You Must Be Sisters (20 page)

Now that they were illuminated Laura felt uneasy. People could see them; she must think quickly. ‘Tell you what!’ She turned to Mac. ‘It’s very warm tonight. Why don’t you go down
the
road to the Rec – I mean the park – nip over the wall and wait for me in the shelter there? It’s not far.’

Mac considered this. ‘You mean, doss down there? Well, why not? Just snitch a bottle of the old –’ he lifted his wine glass, ‘to keep me company.’

Laura got up. Funny how she didn’t want him to stay in the house while her parents were there. He could, quite easily. She could act as if he were an acquaintance; they could make up the spare bed. It was just that she didn’t want to bring the two halves of her life together. Simpler to wait until her parents had left.

They dispatched Mac out of the side gate and watched him as he ambled quite happily down the road, a bottle of Dan’s 1969 Côtes du Rhone under his arm. The darkness swallowed him up.

‘He seems nice,’ said Claire after a pause. ‘Nice and gentle.’

‘Oh he is!’ cried Laura, willing her to say more. But she didn’t.

As they returned to the house Geoff, emboldened by being in on the sisterly secret, linked his fingers through Claire’s. In front of Laura and everything. Claire flashed him a smile – an encouraging one, he thought.

The guests were thinning out when they got back. Soon the room was emptying and the hall echoing with goodbyes. Geoff and the sisters started clearing up.

A hush fell on the hall and Mrs Jenkins returned. Geoff helped her stack some glasses on a tray.

‘Whatever happened to that strange young man?’ she asked Laura over her shoulder.

‘Oh,’ Laura’s voice was casual, ‘he just dropped in.’

‘How odd.’ Geoff and Claire exchanged looks over Mrs Jenkins’s head. He felt quite giggly – he, Geoff, usually so
ungiggly
.

Suddenly Mrs Jenkins stopped. ‘Goodness, who on earth got the verandah light working?’

Geoff looked modest.

‘Geoff did,’ said Claire.

Mrs Jenkins turned to him. ‘How
very
clever of you! My husband couldn’t get it to work at all. Whatever would we have done without you tonight!’ She went on: ‘You’re staying to supper, aren’t you? You must. You’ve been such a help.’

Geoff gladly accepted. Tonight his wooing was being done, as it were, at long distance. But it was easier like that. Scintillating conversation, he knew quite well, wasn’t his forte. How much
easier
to fix the light and get Claire to smile at him for
that
. Much easier.

Thoroughly into his role, he was enjoying clearing the drawing-room when he couldn’t help but hear hissing whispers from the direction of the kitchen. In no way did he linger as he passed the door, but angry whispers are so much more penetrating than their whisperers think them to be.

Mrs Jenkins’s voice: ‘Honestly, Laura, it really was a bit much! Mrs Wilson
so
wanted to talk to you. Marion’s planning to go to university, you know, and Mrs Wilson was
so
keen to get your views on Bristol.’

‘Well, I gave her them, didn’t I?’

‘Hardly! A few curt words and then you turned back to your odd friend. Really, at least you could’ve been polite. I felt so ashamed.’

‘I was polite, but Mrs Wilson was such a drag. Everyone was. They either bored me to tears with their stomach pills or else they spent their whole time throwing up their arms and screaming “How charming! I’m sure psychology must be
fascinating
!”’

‘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.

‘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.

‘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?