I have the smallest bedroom, the one right next to the garage. It's plain as a nun's cell, despite the eye-jangling wallpaper. A narrow bed, a single wardrobe, a small chest of drawers, all white-painted wood. A bookshelf with a few Enid Blytons and my Bible and prayer book. The only softening touches are the fluffy pyjama case on the bed, and a print on the wall of a puppy and a kitten sitting amicably together in a basket. The view from my window is the front path, the front gate, the hard standing for the car. Even so I used to spend a lot of time staring out of my bedroom window. I put my head under the net curtains to look out: I couldn't stand that film of nylon between my eyes and the outside world. 'You've been gawping out of this window again, haven't you?' my mother would say, tugging the curtains straight. As if looking out of a window was a crime. Well, it was fine to look out, but you mustn't be seen doing so.
My gazing wasn't strictly observational: it was the sort that cows do, looking soulfully into the middle distance while their jaws keep moving and sometimes their tails lift to let out squirts of dung. Gazing out provided a view for my imagination to rest on and blank out. Maybe that's just what cows are doing, stuck in the same old field, as they while away the dismal hours.
But I wanted to be up in the roof, under the sloping ceiling where model biplanes dangled. I wanted to be able to lie in bed and gaze out of the dormer window, over the roof tiles and the neat back gardens, to the low hills and greenness inland. There's a feeling, when you're up there, of being alone, complete, like being in a well-defended castle on a mound. As if you could pull up the ladder and shut the trapdoor and no one could come up unless you said so. But you can't. There's just an ordinary door and a steep flight of red-carpeted stairs leading down to the hall.
I don't think Brian could have cared less which room he had. He isn't an imaginative sort of boy. His talents lie firmly in the realm of the practical. He built model aeroplanes out of plastic kits and made stupid noises with his mouth as he flew them round in his hand, but I'm sure he didn't imagine anything other than 'Here is an aeroplane, flying along.'
We live near the coast, though you'd hardly know it. Eastwards, everything's so flat you can't see the sea at all. The horizon is a line of houses. Our road is right at the inland edge of the town. But the soil is full of sand, and the trees are the sort you get near the sea, stunted hawthorns and pine trees, growing in fixed, crouched positions, as if the wind never blows from any other direction.
We're near the main road out of town, and on summer weekends there's always a traffic jam, because of the day trippers. They want their glimpse of the sea, and then when they've had enough they want to go home – all at the same time. Hot and thirsty and sunburnt, with quarrelsome kids in the back. Maybe they sit there in the stalled queue and look out of their car windows and wish they lived here, near the sea. Perhaps they catch a glimpse of Dad doing the garden or us on our bikes, and they wish they were us and not them, not stuck in the traffic with another fifty miles to go yet. I'd see kids with their sticky mouths pressed up against the windows, staring out at me, and I'd know they wanted to be me. Me astride my bike, with my suntanned legs and my chewing gum, and no one telling me to for God's sake, sit still!
Perhaps they did.
I've always found it too easy to think of perhaps, to live in perhaps. The perhaps of being a Carolyn, the perhaps of people who wished they were us. It's so tempting. So much better than real life.
3
The Hedge
At least I don't have to share a room in here. I'd hate that. Because I've never had to share my bedroom. I never dreamed of going to boarding school and sleeping in a dormitory with half a dozen other girls. Where would you ever get any privacy? And what if they snored? What if they had nightmares, or smelly feet? That wouldn't do for me. I've been used to privacy, and being on my own. A certain amount of loneliness. Aloneness. I'm not sure what the difference is.
God knows what a room-mate might get up to, in here. From what I've seen so far, the others are all completely barmy. Mad as hatters. Snoring and smelly feet would be the least of it.
I know I sound quite cheerful, but I'm not. I try to look cheerful and careless, to anyone who's watching. Nothing to worry about, that's me! It wouldn't do to wander around with your tail between your legs, forlorn, or looking guilty. Especially looking guilty.
'Give some people an inch and they'll take a mile,' my mum used to say. 'Hold out the hand of friendship, and you never know what you're letting yourself in for.'
So we didn't know our neighbours. We didn't really know anyone in the road, beyond a pleasant nodding and helloing when we passed. That was what you did – you never ignored anyone, but you never became too intimate.
'I wouldn't want people always in and out of the house,' she said.
It was unlikely. My mum and dad weren't very encouraging. They had no one you might term 'friends'. My mother went to church regularly, and my father irregularly, but they kept the busy church community firmly at arm's length, turning down everything except the most formal invitations. The only people who came to our house were family, and the only people we visited were family, my dad's two sisters Gloria and Stella, his cousin Bettina, and my mum's brother Bob.
We certainly didn't know our neighbours with the hedge.
In the fashion of the neighbourhood, our front garden was divided from our other neighbours and the road by a chain of white links slung between foot-high posts. The back garden had a low fence of brown palings. The aim was always to be able to see – to see the neighbours in their gardens, the washing on the lines, the people going down the road. And to be seen. To be seen doing the neighbourly thing, which was keeping your own patch trim and tidy. And following the rules, cleaning the car at weekends and no bonfires before seven. There might have been frosted glass and nets at every window, but outside all had to be crystal clear.
We were at the outer edge of this oasis of good citizenship. We lived in the last bungalow in the street. Beyond us was a wilderness of thistly fields, scrubby woodland, tumbledown sheds and half-hearted fences. Old tyres, discarded machinery and scruffy ponies were corralled back there. And right along our inland boundary, shielding us from this wasteland and from the house next door, the very last house of all – the old house – ran the hedge. Solid as Sleeping Beauty's thicket, a wall of evergreen laurel, it stretched from the pavement at the front to the far end of our back garden, and grew untrimmed to the height of our roof. At least, it grew untrimmed on their side. On our side, Dad would snip away constantly with the shears, keeping it as tame as he could. But he wasn't brave enough or furious enough to get up on a ladder and have a go at the top.
'That hedge sucks all the life out of the garden,' he always said. He'd walk up and down the lawn, examining the grass, shaking his head and tutting, trying to make out something poorer in its colour or texture which he could blame on the hedge. It was true that bedding plants didn't flourish near the hedge's roots. The soil beneath it was dry and starved.
'It's so inconsiderate,' my mother agreed. 'It casts so much shade.'
'Only in the morning,' I pointed out, when I was old enough to notice. 'Not when you want to sit out here.'
I wanted to defend the hedge, and its owners. I was fascinated by the idea of something different, something secretive and wild. I just didn't have the words to say it.
And it was true: on summer afternoons our back garden was a blaze of sun. You couldn't get away from it; there was nothing higher than a foot tall to cast any shade, apart from the shed. My dad laid out the garden on the basis of interior decoration, and maintained it as neatly as a room kept for 'best'. The lawn was a carpet, a perfect rectangle, smooth and free of weeds, with a strip of bare brown earth – the parquet – all around it. Then he ran dwarf plants round the edges, like wallpaper, alternating the colours: white alyssum, blue lobelia, red salvia, ginger French marigolds. To earn our pocket money I pulled up weeds and Brian mowed the lawn, but Dad always did the edges himself. He
couldn't trust anyone else to get such straight edges as he did.
So the hedge stood for all that was threatening: the unneighbourliness of our neighbours, their suspect desire for privacy, the proximity of behaviour that was not fit for the scrutiny of others. Well, of course, my parents didn't say this, they couldn't have put their feelings into words. But the way Mum said, 'I wish they'd do something about that hedge,' whenever she came in from hanging the washing, and the prim click-click of Dad's shears in the summer dusk, were quite enough.
We knew that there were a lot of them next door. It was a big house, full of loud careless people. You could tell that from the sudden and various noises which came from beyond the laurel barrier. My parents never tackled them about the noise, or about the vast size of the hedge. They were fearful of any kind of interference, in case people interfered back.
'You just never know with people,' my father said. 'You never know what they'll stoop to.'
And anyway, they got a funny kind of satisfaction from complaining, from having a permanent reason to feel disgruntled. A perfectly ordered world would have been less rewarding on that score.
I was playing on my own when I found the hole in the hedge. I couldn't believe my father had missed it.
It must have been spring, because the daffodils were out and the buds hadn't burst yet on the trees. I would have been eight, coming up for nine. I had some complicated game going on in my head and was pretending to hide down beside the shed. The space was too narrow for my dad to slide into with his shears. The long stems of the laurel splayed out, pressing up against the shed wall, leaving just a low passageway for me to creep into. I crept. There was no chance that Brian had been here before me, because he didn't like spiders. Neither did I, but some things are too good to miss just because a creepy-crawly might fall down your neck.
And there was the hole. The laurels gave way, and formed a sort of tunnel. I pushed my head and shoulders into the gap. Inside, disappointingly, the tunnel stopped. Laurel twigs criss-crossed in front of me. But I was in, and it was easier to go forward than back. I crouched down, dropped on to hands and knees, and inched forward. The ground stank of dirty old leaves and mushroomy damp. I peered through the thick stems to the light beyond. I was at the back of some kind of flower bed, filled with leafless bushes.
For the very first time I could see into next door's back garden. It wasn't as I had imagined. For a start, it was nothing like ours. It was so much bigger. Towards the house there was an abandoned bike, and a tree stump, and a swing. In the other direction, a sagging tennis net, and an old wooden summer house, its window panes cracked and its wood peeling. Their lawn wasn't lawn, in the sense that I understood the word. The patchy grass was almost knee-high. In the borders dead plants leaned against each other with their seed-heads still on them. The far end of the garden was full of trees, gnarled bare trees planted in rows. I recognized this from our Children's Encyclopaedia, the double-page spread that depicted a mixed farm in glorious detail: this was an orchard.
Something moved. My eyes flicked back to the summer house: there was a man. My skin prickled. I kept absolutely still, barely daring to breathe. A twig stuck into my ear, but I ignored it. At least the man was far away and had his back to me. I realized that he was completely absorbed in what he was doing, though I couldn't for the life of me work out what that was. He didn't pause or even look up. He was painting a huge board propped against the wall of the summer house, but the bit he had painted and the bit he hadn't painted looked exactly the same.
I stayed where I was for a good five minutes, burning with cramp, itching with fear. But part of me felt triumphant. The man I was spying on was our neighbour. The owner of the hedge.
Suddenly I wanted a garden like that. I'd never seen anything like it. Untidy, haphazard, full of secret corners. Different things could go on there – you could ride a bike on the lawn and just throw it down where you finished with it. You could play tennis, you could hide. And whatever people did do there, it didn't involve manicuring the grass and mowing stripes into it.
I never crawled through the hole again. The laurel burst with bright new leaves to fill the gaps, and started shedding old dead ones. They scattered like dandruff along the foot of the hedge. Spiders began spinning businesslike webs. Anyway, I knew it would end in trouble. Most things did. If I tried again Mum or Dad was bound to spot me backing out of the hole. Or I'd be discovered in the act of spying by the people who lived next door. And you never knew with people. I could imagine the shouts: 'Hey! What do you think you're doing? Get out! Get back to where you came from!' Or worse: taking me by my collar and marching me, red-handed, or, rather, green-kneed, back to my parents. I could see the pair of them, clustering in our front doorway, their faces anxious and uncomprehending. 'What on earth were you up to? Making an exhibition of yourself! And us.' Explain that away.
I relied on my imagination, my usual tactic. In my mind's eye their garden expanded even further. The pockmarked lawn stretched in all directions and grew almost as green as ours, the thicket of shrubs I'd crouched in sprang into a forest, the summer house into a play-palace fit for Marie Antoinette. In my head I played – and won – endless games of tennis. I cycled like the wind up and down, up and down, never hitting a pothole, never catching my shin on the backspin of the pedal as I put my foot down to heave my bike round the corners. In my head, I never had to put my foot down to heave it round corners. I was perfectly competent, and that garden was mine. All mine.
Sad to say, those little chats with Lorna have become a daily event. I thought I'd beaten her, that first time she came into my room. I thought I'd won that round, and she wouldn't try again. Shows how much I know.
We meet in a small room off the front hall. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon, usually. Someone comes and gets me from wherever I am, Mike or Trudy or whoever is on duty. 'Time to see Lorna,' they say. Or just 'Carol?' and a hand signal, a beckoning finger and then a point towards the front hall. They don't let me go on my own, just in case I never get there. They always take me right up to the door.
There's a table which is not quite a desk, and two chairs beside it, facing each other. It's not exactly formal but it's certainly not informal, either. I expect Lorna thinks it strikes just the right note. Whatever that might be.
Today she asked me what I was good at, what I liked doing, and I said, 'Nothing much.'
'Oh, I'm sure that can't be true.'
She pressed her lips together as if she was cross. There was a long silence. I examined my fingers. As far as I was concerned, we could go on like this until the end of the session. It didn't matter to me.
Then Lorna coughed in a fake sort of way, and pushed with her fingertips at the edge of a folder beside her on the table. A folder which was shut. 'I've been looking again at your records,' she said. 'You've had rather a tricky time, haven't you? Almost four years in the children's home before being placed for adoption. Some rather difficult years with your new family. And then this latest business. Still, at least you always had your brother with you.'
She didn't say anything else. After a bit she let me go.
But outside, I thought: Why can't I look at my records? They're my records. Why can't I see what everyone's been saying about me?
I should have said piano. When she asked what I was good at, that's what I should have said.
4
Piano Lessons
Lorna's had another go at asking me to describe my home. She's persistent, I'll give her that.
I said, 'It's a big white house, with a big garden. There are lawns and paths and flower beds. There's a long line of steps down from the front door to the gate. The slope is very shallow. There are a hundred and twenty steps, but only in sets of five. Five steps and then a flat bit, then another five steps.'
'Do you often count things, Cora?'
She always calls me that. It's just a name on a piece of paper, it isn't me. I've half a dozen other names I'd prefer. I'd like to say, 'Don't call me
that,' but I think that's what she wants. What she's after. To get a rise out of me, to get me to say something I really mean. So I don't. I just look steadily back at her when she uses that name. I don't even blink.
'Only sheep,' I replied.
'It must be a very big garden,' Lorna said. 'I make that forty sets of steps.'
Either she's innumerate or she's trying to catch me out. I tend to think the former.
'Yes, it is a big garden,' I replied. 'There are yellow tulips, and white seats to sit on.' I wondered how much detail I could go into before she realized. 'My favourite seat is by a sundial,' I said.
But, actually, she has never come out into the garden here with me. When you go outside you always have to be with a member of staff, or in sight of one, at least. Lorna has never come and sat with me in front of the sundial, and looked down the path between the long beds of yellow tulips.
But every day she must climb the hundred and twenty steps, the twenty-four sets of five steps, to come to her place of work. And not notice them? Now, that is what I call unobservant.
That spring, when I turned nine, I started piano lessons. It was a very Carolyn sort of thing to do. I'd badgered away at them to let me. We had an old upright piano, black as ebony, standing there useless in the lounge. It had come from my mum's own mother's house, apparently, along with the noisy pendulum clock on the mantelpiece and the convex mirror above it, a circular eye that made your top half bulge weirdly when you peered up into it. All these things were old. Old was not desirable, or attractive. They only kept them out of sentiment, and a sense of duty. They liked things spick and span and new; things they had chosen themselves from the big stores in town; at least then you knew where they had been. The piano took up space, and always needed dusting, and nobody could play it. 'Why not?' I kept on. 'Why not, please?'
Living In Perhaps Page 2