Living In Perhaps (27 page)

'How do you know all this?'

'My mum works as an auxiliary up at the hospital. Sees her
every day.'

It always pays to have contacts, I thought.

'And what are you up to these days?'

'Me? I'm at Sketchley's.'

'Sketchley's? I might pop in and see you, then,' she said,
grandly. 'When I'm out. With the baby.'

And I might be very glad. A visit from Natasha Tozer,
née
Maynard, seventeen-year-old married person and mother, even
that would be welcome. There were precious few customers
between the busy hours, which were first thing in the morning,
lunchtime and at the end of the afternoon. People tended to see
to their dry cleaning en route for other things. I had to take my
lunches unsociably early or late. I kept a book under the counter.
'Don't let the customers see you reading,' the area manager
warned me. Why not? Would it shatter the illusion that I was as
dim as the job demanded?

Raymond was wandering off. Natasha lingered. I think she
really wanted me to admire the baby. It wasn't something I had
any practice at. I peeped under the light blue hood. 'He's very
sweet,' I said.

'It's a she. Kerry-Louise.'

'How old is she?'

'Two and a half months.'

I looked back up at Natasha. Raymond was nowhere in sight. I
was beginning to say something else, but Natasha said, 'Don't ask.'

Stella had a new man.

His name was Warren. He was a step up from Dimitri, from
Wally. Even from Gerald, whose airs and graces, we decided in
retrospect, had been assumed.

Warren had a house outside town and a piece of land on which
people paid him to keep their horses. He had a wife, but she was
in a mental institution, had been for years. He was quite open
about this. 'Good God! Is his surname Rochester?' I asked, but of
course no one was listening. Stella would not let on how she had
met him. It was not like Stella to hide away a Man, but she was
quite protective of this one. She didn't waft him into the house
straight away just to prove that he existed. He was too precious to
her for that.

And she changed. Subtly, she changed. I don't know whether he
wrought the change in her, if he actually made the suggestions, or
if she just responded to what she felt he would prefer. If I had to
find a word for what she became, it was more
ladylike
. First her
clothes began to change. She had always been one of those people
you think of as underdressed for the weather. Her blouses were
too fine and see-through, her shoes always strappy and peep-toed.
She never wore a coat unless it was actually snowing, which it
rarely does in our part of the world. A headscarf, a cardigan flung
over her shoulders, an umbrella, were her weapons against what
the climate threw at us.

Now she began with a pair of proper court shoes, filled in all
the way round, still slender-heeled and feminine but not of the
tart variety. Then she appeared in a twinset, not unlike the one my
mother had; but quite unlike my mother's as it flowed over Stella's
curves, and the cardigan – over her shoulders still, and buttoned
with just one button at the throat – quivered with the movements
of her body. She held herself and moved in a quite different way
from my mother, as someone, I began to see, who was aware of
herself and aware of men, of the effect she was having on them.
By comparison, my mother was a clockwork female doll, one of
those house-robots that we were always being promised by the
newspapers would, in the near future, be available to take on all
the squalid chores. But honestly, why bother investing millions of
pounds in inventing them, when the world was full of people like
my mother and Aunt Gloria, doing the job for free? Next Stella
bought a dress, knee-length and fitted, but nothing like tight. It
was a soft light brown, the colour of milk chocolate. Not a colour
Stella had been aware of in the dyer's repertoire before. She
looked – casually elegant. And rather svelte. Maybe she was
getting slimmer. Losing weight, a fool for love. What a turn-up for
the books.

I thought that Warren, on the whole, was a Good Thing. Stella
had grown up, and calmed down. And he treated her better than
the others had done, was easy with her, didn't actually appear to
mind being seen with her and meeting the rest of her family. But
Gloria wasn't so sure.

'He's already got a wife,' she said. And he was a bit well off and
a bit middle class for Gloria's peace of mind. 'I don't like him. He's
too polite. A bit suspicious, to my way of thinking' was how she
put it. 'What could he want with Stella?' That is, if he couldn't
marry her – what did he
really
want?

I could have told her, given my new worldly wisdom in all
things pertaining to adult relationships, but we were not that
close. Though we traded gossip and opinions, and spent happy
hours flicking through the local newspaper or Gloria's weekly
magazines, praising or shredding the reputations and looks of
anyone who appeared within, we never touched on what I really
thought. Warren was after exactly what Wally and Gerald and
Dimitri had been after, and presumably got; they didn't marry her
either, despite the fact that they were, supposedly, free to do so.
What I really thought about Warren was what I could observe:
that he brought out Stella's good points, and enjoyed them – her
adaptability, her soft-hearted female nature, her ability to overlook
or forgive almost all faults. And her sexual generosity.

I suppose this was the bit that was unspoken between Aunt
Gloria and me. Was unspoken and unmentionable.

Perhaps Warren's wife is in here. I wonder which one she is?
Perhaps she's Rose!

You see, what could I say?

I had spent all my life – at least, from ever since I could
remember until my sixteenth birthday – wishing, hoping, pretending,
that I was adopted. Telling other people that I was
adopted. Explaining away anything I didn't like by the fact that I
was adopted.

Until the day I found out that I was.

I could hardly go round to Barbara and say, 'Guess what? I
really
am
adopted. I was just pretending before.' I'd been her
friend under false pretences, and here was evidence of my big lie.
And we weren't close, not any more.

I didn't feel I could complain to Tillie. To her my adoption was
just a rumour heard from Barbara, an ordinary rumour.
Supposing she replied, 'So what's the problem?' with a shrug, and
went on rolling out the pastry?

And what on earth would I say to Tom, who I suspect never
believed me in the first place?

It was all too humiliating. And I didn't want to feel humiliated,
not in front of the Hennessys.

I wasn't allowed to discuss it with Brian. That was embargoed
until
he
was sixteen. Not that I was in the habit of discussing
much with him. I stuck faithfully to my mother's instructions. If
he'd been a different kind of boy I would easily have defied her.
If he'd been a different kind of brother I would have been glad to
tell him, and find out what he made of the whole sorry tale. So
that we could share our shock and sadness and excitement and
curiosity. Or if he'd been another kind of brother altogether, a
bluff and bullying sort, I might have enjoyed spilling the beans to
him, and drawing out his feelings like those medieval torturers
you see in etchings, slowly drawing out the entrails of their
victims by winding them around a stake. But he wasn't like that.

It was almost as if we were not brother and sister at all. We had
nothing in common. I was red-gold and blue, he was dark and
hazel. Perhaps she had made it up, that part of the story. Who
knows what she might not have said? She had lied for years and
years, lied by omission mostly, but lies all the same. 'What day of
the week was I born on, Mum?' A look, a thought, a blink –
'Wednesday.' That would have been a lie, too.

So there was no one.

I did try to talk to Gloria. Or draw her out, at least. I thought
she might be amenable. I hoped she'd have some little gems of
memory stored away, trinkets she'd just love to pull out and show
me. It was like Barbara and me trawling through Tillie's dusty
jewel box. I was eager to see anything she had. Good or bad, pretty
or tawdry. It had to be better than nothing.

But 'Oh, I don't recall. I just remember going round to tea one
time, after you'd arrived. Edie never said anything about the hows
and whys of it. You know her. One day you weren't there, and then
you were.'

'Just like that?'

'Oh, and Ted had done up the attic.' She frowned, and dipped
her biscuit in her tea. 'Though that was years before.'

'But you said she never wanted a
baby
. She must have talked
about it sometimes.'

Gloria shook her head. Perhaps the hows and whys of it were
painful to her. Gloria and Eddy were childless. I didn't know if
this was by intention, or just bad luck. Or maybe she wanted
them, and he didn't. You never know. Married since she was one-and-twenty and nothing to show for it; not even Eddy, half the
time. But these were the unspoken details, the secret life of
married couples. I thought it so unfair that Gloria and my mother
should speculate quite openly about Stella because she lacked the
entitlement to privacy of the married state. Not that all married
states were private. I thought of Tillie, who had had six children,
eight if you included the poor lost babies, and then the op to put
a stop to more. If I had landed in another family, then I would
have known all. All, and maybe more than I wanted to hear,
sometimes.

I used to lie about being adopted as an excuse. A way of saying,
'It's not my fault.' It's not my fault I live here, look like this, have
this mother, this father, this deeply unnoticeable way of life.

I used it like that pendulum swing of belief – total belief, no
belief – that people have about sudden changes in fortune. Gloria
was convinced that one day she would win a million on the football
pools, and followed with great interest the activities of those
who had a big win, always commenting, 'Oh, I'd never do that, or
buy that, or go there,' or 'Oh yes, that's what
I'd
do.' Even my
father, who didn't do the pools (all forms of gambling were
eschewed in our house) talked about the grand day when his ship
would come in. We'll have a new car when my ship comes in. We'd
build a glass porch, or have a pond with a working fountain. Or a
trip to the Isle of Man. It was a way of saying what they'd do if
they had the money, but also if only they had the courage and
audacity and style to go with it. It was a way of saying what they'd
do if they had turned out different people from the ones they
were.

And yet they used it as a dampener too. Mention anything
expensive or unlikely and Dad would say, 'When my ship comes
in,' which meant, in other words, no. And Gloria, if you suggested
something heavenly and desirable, said, 'Oh yes, when I win the
pools,' in just the same voice as she said, 'And pigs might fly.'

So I swung between knowing, really knowing at the bottom of
my soul, that I was not from them, and knowing, really knowing,
at the top of my canny brain, that this was all a fantasy. That I was
really just as dull and ordinary as all around me were.

Well, all except my chosen people.

Hanny is keen to discuss my adoption. I wish she wasn't. It's one
of the few topics that make her focus on me rather than on herself.
This morning she said, quite out of the blue, as no one had
ever said it to me at the time, 'I wonder why your real mother gave
you up to be adopted?'

Mum told me where I came from, in as few words as possible,
and then she dropped the subject, closing and pursing her lips.
Signalling that nothing more was to be asked or said. And we were
not a family that asked or told anyway, not a family who rolled out
the words, the tales, in an endless stream of placing and framing
and decorating. We were a family who behaved as if words cost
money.

Gloria told me, but what she told me were little glinting bits of
gossip, items of interest to her, minute relics picked out of
her
past. She hadn't the mind or the education to take the wider view.
Nothing existed but in relation to her, and her family, and her
neighbours, and her town where she had been born and grown up
and lived her whole life. Everything was filtered through the sieve
of Gloria. And the mesh of Gloria's sieve was very narrow indeed.

Hanny turned out to have a fertile imagination. She sat there
with her pointy fragile knees bent up inside her skirt, and her
bony wrists clasped round her knees, and her raspberry lips
considering and framing questions that were all lively curiosity,
and never noticing my shut face, or my tight voice.

'I wonder if she was married? I wonder if her husband died in
an accident or something, and she got ill and couldn't cope with
you any more?'

'She must have been married,' I said. 'She had two of us.'

'Oh, yes. I forgot about your brother.'

My brother.

'If she wasn't married, she was a very bad girl!' Hanny laughed,
throwing her head back and showing the ridges of her windpipe.
'Oh, a
very
bad girl. Welcome to the house of bad girls, every one
of us a different kind. They've never known what to do with us
bad girls.'

Then 'She could have had kids by loads of different men! The
authorities just took 'em away as they popped out.'

I didn't think this was even worth answering.

'Or I wonder if she just died? Of TB or something, or a bus ran
her over, or maybe she died in
childbirth
. So then you were
orphans and you had to go into a home.' Hanny sounded as if she
were recounting a story, a thrilling story that had happened to
someone else. In a book, or a film. She sounded enthralled.

'She might not have wanted to lose you at all. She might have
had
to give you up. For your sakes. For the best. There are lots of
reasons why women have to have their babies adopted.'

'Or she might have been glad to get shot of us,' I said. 'And I
wasn't a newborn baby.'

'She might have been very young. I mean
really
young. They
might have forced her to give you up.'

'Who?'

'Her
parents
,' said Hanny, with some spite. 'Or she might have
had loads of other children, and you two were just the last straw.
Her womb might have been hanging out, like those women before
the National Health Service who could never afford to go to the
doctor and didn't know what contraception was.'

'That's just repulsive,' I said.

'Maybe she beat you. Neglected you. Maybe they took you
away.'

I hadn't thought of this. I hadn't thought of much, to tell the
truth. I'd just thought of me, tricked and stupid, adopted and
really
adopted. I didn't like to dwell on the idea of being ill-treated.
Perhaps because it sounded more convincing than the
rest. Or perhaps because it rang a bell.

I wonder if I remember and have chosen not to? After all, it
must be quite possible to choose
not
to remember certain things.

One thing I do remember – approaching my fluffy pyjama case
with my hands stretched out in wonder. It couldn't have been a
present, it wasn't wrapped. Nor was it flattened and matted with
use, but soft and white as a Persian kitten. Thinking about it now
makes my heart beat faster. I'm sure this was when I was five, on
that first day: it was waiting for me on my narrow little bed in my
brand new bedroom.

If I can remember this, why can't I remember the children's
home from just the day before, or earlier that very same morning?

I was told I had a visitor. I was stunned. Who? Aunt Stella, now
Mrs Warren Pike. A shock at first, but then I thought: well, who
else would come? Stella was the only one with any guts.

Trudy came to fetch me, escorting me along a corridor I'd not
been down before, a narrow switchback corridor I never even
knew existed. Trudy's massive bulk nearly touched both sides. I
followed her, mesmerized by the jolting of her buttocks in their
tie-dye drawstring trousers. It gave me something to think about,
other than the impending visit. She showed me into a small room,
furnished with two easy chairs and a coffee table. There was a
window covered by a white blind. The door to the room had a big
panel of glass in it, the sort of glass they favour round here, with
a layer of chicken-wire inside. Further down the corridor there
were several more doors. Rooms where people had visitors.
Rooms I never had an inkling of. Maybe I'm not that clever, after
all.

And there, in the middle of that first room, stood Aunt Stella.
Poised, stylish and positively svelte. I think she must have shed a
few more pounds since we'd last met. She wore a plain grey linen
dress. 'Grey' and 'linen' were not words I would ever have thought
to associate with Stella. Her cardigan, in the palest shade of pink,
was draped over her shoulders. I realized that a cardigan over the
shoulders was still Stella's signature, though it was more likely to
be cashmere, now, than nylon. Her hair was smoothed into a
French pleat and she wore plain pearl studs in her ears. She
reminded me of the mother in Brian's tell-the-time book: the one
I thought a Carolyn sort of mother would look like.

Maybe I could pass Stella off as
my
mother. We could track
down Lorna and do a double act for her. It might be worth the
risk, just for the confusion I'd spread.

Trudy said, 'I'll be right outside.' And closed the door. I looked
round and her big moon face was there, in the safety glass. I gave
her a wishy-washy smile.

Good old Stella. She held out her hand and I thought for a
moment she wanted me to shake it, but she was just showing off
her engagement and wedding rings: a complicated modern
design, gobbets of gold and three bright diamonds.

'We did it very quietly,' she explained. 'Well, his wife had only
passed away three months before.'

I remembered – the wife in the mental hospital. I stopped
myself from asking if she'd died on one of his visits. No, Warren
was a kind man, a gentleman. Look at what he'd done for Stella,
made an honest woman of her, a rather elegant woman, too.

'We slipped into the registry office one Friday lunchtime. Just
Warren's mate Nige and his wife as witnesses. I'd have asked
Gloria but Eddy was home. And we wanted it private as possible.'

'Did you have a honeymoon?'

Stella giggled. 'Yes –
Paris
.'

So Stella had been abroad, the first of the Burtons to venture so
far.

'You must have got a passport?' I said, thrilled.

'Yeah. Handy, too. We're off to Spain for ten days in September.'

I thought of how far she had come, and how tricky the journey.
The useless men who crowded her past, and her family at her back
all the time like dogs barking behind a wire fence.

I said, 'Lucky you,' and the words fell into a little pool of silence
between us. There wasn't even a clock to tick away the moments.

Stella looked longingly at the ashtray on the coffee table in
front of her.

'You can smoke if you want to,' I offered. I was the hostess, after
all.

'No, I won't,' Stella said, and then a moment later grabbed a
pack of Rothmans Kingsize out of her handbag and swiftly lit
one. She blew the smoke out sideways, upwards, and held her
hand at a ladylike angle. I saw her glance at the door, and looked
over my shoulder.