In a Good Light (24 page)

PENNY CALLED HER
parents Doug and Heather, or the Raving Tory and the Old Hag, depending on circumstances. The three of them played out a strange version of family life in which they doggedly pursued their own interests with the minimum of involvement from the others. Penny's dad ran his own company – something to do with reprographics, she said – and worked long hours. Even when he came home he carried on working in his study until after midnight. If he ever took a day off he spent it on the golf course, where he played off nine. Penny's mum put in equally long hours battling against advancing middle age and diminishing beauty, by means of shopping, surgery, and various fitness regimes. The rest of her time was spent in bed recovering from these exertions. Penny went to school, studied for her A levels, went out in her yellow Mini with Christian, or her girlfriends, or entertained them at home by making cheese
fondues and discussing Art and Literature and the Meaning of Life.

Occasionally Penny and her parents coincided for exchanges of essential information, and what they called ‘diary meetings', where important events would be timetabled. Sometimes they would book a Civilised Evening In, when the three of them would sit down to dinner together, and Penny would be offered a Dubonnet and lemonade as an aperitif, while Doug and Heather put away the best part of a bottle of gin. They often had lively discussions, Penny said, the sort that might be called blazing arguments in another household. Her mother had been known to throw things for emphasis, and Penny herself said she didn't feel properly alive unless she'd had four good rows in a year.

Naturally I looked up to Penny as a mentor, and came to worship her with the same uncritical devotion that I'd previously reserved for Christian. It was Penny, more than anyone, who rescued me from myself. Without her influence I would have become a clueless, greasy-haired, teenage misfit. She teased and cajoled and flattered me into shape, and offered the kind of brutal advice my parents wouldn't have presumed to utter, and which I would have ignored if they had. It was her example that made me think being a girl might actually be fun – an idea I would never have picked up from my mother, whose femininity took a more puritanical form. Years of trying to win Christian's approval by imitation had inevitably left me with reservations about the value of my own sex. Observing Penny, or rather the progress of Christian's infatuation with her, made me realise that girls were not defective versions of boys at all, but different creatures, deep and complex and fascinating, even
to boys. Especially to boys. Suddenly just being a girl seemed to give me an edge over Christian. However much he loved Penny, and however well he thought he knew her, he would never fully understand the mystery of what it was to be female.

But Penny's intervention was practical as well as spiritual: I was her project, and she was accustomed to getting good grades. She had time and money to spend on me and she was generous with both. It was her support that gave me the confidence to develop my particular style of drawing, which Mr Hatch, my art teacher, was in the process of trying to undo. Whenever I did a picture, I always started with some small detail and worked out from there, using the sharpest pencil or the finest brush I could find, and proceeded minutely, rarely finishing. In life drawing classes, everyone but me managed to sketch a full figure in the allotted time, while I would have produced just one perfectly executed ear. My technique exasperated Mr Hatch, who favoured bold, sweeping strokes, and felt it his mission to liberate me from myself. He replaced my tiny brush and 4H pencil with palette knives, blunt stumps of charcoal and fan-shaped brushes, and gave me vast sheets of paper to fill. ‘Draw from the shoulder, not the fingertips,' he commanded, watching my struggles to subdue these monstrous tools. ‘Relax. You're all hunched up. Block it in. Don't worry about the detail. BIG GESTURES.' It wasn't sheer cruelty on his part: he had the exams to consider, and unless I could be persuaded to cover an A1 sheet within six hours I was certain to fail.

Penny's contribution to this battle was to tell me my own style was exquisite, and to buy me a set of Rotring pens, with nibs like needles, and a box of coloured inks. Generous
soul, she knew that as well as praise and encouragement an artist needs materials. It was the best present I'd ever had, and I immediately reverted to my own method of stubborn miniaturism.

It was the attraction of opposites that pulled Christian and Penny together. One area in which this difference proclaimed itself was their attitude to conversation. Christian tended to favour long silences, punctuated by the delivery of strictly factual information. ‘I'm going out.' ‘I can't find my calculator.' ‘God, it's cold in here.' Penny, on the other hand, liked nothing better than to talk, and had fluent and well-rehearsed opinions on a staggering range of subjects. She felt it her pressing duty to discover as much as possible about the world around her, why she was here, and what she should do about it. Her favourite topics for discussion were moral dilemmas, and she would often read out salient items from the newspaper and demand our views. Do the parents of an anorexic sixteen-year-old have the right to force-feed her? Should white couples be allowed to adopt mixed-race babies? Should Siamese twin A be sacrificed to save Siamese twin B? I think it was Dad who enjoyed these discussions more than anyone: they reminded him of being at theological college. I could usually predict what he was going to say. For weighty matters he advocated praying for guidance, and considering the examples set by Jesus. For dilemmas about personal behaviour, he said, the conscience was usually a reliable guide. ‘Even when I think I'm torn between two courses of action, I find that after careful reflection I generally know what to do: and it's nearly always the thing I'm least inclined to.'

It was during one of these conversations at which Penny,
Christian and I were present, that Dad said something that amazed us all.

I'd wasted the morning messing about with lemons. A beauty tip in one of Dawn's magazines recommended rinsing mid-brown hair in lemon juice to bring out the natural highlights, so I'd bought a net of lemons from the market and done as advised. My hair didn't look any lighter for my efforts, in fact it looked slightly darker, where it was now stuck together in crispy clumps. Rather than waste the rest of the lemons, I trawled Mum's ancient, greasy recipe book for ideas. It had to be something simple which wouldn't tax me beyond my enthusiasm, or require exotic additional ingredients unavailable in our larder. At last I found something suitable: written on one of the many scraps of loose paper stuffed into the back of the book.
Barbara Fry's Real Lemonade
. I'd noticed that most of these handwritten recipes were attributed to some original inventor or donor.
Grandma Percy's Queen of Puddings
;
Aunty Molly's One-Egg Sponge
;
Mrs Tapley's Meatless Meatloaf
. It was as if they were part of some ancient female lore that even women like my mother, who hated cooking, had to guard and pass on. Aunty Barbara's lemonade recipe obviously dated from happier times, when she and Alan used to entertain: it even included instructions on how to frost the rims of the glasses with egg white and sugar – a touch of refinement I was determined to copy.

I remembered, as I was paring the lemons, that Penny had once let slip that her parents sometimes had the neighbours round for
cocktails on the terrace
, and I had a sudden impulse to recreate this experience in our own garden, with homemade lemonade and whatever snacks I could find in the larder: peanuts left over from Christmas, perhaps. Penny
was due to come round to pick up Christian at six. They were spending the day apart, allegedly studying for their A levels, which were looming, although the mournful strains of acoustic guitar and the regular thud of darts issuing from Christian's room led me to have grave doubts about his commitment.

We didn't have a terrace, exactly, but while the lemons and sugar were steeping in the boiling water, I swept the dirt and shrivelled leaves from the brick paving outside the French windows, and shaved off the clumps of moss and sprouting weeds with the edge of a spade. It was late May, and the afternoon sun was warm on my back as I worked. Now that I bothered to look, I could see that the brickwork had been laid out in an intricate herringbone pattern, with a hexagonal mosaic effect in the centre. It astonished me that for all these years I'd walked back and forth across it and never noticed. Then I fetched the wooden table, which was parked, neglected in the long grass under the apple tree, and scrubbed away the dead blossom, bird droppings and snail slime. Some of the stains went deep into the wood, which was grey and spongy from its untreated exposure to the elements, so I covered it up with a once-white tablecloth. The unfamiliar sounds of industry brought Mum out to investigate.

‘Goodness, you've been busy,' she said, with approval. My general indolence – especially my habit of falling asleep in the afternoons – had lately provided her with regular material for her Little Talks. ‘What's brought this on? Are you expecting company?'

‘When Penny comes to get Christian, we're all going to sit out here and have lemonade,' I explained. ‘We're going to be civilised.' Civilised was my adjective of the moment:
it expressed my deepest yearnings for order, luxury, good taste – all those things which seemed to fall naturally to Penny, but which daily life at home made impossible. Purple suede boots were civilised: Nature Trekkers were not. Having a Portuguese cleaning lady was civilised: dirt was not. En suite bathrooms were civilised: wrapping used sanitary towels in newspaper and putting them in the boiler was not.

‘What a good idea,' said Mum, clearly delighted that my bourgeois aspirations had at least raised me from my usual torpor. ‘I'll find some decent glasses.'

By the time Penny arrived, car keys swinging from her middle finger, and Christian had emerged from his room, yawning and stretching and cracking his knuckles, as if from a long hibernation, my preparations were complete. In the course of searching through long-neglected cabinets and dressers, Mum had discovered six undamaged glasses and a large pitcher (civilised), and I had strained the cooled lemonade through a stocking (uncivilised). I had frosted the edges of the glasses and filled them with crushed ice (civilised) and Grandpa Percy had installed himself at the table, in a pair of trousers with a stain down the front (uncivilised).

There wasn't much in the larder that could serve as nibbles, but I did find an open packet of walnut pieces. They were soft and rather bitter, but I put them out anyway, along with a bowl of sugar in case the lemonade needed sweetening.

Everyone was very complimentary about my efforts, though the frosted rims had to be explained to Grandpa, who thought he'd got a dirty glass.

‘It's certainly very refreshing,' said Dad, surreptitiously wiping his eyes.

‘So much better than shop-bought,' said Mum. As if we'd ever had shop-bought lemonade!

Christian drained his glass at a gulp, then pretended to flail and claw at his throat. But he helped himself to seconds, which pleased me. There were no takers for the walnuts, I noticed, though the sugar was warmly appreciated.

‘How homely,' said Penny, swilling ice around her glass. ‘My family never does anything like this.'

But I got the idea from you! I wanted to protest.

‘Have you been working hard?' Mum asked her. ‘Your eyes look a bit bleary.'

Penny almost bridled at this, but collected herself with a laugh. ‘Yes. All day. My head's full of Milton.' She shook it as if to dislodge him.

‘How uncomfortable for you both,' said Dad, gravely.

‘You probably deserve an evening off. Christian's been buried in his room all day, too.'

‘Playing darts,' I said, and Christian gave me a disdainful look.

‘Where are you youngsters off to tonight?' asked Grandpa. He always wanted to know, even though the possible answers: ‘Izzy's', ‘The Wire Mill', ‘The Great American Disaster', ‘The Old Turtonians', couldn't have meant much to him.

It was weird how we all seemed to live vicariously through Penny and Christian, as though they were our chosen emissaries to the world of fun, which we were too young or too old or too nervous to experience ourselves. There was a sort of wistfulness in Mum and Dad's directions to ‘have a lovely time' and ‘take care', and yet they never showed any inclination to follow suit. There was nothing to stop them going for a drive in the country, or out to a pub, but they never
went. In fact, now I came to think about it, they hardly did anything that might be termed fun. All their activities were tied up with service to other people. One evening a week Dad went to play cards with Mrs Tapley, who had no other visitors. Mum made the tea at the mother and toddler group, knitted six inch squares for the Universal Quilt, and read books onto tapes for the blind. Sometimes, with a sort of puzzled detachment, they watched television, but that was just to keep Grandpa company, and not for their own pleasure. No wonder I was always being told what good people my parents were: they were a regular pair of doormats!

While Christian was explaining to Grandpa that he and Penny were going to an eighteenth birthday party in a room over a pub in Chislehurst, Penny picked up Dad's discarded newspaper and began browsing.

‘Oh no, it's that girl,' I heard her say, while I was still tuning into Christian's conversation with Grandpa.

On the back page was a grainy black and white photograph of a girl's face at a window, partly obscured by shadow. The caption read:
Janine Fellowes, Britain's most notorious juvenile killer, celebrates her nineteenth birthday at the Young Offender's institution where she has spent the last eight years. In two years' time the Home Office must decide whether she will be released or transferred to an adult prison
. Below the article, which rehearsed the known details of the crime, was the now-famous picture of her as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl – long, dark hair, Alice band, stern, unsmiling gaze – and the equally famous image of the victim, Baby Claudia – blonde curls, dimples, laughter.