Family of Women (23 page)

Violet didn’t dare argue with them and took all this in quietly, but when she reached Linda outside, she burst out, ‘Coleshill if you please? That’s flaming miles away – it’s nearly Coventry! I don’t know what our mom’s going to say. She’ll have a fit.’

Linda wondered why Nana once again seemed to be judge and jury about every thing that happened. Surely what mattered now was getting Carol better?

‘Ticket?’

Linda fished in her pocket for her penny and the conductor grumpily shoved a ticket at her and moved on. She made a face at him behind his back and returned to staring out of the rain-streaked window. The 29A had left the estate behind and was grinding along in the cold, wet October morning. She felt very out of sorts.

They’d been to see Carol on Saturday, right over at Father Hudson’s in Coleshill. She had a proper bed now, instead of the machine, and seemed much happier. She was in a long ward with doors all along one side that could be opened to wheel the beds onto a terrace outside when it was fine. The nuns who nursed her were kind, she said. Her favourite was called Sister Cathleen. And they were doing physiotherapy every day. It was the only time her face fell, talking about that.

‘It hurts ever such a lot,&rsqus b Aquo; he D>o; she whispered to Linda with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t like it.’

Sister Cathleen, who had a round, freckly face, said Carol was ‘coming on grand’. But she still wasn’t home and it felt such a long time since she had been, and the place was such a long way away. Nothing felt right with Carol away all the time. And Dad was drinking more. She tried to pretend to herself that that wasn’t true, but she knew really it was. You never knew how he was going to be when he drank so you could never relax. All she wanted was to get out.

Yesterday she had wanted to meet her best friend Lucy Etheridge in Sutton Park, but Mom had said no.

‘We’re going to Nana’s – you know we are.’

‘But why do we have to
every
week? Can’t we stay here and do something different – just for once?’

‘You know we can’t – she’ll be expecting us!’

‘Dad’s not going!’

‘All the more reason for you to go,’ Mom snapped. She was bad-tempered all the time, living on her nerves.

‘I’m fed up with going there. It’s always the same and it’s
boring
.’

For once she and Joyce were in agreement. ‘I want to stay at home,’ Joyce said.

‘Enough of your bloody lip! Course we’re going – no arguments.’

Violet left Dad with a ham sandwich and a plea not to go to the pub. He didn’t go to the nearest pub, which sold Mitchells & Butlers beer, but walked further for his Ansells. Linda knew Mom was just trying to make herself feel better – he’d be out the door seconds after they’d gone.

Mom kept saying, ‘He’s getting worse. It never used to be this bad.’ She looked thin and wrung out.

Linda glanced down proudly at the uniform skirt she was wearing. King Edward’s Grammar School! She said it over and over again to herself like a magic spell. Even after a year the wonder of it had not worn off.

When she took the eleven-plus she was full of nerves, remembering how Joyce had said it was ever so hard. Joyce had gone without a thought to the new secondary modern school close by on the estate. Linda got part way through the test paper and wondered if it was all a mistake. If she didn’t find it too difficult, did that mean she’d not understood the questions and got it all wrong? Her hands began to sweat with anxiety and her heart was banging away. She didn’t have any real idea what going to the grammar school meant, it was all unknown, but there was something glowing in her, like the little pilot light in the Ascot heater in the bathroom. She
wanted
it.

And they gave her a place! It was the one time in her life when she saw she had impressed her father.

‘Let her have a go,’ he said. ‘She’s earned it.’

Mum was unsure, Nana fu if @рv ll of scorn.

‘We’ll never afford the uniform,’ Violet said. It was all beyond what she knew, unknown territory, and she wanted to play safe. ‘And it’s two buses away. No – it’s better if you don’t go. You’ll be worse than you are already, nose always in a book. That’s not real life, you know. No – it’s not for people like us.’

It took Linda all her powers of persuasion – that she’d have no other clothes all year and she’d do odd jobs to get the money, she would even eat less to save the money, she’d do
anything
, if only she could go! It was Dad who stood up for her and for that she was deeply grateful.

For the last year she’d entered the portals of this other world of the grammar school, away from their scruffy house with its stinks of the animals and cabbage water and Dad throwing up – to a place where the world opened up in books and maps and pictures, the way it had that day in Johnny Vetch’s house in Aston when he showed her his cases of fossils and his book about the stars and she knew it was possible for someone else like her to care about learning. At school she was in heaven, even though she never felt quite like most of the others. There were only a very few who were poor and down at heel like her. At first she’d wondered if she could ever keep up. By summer she was among the top five in her form, and though a few of the girls were snobby, they weren’t all, and she had Lucy, a best friend who was prepared to stick around with her.

‘If you go there,’ Johnny Vetch said to her in his gentle voice, ‘you’ll learn things you’d never dream of in the other school. You’ll be another person. It’s where they separate the sheep from the goats.’

Johnny was a quiet, thin man of twenty-three. He’d gone away to college and had some sort of breakdown. He lived with his mom still and did odd jobs that didn’t demand too much of him.

‘He overtaxed his brain, that one,’ Bessie would say. ‘That’s what happens. Overtaxed it. You want to be careful, my girl. You don’t want to end up like Johnny Vetch. Nose in a book and no wife.’ She added something else behind her hand to Mom and laughed in a way which meant it was something crude.

Be careful, was all Nana ever said. The only safe thing, so far as her grandmother was concerned, was having babies and more babies and staying at home like a fat queen bee in a hive trying to keep everyone under your thumb. Like her.

‘The world’s a big place,’ Johnny told her one day. ‘Full of interest. One day I’m going to go on a boat along the Amazon river. I’ve read about it. There’re spiders there as big as my hand.’

The spiders made her shiver. But Johnny didn’t tell her just about spiders. He told her about the birds, the snakes and butterflies in the Amazon. And the deserts across the world, full of seeds just waiting for a fall of rain so they could burst out into the brightest, most radiant flowers you could ever see. And about rocks and crystals, and the Northern Lights dancing like chiffon in the cold night, and constellations of stars. Johnny loved the blackout. You could see everything better.

One winter night before the war ended, when Johnnll @рiy was still all right, he came round while Linda was at Nana’s.

‘Tell Linda to come outside a minute,’ he said from the doorstep. ‘There’s something I want to show her.’

‘Don’t talk daft,’ Nana dismissed him. ‘She’ll catch her death.’

But Linda was already jumping up to get her coat down off the hook. Whatever was Nana on about? She walked home every night with Mom, didn’t she? It was just because Nana didn’t approve of Johnny Vetch.

‘Be careful . . .’ Nana said reprovingly. ‘Don’t go keeping her out for long. Her mom’ll be in soon.’ It was getting late. But Mom sometimes was late these days.

The night was cold with the promise of ice. The air made her cheeks feel slapped. Once Nana had slammed the front door huffily, the dark closed in on them.

‘Your eyes’ll get used to it,’ Johnny said. ‘Come on.’

He took her hand and led her down the street towards his mother’s house. She thought they’d go down the pitch black entry and inside, that he probably had a new book he’d ferreted out of some musty old shop somewhere. Or a new rock to show her. Linda knew people thought Johnny was strange, and that he couldn’t hold down much of a job or anything. He wasn’t thought of as ‘normal’, but she always felt safe with him. They were in tune somehow.

‘Best be quick,’ he said. ‘This is something special. I’ve got the key off Mr Jacobs.’

Linda thought this sounded exciting. ‘Where’re we going?’

‘Wait – you’ll see.’

Two streets away was a brick church. To Linda’s astonishment, Johnny led her round to the side door and unlocked it. Leading her inside, he pulled a torch from his pocket. Once more, her eyes adjusted. She could smell the place, a strange sweetness of stone and paper and wax, and as Johnny moved the weak beam of the torch around them she could make out a vast, dark space, pews stretching in lines ahead of them. It reminded her of her grandmother’s funeral, when Dad had got upset and fought with that rough old man who’d turned up. The school had taken them into church once or twice, but that was all. It gave her a funny feeling, as if she had stepped into somewhere quite distinct from the street outside. She realized that Johnny knew the place very well. Perhaps he went to church every week? She didn’t know.

They walked along the side aisle to the back of the church. Johnny shone the torch on a little door at the back and when he opened it she saw steps.

‘You’re not frightened, are you?’

‘No!’ It hadn’t occurred to her to be afraid.

‘Best thing is, if you go ahead of me, I’ll shine the torch for you. I’m right behind you.’

The staircase wound round and round and the only sound was their footfalls on the stone and their eek @рshbreathing, and all they could see were the shadows winding round with them from Johnny’s torch. At the top there was another door, and when Johnny opened it Linda felt a rush of cold air.

‘This is the bell tower,’ he said. ‘Mind your head.’

They were in a wide, flat space, in which hung the dark shapes of several bells. Linda would have liked to look more. They seemed so big and heavy, hanging there. But Johnny was steering her over to the side, where there was a window. Fixed over it was a mesh.

‘That’s to keep the birds out,’ Johnny said. ‘You get pigeons messing all over the bells else and it’d stink. But . . .’ He struggled with something at the side of the window for a moment. ‘It’s loose. Look – come up this end.’

He unfastened the wire at one end and folded it back on itself so there was a space at the end for them to look out. Linda leaned against the wall, her hands on the sill, which was level with her collarbones. Johnny had to bend to look out over her head. He switched off the torch.

‘You can’t see much down there. We’re high up, you know – above everything. If it was daytime you’d see all the houses and factories – the roofs – from up here.’

‘Can we come back in the morning?’

She heard him laugh, faintly. ‘One day, maybe. But look up. This must be one of the clearest nights of the year. Just for once, no clouds and you can see past all the smoke.’

She turned her gaze to the sky. Johnny was right. Apart from a few faint streaks there was nothing to obscure the arc of sky, the great sea of stars. She had never seen it like this before. The more she looked, the more of them she could make out, as if they were coming out in their tens of hundreds just for her. Silently the two of them stared into the sky’s vastness and after a time she had a strange feeling, the same that she had had in the church downstairs, that she was in a special place and all that was around her was somehow alive and in communication with her, making her feel she was awash with life, but she could never have put the feelings into words. Words might have made it disappear.

‘See over there – ’ Johnny broke their long silence. He pointed out a shape of stars, guiding her, and eventually she could see what he was talking about. ‘That’s Orion, the hunter. See those three stars? Those are his belt.’ He pointed out arms, legs, a sword. ‘Oh – and that one’s Ursa Major – the Great Bear. The Plough they call it as well.’

‘Looks like a saucepan,’ Linda said.

‘Yes, I s’pose it does.’

He pointed out another shape which he said was a Greek lady called Cassiopeia, but she thought looked like a W on its side. She liked the pictures in the sky, but best of all she liked standing looking out in the quiet, high above everyone, in a place she’d never been before. It was some time before she noticed how cold she was.

‘Best go now,’ Johnny said, fixing the mesh back. ‘Keep those pigeons out.’

‘I like the night better than the day,’ she said, and he laughed.

‘Only when there’s no clouds.’

When her mom asked what they’d been doing, when she finally got to Nana’s, Linda said, ‘Looking at the stars.’ She didn’t say where. Johnny didn’t ask her to keep it secret, but it was
her
secret because it had been special.

‘That Johnny’s stupid,’ Joyce said spitefully. He didn’t pay Joyce much attention.

‘Bats in the belfry,’ Bessie said.

‘He’s not stupid,’ Linda said crossly. ‘He’s clever.’

That night stayed with her; and Johnny’s books and interest in things that a lot of other people didn’t seem to care about. There had to be more, she knew, than the life she saw round her. Working in factories, having babies. She couldn’t have put that into words either, but the knowledge sat in her like a hunger. And going to the grammar school was part of that hunger, of answering the need for more.

Soon, Lucy got on to the
bus. She was a quiet, serious girl with thick brown bunches lying neatly on her shoulders. Linda adored Lucy, but she’d never invited her round to her house. She was ashamed of the state of the place, the smell. Lucy lived in a nice villa in Sutton Coldfield with a neat front garden and clean, tidy furniture inside. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters and her mom and dad were quite old and they took her to church every week. Everything about Lucy’s life was gentle and calm. Linda had been to her house a few times and they were very kind to her.

‘Sorry I can’t really take you back to mine,’ she said. ‘My dad’s not well. He has to have it quiet so we’re not allowed to take people back.’