Living In Perhaps (14 page)

The nuns apparently had men's names, names they took on
when they entered holy orders: Sister Ignatius, Sister Benedict,
Mother Francis-Xavier. 'Bad enough
looking
like blokes with no
make-up and all bald under those veils, without calling yourself
after blokes as well,' said Barbara.

And 'They're obsessed with sex. If we had absolutely no interest
in boys they would put it into our minds, because they're
always – but
always
– going on about how to protect yourself
from boys, and what boys are after, and how we mustn't get led
astray. They want us to be constantly alert as to the dangers of
impure thoughts, but I bet we wouldn't have half so many if they
didn't remind us about it so frequently.'

And 'Every week they make us bring in money for
the little
black babies in Africa
. They write down everything you bring in a
notebook, so it's not anonymous. It means you always have to
bring something, and they know exactly who's brought the most,
and they announce who it is.'

'But that's blackmail!' I said. I thought of my mother, who
always gave me sixpence for the Sunday school collection. Never
less, but never more.

'
I
don't think they send it to their missions abroad,' Barbara
went on, lifting her lip. 'I think they keep it for themselves, and
spend it on lipstick and high heels and booze!' And she went off
into peals of laughter. But I was concerned.

'Do your mother and father realize what the school is like?' I
asked.

Barbara just shrugged hugely and said, 'Oh,
them
...'

'You should tell them,' I advised. I thought that Tillie would
write a letter, Patrick would charge up to the school, coat-tails
flying, voice booming, surely? They weren't like my parents, they
wouldn't worry about interfering. To them, education wasn't
something you took lying down. They would act first and then
think about the consequences. I could imagine them – Tillie at a
table in the sunshine, head bent, composing her letter on a big
sheet of creamy cartridge paper, hitting just the right balance of
politeness and persuasion; or Patrick, big and jolly, banging his
fist on Mother Francis-Xavier's desk and saying, 'It's not good
enough for my girl!', but with a nun-seducing twinkle in his eye.
Diplomacy and dramatics: Barbara had both of these at her
disposal.

But she didn't want my advice. She never wanted my advice.
That wasn't the point. She wasn't even listening. 'I can see them all
now, in the staffroom,' she went on, 'with their veils flicked back
and their skirts drawn up,
red
mesh stockings and black patent
stiletto heels, knocking back the whisky. 'Another wee drop, Sister
Benedict?' 'Don't mind if I do, Sister Ignatius.' Glug glug.
'Sister Iggie, be a darling, give us a whiff of that latest perfume
from Chanel!' And she leaned on my shoulder, weak with laughing.
'Oh God, just imagine it, I'm sentenced to stay there for
another five years at least. I shall get expelled for insubordination.
Just see if I don't.'

But she didn't.

Maybe if she had, maybe if it had been threatened, that's when
Tillie or Patrick, or both of them, arm in arm, would have
marched on the school, protesting her innocence. Standing up for
their daughter. Like parents should.

What does Lorna want with me?

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?

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.

Wed
lock
. 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 tables. 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.