'Maybe they were never really listening in the first place?'
'Maybe.'
'Didn't care what you were covering up, so they didn't care how you did it?'
'Maybe.' I could feel my voice tightening up again. 'But not in here. Here, they're fascinated.'
'I prefer a dirty great lie, myself. It's more fun.' Hanny unclasped her knees and began picking at a mark on one of her crushed velvet trouser legs. 'When faced with the bitter truth, use bluff, bullshit, injured innocence. But that's just me. Everyone's got their own methods. And nobody's owning up. Not really. Whatever they say in Group.'
What I think is that everybody in this whole place is spinning some kind of fabulous tale, and Lorna and her colleagues are lapping it up, noting it down.
In the little room where we meet, Lorna and I, there is one picture. One small square picture plonked right in the middle of the wall. Its colours are so faint and wishy-washy they might almost not be there. There are overlapping circles, blobs of pale blue and green and pink, as if someone had dipped a pen in coloured inks and let them drip on to wet – very wet – paper. Perhaps it's designed to calm us down. But if, like me, you're used to more robust forms of art, it just makes your blood boil.
Like the Van Hoogs' side, the Hennessys' side of the house was full of pictures. Pictures of people, rather than flowers and fruit bowls and fields of corn. There was Tillie naked and Tillie dressed, and people I didn't recognize, doing ordinary things – bending over a kitchen table, sitting and reading, cutting wood, even people painting other paintings. Up the stairway there were portraits of the children. Someone I thought was Sebastian, a round-headed boy with a sweet protuberant lip, crouching and playing in the sand: this was Eugene, so Barbara told me. He had the family likeness. There were two little girls on a swing-seat: herself and Isolde when younger. Then a strange one of Tom with a bluish face, making him look rather pinched and cruel, and another of Isolde sitting with her feet tucked up on the sofa in the front room, turning the page of a big picture book. It was odd to see paintings of people I knew, especially if they didn't have their clothes on, but somehow even odder to see them of objects and rooms I recognized. The woman standing at a table was using Tillie's blue striped mixing bowl, and a fat black-haired man sat on the veranda of this very house. The paintings of the children were conventional enough, I suppose, but Patrick had laid the paint on in thick unyielding layers, had made the colours uncompromising, the blurriness of their features like them and yet not like. Isolde and Barbara on the swing were almost creepy, Barbara's eyes just dots and dabs of near-black, unaligned. Her expression was of boredom, and rebellion. But then how could that slab of grey-brown-pink, those curranty dots for eyes, be said to have an expression?
And then there were the women.
It wasn't only Tillie who was nude, but a large blonde woman only partly draped with a red shawl confronted visitors to the dining room, and along the passage a thin dark-haired girl sat upright on a hard kitchen chair, looking resentful and cold. Nipples and pubic hair, just like two eyes and a mouth, right in the middle of the picture, staring back at you. Barbara noticed me scurry past this one every time I had to follow her to the kitchen. 'For God's sake, what do you want on the walls?' she said. 'Puppies and kittens with bows round their necks!?' I felt myself blush.
She told me it was the habit of artists to paint human flesh. They had done it for centuries. It was high art.
'But why does it always have to be female flesh?' I asked.
'It isn't,' she said. 'Think of Michelangelo.' Which I couldn't, at that stage.
Tillie told me, another time, that there was nothing wrong with painting people naked. It was a challenge to the artist, she said, and it also got something deep and true about the sitter down on to canvas. The deep and true thing it seemed to me to get on to canvas was the terrible pendant nature of their breasts. I couldn't imagine how the painter could stare at some intimate part of the sitter, then stare at the canvas and carefully paint it, then stare back at the part again in order to get it just right, without thinking thoughts other than colour and shape and line. And the sitter sitting there, aware of the painter's eyes on their intimate places, and having to not twitch a muscle all the while.
So I learned to take my cues from the Hennessys. Nobody in the house turned a hair, walking past naked women with their breakfast bowls and their dirty washing, naked women their father had spent hours and hours staring at and turning into art.
17
The Club
'We'll form a club,' Barbara told me. 'It'll just be us in it. We won't let anybody else join.'
Which was flattering, but – also – disappointing. What was the difference, then, between our being best friends and being in a club? I would have liked Isolde to be allowed in, or even the little boys. Oh no. 'We'll be exclusive,' said Barbara. 'I'm leader. You're second-in-command.' But with no other troops to order about, my rank felt a bit worthless.
We constructed a camp out of sticks and blankets and old apple boxes, down among the fruit trees at the end of the garden. Barbara wanted to build a tree-house for our club headquarters, but the trees proved too stunted and shaky for that. So we had to make do with a prolapsing bivouac with a grass floor, which filled up with sheltering spiders and earwigs overnight. We crammed ourselves inside and Barbara turned on her torch.
'Close the door. Let's make it dark in here.'
I pulled the flap of blanket as far across the opening as I could. Our backs bulged out of the sides of the camp.
'OK, we need some rules, and a badge, and a secret sign.'
I nodded eagerly.
'And we have to do a blood brotherhood thing, and take a vow.'
'Blood brotherhood?'
'Yes. I'll show you. Tom and Tom Rose and another boy used to have a club, in the summer house. They took a blood brotherhood vow. But then they spent all their time being horrible to the other boy. Three's not a good number for a club.'
She pulled a rusting penknife from her pocket and made me hold out my hand. She scraped the blade across the base of my thumb, several times, unsuccessfully. It left a white line, fading quickly as the blood rushed back into the unbroken flesh. 'You're meant to draw blood,' she said, 'and then shake hands, mingling both your bloods.'
'Oh.'
'We'll just do the vow. I'll get a better knife another time.'
I noticed she didn't try it on herself.
'We have to swap some secret that no one else knows, and then vow not to breathe a word. Ever. That proves our trust.'
I wondered what secrets Tom's club had divulged, and how the third boy had felt about trust.
'That must be Rule Number One,' said Barbara. 'Never to break that vow.'
We spent a happy half-hour drawing up a list of rules, and inscribing them on an oblong of hardboard scrounged from the summer house. 'We'll meet three times a week, at the club headquarters, here. Rule Two – you must give the sign before entering. Or if you meet another member of the club, anywhere. That's Rule Three.'
We decided on a badge, which was two apple leaves joined to a twig. This was my idea and I was proud of it: it was germane to our camp under the apple tree, also easily available, and inconspicuous. We didn't want anyone else to spot that we were wearing our secret society badges.
We couldn't agree on a sign. Barbara showed me her idea.
'But that's just like the Brownie salute,' I said.
'I don't go to Brownies.'
'Well, it is.'
'What's your bright idea, then?' she challenged me, folding her arms and sitting so far back that one side of the camp fell down. I made a feeble attempt at some other sign. Barbara looked unimpressed. 'God, now I'll have to mend all this!' she said, and turned her back on me.
It was occurring to me that clubs never did work out, whether you had two members or three.
'There's no point in having a sign, since it's just us,' Barbara said, once she had hitched the blanket up to a tre
e branch again. 'We'll have a noise, though, which you have to make before coming into the camp. To prove it's us.'
The noise was an owl-hoot, made through clamped thumbs into cupped hands. Barbara was better at it than me.
'That'll stop Seb and Mattie coming in,' she said.
But it didn't. Once they got wind of secret activities down in the orchard, they launched an offensive on our camp. They raided it when we were absent, flinging the rules and our scrap of carpet out. The next day they jumped on it when we were inside. There was a fight, with flailing legs inside grey blanket, and Mattie had to be wrestled with to get him to part with the biggest stick, which he was whacking and smacking into the mass of heaving bodies. I think I enjoyed this bit the most. I was taller than all of them, and surprised at my own strength. My lack of experience in fighting did not prove to be such a drawback.
When we had beaten them off and rebuilt the tent, Barbara took a brooch from the pocket of her shorts. It was shaped like a leaf. She unfastened the pin and stuck out her palm. She scraped it back and forth until a tiny intermittent line of red sprang from her skin.
'Now you.'
I bit my lip. The brooch pin felt hot, scratching, and finally stinging. I had borne it. I had shed blood.
'OK, shake.'
We clasped hands.
'What's your secret?'
I had been thinking about this. Indeed, I had been dwelling on it, worrying about it, turning possibilities over in my mind since the day before when Barbara first mentioned it. The big one was: I wish I was adopted, but I'm not – I lied. And I'd look her in the eyes and find the sympathetic gaze of a real friend, a true friend, who understood. Only I wouldn't say this. It was the secret of a very exclusive club, one member only: me. So, stumped for an answer, I said, 'I never tell my mum and dad where I am when I'm here. It's my big secret. I don't want them to know.'
'Why not?'
Because they wouldn't approve of me mixing with you, with your family. That was another thing I couldn't say. Barbara wouldn't believe it – such effrontery – even though it worked the other way. Barbara was always right, and always in the right. She could conceive of no other possibility.
'Because I want to keep it secret,' I said, half true. 'Because I want to keep you to myself.'
'Ooof!'
Barbara dissolved into a grey lump, and the semi-darkness inside the tent became blinding blue day as the blankets were dragged off me. Two feet in hard brown sandals came up in my face as Barbara, imprisoned, rolled over and over with Sebastian clinging round her blanketed head. We'd been the target of another guerrilla attack.
I never got to hear Barbara's deadly secret, if she had one. I never got to hear her swear 'Trust', and shake a bloody hand over my secret. We didn't bother to rebuild the camp that day, and by the next she had lost interest in a club which demanded meetings three times a week and adherence to a list of at least twenty tedious rules. I never got to be a real blood brother.
The funny thing about friendship, I learned, is that it contained an element of hatred. What you loved most in your friend was what you admired and wanted to have. I loved Barbara's self-confidence, the way she never thought before she spoke but just blithely spewed out her opinions on every subject under the sun, on things she knew about and things she must have been quite ignorant of. I liked this ceaseless stream of information and judgement. I didn't even mind her high-handed bossy ways. She never asked herself, 'What will people say?', which was refreshing after the caution and censoriousness of our household. I felt she was teaching me how to live.
I loved her great bouncy carelessness, but when it bounced off me I was desperately hurt. Her bumptious confidence could make me shrink. She always made out that it was Patrick and Tillie who had no time for suburbanites, for small-minded people, for tedious conformity. But it was Barbara who dwelt on the subject – bungalow kids, lace curtains, miniature windmills in front gardens – picking and pulling at it like a splinter, but just driving it further home. It was always she who raised the subject, as if she wasn't content for me to stay in disguise. She had to remind me of my origins, tease me with my danger. She was my very best friend, yet there were times when she made my heart feel as heavy as a rock.
So how did I explain all those hours, all those precious hours spent through the looking glass?
'I'm playing out!' Playing out. It would do, to begin with. Playing out was where my mother wanted us to be, not under her feet. Just as she wanted us off at school unless we were almost dying of something; otherwise we would have to be under her metaphorical feet, lying beneath the bedclothes, requiring to be plied with Disprin and barley water and to have our burning foreheads felt at regular intervals.
And later, once my career swung secondary school-wards, I claimed homework as my excuse. My parents didn't appear to notice the disparity between my keenness to attack homework projects in other girls' houses, and my reluctance and resentment – which descended like fog, heavy and clinging – about undertaking any at home.
I remember that when Brian was little and just learning to tell the time he was given a book to help him. It had come from a church jumble sale, and I loved to look at it, even though I could already tell the time. It was about a mother and her two children and how they spent each hour of the day. Every new page had a clock-face to mark the passing hours. The children themselves were dull, two ciphers. Both had bunlike faces, and blank eyes like ha'pennies, brown and flat. But the mother – the mother was quite another thing. Elegant, lovingly drawn, her hair up in a French pleat, button earrings, a shirtwaister dress. Her lips, in two curves of the pencil, were like a lipstick print, her figure as hourglass-smooth as a Playtex girdle. And high heels. High heels all day long, except at two o'clock, when she kicked off her shoes and lay on the equally elegant sofa, reading and writing letters. At two o'clock the boy and girl obediently took a nap, though the boy was shown playing on his bedroom floor. Perhaps he was allowed to get away with it, so long as he stayed in his room. Then at three they sprang up, donned coats, and took a walk in the park, fed the ducks. The mother had flung on a duster coat and spiked a small hat on top of her French pleat. Though the wind blew a bow-tailed kite in the background, Mother's hat stayed firmly put. And at six Father came through the garden gate, baggy pinstripe suit and briefcase, waving a rolled-up newspaper in greeting. His wife stood waiting in the doorway behind their two offspring, a hand on the shoulder of each, smiling her welcome.
I loved it, I loved the order and routine, the heavenly predictability of it, the way the mother revolved around them all, except for that precious hour at two. But I loved her best for her carefree, carefully honed look. Her fifties Vogue model look. I can see her now, a Cecil Beaton version of a mother, if only her heels were even higher and if she leaned back a bit more from the hips. The sort who in reality banished the children to Nanny, so that she could lunch with her girlfriends at noon, peer stylishly through binoculars at the two o'clock runners at Ascot, and at six take cocktails with broad-shouldered men called Freddy and Boy. Midnight would find her dancing in a slinky backless frock, glancing unseeingly at us over her smooth white shoulder as she whirls past.
The book didn't actually go up to midnight. It ended at seven o'clock, with the children tucked up in their little beds. As all good children should be.
I don't know what happened to it once Brian learned to tell the time. I loved that little book. I used to pore over it for hours. Perhaps that was where I got the germ of Carolyn from, and the sort of mother she'd have.
And my mother? My mother did not want her hours to revolve around us. She had no idea of the work tiny children involved. Or perhaps she had just an inkling. Maybe that's why she plumped for house-trained pups, aged four and five. If we were outside, safely burning off our youthful energies, so much the better for the wear and tear on her upholstery, her carpets, her nerves. If only Mum had worn high heels and a duster coat and taken us to the park, if only a be-suited Dad had swung hi
s briefcase cheerfully through the gate at six, perhaps we would all have been happy then. Perhaps none of this would have needed to happen.
18
The Gift of Language
They never ask the right questions in here. They never look at the broader picture. How can you hope to find out about a person by asking trite questions and drawing the obvious conclusions?
When archaeologists dig up a skeleton, there's a certain amount they can find out: the sex of the person, an approximate age at death, maybe what they died of, some injuries or diseases they suffered in life. If they're lucky, and really industrious, they may be able to determine their status, how they were dressed and what kind of burial they had, what their diet was. And what does this tell us? Not a whole lot. Look at a skeleton and there is no means of knowing what that person felt when those empty eye sockets were still able to see, when inside that skull there was a brain to think with. It seems to me that it's just foolishness to pretend that you can know anything about them.
People have done that to me. They looked at the skeletal shape of my life and they've drawn their own conclusions. They sketched in a few facts and left out so much it took my breath away. They should have taken the broader view.
Even someone as tenuous as Uncle Bob can have an effect on you. But they're incapable of following the thread that brings Uncle Bob to me, to the Hennessys, and wraps us all in a loop. Do they ask about Uncle Bob? Uncle who? See what I mean?
We never went to visit my mother's brother, Uncle Bob. He always came to us, a maximum of once a year, if that. I have a memory of him in shirtsleeves in the back garden one summer. Just like a snapshot, and over-exposed at that, his white shirt and cheekbones and forearms blinding. But all the other years he came at Christmas.
Living In Perhaps Page 11
