Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  'What's all this, Carol?' she asked. 'Stopping Guides?'

  'I've got too much homework these days,' I said. I held a maths textbook open on my knee for authenticity.

  'What about your uniform?' she asked. The expensive uniform, which she had not been able to run up herself on the machine at home.

  'We can sell it. There's always someone joining who will want it.'

  And with that she exhaled loudly and turned away, unrolling her apron again. Another sort of person might have shrugged, but she didn't. Too lax, too sloppy, shrugging.

  I couldn't believe it had been so easy. Well, at least that was out of the way. I would have done it ages before if I'd known. I quite expected her to put up an argument against my leaving, but she didn't seem at all interested, once she realized that some of the money she had spent could be recouped.

  Piano, well, that was easy, too. I was telling Lorna the truth when I said it got too expensive. Almost five years of piano lessons, what an investment. As adolescence rolled inexorably on, my practising slackened off. 'If you're not going to practise, Carol, I'm not going on paying,' my mother said. We didn't shake hands on the bargain, but we kept to it. I think she was relieved, not just about the money but at the sudden lovely silence round the house. We were not a musical family. We had overreached ourselves. I think my five years of grindingly slow progress proved that.

  Giving up church was harder. Too much at stake. This hit at the core of what my mother wanted us to be. There were so many rites and routines associated with it, the Saturday night shoe-cleaning and coat-brushing, coins for the collection put aside in a special jar. We would set out for church after breakfast every Sunday, my mother and Brian and me, leaving Dad oiling and sharpening the edging shears in preparation for his morning's work. These were the times I dreaded meeting a Hennessy – any Hennessy, even Sebastian or Mattie – as we walked down the road, a pair and one trotting behind on the narrow pavement, all neat in our Sunday clothes. I prayed to the dear Lord for rain, because then Dad would have to get the car out and drive us to church, even though he would not go in himself unless it was a special occasion. Perhaps because of my lax and wicked ways, my prayers were answered no more often than the prevailing meteorological situation would allow.

  I said I didn't want to go any more. Dropped my bombshell. 'I've grown out of Sunday school. They're all younger than me.'

  'You can be a shining example to the young ones, then.'

  'And the teenagers' group. It's so ...' What? Condescending, embarrassing, lacking in cogently argued theory? I fell back on 'boring'.

  My mother just looked at me.

  'And I don't enjoy the morning service.'

  Her expression showed me that she thought enjoyment had nothing to do with it.

  'I'm plagued with doubts,' I tried.

  She looked at me as if she had them too, all the time. There was a stand-off. Eventually she said, 'I'm not letting you make up your mind until you're sixteen. Then we'll see if you've still got doubts.'

  'Fifteen.'

  'No.'

  'Fifteen and a half.'

  She looked grim, but conceded with a brief nod of her head.

  I never made it that far. She must have known that there was no leverage she could bring to bear that would make me go with them every Sunday. So eventually she let me drift. It was a funny feeling, beginning to realize that she didn't care. She'd concentrate her efforts elsewhere, on someone more rewarding. She had washed her hands of me. That was the impression I got, as I moved about the kitchen in my pyjamas on Sunday mornings. Even Dad in his old gardening clothes was more useful than me. He handed out more milk from the fridge. He tutted about the weather, and my mother tutted back. She and Brian sat up very straight at the kitchen table, neat and pressed and brushed, eating extremely politely like people dining at a hotel, so as not to get any crumbs or jam on their church clothes. Then they went out, without speaking to me, walking along the pavement briskly: a pair.

  We still had our chores to do. Brian was allowed to take care of the lawn mower, to clean the blades, oil the wheels, scrape the grass-box out. He was strong enough now to keep the mower straight, press on the roller to achieve those neat green lines, that self-stripe in the fabric of the lawn. He'd inherited that responsibility. I don't know why lawns have to be stripy, what's so aesthetically pleasing about tame grass. It's only the way the grass blades lie, reflecting the sun, this way, that way. A trick of the light.

  I knelt on the crazy paving outside the French windows, weeding. I pulled up a plug of bittercress, freeing a ridge of sand, a scatter of enraged red ants. The garden was past its best: sunflowers, flopping from their canes, ragged as old scarecrows, an edging of light blue ageratum like a trim of dirty nylon fur. The sun was dipping, our shadows long. From next door's garden nothing but silence.

  Brian had stopped mowing, was kicking at the edge of the lawn by the hedge. On and on he went, tapping the toe of his shoe, waiting like someone who expected to be asked their opinion. I stood up and took my bucket of weeds down the path to the incinerator.

  'The lawn's very dry,' he said, when I didn't say anything. 'It's crumbling away.'

  'Oh yes?'

  'We should put the hose on it.'

  'Yes.'

  'It's this hedge.'

  Sucks the life.

  'Put the hose on it, then.'

  'Can't. There's a hosepipe ban. Not enough rain this summer.'

  'Don't put the hose on it, then.'

  'Other people do,' he said darkly, scowling. 'Next door do. I've heard them. I've seen 'em.'

  Oh yes? Had he seen me, too?

  'Other people are always breaking the rules.' He glanced upwards, at the dusty, dark immensity of the hedge.

  'Then so can you. Once in a while. It won't hurt.'

  He thought about it. Slow ticking over of time. Then he shrugged. 'No. Not me.'

  'It'll be autumn soon,' I said. 'It'll start raining and never stop.'

  But he was still standing there, hands in pockets, staring up at the hedge, as if the drought, the ban, the petty restrictions, and all the breaking of rules, every injustice in the world, were down to the Hennessys, every little bit.

  Then we became economic units: Brian got a paper round, and I served, Saturday mornings, behind the counter in Mrs Drew's. The wool shop. Now it was incumbent on me to understand the secrets of two-ply and four-ply, to pluck, unerringly, a pair of size seven knitting needles from the close-packed display. It was up to me to slip the puffy packs of Kotex discreetly into thick white paper bags. Or – an innovation, this – the neat blue boxes of Tampax.

  My mother, despite her love of the new-fangled, was suspicious of Tampax, in particular for 'unmarried girls'. They were not at all suitable. In her mind, unmarried girls – despite the incontrovertible evidence before her eyes from Bettina, from whatever she might know about the origins of Brian and me – unmarried girls were synonymous with untried girls. Untempted. Unspoilt. And Tampax were just so undeniably penetrative.

  So I bought my own Tampax. I had ample opportunity, after all. And a staff discount.

  Saturday morning in a wool shop was quite a Carolyn sort of thing to do. Not exactly hard labour; genteel and undemanding. I had high hopes of it that first Saturday. Perhaps I'd found my niche, the thing I could be good at. But by the end of the morning all I'd sold were three yards of ribbon, a thimble and a packet of darning needles.

  Mrs Drew was upstairs resting her swollen ankles on a petit-point footstool. She suffered from 'veins' and 'blood pressure'. Her doctor had warned her to take it easy. Every time the bell on the shop door rang, she called down to find out the latest. At midmorning I took her up a cup of instant coffee and a chocolate biscuit. Her apricot toy poodle was sitting on her lap, and kissing her with his horrible grizzled grey mouth. He got the biscuit. I'd had three cups of coffee already myself, perched on a stool in the little back room, trying unsuccessfully to tune her radio to anything interesting. At
half past twelve I turned the shop sign over, pulled down the blind, and carried the day's takings upstairs to Mrs Drew. Nine shillings and sixpence. I think a Carolyn would have done better. With her winning smile and her delightful ways, she'd have purred the customers into extravagance. She'd have drawn them in off the streets like a magnet, and not let them leave till quantities of hard cash had changed hands.

  The wool shop was struggling, on its last legs. People didn't knit so much any more, or make their own clothes. They liked to buy from the big shops in town, or send for things mail-order, cheap and cheerful garments with no hard work in them at all. They didn't like home-made. I don't know exactly how long the shop lasted after my nine months' stint as a Saturday girl, but, walking past one day, I noticed that Mrs Drew had pulled down the blind for ever. Had packed up the last few balls of wool and cards of lace and taken them home, to knit and sew through her twilight years. Or maybe not. Maybe she never partook of those homely female pursuits. Perhaps she got out the gin and the mah-jong set, even the little wooden sticks for making bets with, and invited all her old-lady friends round, and got them roaring drunk, and robbed them blind.

  Perhaps. One can only hope so.

  'Your brother,' Lorna says. 'Brian – hmm?'

  So she has got round to him at last.

  'When you were younger you were very close, your mother reported. Your adoptive mother.'

  Then she does a thing with her eyebrows, a freaky thing she's started doing recently, raising them and looking at me, and then lowering one eyebrow on its own. Remarkable muscular control. I've tried it myself, without success, I have to say. There's a small mirror bolted to the wall in my room, and the first time she tried it on me I went straight upstairs and practised it in there. I looked like a gurning champion at a country fair, but I still couldn't do what Lorna does. It's very distracting. Maybe that's what she intends.

  I try to keep my mind off Lorna's facial gymnastics and on what she is saying.

  'You used to play together all the time, in the garden and the neighbourhood, with the local children.'

  Yes, because there wasn't any choice.

  'And you had friends in common.'

  Does she mean those twins we forced to be our chariot horses? The little boy with the trike? Mandy? I really feel like saying something here. Almost.

  Lorna grows expansive. 'From about the age of eight or nine, though, boys and girls tend to separate into groups of the same sex. Their friendships polarize. Girls loathe boys, boys loathe girls. Or they say they do. Does any of this sound familiar?'

  'Polarize,' I say. 'I like that word.'

  Lorna twitches faintly.

  'You and Brian were no longer quite so close. You were busy turning into a rebel, while Brian was much more conventional. That must have been very galling for you.'

  I feel a bit queasy.

  'But later on, when your new friends palled, you got together again.'

  That's the trouble with files, with reports, with the official version – you can see how they got the story they end up with, but you can also see where they've gone so very, very wrong. How they've ended up with fiction. Little Red Riding Hood picked up her basket and went off visiting, good intentions all round. What happened in the murky light under the trees is another matter: the wolf, the grandma, the woodcutter ... How do we know for sure who was grinning, and whose blood was spilt? And just who was wielding that axe?

  Lorna says, 'You and Brian, you're all each other has, when it comes down to it.'

  She gives me a long look, not unsympathetic.

  I want to say: no, you've got it wrong. He had Mum and Dad. They were always on his side. Or more on his side than mine. And he knew it, and he worked on it. Sticking his hand inside them like glove puppets, and wagging their heads, and watching me while he did it. And grinning all the time.

  I want to say something. To Lorna. It's not fair. She has brought me to this pass.

  I cross my legs and re-cross them. I fold my hands together, and look at my knuckles to make sure they're not too white. Very quietly, I clear my throat.

  'Ever since the beginning, you and Brian have stuck together. You've had no choice, have you?'

  I really don't like the way this is going, and I really, really don't like the way I'm handling it. If only Dr Travis were here, to pass me a glass of water or smooth his cool medical hand over my forehead. To light a cigarette and hold it to my cracked and bleeding lips.

  But Dr Travis is away this week. At a conference. Hanny told me that, Hanny who always seems to know far more than I do. Maybe she indulges in pleasant conversation with him, maybe she chats away and asks anodyne questions and he tells her things. Ever since I sat in the narrow hallway at Mrs Wallis's and heard Barbara conversing with her like an old friend, I've always been amazed at people who can do that. I can't chat. I can only sword-fight. I am always en garde.

  But right now I'm disarmed.

  Lorna smiles at me, thinking she's won this round.

  'Brian. How would you describe him?'

  Actually, my hands are quite a normal colour and my fingers are relaxed. I flex them in front of me and say, 'We were never close at all. Circumstance threw us together.'

  Lorna bends her head to make a note, smiling as she writes.

  'I think, Cora, that we are beginning to get somewhere. At long last.'

  Mike was taking us in Group today. We played the one-word game, as usual. Find a formula: stick to it. I think that must be the slogan printed on Mike's coffee mug up in the staffroom.

  Strange to say, everyone was quite brief, almost restrained, in their ramblings and shamblings this morning. Marsupial's word was 'bedroom' – not strictly an adjective – but Mike's eyes bulged appreciatively. 'Go on,' he said, clutching both knees and leaning back and lifting his big shoes right off the floor.

  I thought maybe we were plunging into a variant of the game – if you were a room in your house, which one would it be? – but it turned out to be just some lengthy garbled disquisition about not wanting to share a room with her sisters.

  'So what would you say you were – frustrated?' he asked, and then left a meaningful pause. 'And is that what you're feeling like today?' He must have been having tuition. He's never been so direct before.

  'Oh no,' Marsupial said, most reasonably. 'I was just saying.'

  Perhaps Marsupial, despite her sighs and the smell of hot brown soup that escapes whenever she lifts her arms, despite the complete insanity of her precious, bloated, empty abdomen, was winding Mike up. Was taking the piss.

  Then Mike turned to me. I was startled. What was the word for the day?

  'Despair.'

  I didn't mean to say it. It just popped out.

  32

  My Education

  I cannot say we have ever got on well together, education and me. Eleven years, from five to sixteen, and neither side got much out of the transaction.

  I could read and write and spell and do my numbers well enough, but not well enough, if you see what I mean. Not well enough to count for anything.

  In the eleven-plus, we had an intelligence test. This meant endless questions where you had to fill in the blank word or add the missing shape. Most of the time I felt that the only answer I could give was 'Well, it depends ...' There was no box to tick for 'Well, it depends ...' There was no space provided to write down my equivocal reasons. I guess I didn't have the intelligence to pass this test.

  At the secondary modern I was not regarded as anything other than part of the herd. Everyone who was no one went there, girls to the buildings on one side of the road, boys to the buildings on the other. Unlike my junior school, they were not that vigilant about our presence in class. Perhaps it was a matter of some relief when the worst pupils failed to show up. We put in a few years on the treadmill and then were regurgitated at the other end. If you wanted to do anything fancy, like O levels, or, heaven preserve us, A levels, you had to go elsewhere. You had to join the sixth form of the
grammar. Hardly anybody ever did.

  Nobody at the secondary modern picked me out and uncovered my special qualities. My work was equally covered in crosses and ticks, in B-minuses and C-pluses. We did geography, history, religious instruction, English, maths, a bit of science and a lot of domestic science. We did healthy games three times a week. Our teachers were those not good enough for better schools. They appeared to be divided into two camps: those who were interested in their engagement rings and those who were interested in preserving their virginity. The young ones with a bit of energy and a gleam in their eye came and went very swiftly. The old monsters in tweed suits and severe haircuts stayed for ever. I learned to sew a French seam, and that one should always pin and then tack and then sew, never just pin and sew; I learned to beat egg whites until the bowl could be turned upside down without losing any of its contents, to mould a Swedish meatball, to make pastry – short-crust, puff and sweet. We drew up menus for a week and studied the finer points of bringing up a baby: fresh air, regular naps, everything sterilized. All this, together with subject and predicate, photosynthesis, the major exports of India, the lineage of all those Tudors and Stuarts, with a dusting of long division and algebra, was enough to fit us for our futures. Our futures as wives and mothers and Woolworth's salesgirls. Factory fodder. Maybe even Gough Electricals fodder.

  I have never since sewn a French (or double) seam, or made, or even eaten, a single Swedish meatball. I know of no one who has. My mother, who made plenty of her own clothes and ours, didn't hesitate to sew straight from the pins; she couldn't be bothered to fuss with tacking and then to fuss with taking the tacking out. No one has ever come up to me and asked me the value of c if (a + 2) × (b – 3) = 2c when a = 4 and b = 5. I must say, I sometimes wonder to myself was he James the First of Scotland and the Sixth of England, or James the Sixth of Scotland and the First of England? But nothing depends on my being able to answer this except my own irritation. I know that a horse chestnut leaf has five, or alternatively seven, leaflets, and a buttercup five petals, but any curious person could get hold of the real thing and count, if they had a mind to do so. And I have never, ever, had to fill in the missing shape.