Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  'Oh, what's this?' said the man. 'Come on, sweetheart, the more the ...'

  I felt stupid and red-faced, and then it was over, I was through, and the front door was ahead of me, open. The deep blue, scented night. As I crossed the veranda the music downstairs stopped, and I could hear Tom and Tom Rose's voices from above, yelping out over the evening air, laughing, and howling like demented dogs.

  No one was interested in how late I was. I think this time they'd forgotten all about me. I found Mum and Dad and Brian standing on the back lawn, in the full flood of light from the French windows, looking up at the strange glow thrown by flames above the hedge. Grey smoke blossoming up into the navy-blue sky, and burning sparks that shot madly up, darting and spiralling like houseflies, and turned into charred flakes which floated down, graceful and calm. Perhaps I should have noticed the smoky smell in the air when I came out of the Hennessys' house. Perhaps I should have realized that the excited voices weren't just party voices. I was more concerned about walking straight and looking normal. About not puking into the roses. But no one even glanced at me.

  'I wondered where you all were,' I said, trying to imply that I had been indoors for some time. 'What's going on?'

  'More than a bonfire,' my father said, shortly. He sounded cross but the look on his face was triumphant.

  'Maybe it's their summer house,' I said. 'Their garden shed. I mean, everyone has a shed. Don't they?'

  'I suppose we'll have the fire brigade up here next,' my mother said. 'Though how they'll get through all those ...'

  We stood motionless, our heads tilted upwards. No more sparks flew up. The billow of smoke dwindled.

  'Just keeping an eye on our shed,' my father said, looking back at me for the first time. He wore a weary cynic's expression now, as if he had to put up with neighbourhood riots every Saturday night. 'Making sure one of those sparks doesn't catch the roof alight. You go in. We can all go in now.'

  We moved off slowly, Brian leading the way, his hands in his pockets, kicking a snail shell up the lawn.

  That night the Hennessys' old summer house burned to the ground. It was assumed that a spark from the coals where Patrick was roasting half a pig had set it off.

  Actually, it was Brian.

  30

  Home and Abroad

  The day after the party we had Aunt Gloria to tea. My mother, with great bags under her eyes and a drawn expression which could have been removed if she had wished to, complained about the noise the previous night. 'No respect. No respect for other people at all,' she kept repeating.

  But Gloria, most unsatisfactorily, only responded with 'The Crown and Anchor on the corner gets noisy some nights. Fridays and Saturdays, in particular. And the customers, going home! You can hear them all the way up the street.' Which wasn't what my mother wanted to hear at all.

  While Gloria entertained the folks, I slipped next door for half an hour. The Hennessys were still tidying up. The smell of smoke and stale beer hung round the house. Tillie, in her jeans and a crumpled shirt, looking more bedraggled than usual, was stacking empty bottles in a cardboard box outside the front door. 'They're out the back,' she said to me. 'And Patrick's snoozing on the sofa. He's feeling a bit fragile, so I'd appreciate it if you'd be quiet.'

  I should have taken that phrase and presented it in a jewelled box to my mother. It would have proved beyond doubt her belief in the hypocrisy of the rest of the world. She could have lifted the lid every so often, as with a little musical box, and listened to the phrase, and gloated.

  In the back garden I saw that the summer house was nothing more than a heap of damp black charcoal. Mattie and Sebastian had taken bits of it and were drawing rude cartoons on the paving stones. Isolde was sweeping cigarette ends and other debris from the back veranda. She gave me a 'What did you expect?' kind of shrug as I passed. Pickles was sniffing curiously at the path of her broom.

  I found Tom sitting under an apple tree, eating cold leftovers. I sat down a quarter turn around from him, so that I could rest my back against the tree trunk, too. He passed me his beer bottle, and I took a swig. Here was my looking-glass life, the other side of the hedge, where people treated me casually, where I knew a boy, and drank beer. It was so weird that I turned into this other person when I crossed the boundary between there and here. Or was it that they turned me into another person, and my family, when I went home, turned me back?

  'How did it happen?'

  'Patrick and his medieval barbecue.'

  Tom flicked his hand towards a coal pit where the end posts to support the spit-roast arrangement still stood. 'No one was paying it too much attention, and I think a bit must have flown up and caught the timbers of the shed.'

  'Was anything lost?'

  'Some tools and wood. No Leonardos, if that's what you mean. Eugene put it out.'

  'Eugene?'

  'Yeah, Eugene got the fire extinguisher Tillie keeps under the stairs. She keeps it in case the house goes up in flames, and all her precious pictures with it.'

  I scrambled round to face Tom. 'I didn't know Eugene was here!'

  Eugene had been somewhere in that thrumming crowd and I hadn't even suspected it.

  'Yeah.' Tom sounded totally unconcerned. 'He wouldn't miss a party. Came up with his new girlfriend, Tamara.' He fell silent, looking down at the greasy plate in his lap, and there was something about the way he'd said her name that made me think he was silent in order to contemplate the image of Tamara.

  'Is he still here?'

  'Nah. Left this morning. Couldn't wait to get back to the Smoke. Doesn't like yokel life.'

  'Do we?'

  'Not much, but what can we do?' He sighed, and tipped the beer bottle right up, catching the last drops in his open mouth. I looked at the uncouth outline of his throat.

  'I can't believe Eugene was here,' I said.

  I never really believed in Eugene. I'd needed proof, and there was none. I thought of the monkey-baby in the painting. Now he was grown up, with delectable girlfriends. He was older than the others, a legendary sibling. Eugene had put the fire out in the summer house. Eugene was there and I had missed him. Eugene was the Invisible Man.

  Barbara came back from her overnight stay with dyed hair. She and the friend (a girl I didn't know) had coloured it over the bathroom sink. It was dark red, a burnished red, eye-catching, but it didn't go with her complexion. The following evening we sat on her bed and worked our way through a stack of magazines she'd brought from the friend's house: Honey, Nineteen, even Vogue. She flipped pages, looking critically at skinny, soft-focus girls with huge eyes and blank expressions.

  'How come Eugene is much older than the rest of you?' I asked. 'What was Tillie doing? She could have painted then, when she only had him.'

  'Oh, she had two other babies after him,' Barbara said, offhandedly, not looking up from her article. 'But they died. They both had something wrong with them and they died just after they were born. Or they died before they were born. In the womb. I can't remember exactly.' She flipped another page.

  I was shocked. Poor Tillie. And to keep on trying, so many times.

  'It was lucky the rest of you were all right, then,' I said.

  She looked up. 'Are we?'

  What if Tillie, to make up for those poor lost babies, had decided to adopt? Had decided to adopt a replacement to fill the aching void in her heart? What if they had chosen me from the children's home? I could have grown up with Tillie as my mother. I wonder how much would have been the same, and how much that has happened would never have happened, in those circumstances?

  Well, it's no good thinking about what if.

  As my aunt Gloria would say, 'It doesn't bear thinking about.'

  Hanny Gombrich doesn't drink milk or eat any dairy foods. She told me she is allergic to them. I asked her how she knew.

  'It gives me a rash. Anything dairy.'

  'So what do you do?'

  'They're supposed to be careful with my diet here, but they're not that c
areful. I think if they can't be bothered they just slop it all in. And I get a reaction.'

  'Even to chocolate?'

  'Of course to chocolate!'

  'It's not just something you don't want to eat, then?'

  'No!' She sounded most offended. 'Look, I'll prove it. Even if I don't know something's dairy, it still has an effect.'

  She pushed back one sleeve to demonstrate.

  'This is an old bit of eczema,' she said. 'The redness has faded but you can still feel where it was. It's from something milky in a sauce last week.'

  She grabbed my hand and pressed it on to the skin of her forearm. It was true, it felt rough and dry, like you imagine a lizard's skin would feel. I took my hand away quickly, but she left her sleeve rolled back. Exposed like that, her inner arm was a basket-weave of delicate scars, more than I had seen before, more than she had showed me. She must have tried a lot of times.

  I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything.

  Today, under her tapestry coat, she was wearing black crushedvelvet trousers and genuine American cowboy boots. Bought when she was genuinely in America. Hanny has been all over the world.

  I, by contrast, have never been anywhere. Our family didn't go away for holidays like other families did. If asked by some wellmeaning neighbour, my parents would say, 'We're staying at home this year,' as if all the other years we had spent the fortnight in a caravan at Morecambe Bay or a cliff-top hotel in Cornwall. 'We're having days out.' Oh, days out.

  Days out were purgatory. My mother would make us a picnic lunch, and pack it in transparent boxes that reeked of plastic and made the food taste of plastic. We had sandwiches and orange squash, and thermos flasks of tea, and bananas which putrefied inside their skins before the journey was halfway over. We took a blanket to sit on, and plastic macs in case it rained. And a camera to take a photograph of us having fun. To cap it all, Brian would sit in the front of the car. Mum sat next to Dad on the way there, and then on the way home – 'Fancy a change? All change!' my father would say – down Brian would plump into the space and comfort of the front seat, as if it was his God-given right. 'That's it. Ladies in the back. Just like driving the Queen.'

  I think they liked it, men together, steering and navigating, in control of the car. I never sat in the front. Mum and I squashed into the back seat, in opposite corners, the picnic paraphernalia between us, our feet crammed into the narrow leg-space, not talking. It was always noisy in the back. We could hear Brian's and Dad's voices but we couldn't necessarily hear what they said. I stared out of the side window, or round Dad's head, but mostly at his head, the misty brown prickles of his short-back-and-sides, the waxy pink of his bald spot, the curious rolls of fat (and yet he wasn't fat) where his neck met his collar. I wanted to see the open road, the rolling landscape, but all I got was the whirling grass verge and a view of the back of his head.

  We went to places like some forlorn field indistinguishable from any other field, or a small hilltop – hilltops being few and far between in our part of the country and therefore thrilling. We liked a nice view. Sometimes we looked round an old church, or went to a stately home which had an open day. Very occasionally we went to the sea, but my parents, like a lot of people who have grown up in coastal towns, despised resorts and the trippers they attracted, and if we went anywhere near the water it was to bleak reaches of tide and shingle, acres of blade-like grass and piercing winds.

  But the Hennessys, oh, the Hennessys did it differently. Of course they did. Once I went round in all my innocence, on the first day of the school holidays, anticipating endless time together, only to find that Barbara had already left. Flown the coop, hadn't told me a thing. This was early on, this was one of the first surprises, the sudden blows she delivered to me.

  'Oh, she's gone away,' Sebastian said, hanging upside down by his arms from the veranda rail. His mouth hung open and his curly hair streamed towards the earth. 'She's gone to London with Isolde.'

  This simple statement disorientated me as much as his face, the wrong way up. If he'd told me she'd been transported to Botany Bay I wouldn't have been more shocked. How did people just go? There must have been planning, packing, some thought beforehand. Some intimation of sudden departure. In our house even days out were planned for in detail, like a general drawing up his campaign strategy, taking all intelligence into account. Preparations were visible. But no, Barbara and Isolde had just taken off, like will-o'-the-wisps, like thieves in the night. Stolen away from me.

  Or it might be to Devon, to Malvern, to Scotland, to Rome. I found that one or another Hennessy was always zooming off, at a moment's notice, to stay with someone's godmother or Patrick's half-brother or Tillie's old friend from art school. Tillie's extended family might all have died due to the Nazi occupation but Patrick's relations well made up for it. Hennessys, as I might have known, had a wealth of relations sprinkled across the globe, only too anxious to invite and entertain them, and a superfluity of friends just waiting to make them at home.

  They went by train and car and sometimes even plane, in pairs and alone, on exotic adventures with fluid schedules and ever-shifting itineraries. Once when Barbara went to Paris to stay with someone I'd never heard mentioned before, called Joan (not a French name, I thought, in spite of Joan of Arc), I was told, 'She'll be back on Monday.' But when Monday came I learned she'd been despatched to Annecy to visit someone else. Annecy, I was told, had a beautiful lake and a very good climate. All very well, I thought, but why was Barbara in need of them?

  Even Mr and Mrs Van Hoog went away every year for two weeks in the Lake District. They liked the mountains and the water. They always sent a postcard back, of Dove Cottage or Windermere or maybe just an unnamed misty island floating on a lake. I imagined them in their insect-like car, driving carefully down winding lanes, and stopping at recognized beauty spots to admire the view and then study the next leg on the map.

  The exception was Tillie. Tillie never zoomed off anywhere. She didn't seem to need to visit London, or Dublin, or Paris. She barely even went to the shops down the road. Tillie stayed at home, as if she was the very necessary household god, the little deity of the hearth, the genius loci, without whom none of it could survive intact, or even exist.

  31

  Drifting

  For a couple of years I was a Girl Guide. I only went because my mother made me – and because I'd been a Brownie, and that's what Brownies did next.

  Our Guide group met on Thursday evenings in the community hall. Just as at school, we learned things that seemed to have no application in outside life, like tying complicated knots, and identifying predatory birds by their silhouettes in flight, and how to interpret signs and leave signs for other Guides. In the Brownies we had concentrated on semaphore. I was quite keen on semaphore, I liked stretching out my arms like the hands on a clock-face and waving the flags at the end of them. But Guides did not stoop to semaphore. For some reason they did not envisage themselves standing on hilltops and signalling across open valleys. They saw themselves like La Longue Carabine, running trails through dense woodland, and made little signs from sticks and stones, leaving them in the middle of the pathway (where, of course, they could be kicked out of the way by animals or non- Guides), arrows for left and right, a circle with a stone in the middle for 'We have gone home'. It always seemed a bit of a cheek to me to get people out into a dark confusing wood and then signal 'We have gone home'.

  I was in Kingfisher patrol. There were six girls, four of whom went to the grammar school and one who, like me, attended the secondary mod. She was a year older and at school we had never exchanged even a glance, let alone spoken.

  Our patrol leader was a girl called Helen Ethersidge. She was fast and funny, and in another life I would have looked up to her. She had nearly black hair and a broad-boned face with thick pale skin, and I thought she was attractive. Not pretty, but attractive.

  The very first week Helen showed us how to cook sausages over a bonfire, on the scra
p of rough land behind the community hall. She helped us choose green sticks from the hedge for toasting forks so that they wouldn't go up in flames before the sausages were cooked through. When we took them out of the fire, the meat was black on the outside and raw in the middle. But they tasted much better than a lot I've had.

  In another life I would have admired Helen Ethersidge and tried to be like her. It would have been better if I had. But it was too late by then. I had taken the Hennessys as my pattern, and look where that's got me.

  While I was sent to Guides Brian went to Scouts, but he actually enjoyed it. They did much more energetic things than we did, and held open days when their families and friends could come and try out Scout activities for themselves. Scout activities involved rope ladders and walkways, jungle drums and inflatable dinghies. On open days the dinghies were not actually in water: they sat on the floor of the Scout hut and younger children climbed in and out, and sat down in them and waved paddles about. A large Scout in shorts, with hard-looking calves and scarred knees, stood beside the dinghies to ensure no damage was done. In a way it looked fun, the sort of fun Helen Ethersidge and I might have enjoyed. But I could hear Barbara's disparaging voice in my ear, and even worse, Tom's. Is that what you do? You sing songs round the camp fire? You learn to tie knots? What for? So that when your knickers fall down in public you'll always know how to do a half-hitch with the elastic and save yourself further blushes? Oh God, I couldn't be doing with that.

  Leaving the Guides was surprisingly easy. I just stayed in my bedroom one Thursday evening, pretending to do some homework. My ironed uniform on its clothes hanger was ready and waiting. I ignored it. Brian was sent to remind me of the time. I said, 'I'm not going,' and, like a good boy, he reported this back to the kitchen. There was a further relay of messages: why was I not going? 'I've got too much homework.' 'Can't you do that another night?' 'No. I'm stopping altogether.' This brought Mum to my door, untying her cooking apron as if for a fight. She folded it and wrapped it round her arms, which she then crossed over her chest.