Living In Perhaps (25 page)

And then Isolde was gone. She'd gone to London to work as a
personal assistant. Maybe it wasn't what her grammar school
teachers had in mind for her –
a capable girl, clever, definitely
university material
– but she upped and left at the end of her
lower sixth year and moved to London. She had found herself a
job through a contact of their friend, Dill Lopez-Lawrence, and
somewhere to live before she went. She didn't tell anyone at home
of her plans until they were settled. They wouldn't have stopped
her, not the Hennessys, but she wanted to do it all by herself, or so
she said. Though to me it looked like she had help every step of
the way.

She sent me a postcard. She sent it to my house. The picture
was a portrait of Lady Jane Grey from the Tate Gallery. On the
other side it said:

Dear Caro,

V. happy here in London. Flat-sharing with Tamara. Just round
the corner from us is Gordon Square where V. Woolf used to live.
I'm enjoying work at a big insurance company – from my office
window you can just about see the Thames.

Love, Isolde

My mother couldn't read her dash of a signature and guessed
Isabel. 'Who's this Isabel, then?' she asked, holding out the card to
me.

'Just a girl from school.'

'Big insurance company. She's doing well for herself.'

This is precisely why I had to guard my life. Everything was
deemed to be open for inspection. There was no room for secrets,
for true privacy, in our household. Only the self-conscious
privacy of the long dressing gown, the bolted bathroom door. If I
hadn't kept a double life, I wouldn't have survived.

I was gratified that Isolde had remembered me. Perhaps she
had sent postcards to everyone, luxuriating in her new independence,
boasting of her freedom. But I didn't think so, somehow; I
knew that she'd singled me out. I recalled that Tamara was the
name of Eugene's girlfriend or ex-girlfriend maybe by now. I
hadn't a clue who V. Woolf was, though, unless she meant General
Woolf who fought in Canada, and whose Christian name I don't
think I ever knew.

Of course, I know now. I've read
Mrs Dalloway
. But at the time
I'd never heard of Virginia Woolf, and if Isolde possessed her
books she must have spirited them away with her into the Van
Hoogs' half of the house. You see, my knowledge depended on
what the Hennessys were interested in, what they had accumulated
over the years. And if the Hennessys hadn't got it,
I
didn't get
it.

Sebastian got through to the grammar school, and Mattie was no
longer at the Wren. He had gone to a special school – 'an
extra-
special
school' as Tillie put it – where his flapping hands and
ever-present wellington boots would not just be ignored in the
tumult of careless welcome that was the Wren's educational
approach. He'd gone to an extra-special school, where they were
training him out of his boots, if not his other passions.

And Sebastian had grown ugly. I was so disappointed. His face
appeared to be pulled and stretched apart by bones that didn't fit.
The proportions had gone all wrong, leaving his best features –
his eyes, his narrow disdainful nose, his well-drawn mouth
– insignificant and upstaged by his new ploughshare jaw, his
jutting eyebrow bones, the slabs of his cheeks.

'It's OK,' Barbara said when I remarked on it. 'It will turn out
OK. Sebastian looks just like Eugene did when he was little – not
that I knew Eugene when he was little, of course – and now
Eugene's dead good-looking. But when he was younger – when I
did
know him – he looked terrible. It's just puberty,' she said,
shrugging. 'Everyone has to go through it.'

About everyday things, Barbara was so knowledgeable. Yet she
never so much as opened a book or gave any weight to her schooling,
as far as I could see. Where did she get it from?

She tapped her forehead. 'Intuition. And TV.'

Tom Rose went away, too, to do an engineering degree at some
university in Wales. I couldn't remember the name of the place, I
didn't much care to. Tom was staying on at school to do re-sits.
His A-level grades had not been very good, he had disappointed
his teachers. It was hard to tell if Patrick and Tillie were disappointed
in him, their attitude to all their children was so breezy,
and besides, they knew of alternative strategies. They always had
something up their sleeve.

At the same time that Tom slackly passed his A levels and I took
my woeful CSEs, Barbara, at the convent school, was sitting O
levels. Eight of them. She only passed four, and needed five at least
to stay on in the sixth form. Oh,
Barbara
couldn't go to work in a
dry-cleaner's shop. Or Woolworth's, or Gough Electricals, or
selling ice cream in a booth on the seafront. But the Hennessys
had something up their sleeve for her: a crammer.

I had never heard of crammers before. 'It's all right,' Barbara
said, wafting the flimsy piece of paper with her results on at me,
'I'm going to a crammer.' I felt I'd had this conversation with her
before, years ago, by the roundabout at the end of our road, after
the Wren had let her down over the eleven-plus. For Barbara, as
for all the Hennessys, there were always other opportunities.

If I sound mean, I was feeling mean. I was feeling the pinch, the
pinch of different circumstances.

The crammer was in the next town, and Barbara rode off each
morning with Patrick in his old white Austin van, though she
usually returned by train in the early or mid-afternoon, long
before he reappeared. She began to dress differently, to murmur
lines of songs I'd never heard. Her wrists clinked with Indian
bangles and her fingers were heavy with greyish silver rings. She
wore the sort of make-up she'd always been rude about on the
model girls in magazines. It was put on with a skill that showed
great practice, and a steady hand. She was mixing with a new
crowd now, a crowd, she implied, much more exciting than
before. Both girls and boys studied there, even people up to the
age of twenty, and the teachers were known as tutors and were
called by their first names, and some by nicknames. I tired of
hearing about Trevor and Linda and Mark and Dizzy even
quicker than I had tired of hearing about Sister Benedict and
Mother Francis-Xavier.
My
education was doled out in bland all-purpose
places, where we were herded in and out like silly
sheep, indistinguishable to anyone except our own mothers,
forgetting all we learned and instantly forgettable ourselves,
quickly replaced by the next generations. I could never get excited
about it. Whereas Barbara's seemed destined to take place
in highly specialized institutions, inward-turning and self-preoccupied.

Not unlike this one.

I'm sure that Hanny wants me to ask about her wrists. I'm sure
that's why she keeps accidentally-on-purpose letting me see them.

On the other hand, I really don't want to ask her. There is some
information which I don't care to know. And you can't un-know
something once you've been told.

My thoughts about it are these, for what it's worth. Hanny is a
sad person, she has a deep well of sadness inside her, like those
sweets with a hard-boiled outside and a melted sugary centre.
Sometimes the inside oozes outside. I don't suppose there's
anything you can do about it. Some people are just like that.

How profound. I must share my thoughts with Group some
time. Really drive them into supernova.

What did my mother want of us? She wanted children, but they
had to be neat and tidy and no trouble, outside the house or in.
She didn't want us to have a life, except for a pared-down child's
life, of school and well-behaved play. She saw that her duties as a
mother were to feed us, house us, keep us clothed and clean, see
that we went to school and church. See that we did our chores and
knew our place.

Actually, she probably thought she was turning out model
citizens. Doing a duty to self and state. Well, hadn't she taken in
two little orphans of the storm? Two unwanted children, of
irresponsible parents, and turned them into perfectly respectable
members of the community? Give that woman a medal. Give that
woman a round of applause.

Poor thing.

This is how she told me about the adoption: on my sixteenth
birthday, in the middle of exams and a week before I was due to
leave school and go and work in the fumes of the dry cleaner's.
After the presents on my plate at breakfast, but before the English
exam that morning, she said, 'There's something I want to talk to
you about. Later.'

'Why not now?'

'Later. When there's more time. When Brian's not around.'

Oh, I thought, I know what this is about. Sweet sixteen, never
been kissed – better know what's just around the corner. I went off
to school confident enough. With Tom as my tutor and all those
books, I thought there was nothing she could tell me that I didn't
already know. I laughed when I thought about how she might
phrase it.

Back home in the dry silence of the early afternoon (exam
over, free time – the weirdness of being out of school when
others were bent over desks) she made a pot of tea in the stainless
steel teapot and brought it into the lounge. Oh God, this
was going to be serious! I had to keep my smile from giving me
away.

'I'm having a talk with you today, which I don't want repeated
to Brian.'

I nodded, grave and grown-up.

'It's high time you knew where you came from.'

Little shudders of laughter were running through my shoulders
but I managed to keep them still.

'I've talked to your dad, and he agrees with me.' She paused,
fiddling with the cups, rearranging them before pouring out the
tea. You could hear it flowing into the cup, the house was so still.
'You're sixteen. You're old enough to know now.'

I know I'm old enough to know, I thought. I
know
. Visions of
Tom's creased bedsheets swam before my eyes, and him in them,
and I was only glad that she couldn't read my mind.

'You aren't ours.'

The words were in Russian, in Latin, in Martian.

'Not by birth, I mean.'

The interpreter in my ear was beginning to filter through, but
the time-lag was troublesome to comprehension.

'I mean, we adopted you, when you were little. We adopted
Brian, too. You aren't ours, either of you.' She sat back, with her
hands neatly together in her lap. Neither of us drank our tea.

The joke was over. I sat with my mouth open. The clock from
my mother's mother's house (no relation) ticked away. Somewhere
outside a car accelerated.

So. Not sex. Not how babies get here. Just how we got here.

'You
are
brother and sister, though. I mean, really brother and
sister.'

No questions, m'lud.

Where did they think I was, all that time, when I was next door?
They so obligingly swallowed my lies. Where did they really think
I was?

Or did they just not care?

I can see that being adopted must make a difference. If you
have a baby, give birth to a baby that you have created between
you, you must find ways to accommodate its failings and frailties.
It is
of you
, after all. If it grows up with an unappealing character,
an unattractive face, you still have to love it, to find a way of
loving it. But if you
adopt
a child and it turns out not as you
expected, what do you do? Especially if you adopt it at four, at
five, when certain nasty habits may already be entrenched.
Especially if you haven't much of an idea about children, what
they are like, how they develop, how naturally unpleasant they
can be, in the first place.

So I think – I tend to think – that when I got to thirteen or
fourteen or fifteen and I wasn't all they hoped for, maybe they just
discounted me. Maybe they focused their minds on Brian, or on
something else entirely, the crossword, or the garden. And let me
drift away.

Lorna has always asked the questions, Lorna has always wanted to
know
, and I have always evaded her. It is quite easy to evade
her.

Dr Travis, dear Dr Balloon-Head, is more difficult. I think he is
a bit like Tom Rose being Banker in Monopoly, watching
our moves and silently tending his piles of banknotes. And
then, without noticing exactly how it has happened, you realize
he has tipped the balance of the game, that he holds the power.

That he has the information.

'Pharmaceuticals.'

We were walking round the garden paths, Hanny and I, trying
to think of the most beautiful words we knew. It had rained all
morning and we were desperate to get outside, so now here we
were, she in her Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood coat and me in my
Aran jumper, hugging ourselves to keep warm. Layers of grey
clouds and white clouds kept blowing over, and through them the
sun could be seen as a clear disc, a yellow plate. We could look at
it without our eyes hurting.

'No, not pharma
ceuticals
,' she said. 'Pharmacopoeia. Now
there's a beautiful word.'

'Tangible.'

'Alchemy.'

'Vestibule.'

'Vestibule!' She started laughing. 'I always thought that meant a
kind of underwear.'

'My brother hated the word
flavour
,' I said. 'Well, it turned out
he hated it. One day he just squeaked when someone said it, and
shouted, "I can't stand that word. It makes my teeth ache!"'

Actually, it showed he had depths I'd never suspected. I never
thought anything affected him, especially anything irrational, like
the sound of a particular word, and I never imagined that he
had the power to describe how anything made him feel. I thought
he was the most basic of human beings, functioning like a dog or
a plant, moved only by currents such as hunger, tiredness, cold,
the sap rising and falling according to the time of day, the time of
year.

'I didn't know you had a brother,' Hanny said.

There was a silence. I had to ask, then, what she left me room
to ask.

'Do you have any brothers or sisters?'

'No, I'm an only child.'

'My brother was adopted, too,' I explained. 'We
are
actually
brother and sister. I mean, we were brother and sister before we
were adopted. We were adopted as a pair.'

But she wasn't listening, as she often isn't. She said, squeezing
her arms to her emaciated chest, 'So, if I wither away to nothing,
they'll have no one left.'

I looked at the sun scurrying furtively through the clouds. I
didn't say anything. She never leaves me anything worth saying.