Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  'You don't mind me talking like this, do you, Carol?' she asked. 'I'd never say such things in front of your mother. But you're growing up now. You can't keep things from children for ever, can you? Doesn't do anybody any good.'

  After that, I often used to drop round in my lunch hour, take my sandwiches, and we'd sit at the kitchen table, or if it was hot, on two kitchen chairs out in the back yard. 'You need to blow those fumes out of your lungs,' Gloria said at first. 'Dry cleaning, it's not natural. A good soak, that's what things need to get them clean.' That was until I let drop that I was allowed to do my dry cleaning for free. 'Oh,' she said, thoughtfully, 'I've got a coat upstairs that could do with smartening up.'

  I didn't go when I knew Eddy was there. When Eddy came home life took on a new meaning for Gloria. There was a hurried, head-down look about her. She was always snatching off her apron and offering to make him a sandwich, a fry-up, a nice pot of tea. She didn't like Eddy to catch her doing any chores but the house had to be spotless for him. She was like a worried creature that thought at any moment it might be eaten. Eddy was affability itself. A small man, rat-faced, eyes fascinatingly close together, he swaggered around the place with his hands in his trouser pockets, whistling. The first time I went to the house in Beet Street and found him there – a surprise visit – he was outside the kitchen window, doing something to the frame that consisted of swiping it with a hammer and nothing much else. Bits of old putty flew out and landed on the paving stones at his feet.

  'Hello, Carol,' he called, cheerfully. Remembered who I was, then. But that was presumably a talent he'd had to develop, given his way of life.

  'I can't stop. I've brought these,' I said, and left a bag of jam doughnuts on the table. Gloria picked them up, vague and frowning, but I could see she was relieved as I backed out of the door.

  I bumped into Natasha Maynard in the high street one afternoon. She was pushing a pram. Beside her walked an embarrassed-looking youth called Raymond Tozer. He was about Tom's age. They were married.

  'Not seen you in ages,' she greeted me. 'Or anyone much from our class. Did you hear? Suzannah – Suzannah Grey? – well, she's gone off to work in her granny's hotel in Scarborough. Or Bridlington.' She rocked her pram back and forth in a professional manner, with one hand on the handle. The pram was huge, light blue, with shiny chrome fittings like an American car. From inside its depths the baby whimpered. Raymond Tozer gazed distractedly across the street. 'Or somewhere,' said Natasha, wrinkling up her nose, trying to remember. 'And Kay Bell's working in some sleazy pub. A few of the others are at that factory out Bossey Down way. But Mildred – guess what?'

  'What?'

  I could see that Raymond was getting restless. He had fifty years of conversations like this to look forward to, on chilly pavements and across garden fences, if he stayed the course. I could see the realization of it dawning on his still spotty features.

  'She's a pop star in London!'

  'No!'

  Natasha pulled a face. 'No, actually, she's in hospital.'

  Now I pulled a face. 'No!'

  'Fell off her bike and broke her neck.'

  'God ... Is she paralysed?'

  Named Mildred, and then paralysed from the neck down. That really would illustrate life's ironies.

  'No. Not paralysed. The doctors say she'll likely make a full recovery. She's been very lucky.' She pumped the pram back and forth as the baby's squalling increased.

  'How do you know all this?'

  'My mum works as an auxiliary up at the hospital. Sees her every day.'

  It always pays to have contacts, I thought.

  'And what are you up to these days?'

  'Me? I'm at Sketchley's.'

  'Sketchley's? I might pop in and see you, then,' she said, grandly. 'When I'm out. With the baby.'

  And I might be very glad. A visit from Natasha Tozer, née Maynard, seventeen-year-old married person and mother, even that would be welcome. There were precious few customers between the busy hours, which were first thing in the morning, lunchtime and at the end of the afternoon. People tended to see to their dry cleaning en route for other things. I had to take my lunches unsociably early or late. I kept a book under the counter. 'Don't let the customers see you reading,' the area manager warned me. Why not? Would it shatter the illusion that I was as dim as the job demanded?

  Raymond was wandering off. Natasha lingered. I think she really wanted me to admire the baby. It wasn't something I had any practice at. I peeped under the light blue hood. 'He's very sweet,' I said.

  'It's a she. Kerry-Louise.'

  'How old is she?'

  'Two and a half months.'

  I looked back up at Natasha. Raymond was nowhere in sight. I was beginning to say something else, but Natasha said, 'Don't ask.'

  Stella had a new man.

  His name was Warren. He was a step up from Dimitri, from Wally. Even from Gerald, whose airs and graces, we decided in retrospect, had been assumed.

  Warren had a house outside town and a piece of land on which people paid him to keep their horses. He had a wife, but she was in a mental institution, had been for years. He was quite open about this. 'Good God! Is his surname Rochester?' I asked, but of course no one was listening. Stella would not let on how she had met him. It was not like Stella to hide away a Man, but she was quite protective of this one. She didn't waft him into the house straight away just to prove that he existed. He was too precious to her for that.

  And she changed. Subtly, she changed. I don't know whether he wrought the change in her, if he actually made the suggestions, or if she just responded to what she felt he would prefer. If I had to find a word for what she became, it was more ladylike. First her clothes began to change. She had always been one of those people you think of as underdressed for the weather. Her blouses were too fine and see-through, her shoes always strappy and peep-toed. She never wore a coat unless it was actually snowing, which it rarely does in our part of the world. A headscarf, a cardigan flung over her shoulders, an umbrella, were her weapons against what the climate threw at us.

  Now she began with a pair of proper court shoes, filled in all the way round, still slender-heeled and feminine but not of the tart variety. Then she appeared in a twinset, not unlike the one my mother had; but quite unlike my mother's as it flowed over Stella's curves, and the cardigan – over her shoulders still, and buttoned with just one button at the throat – quivered with the movements of her body. She held herself and moved in a quite different way from my mother, as someone, I began to see, who was aware of herself and aware of men, of the effect she was having on them. By comparison, my mother was a clockwork female doll, one of those house-robots that we were always being promised by the newspapers would, in the near future, be available to take on all the squalid chores. But honestly, why bother investing millions of pounds in inventing them, when the world was full of people like my mother and Aunt Gloria, doing the job for free? Next Stella bought a dress, knee-length and fitted, but nothing like tight. It was a soft light brown, the colour of milk chocolate. Not a colour Stella had been aware of in the dyer's repertoire before. She looked – casually elegant. And rather svelte. Maybe she was getting slimmer. Losing weight, a fool for love. What a turn-up for the books.

  I thought that Warren, on the whole, was a Good Thing. Stella had grown up, and calmed down. And he treated her better than the others had done, was easy with her, didn't actually appear to mind being seen with her and meeting the rest of her family. But Gloria wasn't so sure.

  'He's already got a wife,' she said. And he was a bit well off and a bit middle class for Gloria's peace of mind. 'I don't like him. He's too polite. A bit suspicious, to my way of thinking' was how she put it. 'What could he want with Stella?' That is, if he couldn't marry her – what did he really want?

  I could have told her, given my new worldly wisdom in all things pertaining to adult relationships, but we were not that close. Though we traded gossip and opinions, and spent happy hou
rs flicking through the local newspaper or Gloria's weekly magazines, praising or shredding the reputations and looks of anyone who appeared within, we never touched on what I really thought. Warren was after exactly what Wally and Gerald and Dimitri had been after, and presumably got; they didn't marry her either, despite the fact that they were, supposedly, free to do so. What I really thought about Warren was what I could observe: that he brought out Stella's good points, and enjoyed them – her adaptability, her soft-hearted female nature, her ability to overlook or forgive almost all faults. And her sexual generosity.

  I suppose this was the bit that was unspoken between Aunt Gloria and me. Was unspoken and unmentionable.

  Perhaps Warren's wife is in here. I wonder which one she is? Perhaps she's Rose!

  38

  Discussing My Troubles

  You see, what could I say?

  I had spent all my life – at least, from ever since I could remember until my sixteenth birthday – wishing, hoping, pretending, that I was adopted. Telling other people that I was adopted. Explaining away anything I didn't like by the fact that I was adopted.

  Until the day I found out that I was.

  I could hardly go round to Barbara and say, 'Guess what? I really am adopted. I was just pretending before.' I'd been her friend under false pretences, and here was evidence of my big lie. And we weren't close, not any more.

  I didn't feel I could complain to Tillie. To her my adoption was just a rumour heard from Barbara, an ordinary rumour. Supposing she replied, 'So what's the problem?' with a shrug, and went on rolling out the pastry?

  And what on earth would I say to Tom, who I suspect never believed me in the first place?

  It was all too humiliating. And I didn't want to feel humiliated, not in front of the Hennessys.

  I wasn't allowed to discuss it with Brian. That was embargoed until he was sixteen. Not that I was in the habit of discussing much with him. I stuck faithfully to my mother's instructions. If he'd been a different kind of boy I would easily have defied her. If he'd been a different kind of brother I would have been glad to tell him, and find out what he made of the whole sorry tale. So that we could share our shock and sadness and excitement and curiosity. Or if he'd been another kind of brother altogether, a bluff and bullying sort, I might have enjoyed spilling the beans to him, and drawing out his feelings like those medieval torturers you see in etchings, slowly drawing out the entrails of their victims by winding them around a stake. But he wasn't like that.

  It was almost as if we were not brother and sister at all. We had nothing in common. I was red-gold and blue, he was dark and hazel. Perhaps she had made it up, that part of the story. Who knows what she might not have said? She had lied for years and years, lied by omission mostly, but lies all the same. 'What day of the week was I born on, Mum?' A look, a thought, a blink – 'Wednesday.' That would have been a lie, too.

  So there was no one.

  I did try to talk to Gloria. Or draw her out, at least. I thought she might be amenable. I hoped she'd have some little gems of memory stored away, trinkets she'd just love to pull out and show me. It was like Barbara and me trawling through Tillie's dusty jewel box. I was eager to see anything she had. Good or bad, pretty or tawdry. It had to be better than nothing.

  But 'Oh, I don't recall. I just remember going round to tea one time, after you'd arrived. Edie never said anything about the hows and whys of it. You know her. One day you weren't there, and then you were.'

  'Just like that?'

  'Oh, and Ted had done up the attic.' She frowned, and dipped her biscuit in her tea. 'Though that was years before.'

  'But you said she never wanted a baby. She must have talked about it sometimes.'

  Gloria shook her head. Perhaps the hows and whys of it were painful to her. Gloria and Eddy were childless. I didn't know if this was by intention, or just bad luck. Or maybe she wanted them, and he didn't. You never know. Married since she was one-and-twenty and nothing to show for it; not even Eddy, half the time. But these were the unspoken details, the secret life of married couples. I thought it so unfair that Gloria and my mother should speculate quite openly about Stella because she lacked the entitlement to privacy of the married state. Not that all married states were private. I thought of Tillie, who had had six children, eight if you included the poor lost babies, and then the op to put a stop to more. If I had landed in another family, then I would have known all. All, and maybe more than I wanted to hear, sometimes.

  I used to lie about being adopted as an excuse. A way of saying, 'It's not my fault.' It's not my fault I live here, look like this, have this mother, this father, this deeply unnoticeable way of life.

  I used it like that pendulum swing of belief – total belief, no belief – that people have about sudden changes in fortune. Gloria was convinced that one day she would win a million on the football pools, and followed with great interest the activities of those who had a big win, always commenting, 'Oh, I'd never do that, or buy that, or go there,' or 'Oh yes, that's what I'd do.' Even my father, who didn't do the pools (all forms of gambling were eschewed in our house) talked about the grand day when his ship would come in. We'll have a new car when my ship comes in. We'd build a glass porch, or have a pond with a working fountain. Or a trip to the Isle of Man. It was a way of saying what they'd do if they had the money, but also if only they had the courage and audacity and style to go with it. It was a way of saying what they'd do if they had turned out different people from the ones they were.

  And yet they used it as a dampener too. Mention anything expensive or unlikely and Dad would say, 'When my ship comes in,' which meant, in other words, no. And Gloria, if you suggested something heavenly and desirable, said, 'Oh yes, when I win the pools,' in just the same voice as she said, 'And pigs might fly.'

  So I swung between knowing, really knowing at the bottom of my soul, that I was not from them, and knowing, really knowing, at the top of my canny brain, that this was all a fantasy. That I was really just as dull and ordinary as all around me were.

  Well, all except my chosen people.

  Hanny is keen to discuss my adoption. I wish she wasn't. It's one of the few topics that make her focus on me rather than on herself. This morning she said, quite out of the blue, as no one had ever said it to me at the time, 'I wonder why your real mother gave you up to be adopted?'

  Mum told me where I came from, in as few words as possible, and then she dropped the subject, closing and pursing her lips. Signalling that nothing more was to be asked or said. And we were not a family that asked or told anyway, not a family who rolled out the words, the tales, in an endless stream of placing and framing and decorating. We were a family who behaved as if words cost money.

  Gloria told me, but what she told me were little glinting bits of gossip, items of interest to her, minute relics picked out of her past. She hadn't the mind or the education to take the wider view. Nothing existed but in relation to her, and her family, and her neighbours, and her town where she had been born and grown up and lived her whole life. Everything was filtered through the sieve of Gloria. And the mesh of Gloria's sieve was very narrow indeed.

  Hanny turned out to have a fertile imagination. She sat there with her pointy fragile knees bent up inside her skirt, and her bony wrists clasped round her knees, and her raspberry lips considering and framing questions that were all lively curiosity, and never noticing my shut face, or my tight voice.

  'I wonder if she was married? I wonder if her husband died in an accident or something, and she got ill and couldn't cope with you any more?'

  'She must have been married,' I said. 'She had two of us.'

  'Oh, yes. I forgot about your brother.'

  My brother.

  'If she wasn't married, she was a very bad girl!' Hanny laughed, throwing her head back and showing the ridges of her windpipe. 'Oh, a very bad girl. Welcome to the house of bad girls, every one of us a different kind. They've never known what to do with us bad girls.'

&nb
sp; Then 'She could have had kids by loads of different men! The authorities just took 'em away as they popped out.'

  I didn't think this was even worth answering.

  'Or I wonder if she just died? Of TB or something, or a bus ran her over, or maybe she died in childbirth. So then you were orphans and you had to go into a home.' Hanny sounded as if she were recounting a story, a thrilling story that had happened to someone else. In a book, or a film. She sounded enthralled.

  'She might not have wanted to lose you at all. She might have had to give you up. For your sakes. For the best. There are lots of reasons why women have to have their babies adopted.'

  'Or she might have been glad to get shot of us,' I said. 'And I wasn't a newborn baby.'

  'She might have been very young. I mean really young. They might have forced her to give you up.'

  'Who?'

  'Her parents,' said Hanny, with some spite. 'Or she might have had loads of other children, and you two were just the last straw. Her womb might have been hanging out, like those women before the National Health Service who could never afford to go to the doctor and didn't know what contraception was.'

  'That's just repulsive,' I said.

  'Maybe she beat you. Neglected you. Maybe they took you away.'

  I hadn't thought of this. I hadn't thought of much, to tell the truth. I'd just thought of me, tricked and stupid, adopted and really adopted. I didn't like to dwell on the idea of being ill-treated. Perhaps because it sounded more convincing than the rest. Or perhaps because it rang a bell.

  I wonder if I remember and have chosen not to? After all, it must be quite possible to choose not to remember certain things.

  One thing I do remember – approaching my fluffy pyjama case with my hands stretched out in wonder. It couldn't have been a present, it wasn't wrapped. Nor was it flattened and matted with use, but soft and white as a Persian kitten. Thinking about it now makes my heart beat faster. I'm sure this was when I was five, on that first day: it was waiting for me on my narrow little bed in my brand new bedroom.