by Sara Banerji
‘The children,’ she had whispered. ‘You don’t know what they are like, how I have to slave for them. Now that I am unwell, I am just not up to any kind of effort.’
‘You needn’t do anything,’ Tim had begged. ‘Just lie there while I love you.’
She suddenly allowed herself to go limp, afraid that he might find her resistance too strong for one in such a debilitated state. He had stroked her thighs. Then something had happened that, thereafter, Elizabeth had always remembered with fear and bewilderment.
Tim had suddenly withdrawn his hand and, giving her a little push as though she was some product being rejected from the larder shelf, had turned away from her.
At first she had waited, wondering.
After a long time, during which he did not turn back and his breathing seemed to be softening into the rhythm of sleep, she had whispered, ‘Tim, what? What?’
‘Mmm?’ he had mumbled sleepily.
She had lain awake for hours after that trying to understand, for Tim’s incomprehensible rejection of her, just when he had got his way, did in fact awaken desire in her and she found herself lying longing but unable, perfectly unable, to tell Tim ‘I want you.’ The words would not come out. After all, men court women, not women men. And anyway he might have responded with, ‘But I don’t you.’
She had been woken later by the gentle rocking of the bed, and found him, still with his back to her, masturbating.
A few days after this he had come home with the Wren who had kept looking at Tim conspiratorially, though, after she had gone, Tim had told Elizabeth that this was because she was his secretary and they shared naval secrets. Elizabeth had suspected nothing because the Wren was ugly with hair the colour of ham rind, and a shiny pink face like a pre-war rasher. Elizabeth remembered that she had smelled slightly smoky and salty too, and now for the first time the idea occurred to Elizabeth it was the smell of passion.
Elizabeth’s figure was willowy, her hair beautifully permed, her skin like the bloom on a damson – through the application of pre-war powder over the vanishing cream – and she smelled of Chanel and sandalwood soap. It simply had not occurred to her until now that Tim might have preferred a willing woman to a lovely one.
She said to Mrs Lovage, ‘Do you think it will be all right to ask no women?’
‘What about Sissy?’ said Mrs Lovage.
‘Sissy?’ Elizabeth swung round and stared amazed. ‘Sissy?’ she said again, as Mrs Lovage went on polishing unperturbedly.
As though addressing her own reflection, Mrs Lovage said after a while, ‘It’d be a chance for her to meet some decent young men.’
‘But why should she meet men, Mrs L? She’s only thirteen,’ cried Elizabeth.
‘There’s no such thing as “only” when it comes to teenage girls,’ Mrs Lovage replied placidly.
‘It’s ridiculous. You can’t have a child at a dinner party,’ Elizabeth protested.
‘She’d be under your eye at your dinner table.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ snapped Elizabeth.
‘Now don’t take on so, dearie,’ soothed Mrs Lovage, straightening and waving her arms around in one of her symbolic hugs. ‘She’s reached the age, that’s all. My Myrtle was reeking of eau-de-Cologne and making eyes at the young airmen by the time she was twelve. Her Dad caught her canoodling before her thirteenth birthday.’
Elizabeth didn’t comment but thought secretly, what else would one expect from a girl like Myrtle.
‘Three village girls, all under sixteen, have been put in the family way,’ Mrs Lovage was saying.
‘But Sissy isn’t a village girl,’ retorted Elizabeth.
‘It’d be better for Sissy to come to a dinner party than for you to have a bastard for a grandchild,’ said Mrs Lovage, sucking at her ciggy, and scouring a ring mark. ‘She’d have been preggy by the Eyetie by now if it hadn’t been for me.’ Her attention was on the oak sideboard or she might have sensed danger.
‘Girls of our class don’t get bastards,’ Elizabeth announced so suddenly and savagely that Mrs Lovage looked up, alarmed.
Elizabeth was glaring and Mrs Lovage shrank back nervously.
‘How dare you make such a suggestion about my child,’ Elizabeth almost shouted, purposely rude as if the episode of the Italian prisoner had filled her with a desire for revenge.
‘But … but …’ stammered Mrs Lovage, flustered at not finding Sissy their mutual enemy. ‘I thought, I only said –’ She sat back and stared, bewildered hurt in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, ducky.’ She was almost whimpering. ‘I don’t know what I said, but I’m sorry.’
Elizabeth at once felt guilty, and said swiftly, ‘I apologise for being rude, Mrs L. Put it down to a mother’s broken heart,’ then, clasping her palms against her breast, let out a groan.
‘I’ll help you make a dress for Sissy, dearie,’ said Mrs Lovage, trying to get back into the good books. ‘We’ll have her looking really beautiful for the dinner. All she needs is a bit of a scrub and a pretty frock.’
This conversation took place at the moment the sperm’s snout punctured the ovum and made me. It is a cosmic moment, a milestone in the history of the human race, and yet those people closest to me passed it by, and instead discussed scrubbing Sissy, then went on to fret about dried egg powder, the doing up of fly buttons in a hurry, the insufficiency of ham in war-time, and whether the dirty fingernails of Elizabeth’s children had affected their growth.
Chapter 10
‘We will make Sissy’s dress out of this,’ Elizabeth said, a quiver in her voice, and drew a package smelling of mothballs from the drawer. Mrs Lovage, measuring; Myrtle, pins pinched in her lips; Sissy in her underwear; George, scowling from the passage, watched as Elizabeth opened the tissue paper and revealed soft blue cloth.
‘Ah,’ sighed Mrs Lovage as though a jewel had emerged.
Elizabeth sank on to her heels as though the appearance of the cloth had been an overwhelming emotional experience, then, holding the four yards to her cheek, let out a moan so that Mrs Lovage’s features clicked from efficiency to compassion.
‘There you go, luvvy. I remember when Mister Tim brought it back from France for you.’
‘Mrs L, your memories!’ sighed Elizabeth, still squatting, her eyes distanced and wet with nostalgia.
Sissy wiggled and suppressed a titter.
‘You shouldn’t give it away if it means so much to you, ducky,’ Mrs Lovage gave a quick glare in Sissy’s direction as she rolled up the tape.
The chiffon had been kept stored in mothballs ever since Tim had given it to Elizabeth just before the war and she had planned to be encased in it for an opening night at the Royal Opera House. The lovely cloth would caress her slim-as-an-eel body, and would go softly tight tight tight over her flat breasts and round her small waist. Gently swathing Venus’s mount so that it showed without showing, the chiffon would flow on downwards over Elizabeth’s long thighs like a sinking into some warm sweet tropical sea. Elizabeth had flat kneecaps and she could walk smoothly from the hips.
Below, where other people would have had jutting bumps at every stride and Elizabeth did not, soft fumes of gathered chiffon would go clouding out and, from underneath, Elizabeth’s lacquered toes encased in golden Grecian sandals would gracefully emerge.
It had never happened because the war came, and Royal Opera House nights ceased.
Tim’s sister Beattie had held the cloth against Elizabeth’s body when Tim had come back from France with it and Elizabeth could still remember the way her sister-in-law’s hands had trembled.
She said to Elizabeth, ‘You are going to be so beautiful,’ and even Tim’s laugh of ‘She is already,’ had not deprived the statement of its soft hoarse impact.
Recalling the way Beattie had flushed and shivered, Elizabeth had gone later to the glass and been disappointed not to see spiritual awareness reflected in her features.
Still clutching Tim’s French chiffon to her face now, El
izabeth hesitated, making up her mind.
Sissy’s feet were cold on the linoleum, she tingled with shame, had been twice stabbed by pins, once snipped with scissor tips and was now sore across her midriff where Mrs Lovage had hauled the tape measure; still, she did not complain but felt the spittle dry in her mouth as she waited for her mother’s words.
There was a long pause while Elizabeth remained in thought, then at last she said, in the tones of one making the supreme sacrifice, ‘No, it shall be a dress for Sissy.’ She paused so that the impact should sink in, then added, ‘Pale blue chiffon. What could be lovelier for a young girl?’
‘Myrtle’ll stitch it up for Sissy, luvvy,’ Mrs Lovage said.
‘Myrtle?’ winced Elizabeth, glancing at the manicured hands of the vapid teenager.
Mrs Lovage, recognising the look, said soothingly, Of course she wouldn’t do for you, lovey. I know that. For you it has to be cootooreeay … or whatever the word is. But Myrtle got an ‘A’ in sewing for her school cert, didn’t you, Mert?’ She went on measuring Sissy while Myrtle wrote down the results in an old exercise book.
‘Thirteen round the neck …’
‘And we’ll get your hair permed,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Thirty-two round the hips,’ said Mrs Lovage.
‘Thirty-two!’ whistled Myrtle.
‘That was my bottom, not my hips,’ cried Sissy, her cheeks hot and red.
‘Keep still, can’t you,’ said Mrs Lovage. ‘Chest thirty-two.’
‘She’s the same all down,’ said Myrtle. ‘Like a potato.’
‘Now then, our Mert,’ warned Mrs Lovage.
Narrowing her eyes to get the total effect, Elizabeth held up her daughter’s hair before the looking glass, trying it for sweetness and innocence. ‘There, what do you think?’ she said to Sissy’s reflection.
The tickling of Elizabeth’s fingers overwhelmed Sissy with a thrilled dizziness. She sneered ‘Urgh! Yukk! into the glass to disguise it, and gripped the back of a chair because she felt faint with delight.
The strange physical episodes with George seemed to have awakened something in her nervous system; it was as if a live being, residing down her spine, began stirring at a touch or taste or smell: a breeze moving the grass around her bare toes, the treacly hot smell of the new-mown hay, the music her mother played on the gramophone.
As Sissy stood among pieces of blue chiffon, like fragments of sky brought low, she caught sight of George lurking, resentful, jealous, possessive.
Elizabeth, letting go of Sissy’s hair so that it fell heavily against her neck, took cloth with the tips of her fingers, and held it out against her daughter’s body, saying, as though she had scored a bull’s eye, ‘There!’, while Myrtle, awed from tittering, held the pin-prickly other half against Sissy’s throat.
‘Well! You’re beginning to look like a girl at last,’ grinned Myrtle, triumph in her voice, as though she alone was responsible for this desirable sex change.
Sissy winced.
Myrtle tried to insert a pin and jabbed it slightly into Sissy’s midriff.
‘Ow! Ouch! It hurts,’ shrieked Sissy, making much more fuss than the small prick merited, wanting to distract George and have revenge on Myrtle. George stirred sharply at Sissy’s scream, leant forward, fists clenched.
‘Hush. You’ve got to suffer a bit for beauty,’ said Elizabeth, while Mrs Lovage clucked her tongue and said, ‘Now then, our Mert, be careful where you put those pins. We don’t want blood on the pretty cloth.’
‘What about my agony?’ shrieked Sissy, encouraged because she seemed to have decreased the pyronic look in George’s eyes.
As Elizabeth worked round her, pinning, pinching, holding up, pulling round, Sissy pursed up her lips in George’s direction, indicating a kiss later. ‘Tonight,’ mouthed Sissy’s lips, ‘I’ll hold you like this and caress you here –’ She let both her hands lie briefly in the warm crevice between her legs.
‘Oh, do keep still. How can we get it to hang right?’ Elizabeth’s voice was quite understanding as though, now Sissy was turning into a girl dressed in chiffon, they were developing a relationship. ‘We’ll try hard not to hurt you again. Won’t we, Myrtle?’ warningly. Elizabeth knew about Sissy getting offended and digging in her toes. Sissy felt shaken with reluctant delight at the fragile protection.
Elizabeth was shivering a little, excited by the new emerging Sissy, as if her daughter was a piece of Jacobean furniture responding to polish.
‘Lovely, pretty,’ she murmured, and, with a small flush of pity for what he was missing, wondered what Tim’s reaction to his daughter in her soft blue dress would have been.
Sissy caught a glimpse of George’s eye peeping, malevolent, through the hinge, and wondered what revenge he would take for his mother paying her so much attention, and into her mind came the episode of the photograph when the twins were three.
Guarded by Nanny Button, they had been playing on the lawn when Elizabeth had appeared, holding a camera and a little smocked dress. Elizabeth had picked up Sissy, removed her soiled romper and replaced it with the new frock, and to this day Sissy could remember the furry soft feel of the spotted Viyella against her skin and the tickly feel of her mother’s fingers as she did up the little pearl buttons at the back. Then Elizabeth had replaced Sissy on the rug and stood back to admire the effect. Sissy even thought she remembered her mother saying, as she had said today, ‘Lovely! Pretty!’ After that, Elizabeth had raised the box camera while George, jostling, had tried to get into the picture too, but Nanny Button held him back.
Elizabeth, crying playfully, ‘Smile, darling. Smile, Sissy, look at the birdie,’ had put the camera to her eye. ‘It is for the “Pears Soap Beautiful Child” competition.’
Sissy, very keen, had stretched her lips widely. She had heard a click, her mother had lowered the camera, but Sissy had seen no bird.
‘Oh, did you miss it?’ laughed Elizabeth. ‘I bet Georgie saw it. Didn’t you, George?’
‘Yes,’ lied George smugly. ‘It was yellow.’
Elizabeth said, ‘It probably popped in and out too fast for you,’ to try to stop Sissy’s disappointed weeping, but Sissy only howled louder and in the end Elizabeth, losing patience, went back into the house, leaving Nanny Button to console her child and remove the new dress.
As soon as Elizabeth was out of sight, George had leant over and suddenly, and with great ferocity, bitten Sissy on her arm.
Now Elizabeth, immersed in chiffon, and unaware of the dangerous peepings of her son said, laughing, ‘You’ve got a little lady’s figure already. We’ll have to think of getting you a brassière from Officers’ Families at this rate!’
‘A what?’ asked Sissy. ‘I thought that was a kind of stove.’
Myrtle giggled and Mrs Lovage said, ‘It’s to prop up your bust, ducky.’
‘Bust?’ From the way they laughed she knew it was something embarrassing.
‘Bosom,’ explained Elizabeth, patting Sissy on her chest. The slight touch hurt, then embarrassment swept away the small pain, for the breasts had been her and George’s secret – George putting his lips round the nipples till they stood up like mushroom-coloured soldiers – and she had not expected anybody else to ever know about them. Sissy repressed a desire to rush screaming from the room.
But then Elizabeth said, ‘You might be able to fit into my cream silk slippers. You’re much shorter than I but they’ll probably fit all the same.’
Elizabeth had always said Sissy’s large feet were one of her bad points, but they had become an advantage because now Sissy could wear Elizabeth’s shoes.
‘Whatever next?’ thought Sissy, watching her mother draw the pale shining shoes from the cupboard and began to feel like Alice in an upside-down land where amazing things happened every moment. ‘She’ll be inviting me to use her sandalwood soap next. Or her lipstick.’
The thought of the lipstick made Sissy suddenly panic, for Elizabeth would one day discover, from the broken-off t
ip and the smudgy sides, that Sissy had already used it.
‘Are you cold, Sissy?’ asked Elizabeth, and then to Myrtle, ‘Now, come on. Hurry up. The child’s been standing around half-naked for ages.’
‘It’s summer,’ murmured Mrs Lovage soothingly but, all the same, closed the window and beckoned Myrtle with a hurrying gesture.
That night, in the Hairy Petal Bedroom, when George tried to kiss her breasts, Sissy, snorting ‘Oo! Ouch!’, whisked her body away from him.
‘What? What?’ asked George, shocked at this sudden withdrawal.
‘They hurt,’ said Sissy, rolling over on to her back so George could look.
‘Sis! They’ve gone black!’ cried George.
‘What?’ Sissy craned to see in the half dark of the bedroom.
‘Like prunes,’ George said. ‘As if they’ve been set on fire. Perhaps Myrtle’s a witch and has put a spell on you.’
‘I wouldn’t exactly say black,’ mumbled Sissy, who, by rolling her body up and pressing her chin to her collar-bone, had managed to see at last. ‘Dark though. And sore!’ she yelped, as George put out his hand to touch.
Suddenly, through the open window, came the sound of a rich deep man’s voice singing, far away down the garden, ‘Why keep your gaze, beloved, on the chilly moon above …’
It was full moon and Elizabeth had gone with her gramophone to drown in the smell of honeysuckle and revel in the lusciousness of lonely love.
‘… When in my strong arms, fair lady, you will find my burning love? …’came rolling across the garden.
‘It must be awful for the ducks, who are trying to get a bit of sleep after a day of being upside-down in the moat,’ grunted George.
Sissy did not respond; her attention was on the singing, which suddenly seemed to her to be the most beautiful she had ever heard. From his voice, she knew the singer must be dark; from his words, dominant. He would be able to pick her up in his arms and carry her.
Glancing at her plump and nervous brother, Sissy gave a chilly shiver.