You Must Be Sisters (5 page)

A dazed moment, and then she burst into an explosion of laughter. After a moment he did too. Then, when they’d wiped their eyes, faces wet and bodies limp from laughing, he got up and switched on the light. He sat down beside her again, his thighs hairy, hers not, in a most companionable silence. After a while they picked up their underclothes.

Mike said brightly: ‘You know, we could have a bash now if you feel like it.’

‘No! No!’

He buttoned his shirt thoughtfully. ‘I’ve always fancied you. You looked so experienced, too.’

‘Honestly? But I thought you were. It was you who showed me all those poems about love’s quick breaths and stuff like that.’

‘That’s different,’ he said simply. ‘That’s poetry.’

Outside their window all the other lights in all the other windows were off. It must be very late. Mike got up and made some tea. Laura watched him; his bare legs seemed more attractive now they weren’t threatening her.

‘To innocence,’ he boomed. ‘To friendship.’

‘Cheers,’ she said, and added: ‘My ears are sore.’

‘Oh dear, sorry about that. I was carried away by passion, you see.’

Laura leant against the comfortable nylon-shirted shoulder. Good old Mike, she thought. She sipped her tea, nasty peaty stuff as all the milk was finished. They didn’t bother to talk. Really, Laura thought, this debacle of arms and legs has made us much better friends, for what worse event could we go through together?

Platonic friends, of course. More than ever she realized: sex couldn’t possibly work with someone so nice, so suitable. Goodness, her parents would actually
like
him!

Later, walking back past the dark buildings, every light but Mike’s extinguished, she really felt quite refreshed and adult, for wasn’t honestly admitting her virginal state the most adult thing she’d ever done? A hurdle had been jumped, a hurdle from which, in John’s case, she had so pathetically shied away. What an exhilarating feeling!

She breathed the icy night air into her lungs, deeply, and strode up the steps to her block, a strong, adult girl, no longer feeble and no longer – she realized with pleasant surprise – so shamefully homesick.

‘Laura!’

A blinding glare in her face. ‘Laura!’

She stood still. By the voice it must be the warden, though she could see nothing but brilliance. The warden must be waving a torch.

‘Step inside please, Laura.’

She must be leaning out of her special warden’s room on the ground floor. Waiting, like a spider.

Inside, the warden switched off her torch and stood, weary
but
unruffled, in her beige dressing-gown. She wore beige slippers too, Laura noticed with dislike – for she did not quite like to meet her eyes and kept her own lowered – dreary middle-aged beige slippers.

‘I wonder if you’ve seen the time, Laura.’

‘Er, no, actually.’

‘Half past two. Half past
two
, Laura. Quite honestly, I don’t really care for sitting up until half past two.’ Don’t then, thought Laura, but kept her eye on the slippers. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Er, with a friend.’

‘Now, I won’t ask you who that friend was. I will just ask you to tell me at what time, according to the rules, you are required to be back in your block. Could you tell me, Laura?’

‘Midnight, except special permission.’ How soppy and obedient she sounded! And she couldn’t stop talking to those beastly slippers.

‘That’s right. Well, we won’t say any more about it this time, Laura, but I do expect my girls to have the courtesy to abide by the rules. They’re for your own good, you know. Goodnight.’

Now I’ll let her have it, thought Laura. Now I’ll tell her what I think of her!

‘Er, sorry,’ she said.

Blushing furiously, she found her way to her room. For some reason she felt quite trembly as she fumbled with the key. Stupid place; she really had outgrown it. The key shook in the lock. Just like school. Stupid rules, tonight of all nights, just when such important things had happened. When she felt so adult.

She got the door open. There was a note on the floor.

10
p.m. Your sister telephoned to say that she it coming to visit you tomorrow. Expect her late in the morning
.

Warden
.

Laura brightened.

LAURA FOUND IT
easy to work the next morning because she knew that in a couple of hours she would be interrupted by Claire. It gave a tighter feel to the Sunday; drawing in the gathers, so to speak, on a limp piece of cloth. As a rule, Sundays in Hall
did
feel a bit floppy. Much easier with a day structured with lectures, even if she decided not to go to any.

But with no lectures, she found herself sitting about and dreaming. Surprisingly often, these dreams were about home. Sundays at home were an awful bore, of course, but in her daydreams they became distanced into something past and sunlit. Sundays in the garden, her mother weeding round the plants in her own fastidious way, as if the soil was not quite nice; Daddy wearing the gardening-trousers he’d worn every Sunday since the War and doing something useful they’d all forget to comment on when it was done; Holly with a friend, either a blasé or a giggly one, she only seemed to have two kinds; Badger lying on the lawn snapping at flies and occasionally moving to another patch of shade, leaving a map, resembling the USA, of grey hairs behind him on the grass; Claire indoors reading … She could be quite nostalgic for home when she wasn’t there.

She opened ‘A Child’s Conception of the World’. With Claire coming she could concentrate, couldn’t she?

She couldn’t. Last night, detail by blush-making detail, kept creeping up on her. How she was longing to tell Claire! She’d tell her about the John thing, too. Claire would laugh. Things were more fun when they were gone over again with a sister; giggled over and analysed from the safety of one’s room.

Claire! She thought of her driving down in the Morris they shared with its hesitant windscreen-wipers. Down to the tiniest detail she could picture it, because she knew it so well – Claire crouched forward, knuckles mauve from the draughts, eyes narrowed against the blurred windscreen, dogged in her rattling Morris, buffeted and splashed by the passing Jags and Jensens. She must give her a good day. After all, it was seldom that she got
away
. Usually at the weekends she was struggling with some under-rehearsed play or collapsing adventure playground. Old Claire was such a dedicated teacher.

She arrived. Laura asked about her parents first.

‘Last time I saw them,’ said Claire, ‘Daddy was starting evening classes in painting. Isn’t that touching? He says that with Holly at school and us two gone, he ought to branch out.’

‘Good for him. But it’s Mummy who needs the old horizon-enlarging.’

‘I can’t understand what she does all day now.’

‘I know,’ said Laura. ‘She spends the whole morning in Harrods deciding whether she wants a pink or a blue fluffy bog-seat cover, and then she spends all afternoon taking it back because it doesn’t match the plastic toothbrush-holder.’

‘Honestly!’ Laura was such an exaggerator. But there was truth there, too.

‘You must be freezing. I’m going to make us some coffee.’ Laura went outside to the gas-ring.

Claire gazed at the prints crammed all over the walls and the clothes thrown all over the floor. Laura always did things in extremes. When they were younger it had always been Laura who dared shout back at the boys in the Rec – to grown-ups, the Recreation Ground – boys who, with runny noses and peaky faces, had stalked them with jeers and bad words. Even in Harrow there were boys like that. And it was Laura who had led the expeditions to the block of flats at the bottom of the road, up the lift to the top floor and then out on to the roof. There they had played daring games, Laura always a little too near the edge, while underneath them they could see the sliding glitter of the arterial road – it was always night when they played there – and on the horizon the orange glow that meant London. ‘We’re looking for Mrs Fotheringay-Phipps,’ Laura would answer, haughtily, any enquirer they might meet in the corridors. She looked so bossy that they always believed her. In those days her admirers had called her spirited, her detractors pert, and by the time she was adolescent they had joined together in calling her rebellious.

But to Claire she had just been the leader – Roy Rogers while she was Tonto (in the Rec), the eminent surgeon while she was the body (in the bedroom), the messy baby while she was the mother (when they were having tea in the kitchen and everyone was out). Laura had all the star parts.

But Claire didn’t mind, even though she was the older and by rights ought to have been the boss. Her moment came with the recriminations when, Laura fidgeting behind her, she faced up to their irate mother and – far worse – disappointed father. She became an expert at extrication. This tidying-up she found curiously satisfying.

Laura returned. Claire asked: ‘Remember that time you dug up all the potatoes on that man’s allotment and put all the tops back in the soil –’

‘And he thought they’d got blight because they got so withered, and sprayed and sprayed them –’

‘And we put the potatoes in our room and forgot all about them, and Mummy found them all mouldy –’

‘And you,’ said Laura smugly, ‘had to explain.’

They smiled into their steaming coffee cups. It was funny to talk about their youth in this ultra-modern room, devoid of any childhood memories except those assessed by the scientific books that stood on Laura’s shelves.

‘What’s the first thing in your life you remember?’ asked Laura.

‘Ants in my pram,’ said Claire promptly.

‘That wasn’t you, it was me.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course. I remember them biting me. I can feel it now.’

‘But then someone put cream on my arm and it felt better. It was yellow stuff and smelt of the dentist’s.’

They looked helplessly at each other. ‘Which of us was it?’ asked Claire. ‘We just merged for years. We did everything together.’ She gazed at their similar hands curled round their coffee mugs – similar except for Laura’s bitten nails and copper rings. They had parted ways a little – not much, just a little – since those days.

Claire drained her cup. ‘Enough nostalgia,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your room. Is this where you work?’

‘That’s right. When I’m sitting here I can see who’s in whose room in the block opposite.’

‘And your own snug armchair! It’s like a play set. Someone’s figured it all out; every need catered for.’

‘That’s right. Sometimes I feel each one of us in his little room is going through the identical sequence. It’s odd.’

They went up the corridor and wandered through the drizzle
to
inspect the other blocks with their rows of identical windows. In the Common Room they could see a couple playing darts, another playing ping-pong, and in each armchair sat a figure rustling through the Sunday papers.

‘How obedient they look!’ exclaimed Claire. ‘Using the facilities, doing what the building tells them to do.’

‘That’s what I mean. We’re like ants in an anthill.’

Claire looked at Laura. ‘That annoys you?’

Just then a newspaper was lowered. Mike’s face appeared over the top, smiling. Laura, blush rising, said: ‘Hello. This is my sister Claire.’

Mike looked at Claire with interest. What was he comparing? Claire’s calmer face and brushed hair?

‘Are there any more of you?’ he asked.

‘Only Holly. She’s our little sister but she’s only twelve.’

‘Sit down,’ said Mike, ‘and listen to this.’ He was still addressing his remarks to Claire. Could he possibly be selfconscious too? He must be, for he was avoiding Laura’s eye. She was avoiding his, too, of course. They’d both feel better when he’d read something out of the newspaper. Then they’d be able to talk about it and this blushful moment would be over.

‘Hang on,’ he said, shuffling through the pages. ‘Aha! Got it.’ He looked up – at Claire, of course. ‘Lend an ear.’ He started reading, boomingly.

In one of Australia’s most remote areas, mining executives have discovered the richest uranium deposit in the world. Assuming that mining rights would be easily obtained from the aboriginal owners, the company quickly signed contracts to sell millions of dollars’ worth of ore. But what they failed to take into account was the aborigines’ refusal to disturb the Green Ants which live near the site. The place is called the Dreaming Place of the Green Ants, and is deeply holy
.

Mike looked up, addressing Claire. ‘Listening?’

‘Yes’

He was obviously moved by what he was reading. The grey ash lengthened on his forgotten cigarette. ‘
The executives have been offering them higher and higher sums for the mining rights. They started at $7,000: they have grown to $13,000,000. But
,’ he looked up at them; he even looked at Laura, so swept along was he, ‘
the aborigines refuse to sell at any price. Confronted by the wrath of the ants and poverty
… well, they’ve chosen the poverty.’ He
put
the paper down. The ash dropped to the floor.

His audience sighed, for it had moved them too.

Any further conversation was interrupted by the bell. Lunchtime.

‘We all troop down,’ Laura told Claire.

‘Sounds fun.’

‘Awfully regimented. I loathe doing things in the mass.’

Claire smiled. ‘Do you?’ she asked, looking at Laura’s denim skirt, identical to countless denim skirts now passing them as they walked down the path.

They sat down with Mike. Claire ate with relish.

‘A proper Sunday lunch!’ she said between mouthfuls. ‘With roast potatoes and all. I do envy you. I wish I could come to university. All the intriguing people, and everyone having their own lovely rooms …’ She broke off because she sounded too wistful and instead gazed around. Serious boys, laughing boys, round-shouldered, T-shirted ones – could the 1970’s be called the Decade of the Hollow Chest? – sombre, bespectacled boys who were probably doing Maths. When they went into digs their landladies would love them because they’d be tidy and roll their washing into a neat bundle. Plain girls, pretty ones, girls with certain make-up and uncertain eyes – clever, that – girls nobody would notice but who someone some day would want to marry more than anyone else in the world … Claire wanted to speak to all of them.