Her words stung at one level, but they were also a revelation. I had not realised how much she needed my approval or how much self-hatred lay beneath the brash confidence that made her so attractive.
‘Jenny, I don’t blame you. Maybe we both need to learn from each other.’
* * *
That summer, the summer we were seventeen, we drew up a list of goals. Like the burning of the matchbox years previously, it was ritualistic, each of us committing to paper our own aspirations in private, and then sharing and stapling our pieces of paper together for posterity. We allowed ourselves five goals.
Pippa
I will get good A-level grades and I will get into a good university and get a good degree.
I will try and be more open to the people around me.
I will lose my virginity with someone who cares for me (but I will not get too hung up about this and will not pin too many hopes on it).
I will never take Jenny for granted.
I will do something worthwhile with my life.
Jenny
I will travel and see the world.
I will try and learn to concentrate on study and becoming a better person.
I will never be owned.
I will meet someone one day who I will want to remain faithful to forever.
I will always be there for Pips.
* * *
I think, now, of those goals and the young minds that set them, and I wish there was a way back into the past, a way to make all of them come true.
Chapter 39
The end of school for Jenny was a window she looked through every day, a window she longed to open and climb through. I had agreed, with some misgivings, to her plan to spend a year travelling together before going to university. How would we manage? What would we live on? Where would we go? Would Mother agree?
‘Fuck Mother, Pips. Don’t you realise we don’t have to do what she wants anymore? From now on decisions belong to us!’
The summer after our exams was the last summer we spent at ‘home’. Jenny paraded her latest Queen-loving, leather-trousered, biker-boyfriend like a piece of junk jewellery for everyone to disapprove of, and made snide remarks to Frank on the rare occasions we all sat round the same table. I remember the first day she brought Gary back to ‘meet the family’. She arrived triumphantly late for the Italian meal Mother had prepared.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry we’re late Mother. We didn’t realise what time it was, did we Gary?’ Winking at Gary and shooting a glance at Frank. ‘Gary, this is my mother and this is not my father.’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘His name is Frank, rhymes with –’
‘Jenny, that’s enough! Do have a seat, Gary.’ Poor Mother. ‘Let me pour you some wine.’
‘So Gary, now you know all about me,’ offered Frank, feigning amusement, or perhaps genuinely amused, ‘let’s hear about you. What do you want to do with your life?’
‘He plays the guitar, and he rides a motorbike and me!’ The look on Jenny’s face was vicious. ‘He’s a great shag!’ There followed a kind of collective splutter as Mother coughed, Frank cleared his throat and poor Gary, who had not yet opened his mouth, almost choked on his wine. We hadn’t even started the spaghetti. I looked at Jenny and pleaded restraint with my eyes. How many times have I looked at her the same way since?
With the months of concentration for A-levels behind me, I became acutely aware of my own social clumsiness and even yielded to Jenny’s attempts to instil some sense of fashion in me. I went out on a rare date with the brother of a friend, wearing a short black dress, which made Frank do a double take. I blushed with an emotion that felt alien to me. It was a feeling of both power and anger, a shot of adrenaline, which persuaded me to join Jenny in her resolve to leave ‘home’ as soon as possible.
When I learnt that I had got three As, my delight was tempered by a sense of guilt that I had done so much better than Jenny, but she was sweetly generous, proclaiming louder than anyone that she was proud of her sister’s achievement and whispering mischievously that she had all the As when it came to orgasms, so it was only fair.
A door opened, which neither I nor my teachers had anticipated: the opportunity to sit for Oxbridge, the chance to turn another of the five goals into reality. Jenny was amazingly supportive, and tackled the practicalities and her own disappointment about the delay this meant to our travels with quiet determination. Adamant about leaving home, we rented a student flat and she temped to pay the bills and support me while I prepared for more exams. I knew that this was a sacrifice; I knew that she was putting one of her own goals on hold for me.
The day I was accepted at Oxford brought with it a strange mixture of elation and fear; hysterical laughter, which turned to tears with the sudden knowledge of what this meant. The beginning of the unknown in a way that nothing had ever been truly unknown; the first step into a life on my own, without Jenny by my side.
‘Don’t be daft, Pips. I’m only going to be in London. We’ll see each other all the time.’ She had a place to study drama at Goldsmiths. ‘And anyway we don’t even need to think about all that stuff until October. We’ve got six months of the world ahead of us!’ She protected me like a much older sister, yet she was only seven minutes older.
* * *
Before we left on our travels, I had tea with Mrs Forster, fearful that this time might be the last. She had turned ninety that year and still managed at home – just. Each year she seemed to grow smaller and drier, like a prune in a desert, but her eyes were still sharp and she still knew the story behind every photo in her house. This time I took her a photo, a picture taken on the day we celebrated my acceptance at Oxford. Unaware that a photo was being taken, my face was partially covered by hair blowing across it and my smile was unusually confident. Mrs Forster beamed and insisted that I put the photo in pride of place in the centre of the mantelpiece.
‘Now, my poppet, if you’re going to be wandering round the world looking for trouble, you must have a picture of mine, too. Which one will you have?’
‘Goodness, I don’t know. Which one do you want me to have?’
‘Whichever one you want. Now go and choose.’
I chose a picture of her as a young woman, having tea in India. She stood on a lawn, against a backdrop of rampant flowers, holding a cup of tea in one hand and a parasol in the other. She must have been talking to someone outside the frame; her eyes glanced past the camera lens and her face was laughing. She was beautiful. I could only just see this woman in the little old lady before me, but I recognised her spirit. This was how I wanted to remember her.
‘Ah yes,’ she sighed, as I tentatively showed her the picture I had chosen. ’Robert was the man I was talking to, a charming man. Perhaps we will meet again in the next life.’
And so at last, armed with a photo of Nana, a photo of Mrs Forster and a photo of us, I climbed, just behind my sister, through the window that had beckoned to Jenny for so long.
Chapter 40
I still have our diaries from the six months we spent, flirting with danger, hitch-hiking around Europe, believing ourselves invincible and oh-so grown-up. They read very differently. Mine is self-consciously observant, recording facts and conversations with an anthropological curiosity. The ‘me’ in that world is passive, revealed occasionally by reactions to events or people, but never openly introspective. Things happened, or didn’t happen, which I know were important to me then and which I remember clearly now, yet for all its meticulous attention to detail, my diary is silent. The world is a succession of encounters between two pronouns: ‘we’ and ‘they’. There is a sort of dreaminess about it, a shy account of a journey, full of speculation about others.
Jenny’s diary is fiercely honest and introspective. The encounters, which for me are recorded as the essence of experience, are, for Jenny, springboards for stream-of-consciousness rants about her own identity and place in the world. I blush when I read them, embarrassed equally by their naïve, self-important cont
ent and by the blatant lack of shame in them. I was shocked to discover, when I read her diary for the first time, that the ‘no telling’ we had agreed to over the ritualistic burning of the matchbox with Frank’s name in it was no more than a concession to the outside world. Because I had buried the memory so deeply, because we never spoke about it, because I would not have dreamed of referring to it in my diary, I assumed that Jenny, too, had packed this away in a forbidden part of her consciousness.
Jenny ate experience; I looked at it. Yet there was a strength in being together that gave me a kind of mute confidence. We were noticed wherever we went. On a hippy beach in Crete, I caught myself for the first time not wanting to look away as my eyes met those of a tall, blond, twenty-something Dutchman on the other side of the campfire flames. Jenny noticed, too, and sidled up to me with a joint in her hand.
‘Here, have some Dutch courage,’ she giggled. ‘Go get him, sis!’
He must have sensed my inexperience. Over the next few nights we walked along the beach, we bathed in the moonlight, we kissed in warm water. I laughed at the memory of my sister when she first discovered an interest in boys, practising French kisses on a pillow, and relaxed under the supervision of desire. Every muscle in my body ached for this Dutchman and, at last, one soft summer evening in the sand, I watched him put on a condom and gently, oh so gently, caress my wetness to keep me ready for him. I closed my eyes and then I felt something pushing at me and my insides froze. I lurched away from him and cried with incomprehension. He was kind. ‘The first time is always hard,’ he said gently. I know, I know, I thought . . . He will never know how grateful I was that he did not try again.
To an extent, Jenny and I switched roles, with me playing elder sister. It was shyness that did this really. My shyness about losing myself, my fear of losing control, meant that I watched out for both of us. Where Jenny’s greed for direct experience meant that she would lose contact with reality under the influence of drugs or alcohol, I stayed anchored and gently watchful. I envied her ability to let go, yet it frightened me.
Our worst arguments were when she disappeared without telling me where she was going. I worried myself sick one night when she didn’t come ‘home’ to our tent. Still angry with her two days later, I made the mistake of reading what she’d put in her diary after that night.
I need to feel free. Why can’t she understand that? I don’t want my life to be mapped out in predictable reactions and patterns. Sometimes she makes me feel trapped, like an alter ego looking over my shoulder, tut-tutting about what I do and say. I don’t want to be judged all the time. I don’t want to live a life with no risks, no spontaneity. She doesn’t understand that I don’t have the same needs as her. She’s so rational and intellectual about everything. I want to feel, I want to live, I want to experiment. So what if I have sex with someone I’ll never see again? I didn’t even know his name and he’s leaving tomorrow, but that was the whole appeal. He made me feel free. He wanted to take my address, but I disappeared while he was having a pee and he didn’t know where I’d come from. Why can’t she see there is nothing wrong with that? Why can’t she just leave me alone?
* * *
Even twin sisters shouldn’t read each other’s diaries.
‘We could try and find him,’ I mused, as we sat in a taverna with our daily ration of Greek salad and spaghetti.
‘What for?’ She sliced viciously into a piece of tomato. ‘He’s bound to be an arsehole. Who wants to meet a father who left them before they were born? I bet he’s some swanky financial advisor who gets off on persuading old ladies to give him a big cut when they die and they go to their deathbeds grateful that such a charming man has helped them secure their kids’ future.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. What if we’re wrong? What do we know except what Mother told us, and she’s hardly the most reliable person in the world? Maybe he left her before he knew she was pregnant. Maybe he would like to see us.’ Inwardly, I tried to conjure up what he would look like, the look of disbelief and tenderness on his face when we told him who we were.
‘Dream, dream, dream,’ sang Jenny into my thoughts, and I laughed with her.
‘Perhaps you’re right. Anyway, how would we find him?’ I couldn’t let it go completely.
‘We won’t. At least I never will.’
‘I don’t suppose I ever will either.’
‘So where shall we go next? Don’t you think we’ve been here long enough?’
Ever restless, ever greedy for more.
I wandered through a mental gallery of films: Midnight Express, Last Tango in Paris, A Room with a View.
‘How about Florence?’
Chapter 41
I got my first grey hair when I was twenty. The most appalling thing about it was that it was a pubic hair. Jenny laughed and laughed when I told her.
‘I’m sorry, Pips,’ she choked. ‘It’s just too ironic!’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ I giggled, despite a twinge somewhere inside. ‘A virgin with grey pubes. Just my luck!’
I singled it out with great care and cut it off at the root with a pair of nail scissors, but my pruning only served to make it stronger and longer when it grew back. To this day, I still go through the pruning ritual, and to this day it remains my only grey pube, a rogue reminder of destiny.
Oxford made me feel much smaller than hitching round Europe had done. The smallest bit was my tongue. As if there was a faulty connection somewhere in the plumbing between my brain and speech faculties. I didn’t think that I was nervous or shy in the conventional sense, I simply couldn’t think of anything to contribute to the soup of conversation around me. I had always assumed that the drive in me to do well at exams meant that I was competitive, yet I recoiled from the competitive banter of fresh undergraduates staking out new friendships. When I did think of something to say, I sounded like a bad actress, the timing somehow never quite right. I laughed when no one else did and was silent when I should have been laughing. I became aware of a hint of embarrassment in the way that people looked at me. This was new. This was part of my new life, part of life without the protection of Jenny.
New faces meant a barrage of what Jenny and I called ‘search questions’. Where are you from? Did you take a year out? What are you reading? What A-levels did you do? Have you got a boyfriend?
Jenny had me in fits when we met in London at the end of the first week, reeling off daft answers in silly accents.
‘The moon . . . Yeah, I took one to the cinema, but he was as dull as a cow’s bottom . . . Tristram Shandy, my dear . . . Cave psychology, bark painting and the history of pornography. And you? . . . No, have you got a sock?’
But the problem was that when people started asking about me, I either answered with ‘we’ and then found that they assumed I had a permanent boyfriend in tow or I started to tell them about Jenny and found that they looked uncomfortable. Didn’t anyone else have brothers and sisters? I asked Jenny if the same thing happened to her.
‘Yeah, it’s a great way to get men interested! You talk about “the times we had on the road” and they think either “Wow, she must be up for it if she’s been hitching round Europe with a bloke” or “Wow, she’s got a boyfriend, but let’s see if I can rise to the challenge and get into her knickers.” Either way you come out way more interesting than the girl next door!’
I laughed, but went quiet.
‘Don’t worry, Pips, it’ll get better, you know.’ She was big sister again.
One day when I was staring at the mole on someone’s cheek, it dawned on me that there was something wrong in my eye contact with people. The realisation was fatal. The harder I tried, the more difficult it was to look into people’s eyes when they were talking, and the more I tried to look into their eyes and not at their eyebrows or a pimple on their chin, the more difficult it was to concentrate on what they were saying, and therefore the more difficult it was to think of anything to say in the expectant gaps at the end of their sentences – and
on and on until I became quite dizzy with the effort of simple conversation.
Books, on the other hand, were less demanding. They were happy for your eyes to drift over them, line after line, page after page, at your own pace, unchallenged. The college library still harboured the risk of unwanted eye contact with students who recognised you and tried to start a conversation, but the Radcliffe Camera became my personal haven. I took Jenny inside once and she wanted to leave immediately. But I loved the gloom and the high ceilings, the echo of a pencil accidentally dropped, the sheer aura of academia. I revelled in the literary labyrinths of Borges, sensitive to the surrealism of his stories, oblivious to any political context. I highlighted the quirks of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that made me laugh out loud, although my essay on his magic realism left my tutor slightly bemused. I lapped up the darkness of Baudelaire’s poetry and forged my own brand of literary criticism. I started to wear glasses, but not for reading. I needed them for the outside, for conversation.
Chapter 42
The university calendar turned life into a sequence of chapters in a way that the repetitiveness of the school year had never achieved. Perhaps it was our age, perhaps it was the amount I was reading, perhaps it was the insularity of undergraduate life at Oxford, but the four years sit in my memory like a book neatly parcelled into chapters.
Chapter one: Weekends spent mostly in London with Jenny. Easier to spend time with her there than for her to come here. Only friends here are books.
Chapter two: Prolonged affair between Jenny and Daniel. First time she has ever used word ‘boyfriend’. Discovered Borges. Started wearing glasses.
Chapter six . . . Jenny always used to say that there are fewer surprises in life than you think; that the causal links are there in our lifestyles and our choices. If you have a habit of clubbing and no fear of sex on the first night, you are more likely to meet a fucked-up paramedic turning to drink to help him bring back the dead. If you wear red power suits and matching lipstick to work, you are more likely to break up someone else’s marriage than if you rely on Dateline to meet the man of your dreams.
Twin Truths Page 10