The Story of My Face (11 page)

Whilst her sister clung to her dignity on a physical level, Penelope Cole, who could have been head of department, a good one too, was clinging to her very existence in the school as to the edge of a cliff. She was thin enough to feel the cold right through spring. Her face was wrinkled from all the talking she did, her cheeks rough-red from the wind; she cycled six miles to and from work every day, she never got enough sleep and now there were thirty-three exercise books to mark in forty-four minutes.

‘It's about my writing,' I said. ‘Will you help?'

‘I really don't have much time, Natalie –' She gestured at her pile of books, but by now I had my grubby duffle-bag right on her desk and was reaching down into it. ‘Can't Mrs Jay help?'

‘No, she can't.' I gave her the envelope. It was addressed to Mrs Baron, marked ‘By Hand' where the stamp would be, and, naturally, had already been opened.

Miss Cole handed it back.

‘This is your mother's. You shouldn't –'

I removed the letter from the envelope, flattened it on the desk between us.

‘She told me to ask,' I said, and brushed her face all over with my gaze – a tangible thing: close up like this, its effect on someone like Penelope was midway between pleasure and discomfort, like the edge of paper stroked on skin and enough, under the circumstances, to distract her from the possibility of a lie, the fact that really, she should be checking just in case. ‘It's about me. It's an invitation.' Without being asked, I read it out to her and I read it well, although slowly, stumbling just a couple of times. Miss Cole leaned forwards and took the second paragraph in for herself, while she waited for me to get to the end of the first:

So naturally we are seeking your opinion and permission. We would be travelling by car and staying in our four-berth caravan, returning on 4 August. It is of course a religious holiday for us but no pressure would be brought to bear on Natalie and there is plenty of time to enjoy the countryside and play in the fresh air with other children.

I do hope you can say yes but in any case it would be very pleasant to meet you and your husband, seeing as we see so much of your daughter. If you think that Natalie might come there will naturally be questions you want to ask. I am here any afternoon and my husband too in the evenings and Saturdays.

Yours sincerely, Barbara Hern.

‘Well read!' Miss Cole exclaimed. She reached for her pen. ‘And how lovely to be invited!'

‘The thing is,' I told her, ‘my mother has a problem with writing, like me. Worse, really. Normally she just ignores things that come in the post. We can ask the neighbours but she doesn't want people to know our business. Do you see?' I asked.

‘I do see,' Miss Cole said.

‘She says I can go but I have to do the letter. If I write the answer out, she can just put her name at the end –' My face was slack, my eyes huge with the fear of disappointment. My voice grew quieter, thinner: ‘There mustn't be any mistakes,' I told her, ‘none.'

It was irresistible: Miss Cole moved the exercise books aside, opened her desk and brought out a sheaf of good-quality paper.

‘Do your best,' she told me, ‘then we'll go over it.'

By the end of the break we had the text fixed: a joint effort, as Miss Cole put it. I had, for example, taken up her suggestions that my mother should not address Barbara as ‘Barbara' but as ‘Mrs Hern' and that it was better to say simply ‘It is very kind' as opposed to ‘It is very, very kind'.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, while Miss Cole marked, I tried to get the letter written correctly, and failed, differently, maddeningly each time. ‘Dear' became the animal, ‘holiday' accrued an extra ‘l', whilst ‘arrange' lost an ‘r'. ‘Possible' mutated into ‘possable', then ‘busy' wanted to rhyme with ‘missy'. It was a long time since I had tried.

Dear Mrs Hern,

It is very kind of you to invite Natalie to join you in Hunmanby. I am very happy for her to go on the holiday. It would be lovely to meet you but I am rather busy right now. Hopefully it will be possible to arrange something nearer the time.

Thank you again for your kind invitation.

Yours sincearly,

I wanted to explode, to ball the paper, crush it, throw it out of the open window, let it vanish into the bright blue sky – but I knew I needed the thing; I had to get it right. I was trapped inside myself like some fairy-tale maiden with a seemingly impossible task: count all the grains of barley in a barn. Stitch a nightdress without using thread. Make a pair of giant's boots from the skins of sardines. Spin gold from straw. In the story, of course, there is always some kind of supernatural aid, a fairy godmother, and a small animal once shown kindness. But Penelope Cole was only a teacher.

‘This is so much better than it was when we began!' she said. ‘I'm very pleased.'

On Friday, Miss Cole said that she would write the letter out in her writing, very clearly, so that all I needed to do was copy it . . . also, she had brought me some special bond notepaper from home and sent me out to wash my hands before I began.

That day, Miss Cole had no marking to do, and she could have gone to the staff-room and made a cup of coffee to go with her home-made pâté and salad sandwiches. But she stayed to keep me company while I worked, a letter at a time, leaving the pen in place on the paper while I looked to the text on my right, carrying the shape back like a bucket over-filled. I found it oddly calming and for minutes on end, was lost in the task. Miss Cole sat still at her desk and surrendered herself to the quirks and kinks of the way this particular part of the hugeness of time was flowing, its currents eddying and parting and reforming around the point of a child's pen on paper. . . . She watched, and thought of the path of her own life, which seemed to her to fall into two parts, the shorter before, the much longer, harder afterwards. But still, at this particular moment, she felt she would alter nothing.

The wooden chair squealed on the floor. I came up to the desk with my pieces of paper, held carefully at the corners. There was a flutter of excitement in my stomach and I think we both believed that this time it would come out right. . . . Even when the finished letter was on her desk, it did seem for a moment that we had succeeded – until Miss Cole, smiling as she bent over the letter, spotted, right near the end, an old enemy risen from the dead, ‘hte', and then realised that, as if out of sheer perversity, I'd invented a completely new mistake and copied the ‘N' of my own name backwards. The very neatness of the handwriting made these trivial errors show up more than they otherwise would have. Miss Cole let out a sigh. Well, couldn't she have pretended? But she never had, not over anything important; it wasn't in her.

‘The main thing,' she told me, ‘is the progress you've made. And perhaps, if you just very carefully correct –'

‘It must be perfect!' I told her.

‘We can try again on Monday,' she said, and I gathered my brows into a slight frown, the expression of a judge about to pronounce, but waiting for one shred of possibly mitigating evidence. I reached out my hand, still smelling of the pink disinfectant soap dispensed in the school cloakrooms, and picked up Penelope Cole's fair copy of the letter. It was better than mine could ever be, because the writing looked grownup, whereas mine was big and I pressed too hard.

‘Monday will be too late. So can I have this?' I asked, and somehow, the spell was broken because all of a sudden Penelope Cole said, ‘
No
.' She was sorry, but it just didn't feel right, she explained, for a letter she had written to be used out of school. She took it back, and put everything that was hers away in her register drawer.

‘If it's so very important,' she said, ‘surely your mother can make a telephone call?' Then she reached down and brought her lunch-box up onto the desk. ‘Hungry?' she asked as she spread a paper serviette on the desk and unwrapped the sandwiches.

I took one, bit into it, swallowed my rage along with the food. ‘Why are they so heavy?' I asked. ‘What's that oniony smell? Who made them?'

‘Why do you still live with your sister?' I asked a little later on.

‘Because I do.' Penelope Cole filled her mouth so as to prevent herself saying anything she shouldn't.

‘My sister made this bread herself,' she told me. ‘We're twins. We still both have the same eyes,' she added.

Child and woman, we watched each other. There were shifts of attention, comings and goings towards and away from the surface, the beginnings of things suddenly concealed. There was a refusal to meet the eyes, but equally, a refusal to go away.
What is it
, Penelope Cole thought at me,
that you
want?
And I couldn't answer because I just didn't have a name for it. The two of us chewed and swallowed, looked and felt the shape of what couldn't be said.

On Monday, I missed my appointment to see Miss Cole. On Tuesday, she stopped me in the corridor. ‘Oh,' I told her, before allowing myself to be swept along in the tide, ‘we just phoned up, like you said.'

Miss Cole didn't know that this was the last time that she'd see me. But perhaps, because of her disappointment, the sadness that she must have felt when it seemed that the week of lunchtimes would add up to nothing, she took particular notice, just as people do when they are knowingly saying goodbye. The fuzz of hair, the general mottled pallor: the child, she thought, ought to look ethereal and almost does, but on second glance the impression is of an angel accidentally miscast in fleshier than usual human flesh. . . .

Much later, after the summer holidays, after Aldrin and Armstrong had put soft, grey moondust in jars, left messages for other intelligent lifeforms, a flag, footprints, returned safely to earth; after Brittany, the ferry strike, storms, bad mussels and so on, Penelope Cole would have returned to school to find that all the children had as usual grown and some of them were gone, and new ones had arrived to take their places. Hearing the news about Natalie Baron, she'd have searched for the letter we had written together, and, of course, have found that it was gone.

12

Barbara and I: we've mixed a dab of fresh yeast with sugar and water, watched it froth, poured it into the sifted flour and sugar. Now comes the beaten egg, the tiny purple-black currants, the mis-shapen cubes of candied peel. In the bowl, under its cloth, too slow to see, the dough grows. You must be patient, and you can't eat this kind of mixture because it would rise inside and give you tummy-ache.

Barbara is telling me how she and Mr Hern (as she calls him when she's talking to me) first met at a cycling club; how from the start she was struck by the peaceful expression on his face, which seemed at odds with the sudden speeches he made, the power and extremity of his beliefs. Then again he would always stop to help someone with a puncture or a broken chain. . . .

‘Please!' he called out to her, as they cycled through flat fields, Ely Cathedral (which he refused to visit) in the distance, ‘Let's stop a moment –' There, sitting on warm, damp grass with the wheels of the bicycles still whirring, he took her hand and asked her to join him in ‘Blessed Union'.

‘Those were the actual words he used,' she says, ‘and the whole of me said
yes
, although I asked for an evening to think it over, and of course I had to be converted, and have two weddings instead of one, and I knew my parents would never forgive me –' She frowns, shrugs, smiles, all at the same time.

So I sit at the now-familiar table, simultaneously drinking in Barbara's remembered past and the way she is now, for me: the way she leans forward when she talks to me, the fact that she interrupts herself to ask whether I'm too hot and to offer me a drink, the bubbles of excitement in her voice, the slow stretch of her lips when she half-smiles, thinking, perhaps, of something she might or is about to say –

‘Why get married?' I ask.

‘To have children,' she says, immediately. She pulls the cloth from the bowl and holds it out for me to see: a creamy wet mound of the stuff, alive, almost but not quite disgusting. ‘Rub those trays with that butter-paper, will you now? We're ready.'

‘Why have children?'

‘For love!' she says. ‘Why else, silly?'

We flour our hands, push it down, folding it in on itself. It sticks, peels off again. The smell of it rises softly up the back of my nose, fills all the space inside.

‘You know, a baby's head has a smell something like that,' Barbara says, ‘halfway between yeast and vanilla. And a bit like the cupboard where biscuits are kept.' She frowns slightly, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear: perhaps she's wondering what on earth is making her tell me all this. But she doesn't wonder too long, because she wants to tell me it as much as I want her to, and thinking too much might get in the way.