Living In Perhaps (22 page)

For a couple of years I was a Girl Guide. I only went because my
mother made me – and because I'd been a Brownie, and that's
what Brownies did next.

Our Guide group met on Thursday evenings in the community
hall. Just as at school, we learned things that seemed to have no
application in outside life, like tying complicated knots, and
identifying predatory birds by their silhouettes in flight, and how
to interpret signs and leave signs for other Guides. In the
Brownies we had concentrated on semaphore. I was quite keen on
semaphore, I liked stretching out my arms like the hands on a
clock-face and waving the flags at the end of them. But Guides did
not stoop to semaphore. For some reason they did not envisage
themselves standing on hilltops and signalling across open
valleys. They saw themselves like La Longue Carabine, running
trails through dense woodland, and made little signs from sticks
and stones, leaving them in the middle of the pathway (where, of
course, they could be kicked out of the way by animals or non-
Guides), arrows for left and right, a circle with a stone in the
middle for 'We have gone home'. It always seemed a bit of a cheek
to me to get people out into a dark confusing wood and then
signal 'We have gone home'.

I was in Kingfisher patrol. There were six girls, four of whom
went to the grammar school and one who, like me, attended the
secondary mod. She was a year older and at school we had never
exchanged even a glance, let alone spoken.

Our patrol leader was a girl called Helen Ethersidge. She was
fast and funny, and in another life I would have looked up to her.
She had nearly black hair and a broad-boned face with thick
pale skin, and I thought she was attractive. Not pretty, but
attractive.

The very first week Helen showed us how to cook sausages over
a bonfire, on the scrap of rough land behind the community hall.
She helped us choose green sticks from the hedge for toasting
forks so that they wouldn't go up in flames before the sausages
were cooked through. When we took them out of the fire, the
meat was black on the outside and raw in the middle. But they
tasted much better than a lot I've had.

In another life I would have admired Helen Ethersidge and
tried to be like her. It would have been better if I had. But it was
too late by then. I had taken the Hennessys as my pattern, and
look where that's got me.

While I was sent to Guides Brian went to Scouts, but he actually
enjoyed it. They did much more energetic things than we did, and
held open days when their families and friends could come
and try out Scout activities for themselves. Scout activities
involved rope ladders and walkways, jungle drums and inflatable
dinghies. On open days the dinghies were not actually in water:
they sat on the floor of the Scout hut and younger children
climbed in and out, and sat down in them and waved paddles
about. A large Scout in shorts, with hard-looking calves and
scarred knees, stood beside the dinghies to ensure no damage was
done. In a way it looked fun, the sort of fun Helen Ethersidge and
I might have enjoyed. But I could hear Barbara's disparaging voice
in my ear, and even worse, Tom's.
Is that what you do? You sing
songs round the camp fire? You learn to tie knots? What for? So that
when your knickers fall down in public you'll always know how to do
a half-hitch with the elastic and save yourself further blushes?
Oh
God, I couldn't be doing with that.

Leaving the Guides was surprisingly easy. I just stayed in my
bedroom one Thursday evening, pretending to do some homework.
My ironed uniform on its clothes hanger was ready and
waiting. I ignored it. Brian was sent to remind me of the time. I
said, 'I'm not going,' and, like a good boy, he reported this back to
the kitchen. There was a further relay of messages: why was I not
going? 'I've got too much homework.' 'Can't you do that another
night?' 'No. I'm stopping altogether.' This brought Mum to my
door, untying her cooking apron as if for a fight. She folded it and
wrapped it round her arms, which she then crossed over her
chest.

'What's all this, Carol?' she asked. 'Stopping Guides?'

'I've got too much homework these days,' I said. I held a maths
textbook open on my knee for authenticity.

'What about your uniform?' she asked. The expensive uniform,
which she had not been able to run up herself on the machine at
home.

'We can sell it. There's always someone joining who will want
it.'

And with that she exhaled loudly and turned away, unrolling
her apron again. Another sort of person might have shrugged, but
she didn't. Too lax, too sloppy, shrugging.

I couldn't believe it had been so easy. Well, at least
that
was out
of the way. I would have done it ages before if I'd known. I quite
expected her to put up an argument against my leaving, but she
didn't seem at all interested, once she realized that some of the
money she had spent could be recouped.

Piano, well, that was easy, too. I was telling Lorna the truth
when I said it got too expensive. Almost five years of piano
lessons, what an investment. As adolescence rolled inexorably on,
my practising slackened off. 'If you're not going to practise, Carol,
I'm not going on paying,' my mother said. We didn't shake hands
on the bargain, but we kept to it. I think she was relieved, not just
about the money but at the sudden lovely silence round the
house. We were not a musical family. We had overreached ourselves.
I think my five years of grindingly slow progress proved
that.

Giving up church was harder. Too much at stake. This hit at the
core of what my mother wanted us to be. There were so many
rites and routines associated with it, the Saturday night shoe-cleaning
and coat-brushing, coins for the collection put aside in a
special jar. We would set out for church after breakfast every
Sunday, my mother and Brian and me, leaving Dad oiling and
sharpening the edging shears in preparation for his morning's
work. These were the times I dreaded meeting a Hennessy – any
Hennessy, even Sebastian or Mattie – as we walked down the
road, a pair and one trotting behind on the narrow pavement, all
neat in our Sunday clothes. I prayed to the dear Lord for rain,
because then Dad would have to get the car out and drive us to
church, even though he would not go in himself unless it was a
special occasion. Perhaps because of my lax and wicked ways, my
prayers were answered no more often than the prevailing
meteorological situation would allow.

I said I didn't want to go any more. Dropped my bombshell.
'I've grown out of Sunday school. They're all younger than me.'

'You can be a shining example to the young ones, then.'

'And the teenagers' group. It's so ...' What? Condescending,
embarrassing, lacking in cogently argued theory? I fell back on
'boring'.

My mother just looked at me.

'And I don't enjoy the morning service.'

Her expression showed me that she thought enjoyment had
nothing to do with it.

'I'm plagued with
doubts
,' I tried.

She looked at me as if she had them too, all the time. There was
a stand-off. Eventually she said, 'I'm not letting you make up your
mind until you're sixteen. Then we'll see if you've still got doubts.'

'Fifteen.'

'No.'

'Fifteen and a half.'

She looked grim, but conceded with a brief nod of her head.

I never made it that far. She must have known that there was no
leverage she could bring to bear that would make me go with
them every Sunday. So eventually she let me drift. It was a funny
feeling, beginning to realize that she didn't care. She'd concentrate
her efforts elsewhere, on someone more rewarding. She had
washed her hands of me. That was the impression I got, as I
moved about the kitchen in my pyjamas on Sunday mornings.
Even Dad in his old gardening clothes was more useful than me.
He handed out more milk from the fridge. He tutted about the
weather, and my mother tutted back. She and Brian sat up very
straight at the kitchen table, neat and pressed and brushed, eating
extremely politely like people dining at a hotel, so as not to get any
crumbs or jam on their church clothes. Then they went out, without
speaking to me, walking along the pavement briskly: a pair.

We still had our chores to do. Brian was allowed to take care of
the lawn mower, to clean the blades, oil the wheels, scrape the
grass-box out. He was strong enough now to keep the mower
straight, press on the roller to achieve those neat green lines, that
self-stripe in the fabric of the lawn. He'd inherited that responsibility.
I don't know why lawns have to be stripy, what's so
aesthetically pleasing about tame grass. It's only the way the grass
blades lie, reflecting the sun, this way, that way. A trick of the light.

I knelt on the crazy paving outside the French windows, weeding.
I pulled up a plug of bittercress, freeing a ridge of sand, a
scatter of enraged red ants. The garden was past its best: sunflowers,
flopping from their canes, ragged as old scarecrows, an
edging of light blue ageratum like a trim of dirty nylon fur. The
sun was dipping, our shadows long. From next door's garden
nothing but silence.

Brian had stopped mowing, was kicking at the edge of the lawn
by the hedge. On and on he went, tapping the toe of his shoe,
waiting like someone who expected to be asked their opinion. I
stood up and took my bucket of weeds down the path to the
incinerator.

'The lawn's very dry,' he said, when I didn't say anything. 'It's
crumbling away.'

'Oh yes?'

'We should put the hose on it.'

'Yes.'

'It's this hedge.'

Sucks the life.

'Put the hose on it, then.'

'Can't. There's a hosepipe ban. Not enough rain this summer.'

'Don't put the hose on it, then.'

'Other people do,' he said darkly, scowling. 'Next door do. I've
heard them. I've seen 'em.'

Oh yes? Had he seen me, too?

'Other people are always breaking the rules.' He glanced
upwards, at the dusty, dark immensity of the hedge.

'Then so can you. Once in a while. It won't hurt.'

He thought about it. Slow ticking over of time. Then he
shrugged. 'No. Not me.'

'It'll be autumn soon,' I said. 'It'll start raining and never stop.'

But he was still standing there, hands in pockets, staring up at
the hedge, as if the drought, the ban, the petty restrictions, and
all the breaking of rules, every injustice in the world, were down
to the Hennessys, every little bit.

Then we became economic units: Brian got a paper round, and I
served, Saturday mornings, behind the counter in Mrs Drew's.
The wool shop. Now it was incumbent on
me
to understand the
secrets of two-ply and four-ply, to pluck, unerringly, a pair of size
seven knitting needles from the close-packed display. It was up to
me to slip the puffy packs of Kotex discreetly into thick white
paper bags. Or – an innovation, this – the neat blue boxes of
Tampax.

My mother, despite her love of the new-fangled, was suspicious
of Tampax, in particular for 'unmarried girls'. They were not at all
suitable. In her mind, unmarried girls – despite the incontrovertible
evidence before her eyes from Bettina, from whatever she
might know about the origins of Brian and me –
unmarried girls
were synonymous with untried girls. Untempted. Unspoilt. And
Tampax were just so undeniably penetrative.

So I bought my own Tampax. I had ample opportunity, after
all. And a staff discount.

Saturday morning in a wool shop was quite a Carolyn sort of
thing to do. Not exactly hard labour; genteel and undemanding. I
had high hopes of it that first Saturday. Perhaps I'd found my
niche, the thing I could be good at. But by the end of the morning
all I'd sold were three yards of ribbon, a thimble and a packet of
darning needles.

Mrs Drew was upstairs resting her swollen ankles on a petit-point
footstool. She suffered from 'veins' and 'blood pressure'. Her
doctor had warned her to take it easy. Every time the bell on the
shop door rang, she called down to find out the latest. At midmorning
I took her up a cup of instant coffee and a chocolate
biscuit. Her apricot toy poodle was sitting on her lap, and kissing
her with his horrible grizzled grey mouth. He got the biscuit. I'd
had three cups of coffee already myself, perched on a stool in the
little back room, trying unsuccessfully to tune her radio to anything
interesting. At half past twelve I turned the shop sign over,
pulled down the blind, and carried the day's takings upstairs to
Mrs Drew. Nine shillings and sixpence. I think a Carolyn would
have done better. With her winning smile and her delightful ways,
she'd have purred the customers into extravagance. She'd have
drawn them in off the streets like a magnet, and not let them leave
till quantities of hard cash had changed hands.

The wool shop was struggling, on its last legs. People didn't knit
so much any more, or make their own clothes. They liked to buy
from the big shops in town, or send for things mail-order, cheap
and cheerful garments with no hard work in them at all. They
didn't like
home-made
. I don't know exactly how long the shop
lasted after my nine months' stint as a Saturday girl, but, walking
past one day, I noticed that Mrs Drew had pulled down the blind
for ever. Had packed up the last few balls of wool and cards of lace
and taken them home, to knit and sew through her twilight years.
Or maybe not. Maybe she never partook of those homely female
pursuits. Perhaps she got out the gin and the mah-jong set, even
the little wooden sticks for making bets with, and invited all her
old-lady friends round, and got them roaring drunk, and robbed
them blind.

Perhaps. One can only hope so.

'Your brother,' Lorna says. 'Brian – hmm?'