Living In Perhaps (8 page)

Someone left a magazine in the front hall today. It was lying on a
chair as I walked through. I could hardly believe my eyes. Some of
the pages had come right off the staples at the back and I
managed to pinch a couple and bring them up here. There's a
quiz. It's that cheap kind of paper where the colour print comes
off on your fingers. But you could starve for want of reading
matter in this place. Anyway, I like doing quizzes.

Question six. (Unfortunately questions one to five must have
been on the facing page, which I didn't manage to get hold of,
along with the title of the quiz. So I don't quite know what we're
supposed to be finding out here. It could be 'Are You Huggable?',
or 'Would Your Best Friend Recognize the Secret You?' It could be
almost anything.) So – question six: 'When buying a pet would
you choose (a) A cuddly Labrador puppy? (b) An elegant Siamese
cat? (c) A flamboyant South American parrot? Or (d) A goldfish?'

Well, it's obvious that you shouldn't go for the goldfish, not
even granted an adjective. Who wants to be indescribable? Maybe
the whole thing is entitled 'Are You Completely Lacking a
Personality? Find out now by completing our simple quiz!'

I'd definitely choose (a). Or (b). You can catch a disease from
parrots. And goldfish swim happily around with great long
ribbons of fish-shit trailing beneath them. Not very huggable.

See, Lorna? See what your rules and regulations reduce us to in
here?

When, for days on end, for reasons I couldn't begin to imagine,
Barbara failed to intercept me out in the street or on the way
home from school, I took my courage in both hands and went to
call on her. My passport was that phrase of hers: 'Just come
round.' I hoped she truly meant it. My heart was beating hard. Her
sister Isolde let me in. She showed me into the front room and sat
me down. 'Barbara's busy at the moment. Would you like to wait
in here?'

She was only a year older than Barbara, but seemed terribly
grown-up. Her well-shaped legs moved in a carelessly elegant way.
She wore slip-on shoes with tiny heels, over bare skin. Her insteps
were high and pale.

I sat upright on the middle of the big settee. It had carved legs,
a high back and scrolled arms. It was prickly and unyielding.
Barbara had told me it was stuffed with horsehair. I imagined it
stuffed with the taut flesh and hard bones of horses, too.

'Would you like a book to read while you wait?' Isolde asked
me. She was the perfect dental receptionist in embryo.

I nodded.

'Behind you.'

I turned round and knelt up on the seat. Covering the wall
behind me were two huge bookcases with glass fronts, and
between them an alcove also filled with shelves that were stuffed
with books.

'I don't know what to choose,' I said, looking back over my
shoulder for guidance.

Isolde shrugged, a magnificent loose shrug. 'Take anything you
like.'

But it was like trying to find a particular headstone in an endless
cemetery. There were no signposts and much of the writing
was hard to make out. The titles meant nothing to me:
A Tale
of Two Cities
,
Antic Hay
,
Life of Marie Curie
,
Dr. Box's Book of
Remedies
,
Tropic of Cancer
,
The Treasure Seekers
,
Saturday in
My Garden
,
The Way of All Flesh
. The bindings were mostly old
and dull, some with flakes of gold or ornate patterns pressed
into their spines. They looked like books picked up at secondhand
shops and jumble sales, books that had sat unopened for
years.

I was about to reach for one called
Birds of Northern Europe
,
which at least looked as if it must be about what it said, when
Isolde pulled out
Alice Through the Looking Glass
. 'This is funny,'
she said. 'Have you read it?
Alice in Wonderland
comes first, really,
but it doesn't matter. You can borrow it if you like.' She shrugged
her shoulders gracefully, and dropped the book in my lap with the
careless generosity of one who has far more of everything than
they will ever need. And she left me to it. I was still reading when
Barbara at long last came bouncing into the room.

I treated their house like a public lending library after that. I
carried
Alice
home and read it by the summer daylight that came
through my bedroom curtains in the evening. It took me ages to
finish. I was a slow reader. Barbara said it didn't matter how long
I borrowed it for, nobody else wanted it. But the speed of my
reading improved by leaps and bounds. I found you didn't have to
sound every word in your head. You could breathe in the words,
whole sentences, paragraphs, suck them off the page with your
eyes. And reading was fun, it was good, it was a
delight
. I liked
Alice, cussed, confused Alice, and I loved the talking Tiger Lily,
and the wicked greedy Walrus and Carpenter.

Next I took home not one but four books, in case what I had
chosen (without Isolde's advice) turned out not to be interesting.
I kept them under my bed so that I wouldn't have to explain them
to Mum. I forgot that she vacuumed under there regularly. When
she asked I said they came from the school library. I blushed as I
said it. I worried that she might have known I was lying. But she
didn't. She didn't notice my hot face or the artificial tone in my
voice. It's weird how adults don't suspect the most obvious
duplicities. I was only an apprentice liar at this stage, but even so
she didn't notice anything. After that I didn't bother to worry
about her finding them.

And anyway, it was true: those first four books
did
have library
cards inside the front covers. One had a page full of old date
stamps, the others had little cardboard pockets for the slips to go
in. I asked Barbara about this.

'Oh, our books come from all over,' she said. 'Patrick picks
them up when he's out and about. Anything that takes his fancy.
Some of them are old books the libraries sell off. He says he's
going to read them all one day, when he's an old, old man and has
the time. And then Isolde and me used to
play
libraries,' she went
on. 'Isolde had us make cards for all the books and we would
check them in and out if people wanted to look at them. We sat at
a table by the door of the front room, and she was going to charge
fines if anyone didn't hand the books back pretty quick. It didn't
work – nobody borrowed anything. And they wouldn't have paid
up, anyway.'

For all the books there were in the house – propping up the
front-room walls, languishing in piles on the landing, sitting on
the sill in the dining-room window under the damaging rays of
the sun with the tasselled tails of other people's bookmarks hanging
out – they were not a bookish family. I never saw any of them
but Tillie with a book in her hands, and I'm sure she was just looking
at the pictures. Barbara, to my knowledge, never opened
anything but a magazine, and Tom thought of all books as school
textbooks and therefore beneath his consideration. Sometimes to
get up the stairs I had to squeeze past Sebastian, crouching on the
bottom step, scanning that week's
Beezer
with great concentration.
Mattie was very partial to individual letters, finding them everywhere
– W in the house gable, Ls in the banister rails – but had
trouble cementing them into words. Only Isolde impressed me with
her knowledge of books, as with her knowledge of everything,
which she seemed to gain by osmosis, extracting information with
her X-ray eyes, like an alien invader who can suck your whole
history out of your brain in less than a second.

To say my tastes were catholic would be an understatement. At
junior school there was one lesson a week when we could visit the
school's library, a dank room next to the sickbay. Everyone fought
over the
Tintin
books, which were just like comics only in book
form and for some reason allowed in the library. To help the slow
readers, I think; to encourage them that not all books were deadly
books. Of course, I never got one. Never fought hard enough
in the scuffle. I had to take out what was left,
I
got the deadly
books –
Children of the New Forest
,
The Old Curiosity Shop
.
They were printed on hard lavatory paper, in tiny writing, and
smelled of must. I couldn't ever get beyond page one. There was
nothing to interest me, and, anyway, what they really smelled of
was school.

But the books I borrowed from the Hennessys felt different.
In that first armful I took there was a book called
Scoop
, which
was sort of funny, and another called
Tales from Shakespeare
,
where at least all the tales were fairly short. There was
Emma
,
which I couldn't get on with at all, despite the title which attracted
me, and a picture book, a book of paintings by an artist called
Van Gogh. He seemed to use very thick layers of paint, and
rather eggy colours, which I didn't much like. There was a
horrible navy and yellow one with a field full of wavy lines,
and another of an ugly man wearing a fur-trimmed cap and a
bandage. Some of the paintings were only shown in black and
white, which made them even worse. But the book itself, its heavy
shiny paper, the layer of tissue in front of each colour plate, and
its small blocks of print surrounded by acres of luxurious white
space, fascinated me.

Tillie caught me lugging this one back. 'Oh – do you like him?'
she asked.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Guilt suffused me, whatever Isolde
had said about it being all right to borrow. I like to think that my
mouth was not hanging open. I'd like to remember that I made
some trenchant statement, but of course I didn't. I couldn't.

But Tillie was kind, and said, 'I'll find you something else about
painting, if you want.' I nodded. I might have whispered, 'Yes,
please,' but only because I'd been brought up to be polite to
adults.

She looked out a huge book of Dutch paintings for me, which
I took home and never wanted to bring back. There were flat
white winter landscapes, and bowls of fruit and flowers and dead
gamebirds which looked so lifelike, if a dead bird could be said to
be lifelike. There were plump plain women corseted up to the eyeballs
in voluminous plain dresses. I loved the light, the crystal
clear images, the verisimilitude of these contentedly plain faces.
No fat custard layers of paint here. No leaf-print splodges, but
colour put on with a feather, stroked on so thin that daylight or
candlelight could gleam through. Flesh-light. The gleam of
expiring light in a gamebird's eye.

Thus began my education.

At the secondary school where I went when I was eleven we read
bits of things. We read bits of
Pride and Prejudice
and I thought
Elizabeth Bennet was shrill, and a snob. We read bits of
Great
Expectations
: Pip seemed quite unsympathetic, a weedy, boring
boy. We read a bit of Wilkie Collins's
The Woman in White
and I
thought it was a ghost story. We read the whole of Scott
Fitzgerald's
A Diamond as Big as the Ritz
and hadn't got a clue
what it was about. We did a few scenes from
Julius Caesar
, pushing
back the desks so that we could stand up and read aloud out
of the abridged school version, the one with the interesting bits
taken out. It was all nothing to me.

But at home I read other things. Whole, undiscriminating.
Carried home by the armload from the Hennessys', read in
patches of sunlight on their staircase, read lying on Barbara's
lumpy bed, posting my toes through the holes in her crocheted
bedspread. I learned to read while around me Barbara carried on
with whatever she was doing, to read and still make believable
responses to her questions, and to filter out her running
commentary. Sometimes she'd deliberately flick the book shut
before I had a chance to mark the page, saying, 'Come
on
. Let's
do
something!' and then I wasn't able to resist her. But quite often she
let me read. There were no hours the length of those hours. Time
is much quicker these days.

I read lots of books about sex, written by men, which was an
eye-opener for a naive and virtuous girl of eleven. I got to know
all about putting it in and then taking it out in time, about the
way in which women had to be dismembered in order to be
described – 'her eyes, her lips, her luscious breasts, her narrow
waist' – about 'a clitoris the size of a boy's thumb'. What was a
clitoris anyway? And how big was a boy's thumb? I looked at
Brian, whose hands were large, and judged it to be about four
inches in total. It was all information, but was it
good
information?

Without guidance, I read anything and everything for fear of
missing something – and still there were huge gaps. I came back
to Eliza Bennet and her distant cousins and began to laugh at
them and worry for them. I thought Mr Elton seemed like a good
catch for Emma until it proved otherwise. I read
The Mill on the
Floss
and assumed that Maggie would come out all right because
she was, after all, the heroine. I read
Madcap of the Fourth Form
and
Tristram Shandy
and
A Pony for Patricia
one after the other,
without breaking stride. Without a pause for intellectual breath.
This is how you read when no one tells you. I read like a great
white shark, moving forward with my mouth open, eating
porpoises and number plates and witch balls; I read like a giant
whale with its krill-gleaning, ocean-cleaning grilles.

I haven't really described them properly yet, the Hennessys.

Ask about
them
, Lorna. Instead of harping on about
my
bloody
family. You're barking up the wrong tree.

I loved them all at first, indistinguishable, just the brilliant
Hennessy-ness of them. So many, and so vibrant, and so loud! To
think that they were tucked away just next door. All those long
bored hours I'd spent kneeling up on my bed, elbows on the
window sill, gazing out over the front path and the motionless
sails of the miniature windmill, daydreaming. Surely a Hennessy
must have strolled by at some point? Or a Hennessy vehicle
chugged its way out of their tumbledown garage? Not that I
could recall. Not one that had disturbed my imaginary worlds,
anyway.

And who did I come to love best? Well, darling Tillie, obviously.
And then Tom. My fortune and misfortune. Ah well.

Darling Tillie
. It's the phrase that keeps sort of slipping into my
head. I've never in my life called anyone
darling
out loud. It's a
fussy kind of word, a word that fussy, over-fond mothers use to
their children in the street. Or under-fond mothers use without
thinking, like they use an ashtray without looking. 'Don't,
darling
.'
But it suits her, it suits Tillie. Such a darling.

Tillie was thin and fair. She wore faded jeans and a matted
jumper which hung away from her sides like a bell. The sleeves
were too short and showed her knobbly wrists. Or sometimes
she wore an old checked shirt of Patrick's, with frayed cuffs and
a tear at each elbow, and all the buttons hanging by a thread. I
didn't think she looked like anyone's mother. She probably wasn't
their
real
mother, I thought, at first. Not the mother of all those
children. She certainly didn't look like any other mother that I
knew. Barbara was three months older than me, and Isolde was a
year above her. Tom was a year older again, and Eugene was so old
that he didn't even live with them any more. He lived with friends
of theirs in London for some reason that no one had yet told me.
Tillie looked about eighteen, to my eyes. She wore no make-up
and her whitish-fair hair was hardly ever combed, let alone styled.
She even moved like a girl, forgetful of herself. She sat down with
her knees wide apart and her bony elbows resting on them. Or she
stood leaning on one hip and chewing at a hangnail. She had no
interest in her appearance. In summer she wore a garish red and
white striped dress, tight in the bodice and with a full skirt, like a
little girl's dress. The gathers of the skirt were always squashed
into flat creases, because she never ironed anything. Another
outfit she had was a lemon-yellow sleeveless blouse, pierced all
over with tiny eyelet holes, which made her skin look the colour
of dirty washing-up water. She wore this with a skirt of shiny
green material. I couldn't understand how someone who was
supposed to be a painter, and was surrounded by paintings, could
have so little awareness of how they looked.

Patrick Hennessy usually wore jumble-sale clothes with
spatters of paint on them. But I once saw them when they were
going out somewhere grand. He had on a black suit with satiny
lapels, and she wore a tight crimson dress of rough-surfaced silk.
Her hair was pulled back into a couple of tortoiseshell combs and
she had on dark lipstick which drained all the colour from her
face. The tips of her pale lashes were brushed with mascara, so
that when she looked straight at you you saw a row of black dots
just above her eyes. Her feet were in high-heeled sling-backs with
a latticework of black straps over her toes. She hadn't scrubbed
her fingernails, and bits of hair were coming down from her
combs before she'd even left the house. I thought she looked
strange and unfinished, more like a little girl in dressing-up
clothes than a grown woman. Patrick obviously thought she
looked marvellous, and kept squeezing her up in his huge arm, or
putting his hand on her crimson bottom. I really wished he
wouldn't. Then they went out, Tillie tap-tapping down the
wooden steps in her sling-back shoes, swaying because she wasn't
used to high heels. Patrick called out to us back in the house, and
Tillie waved her little black beaded bag, and then they were gone,
hidden by the hedge.

Patrick was much older than her, or seemed older, seemed
anyway to be the right age to be the father of so many children.
Tall, with a laughing brown face and curly dark hair, he was the
king of bonhomie. I was a bit afraid of him, afraid of what
he would do next, whether he would ignore me or – worse still –
notice me. He stepped over me, once, when I was reading a
book at the top of the stairs. I was waiting for Barbara, who
unselfconsciously and happily spent hours on the toilet, talking to
me from time to time through the closed door. 'Nose in a book,'
Patrick said, 'that's the ticket. That's what I like to see. A little
scholarship. What're you reading?' I held it up, an old green
paperback Philip Marlowe, price one shilling. '
The Lady in the
Lake
, eh?' And he took the book from my hand and tapped me
smartly, painfully, on the head with it. 'That'll teach you to stick
indoors reading on a fine sunny day,' he called out, laughing, as he
cantered away down the stairs. I could never tell whether he was
joking or not.

Barbara said that he and Tillie took turns to name the children,
and all the names he'd chosen were characters in operas. Eugene
was for Eugene Onegin, Isolde was from
Tristan and Isolde
, and
she couldn't remember what Sebastian was from. Tillie had
chosen Tom, Barbara and Matthew, because they were names she
liked at the time. What if they had more children? I asked. They
wouldn't, Barbara said firmly, because she'd had the op. I didn't
know what she meant, but I looked wise. I never liked to appear
ignorant in front of Barbara.

I liked all their names. They seemed to fit admirably. I didn't
feel the need to make rude or witty remarks to myself about the
Hennessys' names.

What Barbara wanted from me was an audience, a sidekick, a
constant companion. No one in her family would do. They were
all too busy with their own stuff. I wondered why she didn't turn
to Isolde. I badly wanted a sister. In her position I would have
made great use of a sister. But it was a point of honour for Barbara
not to get on with her. They had been little girls together, had
shared a room, were lumped together for presents and treats by
their numerous relations and friends. Isolde's clothes were passed
down to Barbara, Isolde's toys. But it was difficult for me when
Barbara dragged my arm and we ran off giggling, flinging ourselves
into the bushes or hiding behind the summer house; I
wanted Isolde to come too. I wanted her to be allowed into our
games and our secrets. But she was too old. Too grown-up,
superior, disdainful of our silly behaviour. Which made me yearn
after her all the more.

Sebastian and Mattie, the two youngest ones, were much the
same age and size. Mattie had very fair hair just like the roof of a
haystack, and ran around the house all the time in wellingtons,
kicking his feet out at the sides. It was dangerous to get near him.
He was always making a noise. Sebastian, who was an inch bigger,
was much more calm. His brown hair grew into tiny perfect
corkscrew curls that I wanted to reach out and touch whenever he
came near. He had sombre round dark eyes like chocolate drops,
and a kind of look – a 'pity me' look – which could always get him
out of trouble. He knew he had this look and he went about using
it on people when it suited him.

And then there was Tom.

Tom was the most like Tillie. Tall and thin, he had the same
white-fair hair, but it grew in curls. Not like Sebastian's, which had
an inch of straight hair before the curling started, but right from
his scalp, springing out round his head like bunches of grapes. His
face was rounder and sharper than Tillie's, rounder at the
cheeks and more pointed at the chin. His eyes were very light in
colour, and although he had eyebrows and eyelashes you could
hardly see them. But it didn't spoil his looks. There was something
about him that was compelling.

The Hennessys weren't like anyone else I knew. They had three
dimensions and the rest of us, I saw now, had only two. But
maybe, thinking about it, they were just so alluring because they
let me into their lives without ever questioning my presence.
They gave me an inch, and I took a mile.

Things happened in the Hennessy household that never
happened anywhere else, not that I knew of. They were relaxed
and slapdash in a way that delighted me. Tillie washed dishes with
the cuffs of her jumper dipping into the water, seeming not to
notice. Or the flopping unbuttoned sleeve of her shirt would
catch in a stack of cereal bowls waiting to be washed, so that they
fell to the floor with a resounding crash. Milk and strands of leftover
shredded wheat sprayed all over the floor, and two of the
bowls split neatly in half, their white china insides grinning
between the layers of sunshine-yellow glaze. 'Oh bugger!' Tillie
shouted. 'Bugger-bugger-bugger.' A chant unknown to me. Our
cereal bowls at home were made of convenient melamine so that
even if our mother knocked them carelessly to the floor they
wouldn't break. Nor would she jump lightly up and down and
shout so merrily if they did.

To help in the kitchen, Patrick thumped the gas water-heater
to get the washing-up water going and sang the duet from
The Pearl Fishers
, both parts, alternating them. He loomed big
against the cupboards, his feet enormous, spanning each floor
tile. He would try to put things away, but was always asking,
'Where does this go, then?', holding up a cup by its handle as
if it were a small fish he'd caught, or an egg whisk or a place
mat, looking like he had no idea of its function, let alone
its home.

The Hennessys all liked doors to be constantly open so that
they could look – and shout – through them, but also shut, so that
they could come flying through, kicking them open for preference,
flinging them back on their hinges. You could hear Patrick's
voice from all over the house, booming out instructions or
singing bits of opera and Irish jigs; and the flip-flap of Mattie's
boot-tops as he ran up and down, making crowing noises; and
Isolde clicking about in her heels and sighing heavily. 'I think I
must have been a changeling,' I heard her say, more than once.

All in all, it was a rich diet for a girl like me.

And then there was Tom Rose. He was a friend of Tom's, always
hanging round the house as if he had no home of his own to go
to. Like me, I suppose. I was always disappointed if I found him
there, too. But Barbara took his presence for granted so I didn't
dare complain. 'Oh, it's just Tom Rose,' she'd say.

We would sit on the floor in Tom's room, just bare floorboards
stained with varnish, and he would teach us things: card tricks,
and how to roll dice properly. He taught Barbara and me to play
poker. Isolde wouldn't join in, but she watched from the doorway
with her arms folded and her nose in the air.

'Corrupting the children again,' she said.

'We
want
to be corrupted,' Barbara told her. And giving me that
glinting look, she added, 'We're not goody-goodies, all timid and
feeble, must-do-what-your-mummy-says. We're not
bungalow
kids.'

When Isolde stalked off Tom called after her, 'Interfering bitch,'
and glanced conspiratorially at Tom Rose, who snickered with
amusement. And that was that. Nothing happened. No fire or
brimstone rained down on him for being rude, or disloyal about
a sister, or for using such a word. Nobody came crashing up the
stairs saying, 'I heard that!' No one suggested he wash his mouth
out with soap and water.

Once, even, I was in the kitchen and Patrick was having a sort
of mock fight with Tom (I thought it was a mock fight), and had
grabbed him by both arms from behind. Tom, who was nearly as
tall, struck backwards with both elbows into his father's ribs, with
all his might. Patrick yelled and let him go, laughing and crying
out, 'You bloody little sod!' I froze. My ears turned crimson, and I
could feel a prickling sensation all over my face. Could other
people hear that sound as if a huge pane of glass had smashed, the
tinkling of the slivers of glass as they fell to the ground? Tom was
hovering in the doorway, cackling at his father's discomfort.
Patrick rubbed his ribs through his grubby jumper, and said,
'Little sod,' again, in wonder.

No one ever uttered a swear word in our house. We knew there
were words one could not say, or even hear, without being defiled.
But we didn't know what they were. So, how come, from out of
that startling sentence, spoken by a father to his son, could I
unerringly pick out the words I knew to be wrong?
Bloody
little
sod
. And no one baulked, no one froze – except me – no one else
did
hear the glass crashing to the ground. Tillie went on with her
washing-up, glancing over her shoulder, untroubled, and Tom
hopped up and down in the doorway, and then, laughing,
sprinted off down the hall like a dog that really wants to be
chased.

They even arranged their house differently. I just assumed that
the biggest bedroom was reserved for the parents, the couple, the
heads of the household. At Gloria and Stella's the bigger bedroom
automatically belonged to Gloria and Eddy, even though the high
marital bed was so seldom busy. Stella was banished to the back
room, being single. And Bettina, who spoilt Mandy in every way
possible, still claimed the bigger bedroom for her own. It went
without saying. Until I knew the Hennessys.

It was Tom who occupied the big upstairs front room. The
curtainless windows let in all the sun. He had louring posters on
the wall, Che, and amorphous bubbling shapes, and Dalí's soft
clocks. He lay on his bed and threw darts at Che's handsome
warrior features. The room smelled of socks, and old cardboard,
and something sweet and sour. Tillie and Patrick were relegated to
a smaller room at the back of the house, where all the furniture
was pressed up against the walls to make way for their bed.
Barbara had a room downstairs which she referred to as the study.
'
I
sleep in the study.' It looked like an ordinary bedroom to me,
though desperately untidy. This was another shock – that you could
have a bedroom downstairs in a house that was not a bungalow. And
Isolde had stepped through the blue curtain into next door and
taken up residence in one of her grandparents' spare rooms,
gradually moving all her possessions through after her.