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.
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 shou
ld 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.
twenty-two
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 dec
ision 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.
twenty-three
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.