Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  How it came about was this.

  Apparently Tom Rose had told Tom that I was madly in love with him, Tom Rose. He was very shrewd, and not at all likeable. When Tom thought that I fancied Tom Rose, it was all too much for him, and he had to do his bitterest best to muck it up for us.

  What were they up to, those two? What the hell was going on?

  If he had had any sense at all – Tom Hennessy, my Tom – if he had any use of his five senses, he would have known that I loved him. I thought he must know already. I'd thought he'd known for ages, and that was why he bossed me around and bullied me, because he knew I'd put up with it just to be near him. That I'd do anything he asked. Anything at all.

  Tom Rose was a Machiavelli. What did he want out of it? I still can't work that out. Perhaps he wanted to believe what he said – that I fancied him – and hoped that by putting it into words it would become reality. Or perhaps he just wanted Tom to believe it, knowing how Tom would react. Stirring things up, just to see the effect. On reflection, I think probably the latter. The former is too much like how a girl might act, how a girl might wish things to be.

  Maybe he wanted the reciprocal arrangement that obtained before, and knew he couldn't get it by himself. Maybe he was only after one thing.

  I can still hear the words: 'Now Tom ... Now me.' I can hear that silky tone of voice, see the sun filtering dust in strips across the room. I can hear the sound I made as I slid across the bare floorboards to cross the space between the two of them.

  So Tom set about wheedling and cajoling me, a most unusual experience, and really not bad. It certainly made a change. He set about seducing me. His long limbs were filling out, he had a man's hands and a man's jaw now, and his settled deep voice was thrilling. When I lay against his chest I could hear it vibrating inside his ribcage.

  He even consented to go out in public with me. Very occasionally we would be seen in town together. 'Oh, him,' said the girls at my school, looking at me with new eyes. They all knew, or knew of, Tom. He was a sixth-former at the grammar school. It was good for my reputation to be seen with someone as sought-after as that. That's what Natasha Maynard said, and I believed her.

  So when Tom said, 'This is it. Come on, you will have to come to bed with me now,' what could I do?

  It was evening and we were up in his room. I could hear Tillie down below in the garden, playing some wild game that was making Mattie scream. I could hear Patrick's opera music roaring out from somewhere up above. I could hear the heavy footsteps of someone – it could only be Sebastian – stumping up the stairs, patently in a mood. And I knew from old experience that they would leave us all alone, would not venture in. It would never cross their minds that here a girl and boy of certain ages, of certain dangerous ages, were alone together in an upstairs room, with access to strong drink and suggestive music lyrics and a bed that was wider than two foot six. I knew that in many a house in our town, the circumstances would call for a parental pounding on the door at least every five minutes, and in my own house a hedge away, the circumstance would never have arisen at all.

  So no one was going to come to my aid.

  'I could get pregnant,' I said to Tom.

  'Nah, you won't.' He sounded very sure. 'Virgins never do.'

  'Oh, Tom, don't be so stupid!' I said, but he just waved a little packet at me cheekily and added, 'Not with one of these.'

  I'd seen the old dead-jellyfish things washed up on the seafront. And once in the black mud of a lovers' lane that Barbara had shown me. To me they seemed the antithesis of love, but they were its living proof. Proof that people did such things. Proof that people were wild to do such things, again and again, even in the most uncomfortable and undesirable of places. And there were girls in my school who were taking the Pill. They went to their doctors complaining of irregular periods, and were prescribed the Pill. There were side effects: perfect twenty-eight-day menstrual cycles and, by the by, no babies. There were girls in my class, it was rumoured, who were already on it. One girl, indeed, had grown enormous breasts where previously she had hardly any, so we had to give credence to the rumour. The oestrogen, apparently. It chilled me to think of people my own age having that knowledge, that very particular knowledge, of someone else's body parts. And someone else of theirs.

  'We can't,' I said.

  'Why not?' he asked, and when I didn't answer, he just shrugged lightly and put the packet down.

  I heard Tillie in the hall, calling, and then Sebastian pounding back down the stairs, joyful again.

  And I did love Tom, love him very badly, and if I didn't cede to his requests, God knows, there were girls in shelters on the prom who very likely would.

  So I lay down like the Rokeby Venus on his tartan blanket and gave him what I hoped was a most inviting smile.

  Of course, he fucked those girls he met on the prom. He'd fucked them before and he'd do so again, and never mind the fact that he had me there for the asking. Me, who loved every last molecule of him, nice and nasty.

  But he slept with me, as well, because I was so convenient, only next door and in his house so much of the time.

  And because it was one in the eye for old Tom Rose.

  34

  Onward and Upward

  And then Isolde was gone. She'd gone to London to work as a personal assistant. Maybe it wasn't what her grammar school teachers had in mind for her – a capable girl, clever, definitely university material – but she upped and left at the end of her lower sixth year and moved to London. She had found herself a job through a contact of their friend, Dill Lopez-Lawrence, and somewhere to live before she went. She didn't tell anyone at home of her plans until they were settled. They wouldn't have stopped her, not the Hennessys, but she wanted to do it all by herself, or so she said. Though to me it looked like she had help every step of the way.

  She sent me a postcard. She sent it to my house. The picture was a portrait of Lady Jane Grey from the Tate Gallery. On the other side it said:

  Dear Caro,

  V. happy here in London. Flat-sharing with Tamara. Just round the corner from us is Gordon Square where V. Woolf used to live. I'm enjoying work at a big insurance company – from my office window you can just about see the Thames.

  Love, Isolde

  My mother couldn't read her dash of a signature and guessed Isabel. 'Who's this Isabel, then?' she asked, holding out the card to me.

  'Just a girl from school.'

  'Big insurance company. She's doing well for herself.'

  This is precisely why I had to guard my life. Everything was deemed to be open for inspection. There was no room for secrets, for true privacy, in our household. Only the self-conscious privacy of the long dressing gown, the bolted bathroom door. If I hadn't kept a double life, I wouldn't have survived.

  I was gratified that Isolde had remembered me. Perhaps she had sent postcards to everyone, luxuriating in her new independence, boasting of her freedom. But I didn't think so, somehow; I knew that she'd singled me out. I recalled that Tamara was the name of Eugene's girlfriend or ex-girlfriend maybe by now. I hadn't a clue who V. Woolf was, though, unless she meant General Woolf who fought in Canada, and whose Christian name I don't think I ever knew.

  Of course, I know now. I've read Mrs Dalloway. But at the time I'd never heard of Virginia Woolf, and if Isolde possessed her books she must have spirited them away with her into the Van Hoogs' half of the house. You see, my knowledge depended on what the Hennessys were interested in, what they had accumulated over the years. And if the Hennessys hadn't got it, I didn't get it.

  Sebastian got through to the grammar school, and Mattie was no longer at the Wren. He had gone to a special school – 'an extra-special school' as Tillie put it – where his flapping hands and ever-present wellington boots would not just be ignored in the tumult of careless welcome that was the Wren's educational approach. He'd gone to an extra-special school, where they were training him out of his boots, if not his other passions.

  And
Sebastian had grown ugly. I was so disappointed. His face appeared to be pulled and stretched apart by bones that didn't fit. The proportions had gone all wrong, leaving his best features – his eyes, his narrow disdainful nose, his well-drawn mouth – insignificant and upstaged by his new ploughshare jaw, his jutting eyebrow bones, the slabs of his cheeks.

  'It's OK,' Barbara said when I remarked on it. 'It will turn out OK. Sebastian looks just like Eugene did when he was little – not that I knew Eugene when he was little, of course – and now Eugene's dead good-looking. But when he was younger – when I did know him – he looked terrible. It's just puberty,' she said, shrugging. 'Everyone has to go through it.'

  About everyday things, Barbara was so knowledgeable. Yet she never so much as opened a book or gave any weight to her schooling, as far as I could see. Where did she get it from?

  She tapped her forehead. 'Intuition. And TV.'

  Tom Rose went away, too, to do an engineering degree at some university in Wales. I couldn't remember the name of the place, I didn't much care to. Tom was staying on at school to do re-sits. His A-level grades had not been very good, he had disappointed his teachers. It was hard to tell if Patrick and Tillie were disappointed in him, their attitude to all their children was so breezy, and besides, they knew of alternative strategies. They always had something up their sleeve.

  At the same time that Tom slackly passed his A levels and I took my woeful CSEs, Barbara, at the convent school, was sitting O levels. Eight of them. She only passed four, and needed five at least to stay on in the sixth form. Oh, Barbara couldn't go to work in a dry-cleaner's shop. Or Woolworth's, or Gough Electricals, or selling ice cream in a booth on the seafront. But the Hennessys had something up their sleeve for her: a crammer.

  I had never heard of crammers before. 'It's all right,' Barbara said, wafting the flimsy piece of paper with her results on at me, 'I'm going to a crammer.' I felt I'd had this conversation with her before, years ago, by the roundabout at the end of our road, after the Wren had let her down over the eleven-plus. For Barbara, as for all the Hennessys, there were always other opportunities.

  If I sound mean, I was feeling mean. I was feeling the pinch, the pinch of different circumstances.

  The crammer was in the next town, and Barbara rode off each morning with Patrick in his old white Austin van, though she usually returned by train in the early or mid-afternoon, long before he reappeared. She began to dress differently, to murmur lines of songs I'd never heard. Her wrists clinked with Indian bangles and her fingers were heavy with greyish silver rings. She wore the sort of make-up she'd always been rude about on the model girls in magazines. It was put on with a skill that showed great practice, and a steady hand. She was mixing with a new crowd now, a crowd, she implied, much more exciting than before. Both girls and boys studied there, even people up to the age of twenty, and the teachers were known as tutors and were called by their first names, and some by nicknames. I tired of hearing about Trevor and Linda and Mark and Dizzy even quicker than I had tired of hearing about Sister Benedict and Mother Francis-Xavier. My education was doled out in bland all-purpose places, where we were herded in and out like silly sheep, indistinguishable to anyone except our own mothers, forgetting all we learned and instantly forgettable ourselves, quickly replaced by the next generations. I could never get excited about it. Whereas Barbara's seemed destined to take place in highly specialized institutions, inward-turning and self-preoccupied.

  Not unlike this one.

  I'm sure that Hanny wants me to ask about her wrists. I'm sure that's why she keeps accidentally-on-purpose letting me see them.

  On the other hand, I really don't want to ask her. There is some information which I don't care to know. And you can't un-know something once you've been told.

  My thoughts about it are these, for what it's worth. Hanny is a sad person, she has a deep well of sadness inside her, like those sweets with a hard-boiled outside and a melted sugary centre. Sometimes the inside oozes outside. I don't suppose there's anything you can do about it. Some people are just like that.

  How profound. I must share my thoughts with Group some time. Really drive them into supernova.

  35

  Information

  What did my mother want of us? She wanted children, but they had to be neat and tidy and no trouble, outside the house or in. She didn't want us to have a life, except for a pared-down child's life, of school and well-behaved play. She saw that her duties as a mother were to feed us, house us, keep us clothed and clean, see that we went to school and church. See that we did our chores and knew our place.

  Actually, she probably thought she was turning out model citizens. Doing a duty to self and state. Well, hadn't she taken in two little orphans of the storm? Two unwanted children, of irresponsible parents, and turned them into perfectly respectable members of the community? Give that woman a medal. Give that woman a round of applause.

  Poor thing.

  This is how she told me about the adoption: on my sixteenth birthday, in the middle of exams and a week before I was due to leave school and go and work in the fumes of the dry cleaner's. After the presents on my plate at breakfast, but before the English exam that morning, she said, 'There's something I want to talk to you about. Later.'

  'Why not now?'

  'Later. When there's more time. When Brian's not around.'

  Oh, I thought, I know what this is about. Sweet sixteen, never been kissed – better know what's just around the corner. I went off to school confident enough. With Tom as my tutor and all those books, I thought there was nothing she could tell me that I didn't already know. I laughed when I thought about how she might phrase it.

  Back home in the dry silence of the early afternoon (exam over, free time – the weirdness of being out of school when others were bent over desks) she made a pot of tea in the stainless steel teapot and brought it into the lounge. Oh God, this was going to be serious! I had to keep my smile from giving me away.

  'I'm having a talk with you today, which I don't want repeated to Brian.'

  I nodded, grave and grown-up.

  'It's high time you knew where you came from.'

  Little shudders of laughter were running through my shoulders but I managed to keep them still.

  'I've talked to your dad, and he agrees with me.' She paused, fiddling with the cups, rearranging them before pouring out the tea. You could hear it flowing into the cup, the house was so still. 'You're sixteen. You're old enough to know now.'

  I know I'm old enough to know, I thought. I know. Visions of Tom's creased bedsheets swam before my eyes, and him in them, and I was only glad that she couldn't read my mind.

  'You aren't ours.'

  The words were in Russian, in Latin, in Martian.

  'Not by birth, I mean.'

  The interpreter in my ear was beginning to filter through, but the time-lag was troublesome to comprehension.

  'I mean, we adopted you, when you were little. We adopted Brian, too. You aren't ours, either of you.' She sat back, with her hands neatly together in her lap. Neither of us drank our tea.

  The joke was over. I sat with my mouth open. The clock from my mother's mother's house (no relation) ticked away. Somewhere outside a car accelerated.

  So. Not sex. Not how babies get here. Just how we got here.

  'You are brother and sister, though. I mean, really brother and sister.'

  No questions, m'lud.

  Where did they think I was, all that time, when I was next door? They so obligingly swallowed my lies. Where did they really think I was?

  Or did they just not care?

  I can see that being adopted must make a difference. If you have a baby, give birth to a baby that you have created between you, you must find ways to accommodate its failings and frailties. It is of you, after all. If it grows up with an unappealing character, an unattractive face, you still have to love it, to find a way of loving it. But if you adopt a child and it turns out not as you expected,
what do you do? Especially if you adopt it at four, at five, when certain nasty habits may already be entrenched. Especially if you haven't much of an idea about children, what they are like, how they develop, how naturally unpleasant they can be, in the first place.

  So I think – I tend to think – that when I got to thirteen or fourteen or fifteen and I wasn't all they hoped for, maybe they just discounted me. Maybe they focused their minds on Brian, or on something else entirely, the crossword, or the garden. And let me drift away.

  Lorna has always asked the questions, Lorna has always wanted to know, and I have always evaded her. It is quite easy to evade her.

  Dr Travis, dear Dr Balloon-Head, is more difficult. I think he is a bit like Tom Rose being Banker in Monopoly, watching our moves and silently tending his piles of banknotes. And then, without noticing exactly how it has happened, you realize he has tipped the balance of the game, that he holds the power.

  That he has the information.

  'Pharmaceuticals.'

  We were walking round the garden paths, Hanny and I, trying to think of the most beautiful words we knew. It had rained all morning and we were desperate to get outside, so now here we were, she in her Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood coat and me in my Aran jumper, hugging ourselves to keep warm. Layers of grey clouds and white clouds kept blowing over, and through them the sun could be seen as a clear disc, a yellow plate. We could look at it without our eyes hurting.

  'No, not pharmaceuticals,' she said. 'Pharmacopoeia. Now there's a beautiful word.'

  'Tangible.'

  'Alchemy.'

  'Vestibule.'

  'Vestibule!' She started laughing. 'I always thought that meant a kind of underwear.'

  'My brother hated the word flavour,' I said. 'Well, it turned out he hated it. One day he just squeaked when someone said it, and shouted, "I can't stand that word. It makes my teeth ache!"'

  Actually, it showed he had depths I'd never suspected. I never thought anything affected him, especially anything irrational, like the sound of a particular word, and I never imagined that he had the power to describe how anything made him feel. I thought he was the most basic of human beings, functioning like a dog or a plant, moved only by currents such as hunger, tiredness, cold, the sap rising and falling according to the time of day, the time of year.