—You’ve chosen all the easy ones, you clever thing! My school forced me to do double maths, it was ghastly.
—Are you sure you’re not hungry? Neil said to Hilary as they hurried past a busy chip shop with a queue. —Only if we don’t stop we’re in time for the pub. You could have some crisps there.
Hilary gazed into the bright steamy window, assaulted by the smell of the chips, weak with longing. —Quite sure, she said. She had never been into a pub in her life. There was a place in Haverhill where some of the girls went from school, but she and Sheila had always despised the silly self-importance of teenage transgression. It was impossible to imagine ever wanting to enter the ugly square red-brick pub in the village, where the farm labourers drank, and the men from the estate who worked in the meat-packing factory. Neil’s pub was a tiny cosy den, fumy light glinting off the rows of glasses and bottles. The stale breath of it made Hilary’s head swim; they squeezed into red plush seats around a table. Neil didn’t ask her what she wanted, but brought her a small mug of brown beer and a packet of crisps and one of peanuts. She didn’t like the taste of the beer but because the food was so salty she drank it in thirsty mouthfuls, and then was seized by a sensation as if she floated up to hang some little way above her present situation, graciously indifferent, so that her first experience of drunkenness was a blessed one.
When the pub closed they came back to the house and sat around a table in the basement kitchen by candlelight: the kitchen walls were painted crudely with huge mushrooms and blades of grass and giant insects, making Hilary feel as if she was a miniature human at the deep bottom of a forest. She drank the weak tea they put in front of her. The others talked about work and exams. Becky was doing biological sciences, Gus was doing history, Julian and Neil seemed to be doing English. Hilary couldn’t believe that they sounded just like girls at school, scurrying in the rat-run of learning and testing, trying to outdo one another in protestations of how little work they’d done. Not once did any of them actually speak seriously about their subjects. Hilary felt so deeply disappointed in university life that on the spot she made up her mind to dedicate herself to something different and nobler, although she wasn’t clear what. Neil and Julian were concentrating upon sticking a brown lump of something on a pin and roasting it with a match. From her indifferent distance she supposed this must be drugs, but she wasn’t frightened of that now.
—Don’t tell your daddy the vicar what you’ve seen, said Neil.
She was confused – did the others know what had happened after all? – until she realised that he meant the brown lump.
—Are you two really from a vicarage? asked Becky. —It’s like something out of a book.
—We can’t offer the respectability that Hilary’s used to, Neil said. —She’ll have to slum it here for a few days.
Hilary could see that Neil was the centre of all the others’ attention. At least he had not joined in when the others were fluttering and fussing about their work; he had smiled to himself, licking the edges of little pieces of white paper and sticking them together as if none of it bothered him. He had an air as if he saw through the sham of it all, as if he came from a place where the university didn’t count for much: she could see how this had power over the others. He didn’t say much but when he spoke it was with a deliberate debunking roughness that made the others abject, ashamed even of the feel in their mouths of their own nice eager voices.
Becky told Neil flirtatiously that he would have to be on his best behaviour, while Hilary was staying. —No swearing, she said. —’Cause I can see she’s a nice girl.
—Fuck, he said. —I hadn’t thought of that. Fuck that.
Hilary thought of the farm boys at home, who called sexual words when she and Sheila had to walk past them in their school uniform. She had always thought, however much it tortured her, that they had an obscure right to do it because of their work. In the winter mornings from the school bus you could see the frozen mists rising up out of the flat colourless fields, and figures bent double with sacks across their shoulders, picking Brussels sprouts, or sugar beeting. But Neil was here, wasn’t he, at university? He’d crossed over to their side, the lucky side. Whatever she thought of her life, she knew it was on the lucky side, so long as she wasn’t picking Brussels sprouts or meat-packing.
No one had said anything since she arrived about where Hilary was to sleep. Sheila was supposed to have booked a guest room for her at Manor Hall, but of course she couldn’t go there now. When she couldn’t hold herself upright at the kitchen table any longer she climbed upstairs to ask what she should do, but Sheila was asleep, breathing evenly and deeply. Her forehead was cool. Hilary kept all her clothes on and wrapped herself in an old quilt that Sheila had kicked off; she curled up to sleep on the floor beside the bed. At some point in the night she woke, frozen rigid and harrowed by a bitter draught blowing up through the bare floorboards; she climbed into the bed beside Sheila who snorted and heaved over. Under the duvet and all the blankets it smelled of sweat and blood, but it was warm. When she woke again it was morning and the sun was shining.
—Look at the patterns, Sheila said.
She was propped up calmly on one elbow on the pillow, and seemed returned into her usual careful self-possession. Hilary noticed for the first time that the room was painted yellow; the sun struck through the tall uncurtained windows and projected swimming squares of light on to the walls, dancing with the movements of the twiggy tops of trees which must be growing in a garden outside.
—Are you all right? she asked.
Sheila ignored the question as if there had never been anything wrong.
—How did you get on with everybody last night?
—We went to a pub.
—Oh, which one? She interrogated Hilary until she was satisfied that it must have been the Beaufort. —We often go there, she said enthusiastically.—It’s got a great atmosphere, it’s really local.
—When I told them we lived in a vicarage, Hilary said, —one of them asked if we were Catholics.
—That’s so funny. I bet I know who that was. What did you think of Neil?
Hilary was cautious. —Is he from the north?
—Birmingham, you idiot. Couldn’t you tell? Such a pure Brummie accent.
—He wasn’t awfully friendly.
Sheila smiled secretively. —He doesn’t do that sort of small talk. His dad works as a toolsetter at Lucas’s, the engineering company. No one in his family has been to university before. His parents don’t have money, compared to most of the students here. He gets pretty impatient with people, you know, who just take their privilege for granted.
Hilary felt like a child beside her sister. What had happened yesterday marked Sheila as initiated into the adult world, apart from her, as clearly as if she was signed with blood on her forehead. She supposed it must be the unknown of sexual intercourse which could transform things in this way that children couldn’t see: Neil’s self-importance into power, for instance. At the same time as she was in awe of her sister’s difference, Hilary also felt a stubborn virgin pride. She didn’t want ever to be undone out of her scepticism, or seduced into grown-up credulous susceptibility.
—But doesn’t he think that we’re poor, too? she asked fiercely.—Have you told him? Does he have any idea?
—It’s different, said Sheila with finality.—It’s just different.
When Hilary drove in the summer with her father in the Bedford van, to pick up Sheila and all her things at the end of her first year, she was waiting for them of course at Manor Hall, as if there had never been any other place, any squat whose kitchen was painted with giant mushrooms. Hilary understood that she was not ever to mention what had happened there, not even when she and Sheila were alone. Because they never wore the memory out by speaking of it, the place persisted vividly in her imagination.
She had stayed on in that house for almost a week: she had arrived on Monday and her return ticket was for Saturday. Sheila rested f
or the first couple of days, sleeping a lot, and Hilary went out on her own, exploring, going round the shops. On Sheila’s instructions she took several carrier bags of bloody sheets and towels to the launderette, where she sat reading Virginia Woolf while the washing boiled. There seemed to be a lot of hours to pass, because she didn’t want to spend too much time in Sheila’s room; she shrank from the possibility of getting in the way between Sheila and Neil. A couple of times she went to the cinema in the afternoon by herself. They all went out to pubs every evening and she got used to drinking beer, although she didn’t get to like it. While the others joked and drank and smoked she sat in a silence that must have looked gawky and immature, so that she was sure Sheila despaired of her, although Sheila must also surely have known that she found the conversation impossible to join because it was so tepid and disappointing, gossip mostly about people she’d never met. Sheila, who had been aloof and not popular at school, seemed to be working hard to make these people like her. She made herself brighter and funnier and smaller than her real self, Hilary thought. She surrounded Neil in particular with such efforts of admiration, prompting him and encouraging him and attributing ideas to him, while he smiled in lazy amusement, rolling up his eternal cigarettes. At least they weren’t all over each other, they didn’t cling together in public. Hilary even feared for Neil, thinking that he shouldn’t trust her sister, he should wonder what dark undertow might follow after such a glittering bright flood.
By the end of the week Sheila was well enough to go to lectures again, and on the Saturday she came to the bus station to see Hilary off. She insisted on carrying Hilary’s suitcase, which swung in her hand as light as if there was nothing in it, now that their father’s old dictionaries of classical mythology had been unloaded.
—I didn’t feel anything, you know, Sheila said as they walked, as if she was picking up on some discussion they had only broken off a few moments before, although in fact they hadn’t talked once, since it was over, about what had happened to her.—I mean, apart from physically. Just like a tummy upset. That’s all it was: a nuisance.
—All right, if you say so.
For the first time Sheila talked about her studies. She had to write an essay on the Oresteia which she said was all about the sex war, female avenging Furies and male reason.
—The gods are disgusted at you, she said gleefully.—Apollo to the Furies. Apoptustoi theosis. Never let your filth touch anything in my sacred shrine.
When Hilary was in her seat in the coach, Sheila stayed hanging around outside the window although Hilary signed to her to go, there was no need to wait. They laughed at one another through the glass, helpless to communicate: for the first time they were in tune together as they used to be. Sheila mouthed something and Hilary mimed elaborately: frowned, shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t understand. Sheila put her face close to the glass and cupped her hands round her mouth, shouting. She was wearing a woollen knitted hat with knitted flowers pulled down over her ears.
—Give my love to everybody!
Hilary saw that all of a sudden her sister didn’t want her to go. She was seized then by an impulse to struggle off the coach, to stay and fight, as if Sheila had after all been abducted by a Bluebeard: she felt focused as a crusader in her opposition to Neil. She even half turned round in her seat, as if to get out. But there was a man in the seat beside her, she would have had to ask him to move, he was settled behind his newspaper. The moment and the possibility passed. The coach reversed, the sisters waved frantically, and then Sheila was gone and Hilary subsided into her solitude, keeping her face averted from the man who had seen too much of her excitement, and whose newspaper anyway would make her sick if she accidentally read any of the headlines.
Above the city buildings the sky was blue and pale with light, drawn across by thin skeins of transparent cloud. Beyond the outskirts of the city everything was bursting with the spring growth which was further on over here than in the east. The tips of the hedgerows and the trees, if they hadn’t yet come into leaf, gave off a red haze where the twigs swelled and shone. It seemed extraordinary to Hilary that her life must at some point soon change as completely and abruptly as Sheila’s had, so that everything familiar would be left behind. She sat with bubbles of excitement rising in her chest. The scruffy undistinguished countryside outside the coach window seemed to her beautiful. It desolated her to think that when she was dead she wouldn’t be able to see it: cows, green hummocky fields, suburban cottages of weathered brick, a country factory with smashed windows, an excited spatter of birds thrown up from a tree. Then she started to see these things as if she was dead already, and they were persisting after her, and she had been allowed back, and must take in everything hungrily while she had the chance, every least tiny detail.
PHOSPHORESCENCE
THE COOLEY BOYS used to spend all their summers at the cottage in West Wales. They had a boat, so most of the time they were on the water, or playing cricket on the beach, or helping their mother who was restoring the cottage. For whole days that summer when Graham was thirteen she was up on the roof in shorts and T-shirt and old daps, reslating. Their father went off every day alone, to paint landscapes.
That summer, as usual, various friends and family came and went, either staying at the cottage or in the tiny primitive chalet at the other end of the meadow which Graham’s mother had done up for overspill visitors. It was to the chalet that Claudia and her family came: the Cooleys didn’t know them well, her husband was some sort of technician in Graham’s father’s lab at the university. Their children were too small to join in the Cooley boys’ games.
At first Graham took no more notice of Claudia than of any of the others who swam in and out of focus on the far-off adult surface of his world. Then she started to pay him attention in an extraordinary way. Fourth of five brothers, he was surprised enough if any of his parents’ friends even remembered what school he was at and how old he was. Claudia, this grown-up mother of three children, began to make a point of sitting next to him. When they all squeezed into the back of the old Dormobile van, or around the cottage table for lunch, or in the sitting room in the evening for cards and Monopoly, she simply sat up against him and then let the weight of her leg lie against his. They had bare legs, usually: he was still young enough for shorts even on cool days, and it was at the time when women wore short skirts. She shaved her legs, brown legs (his mother didn’t): he saw the stubble, felt it. Sometimes, after a while, almost imperceptibly, she began to press, just slightly press. It always could just have been accidentally.
Probably she was doing it for a long time before he even noticed: he was thirteen, sex had hardly occurred to him, not as a physical reality he could have in connection with other people. And evenonce he’d noticed, once he’d started excitedly, scaredly, to wait for her to choose her place, even then he couldn’t be sure, not at first, that he wasn’t just crazily making it all up.
And at this point he began to take notice of Claudia all the time, to hardly take notice of anything else. She was plump and blonde, pretty, untidy: he noticed that a button kept slipping undone on a blouse too tight across her bust, and that her clothes bought to be glamorous were crumpled because her children were always clambering over her. Struggling down to the beach with a toddler on one arm and beach bags slung across her shoulder, she kept turning over on a sandal with a leather thong between her toes, and he heard her swear – shit! – in an undertone. Once he heard her snap at her husband, when she was trying to read the paperback book she brought down every day to the beach, and the children interrupted her one after another to pee or for food or quarrels, —If I don’t get to finish this bloody sentence I’ll scream! Graham’s parents never swore, he only knew those words from school and from his brothers.
Claudia was a perfectly competent adult. She brought down to the beach everything her family needed: costumes and towels and picnic and suntan oil and changing stuff for the baby and rackets and balls. She fed
them and soothed them all. One of her little girls stepped on a jellyfish and howled for half an hour before she fell asleep on Claudia’s lap, while Claudia sat stroking her sticky salty hair. But when Graham watched her playing badminton with his brothers – dazzling against the sea, grunting and racing and scooping up the shuttlecock in halter top and John Lennon peaked cap – he saw that she was still young, not his kind of young, but Tim’s and Alex’s. That must be why she was still crazy enough to be doing this thing to him. She couldn’t have done it to Tim or Alex because with them it would have been real, she would have had to acknowledge what was going on, they would have known. With him it was so completely, completely outside possibility. It couldn’t be happening.
On the beach it wasn’t possible to be squeezed side by side. But she found other ways: he’d feel a gritty sandpapery toe just making contact, or when she reached across him to hand out sandwiches, he’d get a scorch of the flesh of her arm against his shoulder. It was so subtle that no one, however scrupulously they watched, could ever have seen: it was a chain of innocent accidents only connected through his burning consciousness of her touch.
On the surface she was particularly nice to him, asking him about school, asking his opinions on things the others talked about, the boat, the weather. She chose him to explain to her the rules of racing demon; he had to play through the first couple of hands with her. When she leaned excitedly forward over the table to see what had been played – she was short-sighted but wouldn’t wear her glasses – she wedged him heavily into the corner, he smelled her sweat. His mother complimented Claudia on how she drew Graham out. He was supposed to be the shy one in the family arrangement: Alex was the brainy one, Phil the sporty one, and so on.
Sunstroke and Other Stories Page 6
