Living In Perhaps (26 page)

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 attic 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.

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 Edie 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.

'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.