I allowed some tears to pool up in my eyes. I wasn’t sad for myself, exactly. I just felt confused and disorientated and slightly foolish. But I was sad that Christian, who could have done so much better, should have lowered his sights this far. And I thought of Elaine, that impostor, who would soon be sharing my name and living in my house and planning how to refurnish my rooms and telling me what was good for Christian, and me, and the world in general. Then I thought of Penny, who had been marked down as my sister-in-law from the day we met, and who had wielded such influence over me, and whose path had crossed mine this very day, as if by design. Occasionally, over the years, I had entertained the fantasy that she and Christian might meet up again and there would be some gesture of reconciliation. Now, as I reviewed these two apparently unconnected events – Christian’s intention to marry Elaine, and my rediscovery of Penny – it was impossible not to see the workings of Providence. It was my job, evidently, to bring about this long overdue reunion. For Christian’s sake I would take a deep breath, dive back down through the cloudy waters of the past and bring up the pearl.
PART TWO
2
CHRISTIAN WAS FIVE when I was born. Before I had even learned to smile he could read, write his name, catch a tennis ball one-handed and run like a hare, and a quarter of the best part of his life was already in the past. The age gap was such that there was never any competition between us. Christian surpassed me in every accomplishment, so rivalry was pointless. I worshipped him; he endured my worship. According to family lore it was Christian who taught me to read when I was three and he was eight. (Mother was a great delegator.)
We lived on the border of Kent, where the London suburbs trickle into the green belt, in what we liked to call a village, bordered as it was by an approximation of countryside: common land on two sides and a scrubby, pick-your-own farm on the other. Ours was the largest house and garden in the area by some stretch – a grade two listed Victorian schoolhouse, set in an acre of weeds. It had been left to Dad by a maiden aunt, a piece of good fortune he endured with his usual stoicism.
Though picturesque from the outside, the house had fallen into a state of disrepair during Aunt Edie’s lifetime, a trend which our tenancy, unfortunately, did nothing to reverse. One of the seven bedrooms was out of commission all the time I lived there because of advancing damp. Black clouds of mould grew on the bulging ceiling and sweaty walls; cardboard boxes stored there would turn soft as felt overnight. In the end the door was locked on the problem: it didn’t matter; there were plenty of other rooms.
There was something wrong with the plumbing, which meant that hot water was sometimes available and sometimes not, according to the mood of the boiler, a black monstrosity called The Beast, which bent us all to its cast-iron will. It was always threatening to expire, like a querulous elderly relative, and had to be fed regularly with shovelfuls of coal and given artificial respiration with a pair of bellows. Dad was often to be found first thing in the morning on his knees before it, as though at prayer.
Electricity, too, was subject to an air of randomness rare in other houses. The wiring was clearly ancient and temperamental, and had probably suffered interference from rodents over the years. Switches and sockets wobbled like loose teeth, and it wasn’t unusual for us to be plunged into darkness if more than one appliance was running. There were always candles in jam jars standing around in readiness. When the blackouts came in 1974 we hardly noticed.
Dad worked as a chaplain at a young offenders’ institution near Gravesend. He once told us that one of his altar boys was a murderer – a fact we used to parade with some embellishments before our friends, to their great admiration. Mum had trained as an optometrist and once worked in a mission hospital in Cameroon. To hear her talk you’d think she had removed cataracts with her bare hands. Perhaps she had: she wasn’t squeamish. Now she worked as a volunteer in a local charity shop, and did odd bits of typing and other menial jobs (unpaid) for different overseas aid organisations. There wasn’t much money around. The generous maiden aunt had also left Christian – then a baby – £100, which Mum duly confiscated and donated to famine relief, an act whose legality Christian still disputes. Mum took little interest in housewifery: her mind was fixed on nobler things. Every ledge and rail in the house was richly lagged with fluff and dust, huge spiders squatted in cobwebbed corners, and windows were cloudy with smears. Once a year, in late spring, Mum might launch a brief but futile assault on the dirt. Rugs would be dragged into the garden, hung over the washing line and beaten with a broom. A feather duster would be twitched along the picture rails and twirled into corners, momentarily unsettling the dust and sending the spiders skating for cover.
Cooking was another household chore performed dutifully, but without enthusiasm or skill. Ever since working at the mission hospital and witnessing poverty and starvation daily, Mum had had an uneasy relationship with food and took no pleasure in handling it. The fact that human beings required so much of it, so often, seemed to her a design flaw that she would have liked to take up with the Maker at the earliest opportunity. She would never use cookery books, which were in her view decadent and wasteful of ingredients, but instead followed her instincts, invariably driven by thrift or haste, and often wrong. I remember the recriminations that followed Christian’s discovery of a whole snail shell in one of her blackberry crumbles. In one respect she was ahead of her time, undercooking vegetables decades before it became fashionable. Unfortunately meat and poultry frequently came in for the same treatment. The phrase ‘avoid the pink bits’ became something of a family motto. Dinner was often bread and cheese.
Perhaps it was hunger that accounted for my early habit of promiscuous grazing. By the time I was two I had, according to family legend, eaten:
1 earthworm
1 Christmas tree bauble
1 fir cone
2 pieces of coal
the cardboard cover of Ant and Bee.
When I was little, this was held up as an example of my irrepressible character and prodigious appetite. Years later it occurred to me that it also signified a certain level of neglect: how long would a toddler have to be left unattended to dispose of an entire book cover?
This is my earliest authentic memory: broken glass.
It was the summer of ’73: the year eleven-year-old Janine Fellowes murdered little Claudia Lyle and was sent to prison for ever. Christian told me she put a pillow over her face, and then hid the body in the wardrobe and went to the cinema. That was the bit that made me shiver. I was glad to think she was locked away, and not prowling the lanes with her pillow, looking for other little children, but Dad said it was a terrible thing to imprison a child, shocking beyond words, and he couldn’t sit back and say nothing.
On this particular night I came down to the sitting room after lights out because I was having a nightmare. Janine Fellowes again. A strange woman with damp, waist-length hair was sitting on a stool on an island of newspaper in the middle of the floor. My father was on his knees behind her, endeavouring to trim two inches from the ends of her hair by following the horizontal stripe of her shirt. Christian was lying on the couch under the front window, reading Shoot.
‘Where’s Mummy?’ I asked.
‘Here,’ the woman replied, smiling, and now I could see and hear that she was. ‘What do you want?’
‘You don’t look like you.’
‘That’s because you’re used to seeing me with a bun,’ she said.
‘Keep still,’ Dad instructed, pausing to readjust the position of her head. ‘Or it’ll go skewiff.’
‘Why don’t you leave it like that all the time?’ I wanted to know. She looked so lovely, like my Tressie doll, who had a thick blonde plume that you could pull out of a hole in the top of her head by pressing her belly button.
Mum smiled. ‘Because I’m too old. When women get to a certain age long hair doesn’t look nice any more.’
‘Mrs Blewitt’s got long hair,’ I said. Mrs Blewitt ran the M
others’ Union and wore an Alice band.
‘Yes, well,’ said my mother.
‘All done,’ said Dad, whisking the towel from her neck and shaking it out with a flourish, sending up a shower of bristles.
‘How old is too old?’ I wanted to know.
‘Thirty,’ said mother decisively, brushing herself down.
‘Is thirty too old for everything?’ I wondered aloud. I could hear Dad chuckling away. He always found these question and answer sessions highly amusing. I could make him laugh without even trying.
‘Certainly not,’ said mother. ‘Only some things, like long hair.’ She swept the pile of drying fluff into a dustpan and tipped it into the bin, losing some in the process. ‘And short skirts.’ Her own skirts came from the Nearly New shop in West Wickham and fell in a stiff cone of earth-coloured tweed or corduroy to three inches below the knee. She stroked my plaits and then gave me a gentle pat on the back in the direction of the door. ‘So make the most of your lovely long hair while you’re young,’ she ordered, and then turned to include Christian in the dismissal. ‘Bed, young man.’
He made grumbling noises, and rolled reluctantly off the couch onto all fours, before slouching after me. Moments later the central window pane exploded, and in the very spot where he had just been lying sat half a brick, surrounded by shards of smashed glass.
‘Was that my fault?’ Christian said, when the pieces had been swept up and wrapped in newspaper. He had broken windows before, usually with a football, but never by just lying down.
‘No,’ said Dad, peering into the darkness through the empty frame. ‘It was mine.’
A month later my lovely long hair went in the bin. Our school had been raided by the nit nurse not long after I started as a pupil in the reception class and Christian and I were identified as carriers. We were taken aside quietly and given some leaflets, which we were told to take home to our parent-or-guardian.
‘What’s a guardian?’ I asked.
‘Someone who looks after you who isn’t your mummy or daddy,’ the nurse explained kindly.
‘I haven’t got one of those,’ I said, and started to cry.
Fortunately Christian was on hand to explain our domestic arrangements and try to comfort me. ‘Stop crying, stupid,’ he said, and made a move to ruffle my hair, then thought better of it.
We ran to meet Mother at the school gate, waving our sheets of local authority literature on pediculus humanus capitis, invalidating all our teacher’s efforts at discretion.
‘Oh, that’s a nuisance,’ said Mother serenely. She was never one to fuss over matters of hygiene: her dealings with malaria and leprosy had left her unimpressed by lesser ailments. We stopped at the chemist on the way home to pick up a nit comb and some lotion.
‘They only go to clean heads,’ said the woman behind the till, in what she imagined to be a comforting tone, as she counted out Mother’s change.
‘What nonsense,’ said Mother, who had no time for such platitudes. ‘The soldiers on the Somme were crawling with head lice and you don’t think they had clean hair.’ And snapping her purse shut, she led us out of the shop with our dirty, infested heads held high.
At home the scissors were produced and Mother cut my long, looping curls to a ragged two-inch crop. Christian laughed when he saw me shorn and smeared with lotion, then shut up when Mother turned the scissors on him.
‘You look like a boy,’ he said afterwards, as we gazed at ourselves in the big gilt mirror above the fireplace. I was standing on a chair, so our heads were level, and I noticed for the first time that we had the same large, crumpled ears. Since much of my time was devoted to the business of emulating Christian I didn’t take his remarks as an insult. On the contrary I was delighted. Boys had all the best games: they could climb onto the shed roof, throw tennis balls right over the apple trees, ride a bike no-handed, and swarm up to the top of the rope swing and sit in the oak tree, miles above my head, pretending not to hear anyone calling.
‘Let’s play death-sticks,’ I suggested. This was a game of Christian’s own invention, involving rolled-up magazines which functioned as treasure and weapons. The object was to impound each other’s hoard by any means possible – principally force. There were no rules. Daring raids on one another’s territory usually ended with the two of us brawling in the long grass and thumping each other with tattered copies of Shoot.
Christian pulled a face. ‘It’s too easy. I always win.’
This wasn’t boastfulness, but simple fact. His five-year head start meant that there was no game at which I could beat him, no skill I could ever teach him. Nothing I did could ever impress Christian, but the effort of trying seemed to rule my whole childhood.
3
OUR PARENTS WERE different from other people’s, and they had different rules. They didn’t mind if we were noisy or boisterous, or if we traipsed mud through the house, or slid down the compost heap, or caught nits. They didn’t rant and fume when we came home from school with indelible ink on our uniforms, or pockets torn loose, or our shoes scuffed grey. When we left our pens all over the kitchen floor, Mum and Dad stepped over them, and when we trampolined on the beds and crippled the springs, and left footprints on the wall from sliding down the banisters, they just shrugged.
Dad’s position on discipline owed much to his job at the prison. He spent all day among young people for whom rage was the normal mode of expression; he had no wish to witness or participate in angry scenes at home. His sternest reproof was likely to be ‘Now, now . . .’ and a telling off was referred to as ‘a kind word’. Mum’s attitude to child-rearing – in fact to everything – had been shaped by those years with the mission. She had seen so much poverty and suffering, and so much resilience of spirit, it had left her with a contemptuous disregard for life’s petty problems. What was faulty wiring, or a dirty carpet to a woman who was in mourning for a whole continent? Her view – not one widely held in the suburbs at that time – was that children in good health, who had food and shelter, were already thrice blessed and needed no further cosseting. Money that could be given to charity was not to be wasted on frivolities like television, sweets and trashy plastic toys.
Instead, we had the run of the garden and its amenities: the trees, the rope swing with the tyre on the end, the shed and its collection of ancient tennis rackets, bats and balls, the nettle patch. We seldom had other children back to play. Mum had tried it once but it hadn’t worked: a girl from my nursery school had come to tea and got an electric shock from one of our loose light switches. She had cried so much that Mum had to take her home early. The invitation was never returned and the experiment wasn’t repeated.
In return for considerable latitude in the matter of dirt, disorder and noise, we were expected to observe three general rules: we were not to moan; we were not to be bored; we must share everything and hoard nothing. Although we were rarely told off and never smacked, there existed a powerful deterrent to misbehaviour in the form of Mother’s patiently delivered lectures. She would sit the offender down and explain, at great length and in fine detail, the historical, moral and sociological reasons why certain actions were undesirable, citing many examples, and alluding frequently to the Less Fortunate.
The Less Fortunate were often a spectre at our feasts, and were sometimes there in person. Since the house was large, and our parents had philanthropic tendencies, the spare rooms would occasionally be offered as temporary accommodation to the homeless of the parish, visiting clergy, or young offenders at the end of their stretch.
The most recent lodger was a plump teenager called Cindy, who was having ‘problems at home’, the details of which were known only to Mum and Dad. She was introduced to visitors, for tact’s sake, as our au pair, although she never lifted a finger in the house, and seldom climbed out of bed. She passed most of the days in her room listening to Capital Radio, making the odd foray into the kitchen to raid the fridge. Sometimes she let me perch on the window sill and watch her applying her make-
up, from a staggering array of bottles and tubes, ranged in height order on the dressing table. She had tan foundation to cover her red cheeks, and red blusher to paint them back on again, lipsticks in every colour including black; a whole paint palette of eyeshadows, and a tiny brush and comb for eyebrows. For someone who never went out, she spent an awful lot of time on grooming. Her knowledge of the subject was encyclopaedic, and she enjoyed nothing more than passing on her wisdom to a novice. The relative merits of block or wand mascara, and the difference between cream and powder blusher were secrets I would never hear from my mother’s unpainted lips. Mother was evidently less impressed with Cindy than I was: one afternoon I caught the tail-end of one of her famous lectures. They were in the kitchen; Mother was tending a pan of blackberry jam; Cindy was staring at her with her painted peacock’s eyes, bottom lip drooping, in an attitude of helplessness.
‘The point is, Cindy,’ Mother was saying, dripping hot jelly onto a plate and prodding it with her finger, ‘by sitting around here all day listening to pop music you aren’t really fulfilling your potential, are you?’
Cindy’s bottom lip, glossed to a high shine with Midnight Cherry, drooped still further.
‘You mustn’t let the terrible experience you’ve had ruin the rest of your life. It’s never too late to make amends. You have talents . . .’ Mother snapped off the gas under the preserving pan. ‘You mustn’t let them go to waste.’
‘I don’t think I’ve got any talents,’ Cindy said.
‘Nonsense. Of course you have.’ Mother set to writing labels for the jam jars. Bramble – September ’73.
‘Like what?’
‘Well . . .’ A frown gathered on Mother’s brow, then she spotted me eavesdropping from the doorway. ‘What are you doing skulking there, young lady?’ she demanded.
‘I smelled something nice.’ I pointed at the stove where the jam sat resting. ‘Is that for us?’
In a Good Light Page 4