'Do you always have to do everything people tell you?' I pressed him.
'No.'
'But that's what you're doing! Don't you ever want to shake people up? Give them a bit of a surprise?'
'Don't get so angry, Carol. You're always in a stew.'
'But don't you?'
'What for?'
'Just because. Just to show you can.'
'Well, I could if I wanted to,' he said, not looking at me.
We were standing outside on the lawn. He glanced up at the great wall of the hedge, and scowled, and then turned away from me. 'I'm going to get the shears,' he said.
'Brian!' I called after him. I almost shouted, and then thought better of it. We never shouted this side of the hedge. Somebody might hear us. But I wanted to grab him and shake him. I wanted to shake him till his head jangled about on its shattered neck and his eyeballs fell out, like some cartoon creature.
I caught sight of Barbara one day, coming down the steps of the bridge at the station. She must have just got off the train, back from a day at the art school. She wore a long silky dress like the one Gloria is wearing in her wedding photograph, heavy satin, gathered beneath the bust, a smooth skirt flowing to her feet. Gloria holds an armful of flowers and Eddy, firmly, in the crook of her elbow. Barbara held a big art portfolio tied with black tapes. Her dress was a yellowish ivory, like something hidden away in a cupboard for a long time and then brought out into the glaring daylight. The hem swooped and drooped. Over the top she had on a ragbag crocheted cardigan, much like the one she used to wear to the Wren – maybe the very same one, since the sleeves were stretched tight around her upper arms. Beneath the uncertain hem of the frock I could see scarlet clogs. Her hair, henna-red, hung to her waist, still without benefit of comb. She was wearing sunglasses. They made her eyes blank, hidden. She walked right past me, scanning the traffic for a space to cross the road. She didn't say hello or nod, or even seem to glance in my direction. Perhaps she hadn't seen me? Or failed to recognize me?
I don't think for one moment that was true. I 'd have recognized her anywhere.
When his re-sits were over and he was waiting to take up his place at university, Tom spent six months as, variously, an assistant house-painter, a waiter and, finally, a van driver for a soft drinks supplier. He rode around all day with his arm out of the van window, ending up with a tanned right arm and a pale left one. Well, it seemed exotic to me. I stroked the silvery hairs on his tanned arm as we sat together, drinking beer, in the sunshine on the prom. Tom upended his bottle above his open mouth, catching the last drips, and then balanced it carefully on the upright of the railings in front of us. 'Finito,' he said. He lay back, wiping his mouth with one hand. 'You could get yourself another job,' he said to me. 'You don't have to stick where you are. You could be a waitress.'
But I had seen those waitresses at the restaurant where he worked. They were college girls, university girls on vacation, they had a swing to their walk and a gleam in their eye. Their names were Sarah, Suzannah, Julie, Elaine. That's why they were chosen. Their high heels clicked like flamenco dancers' and they earned a fortune in tips. 'More tips than me, especially when they twitch their bums,' Tom complained. And laughed in lascivious delight at the remembrance of them. I hated those girls. But whatever he said, Tom, in his snow-white shirt and black waistcoat, with his pale curly hair just perfect for the year, got more than enough tips.
'You could learn to swing your hips.' He patted my thigh and laughed. 'Get some hips first and then learn to swing them.'
'I couldn't,' I said. 'They wouldn't hire me. I'm clumsy, I'd drop things.'
It was an excuse. I didn't even like their eyes when I walked into the place. They looked you up and down, summed you up in a split second. Summed you up and flicked on to the next person to walk in. Dismissing you.
He didn't know. I had tried once, swallowed my pride, sashayed in, asking. Eager to mention my previous experience, of dealing with customers, of keeping a ready smile. Some hope.
He had never known the truth of it. It wasn't just there for the picking.
I was hoping that Patrick would ask me to sit for him again. I thought he might get me some work modelling at the art school, I'm sure he could have. He could have said to all his colleagues, to his students, 'I've found a wonderful life model. Very patient, very still. Born to it. You must meet her.' He could have said, 'She's the perfect inspiration, the perfect muse. You won't be able to resist her. Naked or dressed.'
I might even have proved brave enough to out-stare Barbara, if I'd had to model for her class.
But then I remembered that what he'd actually said was 'Come on, you're not busy.' You'll do.
And I thought that maybe, all down the centuries, that's what it was. Rembrandt's Saskia, Elizabeth Siddal, Camille Doncieux (later Mrs Monet), Vermeer's golden-haired girl with the egg-shaped face. Perhaps what was the most compellingly lovely element about them all was their convenience. 'Come on, you're not busy' – blind to the babies, the baking, the master's socks to darn – 'you'll do.'
Isolde often came back to visit, as if she couldn't keep away. Didn't like it when she lived there, longed for it now she'd gone. Maybe she missed Barbara, and Mattie and Sebastian. Maybe she missed her mum and dad. She'd be suddenly there in the golden sunny evening, leaning over the veranda rail and pulling the roses towards her, examining them critically, as if she still lived in the house. Smart, jewel-like, a finished creation: her own work of art.
When she hugged me I caught the scent of her perfume, deep and strong. Not like the patchouli everyone my age reeked of. And she hugged me when we met, taking my upper arms in her hands and leaning close like someone highly practised in the social arts. I fear I was a bit wooden. She was nicer then, gracious to everyone in the house, not carping and disdainful as she had been. She played the perfect guest.
I always thanked her for her postcards. 'When you come to London,' she said, 'we'll go to the Tate – have you been there recently?' I mumbled something and she carried on. 'You'll love the Hayward, and the special exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery.'
Yes, I'll love them. I will. And for a while it seemed a certain thing, a thing that would unavoidably happen – though I didn't quite know how – in the natural course of time and events. I would go to London, I would be a single girl, I would have fun. I would continue my education. In some way, some very special and totally deserved way, my real life would begin. I just had to wait for it to start.
In October Tom went to London. He was allocated a room in a student hall of residence. But if he'd rather, he could lodge at Eugene and Tamara's. (They lived together now, so Isolde said, in a crummy flat in Notting Hill.) Or with Arthur and Dill, if he cared for more homely comforts. He had a choice. I waited for my invitation, from him or from Isolde, to sample the heady sights of London, to taste the wicked fruits.
None came.
I'd been brought up to be fatally polite, not to be pushy, never to impose. I waited, and waited.
Tom arrived home, on Christmas Eve. I'd thought it would be sooner. Barbara told me that university terms were shorter than school terms, and the schools had broken up the week before. I'd been counting off the days: no Advent calendar for Christmas, only for Tom. He had a small beard, which didn't suit him. It made his pointed chin appear more pointed, and because it was pale it looked transparent and fake; a young lord out of amateur dramatics. It didn't matter, my heart still leaped to see him, the familiar way he moved, his long body and long legs. Despite the ridiculous beard, my heart still jumped. Tom Rose was home too, a strapping man now, in a striped rugby shirt.
I hadn't got a Christmas present for Tom. It was difficult to get him anything that was meaningful enough, without laying myself open to ridicule. I felt unequal to any choice. Besides, any present got from round here, anything small-town or suburban, would be beneath Tom's notice. In the end I settled for a bottle of whisky, bought as we sailed arm in arm past an off-licence, o
n our way into town. I stepped out of the shop and handed it to him, in its paper bag, pressed it into his chest, with a laugh, as if it meant less than nothing.
He hadn't got anything for me, of course. No little London knick-knack, nothing exotic from far afield. But then that's boys for you.
In the last year Tom had developed a taste for pubs and clubs. There weren't that many of them in town, but there were enough. Or we borrowed Patrick's van and drove into the neighbouring town, which offered more. We drank and smoked, and in the seedy darkest ends of dark pulsating rooms, Tom bought all kinds of pills and powders. There was always a fold of paper or a bit of silver foil in his pockets, just like small boys who constantly have twists of cellophane from boiled sweets or the gold wrappers of cream-line toffees about their persons.
But now he found the brightly lit pubs and the dirty sweaty clubs were not up to his new standards, or even as satisfyingly, seedily bad as he recalled. He sat with us at a wet, brass-topped table with his pint of beer and sneered over the top of his hand-rolled cigarette. When I asked him how was London, he just put out his lower lip and shook his head, as if he couldn't possibly say. I think even Tom Rose felt left out, surpassed, as if, of all of us, Tom had chosen the grown-up option, the world of London, and glamorous emaciation, and unspeakable depravity. He was certainly thin. When I lay next to him on his tartan blanket I could play the piano on his ribs. His sexual technique had changed. He'd learned a thing or two at university. I can't honestly say that it had got any more tender.
Suddenly it hits you. You realize how stupid you've been. You begin to understand that all those wonderful things you were counting on to happen – because they must happen, mustn't they? otherwise life would be unbearable – won't happen at all. You won't come across ten thousand pounds just lying in the road, and you won't get that beautiful snow-white horse. Nor will anyone spot your special talents – do you even have any? – and whisk you away to a future worth all that waiting. To fun. To life.
You begin to really grow up now. Childhood is over, finished. Finito. Sorry – no sneaking back to the safe confines of dreaming how it might be one day. One day has come. You look around and realize that this is life, horrible boring horizonless life, what you see before you. Tough luck. Hard cheese.
It just took so long for the thunderbolt to strike me. Maybe I simply didn't want to see.
Perhaps I shouldn't generalize. Maybe those amazing things do happen to some people.
So Isolde never asked me, maybe never intended to ask me, asked me only as an automatic part of her newly acquired social graces. Or perhaps I'm being unkind. Perhaps she thought that everybody went down to London sometimes – surely they must? – and that when I was there I would surely drop in. Or that I would be there as part of Tom's entourage. Tom would invite me. Tom, who leaned his chin over my shoulder or put his hand roughly through my hair as he was speaking to someone else, as if I was his pet or part of his furniture, Tom would surely ask me there.
Only Tom never did.
*
Lorna tells me Hanny Gombrich has gone. She tosses this remark away like someone throwing a winter scarf off on entering a warm room. She tells me – when I decline to ask – that Hanny has had to go away. The treatment here wasn't working, she says.
I say nothing. I even give her a little smile.
But when I'm walking down the corridor away from her, I feel sick. I hope that Lorna isn't standing in the doorway of her room, watching me. My hands tingle. My feet keep walking but I don't know how.
This is how it is with friendship. This is how it always ends. They go away, they always go, because something else looks a better option, and because they never loved you enough in the first place.
43
Library Books
My God, there is a library here!
You know who told me about it? Wet Lettuce. Of all people, Wet Lettuce enjoys a good read.
Which means she'll be disappointed.
I have only just found it, a small room, shut away, windowless, as if they were ashamed of it. There are two shelves of books, half empty, and a trolley standing in the middle of the floor, taking up most of the space. One of those trolleys they use in the public library when they are putting back all the returned books. It has upward-sloping shelves at the top so that the books can lie with their spines to the ceiling, easily seen. At the public library, people always hang around the returned-books trolley as the librarian fills it up, waiting to catch a glimpse; as if the books that other people have chosen are likely to be far superior to anything they might choose themselves, from off the ordinary shelves. Personally, I never use the public library, not unless I need to look something up. Or if I can't get books elsewhere.
This trolley is empty, except for a square biscuit tin and a blue biro, the transparent plastic sort where you can see the tube of ink inside. The people in here could do things with a biro like that. All kinds of things.
And I've been subsisting for all this time on Little Women. I've read it four times so far. Jo is the obvious favourite, the one you identify with. Personally I think Marmee is a stinker. You're supposed to like her but she's so kind and noble it positively reeks. Laurie, of course, is lovely. He's made for Jo, you'd think. Laurie is the boy next door.
So what kind of books might they have in here? Safe books, neutral books, soft pappy comforting books, like the kind of food that builds up poor undernourished bodies, damaged systems, digestive tracts that must not be put under the slightest stress or strain. Complan books.
Not something like Jude the Obscure. That might give people ideas.
When I say ideas, I mean what my mother meant by the word. She didn't mean things you might get from Plato or St Augustine, or even Marx and Engels. Philosophical, political. Her definition was more all-encompassing. She never liked ideas. Ideas were matches in the wrong hands, fireworks bought by under-age children from less-than-scrupulous shopkeepers. Dangerous, potentially damaging, troublesome. Ideas were not neutral. 'You'll be giving her ideas,' she might say, or 'They've got ideas above their station.' Heaven preserve us from that.
The whole point of books, it seems to me, is that they give people ideas. They furnished me with ideas for years, ideas I would never have picked up otherwise. Ideas philosophical, political, sexual, metaphysical, ideas general and ideas specific. They stretched the inside of my head like a very large foot pushing its way into a very tiny slipper. And whosoever the slipper fits ... Well, you don't get to marry the prince, but it certainly is your passport to other worlds, beyond the kitchen hearth and the cinders.
No wonder my mother was suspicious of them.
So what do we have here? To lighten our darkness, to lighten our burdens in this vale of woe? Well, there were several romances, to judge from the vivid covers, but no doctor/nurse ones, not very healthy in this context. Various animal stories, a paperback autobiography of someone who moved from London to Cornwall and had a happy life, an abridged book-club version of the Pickwick Papers. Something uplifting about a nun. And a book of light verse, covered in soft blue blotting paper. I could feel the strawberry-flavoured nourishment smoothing its way through my body already. I wondered if this was the kind of dairy produce Hanny Gombrich was allergic to. I looked at my arms to see if I was coming out in blotches. They all have that feel of cheap books, too, books no one cared about sufficiently, when bringing them out, to print them on good paper, with reasonable margins around the blocks of text. The paper has that rough, pulpy feel, as if it is made of pressed breakfast cereal, and already it's turning yellow. The pages won't open well, they're stuck too tightly to the spines. These books don't actually want to be opened and read.
I have borrowed the volume of light verse. Someone has written the title on the paper cover in the turquoise Quink we all favoured in the third year at secondary school. The verse is all very inoffensive. Still, it makes a change.
I borrowed it and I signed it out in the exercise book on the library tr
olley. Someone had already ruled the columns. I wrote the title of the book and my name and the date I borrowed it. Well, no, not my name. I put Hanny Gombrich. Only because she's the one person here whose first name and surname I know.
Ever the dissembler.
The other night I saw an ambulance pull up. When there is any urgent business to be seen to they don't bother with the hundred and twenty shallow steps that wend their leisurely way through flower beds to the big front door. There is a service road that comes in round the back of the buildings. I can see it from my room. An ambulance drew up and a couple of men in uniforms sprang out, and opened the back doors, and disappeared. After a bit someone was stretchered inside it. Doors shut, driver jumps up in the front. Five minutes and it was all done. The ambulance drove smoothly away. No flashing lights, no sirens.
And now Rose is absent from Activity.
First Hanny, and now Rose. It's getting lonely in here.
I wonder if Hanny went home? I refuse to ask. Or have they sent her to some far more specialized place, where they've strapped her to a bed and plugged her with tubes and pumped the very life force back into her? Where they purée roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and proper gravy and flood her system with nourishment? I can imagine the kind of stare she would give them, a basilisk stare, full of the bitter knowledge of humankind, that would turn them to stone inside their crisp white uniforms.
Actually, I can't imagine Hanny anywhere but in this place, on our usual seat, on the afternoons that were fine enough for them to let us out into the gardens. Hanny only exists here, and then.
Perhaps I made her up.
Question: you're redecorating your room. Would you choose (a) a strong modern colour scheme? (b) pastel shades and pretty florals? (c) plain walls and floor to show off your collection of valuable antiques? or (d) keep to the same as before but freshen it up – you don't want to spoil the homely atmosphere with its family photos and mementoes?
Living In Perhaps Page 30
