an empty matchbox and ceremoniously burned the memory, agreeing then that we would never tell anyone again. The burning part was Jenny’s idea, but I made her agree to the not telling any more.
Then, two weeks after our eleventh birthday we, or rather I, met Mrs Forster. It was part of a community awareness initiative to send pupils out on home visits to a number of carefully selected old ladies, living locally and dependent on a range of home-help services to fend off the moment they would need to move into the institutionalised solitude of an old people’s home. It was decided that each term one class would take part in the scheme, which meant that everyone in that class was allocated a person whom they would visit once a week for an hour instead of their homework session. My class was the first.
&nbs
p; Mrs Forster was small and wiry and the first time I met her I thought she might break while she made me tea. She had bad arthritis and used a weird kind of pulley system to get upstairs. Her face made me want to iron it. I sat in front of her, glum and silent and embarrassed.
‘Now what does a bright young thing of your age want to be doing with an old thing like me?’ she laughed as she poured tea unsteadily into china cups, which looked like part of a doll’s set. ‘The things people think of nowadays! Why, when I was your age I would be running round outside, not forced to go and have tea with old ladies.’
‘You’ve got a very nice house,’ I volunteered, in an attempt to stop her saying what I was thinking.
‘Do you think so? Well now, why don’t you have a look round and tell me what you like about it.’
I shuffled off and wandered from room to room, taking in, with real curiosity, the photos that lined whole shelves and mantelpieces.
‘So what do you think?’ she asked the moment I had returned.
‘I think you’ve got a lot of photos,’ I said, and she smiled.
Over the coming weeks, I learnt to respect the lines in her face, some of them the signs of too much Indian sunshine in her youth, and I learnt that wrinkles tell a story. I learnt to see in the ridges around her mouth and the sharp crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes the havoc that laughter had wreaked in her lifetime. Each week she told me more about her life, more about the photos that crowded her house and her mind, and I found myself truly relaxing in adult company for the first time since Nana.
And, without knowing why, I didn’t tell her that I had a sister. I suppose, looking back, that her home was a haven from everything else in my life, everything that made me ‘me’ – and Jenny was part of that. For the first time, something in me yearned for a space of my own.
‘Let me go in your place next time.’ Jenny interrupted my thoughts one morning break.
‘It wouldn’t work. She would know it was you.’
‘But you haven’t told her about me. How would she know you had a sister?’
I was sure that I hadn’t mentioned this to Jenny, yet there were no secrets between us. I resisted, but she was forceful and, feeling obscurely guilty, I finally gave in.
‘Don’t talk too much, just sit and listen,’ I coached Jenny, in preparation for the visit. ‘Ask her about the photo on the right of the bookshelf. We haven’t done that one yet.’
And I tied my hair up like Jenny usually did and examined myself in the mirror, wondering nervously if I would get away with replacing Jenny in her homework session, while she had tea with Mrs Forster.
No one noticed that it was me at the homework session and, when I went to Mrs Forster the following week, she said nothing to indicate that she had noticed anything strange.
‘Mrs Forster, do you have good eyesight?’ I asked her over tea.
‘Why, I didn’t need these until I was seventy-five!’ she chirped, removing her glasses and looking straight at me.
I glanced down, swallowing an unknown sense of disappointment.
The next visit to Mrs Forster was supposed to be the last, and I felt physically heavy. She was as cheerful as ever and I resented her for it.
‘Oh, by the way, Pippa, I hope you don’t mind, but I had a word with your headmistress, Mrs Hawkins, and she has agreed to let you keep coming for tea if you want to.’
‘Really?’ I laughed. I sounded like Jenny.
‘Oh, and one more thing, young lady, I think you have a little confession to make, don’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’ I floundered, embarrassed, realising she had known all along that it wasn’t me the day Jenny had come in my place.
‘That was a mean trick to play on an old lady!’
‘Oh Mrs Forster, I didn’t mean . . .’
But her eyes were twinkling and my heart was racing with joy.
Chapter 37
As we got older, Jenny’s tangles with authority gathered momentum. We had changed schools, moving not more than a few miles to a private girls’ school as mediocre as the prep school we left behind us. When Jenny misbehaved I was no longer automatically drawn in by association and, very slowly, we created different allegiances at school and people stopped referring to us constantly as ‘the twins’. Yet our friendships with other people continued to be superficial. Jenny was fickle, enjoying an audience and easily getting bored, while I discovered an interest in reading and study, which earned me a reputation as ‘the boring one’. And Frank was right. Jenny seized the first opportunity she could to dye her hair a different colour, although we never fought over the same boyfriend.
Having smoked her first cigarette at the age of thirteen behind the sports hall in front of an admiring audience, at fourteen Jenny dyed her hair pink and converted this into a political statement in the face of resistance by the headmistress. She was antagonistic, asserting her refusal to conform through the addition of pink accessories to her school uniform: a scarf, a badge, a pair of tights.
She challenged the English teacher’s assertion that no one was ‘obliged’ to read aloud from Shakespeare by persuading every single one of the class to decline when their turn came round. She refused to sing at assemblies on the grounds that ‘God couldn’t exist, else he wouldn’t allow children to be raped.’
But there was a problem. She didn’t have a boyfriend, and to be truly rebellious at that age you needed a boyfriend – and you needed to do things with him (things which we had known about since the age of eight and experienced at the age of ten).
Boys were a different species. We didn’t have brothers to go home to, brothers who brought friends back and played hide and seek and sardines in the dark. Boys were supposed to be tall and handsome and good at kissing. We had no idea how to actually talk to them.
The difference between Jenny and me was that I simply wasn’t interested, while Jenny was greedy for experience.
‘I am going to lose my virginity before the summer,’ she told me in January, just like that.
‘But you haven’t even got a boyfriend and if you had one, you might not want to sleep with him,’ I pleaded.
‘You know what your problem is? You’ve got too many hang-ups.’
‘I’ve got too many hang-ups! Who’s got the obsession with losing her virginity?’
‘Oh fuck off, Pippa. No one’s asking you to drop your prissy little knickers.’
‘So who exactly is going to be the lucky man?’ I jeered.
‘Samantha’s brother.’
‘You mean George? But he must be about four years older than us, and anyway you don’t even like Samantha. How are you going to get George interested in you?’
George was Samantha’s main source of popularity. He was the stuff of girly fantasies about chancing to pass beneath the mistletoe . . . and he sometimes came to collect Samantha at weekends.
‘You watch me.’
Where did her confidence come from? It took me years to realise it was a form of anger.
Jenny found out as much as she could about George from Samantha. She learnt that he had recently split up with his girlfriend, had passed his driving test and had been given a car by his parents, so she simply sent him a Valentine’s card. She showed it to me in anticipated triumph. ‘I would love a ride in your car. You won’t regret it.’ She included details of how to contact her and it worked. She had sex with him on their third outing, and if he boasted to his mates that he had slept with a virgin from the local girls’ school, he had no idea that she had planned it all.
Chapter 38
While Jenny experimented with make-up and the male psyche, I swotted. I got nine GCSEs to Jenny’s six and I spent hours deliberating over my choice of A-levels, while Jenny simply opted for what she thought would give her an easy ride. Both of us chose Spanish, perhaps in unspoken loyalty to the memory of Nana (we learnt that she had died of a stroke in a rare letter from Mother), but I agonised for days over the other two, aware, unlike most of my peers and
certainly my sister, that I was shaping the options for my degree, which would shape the rest of my life. My love of reading competed with the allure of subjects like zoology or social anthropology. In the end, I opted for Spanish, French and English literature. Ironically, Jenny’s choice was not very different from mine. She chose Spanish, English literature and drama.
Jenny protected me from the demands of peer pressure and social convention. Through her I had just enough contact with boys and friends at school to ensure that words like ‘weird’ or ‘frigid’ were held at bay. Some of her vivacity rubbed off on me and distracted attention from my own awkwardness. Sometimes I resented her, felt jealous of friendships that excluded me. Yet mostly I was grateful to have her as a buffer between me and direct experience. While she buried childhood abuse under as many new pieces of male anatomy as possible, I discovered my own sexual urges slowly, on paper, as I ploughed through Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence.
‘You can’t go on intellectualising sex, Pips. You’ll have to join the real world one day, you know.’ Jenny was lying on her back, chewing a piece of grass and looking up at the hazy English summer sky. She looked peaceful – deceptively peaceful.
‘But I want it to mean something. I want it to be part of a relationship with a future, and I’m not ready for that, so I’m not ready for the sex part either.’
‘Pips, do you disapprove of me?’ It was supposed to be a throwaway question but it was too self-consciously so.
‘Jens, you’re a different person. What you do is what you do and I respect your choices.’
‘But you disapprove. You think I’m a slut.’ She was crying now, but I couldn’t lie to her, couldn’t hide the fact that I never understood – until years later – how she could give herself so carelessly.
‘Don’t you think I feel disgusted at myself? Don’t you think I envy you and wish I was like you? But I have to live and I don’t want to live in a cage. I’m not like you. I can’t live through books. I need real life.’
Twin Truths Page 9
