Living In Perhaps (28 page)

'That's Trudy,' I said. 'She's all right.'

'One of the staff, is she? I thought they'd wear uniform.'

'Some of them do.'

A long pause. I wondered if we could send Trudy to fetch coffee
and biscuits. But it wasn't really the sort of place that provided
room service.

Question: your favourite aunt comes to visit. Do you (a) lay on
a slap-up tea at home? (b) take her out for a meal? or (c) ask her
what the hell she's doing here?

Stella gazed at me. I felt her eyes roaming up and down, maybe
in just the same way that I had scrutinized her. I wondered what
she made of me.

'Thank you for coming,' I said.

'You have to be family. They won't let you come unless you're
family.'

'Oh, I didn't know that.'

But then it was becoming clear that I didn't know anything.

'How are you?'

'OK.' I thought of what Hanny had said.
Don't tell me you
thought we were OK!?

Stella ground her cigarette out, and looked as if she wanted to
reach for another one right away. She twisted round to the
window, but you couldn't see anything out of it. I wondered if
there were bars hidden behind the blind, in case anyone
was tempted to make good their escape. But then there weren't
bars on the garden, there were just flower beds and
hedges, and the eagle eyes of the staff. I looked round for Trudy
again, and caught a glimpse of her broad tie-dyed back.
I wondered how long these visits were supposed to last.

'No one else has been to see me,' I said, making my voice sound
breezy.

'No. I know.' Stella's eyes were cast down now. 'You're not cross,
are you?'

'I didn't expect them to.'

My mother had visited me, once, in the place I was in before
this, a day or two after I'd been taken there. She wore her
mackintosh buttoned up, and a hat, as if for church. She had
her standards, despite everything. She whispered, through tight
lips, 'How could you do this to us?' I was pleased that she never
came again.

Stella asked, 'D'you mind if I have another smoke?'

I shook my head. She clicked her lighter nervously several times
before managing to make a flame. I had never really got the habit
of cigarettes but that first curl of smoke smelled beautiful to me.

'I could come again,' Stella said. 'If you wanted me to.' Her eyes
were cloudy blue and doubting. 'I drove over. It's quite a nice
drive. The different countryside, and so on.'

'Yes. I'd like that.'

She exhaled a long plume towards the ceiling. She was still
clutching the lighter, and for something to do she held it out to
show me. 'Warren bought me this.'

'It's nice.'

Stella remembered something then, and quickly took her hand
away.

'Warren's good to you.'

'He's great.' She was picking up her handbag now, girding her
cardigan more firmly round her frame. The last thing she did
before standing up was to lean forward and decisively stub out
her cigarette.

'Have a nice time in Spain,' I told her.

'Oh, I'll see you again before then.' She was halfway to the door,
and through the glass panel Trudy stood to attention.

'It's nice to see you, Carol.' Now that she was on her way, the
words seemed to flow more easily. 'You eating all right? Getting
enough fresh air? Is there anything I can bring you, next time?'

'A book,' I said.

'A
book
?'

Trudy had the door wide open now, a look of bovine patience
on her face.

'What kind of a book?'

'Oh, any book,' I said. 'A thick one. A nice thick one.'

'Why don't you want to eat?' I asked Hanny today, in Activity.

We were making snowmen with our clay. They're the easiest
things to make, one big round blob topped by one small round
blob. Then you can cut the details of eyes and mouths and
buttons with your fingernails, if you have any.

Hanny bites her fingernails right down. They're shallow and
boat-shaped and set deep in the stubby tips of her fingers. I hadn't
really noticed this before. You would have expected her to have
long, delicate hands and slender almond-shaped nails. Even if you
bit almond-shaped nails they would still look all right. Hanny has
the hands of a person who has been forced to go grubbing
through rocks and earth for the whole of their life.

I had lowered my voice to ask her, but clearly not low enough
for Hanny.

'For God's sake, Coral!' she growled at me. 'Not
now
.'

I shivered when she said my name.

It was hardly any time before Patrick asked me to sit for him in
the nude.

I sort of knew from the very first that it would happen, that it
would have to happen, but I told myself that really he wanted me
there in my jeans, on kitchen chairs and shawl-bedecked sofas,
that my wide-set eyes and golden-red hair and bony knees in
faded blue denim were quite enough. And he was always painting
people clothed, clothed and busy, clothed and just sitting there,
musing or reading. I hadn't posed on the veranda yet, or at the
kitchen table. I hadn't had my go with the blue striped bowl.
There were plenty of alternatives to work through before we had
to come to
that
.

But just like with Tom, it was very hard to say no.

Hadn't his wife and his daughter educated me all about it?
What were my arguments against it, given the weight of artistic
tradition and the evidence right here in the house that nobody
minded at all?

'It's a bit cold,' I said. It was October, and chilly up there.

'Would you like to go down by the fire, then, the nice bright fire
in the sitting room?'

No, of course I wouldn't. Thank you very much.

I sat on the sofa, which he had covered in blue this time. I
leaned my jaw on my hand, and my elbow along the green plush
arm. I crossed my ankles and kept my knees together. I stayed as
still as I could, which was utterly still. It was very much like waiting
to go in and see the headmistress. Except that my nipples were
standing out like doorstops with the cold.

I didn't particularly want to see what this one looked like. I
knew how he saw me by now, I was acquainted with my degree of
attractiveness, or otherwise.

And he always slapped the paint on too thick.

Maybe if Rembrandt had asked to do me stepping out of the bath,
or Velázquez, a half-torso, I would have let my shawl drop and
looked tenderly over my shoulder at him. They would have let the
light melt over me, like cloth-of-gold, like finest lawn, clothing me
before the eyes of others. Shielding me with centuries-old dust-in-light.
I would have shone, and been glad to do so.

But Patrick is like someone making shapes with clay. He
plasters scraps together, leaves his thumbprint sometimes, makes
flesh as choppy as a windy day in a maritime study.

I wonder what Tillie would have painted like?

I mentioned to Barbara that he'd painted me in the nude. I just
wanted her to know that I could do it. She was astonished.

'Good God! You wouldn't get me agreeing to that,' she said.
'Not that he'd ask me anyway. I'm his daughter. It'd be like incest.'

So thank you for that, Barbara. Yes, thank you for that.

Another time he painted me naked, standing up. At least this time
the weather was warmer. It was just after Easter and the temperatures
had shot up, sending everyone out into the sun with their
white arms and legs on show in unaccustomed summer clothing.
I had to stand up under one of his roof lights, with the spring
sunshine pouring in over me, leaning against an old-fashioned
upright cabinet he'd recently acquired. He never bothered to
paint his nudes caught in the act of washing or dressing, as if
to give an excuse for the acres of bare flesh, but had them standing,
sitting or lying, staring back at the artist, empty-handed and
aimless.

There was something wrong with my pose. He came over to
rearrange me, moving my left arm, then my right, interfering with
the angle of my feet, then coming back to touch my jaw, my neck,
my chin. His hands felt rather warm, very dry, and, just like a
doctor's, were completely unembarrassed. Just as he drew his
hand away from my chin he brushed my cheek with the side of
his thumb. Accidentally, or otherwise.

Brushed my skin like he pronounced
Mathilde
, the slightest
sighing caress.

At the end of the session, I decided to be brave and bold. I had
got my clothes back on by then. 'Do you ever sleep with your
models?' I asked, briskly, as I bent to do up a tennis shoe.

He was cleaning brushes. 'Absolutely,' he said, 'I swear by it,' not
bothering to look up. He spoke just as if he was saying, 'I swear by
linseed oil, or paraffin, or real beeswax,' or whatever the tools of
his trade were. 'Except, of course, the men.' And then he looked
up, and gave me a Hennessy kind of grin.

I hurried away down the attic stairs. I thought of what Barbara
had said: 'It'd be like incest.' I thought of the fat blonde nude, and
the thin dark one. I thought of his late-night comings and goings
and the voices round the house that I could not identify. And I
thought of Tillie.

Which makes me think of another time, several years before. It
was autumn, quite cold, but we were sitting out on the veranda in
a patch of sun, turning up our faces like basking seals, or elderly
trippers in the seafront shelters. There was Barbara and me, and
Tillie in the swing-seat covered by a blanket, and Mattie asleep
with his head in her lap. We were doing some word game, I-Spy,
or B for Botticelli. (I had enough education to cope with the latter
by then. I knew who Botticelli was and could offer M for
Michelangelo all of my own accord.)

In a pause while we gazed around searching for objects
beginning with M, I heard the descending squeals of laughter
from up above, peals and squeals of what could only be described
as a
musical
laugh, something I'd only come across before in
literature, and only second-rate literature at that.

'Mackintosh,' I guessed.

'Where?' demanded Barbara.

'It's what the pony wears in very bad weather.'

'But he's not wearing it now, is he?'

'Minestrone,' said Tillie.

'Oh, come
on
.'

'Meteorite. Mandolin,' said Tillie. 'Marguerite of Anjou.'

There was nothing out there beginning with M. The laughter
fell in peals and rolls, arpeggios of laughter, on and on.

'Who
is
that?' I was forced to ask, though usually with the
Hennessys I retained an air of casual detachment, as though
nothing in the world could or would surprise me.

'Freddie.'

'There's nothing beginning with M,' said Tillie. 'We give in.'

'Don't be so
boring
,' said Barbara. 'Look
harder
.'

'
Fred
die?'

'Yes. Are you really looking?'

'How can it be Freddie?' I asked. The musical laugh was clearly
female. It stilled for a moment, and then came gurgling again, this
time on an ascending scale. As if naughty fingers were tinkling up
her ivory backbone.

'Short for Frede
rica
,' said Tillie in a flat voice. 'Mistletoe.'

'There isn't any mistletoe.'

'I thought there might be but my eyes aren't good enough to
see it,' said Tillie, in a conciliatory tone. 'Not as good as yours.'

'Who's Freddie?' I asked.

Barbara gestured with a flick of her head. 'The fatty in the red
shawl.' Her head flicked towards the dining-room window. The
big nude. The big fat red-shawled nude. Frederica. 'Come
on
.
Keep guessing.'

'Metal. Metal as in barbed wire,' I said.

'No. Give up?'

'We give up,' said Tillie.

There was another sort of squeal, a quite different sort of
squeal, from above. Tillie put Mattie's head aside from the blanket
and jumped up.

'Give up,' I said.

We heard Tillie running down the back veranda steps.

'It's
marguerite
. They're still in flower, just about,' said Barbara,
pointing to a grey clump with two straggly white flowers on show.

'Well, I didn't know that's what they're called,' I complained.
Mattie sat up, scratching himself.

The squeals had disappeared now. All was silence from above.

'Tillie almost got it with Marguerite of Anjou.'

'You should have let her,' I said.

We could hear Tillie. She was chopping firewood down by the
summer-house step. Chop chop, chop chop.

'They don't like me, you know,' Hanny told me. 'They think I'm a
pain in the neck.'

'Who?'

'Travis, and Moira, and Mike. And the rest.'

'Not all of them, surely?'

'They've got me down as Un. Co. Operative. They'd be happy
to see me dead.'

'Not
Mike
. He's so wet, he wouldn't wish harm on a
fly.'

'Don't you believe it.'

As if the mention of his name had summoned him up,
Mike appeared on the lawn to gather everyone in. The others
assembled docilely. We were on our usual bench, hidden on three
sides by hedges. Maybe he wouldn't see us.

'I'm not going,' Hanny said. 'I like it out here. And I hate it in
there.'

She kicked off her shoes and put her bare feet up on the seat,
hugging her knees. 'I think we should go on strike. Stay out here
all night.'

I looked up at the sky. 'We'll get cold in the night, and wet if it
rains.'

'You've got no spirit of rebellion, have you?'

'I wouldn't say that. I'm just being practical.' She was the one
who was always shivering.

'We're OK in our little corner. We'll be just fine.' Hanny made
both her hands into pistols and aimed them at the figures on the
lawn. 'We'll be like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They'll
have to surround us with troops to get us out. I loved that film.'

'I never saw it.'

'You're joking.'

'I'm not.'

'Where is it you live – Timbuktu?'

'We used to have a cinema in the high street, but it closed down
because of a leaky roof. When it opened up again, they'd turned
it into a bingo hall.'

'No kidding?'

'I've seen
The Sound of Music
, and Cliff Richard in
Summer
Holiday
.'

'Poor you.'

Mike was walking steadily down the path towards us, holding
out his arms like someone driving cattle. 'Sorry, you two, but it
really is time to go in.'

'We're not coming. You'll never take us alive.' This time Hanny
raised a shotgun, and squinted down the sights.

'That's not funny,' Mike said.

But Hanny let him have both barrels anyway, right in the guts.

We aren't allowed to go into each other's rooms here, though I've
often walked slowly past the open doorway of Hanny's. She's got
the same blue-checked bedcover and curtains as me; some people
have green. On the wall-shelf she has arranged a photo gallery.
Her parents, grandparents, numerous cousins and uncles and
aunts, the family cat, her grandmother's cairn terriers, all in silver
frames. They watch her push the food around her plate and
practise sleight-of-hand with her sleeves.

I've got no such thing. Our family were not much given to
photography, and they weren't that keen on displaying the results.
In Gloria's house the only ones I remember were a touching
picture of her and Eddy on their wedding day, and two posed
studio portraits of her long-dead mother and father hanging
above the sideboard in the front room. Taken in their early
twenties, when they were engaged but not yet married, they faced
each other, looking lugubrious and far from young. Sometimes, if
she was doing the dusting or putting away knives and forks in the
cutlery drawer of the sideboard, Gloria would chat to them: 'All
right, Mum? All right, Dad?'

'You can't ignore them,' she told me, quite seriously. 'It
wouldn't be polite.'

At home the only photos on display were of Brian and me, aged
seven and eight, in what must have been our peak year as satisfactory
offspring, taken by the school photographer against a
sky-blue backdrop. Both of us in neat uniforms, my hair not yet
long enough for bunches, Brian's wet-combed across his chubby
forehead. They stood for years on top of the piano, not looking
down on me as I practised but gazing away across the room, as if
desisting from comment. All the other family photos were kept in a
single album, hard to fill, with snaps of us in front of stately homes
or picnicking in windy fields on our days out. A few of Bettina's
wedding, and an old one of Stella, Gloria and Eddy in deckchairs,
with the big clock on the prom recognizable behind them. Maybe
Wally, or another of Stella's unpromising beaux, took this snap,
crouching down with the Kodak and instructing them all to say
'
Cheese!
' The rest of our annual school photos were tucked inside
the back cover. There were no pictures of us as babies (of course) or
of Mum and Dad in that blank time before we arrived.

The Hennessys went in for paintings, not photographs. But I had
one record of Tom, taken in the automatic photo booth that
Woolworth's installed after they ripped out the old tea bar. One
day when we had nothing better to do, Tom and I crammed inside
and posted our coins. We squashed our faces together and
arranged our expressions in the mirror, waiting for the flashes to
start. After the fun Tom could barely be bothered to wait for the
results to drop through the slot. 'We'll look like gibbering idiots,'
he said, leaning against the booth with his arms folded
aggressively, putting off any other potential customers.

I waited, and I picked up the strip of four tiny photos. In one
Tom was grinning like a death's-head. My eyes were huge with the
flash, except for the last one where they were screwed up, laughing.
I didn't keep that one, or the death's-head. I snipped them up,
but carefully scissored between the remaining two, and gave one
of them to Tom. I don't know what he did with it. In mine Tom
just looked like a pale and ugly boy with a bad perm. But it was
the nearest thing I had to a picture of my love.

Every summer Brian went to Scout camp. Stayed for a week in a
damp tent with five other smelly-footed boys. One year I said to
Mum, 'I'm sleeping in his room while he's away. It's OK. I checked
with him and he said yes.'

Of course I hadn't checked with him. He wouldn't have
approved. Very jealous of his territory, was Brian. As if he had
something to hide.

So for a week I slept in the built-in bed up near the stars. The
ceiling sloping over me felt strange. Even in the darkness I could
feel it there. I was aware of myself up high, like on the deck of
some old-fashioned ship, a vessel of exploration, the
Pinta
or
the
Santa Maria
. Breasting into the waves with me dozing at the
helm, out on the bowsprit, up in the crow's nest. It was away from
every other room, every entanglement and obligation in the
house. You could breathe. No wonder Brian liked it up here. He
never had to sleep downstairs in the belly of the house, like a slave
in a slave-ship. I left the windows open so that the smell of the
night could drift around me, and I heard the night sounds come
in. You couldn't hear that kind of thing from my room. The bird
hoot, the fox yell, and sometimes the wonderful sound, like a
powerful zip unzipping, of a motorbike engine tearing away up
the main road.

Bikers hung out at the café by the roundabout. During the day
it was family time, trippers welcome – bring the kiddies in,
madam, plenty of room! But in the evening, motorbike boys
assembled in the forecourt, swaggering round, gunning their
engines, shouting out in rough voices. And Mandy had been seen
there, on the forecourt, hanging out with greasy bikers. It was
Suzannah Grey who told me, when we were in our last year at
school.

'That Mandy Burton – she's your cousin?' she said, stopping
abruptly in front of me in the corridor one day.

'Sort of cousin. Distant cousin.'

'What's she like?'

This was a fatal question to be asked at school; a cryptic
question. You could never be sure if the person asking was a
sworn enemy or a bosom friend of the person being asked about.
The only thing you could be sure of was that they had some good
and as yet hidden reason for asking. I took the politic way out and
gave the smallest shrug.

'Does she go with greasers?'

'
I
don't know.'

'You know the transport café by the roundabout?'

I nodded.

'Saw her there, getting on the back of some dirty great motorbike.
Bloke looked about forty.
How
old is she?'

That was the reason, then, the delight of scandal and gossip, the
satisfaction of rubbishing someone's reputation in front of their
kith and kin. Publicly, in a corridor seething with other girls. I
wasn't quick enough to think of asking how Suzannah saw her,
what Suzannah was doing in the vicinity. My best retorts are only
ever in my head.

So Mandy had felt the call in her blood of her poor dead
motorcycle-riding father. I could see her there, in my mind's eye,
all too easily. Pinched white face under the brilliant lights, gum-chewing
jaw hard at work, bump-and-grind hip jutting out,
bantering with bikers. Great big bulky men in studded waistcoats
and fingerless gloves, with ratty beards and stubbly jowls. Dirty
hands and black-rimmed nails. She had found her niche, her true
home. God knows what they made of her. Skinny mascot doll to
dangle from their handlebars? Baby delinquent in need of a good
fright, or a firm hand? Maybe they just took her home to her
mum. They say there's honour among thieves.

Not that there was any among the ones I knew.

I didn't mean to waste time thinking about Mandy while I was
up there in Brian's room. I meant only to sleep, afloat, try it out,
while I could.

When he came back from camp he was angry with me. I didn't
tell him anything, but I think Mum must have let something slip,
mentioned it in passing – 'Oh, that was very kind of you, Brian,
letting your sister borrow your room. Not that I can think why
she'd want to.' And he was furious! But he showed his fury in sly,
cold ways. He trod heavily round the house for days, not attempting
to speak to me unless it was necessary. He'd pass the salt when
asked, but leave it just outside my reach. He'd turn out the light if
he left a room and I was still in it. He never said anything about it
at all. He never accused me of taking his room, sleeping in his bed,
trampling all over his territory. Maybe Mum didn't tell him, didn't
need to. Maybe some animal sense of his picked up the wrong
smell, the rumpled rug, the footprint discernible only to the most
intense and spiritual of native trackers. After all, the sheets had
been changed. And I'd aired the room quite thoroughly with
those wide-flung windows.

The other thing that he did was take my latest book, one I was
borrowing from the Hennessys, and burn it to a little heap of
ashes in the wire incinerator down beside our garden shed. I
didn't see him do it. But I couldn't find the book, not on my
bookshelf, under the bed, or even in Tom's or Barbara's room
where I might well have left it. I didn't like to ask anyone if they
had seen it. But I'd gone out to unpeg the washing for Mum – see,
I was still biddable, in small house-trained ways – and I spotted
something in the incinerator. I looked more closely: a new pile of
ashes and a triangle, an inch wide and two inches across, of dun
cloth-covered board with a minute gold line just inside the rim. I
knew exactly what it was. No one should burn books. No one
should burn anything as blameless as Rosamond Lehmann's
Dusty Answer
. But Brian had.

And after that he was back to normal. Back to
usual
, I should say.

Sometimes I look about me at the people in here and wonder if
they were ever normal. If they ever, at one time in their life,
walked down a street or round a playground without anybody
staring at them, whispering, pointing them out. Maybe they were
ordinary people, once. Perhaps they had friends, real, normal
friends, not just someone whose mother had insisted they be
friendly, out of pity's sake. Not just some aunt or cousin, acting as
a surrogate friend, because there wasn't – never would be – anyone
else, not from choice. God, I wonder if any of them were
married, once, on the outside? Were loved and cherished and
desired, had someone whose face lit up when they walked into the
room? Someone who
longed for them
. I wonder if any of them had
children of their own?

I wonder if they remember?

Actually, it's hard to imagine it. It's even hard to imagine Mike,
or Trudy, or Lorna, for that matter, finding anyone weird enough
to want them, fancy them, yearn for them from afar. Hanny and I
are definitely the only two normal people in this place.

Oh, and there's Dr Travis. I can imagine him with a mum and
a dad, I can see him in a pleasant family setting. I can see him
having dinner with his girlfriend at a restaurant table, snow-white
linen and gleaming china. I can imagine them raising their glasses
to each other over the small vase of carnations that sits between
them. I can see the pair of them quite clearly. The funny thing is,
in my mind's eye,
she
looks a bit sort of Carolyn-like.

'You haven't
been
...' Lorna says, pausing on the word
dramatically. I don't admire her technique. She's chosen the
wrong sort of word to emphasize. Far better a noun, or a decent
verb, something more specific. I wait for the rest. '... very
creative
in Group, Cora.'

Oh, my mistake. I thought it was Activity that we were
supposed to be creative in. I thought it was there that we gave ourselves
up to the sordid secret shapes in our minds and let them
take substance through our fingertips. Once at school I got given
a C-minus for a composition, and the remark was added (in red
ink): 'You must show more imagination!' Since the title set for the
composition was 'A Day in the Life of a Penny', I think I would
have been justified in replying the same. Why should we produce
more than our superiors are capable of coaxing out of us? I
wouldn't mind if my clay penguins or my snowmen were judged
and found wanting. Lorna must know by now that manual
dexterity is not one of my strongest points. Though, in
mitigation, perhaps she's not been a party to most of the
discussion around that subject.