You Must Be Sisters (22 page)

Into the passenger seat slid Laura; into the driver’s seat slid Mac. ‘OK bud, over to you,’ she growled. ‘Show us her paces.’

With a jerk the car sprang forward. ‘Hey, watch out!’ she cried.

In a shuddering series of jerks, jerks like huge hiccups, the car juddered across the road.

‘MAC!’ she screamed. ‘BRAKE!’

In sickening jumps it jolted across the white centre line,
across
the other side of the road and in a final spasm crunched into a parked car.

A loud, horribly loud crunch.

They straightened themselves and sat still for a moment, staring through the windscreen. Badger wagged his tail and barked at this jolly game.

Laura didn’t look at Mac. Slowly she got out of the car and walked round to the front. Wordlessly she stared at the crumpled bonnet, at the shattered lights, at the buckled bumper of the beloved Morris. Then she stared at the parked car, at its caved-in door and the handle that hung on a wire, pointing downwards like a finger of doom.

She heard Mac getting out and standing beside her. ‘Monkey’s bollocks, I’m sorry, my sonner. Honest. What did I do wrong?’

‘I suspect you didn’t find the brake.’ She stared at the car, not at him.

‘Hmm. Just like the dodgems.’ Probably he was trying to smile but she didn’t look. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll back it out.’

She got into the driver’s seat. A jerk, then an ugly grinding noise and she eased the car from its nuzzled union. She parked it on the other side of the road. Badger’s tail was still wagging; it made her feel even more irritable.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what shall we do?’ He’d bashed it up, so he should have the ideas.

‘I dunno.’

By now faces had appeared over garden fences. Someone, no doubt the owner of the car, came out into the road.

‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Laura. ‘It’s got to be me that’s done it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise I’ll be prosecuted for letting you drive, stupid. If I say I drove it I’ll only get a fine.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘You can’t,’ she replied witheringly. ‘You haven’t got any money.’

This was so true they both lapsed into silence.

The shadow of the man fell across the car. Laura got out. Mac stayed inside.

And as she explained in detail how her foot had slipped off the pedal, and as she saw the superior look on the man’s face, perversely
she
wished that Mac would burst out of the car and cry ‘I did it! It wasn’t her fault!’ It would be foolish of him but at least it would be, well, positive. Chivalrous. But chivalry, as her father so frequently said (just then she felt a pang;
he
would have taken care of everything), chivalry seemed to have died out nowadays. And of course it would only get them into worse trouble if he did. Much more sensible to stay in the car as he was doing, ruffling Badger’s hair and avoiding everybody’s eyes.

Addresses were exchanged, apologies given and finally Laura drove back to the house. Inside the drawing-room, for the first time that weekend, she opened the curtains to let in the light. She needed to think clearly. Mac sat next to her, humbly, but her mind was on her car, and Claire, and her parents. By comparison Mac seemed flimsy.

‘Forgiven me yet?’ he asked with a hangdog look.

‘I suppose so.’ She gave him a watery smile and turned back to the window from which she could see the car, its blunt nose crumpled. It was real, that car, its caved-in metal and shattered headlamps were real, just as the pound notes and the no-claims bonus that would pay for it were real. More real, suddenly, than her sunny Bristol room where she could play at home-making, and its non-husband coming home in his silly uniform.

But most of the time, of course, she felt just the opposite. It was she and Mac who were the real ones; only they knew how to live. All the other lives, those lived behind trim hedges, lives like those of her parents, weighed down, hemmed in, busy with trivia, those were mere existences. Weren’t they?

Later that day Mac left for Bristol. Laura cleared up the house, made the bed and turned the pictures the right way round. She opened the windows. She put the cushions back on the chairs. By the time her parents returned the house was looking as welcoming and as boring as it usually did.

Her father took the bags upstairs to the bedroom. Laura thought of its satin counterpane, smooth now. Holly hugged the dog. Her mother bustled about. Then they gathered round the pretend logs in the drawing-room and her father made them Martinis.

‘So what happened to your car, then?’ he asked, quite cheerfully because he’d enjoyed his Easter.

Laura said: ‘I bashed it up.’

They waited for more. None came, so her mother asked: ‘How?’

‘Well, my foot just sort of slipped off the brake.’

‘How extraordinary, darling. You’re usually such a good driver.’

‘It just did.’ How uncomfortable she felt lying, and even worse seeing her father’s cardigan shoulders. Feeling tense, too, whenever they looked around the room in case they saw some relic of Mac.

Her mother left the room to prepare the supper. Laura could hear the kitchen sounds she’d heard a thousand times before … fridge being opened, mother murmuring to Badger, bowl clattering as he ate his supper … more fridge noises, water running, then a clanking of saucepans. Sounds whose normality was heightened, tinnily, by her guilt.

And the worst of it was that her father would pay. The sounds grew tinnier; her guilt increased. He always did. I just play games, thought Laura, and if anything goes wrong I can scuttle home to safety. Complain I might, sneer at Harrow I might, but home I scuttle. And Daddy’s always there, safe and reliable, to pick up the bill.

MARRIAGE, THE THOUGHT
of it, changed things completely. Claire forgot what it had been like before Geoff had turned off the engine and, addressing the steering wheel with fervour, had spoken those words. Though she knew she loved him she hadn’t yet given him an answer. Instead she dithered and drifted in a warm May limbo; it was like lying on her back in water, to one side lay one shore, to the other side the other, and just for the moment she was unwilling to turn either way and force herself to swim.

And as she drifted she watched. She didn’t like herself for it, but she couldn’t help it. Nothing was too small to be noticed: in restaurants, how much he tipped (enough; a sigh of relief here), in the car, what programme he chose on the radio (sometimes pop, occasionally classical and often, for he was very masculine, the Test Match). Love is not blind, she thought, it is analytical,
exhaustingly
so. Is he sometimes
too
masculine? Buttoned-up? Sometimes a bit pompous? Could some people, Laura for instance, call him dull? Once, when he was trying on suits in Austin Reed and one looked funny, she laughed and he was irritated. Was this significant? A pointer to the years ahead? For everything, like plants towards a window, now leaned towards the future.

In Austin Reed she thought she wouldn’t marry him. Geoff’s bothered expression, something twitchy about his shoulders, repeated itself, as in a hall of mirrors, far into the years ahead. But after she visited his mother she thought she might.

His father had died and his mother, who lived alone in leafy Finchley, was treated by Geoff in a courtly, ceremonious way. Affection had been translated into small deeds. He only half-filled her coffee cup, Claire noticed, and guessed that otherwise her trembly hands (she seemed remarkably old) would spill it. In such details Claire could glimpse, as pressing a button illuminates a street plan, a whole network of tender routines, taken for granted by their practitioners but a source of considerable pleasure to herself, their witness. His tact, unconscious and dignified, touched her; so did the way he folded his mother’s newspaper at the right page before they left. How unlike most of her friends with their parents! He was kind; Claire loved him, she did say yes.

For a few days they enjoyed together their first large secret. They even house-hunted. Geoff prodded walls and she stood in gardens imagining the rows of hollyhocks. They were suburban gardens, for they wanted children and couldn’t afford to live in the middle of London. But Claire didn’t mind. She would do whatever he suggested, so oblivious was she; oblivious and warm and relieved to have made her decision.

And of course she longed for Laura. She must tell her the news, but not by phone. There was so much to tell; she had to see her face, her expression. ‘Let’s go to Bristol,’ she said.

‘By all means,’ he replied. He often said things like ‘by all means’. ‘Actually I have some business down there in a couple of weeks. Why don’t you come with me and visit Laura while I work?’

Until she’d spoken to Laura she didn’t want to tell anyone. So they kept their secret for two more weeks. They went to Harrow for a drink one night and everything was bland and polite. Claire felt big with her secret; impatient, almost fretful with it, and longed again for Laura. Laura would shake them up!
Laura
would have no time for How nice it must be to have an open car in this weather. She’d take one look and know what had happened. None of this polite chat and then a tinkle of ice as everyone, with a pause, inspected his glass before the next topic. How English they all were, herself included, speaking in code, oblique, skirting round things. Pleasant, but how could they ever get to know each other? Would Geoff and her father always nod, with a little smile, after the other one had spoken? Would they never disagree? It was at moments like these that she could understand Laura’s hot frustration. Difficult to imagine Laura and Mac sitting here, keeping things so very safe.

And yet she did nothing, for she felt herself strangely in a limbo, suspended above normal life in this period after the decision and before the flurry of telling everyone. At school she drifted through the day … Roy, Lance, Clive, their faces floated in front of her, she could see their jaws moving as they chewed their gum, they might even be making belching noises; she must be talking to them, but she could never remember what she said. It was like a dream.

‘Penny for ’em.’ It was the biology master, gallant as always. ‘If I may venture to say so, Miss Jenkins, you look a thousand miles away.’

She settled into an armchair and smiled vaguely at him, amazed how all men, even one so bald, had become mysteriously infused with Geoff-ness. She hadn’t expected this, how all Geoff’s sex was enhanced, made in some way more welcoming, by her passion for one of its number.

IT ALWAYS GAVE
Laura a shock when Mac mentioned his parents. Part of his fascination lay in his self-sufficiency. Amongst his few possessions it pleased her to find knife, fork and spoon wrapped in a spotted hanky. So neat and self-contained he seemed, compared with those students whose identities, struggling like hers out of some parental mould, were all blurred edges. They dragged their upbringings around with them; Mac, his belongings in a hanky, seemed complete.

So the fact that he had parents there in Bristol, that his father had just retired from thirty years at Rolls-Royce, that his one sister had married and gone to live in New Zealand (all of which she’d collected, sieve-like, from conversations she’d otherwise forgotten) – all these facts, though in themselves hardly earth-shattering, were for her unexpected, and of course all the more tantalizing for that. She wanted to know more.

‘I was on the 97 today,’ Mac informed her when he came back one afternoon. Summer term had just started. ‘It goes right past me folks’ place.’ He sat down in an armchair, threw his busman’s cap on to the mantelpiece and stretched out his legs in their busman’s trousers that her efforts to taper had only made odder. ‘Shitting bricks, I was, that someone I knew would get on board.’

‘Why?’

‘It’d get to the old man, wouldn’t it.’

‘What, that you’re a bus conductor? Would he be terribly upset?’

‘He was pleased as hell I got into Design School. If he knew, like, I’d quit …’

‘Why did you?’ She felt like prodding again this shy subject.

‘I told you. It was a real rat race. All closed in.’

Oh well, she supposed he must be right. It just seemed a bit sad.

‘It froze up me painting, you see,’ he said.

‘Yes, but when’s it going to unfreeze?’ She kept her voice
pleasant
but she felt impatience creeping in round the edges. For some reason she’d been feeling it creeping in quite often since the episode with the Morris. Or perhaps it had existed before and the car thing had just put a name to it. ‘I’ve known you three months and all you’ve done is one drawing of me in the bath and two Airfix model bi-planes.’ She added: ‘You never finished the drawing, either.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ he said, unrattled. He never got rattled. So mild, he was; sometimes it disarmed her, sometimes it didn’t. ‘I thought we might saunter down that way this afternoon and fetch the rest of my stuff. Some canvases and suchlike. I’ve got a couple of stretched canvases in my room.’

His old bedroom! She perked up. ‘And I can come?’

‘Why not? My mum’ll like you because you’re so classy.’ He stood up, reached for his jeans and started undoing his busman’s trousers. ‘But I’m still at Design School, remember.’

They took the bus because the Morris was still in London being repaired. The conductor, who knew Mac, sat down beside them, produced a battered copy of the
Sun
and started reading out the jokes. Laura, laughing, saw the grey university buildings slide past the window. Much better to be here in the bus, she thought. Amongst real people, not suspended up there above it all, sealed into rooms full of billions of words, windows closed on the street outside, doors closed on life itself. She gazed out at the shop fronts. Ron Balls, Turf Accountant said one,
Tyres
40%
Off!
said another,
Retreads Our Speciality
. Life itself!
This
was life, wasn’t it? This rumbling bus, these busy streets, this marvellously free feeling – well, not quite free because that clock said 3.30 and she ought to be at a lecture now. Still, the guilt was just part of her bones nowadays; something to be lived with, rather than the hot sediment in the stomach that she’d felt in those early weeks of seminar-dodging. She could ignore it if she tried.