Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  My head on a platter?

  That's the way it feels, at times. That she has some deeply personal grievance against me, which she almost completely and cunningly hides. But not quite. It's as if she lets me see the tip of her annoyance, her anger, just enough to make me feel threatened. And then she hides it again. But why? I truly don't know what it is she's after. And her questions don't help. We cover a wide variety of topics, which she invites me to discuss. We go all round the houses, round and round, around one house in particular.

  Sometimes I just want to jump up and shout: 'Say it! Say it! Just ask me directly and I'll tell you.' Just to get her off my back.

  But will I?

  21

  Marriage

  Bettina was getting married.

  I couldn't think how it had happened. She hadn't put any effort into it, like Stella did. She had continued to come to our house with Mandy every Saturday afternoon, and to work in the hairdresser's all week. But suddenly she was marrying someone, a man called Roy Tiltyard. However had she found the time to meet him?

  Our social pattern was disrupted. Mandy might be delivered on a Saturday, but was left abruptly, with a sharp kiss and a quick wave from her mother. Or she might not. Just as well. I didn't like her hanging around, scenting out my secrets. I didn't want to give her any extended opportunity to spill the beans. Though she never did tell. Not then, anyway. I don't know why. Mandy was super-devious. She was saving it up for the right moment, the one perfect moment for revelation, which she knew must come, if she bided her time.

  Gloria took to visiting more often, sitting over the teacups with my mother. They said they were planning for the wedding, but it sounded like simple gossip to me.

  'I suppose they'll be bridesmaids,' my mother said, nodding to where Mandy and I were putting together a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of 'The Hay Wain'. Please, God, no, I prayed; two years before and I'd have loved to be a bridesmaid. Not any longer.

  Gloria pursed her mouth. 'Registry office,' she said, in a confidential tone.

  'Oh yes. Of course ...' My mother sounded disappointed. 'Does he have any family?' she asked, after another cup of tea was poured.

  'She's not said much,' Gloria answered. 'But I know someone whose nose will be put out of joint,' she said, raising her eyebrows.

  I could think of several people. My mother, for a start, believed that registry office marriages were as good as living in sin. It had to be church, under the eyes of God, for it to count. And then Stella: she was older than Bettina, she had put in so much spadework, with Dimitri, and Gerald, and Wally, had got them almost to the brink, but never quite over the edge into wedlock. It was humiliating, for a professional like her to be pipped at the post by a mere amateur like Bettina.

  Wedlock. What a word. Like armlock. Or hemlock.

  But Gloria was nodding in our direction. She tilted an eyebrow at us, and my mother turned ever so slightly and looked over her shoulder. At Mandy.

  So it was Mandy's nose that would be put out of joint. Mandy's tiny white freckly nose. Her chocolate-seeking, secret-snuffling nose. She would no longer be the centre of attention.

  'Will she stay on at Charisse?' My mother was the only one who ever called the hairdresser's shop by that name. The rest of the family referred to it as 'Maureen's'.

  'Who knows? She's an independent girl, I'll give her that.'

  'Where will they live?'

  'He's got a place out at Bossey Down,' said Gloria. 'Or is that his auntie?' she added vaguely.

  Roy Tiltyard. We hadn't seen him yet. 'Haven't laid eyes on him,' as Gloria said, sucking in her cheeks. I gave a lot of thought to his name. A tiltyard, I fancied, was something to do with jousting. It was amazing that, in the centuries since jousts had been discontinued, the name hadn't been corrupted, worn away to something easier to pronounce. But maybe Roy's ancestors had been proud of the medieval connection, and kept reminding everyone to enunciate that second T.

  'Will she be Mandy Tiltyard,' I asked Gloria, when we were round at their house in Beet Street one Sunday for tea, 'after the wedding?'

  Gloria hadn't given this any thought – I could see it in her face. She stopped to think about it now. 'If he adopts her,' she said slowly, 'then she'll take his name. But she might stay as she is now.'

  My mother came into the room, returning from the bathroom at the back of the house. Gloria coughed a bit and stirred her tea.

  'What – Mandy Burton?' I asked, and suddenly realized that she shouldn't be called that. Bettina Burton, Mandy Burton. It didn't fit the facts, as I knew them. Or maybe I didn't know them.

  But Gloria, lifting the lid and peering into the teapot, was more concerned at squeezing out a second cup of tea. 'Another cup, Edie?'

  'I could do with one.'

  'I'll just go and top up the pot.' She hurried out.

  My mother turned to me. 'I hope you haven't been annoying your aunt Gloria,' she said. 'You children, you're always the same.'

  I took the conundrum to Barbara. She seemed to have a natural grasp of such things. She said it was because she watched television. 'You can learn a lot from The Wednesday Play, you know.' We didn't have a television set, my mother wouldn't allow it. We listened to the wireless, which she kept tuned to the light music programme. Orchestras playing string arrangements of popular tunes. You didn't learn a lot from the wireless.

  'If a person has the same surname as all the rest of her family, and her child does too, and she's a woman ...' I could see Barbara getting impatient at this point, signalling acute boredom by rolling her eyes upwards so that the whites showed, so I hurried on: 'What does that mean? Is she married, or what?'

  'Maybe.' Barbara shrugged one shoulder, lightly. 'If she married a man with the same name. A cousin or something. Cousins can marry.'

  'What if she didn't? Could she keep her own name? And would the child automatically get her name, or its father's?'

  'The father's.' She was firm about this.

  'So if it has her name?'

  'Illegitimate,' pronounced Barbara. 'Like Philip.'

  'Who's Philip?'

  'At piano,' she said, as if I was thick. 'Gwynne Wallis is Mrs Wallis's unmarried daughter, and Philip Wallis is her little boy. The illegitimate little boy. The little bastard.' She enunciated all these words clearly, so that even I could understand.

  But I wasn't interested in the skeletons in Mrs Wallis's family cupboard, only in my own. Well, I thought, perhaps that explained the pitying looks, all the chocolate bars and baby dolls that flowed Mandy's way like iron filings towards a magnet.

  'If the mother was married, the child would have its father's name.' Barbara held her hands out like two equally balanced weighing scales. 'If not, no wedding bells.' She dropped her hands to her sides.

  'Crumbs,' I said. 'So Mandy's a little bastard.'

  Sometimes I'd watch TV with Barbara. I wasn't terribly interested in television – 'What you don't have, you won't miss,' said my mother, and in this case it was true – but Barbara was, so if there was a programme that needed her attention while I was there, I went with her.

  Patrick wouldn't have the television downstairs, said, 'Jesus God, it interferes with the brain cells. I'll not have the whole family sitting round the front room like morons, like you see through people's windows, mooning at the thing.' So it was in Tillie and Patrick's bedroom, whose brain cells were somehow all right, protected. You had to go in there and sit on the bed, resting up against the pillows they had slept on. Their room was small – though not compared to my parents' bedroom, or Gloria's and Eddy's which was even pokier – but small compared to other rooms in the Hennessy house. It was made smaller by the built-in cupboards, which Barbara said were there when they moved in and which her parents had always meant to get rid of, but never had. Interior decoration was not really their strong suit. The cupboards, dirty white, with finger marks, ran across the party wall, clasping the bedhead in a series of intricate shelves and drawers and little side tabl
es. There was even a wall lamp for each occupant of the bed, drooping over their heads like glass lilies-of-the-valley; they reminded me of the hair-dryers in Charisse.

  On the wall by the door, above and below the light switch, were two paintings. A little one of Tillie, just head and shoulders. The painter had made her face too long and her expression bleak, and it looked as though she wore a halo. It wasn't very flattering. The other picture was larger, a multicoloured mess, random shapes in muddy reds and purples and browns. The initials, in thick black at the bottom right-hand corner, were A.L.L. An example of the Wren school of painting, I thought. But 'Our friend Arthur painted it,' Barbara told me one day, with a shrug. 'It's worth more than anything else in the house.' I didn't know what anything else in the house was worth, but it sounded impressive. If forced to choose between it and the print of the puppy and kitten on my bedroom wall, I'd be hard pressed to know what to say. No thanks, probably.

  There were more cupboards on the other side of the room, with an alcove for the dressing table. This was where the TV stood, a small square set with a V-shaped aerial. It sat in front of Tillie's three-panelled mirror, so that we had the weird experience of seeing ourselves, from three different angles, watching. The watchers watched. Most peculiar. Barbara didn't seem to notice, but I spent as much time looking at our slumped bodies and engrossed expressions, the way our hair curled behind our ears, the way our shoulders rounded, as I did at the programmes I was there to see.

  Anyway, being at the heart of the Hennessy stronghold was weird enough for me. I could barely follow the plot of Barbara's favourite hospital series or the urgent dramas of people in pubs, or laugh at comedians in bow ties, when two inches from the screen was something as intimate as Tillie's jewellery box, open and spilling where someone had been rifling through it. An eclectic mixture: pearls, plastic pop-it beads, tarnished silver bangles, tortoiseshell hair combs. And the brooch, just like a hawthorn leaf pressed out of copper, which Barbara had used that time, instead of a knife, to split our palms. To seal our blood brotherhood, our friendship. Perhaps it was Barbara who had been rummaging through. Tillie never wore jewellery, as far as I could see. There were glittering dustballs mixed up with the beads and glass, and the velvet shelves of the box were as bloomy as old grapes. I familiarized myself with everything else scattered over the dressing table: an enamel-backed hairbrush and a pink plastic hairbrush, a pot of face cream, a packet of Aspro, a pencil and a boiled sweet wrapper and some tweezers and the handle off one of the kitchen cupboards. I've always been hungry for detail; I've always thought there must be things to learn from picking over details. The saga of Tillie's bedroom was far more compelling to me than the saga of black-stockinged television nurses and their handsome, uncooperative doctors.

  There was something I was keen to know – at night, who slept on which side? I didn't dare ask; they'd definitely notice the spooky degree of my interest if I said something like that out loud. The smell of paint and linseed oil and discarded clothes and something else permeated the room, permeated the bed so that I couldn't tell if where I sat was where Tillie rested her head, or Patrick his. It was desperately intimate. Here you could breathe in essence-of-Hennessy. Here it was almost too much.

  Sometimes when we went in the little boys were already there, nestled down in the bed covers, watching a cartoon. Or Tillie would settle in with us, just as the smoky roofs of Coronation Street came up on the screen, and say, 'What a horrible place to have to live!' Sometimes Isolde consented to watch, though she insisted on perching on the dressing-table stool and never joined us on the bed.

  And sometimes Tom came in, too, and portioned out his lengthy frame on the bedspread between us, just to annoy. 'Get your great feet out of the way!' shrieked Barbara, thumping him. 'I can't see the bloody screen.'

  I wasn't so comfortable when Tom was there. His presence was distracting. He made the bed-springs leap up and down when he moved, his elbows stuck in me. I looked at his pale face sunk in sceptical torpor as he watched the screen. I watched him in the mirror, from three different angles. Once I caught his eye, in the big mirror panel, looking back at mine. Something inside me shivered. I didn't know if the feeling was horrible, or nice.

  'Where did Bettina meet this Roy Tiltyard?' my mother asked.

  'She did his auntie's hair,' said Gloria.

  We were eating Battenberg cake at their dining table. Stella never seemed to be there these days.

  'Stella's a bit put out,' Gloria told us, in an over-enunciated whisper, then went on: 'His auntie had been in hospital for a big op, and was convalescing at home, and she wanted someone to come out and do her hair, to cheer her up. That's how they met.'

  I thought it wasn't a complete explanation. They hadn't moved Bettina and Roy Tiltyard into connecting squares, like on a chessboard. Was he the one who had actually hired Bettina for the hairdo, or did he just happen to be visiting the house when she called? And how was the interest kindled, and who made the first move? There were too many gaps in adult conversation; they left the vital bits out. You had to guess the connections, spin the spider webs between.

  The wedding was to be in November. 'Depressing time of the year,' Gloria reported Stella as saying.

  My mother made me a Black Watch tartan dress to wear, but we had to go into town to find black patent shoes to go with it. Smart coats were also a problem. We made do with brushing ours a lot, and Mum sent hers to the cleaner's. I remember going with her to fetch it. We had my new shoes in a carrier bag: they hadn't offered the shoebox this time. When they did we always said yes, because Brian liked to use them for making into garages and aircraft hangars. We stood in the chemical air of the dry cleaner's and the girl behind the counter rummaged for Mum's coat in a whole rail of coats on metal hangers, with yellow tickets safety-pinned to the lapels. We stood looking on – we could have told her it was the grey one, but somehow the etiquette of the place demanded that you didn't. It might seem like you were choosing a better one than your own, and laying false claim to it. Anyway, there was the ticket. No doubt the girl – not too quick on the uptake – would find the right one, given time.

  I had no sense of premonition as I stood there, breathing in the dry-cleaning fumes. I didn't foresee my future, interchangeable with that of the girl behind the counter, the glum-looking, slow-off-the-mark girl. But then I never seem to have a clue what's in store for me.

  Roy Tiltyard turned out to be a short man with absolutely no chin. 'Weedy little thing, isn't he?' was Stella's verdict, as she watched him from the sidelines. Her voice was tinged with knowledge, like a trainer sizing up rival horseflesh. But he was a man, and he was marrying Bettina, so all in all I think the family felt she'd got a good deal. By November Bettina was terribly plump, pinkly plump, and her hair full of electricity. She wore a whitish suit, ivory they called it, and a perky little hat with a net veil, and a spray of apricot carnations on her sizeable breast. In her high heels she was about four inches taller than the groom. I kept thinking about what I'd learned from all those novels, and how on their wedding night she would overlap and overflow his skimpy form. How she could, easily, quite overpower him. He looked pretty cheerful, despite this. I imagined her casting off her wedding hat, kicking off her high heels, and splitting the zip at the back of her skirt in her eagerness, while he lay on the bed in his wedding suit, his lower lip disappearing into his neck, smiling a nervous smile. I know I've read far too many unsuitable books, but it was difficult to get from here – stilted speeches and laughter in the back room of the Bull and Garland pub, my mother drinking bitter lemon with a lemon-puckered expression on her face because she didn't hold with public houses – to there, a riotous consummation in a hotel room up the coast, in only a few hours' time, while the rest of us were drinking our bedtime hot chocolate and examining the sore places on our feet where our new shoes had rubbed.

  I found it the hardest thing to imagine, how people got on in private. How they really got on.

  Mandy wore shocki
ng pink. It clashed with her hair.

  In the back room at the Bull and Garland pub, a place of quite unfamiliar smells and sensations, I watched my relatives and Roy Tiltyard's relatives. It wasn't often that an opportunity like this came my way. I made full use of my powers of observation. Ladies with fat bottoms (the Tiltyard side) capered in the middle of the room, doing some version of a country dance, arm in arm and round and round, to Lonnie Donegan on the jukebox. I wondered which one was Roy's auntie, so recently under the knife. They all looked in the rudest health. Their tight skirts, in electric blue and sugar pink, wrinkled spectacularly over their thighs. I thought I could hear the creak of their girdles above the music. Whereas my side of the family sat primly behind the small round tables, knees together, holding up their glasses as if about to make a toast. They looked as if enjoyment did not come naturally to them. Stella was subdued. The men (both sides) stood in huddles near the bar, or near to the door marked 'Toilets'. My father was letting his half of light ale go a long way. He wasn't, as my mother said, 'a drinker'. Nor was he likely to be, under her eagle eye.

  I leaned my head towards Gloria and said, under cover of the music, 'What happened to Mandy's father?' Gloria was the one person you might ask, she had a taste for gossip, and whatever was in her glass was beginning to make her go loose-featured and giggly.

  'Mandy's father? Oh, he was killed in a motorcycle accident, years ago.'

  So he had actually existed. Bettina had not produced Mandy in isolation, like some self-pollinating flower, or a greenfly giving birth to replica female greenflies. 'Eleven years ago!' she said, and went off into a spasm of laughter, her shoulders shaking. I couldn't see what was funny about this. Mandy was eleven, almost.

  'He always went too fast on that awful motorbike,' Gloria continued. 'Sometimes she rode pillion. Used to give her poor mother the willies.' So Bettina had a mother at one time, too. 'After he got killed, she used to refer to him as her fiancé. I can't blame her, it sounds better, doesn't it? Anyway, there she was, in the club. Never trust men on motorcycles.' And she burst into laughter again. I wondered if she meant a motorcycle club, which was no good if you didn't have a motorcycle to ride on any more.