‘Goodness, you’re so intolerant. It’s us, darling, who are supposed to be that, not you.’
‘Ha ha. Honestly, it infuriates me how you both get angry if I say what I mean, if I’m honest, if I don’t gush away all the time. You think the most important thing in the world is to say the right thing, never disturb anything ever. It makes me sick.’
But both Geoff and Laura felt better after the quarrel; Geoff because he could communicate more, Laura because she could communicate less. For Geoff, hearing these hissed hostilities made the whole Jenkins family less perfect and therefore more approachable. And now, consuming scrambled eggs off canapé plates and finishing bottles of wine made him feel so included; the meal’s very informality made him feel less of a stranger. And Claire … smuggling Mac out had left her disarranged, her barriers down, less of a cocktail-party girl. He dared approach her now. In fact, he was driving her back to Clapham after supper. He’d ask her to marry him then. Or anyway, he’d edge towards the subject. He could do that tonight, after all this.
Laura felt better because the sharp words had sorted everything out. Silly, those untidy feelings, that uneasiness about having Mac to stay, those sudden moments of warmth towards her parents. Silly to see-saw about, not knowing on which side she stood. But now she knew, for weren’t her parents hopelessly in the wrong, stupid and social?
What a relief that was! She felt quite calm now. Free, too. Funny how unsettling moments like that Scrabble moment could be, when they all seemed just right together. Well, she wasn’t going to be friendly now, not when they’d been so bourgeois about the party. She could sneak Mac into the house tomorrow without feeling peculiar about it. Guilty and things. Not her.
After supper she crept out to visit Mac and bring him a blanket and cushion filched from the drawing-room. Wild she felt, wild, free and deliciously cleansed of uncertainties. She could see Mac sitting on the grass, a blacker shape in the blackness. She ran across the Rec and flung herself into his arms.
And full of Daddy’s Côtes du Rhone, warm and sensual, delightfully lawless, they struggled together on the damp Harrow council turf while the lights from the neighbouring houses looked down on them sternly. Trembling, they fumbled each other’s clothing apart; it was thrilling, it was unspeakably uncomfortable, it was shameless.
And serve them right, thought Laura as she walked home later in her damp and crumpled dress. ‘Serve them right!’ she called out loud to the stars and the ordered silhouettes of their street, not realizing how pleased she was to reach such a neat conclusion.
twenty-one
‘NOW LAURA, IF the light man calls, tell him we’ve fixed it – at least, kind Geoff has. And remember to water those seedlings over by the pond, darling, and bolt the back door at night, oh and don’t try to open that funny window that’s jammed and your father says – says – he’s going to unjam. And, let’s think, feed the dog and put some of that Baby Bio stuff on the plant in the hall if it looks feebler …’
‘Good grief,’ laughed Laura, ‘you’re only going away for two days, you know.’
Her mother looked up at the house doubtfully, fussily. ‘I’m just worried about leaving you all alone. Do remember to lock up.’
‘Perhaps a mad rapist’ll get in,’ Laura chuckled. Perhaps he will. ‘I am nineteen you know.’ She felt so cheerful this morning.
They seemed to take a hundred years to leave but at last they were gone. Badger stood beside Laura and wagged his tail at the departing car that in a few seconds would be passing the Rec. Passing its shelter. Little did its passengers know it had a swathed and chilly occupant. Swathed in their blanket, too. Laura smiled.
She watched the car turn the corner and then she was off. Down the road she ran, her feet thudding on the pavement. Birds sang, the sun shone, Badger danced and barked around her, excited at her sudden energy. He wasn’t used to her running.
At that hour the Rec was deserted. Deserted, that is, except for the rows and rows of daffodils, her yellow conspirators, her rustling witnesses that whispered together as she ran past them over the grass. The dew sparkled and the birdsong rang out loud enough, she was sure, to deafen all Harrow and shake up every suburban slumberer. Let them be shaken up! She laughed out loud. The most radiant of mornings and she herself, free at last.
Actually, the shelter was empty. Or was it? In the sudden gloom she could see nothing distinctly. Perhaps the whole thing had been a dream. Now she thought of it, it did seem most unlikely – Mac in the shelter; Mac in Harrow at all. Could yesterday really have happened?
It had. She could see the blanket now. At its bottom lay the empty bottle.
Then a whistle behind her; a rustle of bushes. Mac’s face appeared behind the foliage. She looked at him, sunlight haloing his hair. He stepped out. ‘Top o’ the mornin’,’ he called, zipping up his jeans. ‘Nature called.’
Carefully he stepped through the bed of daffodils; he picked his way through them, for he liked plants. Their yellow heads nodded.
‘Hello,’ she said, awe-struck at her Easter vision. It was going to be a strange weekend, she knew.
‘And hello dog,’ he said.
She introduced them.
‘Wotcha, Badger me lad.’
They fetched his things and walked back, arm-in-arm across the grass and past the asphalt place where as children she and Claire had played for hours and hours on the swings.
‘Were you all right?’ she asked.
‘Bit on the chilly side, but some intriguing night sounds. Cheeps and patterings. I got up and watched the spiders this morning in their webs all sparkling; it was nice.’
This park, the Rec of old, whose tiniest crack in the asphalt was etched in her memory, whose most secret tunnels through the bushes had been her commonest route, today it was as if she’d never set foot in it before. He’d known it too, but in such a different, Mac-like way. Familiar old Harrow; today it was the strangest of countries.
They walked up the street. The day was starting. From the houses, Saturday morning noises … from the Hacketts’ the sound of a vacuum cleaner; from the house where those new people had moved in, the buzz of an electric drill and the sound of someone trying to start a lawnmower; from Marion’s house (here she hurried) the noise of a transistor from the downstairs room they called the den. How busy everybody was, busy and blameless! Sounds from the sunlit vista of Saturdays, reassuring in their known-ness. Whatever was going to happen in the tranced house known as Greenbanks, the rest of Harrow was carrying on as usual. Soon the corner Co-op would be full of faces, housewives weighed down with necessities, neighbours inspecting the bin of Special Offers. They were all the same, Miss Price, Mrs Hackett, Marion’s mother: Saturdays to them were a list of tasks. More brightly coloured, perhaps, than the monochrome weekday ones, but chores all the same. Things to be Done.
Not like us! Laura hugged the stolen cushion.
Indoors, though, it was different. Just slightly so. The whole place was silent in rather a stealthy way. Dark too, because her parents hadn’t drawn back the curtains before they left.
They hovered in the shadowy hall. Though she’d only run out of the house ten minutes before, she felt a different person now she’d returned with her uninvited guest. Outdoors they were free; indoors they might be thieves. Who on earth could be watching? Of course, nobody.
They both hesitated. Could he be thinking the same? Surely not.
‘I’m starving,’ he said.
‘Heavens, I forgot you haven’t eaten for days.’ She took him into the kitchen which was sunnier and less watched somehow. More a normal room. But it still looked odd with him sitting on top of the washing-machine – would he break it? – swinging his legs.
‘Posh, isn’t it,’ he observed, gazing round at the gleaming surfaces. ‘Straight out of a colour supp.’
‘Is it?’ Yes, it must be to a stranger – no, not a stranger: Mac. She wished it were all a bit humbler; she felt impelled to apologize for everything.
&
nbsp; ‘All those gadgets. Wow.’
‘But they often go wrong,’ she said.
‘Any leftovers? I fancy some more of that caviare stuff.’
‘No, we finished it all.’ She remembered the quarrel then, and felt reassured. ‘Let’s rummage around for something.’
‘Hey, what about this?’ Mac was crouching at a cupboard now. He lifted out a tin. ‘Prawn Curry and Rice. Just Heat ’n’ Eat, it says.’
He inspected it, curious as a child, reminding her of that first day in the supermarket. For the slightest thing he did she adored him. The way he held it up, brows quizzical. But today they were at Greenbanks and she felt uneasy about him rummaging about like that as if they were stealing. Ah, but it thrilled her too!
‘Prawn Curry at nine o’clock!’ she laughed, stirring the saucepan.
They sat down on the back steps while they ate. Nobody ever sat on the back steps; they either sat in the kitchen or on the lawn. She surveyed the garden from this low and novel angle. ‘Shall I show you things?’ she asked. They finished their curry and wandered out into the garden.
‘This is the sandpit. We played here for hours. We made little towns for my Dinky cars.’ She liked to volunteer childhood facts, she realized. Despite herself she wanted to link Mac to this garden and her former life. The thinnest thread perhaps, but she needed to join them somewhere. ‘I had a huge box of Dinky cars. Wherever you dig here I bet you find one. Dinky cars and Badger’s turds.’
Mac didn’t dig for the Dinky cars, though. Instead he made swirly patterns in the sand with a stick. When they got up the sandpit was swirly all over. It looked different now.
‘And in these hollies,’ she went on, ‘I threw away secret things, like stuff I didn’t eat at lunch and threepence I pinched once. Nobody could ever find them there.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Mac peered into the depths and flicked his smouldering butt-end into the leaves. It disappeared and she thought of it lying amongst the half-eaten bits of cauliflower, surely fossilized by now, and that ancient threepenny-bit. Odd to have Mac with her, flicking butts into her wood, putting swirls into her sandpit. It was altering her childhood.
But she’d grown beyond sandpits now, hadn’t she? Grown out of this house too. Mac didn’t fit here, but then neither did she. Misfits, rebels, the pair of them! As they walked to the house she squeezed his arm.
Back in the darkened drawing-room Laura didn’t bother to open the curtains. It was mysterious like this. It wasn’t right, but it was mysterious. What could the time be? Who cared?
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.