Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (17 page)

Dad was still cuddling her, and now beckoned Anna and Mum to join in, so that they were all clasped together in a ridiculous team hug. Anna couldn’t remember that happening before, ever; hugging didn’t come easily to their mother. Mum seemed to have become smaller and younger.

‘You’re who you always were,’ Dad was saying. ‘Our beautiful Rose. Your mother couldn’t look after you herself, so she gave you up for adoption.’

‘Gave me up?’ Rose repeated, indignant.

Anna’s thought had snagged on the phrase
your mother
. Suddenly it meant something different, something new. Not Mum, but a stranger. A strange, remote, other mother who didn’t want her own baby.

‘I want to know who she is. I want to meet her.’ Rose seemed to be speaking from a long way off.

‘No, darling, please,’ said Mum, her voice still tight and tearful. ‘It’s better left. Better not to stir things up.’

Always, whenever Anna looked enviously at Rose, there had been the comforting thought that one day she would metamorphose into something similar; ugly duckling into swan. Well, no, not
ugly
– even at her most despairingly self-critical, Anna saw no ugliness in the face that looked back at her from the mirror. Dullness, ordinariness, yes. Her hair was thick and brown like Mum’s, her eyes more grey than blue, and although she could find nothing wrong with her features there was nothing remarkable about them, either. She had the sort of face no one would look at twice. People would look straight past her and gaze at Rose.

Now, she wondered how she could ever have believed that Rose was her blood-sister. Rose’s eyes were brown, her hair dark and springy, with natural kinks. She had different skin. Different genes. Different everything.

Anna told Melanie, and from then on it was a game to imagine who Rose’s real father and mother might be. Mel thought that the mother must be a ballet dancer who’d escaped from Russia. And her father? He might be a rock musician, a film actor, a member of the royal family. Or, more luridly, a murderer; he was in prison serving a life sentence, and didn’t know he had a daughter. Anna’s theory was that Mum had snatched Rose from her real mother, stolen baby Rose from outside a shop, maybe, or from a hospital, and had somehow got an adoption certificate to make it look legal. Why, otherwise, would Mum be so furtive about it, so guilty?

Whatever the truth, Rose had acquired a new glamour. Intrigue wafted about her like perfume. A mysterious other life had been bestowed on her, full of possibilities; Mum and Dad had only borrowed her. Anna felt critical of herself, by comparison. It felt rather unenterprising to have just one set of parents who lived in an ordinary house in Sevenoaks, and to know exactly who she was.

Rose soon became matter-of-fact. With time to assimilate her changed identity, she announced that she didn’t want to meet her birth mother after all; wasn’t even the slightest bit curious. At home everyone continued to treat her carefully, and Dad told Anna to be considerate of Rose’s feelings, after such a shock. Rose had special status. The idea grew and grew in Anna’s mind that Rose was her parents’ favourite.

‘They chose her,’ she complained to Mel. ‘They didn’t choose
me
.’

‘Oh, but that’s just silly!’

If they’d been able to choose, wouldn’t they have picked someone cleverer, more beautiful, more special? Anna watched closely for signs of preference, for Rose being allowed to get away with things, or receiving excessive praise. But Rose carried on much the same as she always did. She had interminable conversations with her friend Chrissie; she read lots of books, ready for starting in the sixth form. She painted and drew in her bedroom; she did a big self-portrait in pastels, hair tumbling and kinking over her shoulders, eyes gazing a question. She painted herself reflected in a series of mirrors, her face echoing back and back until it became a postage stamp, unrecognizable.

Often Anna thought of that moment in the bedroom, frozen into stillness in her memory, when she’d held out the paper, and Rose’s hand had been stretched out to take it. The last few moments of not-knowing, of being proper sisters, before Rose turned into someone else.

Chapter Ten

Sandy, 1966

The Skiptons lived in a town house on the eastern side of Croydon: a narrow, modern terrace, three-storeyed. Sandy and Roland’s bedrooms were on the top floor, divided by a square of landing. Roland’s room was the larger of the two, and he spent hours alone in there on his homework, or practising his guitar and perfecting his compositions. Only rarely would he let Sandy in; usually the door was closed.

In the Merlins Roland sang only backing vocals; Phil, with his raw, plaintive voice, was their lead singer. In his bedroom Roland sang softly, or hummed, going over and over a snatch until it flowed. His hero was George Harrison of the Beatles. Sandy preferred Paul – that face, those eyes that gave him an almost preternatural beauty! – or even John Lennon, with his acerbic wit. But then her interest was rather different. Roland admired George for his quiet strength, his willingness to let the more outgoing John and Paul take the lead, and above all for his virtuosity with the guitar. When the new Beatles album,
Revolver
, was released in August, Roland bought it immediately and played it over and over on the portable gramophone in his room. It included three George Harrison songs:
Taxman
,
I Want to Tell You
, and Roland’s favourite,
Love You To
, with its Indian sitar accompaniment like nothing heard before on a Beatles record. Roland learned all three, singing them in a fair approximation of Harrison’s soft Liverpool accent and flattened tones, though his guitar couldn’t replicate the thrilling sound of the sitar. When Sandy was allowed in to listen she closed her eyes to Paul McCartney’s voice in
Eleanor Rigby
, which unfolded its scenes of loneliness and waste like episodes from a novel.

Their father had been tolerant of the Merlins at first, when the four boys – Phil and Roland, with Mick the drummer and Dempsey on bass guitar – formed the group during the summer after O-Levels. As a holiday occupation, Roland’s father saw it as a reasonable, even commendable way to pass the time. But they stayed together in the sixth form, helped by Phil’s older brother Brian, who drove a van and became their unofficial manager, hoping to get a recording contract. They appeared at youth centres and dances, attracting a local following. Girls at school spoke of them as if they were a real, established group, to be mentioned alongside their famous idols.

Now that Roland was in the upper sixth, his father dis approved. ‘It’s taking up valuable time. Getting in the way of your school work. You should be knuckling down – you only get one chance.’

‘I can do both.’ Roland would never be drawn into argument.

‘You might think so, but you’ll let yourself down. All this caterwauling – where’ll it get you?’

Roland had a quiet stubbornness that meant he drove himself hard but pretended not to. In front of his friends, especially Phil, he kept up an attitude of not caring, of giving only scant attention to his studies. In reality he worked hard for his successes. When his O-Level results came, the string of nine grade As was marred for him by a B in Latin. His results were among the best in his year group, but he wouldn’t celebrate, wouldn’t be congratulated; in his own terms, he’d failed.

With Sandy’s O-Levels approaching now, she was relieved not to have the same spotlight turned on her. She was fairly sure of getting good enough grades for a secretarial course without putting herself through the anguish of trying for the top and failing.

There was too much going on to let school dominate her life.

Occasionally, at weekends, Phil came round to work on songs with Roland. They were the Lennon and McCartney team of the Merlins, sparking ideas off each other. On one memorable occasion, when Sandy had lingered in the bedroom doorway, Roland told her, ‘Go away, Sand, we’re working,’ but Phil bestowed a smile on her – oh, something to treasure for days and weeks to come! – and said, ‘It’s all right, Sandy. Come in if you want.’ And she sat on a floor-cushion, mesmerized, ignored, as they put a song together: haltingly, pausing to note down chords, as words and music slowly came together. More than once Phil stopped playing and asked her opinion, and her happiness was complete.

Beautiful Phil. Sandy gazed and gazed, storing every detail in her memory – the fall of light hair that curved into the back of his neck, bony hunch of shoulders, sweep of lowered eyelashes, hands caressing his guitar – so that she could recall every detail later, in bed. Those few words of acknowledgement were a blessing; she wanted no more. She had fallen in love with his voice, with the range of expression it conveyed, from searing anger to a barely whispered intimacy that touched something deep inside her.

When she saw the group on stage, what attracted her most powerfully was Phil’s remoteness, his absorption: his eyes half closed as he cradled the microphone, the creak in his voice that was almost a sob. Who was he thinking of as he sang Roland’s lyrics? Someone, surely. Phil made the words his own, flinging them at no one in particular, not looking at any one girl in the audience. Roland stood behind, sometimes sharing a mike stand with Dempsey as he leaned in to sing backing vocals. Or, when the lead guitar took off thrillingly on its own, rising above bass and drums in notes that rose like bell chimes to the ceiling and gathered there, Roland seemed lost in an ecstasy that was almost painful, and Phil would turn to look at him, acknowledging his moment. Sandy could never be part of this, other than as an observer, and that was its attraction. It was an exclusively male thing, bonding them into brotherhood. To perform was to expose themselves to an audience, to lay bare their passions, invite ridicule and sneers. There was bravery in that, Sandy thought; bravery and defiance. On weekdays they were ordinary schoolboys, but as the Merlins they were transformed into something bigger. Energy pulsed from their voices and their instruments, vital, exhilarating.

‘I want to be their road manager,’ Elaine said.

‘They’ve got one.’

‘Assistant, then.’

‘You wouldn’t, if you saw the back of their van,’ Sandy told her. ‘All beer cans and chip papers and plugs and leads and sweaty T-shirts.’

‘Oh, take me there!’ Elaine inhaled deeply. ‘I’d love it. I’d get drunk on it.’

Elaine’s chance came at the end of the autumn term. As a daring innovation that year, the fifth form was allowed to hold a dance jointly with the boys from Grove Park. Elaine, who was on the fifth-form council, pressed for a live group rather than a DJ, and the Merlins were booked.

The resulting performance got the group banned from St Clare’s and also from church youth clubs nearby. In the form room the Merlins were spoken of in the same breath as the Rolling Stones; Phil injected a new strut and swagger into his act, imitating Mick Jagger’s feral magnetism. Bookings rolled in; Sandy gained prestige at school. Meanwhile Elaine was summoned to the headmistress’s office to account for herself.

‘Have you any idea how damaging this is to the school’s reputation? I might have expected you to have more sense of what’s appropriate. You’ve let me down badly.’

This was relayed to Sandy with full dramatic effect; Elaine could do Miss Mowerby’s rigid, upright posture to perfection, and the way she spoke through closed teeth.

‘
I understand that these young men made blatant references to sexual intercourse
,’ Elaine went on, flaring her nostrils.

‘She didn’t say that!’

‘She did. That’s what this is all about. Roland’s lyrics. Oh, he’s such a hero, your brother! You should have heard me, all innocence.’ Elaine made her eyes big and round. ‘
No, really, Miss Mowerby? Are you
sure
? I had no idea!
’

What had caused this outrage was Roland’s latest composition,
The Power of Love
, written for the occasion. Sandy had listened to him improvising in his bedroom, but hadn’t heard the full version until Saturday night, and even then couldn’t make out most of the words; with the amplifiers turned up, it was poundingly fast, crashingly rhythmic. But one of the staff, who must have paid close attention, reported suggestiveness and indecency. It didn’t sound like the sort of thing Roland would write.

The evening after Elaine’s summons, when he was bent over physics homework at the desk in his bedroom, Sandy asked him. Unmistakably pleased with himself, he opened the desk drawer and pulled out a folder, from which he took a page covered in words and chord notations. He handed it to her and carried on working.

It’s electrifying, terrifying
, she read,

Energizing, so surprising,

Titivating, elevating,

Awe-inspiring, mesmerizing,

CODA: It’s the power of love,

I’ve got the power of love.

Feel the power of love,

The power of love, love, love, love, love.