Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  So she said hello and told me her name, and when I raised my eyebrows (I couldn't help it, it wasn't the kind of name I'd come across before) she explained, a bit curtly, that she was Jewish. I said I hadn't ever met anyone Jewish before.

  'Where have you been all your life!?' she cried, so I said maybe I had met some but I just didn't know it. Then she made a noise in her throat and laughed. She said it was the noise her grandmother made when she was being disparaging about goyim – that's the rest of us.

  8

  Next Door

  'Come round to our house,' Barbara said one day.

  These were the words I'd been waiting for, for months. She had found me slouching home from school, towing my more or less empty satchel as if it was a bag of stones.

  'Only don't say you live next door.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because we don't like the people who live in this road. They're suburban.'

  'Oh. OK.'

  I dropped off my satchel at home and said, 'I'm playing out.' I ran off again before my mother could say, 'Playing out where?' Not that she usually did. It was just my guilt that made me dash away.

  Barbara was sitting on the kerb, waiting for me. She jumped up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me past the laurel hedge and in at the peeling gate, which today was propped open with a brick.

  The house was tall, with steeply pointed gables and symmetrical windows and a wooden veranda all the way round. The two front doors stood side by side. There was lots of fancy fretwork, just like a gingerbread house, which could have done with a lick of paint; and on closer inspection the windows – no net curtains at all – weren't very clean. We ran up the front steps, and they juddered beneath my feet like the steps of the old passenger bridge at the station. My stomach felt the way it did when a train went under the bridge while I was on it: flipping over with nerves and excitement. Barbara kicked open the left-hand door and we stepped into the darkness of the hallway.

  A long staircase was straight ahead and at its foot was a doorway with a heavy blue curtain across it, trailing on the floor. She swept this aside and we were in the next-door hallway, the other half of the house, at the foot of their stairs. This hall was dark too, with pictures all over the walls, and a table full of sprawling plants in lead-coloured bowls. Barbara cantered down the passage towards the rear of the house, with me following close behind, grabbing at the back of her cardigan, fearful of being left alone in such a strange place.

  The kitchen was full of light. There was a big window with glass shelves set across it and striped spider plants cascading down the panes. Barbara took a glass from the draining board, filled it with water, downed half of it, opened her mouth to yell 'O-ma!', and then finished off the water. She didn't offer me any. She rinsed out the glass and turned it upside down again to drain.

  I heard a slapping, slippery noise behind me.

  'Oma!' Barbara cried out joyfully.

  Oma was composed entirely of circles. Her face was round, her wire-rimmed spectacles were round, the top of her body with its sloping shoulders and shelf of bosom was round, and her great fat stomach, covered with a sky-blue pinafore, was another circle. Her skirt was ankle-length, and her mannish cotton shirt was filled to bursting. The noise I'd heard was her trodden-down slippers. I thought she looked repulsive.

  'My little Baba!'

  She took Barbara's cheeks in both her hands and pressed a kiss on Barbara's nose, which was about the same height as hers.

  I leaned back against the cupboards, making myself small in case she did the same to me. But she took no notice of me at all.

  Oma was Barbara's grandmother. She lived with the grandfather in one half of the house, and Barbara and her parents and brothers and sisters lived in the other half. Of course Barbara didn't bother to explain this at the time, just left me to work it out as best I could.

  The house had originally been two properties but when the family moved in they knocked a doorway through in the downstairs hall and another upstairs, for ease of movement. Such casual vandalism impressed me, especially since the upstairs doorway was still unfinished, a rough hole gashed in the brickwork, with no curtain across. The two families maintained separate households, with separate sets of furniture and meals, but when they felt like it they stepped through into the looking-glass world of the other house and had a chat or borrowed a pan or sat down and cuddled a child.

  That first afternoon we stayed in the grandparents' half of the house. It was very quiet, and half light, half dark, like the paintings by Rembrandt I later saw in books. Much later. It smelled of strange food, and beeswax polish, and the scent of the jars full of drooping flowers which stood in every room. Despite the cool air inside the house, the palms of my hands were sticky with sweat. I didn't know how to be with a friend. I was glad when I heard Oma slip-slop away upstairs. We sat down on the threadbare carpet in the front room, and Barbara told me her story.

  Barbara's grandparents were called Mr and Mrs Van Hoog. They were both short and fat, and said very little. Barbara's mother was their daughter. Tillie Hennessy now, but once upon a time she'd been Mathilde Van Hoog. Now there was a name, though not one you'd want to take to school with you.

  The Van Hoogs came from Holland. They'd both been painters long ago, and the walls of their house were filled with their paintings, and paintings done by their friends. Then they had Tillie, and Mr Van Hoog's father had said that he must stop messing about being a painter and earn his living. They were sent to England, to East Anglia, where a distant relative ran a nursery business. This was before the war. Mr Van Hoog worked at the nursery and Mrs Van Hoog looked after Tillie and painted all the plants and flowers her husband brought home for her. There were pictures of auriculas in pots, and sheaves of roses lying on a table, and stripy red-and-white tulips leaning out of a glass vase. Bouncy peonies and vivid poppies. Then the war came, and Mr and Mrs Van Hoog lost all their family back in Holland.

  'Shot – or starved,' Barbara said bluntly, and we exchanged looks of horror. All the grown-ups we knew had been in the war. We were used to stories of loss and destruction murmured like gossip over our heads.

  When we'd finished giving each other suitably horrified looks, she went on: Mrs Van Hoog stopped painting altogether, and they both worked in the nursery, which had been turned over to vegetables for the war effort. But Tillie grew up wanting to paint. They didn't stop her, but they didn't particularly encourage her either. They felt that painting always led to grief and frustration. She worked as a life model for an art school, to help pay her way, and that was where she met Patrick Hennessy.

  'A life model,' Barbara told me, 'is someone who poses naked.'

  This time my look of horror was genuine.

  And that was it, Barbara said, although I felt the story was only halfway there. When her grandparents retired and sold the nursery, they moved here to the coast, bought a house big enough for the lot of them. Tillie'd had so many children that there was no time left for her to paint.

  'How many children?'

  'Six.'

  'Six?'

  Barbara nodded casually, as if this was normal.

  Patrick taught at an art school, and painted pictures in his spare time.

  'I'll show you,' Barbara said, uncrossing her legs and standing up. 'But not today.'

  This was my cue to go.

  *

  I saw Tillie Hennessy naked before I ever saw her clothed.

  The day I got to go into the Hennessys' side of the house, Barbara kicked the front door open as before and this time turned left, into their big front room. Above the mantelpiece, facing anyone who walked into the room, was a huge painting. Of Tillie, naked. Only I didn't know it was her, then.

  I hadn't seen much flesh. We were a modest family. The bathroom door stayed shut, and bedroom doors when people were changing. My mother went quickly to and fro in her ankle-length dressing gown as she readied herself for the day. I never saw my parents undress to sunbathe or to swim. If we went t
o the seafront, it was for a stroll after all those awful trippers had gone home, and if we ever sat on the sand with a picnic between us, the only people who ever rolled up their sleeves or took off their shoes and socks were Brian and me. Cousin Bettina, sun-blushed and bulging out over the straps of her summer frocks, amounted to indecent exposure, and left me feeling quite shocked.

  In the painting, Tillie was pale and bony. There was something both natural and awkward about her posture. She was caught half sideways, sitting on the edge of a chair, holding on her knees a naked baby. Her breasts drooped against her ribcage like small flat saddlebags. Behind her shoulder was a table with a blue-and-white cloth and a big vase of blurry flowers. A mirror, or something, on the wall caught the light and shone it back like a flat white shield. The baby, a big baby, like those enormous versions of the infant Jesus, crouched on her knees, his back curved. She held him by the upper arms – not like you would hold a baby, I thought. Her face was turned to him and her hair hung like a curtain.

  I didn't even think it was a very good picture. Let alone nice.

  'It's a fake,' Barbara said, seeing the direction of my stare.

  All at once a little cushion of air let down inside me: relief. I didn't know what she meant at all, but my insides told me that it was a made-up picture, not a painting done of real naked people. So that was all right.

  'That's my mum, with my brother Eugene. But Eugene wouldn't sit still for a minute – not one single minute, which Tillie had told him would happen all along – so he painted her, for days and days, and he took a snapshot of Eugene and painted him in from that. That's why he looks like a monkey, I think.'

  'Who painted it?' I asked. My insides had contracted again.

  'My dad, of course. Honestly, painting Eugene in from a snapshot. It's as bad as those people who do portraits by post of your bloody corgi!'

  And she turned on her heel and marched off down the passage to the kitchen. I followed, as I was meant to. Beyond the kitchen, sitting on the back step in the sun, was her mother. Fully clothed, thank the Lord.

  I saw Hanny Gombrich today in Activity. I was glad she was there, as I hadn't seen her again in the gardens and I thought she might have been avoiding me. She made penguins out of her clay, sweet, neat little penguins, and then she lined them up according to size. None of them was more than three inches high. She said she would like to get hold of a book about penguins so that she could see what the other species look like. At the moment she can only do King Penguins. She tried another kind but it ended up looking like a skittle. Then she said, 'But books are rarer than live penguins in this place,' and she gave me a tired kind of look, a 'Wouldn't you just know it?' sort of look, and let her hands fall slack in her lap.

  She said that she was in here because she wouldn't eat. It's true that she doesn't seem to fill her long loose dresses, and her eyes are enormous, with half-moons the colour of purple crocuses beneath them. She asked me why I was here and I said that I was an orphan, I was adopted, and I hadn't got over the shock of my mother telling me about it so suddenly.

  She didn't say anything to that. Instead she went on, 'A Jewish girl starving herself. Ironic, isn't it? My grandmother can't bear it.' Then she told me that her father wasn't really Jewish, because his mother wasn't, and Jewishness is inherited through the mother's line.

  'Maybe I'm Jewish,' I said, 'only I don't know it.'

  She gave me a look, and I think I might have offended her again.

  9

  My Relations

  What amazed me about Barbara's family was that they all seemed to really like each other. That made me think about my own relations.

  Every Saturday afternoon, almost without fail, my dad's cousin Bettina visits us. Which means that Mandy visits us too, virtually every week. We hate Mandy, Brian and I. It is the one thing that we are united in – our hatred of Cousin Mandy.

  I've always thought the name Bettina sounds bouncy, like bedsprings. Bettina is the fun of bouncing on beds, and in beds. She's quite a bit younger than my dad and his sisters, and she always seemed to me like a woman of mystery. She never mentioned her parents, and no one ever mentioned her husband, if she had one. She must have had one at some point, I always thought when I was younger, since she had Mandy.

  Bettina lives across the far side of town from us, in a district that looks much like ours, with scrubby trees and sandy roads. But it's just a bit more built-up, and a bit less respectable. She has a flat above a hairdresser's in a short parade of shops. The hairdresser's is called 'Charisse' and Bettina is the second stylist. The first stylist is Maureen, who owns Charisse. I can see why she wanted to call it that. I know what she was after. Sort of French, sort of Hollywood, sort of glamorous. Sort of an uphill slog, too, maintaining that image, since everyone else calls it 'Maureen's'.

  Maureen used to work in a fashionable hairdressing salon in London, and that's why she calls herself and Bettina, who do all the cutting and curling, stylists. It costs slightly more to be attended by the first stylist than the second stylist. The only other person employed there is the shampoo girl, a woman of about ninety whose name is Ida Carr. She sweeps up all the fallen hair and writes names down in the appointment book with a very blunt pencil, which she keeps licking to make it write at all.

  Occasionally my mother goes for a perm at Charisse. I go with her, waiting for her on one of the plastic chairs, smelling the smells and watching everything that goes on. For an ordinary shampoo-and-set Bettina will oblige in our kitchen, but a perm she considers more technical. Home perms, Bettina says, look like something the cat's dragged in. Even in qualified hands. Better to come to the salon.

  This is why we've always hated Mandy. She's six months younger than Brian and two years younger than me, but she makes us feel foolish, and not because she's clever. In some ways she's stunningly stupid. But she's one of those effortlessly knowing, worldly girls who can mimic adult gestures and tones of voice perfectly whenever she wants to. Mandy spends the hours after school (late night Thursdays) and Saturday mornings in the salon, flicking through tired magazines, sorting pins and curlers into their different trays, and rearranging the artificial flower display. Customers are always giving her sweets. They bring sweets in specially for her. At Christmas they come bearing little packages wrapped and labelled for Mandy. 'Put this under your Christmas tree, darlin',' they say. At Easter she gets more chocolate eggs than anyone I've ever come across. And on her birthday – 'Mandy's coming up to seven soon,' Bettina would shamelessly advertise; 'Ooh, when's your birthday?' the customers would ask, and Mandy would lisp 'Next Fwiday' – she has hair-slides and colouring sets and tiny baby dolls in baskets, anything small enough to be wrapped and slid into a handbag and then produced like a magic trick when the customer is under the dryer.

  'Just a little treat for Mandy,' they say. 'Bless her.'

  What is it they know, or suspect, about Mandy? Brian and I discuss this in low resentful whispers. We hope it is a life-threatening disease that they nod and murmur about as they tie plastic rain-hats over their fresh shampoo-and-sets. Otherwise, what is fair about the loathsome Mandy, not even pretty, receiving so many undeserved tributes?

  And she's such a fraud. Our sense of injustice glows hot every time we see this sly know-all give way to a wide-eyed lisping baby as soon as any adult comes into earshot. Don't they notice? Why are they taken in? Their voices turn to honey and they croon, 'What was that, Mandy, sweetheart? Won't they let you have a turn?'

  Haven't they heard the way she speaks to us out in the garden, or seconds before they walk into the room? Don't they notice our dropped jaws and scowling expressions? Or is it that they just don't care? That they know something about Mandy that makes them favour her above us at every opportunity?

  She's younger, for a start, and that puts us at a huge disadvantage.

  'She's younger than you, remember,' they keep saying.

  Which means that any cheating on her part has to be overlooked by us – 'Mandy does
n't understand the rules yet' – any dispute over whose go it is on a bike or a skipping rope is resolved, in her favour, by an adult intervening. She gets let off any chores that have to be done, by virtue of the fact that she's supposed to be too little to be of any help. So we'll be drying the tea dishes or sweeping up the grass cuttings, and there is Mandy, pausing astride my bike, watching us with a glazed, soppy expression, mouth hanging slightly open, as if she doesn't really know what's going on. And then she'll ride off, fast and purposeful, standing up on the pedals. Her jaw is set, and she's whistling 'Colonel Bogey' as professionally as any station porter. And the grown-ups never ever notice this bit!

  Mandy is small and scrawny, with legs like sweet pea stalks, and a little, baffled, white face covered in blotchy fawn freckles that stand out as if they're half an inch in front of her skin. Her eyes are very light grey with pinpoint pupils – she can look either stupid or very, very mean. Her hair is a wispy aureole of red strands that get sweaty easily, and stick to her forehead, which turns pink after any exertion. Are these all signs of imminent demise? We hope so. We don't mind weeping at her graveside, if it means that our bikes are our own on Saturday afternoons.

  The rest of the family routine goes like this. Every two or three weeks we go to tea on Sunday with my aunts Stella and Gloria, and every two to three weeks Stella and Gloria come to tea with us. Sometimes Stella isn't there when we arrive, or leaves before we do. The assumption is that Stella, being a single woman, has a duty to see to her love life, while the rest of them, being married, have a duty to fulfil family obligations. Sometimes, though less often, Stella doesn't make it over to tea with us at all. Then Gloria says to my mother, 'Stella's not with us today,' and gives a quick flick of her eyebrows. She'll never say, straightforwardly, 'Stella's out with Gerald this afternoon,' or 'Wally has taken Stella for a drive.' It's always as if some plot or intrigue is taking place, some I told you so or let's see what comes of this.