In a Good Light (23 page)

‘I wish you were my sister,' I said.

She gave a sly smile. ‘Maybe I will be one day,' she said, and then looked horrified at this lapse. ‘Don't ever tell Christian I said that,' she begged. ‘Promise.' To cover her confusion she started rummaging again, presently emerging from the wardrobe with a black velvet beret. ‘Here,' she said, tossing it over. ‘This will look great on you. You're a hat person.'

A keeper of confidences and a hat person – all in one day! I put the beret on and allowed Penny to tweak it into position. ‘It's not a pancake,' she reproved. Her final donation was a pair of pointed mock-croc stilettos. ‘They're sheer torture to wear,' she promised, watching my pinched expression as I forced my feet, minus the woolly brown socks, as far as they would go down the rigid conical toes, until my eyes watered with the pain.

‘Perhaps that's what they mean by crocodile tears,' I said, as I freed my crushed feet and massaged them back to life.

‘They're not comfy,' Penny agreed. ‘But there are some occasions,' and here she shot an unfriendly look at my Nature Trekkers, ‘when comfy just won't do.'

I nodded, thinking of Pam and her bone-hugging jeans. I could see that elegance came at a price, and I wasn't sure if I was willing to pay, just yet.

‘Well,' Penny was saying, adding the shoes to the bag. ‘They'll do for parties.'

‘I never go to any parties,' I said.

I offered this as a plain fact, but my tone must have been unintentionally woebegone because Penny said, ‘Poor little Cinders,' in a tragic voice. ‘What do you do with yourself, then?' she went on, more seriously. ‘You must have some hobbies.'

I shrugged. ‘I go round to my friend Dawn's and we make up dances to the Top Forty.'

For some reason this had Penny in convulsions. ‘Oh God, Esther, you kill me,' she said.

The Dogs, Matt and Gloss, almost garrotting themselves on their choke chains, dragged us all the way to the park and then bolted for the trees the moment we released them. Penny and I followed at a more leisurely pace, swinging the empty leads. She had exchanged her lilac suede boots for black leather as a precaution against grass stains, and was carrying a zip-up nylon holdall, which she had taken from the boot of the Mini.

At the boundary of the field, between a cycle track and the trees was a wooden bench, which we headed for to await the dogs' return. Every so often they would come tearing
out of the undergrowth, leaping from side to side as though the ground was scorching. Penny tutted at the carved graffiti on the bench, twitching her skirt away as she sat down. ‘I don't know what's more annoying,' she said, ‘the stuff you can read or the stuff you can't.'

I just grunted. I decided I wouldn't mention that Dawn was a compulsive gouger in case she thought I was similarly inclined. On our walk I'd told her about the Clubb household and I'd formed the impression she didn't approve. When I'd come to the bit about the Old Bastard and his magazines, she'd pulled a face and told me to make sure I always kept between him and the door. This showed amazing insight on her part, as the one time I had been on my own in a room with him he had done something so creepy I couldn't even mention it to Dawn. It had been a hot day and we'd been sunbathing in our bikinis. When I came in to get some more golf balls out of the freezer for our drinks Mr Clubb had come into the kitchen and run his finger down my bare back, to the top of my bikini pants, and I'd dropped the whole ice tray. I made sure I was never on my own or less than fully dressed in his presence again.

‘Where did you and Christian meet?' I asked Penny at last, looking sideways at her. She was unzipping the holdall, from which she pulled a headscarf, a nylon overall, a packet of Raffles and a lighter.

‘He was caddying up at the golf course one time when I was there for a lesson,' she said, throwing her hair forward and using the scarf to tie it all up in a turban. ‘He offered to buy me a drink, but he couldn't go into the bar because he wasn't a member, and I couldn't go in because I wasn't a man. So we went to the pub instead. Being fellow outcasts brought us together.'

‘What are you doing?' I asked, as she put on the overall and buttoned it to the neck. She looked like a film star pretending to be a charlady. Before answering she lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, with profound relief. ‘It's my parents,' she explained. ‘They're both reformed smokers, so naturally they're total bigots. They've threatened to cut off my allowance if I spend any of it on cigarettes, so I mustn't go home smelling of smoke.'

‘How much do they give you?' I asked. I was expecting to be amazed, but even so wasn't prepared for the exorbitant sum she named. ‘It goes nowhere,' she sighed, and then looked ashamed. ‘I'm not complaining. I'm very lucky.' She leant back, enjoying the cigarette and the sunshine. Sitting there, blinking through the smoke, dressed in that bizarre outfit, she suddenly reminded me of Aunty Barbara: a younger, prettier, saner Aunty Barbara. But then, I told myself, Aunty Barbara had been young and pretty and sane once too, as that brief piece of film footage had proved. It wasn't her appearance, so much as her proprietorial attitude towards me that rang a bell. They had both tried to dress me up in pretty clothes, although Aunty Barbara's gift of the bridesmaid's dress had more of unhinged defiance than practical assistance about it, I now realised.

As if reading my thoughts, Penny said, ‘I need a project. Something to get my teeth into. I think you could be it.' She smiled, and I looked at her straight, white teeth and shivered inwardly with a mixture of excitement and trepidation at what form this mauling might take. ‘You've got a lot of potential,' she went on, ‘but at the moment it's buried under . . . under . . .' she groped for the tactful word.

‘Underwood?' I suggested, and she laughed. The school, and the estate it served was infamous across the county, its
name a byword for social evils of every kind. Only my parents refused to view it in these terms: for them humanity was divided into the Fortunate and the Less Fortunate, and their life's aim was the more equitable spreading of that elusive commodity, Fortune.

‘We could start with your hair,' Penny said, pinching a limp curl and examining the ends. ‘I suppose you're going to tell me your mum cuts it.'

‘Dad, actually,' I said.

Penny rolled her eyes. She had finished her cigarette by now and carefully removed her disguise and stowed it in the holdall. ‘Come on. We'll go and do it now.' She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled for the dogs, who came bounding over, ready to play. They didn't like the sight of their leads in Penny's hand, and kept their distance so we were forced to throw sticks for them to fetch, in order to bring them close enough to be collared.

Back at the house Maria had finished the carpets and was polishing the parquet with a sort of throbbing dalek. She was wearing an overall from the same range as Penny's smoking jacket. ‘Your mum's home,' she said to Penny. ‘She's gone to bed.' Penny seemed unperturbed by this news, though it was only three in the afternoon.

‘Is she ill?' I asked, as we shut the dogs in the conservatory.

‘Oh no,' Penny replied. ‘She often goes to bed early to try and lose weight. She thinks if she stays in bed drinking mint tea it'll stop her eating. Sometimes she stays up there all weekend.'

‘Is she very fat?' I asked.

‘God, no,' said Penny. ‘She's as thin as a twig, the silly cow.'

Before we left she pressed a copy of
I Capture the Castle
into my hands. ‘You must read this,' she instructed. ‘It's my favourite book. I'll draw up a list of others.'

‘I didn't realise I was going to have to do homework,' I grumbled, as we got back in the Mini. Suddenly being Penny's protégée wasn't looking so attractive. I hadn't read much fiction since graduating from children's books. In fact the only grown-up book I'd read all the way through was
The Lord of the Rings
because it was Christian's favourite, but I hadn't enjoyed the experience. I found I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for non-human predicaments, however well described.

Penny took me to her local hairdressing salon, a frightening place staffed by androgynes in boiler suits. Over the roar of hairdryers and pop music she managed to secure me an appointment, and told the genderless alien assigned to me to ‘tidy it up a bit'.

After two shampoos and a ‘treatment' my hair was as slippery as sealskin. It never felt this clean at home. I wondered if there might be something wrong with our water supply: deposits of lead or rust, or dead squirrels in the tank. While the alien combed and snipped, scuttling round me on a plastic stool-on-wheels, like a giant spider, Penny lounged in a cane armchair, browsing through
Harpers & Queen
. Every few minutes another member of staff would be over to offer her tea or coffee or more magazines. As I got to know her better I would become familiar with this phenomenon. Wherever Penny went people would spring to do her bidding. Doors would be opened, bags carried, obstacles removed, assistance offered, so that her path would always be smooth. It was just a way she had – nothing tangible that could be imitated – and she accepted it all with
perfect equanimity. Now she approached to supervise the blow-drying, smiling encouragement at me in the mirror as the hairdresser tried to subdue and straighten my curls.

‘Do you think you'll be bothered to do this at home?' he asked, dragging a section of hair taut with a fat brush and blasting it from above with a jet of scorching air. I laughed aloud at the idea. We did have a hairdryer at home – a 1950s model with a frayed flex and a rattling motor that was just as likely to suck hair in and chew it up as blow it dry. It lived in a box on top of the wardrobe along with a rubber glove which had to be worn to protect against shocks.

When he was finished with me, he dusted my shoulders and held up a hand mirror so I could inspect the back of my head. I thought it might look vain to show too much delight in my changed appearance, so I just nodded non-commitally, then it occurred to me that not wishing to be thought vain was itself a form of vanity. I decided to make a note of this when I got home, in my book of interesting observations, which was still largely blank.

Penny came to my rescue by telling me how nice I looked, which allowed me to smile, showing some of the pleasure I felt at my transformation. My hair swung, shiny and thick to just above my shoulders, where it tipped up to tickle me under the chin. I knew that as soon as I was outside the damp air and gravity – Pam's old enemies – would flatten the top and crinkle the ends, but for the moment it was perfect.

When Penny dropped me back home mum was still at the kitchen table tussling with the household finances. Something told me it wouldn't be a good time to flaunt my change of image, however cheaply acquired, so I decided to
creep upstairs to my room. But ours wasn't the sort of house where you could creep successfully: hinges squeaked and floorboards jumped and banged and before I had crossed the hall Mum had spotted me over the top of her cracked spectacles.

‘Goodness, look at you,' she said. ‘Have you won the Pools?' This was her idea of a joke. We never did the Pools, of course. I shook my head.

‘That's a pity,' she said, tapping her pencil on the topmost of her papers.

‘Penny paid,' I said. ‘And she gave me all these clothes. Cast-offs,' I wheedled. ‘But really nice ones.'

‘I suppose the hairdresser told you to come back every three months for a trim,' Mum said.

‘Six weeks,' I replied.

‘Well, you've had that.' She looked down at the columns of figures in front of her and sighed.

‘You could get a job that actually pays,' I suggested.

‘There aren't quite enough jobs to go around at the moment,' she said. ‘It wouldn't be right for our family to have two when some families don't even have one. Besides, it won't be long before Grandpa can't be left alone. He's so forgetful.' This was true. Only the other day I had caught him trying to leave the house in his pyjamas. He'd thanked me and laughed at his own absent-mindedness, and gone upstairs to dress, but half an hour later when I looked in his room, he'd gone back to bed, even though it was midday.

‘The trouble with never spending anything is that it leaves you nowhere to make economies,' Mum said at last.

That day marked a rite of passage in another way too. When I got undressed for bed I found a stain, like tar, in
my knickers. I went down to Mum, who had abandoned the accounts and was mending the broken strap of her handbag with duck tape.

‘I've started my periods,' I said, suddenly embarrassed to be a conspirator with her in this dark, female mystery.

Her face fell for a second.
My little girl
, she was perhaps thinking. Or probably:
more expense
. She went to the cupboard under the sink and brought out a pile of old newspapers, and my heart quailed. Surely we're not that poor, I thought. Then, from the depths of another cupboard she produced a pink squashy packet of Dr Whites.

‘See how you get on with these,' she said. ‘Don't flush them down the loo or they'll bung up the drains. Wrap the used ones in newspaper and put them in the boiler.'

She must have seen my queasy expression and mistaken its cause, because she laid a hand on my abdomen and said, ‘Does it hurt?' I said it didn't, but even as I was shaking my head I felt an unfamiliar ache, bone-deep and burning, spreading down the top of each leg, and I winced.

‘Poor you,' said Mum. ‘A hot waterbottle sometimes helps. I'll go and get it off Christian.'

And so I went to bed with the hot waterbottle that night, and Christian had to do without, because I had stepped through a doorway now, into a special female world of privilege and pain.