You Must Be Sisters (16 page)

These words slightly nagged, too.
The special one
. How much did she admit this as part of her motive, and how large a part?

Upstairs as usual a baby was crying. Someone swore, she could hear the actual word, and then the television was switched on. Sounded like the afternoon racing; the tedious hysteria of the commentator, rising and falling, invaded the room. To drown it out she fiddled with the radio knobs.

…
and here we have a card from Vera, Vera Scannel of Laurel Drive, Swanage. Hi Vera! You say you’d like a card for the best Mum and Dad in the world and for all the gang, that’s Jim, Piff, John, Mo, Sue, Ned, Barney
… Goodness, thought Laura …
Babs, Gruggs and a very special hello to Dave
…

What a lot of friends that Vera seemed to have. Laura thought of Hall; mid-afternoon and they’d all be trooping back from their lectures, dumping their books, making tea, chatting.

It was all right when Mac was here, of course. But when he wasn’t the solitude pressed in on her more than ever. No longer was it a stillness about the furniture; now it was a solid, weighty need. Part of the trouble was there being no one around to distract her – upstairs the large upset Irish family, downstairs the derelict spaces, nothing else. Standing here in the middle she felt so exposed.
Hall protected you
, her father had written. There was no protection here, no bar to go to, no friends to drop in, no warden to fear. Just her own body. No wonder she’d succumbed to Mac that first night. Lovely to succumb, of course; it was just that she was so vulnerable here.

Today she felt more vulnerable than ever because of the diaphragm.

Trouble was, she had no one to tell. At Hall she could have told somebody; it was just the sort of topic for the hour before bed, hour of dressing-gowns and confidential mugs of Nescafé. Here there was just a draining-board of drying plates.

And here she was lingering over it, spending ages wiping them, even washing out the dishcloth, a thing she’d never done in her life. Anything to delay opening the door and walking up the road to the chemist. All by herself.

Funny how she and Mac could be so bold with each other’s bodies but so shy about this. In the end, though, she’d taken it into her own hands and gone to a doctor. His trolley had been full of domes, surprisingly roomy things, whose shape was familiar from line drawings in ‘Young Marrieds’. Years before, she and Claire had discovered this intriguing volume in their parents’ bookshelves and countless nights had giggled over it with a mixture
of
fascination and unease. Each drawing had been thoroughly inspected until they knew it by heart. Finally their father had found it under Laura’s pillow, and in a moment of wit for which she was eternally grateful had written a note saying
Really!
and slipped it between the pages. He could surprise sometimes.

So yesterday she had seen them in real life, rubber objects laid out like exhibits. The doctor, rolling on his crackling membranous gloves, had foraged inside her with one cap after another. Stiff she’d lain, comparing his rummaging with Mac’s midnight welcome, until finally he’d unpeeled the membranes and written down her hidden number – the circumference, she supposed, of her womb.

All that remained was to go out to the chemist and buy one. Then mention it casually to Mac. Silly to be selfconscious about such a very sensible and adult thing as this, but she was.

She bundled the rubbish from the sink basket into a plastic bag that was bursting at the seams. The trouble was, there seemed to be so much sheer apparatus piled up round this business of being free. So much she had to take care of herself – rubbish bags that kept splitting, pipes that got blocked, complicated things like diaphragms to be organized. Hall lifted off the burdens, her father had said. He was right.

Down the stairs she went, past the pram – bulky result of a union that was dome-less. Up the road she walked.

Outside the chemist’s shop some workmen were digging up the pavement. They gave her a bold look. She felt even more selfconscious. She opened the door.

Her heart sank. The shop was full of customers and there was only a male assistant in sight. She realized she’d expected a woman. Waiting for her turn, she scanned the shelves hoping to see a discreet package so she could just point. Behind her she could hear more customers joining the queue.

Her turn. ‘Good afternoon,’ said the man.

‘Er, hello. Er, I wonder if you possibly have –’ With a cough and a splutter the road drill started up outside, deafeningly.

‘What did you say?’ shouted the man.

‘An Ortho Diaphragm!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘An
Ortho Diaphragm
!’ All those people behind her! She felt her face reddening.

‘A diagram?’ shouted the man. ‘A diagram? Of what?’

‘A diaphragm!’

‘I’m sorry, could you speak up please!’

‘I said, an –’ Suddenly the drill stopped. ‘
Ortho Diaphragm!
’ The shout hung in the dead silence. Someone behind her cleared his throat.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the man in a normal voice. ‘What size?’

Hell! She’d forgotten that. She fumbled in her bag and found the doctor’s piece of paper. She could have just given it to him wordlessly, she realized. No need to speak at all.

‘Here we are,’ he said, fishing out a package. ‘And would you like cream or jelly?’

‘Cream or what?’

‘Jelly. Spermicidal jelly. Cream or jelly.’ Eyes bored into her back. The whole shop was dead quiet, listening.

‘Jelly!’ she hissed.

Thank God she could escape. The door swung shut behind her.

‘Wotcha Boobs!’

One of the workmen was resting on his drill, grinning at her. ‘Nice,’ he called, eyes on her chest. His grin widened.

Laura stumbled across a mound of sand, tripped over a pipe and walked up the road as fast as she could without running. She was blushirg, she knew. Never, ever had she felt so completely
exposed
.

According to the clock above the jeweller’s it was 4.30. She would go and see Mac; he’d be back home at Hal and Min’s house by now. Being a gardener, he ended work at four. Perhaps she could tell him about this awful episode so that, amidst the laughter, the fact that she’d actually done something as sensible and boring as buying such an object would be less of an event.

He was back. She found him in the kitchen eating something from an open tin and drinking something from a brandy glass. Over its rim he smiled and her heart turned over.

‘What peculiar meals you have,’ she said brightly, ‘at peculiar times.’

What she really longed to do was to kiss him, but he was scraping out the tin – Heinz Vegetable Salad – and anyway, still blushing from the chemist’s, she was too selfconscious. So she perched beside him on the kitchen table instead and felt his nearness all up her right-hand side.

Mac took a swig from the brandy glass. ‘You look bonny,’ he said. ‘Quite pink.’

She didn’t tell him why. Instead she looked round the room. Hal and Min’s kitchen was most un-kitchen-like, its atmosphere far removed from the spotless Formica of Greenbanks. Much, much nicer. In one corner rested a heap of leeks and potatoes, smuggled by Mac from the university vegetable garden. In another corner stood a moose’s head that stared at them glazedly. The walls were covered with scribbles upon which, the first time she’d been there, Laura had congratulated Hal and Min’s little daughter. She’d indignantly replied that they weren’t
her
drawings; she used her drawing book of course. They were Daddy’s.

A disembowelled bicycle, a hookah, a tuba … the room was hardly recognizable as a kitchen. Except, that is, for one neat row of baby food tins, a reminder of the orthodox needs of the baby to keep growing.

‘What did you do today?’

‘Oh, climbed a tree and had a snooze, did a bit of the old shit-shovelling, raced a couple of snails. They had amazing striped shells. A healthy sort of day.’

How he charmed her! How the whole household charmed her, so casual and disconnected from the outside world with all its silly rules and conventions. She looked at the scribbles on the wall. They were like children. Almost.

Mac was tapping his feet to some inner song. Never, she was discovering, did he ask her about
her
day, or her past, or anything like that. Never, it seemed, did he feel the need. He just smiled and drained his balloon glass and existed, amiably. How his very casualness tantalized! Here she was, longing to hold him; and there he was, slipping from her whenever she tried to get a grip.

Mac wiped his mouth. ‘Hal’s just got his dole,’ he said. ‘So it’s piss-up night tonight.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Laura untruthfully. The Heinz Vegetable Salad, combined with the piss-up, meant he wouldn’t eat the stew she’d made for tonight – but what a dull housewifely thought! She blushed. Never ever would she let him know that such terrible thoughts existed. He, who never showed the slightest urge, in contrast to her shamefully strong, shamefully
ordinary
impulse, to do any possessing at all.

Looking round at the communal belongings, at the car keys Hal always left dangling from the moose’s antlers for anyone to
use
, how she admired their ease, their lack of demands, the way everything was shared. Every day seemed a delightful surprise to be drifted through unhampered by dull things like jobs and routines and blush-making little awkwardnesses like buying a diaphragm. Unhampered, too, by the desire she was trying to hide of having Mac all to herself, in her own little room, surrounded by her own things and eating the stew she’d so painstakingly prepared.

Just as it took weeks to dare buy it, it took weeks to dare produce her little package, tell Mac about it and creep from the firelit bedroom into the chilly little bathroom on the landing.

The first time she dared struggle away at it with her clumsy hands, she felt a wave of nostalgia for the innocent, giggly days of ‘Young Marrieds’ when such things remained safely on the printed page. Easier on the page than all rubbery and springy in the fingers. Also, she felt a pang for Claire. Funny to want a sister now, of all times. But Claire would understand better than Mac.

And yet, when she grew better at it she got to enjoy her solitary bathroom preparations. They grew to be the one unfailing moment of order in the day, and she had to agree that, like Holly, she needed a little order, somewhere. She had more in common with Holly than she was prepared to admit.

GEOFF’S NEXT HURDLE
was Nikki and Yvonne. Claire couldn’t help thinking of them as a challenge, Nikki being so very pretty and Yvonne so extremely plain. Most people coped badly with this. Would he?

On this particular night Nikki happened to be in. From the sounds and scents a general overhaul of face, nails and body seemed to be taking place. As Claire ushered Geoff into the living-room Nikki’s gay singing voice could be heard through the bathroom door; fragrance wafted through the cracks.

‘That’s Nikki,’ Claire told him, gesturing towards the door. She led him to a chair. ‘And this is Yvonne.’

Yvonne, plump and sedate in her dressing-gown, sat on the sofa.

‘Pleased to meet you.’ She gave him a significant look. ‘Clary’s told me all about you.’

‘Really?’ asked Geoff. ‘Hope it wasn’t too bad.’

‘Oh no, I should say not.’ She gave him another meaningful look. ‘But you aren’t quite like I expected.’

Claire stiffened.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Well, Claire said you looked a bit like Paul Newman. He’s my favourite actor, you know. He makes me feel all whoozy inside.’ She stopped her knitting and inspected him. ‘But you don’t look as much like him as all that. You have brown eyes, for a start. His are blue, a sort of deep gorgeous blue. Baby-blue eyes, that’s what I call them.’

Claire asked quickly: ‘Would you like something to drink?’

‘Let me.’ Yvonne put her knitting aside. ‘You two just stay there and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.’

‘Not tea,’ said Claire briskly. ‘It’s seven o’clock. How about some sherry, Geoff?’

Claire escaped into the kitchen. She could hear Yvonne’s voice carrying on in the living-room. Oh, to live alone! She scrabbled about in the cupboard, pushing aside the awful cracked coffee mugs. Panic-stricken, she could feel things slipping out of hand. And soon there’d be Nikki too.

She didn’t meet Geoff’s eye when she came back with the sherry glasses. She set them down. ‘Would you like some, Yvonne?’

‘You know me. I’m a good little girl.’ She put her knitting aside. ‘What I prefer is a nice cup of tea.’ At the door she stopped and wagged her finger roguishly. ‘I’ll leave you two alone then, but no hankey-pankey, mind.’

Rigid and wordless, Claire and Geoff sat still as she padded out and closed the door behind her. Hankey-pankey seemed a long way away. Claire stared into her little sherry glass and carefully lifted it to her lips. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him doing the same. They took a sip each. They put the glasses down. Then she stole him a glance.

He turned to her, raised his eyebrows and smiled conspiratorially. ‘Goodness,’ he said.

She went limp with relief. They were confederates. He smiled at her with a new intimacy and took her hand. ‘Here’s to us.’
With
their free hands they clinked glasses.

They were just finishing their sherry when the singing stopped and Nikki came in.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Is that your super car outside?’

Geoff looked pleased.

‘I
adore
Lotuses,’ she said. ‘A touch of your actual class. What’s it do in top?’

‘Oh, about a hundred on a clear stretch.’

‘That’s cool. It’s an Elan, isn’t it?’

‘Right.’ He looked at her with respect. ‘You seem to know a bit about Lotuses.’

‘They’re so beautiful. When did you get it?’

‘Oh, when I was just starting college. I’d taken a holiday job …’

Claire listened. Never had she heard Geoff sound so interesting or talk so eagerly about himself. She had no idea he’d once had a holiday job in a Bird’s Eye factory. How did Nikki manage it?