She's Leaving Home (23 page)

‘Sea-port,’ Helen explained briskly. ‘Look, this headstone’s full of Finnish sailors – Carl Alexander Ingmar of Kristinestad, died 30 September 1869 aged twenty-eight. Another from Uledborg aged thirty, two years later. A dozen of them – there must have been a little community. So much for the assertion that Liverpool couldn’t cope with our entry into the Common Market because our trade is with the Americas. We’ve had a Baltic Exchange here for generations.’

‘A sea-port with a lot of dead children.’ Michael had half knelt at a series of graves in one corner and began to trace out the inscriptions with his finger. ‘Liverpool Female Orphan Asylum. Ann Davis aged eleven, 1844. Maria Hughes aged thirteen, 1849. Lots of them. Why so many deaths in 1849? Was that because of the Irish famine?’

‘No, that’d be earlier – 1846 or ’47. Anyway, the Irish wouldn’t have been in an Anglican cemetery. Cholera epidemic, perhaps. Kitty Wilkinson’s buried somewhere near. She campaigned for public baths and washhouses for the poor in the last century. A blessed woman, my Dad once called
her.’

Michael turned and gazed around. ‘I haven’t got long. Let’s find somewhere to sit, shall we? I’ll spread out my jacket.’

In the shelter of a cliff overhang they found two substantial family graves, handsomely cut in granite with flat tops and low wrought-iron surrounds. ‘Not the Rathbones,’ said Helen firmly. They are great benefactors of this city. We’ll sit on the other one.’

For a while they chatted amicably. Michael wanted to take up the conversation where it had been left off in the Cavern.

‘Why did you say that dive wasn’t real?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never been anywhere so – magic, so vibrant in my life.’

‘Oh, the council will catch up with it sooner or later. It’s a fire-trap. The warehouses overhead are collapsing. So its success is temporary in every way: in a couple of years or so it’ll have closed. Anyone with any talent will have been spirited off to London.’ Helen reached inside the paper bag and selected a chocolate bar. ‘I mean also that its appeal is false. Those lads on stage – some give up good jobs to play and are thrilled when they sign a contract. They’re everybody’s heroes. But they’ll find they’ve been fleeced or lost every penny and will end up on the dole, permanently. It’s not the way forward. It’s not real.’

In the Cavern itself or with adherents it was not possible to utter such doubts. Helen continued, ‘Down there if I said such things I’d be lynched. Oh, I love being a member and I have my favourites. But I don’t want to be like them. I want something far more substantial in my life.’ Artlessly, she grinned at Michael. ‘Like you.’

Michael smiled down at her, then opened two bottles of sarsaparilla and handed her one. He looked around. ‘You sure chose the right spot to debate the permanent and the ephemeral. Everybody who sleeps here once thought their experience was absolute truth, and now it’s vanished and so have they. Their attitudes were held with total certainty. But in our days change is the watchword. And I think that is wonderful.’

He expanded with references to Franklin Roosevelt, that passionate exponent of the necessity of change in whose footprints his own heroes the Kennedy brothers wished to follow – no mean feat, and no mean ambition. Since her admiration for Macmillan was in part based on his links with the youthful John Kennedy, Helen willingly concurred. The discussion flowed easily, but on a higher plane than Helen expected. Michael was a sensitive and thoughtful man, utterly to her taste.

‘I wish you liked our pop groups as much,’ she teased. ‘For all my hesitations, I am certain that the Beatles and some of the other groups will be worldwide successes.’

‘I do,’ he protested, mouth full. ‘But mostly what I’ve heard so far has been loud. I like intelligence and wit in a lyric.’

‘Oh, you do? But so much of what comes out of Nashville is such rubbish.’ She began to warble, imitating the American long vowels and tapping her foot in rhythm: ‘
Laallipaap, laallipap
,
ooh lally lally
tally
or how about
Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp, who put the bam in the bama-a-lalla ding-dong
?’

‘Mercy,’ he chuckled. ‘I can do better than that.’ He sat up, an empty lemonade bottle in one hand like a microphone. ‘This is the ideal spot. Remember the Eddie Cochrane number?
Ob, there are three steps to heaven, Just listen and you will plainly see –’

Above Helen his broad shoulders blocked the light. Something about his appearance, his bulk, made her catch her breath, but he seemed oblivious to their closeness. He gazed merrily down at her.

Helen joined in the familiar last line.

The two laughed, but Helen suddenly averted her eyes. Who was he, this man whose physical presence had such power to excite her? The fine hairs on her forearms and at the back of her neck rose as he bent over her and every nerve tingled. Surely, she did not know him well enough to love him. She did not need to know him well to fall in love with him, of that she was fully aware. But the sheer intensity of the sensations he aroused, and the fact that she had no control whatever over them: this was new and thrilling, but scary.

Michael seemed to catch her tension. He put down the bottle and took her hand, but continued to sing in a fair baritone.

‘How about this one, Helen?
Please help me, I’m falling, In love with you –’

He finished the song, then looked quietly at her. ‘I dedicate it to you. Don’t be frightened of me, Helen. I mean you no harm. I’d break the leg of any guy who tried to do you harm.’

She could not answer. He put a finger under her chin and lifted her face, then kissed her full on the lips.

‘You’re a very special girl: I’ve never met anyone quite like you before. I don’t know how much time I’ll have in the UK, but as long as I’m around I’d like to go on seeing you. Is that OK? Do say yes, dear, sweet Helen.’

Her head was spinning. For answer she looked him in the face and touched his cheek with her fingers. He leaned across her and she lay back, nestling in the warmth of his jacket, and she let him kiss her, long and lovingly. For the first time she felt his warm weight press upon her body, though he was considerate and gentle. Yet the messages were paradoxical and confusing. Above his head the empty branches of dead trees, devoid of bud, bent and sighed at her in the salt breeze. Beneath the sheepskin under her shoulders the tombstone was hard and chilly.

‘I must go.’ She jumped up. ‘We shouldn’t fool around in this weird place. Angry ghosts might pursue us.’ His question was unanswered. ‘Yes, I’d love to see you. But it might be best not to broadcast it, not just yet.’ She could not have explained why not, but some instinct had intervened. She laughed shortly to cover her embarrassment.

‘You don’t believe all that superstition, do you?’ As they climbed back towards the cathedral entrance Michael was clearly making an effort to return them both to normality. He avoided using the carved headstones as a support this time.

‘About ghosts, and that? No. I live in the present, and I sometimes resent the hold the past wants to exert upon us. They should let us go. The future is ours.’ The two had reached the top once more. Helen added cheerfully, ‘I’d much rather be cremated than buried, wouldn’t you? But it’s not allowed for us.’

He looked oddly at her but said no more. Across the street by the Post Office a group of younger schoolchildren were watching them with unconcealed curiosity. Quickly she bid him goodbye and walked, outwardly calm, towards the school entrance.

Michael would let her know when it might be possible to meet. She did not need to press him: he was determined to see her again, and as often as possible. Already, she realised with a jolt, she was beginning to read his mind, and to like what she found there.

When Helen returned home that evening it was to a smell unfamiliar in the Majinsky home – a warm, rich aroma which, after some puzzlement, she identified as ground roast coffee.

‘What I should also have got,’ she could hear her aunt intone, ‘was an electric coffee grinder.
But d’you know I went everywhere in town and couldn’t buy one? “Try a catering supplier” was the best advice. In the end, joy: I found Kardomah, and tins of ground coffee. You have to keep it in the fridge.’

‘In the fridge? Tins?’ Her mother’s voice wavered.

Helen stuck her head quickly around the door to announce her arrival and slipped upstairs. It might be safer to stay out of the way for a while. In a trice the hated uniform was on its hanger and had been replaced by cotton trews and a baggy sweater. The satchel was emptied on to her bed and papers rearranged.

For a few moments she sat and ranged through the file. Damn Miss Plumb. The essay on satire was in confusion; the ideas wouldn’t come clearly, though in a group discussion Helen knew she would have no hesitancy.

Naturally it was wonderful to poke fun at established institutions and defy the conventions. That was the role of the young in every age. Hadn’t her parents’ generation done the same? Helen was a bit vague about social history, but she could well imagine her mother dancing the Charleston with gay abandon, or her father voting Labour in an earnest desire for radical, compassionate government. He gave the impression he had had faith – in the political system perhaps, though maybe not in God. There must have been a time when he sincerely believed in something, before the apathy and
middle-aged
inertia which lately had infected him had taken grip. Was there a particular event which disillusioned him, or did it happen so gradually he didn’t notice? On the other hand, her mother had probably always been quite a conventional person. Annie had the capacity to close her mind, to shut it tight. Helen could not picture her engaged in energetic rebellion, ever. Maybe Gertie would offer her some clues, if the chance arose and it wasn’t impertinent to ask.

This was no help. She badgered her brain to think further back. In her grandparents’ day people had been critical of old ways. Victorian mores had vanished once their war was over – votes for women came in, skirts went up, wholesale illegality was condoned at least in Prohibition-ridden America. At home a decade later in 1936 even the monarchy was briefly under threat as love for a divorcée had brought about the Abdication. So her parents’ resistance to change, bolstered, as far as she could tell, by their friends’ conformity, was not merely an irritation but an anachronism.

Michael’s references to Roosevelt and Kennedy came back to her. It was unusual to hear anyone talk with such enthusiasm of a nation’s leaders; that was not the British style at all, where (at least in her own circle) those in authority were regarded with derision. He approved of them precisely because they espoused change and were determined to make it work for their citizens. That, too, seemed far more transatlantic than European.

She had found the discussion remarkable and thoroughly enjoyable; in his company she had begun to feel more assured. Was this the ‘serious boy’ she had been seeking? Was that the reason, without understanding exactly why, she had a need to keep his friendship a secret? It came to her, though, with a faint melancholy, that conversations of this ilk with her own generation had all but displaced those she used to have with her father.

In her own time examples abounded of attacks on once-settled regimes. Censorship had vanished – officially, anyway – both from the printed word and on the stage. A much-thumbed copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
had found its way into the prefects’ satchels if not yet visibly on to Library shelves. Established notions of God were being brutally demolished: Miss Plumb had sought their views on Dr John Robinson’s
Honest to God
which derided the commonly held picture of the deity as a hirsute old man ‘up there somewhere’ as painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Then the notion of marriage as the sole destination of normal women was uproariously sent up in Helen Gurley Brown’s
Sex and the Single Girl
. Ms Brown propounded the scandalous theory that women might enjoy sex, and seek it, and have boyfriends – sexual mates – without ties or contracts, or regrets. Pregnancy was not an unavoidable outcome, nor unhappiness. Meg bought the book and wrote her
name boldly inside the cover but Colette, to her friends’ bafflement, was scathing about its casual immorality and the likely risks.

So everybody was at it – the pillars of society, as Miss Plumb and the
Daily Telegraph
described them, had been seized and shaken vigorously. Would they stand, or were they so weakened that collapse was inevitable? Nor was this satire, in the sense of poking fun – it was a deliberate attempt to alter the way people lived. The air sang with brilliantly fresh ideas; her time at university could be filled with joyous experimentation. If only she could get there.

‘Penny for ’em,’ came the aunt’s soft drawl.

‘Sorry?’ Helen was nonplussed. She folded the file on her lap.

‘Penny for your thoughts. You were a million miles away.’

‘No, not really. I have an essay to write and I can’t get my head around it. All about challenges to an accepted way of life.’ Helen grinned sheepishly.

‘Oh, my. I’m beginning to feel I know chapter and verse about that.’ The aunt sat heavily down on her bed. Her knees were close enough to touch her niece’s. ‘Say, Helen, what have I done wrong? Your Ma seems mad at me. I don’t want to get in the way. But every time I offer to do something for her or the family, she looks daggers. I don’t mean to upset her, not a bit.’

‘She’s a bit edgy. The barmitzvah’s a big headache. And she’s often a bit tense. Worries about us, I guess.’

‘I guess: you’re picking up a bit of American. That makes me feel more at home. Did you like your present?’ In answer Helen reached in the top drawer and brought out the red leather vanity case with its stainless steel clippers, its tweezers and emery boards and tiny scissors. As with her brother’s gift, her initials had been embossed on the corner.