by Emma Morgan
When Grace was twelve, normal was Susannah Lewes, the girl who sat behind her in their first year at school. Normal then was having your hair in a French plait and wearing clean clothes and having neat handwriting. Normal was eating a roast on Sundays and sitting with your family in a row on the sofa and watching TV together. Then when she was fourteen, normal was a different thing altogether. Normal was having the right jeans and having boys want to snog you and you liking Strongbow. It was not the thought of snogging a boy making you feel physically sick and being in love with a girl who was in the Sixth Form and didn’t even know your name. At seventeen normal was going out with the head boy and having a decent tan. The paraphernalia and the language changed but normal didn’t.
‘Normal is so boring, normal is so average, who wants to be like everyone else?’ said Great Aunt Beatrice as she pruned the ‘Maiden’s Blush’ roses while La Traviata blasted out of the open windows at maximum volume. Grace and Eustacia and Bella and Tess were playing croquet on what they referred to as ‘primo lawn’ to distinguish it from the others. ‘I don’t,’ said Bella, which was all very well for her because she was the coolest one of them, she had no trouble at school at all, all she had to do was shorten her skirt to above the knee and it became a new craze. Grace, however, was suffering. What Beatrice didn’t understand was that normal was advantageous as camouflage, that normal was the ease of being in a world into which one naturally fitted without the need of an adaptor plug. The word ‘lezzer’ was thrown at Grace like a hand grenade. Girls shielded their bodies from her view in the changing rooms. An alternative form of bullying to less popular girls was to say that they fancied her or worse that she fancied them.
‘What is a lezzer?’ she asked Beatrice and Cyril when aged twelve.
‘It means that you like girls better than you like boys, which seems eminently sensible in my book,’ said Beatrice.
‘Male homosexuality was of course very much tolerated, and, one could argue, more than tolerated in the ancient world,’ said Cyril. ‘I’ll find you some literature.’
The Spartans however were of little help to her at all.
What is normal? Grace now knew that it was a word that needed air parentheses around it. It didn’t, after her years of investigation into the strangeness of the human state, seem to exist in the adult population and she was grateful for this knowledge. She was grateful too to have escaped the prescriptions of childhood, its narrow conventions and petty divisions, to live in a world where she could now move about more or less freely. Grace had had sex with twelve women before in her life. Was that ‘normal’? She’d never asked anyone else except Eustacia, who had looked at her and said, ‘Two,’ and Grace had had to laugh. She had not ever had sex with a woman she had been in love with before, and she was, she realized, when waking up in Sam’s bed, most certainly in love. She felt stupidly happy, face-achingly so. She couldn’t stop grinning, and then her heart would rise suddenly like an out-of-control lift as she remembered things from the night before. The way they had got so sweaty that they had stuck together and only laughed about it. The way Sam had pulled her knickers down her legs slowly. Grace felt finally that she had reached a state that everyone else had talked about but which she had not been able to imagine clearly. This is what it felt like to be in love as people had always described it. ‘It feels like my vagina is pulsing and that I’ve got tachycardia,’ she considered saying to Sam, but decided against it.
Sam wasn’t in the bed, which had a wooden headboard and a footboard but wasn’t big as doubles go. The duvet cover was green. Grace sat up. Opposite her was a chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it, draped with a black and white scarf. Grace was grateful not to be able to see her morning complexion. In front of the mirror was a large rectangular wooden box. Maybe it was where Sam’s earrings lived or where she kept letters from old lovers. Grace wanted to open that box and see what was inside it. She pulled back the duvet, knowing that this was completely the wrong thing to do.
‘Are you all right?’ Sam asked, making Grace jump. She was standing in the doorway. Even in her faded towelling bathrobe she was beautiful.
‘Yes, I’m great,’ Grace said, trying not to look guilty. She had an urge to lick her thumb and check for sleep in the corner of her eyes but she stopped herself in time. She wanted to ask for a kiss but she didn’t want to appear demanding. She wanted to say come back to bed with me but she’d missed the opening.
‘What would you like for breakfast?’ Sam said, which should have pleased Grace. Being offered breakfast was, in her experience, a good sign. It meant that the person who was suggesting it had some modicum of politeness, and that even if all it resulted in was half a stale croissant the offer indicated kindness. Better than the time someone had offered tea and Grace had said she preferred coffee and the woman involved had said, ‘I don’t have any coffee,’ and simply stared at Grace until she was forced to leave.
‘I’m fine, thanks. I’ve got to get home,’ Grace said, and she picked her clothes off the floor and put them on as quickly as she could with her back to Sam. She sat on the bed to put her socks and boots on and she could tell that Sam was looking at her but was remaining silent and the silence made Grace’s face go hot. She got up and faced Sam.
‘Thanks for a nice time,’ she said.
‘I had a nice time too,’ said Sam. ‘Call me.’
Was that the brush-off? Was that the end of it now?
‘OK,’ said Grace. ‘I will.’
She went into the hall, Sam following her. Grace opened the front door of the flat and without looking at Sam again she said, ‘Bye,’ and moved quickly down the stairs even though her leg still hurt. She let herself out of the house and the door clicked shut behind her and she wished it hadn’t because she wanted to turn around and go back upstairs and say, ‘What did you mean when you said, “Call me”? Did you mean that or was it your way of saying, “Go away, you unpleasant woman, I’d rather sleep with anyone in the world than sleep with you again.” ’ Am I being completely and stupidly paranoid? thought Grace as she unlocked her car door. Her teeth were unbrushed and the inside of her mouth tasted like fur. She looked at herself in the car mirror and flattened down her sticking-up hair and gave her unwashed face a once-over with her hand. She looked rough. That’s what Sam must be thinking – that rough-looking woman, thank God she’s gone now. Grace sniffed under her armpits. Why did one armpit always smell worse than the other? I want to be there always, at Sam’s, she realized. I want to belong there. I want to find out everything about her that there is to know. I want to have sex with her that keeps me up all night until I am begging for sleep. That is not good. I’ve only just slept with her once and she probably doesn’t even like me. What would I tell a client to do under these circumstances? I’d say go home and get some rest and deal with it later. She got out of the car, relocked it, and went back to the house and rang the doorbell. After a while she could see through the opaque glass panel Sam’s shape padding down the hall. Sam opened the door and seemed pleased if surprised to see her.
‘Did you forget something, Grace?’ she asked, smiling.
‘What did you mean when you said, “Call me”?’
‘Do you like eggs?’ said Sam, and put out her hand and pulled Grace inside.
This is Annie and her suggested night out
‘Violet?’
‘Yeah?’
Annie’s manicurist was on holiday and so she was sitting in the living room giving herself a pedicure. ‘Slumming it’, as Violet would put it. Violet, having got up at a reasonable hour for once, especially considering it was Sunday, came out of her room in a mini red kimono and mustard yellow cords. Annie raised her eyebrows.
‘You look like you were on the game in Japan but then got confused and decided to go hunting.’
‘It’ll have to do,’ said Violet, ‘there’s nothing else that’s at all clean. Do you want some toast?’
‘Do you like Laurence?’ asked Annie.
&n
bsp; ‘He’s OK.’
Annie watched Violet move into the kitchen and look in her cupboard. Well, she’d get no joy there; Violet’s cupboard was always half empty apart from useless tins like pilchards. Why did she buy them? Who likes pilchards? But she knew that Violet found shopping overwhelming and was easily seduced by pretty packaging.
‘What does that mean – he’s OK?’
‘Did he go to public school?’ asked Violet. ‘I haven’t got any bread. Have you got any bread?’
‘Of course I have. Look in my cupboard.’
Violet came and slumped next to Annie on the sofa and Annie moved the pot of varnish away before Violet could attack it, because Violet had once got polish on the top of the coffee table and it had caused Annie no end of effort to get it off.
‘Yes, he went to public school,’ said Annie.
‘Eton?’
‘ “Minor” is what he said.’
Violet harrumphed and picked at her fingernails and went to put her thumbnail in her mouth but saw Annie was about to slap her hand down and stopped herself in time.
‘Does he know how to sail?’ she asked.
‘How would I know?’ asked Annie.
‘I bet he does, though. And I bet he pronounces the names of wines properly. You know, like I bet he rolls his “r” on Rioja.’
‘He doesn’t drink rioja. He drinks burgundy,’ said Annie.
Violet snorted.
‘Would he drink warm Lucozade if pushed?’ she asked.
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘Would he?’
‘No, definitely not. And neither would I,’ said Annie.
‘Yes, you say you wouldn’t but I know, in an emergency, you would. Laurence would prefer to drink his own urine. In fact, he probably has on one of those trekking through the jungle expeditions that posh boys do on their gap years. How come all posh boys want to be explorers?’ asked Violet.
Annie finished her toes and looked at them with satisfaction. Violet reached for the pot of polish but Annie quickly put on the lid and placed it back in her extensive manicure kit. She hadn’t even got any on the newspaper which she had carefully put out to catch any accidental drips, not that Annie was a person prone to accidental anything.
‘You forgot about the bread,’ said Annie. ‘Do you want toast?’
‘Do you want toast?’
Annie knew that Violet felt guilty about eating her food. She also knew that she did it while she was out anyway and carefully repositioned the cupboard’s contents afterwards to hide the gap. To pre-empt this, Annie encouraged her to do things out in the open.
‘No. But you have some. There’s half a loaf.’
‘I bet he wears deck shoes that have seen actual decks. I bet he knows how to turn about a boat. I bet his family dress for dinner.’
‘You’re being ridiculous. You know nothing about him.’
She watched Violet put the bread in the toaster. Soon there would be crumbs everywhere, including in the Flora, and jam smeared on the counter top, but Annie was so used to clearing up after Violet that she hardly thought about it any more. She wondered if Violet was jealous of Laurence because she wasn’t paying as much attention to her as usual. That would be strange; she hadn’t thought of Violet as the jealous type.
‘No, you’re right,’ said Violet. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’
Violet stood watching the toaster.
‘A watched pot never boils,’ said Annie. ‘Come here and sit down.’
Violet slumped next to her. Annie had been thinking carefully about her next suggestion. It was easy to spook Violet, she was like a very shy pony. You had to introduce ideas in a casual way, as though the outcome wasn’t very important to you.
‘I was thinking we could do something together.’
‘Like what sort of thing?’ asked Violet, looking alarmed. She had put her feet on the coffee table. Annie looked at her. She put her feet down again.
‘Let’s go out somewhere. The three of us. Would you like to do that?’
‘Dunno,’ said Violet.
‘How about tomorrow?’
‘Dunno,’ said Violet.
‘It’ll mean going outside and interacting with a stranger and so I’ll understand if it’s too much for you. You can say no,’ said Annie. It was important both to acknowledge ‘the fear’ and offer a get-out clause.
‘You don’t like me saying no,’ said Violet. ‘You get cross.’
‘You can say what you want. And I don’t get cross.’
‘I am fighting my way through the thicket.’
‘I have no idea what that means. Could you explain it to me?’
‘Dunno.’
Annie was pleased with her own patience.
‘Look, we’ll have a good time. As long as we don’t go to that terrible club you used to work at.’
‘I’m sure that Laurence is used to the smell of urine.’
‘You keep using that word. It’s worrying me.’
‘We could take him to the shop. He could buy some angel cards. Yes. OK. OK. I’ll come if I must. Where do you want to go?’
Annie had already made the decision long before she had suggested anything.
This is Grace and her new definition of happiness
Grace’s world suddenly expanded. It was amazing what a difference having one new person in it could make. Except it wasn’t just any person, it was Sam. Sam – the woman I am in love with – Grace wanted to introduce her with this honorific. She had presumed that if she ever had anything like a girlfriend she would want to show her to all her friends immediately, to shout it from the rooftops, but no, it was the opposite, she wanted to keep the thing secret. The what – the affair? Grace liked that word, it sounded forbidden and exciting. And Sam didn’t seem to want to go public either and that pleased Grace. Being with Sam felt like a secret only they shared, as though they were creeping around together in the dark holding hands where no one else could see. No, I can’t play badminton this weekend, she told her friends Marcia and Sally, a gay couple she knew from her badminton group, I’m coming down with something. No, I can’t come to the cinema, she told her friend Andy, with whom she had formed a two-person Sandra Bullock fan club, I’ve got people coming to stay. She was aware that she was a cliché – dropping people when you were with someone new. But she was thirty-two, and so she felt that she was allowed to do that for the first time. No, I’m studying, got a lot of reading to do, I’m thinking of doing a PhD, she even lied to her sisters. And yet she didn’t feel ashamed of the lies as she probably should have done, instead she felt protective of her and Sam. It was such a small thing that it was like a seedling that needed shade to grow in, somewhere out of the harsh sunlight of the gaze of others. And what were they to each other anyway? Was someone you had slept with five times your girlfriend? Was someone whose mouth you thought about when you were supposed to be listening to someone complain about their husband your lover? Just because knowing it was her knocking on your front door made your knees shake. Just because you got out of their bed and went to work so crumpled from being awake half the night with them that you probably looked like a bag lady. Just because they let you use their toothbrush. It didn’t mean anything. They could say, ‘No, I don’t want to see you again,’ at the drop of a hat. And this insecurity was so frightening to Grace that at the same time as her world expanded it contracted like a fist grasping her heart. What if she changes her mind? What if she says it’s over? I never knew I was so insecure, thought Grace, but maybe I never had something to be so insecure about before. The way Sam placed her hand on Grace’s belly and it contracted. The way she bent to kiss her breast. It was all wonderful but it was all so tenuous. This new way of being could be taken away at any moment. She couldn’t tell anyone and yet she had to.
‘Can I come over?’ she rang Eustacia to ask.
‘Of course, come any time. You know I love having you here. Come for the weekend.’
‘No, I’m busy
, I’ll just come for lunch.’
‘Is anything wrong?’
‘No, everything’s fine. I just fancied a chat.’
Eustacia was a painter, although you’d never know it to look at her. She didn’t look arty or bohemian. Eustacia was a thirty-year-old woman with smart clothes and a neat brown bob. She didn’t wear dungarees or smell of turps. You couldn’t imagine her spattered with paint. She looked like one of those good Englishwomen who are headmistresses or who head committees – clever, capable, in charge. She was the next sister down from Grace but she had been the motherly one – she cooked for them on the ancient Aga, she cleaned the house as best she could, she tried to keep up with the enormous quantities of laundry, she even washed herself. True, Cyril’s personal hygiene was unimpeachable, but Beatrice didn’t believe in bathing, she favoured liberal splashes of eau de Cologne, including over the dogs, and there was only a freezing bathroom with a bath that took an hour to fill up with lukewarm water. Only Eustacia bothered, the rest of the sisters used grubby flannels. But it was to Eustacia’s credit that she never told the rest of them what to do.
Now and then, in need of her sensible advice, Grace drove too fast from Leeds to the coast near Filey in a car about to fail its MOT, to eat Eustacia’s complicated recipes learnt from French cookery classes, many of which seemed to involve pigeons and chestnuts, and listen to the quick movements of her brush across the canvas, which had always been one of the most comforting sounds that Grace knew. Eustacia painted in oils – seascapes mostly, she marked the long beaks of the birds on the shoreline, the brightness of fishing floats, the colours of the rising tide. Her paintings were sold in a small shop in the village near where they lived in a house like a white cube at the end of a beach of the windswept kind that always reminded Grace of seaside trips from her childhood. Cyril shouting Xenophon to the waves. Thalassa, Thalassa, the sea, the sea. A house which, the first time you saw it, might as well have THIS IS AN ARCHITECT’S HOUSE written in fifteen-foot-high letters across the front. Her husband Jeremy was twenty-two years older than Eustacia, a kind, quiet man with a grey beard clipped as neatly as a yew hedge and a love of world music. He went to Womad and he lent Grace strange CDs, undeterred by years of total lack of enthusiasm for any of the things he liked.