You Must Be Sisters (21 page)

Mac pulled some cushions on to the floor and lay down, leafing through
Good Housekeeping
. ‘“Tempting Roasts for Your Man to Come Home To”,’ he read out. ‘Hey, why can’t you make me a tempting roast, Laura?’

‘Because you’d never eat it, stupid. You’d never come home at the right time or you’d be pissed or –’

The phone rang. They froze and stared at each other with sudden surprising guilt. For a moment they couldn’t move, either of them.

Laura pulled herself together. Why should I feel guilty? She rolled over and picked up the receiver.

‘Rosemary darling!’ A voice crackling down the line.

‘Hello. Actually it’s Laura here.’

‘Oh,
Laura
darling! It’s Mrs Wilson here, you know, Marion’s mother. I was just phoning to tell your dear ma what a really super party it was.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad you enjoyed it.’

Mac had rolled over behind her. He started to run his hands up the inside of her jumper, up the back. ‘Mmm,’ breathed Laura.

‘Sorry? I didn’t catch that. Anyway, Laura darling, your dear ma always does things so very well, I think, don’t you? Perfect company, delectable food …’

Laura spluttered something. Mac’s hand was edging round to the front of her jumper now, inside it, all warm and groping. And he was making little hissings and nibblings at the back of her neck. It was agony not to giggle.

‘… and she’d taken so much trouble with the house and garden, hadn’t she. It looked so delightful … charming …’ The voice
was
trailing off. ‘Anyway Laura; Rosemary’s not there, is she? No. Well, I
do
hope you’ll come round and see us very soon. Marion’s awfully looking forward to seeing you again …’

‘Ha!’ Perhaps an odd reply, but that was all she could manage, what with Mac’s hands now zeroed in on target. Whoops.

She put the phone down and rolled over, giggling. ‘An idiotic friend,’ she told him, ‘of me mum.’ Mum? She never called her Mum, always Mummy. Until today, that is. Why did she feel the need to call her Mum today?

‘Actually, I suppose I’d better write that down.’ She disentangled herself and reached for the pad under the telephone directories. The pad was there as it always was. So was the pencil, ‘A Present From Bangor’ it said up the side, it had been hanging on its string there for years getting shorter and shorter. A wooden sliver of family history, that pencil. Despite everything she was still part of it, this house with its pencils and pads and tiny routines. Despite Mac lying back on the cushions, fascinatingly inappropriate, despite her jumper rolled up like a woolly necklace, this
was
her home.

She wrote the note, she went outside and wedged it into the curl of the banisters where such notes were always put and then, in a flurry of normality, she watered with Baby Bio the plant in the hall. Her mother was right, feeble was the word for what it was looking.

‘Hey.’ Mac poked his head round the door. ‘How about a drink for
us
, then?’ An endearing hopeful look.

‘What? At eleven o’clock?’ She paused with her watering-can.

‘Well, why not? I ask myself.’

Back in the drawing-room they opened the door of the cocktail cabinet. They gazed in awe at the rows of bottles, a radiant panorama lit from the back. ‘Pretty hideous object, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Vodka? Campari?’

And just for a moment they hesitated, both of them. They looked at the proud and neat rows, at the silver shaker, at her father’s special little thing for chopping up the lemons. Both of them faltered.

‘Shall we, my sonner?’ Mac asked at last.

Laura rallied. Wasn’t she the reckless one, heedless of shadows? ‘Of course we should. He can afford it.’

She reached for the Campari. It felt like stealing the church wine but she wasn’t going to feel doubtful, no. No little tugs.
She
wouldn’t even open the curtains; it was so tranced and twilit like this, so wicked to be islanded in the middle of the floor, sipping, in the half light, their bright pink drinks.

Badger sat on the floor beside them and, courteous as always, thumped his tail whenever they looked in his direction. He was an old dog now and had taken care of Laura through her youth. Now he was taking care of them both, and when Mac got up he too heaved himself to his feet with a creak and a grunt. Respectfully he followed as this new occupant of the house wandered round the room.

‘Hmm.’ Mac had come to rest in front of one of Dan’s water-colours.

‘What do you think of it?’ asked Laura. She didn’t tell him her father was the artist.

A pause. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit, like, on the corny side.’

Quite true. It was! She knew there had to be a word for it. It was dreadfully corny. Nobody had ever dared admit that before. All his paintings were.

She jumped up. ‘Let’s not look at any of them any more,’ she cried, and walked from one little painting to another, turning them round so they faced the wall. Quite calmly she did it, not stopping to think.

Badger sat on the floor thumping his tail at this new game. Always courteous he was, and pleased with anything, but then he was a dog.

‘Ah, that’s better.’ Laura threw herself down on the cushions. She kept her eyes away from the walls with their rectangles no longer of cottages amongst hills but of cardboard backing with Winsor and Newton printed on them. Daddy couldn’t watch them now.

And his paintings really weren’t much good; she’d always known that.

Funny how playing-fields are always muddy, Claire thought. Or else iron ruts. And always those rows of poplars. Funny, too, how she’d been roped into taking the girls’ team for a netball practice. Was there something about her face that made her so obviously the sort to agree, on Easter Sunday, to trundle off in a coach to these nameless suburban playing-fields and skid about in the mud vainly blowing her whistle? Obviously there was. Who cared, though? He’d proposed.

Geoff had proposed
.

‘Miss!’

The ground thudded.

‘Watch out!’

Bodies hurtled past. She blew her whistle.

What a day! Sun, blue sky, a mist of green on the poplars and a brighter, more determined green on the grass that had escaped being turned into mud. And he’d asked her to marry him.

Keep your mind on the game, Claire. But she’d had no idea it was coming. A complete surprise.
Did
men propose any more? Today, in the sunshine, it seemed such an unlikely thing to have happened.

‘Miss! It was ’er fault, wasn’t it. You saw!’

‘But miss, she pushed!’

Claire joined them where they stood, stamping and steaming like ponies, filling the air with girlish sweat and Woolworth’s ‘Affair’.

‘I didn’t!’

‘You did!’

‘Didn’t! Just lost me balance!’

‘Oh yeah? You pushed. Didn’t she, miss.’

‘Girls! Don’t be babies. Here, Elaine, you take the ball.’

They surged off, their aromas lingering. Claire stood in the mud, lost in thought. What had she replied? So dazed she’d been, sitting there in the car. She hadn’t looked at his face, just at the cracks of light between the curtains all down the Clapham street. Slivers of light.
Do you really mean it?
She had a suspicion she’d said that. How very stupid. And then
Oh dear, just let me think for a bit, give me a few days
. How ungracious that must have sounded. What a dope she was.

Thud! The ball landed at her feet.

‘’Scuse me, miss!’ A gasp, a whiff of ‘Affair’. The others surged round. ‘Janice! This side! Quick!’ A muddy struggle and then they were off, bobbing up and down for the ball. She liked them like this, when for an hour their dull adolescence slipped from them and revealed their faces shiny and alive. Their bodies revealed too, with such mauve and childish knees. Just for an hour they were children again, freed from the selfconsciousness that usually weighed down on them, their communal burden.

But back in the changing hut the selfconsciousness was reapplied with the make-up. Max Factor Pan-Stick was applied
to
glistening faces. Pink legs disappeared into smart flared trousers. Friendly plimsolls were taken off and replaced by ferocious black platforms that resembled surgical footwear. Mirrors were produced.

Standing there with her whistle, Claire suddenly felt rather solitary. How she longed to talk to somebody. There was a phone in the hut; why not try Laura? It would be nice just to hear her voice. She wouldn’t tell her about Geoff – not yet, and not by phone – but they could gossip about the party and perhaps just mention his name; talk
around
it. That would be enough.

‘Laura? Hello. I say, how are you getting on there? Have Mummy and Daddy left?’

‘Oh yes,’ came Laura’s voice, faint as from Australia. ‘Goodness, they left aeons ago. Aeons.’

‘And you’re having fun without them.’

‘Telling me. It’s fantastic, doing just what we like with no one to boss us around. Isn’t it, Mac?’ Muffled mumbles. ‘We’re just about to grub about for some lunch. What are you doing?’

Claire told her.

‘Gosh, poor Claire. How tedious, and keen of you.’ More mumbles. ‘Mac says you’re the kind that keeps Britain great.’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘This and that. Mac had a weird time in the park, didn’t you Mac.’ More mumbles.

Claire felt shut out. She couldn’t talk about Geoff now, not even indirectly. Not with them both mumbling together like that. She liked Mac but she couldn’t say anything with him there. And they didn’t even call it the Rec, they called it the park. That made her feel more shut out than anything else.

The girls were ready. They lounged around, their faces no longer shiny and pink. Now they were matt and orange. She felt a pang for them.

And on the coach back she thought of Geoff’s words. They still seemed unlikely – more unlikely than ever; as a snapshot by long perusal loses its resemblance to its subject. and becomes a mere emblem, so Geoff’s words, after a morning’s repetition, had become a mere chant going round and round in her head. They had been said, hadn’t they?

‘Where are we dossing down, then?’ asked Mac that night.

Laura hesitated. She’d been thinking about this. In fact,
she’d
been thinking about it all afternoon. ‘Well …’ she began. ‘My bed’s ridiculously narrow. We couldn’t possibly squeeze in there. Not possibly. We’d be hanging over the edge. We wouldn’t be able to breathe.’ She paused. ‘So I thought we might just as well use, er, me mum and dad’s.’ A silence. ‘After all,’ she went on, ‘it’s just sitting there all empty, just waiting to be used. It seems immoral for us to be all squashed up when we could be, well, not squashed up.’ She kept her eyes on the wall, hoping to convince herself.

‘Sounds logical,’ he said.

Of course it was logical, Laura told herself as they walked upstairs. Of course it was, she thought as she pushed the door open and hesitated on the threshold.

The room was immaculate, as it always was. The bed, large and inviolate under its quilted satin counterpane, stood squarely between the two windows as it had stood for as long as she could remember. It had creaked with her conception and the conception of her sisters. It had stood there before she was born, before she even existed. It was the very centre of the house, its secret heart. How could she?

Easy! thought Laura, plonking herself down on it and feeling the satin sighing and settling around her. She threw herself back on the pillows and, twisting her head around, gave a challenging stare to the photos in their silver frames on the wall. One was of her parents’ wedding day, war-time uniforms and her father looking innocent and Adam’s apple; another showed herself as a baby, fat smile and nothing to hide.

She went over to the dressing-table and sat down. Behind her Mac had washed and was climbing into bed. She switched on the lamp whose frilly shade matched the curtains and she started brushing her hair with her mother’s brush. A dab of scent? She picked up the bottle and then, after a moment’s pause, she put it down. To actually use her mother’s smell …

In the mirror she could see Mac’s wild hair against the pillows. He looked as incongruous here as he’d looked in the blood clinic. But it was not as simple as that any more, not in this house. She looked at the hairbrush, at her mother’s dark hairs mingled with her own. How complicated it was! She put the brush down.

Conscious of his eyes watching her from the bed, she pulled off her jersey. For a moment she sat there gazing at her breasts. Beyond the angle of her shoulder she could see, in the mirror,
his
face and his soft brown hair that she would soon be touching. Her eyes returned to her breasts. He was looking at them too, she knew. Suddenly just gazing at her body excited her. His body and hers; that at least was simple, thrillingly so. Their sensuality amidst such neatness, their nakedness in this over-clothed room; especially her
parents
’ room! She lingered there, just gazing in the mirror at her bare shoulders and breasts, while he lay waiting for her in the big bed.

But when, a few moments later, he lifted her parents’ sheets and she slipped between them, she closed her eyes as she reached out her arms.

The next day, Easter Sunday, catastrophe struck. Later Laura found herself blaming it, with a puritan logic she thought she no longer possessed, on their sacrilegious night in that bed, their fornication in a setting so totally tabooed that nobody had even put it into words.

It started gaily enough. Laura suggested they take Badger out to Harrow Common; they got into the Morris; she had just reached the end of the road and was turning right when Mac said: ‘Give us a go. Be a devil, my sonner.’

‘But you can’t drive.’

‘Yes I can. At least, I know how.’

‘You haven’t got a licence.’ That sounded prim, so she added: ‘Anyway, you don’t know the pedals or anything.’

‘’Course. That one starts it and that one stops it.’

‘And this one?’

‘That’s the clutch. I know all about that too.’

‘Honest?’

‘Honest. Go on. I’m an ace driver, my sonner. You’ll be amazed.’

The sun shone, the trees waved their branches, Badger’s yellow eyes in the driving-mirror danced with eagerness. Why not? she thought.