Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  'I didn't know you had a brother,' Hanny said.

  There was a silence. I had to ask, then, what she left me room to ask.

  'Do you have any brothers or sisters?'

  'No, I'm an only child.'

  'My brother was adopted, too,' I explained. 'We are actually brother and sister. I mean, we were brother and sister before we were adopted. We were adopted as a pair.'

  But she wasn't listening, as she often isn't. She said, squeezing her arms to her emaciated chest, 'So, if I wither away to nothing, they'll have no one left.'

  I looked at the sun scurrying furtively through the clouds. I didn't say anything. She never leaves me anything worth saying.

  36

  Sitting

  It was two days after my sixteenth birthday that Patrick asked me to sit for him. He might have been waiting till I was of that age before he asked. But how could he have known?

  And how could he have known how angry I was? That I was just in the mood, what with my newly acquired information, just in the right mood to shed my old skin. Shed it roughly, shrug it off and kick it aside.

  I'd seen him drawing someone before. Two friends of theirs had dropped in on the way to some grand garden party, and he'd drawn the girl. She was in a dashing pink and black dress, with a cartwheel hat of crimson straw. He stood her in front of the old summer house and sketched her like lightning, in oil pastels, to get the colours in. We were playing French cricket, running up and down, but stopping to look over his shoulder every now and then. His model laughed a lot, holding on to her hat, which was taking off in the breeze. Her friend, a gangling, fair-haired, balding man, sat in a deckchair and drank from a bottle of beer. Sometimes he got up and handed the bottle to the girl. When he moved, the thin strips of his hair blew upright in the wind.

  I saw the painting only briefly, when Patrick was manhandling it into his van one morning. He'd put it on a tall canvas; she was laughing, one hand up to her hat. A beer bottle stood on the doorstep of the summer house behind her. 'Selling this one,' he said, grunting as he hefted it on to the floor of the van, and then spread a white cloth over it. 'Doting lover. Still, he's getting a bargain. What'll it be worth when I'm famous, eh, Caro? When I'm dead and real famous, eh?'

  So I said yes. Yes, I would sit for him.

  I had never been in the attic before. We were not allowed. The only place in the house that was forbidden to us. Patrick's castle must remain unbreached, the drawbridge pulled up, the portcullis firmly shut, when he willed it. Barbara had only described it to me.

  I knew he had painted the bare brickwork white, and I imagined that – and the windows in the gable at either end, since it was knocked through into one long room – would give him the light he needed. But when I got up there, I found there were two huge windows set into the sloping roof, following its angle. The light felt as if it was pouring straight down from heaven.

  'My north light,' Patrick said, while I stood there, eyes and chin raised, letting the pure white light of the overcast day flood down on to me. 'My good north light.'

  If you stood on a chair – which I tried – you could see out, over the meadow next door, over the woods, over the top of the oak tree Tom and I climbed, inland to the low hills, like little hummocks. But most of all you could see the sky. Endless grey. Trackless wastes.

  He told me to get down, sit down, sit on the chair (an old kitchen chair, very hard) just anyhow, however I sat naturally, and he began to draw me. It was the oddest thing, Patrick Hennessy, king of bonhomie, retreating into something else, something like a glass column, inside which he was strict and cold. I could see then – begin to see – how sitters might not mind his stare, might find it just clinical, just for practical purposes, of getting this angle right and this weight of flesh correct. I was all of a piece. My face was not prettier than my right foot, my eyes were not more important than my collarbone, the folds of my jeans where my knees bent had to be rendered with as much delicacy as the space between my nose and my upper lip. His eyes went, washed, scraped, over the surface of me; not seeking to look at me, or put me at my ease and make me laugh, which he sometimes did downstairs.

  'Don't look so miserable, now,' he said. Breaking the spell. A whole half-hour had passed. I caught his eye. His eye was twinkling as it did downstairs. I preferred it when it didn't. I much preferred it when he kept things clinical. He started talking about his other pictures I might have seen about the house. The seat of the chair was very bony. My right foot was beginning to cramp. 'Now, the one of Arthur, Arthur Lopez-Lawrence, that's a grand one. Arthur was my best man, you know, when I got married to young Mathilde.' He didn't pronounce it harshly like Matilda, but made a breath of the H and ended the E like a sigh. I never thought of Tillie like that. Young Mathilde. Her name pronounced as a caress. I thought for the first time how much he must really, really love her.

  The drawing was very interesting. To my mind there are three ways you want to look at a drawing of yourself. First is to see how another person might see you; then to see if it is, as a drawing, any good; then, last and most pressing, the vain bit of you just wants to know how you look, if you are pretty, or plain, or even – hold your breath – beautiful. A proper painter will not, I think, make anyone beautiful. A proper painter will be too interested in the fall of the light, the tone of the skin. A natural awkwardness of posture is just as desirable to them as a gorgeous fluidity, maybe even more so. John Singer Sargent was painting for money, flattering his sitters, their husbands and his own reputation. Rembrandt, I do believe, was not.

  Patrick Hennessy had drawn me as a girl perched on a hard chair. There was another girl on just such an uncomfortable chair, in the kitchen corridor, only she was naked. I looked as thin and awkward as her. Not pretty, at all. Not a Carolyn sort of girl, no, never. Interesting, perhaps. I looked angry and resentful, as if I had just gone over and kicked the painter in the teeth and was wondering what would happen next. My wide-set eyes, I could see from his soft fluent line, were not the wide-set eyes of my father and his sisters. What I had always believed were inherited were only my own.

  So maybe he had got me right. Maybe he had seen inside, to the deep true nature of things. Maybe he did have a painter's eye.

  He didn't turn that one into a painting. It remained a sketch. I wish he had given it to me, but I don't know what he did with it.

  The next one he painted. He came into Tom's room one day, when I was on my own, sitting on the window sill with a book, and he said, 'Come on, you. You're not busy. I need someone,' and he carried me off. So much for the value of reading. He put me on the old ratty green sofa that he had up in the attic, a piece of nineteen-twenties furniture with very palpable springs in the seat. He'd spread a red shawl diagonally across it – the same red shawl, I feared, that featured so briefly on the fat blonde nude downstairs – and he stuck me on that, with my back against the armrest and my feet up on the seat. 'Here, you can have your bloody book back,' he said, chucking it at me. 'Maybe that'll make you relax. At the moment you look like Mrs Scrubbit out of The Woodentops.' Which made me laugh, and so of course he'd achieved his aim.

  'I might say that the Muse is upon me,' he went on, glancing to and from me to the canvas. 'But it's not so romantic as all that. I have to paint like other people have to eat. I get a pain in my belly if I don't.'

  I thought this was romantic tosh as well.

  He painted me, on the red and green, in my washed-out blue jeans and my white T-shirt. He made my hair a sort of reddish gold and my face very white. I was looking over the top of the book at him. In colour I hardly recognized myself. If I looked like anyone, it was my cousin Mandy.

  I think he was better at drawing than painting. He put the paint on too thick, to my mind. And I can't stand that. But his drawing line was soft as a feather and instantly knowing.

  I don't know what happened to this one either. My sitting for him was never mentioned, it was not a topic around the household. What he did up there in the atti
c was sacred, and sacrosanct. Until it appeared on the walls. Or slid away, under cover, in the back of the white van.

  In the little room off the hallway, Lorna leans nearer. 'Tell me about the house,' she says, at last. 'The house next door.'

  I look at her. I am bored with this. Already bored.

  'Let's talk about the fire. Tell me who was there.'

  She's whispering. I don't respect her technique. It's as if she's expecting me to whisper back. Give up my secrets in whispers.

  Of course I tell her nothing. It's private.

  37

  Gossip

  After I learned that I had been adopted, I started going round to Gloria's.

  Our social patterns had fallen apart. No Saturday afternoons, no Sunday teas – well, hardly, any more. Bettina had other fish to fry, and so did Mandy, these days. My little nuclear family – which wasn't really my family – seemed to retract into itself, with gardening or dozing over the papers replacing the pattern of regular visits. I was working at the dry cleaner's from Monday to Saturday, and Brian was often out, about his own business, though what that was I hadn't a clue.

  The first time I dropped in, just before midday on a Saturday (I'd got tired of mooching round the shops to fill my lunch hour) I found Gloria in apron and slippers, a yellow duster in her hand. For the first time ever we sat in the kitchen, drinking weak instant coffee and eating Rich Tea biscuits straight from the packet. It felt different from those well-behaved family teas. More relaxed, as if I'd entered Gloria's world, the real world of the house in Beet Street, hitherto unknown. Turning sixteen, like turning eleven, had taken me up a notch in Gloria's estimation.

  'It wasn't my idea to leave it so long before telling you that you were adopted,' she said. 'But then Ted never listens to me.'

  Although my father was their big brother, I got the impression that Gloria and Stella thought him weak, under my mother's thumb. They couldn't turn to him for advice or help, except over matters like plumbing or a leak in the roof. But then, I felt that they thought all men a bit weak, a bit lacking, when it came to the important things: matters of the heart, or family relationships. Stella wanted a man, like a badge, to say that she could get one, not because he would be of any actual use to her once he was got.

  'My idea was to tell you gradually,' Gloria went on, 'get you used to the notion. Not hold back till some special occasion and then blurt it all out in one go.'

  Though I couldn't see how you could pass on such information gradually, it did seem the kinder method. But I didn't venture to comment.

  'I think adopted children should be told about it from the start,' she said, firmly. 'I think they should have their questions answered.'

  But what if they're not in the habit of asking questions? What did you do in the war, Daddy? and Tell me about your birth pangs, Mama, were not topics that would go down well in our household. We never knew why they were so reticent, we just knew that they were.

  'And then not telling Brian at the same time. I mean,' she went on, 'what a secret for you to have to keep! What a responsibility! Good thing you're a reliable sort of girl. Trustworthy.' I hadn't considered it like that until she mentioned it. 'I think he'll take it hard,' Gloria continued, 'when he does find out.'

  It had never occurred to me that Brian would take it hard. It never occurred to me that anything much went on in Brian's head, intellectually or emotionally. He was the most transparent of boys, the most opaque. I took the last Rich Tea biscuit and thought about him. I suppose all brothers and sisters grow apart as they get older, get into the extreme polarity of teenagerhood. For us, it began with my defection to the Hennessys. I withdrew, when I could, from our joint world of garden and pavement and bikes and Mandy. And even before that, I'm sure we were just going through the motions. We did things together simply because we were both there. Not because we were alike, joined at the hip, at the brain. But because we were both lonely, I suppose.

  What was he like? There wasn't much to tell. Like me, he went to the secondary modern, the boys' version. His school tie was always tightly knotted, black with narrow stripes of bottle green and purple. He wore the black school blazer which went shiny at elbow and pocket, and was supposed to wear a cap. I'm sure he would have worn a cap, except that the bigger boys always pinched them off the heads of small inoffensive pupils trying their hardest to follow school rules. He had grown taller, but not tall. He was still tank-shaped, stump-shaped. His round brown wire-rimmed glasses had been changed for ones with square black frames that were meant to look more grown-up. His hair was still cut brutally short when other boys' hair was growing long and shaggy. Boys were sent home from school for having hair over their shirt collars. The next year it was for having hair two inches over their shirt collars. Youth was rebelling, but Brian didn't join in. It was as if he couldn't be bothered with being a teenager. I suppose he had friends, but I hadn't seen any. Perhaps, like me, he kept them out of sight.

  'I suppose it's your mother's decision to leave telling him till he's sixteen, too,' Gloria went on. 'He's a sensitive boy, Brian. Lord knows how he'll take it, when she tells him.'

  Sensitive! I was tired of this. I wanted someone to worry about how I was taking it. Gloria's character analysis was not worth a light.

  'Thank goodness you're a sensible girl,' she said, rooting through the cupboard for something more to eat. 'Always have been.'

  She came out with a packet of Jacob's Cream Crackers. She couldn't see my face as she spoke. I'd had no choice but to be sensible, I thought. Not with my upbringing. My rebellions were really only slight, and never out in the open. True, I had given up Guides, piano, I had ducked out of the constant church-going. I had given up, in the last two years of school, doing homework and sometimes even going in at all. My attitude to school had become much the same as Barbara's to the Wren – you didn't learn anything much while you were there and nobody seemed to notice if you weren't. And I told the odd lie. But underneath it all I was a sensible girl. Look at all the shameful things I could have done – got pregnant in the fourth year like that girl who kept coming back and hanging round the school gates with a little shawl-wrapped bundle, as if she'd done something to admire. Or I could have turned out like Suki Wooster, who ran away with a thirty-year-old man, failed to respond to the pleas of her anguished parents, and had to be publicly dragged home from Weston-super-Mare a fortnight later. Or the one with the dyed black hair in the year above who got badly into drugs and could be seen in the high street sometimes, ghost-faced and draggled, hanging round with thin young men who were clearly up to no good. Beside them I was as pure as the driven snow. Nobody saw what I got up to. There were no awful consequences to my actions. I was the perfect daughter.

  But Gloria was kind. She settled back down at the table with the cream crackers and the butter dish. She gave me information.

  Such as 'They didn't want a baby. Not a newborn baby. They were pleased when they heard you were four and five. Edie's never been one for babies. Doesn't know what to do with them. You should have seen her when Bettina tried to put Mandy into her arms, just a little scrap in a pink bonnet. No fear! Not your mother.'

  And 'He ran away from home, once, Ted, when he was twelve or so. I remember there was an awful kerfuffle. He got himself hidden away on one of the fishing boats that used to work off the beach here in those days, and no one knew he was there till they were out at sea. He came back after a night and a day. He got a belting but we had plenty of mackerel for tea.' I couldn't imagine my father doing anything so exciting. I certainly couldn't imagine him telling it as an adventure, or even a moral tale. I wish he had told us. Maybe he was ashamed of his reckless youth.

  Gloria's mouth ran away with her, after just a cup of tea. She loved gossip. Perhaps it was because I was such a good audience. I didn't have my mother's prim puckered mouth if things got too plain-spoken, I didn't have her raised eyebrows and warning lowered lids – because the children might overhear. There were no children now, and no E
die present to put a spoke in things with her churchy ways and her snobbier-than-thou.

  And so 'When Ted got married, he was twenty-six, and poor Edie was thirty. Your uncle Bob gave Edie away because her father was dead by then. I remember her mother, in this awful peacock-blue costume and a matching hat with a little veil. She wept all the way through, and when we were standing there for the photographs she kept saying, "I never thought I'd see the day." Which I didn't think was very flattering to Edie.'

  It was of huge importance to Gloria that 'poor Edie' was as much as thirty before she got hitched. And older than her husband-to-be, as if that was somehow questionable behaviour. Gloria was sweet one-and-twenty when she married Eddy, much good that it did her. But it gave her an edge. She had been a successful young woman, competing and winning in the great female stakes.

  'They met at a church outing. Your father was only there to help drive the bus. We've never been a church-going family, not much of one, anyway. Ted was helping Albert Hamer, who'd hired a bus with a dicey engine and didn't know the first thing about mechanics. They were on a trip to Ely Cathedral. Got talking to Edie on the way there, never looked back. I don't know. What people see in each other!' She laughed and shook her head and swung at a wasp with her tea towel. 'I think she'd given up hope. Well, thirty, in those days ...'

  I could see that it might have been humiliating for my mother to find she'd married into such a family. Gloria, Bettina, Stella, they measured each other and themselves by their ability to catch and keep a man. (It didn't really matter too much what kind of man, so long as he was formally enlisted.) I could see that she'd need all her weapons to survive, her religion, her standards, her tiny social edge. And then turning out not to be able to have children. At least, I assumed this was the reason why they adopted us. Gloria didn't volunteer any reasons, and I wasn't about to ask. Gloria had her own taboos, her own big silences.