Living In Perhaps (11 page)

And then there were the women.

It wasn't only Tillie who was nude, but a large blonde woman
only partly draped with a red shawl confronted visitors to the
dining room, and along the passage a thin dark-haired girl sat
upright on a hard kitchen chair, looking resentful and cold.
Nipples and pubic hair, just like two eyes and a mouth, right in
the middle of the picture, staring back at you. Barbara noticed me
scurry past this one every time I had to follow her to the kitchen.
'For God's sake, what do you want on the walls?' she said. 'Puppies
and kittens with bows round their necks!?' I felt myself blush.

She told me it was the habit of artists to paint human flesh.
They had done it for centuries. It was high art.

'But why does it always have to be female flesh?' I asked.

'It isn't,' she said. 'Think of Michelangelo.' Which I couldn't, at
that stage.

Tillie told me, another time, that there was nothing wrong with
painting people naked. It was a challenge to the artist, she said,
and it also got something deep and true about the sitter down on
to canvas. The deep and true thing it seemed to me to get on to
canvas was the terrible pendant nature of their breasts. I couldn't
imagine how the painter could stare at some intimate part of the
sitter, then stare at the canvas and carefully paint it, then stare
back at the part again in order to get it just right, without thinking
thoughts other than colour and shape and line. And the sitter
sitting there, aware of the painter's eyes on their intimate places,
and having to not twitch a muscle all the while.

So I learned to take my cues from the Hennessys. Nobody in
the house turned a hair, walking past naked women with their
breakfast bowls and their dirty washing, naked women
their father had spent hours and hours staring at and turning into
art.

'We'll form a club,' Barbara told me. 'It'll just be us in it. We won't
let anybody else join.'

Which was flattering, but – also – disappointing. What was the
difference, then, between our being best friends and being in a
club? I would have liked Isolde to be allowed in, or even the little
boys. Oh no. 'We'll be exclusive,' said Barbara. 'I'm leader. You're
second-in-command.' But with no other troops to order about,
my rank felt a bit worthless.

We constructed a camp out of sticks and blankets and old apple
boxes, down among the fruit trees at the end of the garden.
Barbara wanted to build a tree-house for our club headquarters,
but the trees proved too stunted and shaky for that. So we had to
make do with a prolapsing bivouac with a grass floor, which filled
up with sheltering spiders and earwigs overnight. We crammed
ourselves inside and Barbara turned on her torch.

'Close the door. Let's make it dark in here.'

I pulled the flap of blanket as far across the opening as I could.
Our backs bulged out of the sides of the camp.

'OK, we need some rules, and a badge, and a secret sign.'

I nodded eagerly.

'And we have to do a blood brotherhood thing, and take a vow.'

'Blood brotherhood?'

'Yes. I'll show you. Tom and Tom Rose and another boy used to
have a club, in the summer house. They took a blood brotherhood
vow. But then they spent all their time being horrible to the other
boy. Three's not a good number for a club.'

She pulled a rusting penknife from her pocket and made me
hold out my hand. She scraped the blade across the base of my
thumb, several times, unsuccessfully. It left a white line, fading
quickly as the blood rushed back into the unbroken flesh. 'You're
meant to draw blood,' she said, 'and then shake hands, mingling
both your bloods.'

'Oh.'

'We'll just do the vow. I'll get a better knife another time.'

I noticed she didn't try it on herself.

'We have to swap some secret that no one else knows, and then
vow not to breathe a word. Ever. That proves our trust.'

I wondered what secrets Tom's club had divulged, and how the
third boy had felt about trust.

'That must be Rule Number One,' said Barbara. 'Never to break
that vow.'

We spent a happy half-hour drawing up a list of rules, and
inscribing them on an oblong of hardboard scrounged from the
summer house. 'We'll meet three times a week, at the club headquarters,
here. Rule Two – you must give the sign before entering.
Or if you meet another member of the club, anywhere. That's
Rule Three.'

We decided on a badge, which was two apple leaves joined to a
twig. This was my idea and I was proud of it: it was germane to
our camp under the apple tree, also easily available, and inconspicuous.
We didn't want anyone else to spot that we were
wearing our secret society badges.

We couldn't agree on a sign. Barbara showed me her idea.

'But that's just like the Brownie salute,' I said.

'I don't go to Brownies.'

'Well, it is.'

'What's your bright idea, then?' she challenged me, folding her
arms and sitting so far back that one side of the camp fell down.
I made a feeble attempt at some other sign. Barbara looked unimpressed.
'God, now I'll have to mend
all this
!' she said, and
turned her back on me.

It was occurring to me that clubs never did work out, whether
you had two members or three.

'There's no point in having a sign, since it's just us,' Barbara
said, once she had hitched the blanket up to a tree branch again.
'We'll have a noise, though, which you have to make before
coming into the camp. To prove it's us.'

The noise was an owl-hoot, made through clamped thumbs
into cupped hands. Barbara was better at it than me.

'That'll stop Seb and Mattie coming in,' she said.

But it didn't. Once they got wind of secret activities down in
the orchard, they launched an offensive on our camp. They raided
it when we were absent, flinging the rules and our scrap of carpet
out. The next day they jumped on it when we were inside. There
was a fight, with flailing legs inside grey blanket, and Mattie had
to be wrestled with to get him to part with the biggest stick, which
he was whacking and smacking into the mass of heaving bodies. I
think I enjoyed this bit the most. I was taller than all of them, and
surprised at my own strength. My lack of experience in fighting
did not prove to be such a drawback.

When we had beaten them off and rebuilt the tent, Barbara
took a brooch from the pocket of her shorts. It was shaped like a
leaf. She unfastened the pin and stuck out her palm. She scraped
it back and forth until a tiny intermittent line of red sprang from
her skin.

'Now you.'

I bit my lip. The brooch pin felt hot, scratching, and finally
stinging. I had borne it. I had shed blood.

'OK, shake.'

We clasped hands.

'What's your secret?'

I had been thinking about this. Indeed, I had been dwelling on
it, worrying about it, turning possibilities over in my mind since
the day before when Barbara first mentioned it. The big one was:
I wish I
was
adopted, but I'm not – I lied. And I'd look her in the
eyes and find the sympathetic gaze of a real friend, a true friend,
who understood. Only I wouldn't say this. It was the secret of a
very exclusive club, one member only: me. So, stumped for an
answer, I said, 'I never tell my mum and dad where I am when I'm
here. It's my big secret. I don't want them to know.'

'Why not?'

Because they wouldn't approve of me mixing with you, with
your family. That was another thing I couldn't say. Barbara
wouldn't believe it – such effrontery – even though it worked the
other way. Barbara was always right, and always in the right. She
could conceive of no other possibility.

'Because I want to keep it secret,' I said, half true. 'Because I
want to keep you to myself.'

'Ooof!'

Barbara dissolved into a grey lump, and the semi-darkness
inside the tent became blinding blue day as the blankets were
dragged off me. Two feet in hard brown sandals came up in my
face as Barbara, imprisoned, rolled over and over with Sebastian
clinging round her blanketed head. We'd been the target of
another guerrilla attack.

I never got to hear Barbara's deadly secret, if she had one. I
never got to hear her swear 'Trust', and shake a bloody hand over
my secret. We didn't bother to rebuild the camp that day, and by
the next she had lost interest in a club which demanded meetings
three times a week and adherence to a list of at least twenty
tedious rules. I never got to be a real blood brother.

The funny thing about friendship, I learned, is that it contained
an element of
hatred
. What you loved most in your friend was
what you admired and wanted to have. I loved Barbara's self-confidence,
the way she never thought before she spoke but just
blithely spewed out her opinions on every subject under the sun,
on things she knew about and things she must have been quite
ignorant of. I liked this ceaseless stream of information and
judgement. I didn't even mind her high-handed bossy ways. She
never asked herself, 'What will people
say
?', which was refreshing
after the caution and censoriousness of our household. I felt she
was teaching me how to live.

I loved her great bouncy carelessness, but when it bounced off
me I was desperately hurt. Her bumptious confidence could make
me shrink. She always made out that it was Patrick and Tillie who
had no time for suburbanites, for small-minded people, for
tedious conformity. But it was Barbara who dwelt on the subject
– bungalow kids, lace curtains, miniature windmills in front gardens
– picking and pulling at it like a splinter, but just driving it further
home. It was always she who raised the subject, as if she wasn't
content for me to stay in disguise. She had to remind me of my
origins, tease me with my danger. She was my very best friend, yet
there were times when she made my heart feel as heavy as a rock.

So how did I explain all those hours, all those precious hours
spent through the looking glass?

'I'm playing out!'
Playing out.
It would do, to begin with.
Playing out was where my mother wanted us to be, not under her
feet. Just as she wanted us off at school unless we were almost
dying of something; otherwise we would have to be under her
metaphorical feet, lying beneath the bedclothes, requiring to be
plied with Disprin and barley water and to have our burning foreheads
felt at regular intervals.

And later, once my career swung secondary school-wards, I
claimed homework as my excuse. My parents didn't appear to
notice the disparity between my keenness to attack homework
projects in other girls' houses, and my reluctance and resentment
– which descended like fog, heavy and clinging – about undertaking
any at home.

I remember that when Brian was little and just learning to tell
the time he was given a book to help him. It had come from a
church jumble sale, and I loved to look at it, even though I could
already tell the time. It was about a mother and her two children
and how they spent each hour of the day. Every new page had a
clock-face to mark the passing hours. The children themselves
were dull, two ciphers. Both had bunlike faces, and blank eyes like
ha'pennies, brown and flat. But the mother – the mother was
quite another thing. Elegant, lovingly drawn, her hair up in a
French pleat, button earrings, a shirtwaister dress. Her lips, in
two curves of the pencil, were like a lipstick print, her figure as
hourglass-smooth as a Playtex girdle. And high heels. High heels
all day long, except at two o'clock, when she kicked off her shoes
and lay on the equally elegant sofa, reading and writing letters. At
two o'clock the boy and girl obediently took a nap, though the
boy was shown playing on his bedroom floor. Perhaps
he
was
allowed to get away with it, so long as he stayed in his room. Then
at three they sprang up, donned coats, and took a walk in the
park, fed the ducks. The mother had flung on a duster coat and
spiked a small hat on top of her French pleat. Though the wind
blew a bow-tailed kite in the background, Mother's hat stayed
firmly put. And at six Father came through the garden gate, baggy
pinstripe suit and briefcase, waving a rolled-up newspaper in
greeting. His wife stood waiting in the doorway behind their two
offspring, a hand on the shoulder of each, smiling her welcome.

I loved it, I loved the order and routine, the heavenly
predictability of it, the way the mother revolved around them all,
except for that precious hour at two. But I loved her best for her
carefree, carefully honed look. Her fifties
Vogue
model look. I can
see her now, a Cecil Beaton version of a mother, if only her heels
were even higher and if she leaned back a bit more from the hips.
The sort who in reality banished the children to Nanny, so that
she could lunch with her girlfriends at noon, peer stylishly
through binoculars at the two o'clock runners at Ascot, and at six
take cocktails with broad-shouldered men called Freddy and Boy.
Midnight would find her dancing in a slinky backless frock,
glancing unseeingly at us over her smooth white shoulder as she
whirls past.

The book didn't actually go up to midnight. It ended at seven
o'clock, with the children tucked up in their little beds. As all good
children should be.

I don't know what happened to it once Brian learned to tell the
time. I loved that little book. I used to pore over it for hours.
Perhaps that was where I got the germ of Carolyn from, and the
sort of mother she'd have.

And
my
mother? My mother did not want her hours to revolve
around us. She had no idea of the work tiny children involved. Or
perhaps she had just an inkling. Maybe that's why she plumped
for house-trained pups, aged four and five. If we were outside,
safely burning off our youthful energies, so much the better for
the wear and tear on her upholstery, her carpets, her nerves. If
only Mum had worn high heels and a duster coat and taken us to
the park, if only a be-suited Dad had swung his briefcase cheerfully
through the gate at six, perhaps we would all have been
happy then. Perhaps none of this would have needed to happen.