Living In Perhaps (5 page)

We waited on the steps until Mattie and Sebastian came out
and then set off for home.

'I'm much too early,' I said to Barbara. 'We don't usually finish
for another hour.'

I thought she might invite me to her house to wait out the
interval, but she just said, 'Then you'll have to hide in the bushes
again, won't you?'

When I saw Barbara the following week at piano I said bravely,
'I didn't like your school much. I thought it was boring.'

She blinked sleepily. 'That's why we don't bother to go all the
time. You don't
learn
anything there. Except Izzy and Tom. And
they're clever anyway, so they probably taught themselves.'

School dinners cost a shilling, and I had missed a dinner that had
been paid for because of going to the Wren. My mother always
sent the right money at the beginning of each week, so at the end
of term they gave me the shilling to give back to her. I kept it, of
course. And that was how I learned that crime
does
pay.

There's a lot I don't think about. Recent things.

I'm only eighteen and already I'm living in the past. I'm like an
old lady with nothing to fill her days and nothing to look forward
to, who dwells continually in some lost golden age,
before the war
,
when she was young. Either I think about right now, today, breakfast,
dinner and tea. (Or breakfast, lunch and supper, as they call
it here. I don't know what happened to dinner. It doesn't feature,
not at midday or in the evening.
Dinner
is off the menu.) Or I
think about way-back-when. When I was little.

I'm only eighteen. I should be able to look to the future. If I was
a Carolyn sort of girl my life would be full of things to look forward
to: invitations, parties, the purchase of fashionable dresses
that would fit me like a glove. Maybe an engagement ring. I bet a
Carolyn sort of girl would have her wedding all planned out in
her head by the time she hit puberty. She and her mother would
smile at attractive small children when they were out and about,
and remark to each other that Julie was a nice name for a girl and
Mark a very good choice for a boy. All this long before there was
any suitable man on the horizon. Because of course, for a
Carolyn, there always would be, some day. No question. Simple as
that.

If I think about the future I see only a door slamming shut.

*

Lorna has been chipping away again. Or she tries to. She keeps
asking about my mother. Frankly, the woman's
obsessed
with my
mother.

There are little gems, little jewels, I could hand her. But I don't.

I could say how she would dry my hair with a towel, roughly,
poking my scalp with her bony fingers and almost pulling my hair
out as she rubbed it between the folds of towelling. I hated
hair-washing day. But she didn't mean to hurt me.

Or porridge. She could make it thin as gruel, or thick as rice
pudding. Either way it had lumps in. Little blunt lumps which
broke apart into dry oatmeal under your teeth. And then she'd
nag us if we didn't eat it all up. Summer was better. In summer we
had cornflakes instead.

But does Lorna want little gems, or does she want facts and
figures? Does she like stories – where there's the risk of fiction –
or does she like the safe, calculable nature of maths? And why
does she want them, anyway? She's got my precious file. She's not
getting anything else.

She sits down. She laces her fingers, and glances out of the
window with great interest. She opens her mouth with an intake
of breath, as if she's going to comment on the butterflies that flit
past or the way the clouds have built up on the horizon, or,
indeed, the shape of a gardener's bottom as he bends over the
tulip beds.

Instead, not quite looking at me, she says, 'Tell me about your
mother.' And she swings her gaze over to mine, like a crane with a
demolition ball wild on the end of its chain.

Oh, no. You don't catch me that way, Lorna.

I won't fall for such tricks. I tell her instead about a Carolyn
sort of mother. I don't think she'll notice the difference.

Of course, my mum is not my mother. Lorna forgets that. She
forgets her question is a paradox. Who
does
she want to know
about?

My mum is a tall woman, not exactly thin but spare, nothing
but muscle to cushion her bones. She stands and sits very upright,
as if to relax would be to let something go. She is as tall as Dad,
taller if she wears heels of any kind. Her short hair is always tightly
waved. She does this herself, with curlers which go in at night and
come out first thing in the morning. Dad's cousin Bettina is a
hairdresser, but she's never been allowed to get her dye mixes near
Mum's hair, which is the same shade of brown as it must have
been all her life: middling brown, like milk chocolate, stippled
with a few grey hairs. She doesn't wear make-up, only powder for
special occasions. I can't see what this is meant to achieve as an aid
to beauty, but it makes her feel respectable.

She always dresses in the same way, whether she's visiting
relations or cleaning the house. This is because she has
standards
.
She wears a skirt and a blouse, and shoes and stockings. She owns
a pair of slippers but only wears them for moving between bedroom
and bathroom. A woman who pads around in bedroom
slippers all day is, according to Mum, a slouch. (She probably
means
slut
, but even the word itself is a step too far for Mum.) If
it's cold, she puts a cardigan on over the blouse. In winter she
wears a vest. She's a great advocate of sensible underwear. To do
housework she puts a nylon overall on top of her skirt and blouse.
To cook she wears a flowered apron with a bib. When she is
serving the tea to guests – our relations – she ties on a perky little
waist-apron with a frill round the edge. When she goes to church
she wears a mackintosh, neatly buttoned up even in warm
weather, and a hat.

Hats are her weakness, if she could be said to have a weakness.
When we went into town we would sometimes make a detour to
the hat department in the big shops, and have a look, though not
try anything on. I remember her owning four hats: a brown
angora beret, a black pillbox (for funerals), a green velour bucket,
and a red squashy shape with a small crimson feather. Most often
she wears the beret. I never once saw her in the red hat.

When she goes to church she carries a large handbag, and keeps
her Bible inside it. A lot of people at church carry their Bibles in
their hands. Some of them have normal little Bibles but with lots
of texts and bookmarks and ribbons poking out. Some people
have those big soft-covered black Bibles, with curled-out edges
from constant pious use. My mother never carries her Bible in her
hand, and thinks all those big flashy Bibles and ribbons are just a
way of showing off. Needless to say, I longed to be given a big
black Bible. Or, better still, a white one with gold lettering on the
front, like a girl had in my Sunday school class.

It was my mother who insisted on the church-going. She had to
keep Brian and me up to scratch.

'Well-brought-up people go to church,' she said. Well-broughtup
people, she implied, did God the politeness of believing in
Him.

My father went along with it, though only so far. He managed
Christmas and Easter, and showed some signs of actually enjoying
Harvest Festival. The rest of the family, Gloria, Stella, Bettina,
Bob, were very remiss in their devotions. They were fond of a
lie-in on Sunday mornings, I suspect.

My mother used to be a bookkeeper but when we were little she
never had a job outside the home. She kept constantly busy with
cooking and cleaning and knitting and sewing. She knitted all my
jumpers, and Brian's, and she knitted thick winter socks for Dad.
She sewed my dresses.

'Isn't she clever, your mum?' my aunt Gloria often said to me,
holding up an unrecognizable slab of knitting, destined to
become a pocket or a sleeve. Another trick of hers was to lift the
skirt of the dress I was wearing, to admire the tiny hem stitches.
'Auntie!' I pushed at my skirt, trying to hide my knickers from the
company. 'Please!'

'I could never do all that, Edie. I really couldn't. Such patience.'

Gloria's humility was put on to increase the compliment, but I
saw my mother's look: no,
you
couldn't.

The only other child in our family was Mandy, Bettina's
daughter. I envied Mandy her shop-bought dresses with their
machine-finished buttonholes and narrow machine-stitched
hems. Sometimes Mandy wore dresses identical to those I'd seen
other girls in, flimsy checked frocks with gathered skirts and
sashes, daisy prints with puffed sleeves. My dresses were never the
same as anyone else's. My mother used patterns that had been
around for years, and then gave them a twist of her own: lasting
quality. They had big hems, with 'lots to let down'. They were
never skimpy, and the buttonholes never came unravelled. But I
longed for a frock that was up-to-the-minute, shoddy as only
shop-bought products could be, and then tatty enough to be
chucked away. Even Mandy's cardigans were made on a machine:
the automated sheen of their surfaces was thrilling. I wished mine
could be like hers.

One day when we were going past our local wool shop I noticed
in the window a pale green cable-knit jumper very like the one
Mum was currently making at home. 'Look,' I said. 'That's just like
the one you're knitting.'

'It
is
,' she said. At first I thought she meant 'It's the pattern I'm
using.' But when we got home, I noticed that the pale green wool
had gone from her needles and been replaced by brown yarn for
my next school cardigan.

'Where's the green one?' I asked. 'Who's it for?'

'At the shop,' she said. 'It's for whoever buys it.'

And that was the start of her new job, her home knitting career.

Mum liked us out of the way while she was doing this, concerned
that our mucky fingers would spoil the goods. Just as she
liked us off her clean kitchen floor, away from her plumped-up
settee cushions and smoothed bedspreads. Just as Dad liked us
out of the flower beds with that ball, and off the nice sharp edges
of his lawn. We couldn't put a foot right.

My new friend Hanny Gombrich is Jewish. That was the second
thing she told me, after her name. We met in the gardens here,
where we're allowed out for an hour in the morning (weather
permitting), and again in the afternoon. I knew she wasn't a
zombie that first time because I caught her eye. Everyone else here
avoids meeting eyes. Or they're too drugged-up to be capable of
noticing you. I caught her eye and she looked back at me for – it
must have been – all of three seconds. It was such a relief. It was
like a hand reaching out and pulling you up out of a deep, deep
well.

So she said hello and told me her name, and when I raised my
eyebrows (I couldn't help it, it wasn't the kind of name I'd come
across before) she explained, a bit curtly, that she was Jewish. I
said I hadn't ever met anyone Jewish before.

'Where have you
been
all your life!?' she cried, so I said maybe
I had met some but I just didn't know it. Then she made a noise
in her throat and laughed. She said it was the noise her grandmother
made when she was being disparaging about
goyim
–
that's the rest of us.

'Come round to our house,' Barbara said one day.

These were the words I'd been waiting for, for months. She had
found me slouching home from school, towing my more or less
empty satchel as if it was a bag of stones.

'Only don't say you live next door.'

'Why not?'

'Because we don't like the people who live in this road. They're
suburban
.'

'Oh. OK.'

I dropped off my satchel at home and said, 'I'm playing out.' I
ran off again before my mother could say, 'Playing out
where
?'
Not that she usually did. It was just my guilt that made me dash
away.

Barbara was sitting on the kerb, waiting for me. She jumped up,
grabbed my hand, and pulled me past the laurel hedge and in at
the peeling gate, which today was propped open with a brick.

The house was tall, with steeply pointed gables and
symmetrical windows and a wooden veranda all the way round.
The two front doors stood side by side. There was lots of fancy
fretwork, just like a gingerbread house, which could have done
with a lick of paint; and on closer inspection the windows – no
net curtains at all – weren't very clean. We ran up the front steps,
and they juddered beneath my feet like the steps of the old
passenger bridge at the station. My stomach felt the way it did
when a train went under the bridge while I was on it: flipping over
with nerves and excitement. Barbara kicked open the left-hand
door and we stepped into the darkness of the hallway.

A long staircase was straight ahead and at its foot was a doorway
with a heavy blue curtain across it, trailing on the floor. She
swept this aside and we were in the next-door hallway, the other
half of the house, at the foot of
their
stairs. This hall was dark too,
with pictures all over the walls, and a table full of sprawling plants
in lead-coloured bowls. Barbara cantered down the passage
towards the rear of the house, with me following close behind,
grabbing at the back of her cardigan, fearful of being left alone in
such a strange place.

The kitchen was full of light. There was a big window with glass
shelves set across it and striped spider plants cascading down the
panes. Barbara took a glass from the draining board, filled it with
water, downed half of it, opened her mouth to yell 'O-ma!', and
then finished off the water. She didn't offer me any. She rinsed out
the glass and turned it upside down again to drain.

I heard a slapping, slippery noise behind me.

'
Oma!
' Barbara cried out joyfully.

Oma was composed entirely of circles. Her face was round, her
wire-rimmed spectacles were round, the top of her body with its
sloping shoulders and shelf of bosom was round, and her great fat
stomach, covered with a sky-blue pinafore, was another circle.
Her skirt was ankle-length, and her mannish cotton shirt was
filled to bursting. The noise I'd heard was her trodden-down
slippers. I thought she looked repulsive.

'My little Baba!'

She took Barbara's cheeks in both her hands and pressed a kiss
on Barbara's nose, which was about the same height as hers.

I leaned back against the cupboards, making myself small in
case she did the same to me. But she took no notice of me at all.

Oma was Barbara's grandmother. She lived with the
grandfather in one half of the house, and Barbara and her parents
and brothers and sisters lived in the other half. Of course Barbara
didn't bother to explain this at the time, just left me to work it out
as best I could.

The house had originally been two properties but when the
family moved in they knocked a doorway through in the downstairs
hall and another upstairs, for ease of movement. Such
casual vandalism impressed me, especially since the upstairs
doorway was still unfinished, a rough hole gashed in the brickwork,
with no curtain across. The two families maintained
separate households, with separate sets of furniture and meals,
but when they felt like it they stepped through into the looking-glass
world of the other house and had a chat or borrowed a pan
or sat down and cuddled a child.

That first afternoon we stayed in the grandparents' half of the
house. It was very quiet, and half light, half dark, like the paintings
by Rembrandt I later saw in books. Much later. It smelled of
strange food, and beeswax polish, and the scent of the jars full of
drooping flowers which stood in every room. Despite the cool air
inside the house, the palms of my hands were sticky with sweat. I
didn't know how to
be
with a friend. I was glad when I heard Oma
slip-slop away upstairs. We sat down on the threadbare carpet in
the front room, and Barbara told me her story.

Barbara's grandparents were called Mr and Mrs Van Hoog.
They were both short and fat, and said very little. Barbara's
mother was their daughter. Tillie Hennessy now, but once upon a
time she'd been Mathilde Van Hoog. Now
there
was a name,
though not one you'd want to take to school with you.

The Van Hoogs came from Holland. They'd both been painters
long ago, and the walls of their house were filled with their paintings,
and paintings done by their friends. Then they had Tillie,
and Mr Van Hoog's father had said that he must stop messing
about being a painter and earn his living. They were sent to
England, to East Anglia, where a distant relative ran a nursery
business. This was before the war. Mr Van Hoog worked at the
nursery and Mrs Van Hoog looked after Tillie and painted all the
plants and flowers her husband brought home for her. There were
pictures of auriculas in pots, and sheaves of roses lying on a table,
and stripy red-and-white tulips leaning out of a glass vase.
Bouncy peonies and vivid poppies. Then the war came, and Mr
and Mrs Van Hoog lost all their family back in Holland.

'Shot – or starved,' Barbara said bluntly, and we exchanged
looks of horror. All the grown-ups we knew had been in the war.
We were used to stories of loss and destruction murmured like
gossip over our heads.

When we'd finished giving each other suitably horrified looks,
she went on: Mrs Van Hoog stopped painting altogether, and they
both worked in the nursery, which had been turned over to
vegetables for the war effort. But Tillie grew up wanting to paint.
They didn't stop her, but they didn't particularly encourage her
either. They felt that painting always led to grief and frustration.
She worked as a life model for an art school, to help pay her way,
and that was where she met Patrick Hennessy.

'A life model,' Barbara told me, 'is someone who poses
naked
.'

This time my look of horror was genuine.

And that was it, Barbara said, although I felt the story was only
halfway there. When her grandparents retired and sold the
nursery, they moved here to the coast, bought a house big enough
for the lot of them. Tillie'd had so many children that there was
no time left for her to paint.

'How many children?'

'Six.'

'
Six?
'

Barbara nodded casually, as if this was normal.

Patrick taught at an art school, and painted pictures in his
spare time.

'I'll show you,' Barbara said, uncrossing her legs and standing
up. 'But not today.'

This was my cue to go.

*

I saw Tillie Hennessy naked before I ever saw her clothed.

The day I got to go into the Hennessys' side of the house,
Barbara kicked the front door open as before and this time turned
left, into their big front room. Above the mantelpiece, facing anyone
who walked into the room, was a huge painting. Of Tillie,
naked. Only I didn't know it was her, then.

I hadn't seen much flesh. We were a modest family. The bathroom
door stayed shut, and bedroom doors when people were
changing. My mother went quickly to and fro in her ankle-length
dressing gown as she readied herself for the day. I never saw my
parents undress to sunbathe or to swim. If we went to the
seafront, it was for a stroll after all those awful trippers had gone
home, and if we ever sat on the sand with a picnic between us, the
only people who ever rolled up their sleeves or took off their
shoes and socks were Brian and me. Cousin Bettina, sun-blushed
and bulging out over the straps of her summer frocks, amounted
to indecent exposure, and left me feeling quite shocked.

In the painting, Tillie was pale and bony. There was something
both natural and awkward about her posture. She was caught half
sideways, sitting on the edge of a chair, holding on her knees a
naked baby. Her breasts drooped against her ribcage like small flat
saddlebags. Behind her shoulder was a table with a blue-and-white
cloth and a big vase of blurry flowers. A mirror, or
something, on the wall caught the light and shone it back like a
flat white shield. The baby, a big baby, like those enormous
versions of the infant Jesus, crouched on her knees, his back
curved. She held him by the upper arms – not like you would hold
a baby, I thought. Her face was turned to him and her hair hung
like a curtain.

I didn't even think it was a very good picture. Let alone nice.

'It's a fake,' Barbara said, seeing the direction of my stare.

All at once a little cushion of air let down inside me: relief. I
didn't know what she meant at all, but my insides told me that it
was a made-up picture, not a painting done of real naked people.
So that was all right.

'That's my mum, with my brother Eugene. But Eugene
wouldn't sit still for a minute – not one single minute, which Tillie
had told him would happen all along – so he painted
her
, for days
and days, and he took a snapshot of Eugene and painted him in
from that. That's why he looks like a monkey, I think.'

'
Who
painted it?' I asked. My insides had contracted again.

'My dad, of course. Honestly, painting Eugene in from a snapshot.
It's as bad as those people who do portraits by post of your
bloody corgi!'

And she turned on her heel and marched off down the passage
to the kitchen. I followed, as I was meant to. Beyond the kitchen,
sitting on the back step in the sun, was her mother. Fully clothed,
thank the Lord.

I saw Hanny Gombrich today in Activity. I was glad she was there,
as I hadn't seen her again in the gardens and I thought she might
have been avoiding me. She made penguins out of her clay, sweet,
neat little penguins, and then she lined them up according to size.
None of them was more than three inches high. She said she
would like to get hold of a book about penguins so that she could
see what the other species look like. At the moment she can only
do King Penguins. She tried another kind but it ended up looking
like a skittle. Then she said, 'But books are rarer than
live
penguins
in this place,' and she gave me a tired kind of look, a 'Wouldn't
you just know it?' sort of look, and let her hands fall slack in her
lap.

She said that she was in here because she wouldn't eat. It's true
that she doesn't seem to fill her long loose dresses, and her eyes
are enormous, with half-moons the colour of purple crocuses
beneath them. She asked me why I was here and I said that I was
an orphan, I was adopted, and I hadn't got over the shock of my
mother telling me about it so suddenly.

She didn't say anything to that. Instead she went on, 'A Jewish
girl starving herself. Ironic, isn't it? My grandmother can't bear it.'
Then she told me that her father wasn't really Jewish, because
his
mother wasn't, and Jewishness is inherited through the mother's
line.

'Maybe I'm Jewish,' I said, 'only I don't know it.'

She gave me a look, and I think I might have offended her
again.