Here We Are

supposed to think of them as Mr and Mrs Lawrence he had very quickly begun to call them in his head Eric and Penny, as if they were no different from friends he’d had at his school in Bethnal Green. And he quite soon felt, though it was not as if they ever formally said he could, that he might call them by these names aloud. Or rather that there were times, and he understood the difference between them very clearly, when he might say ‘Mr Lawrence’ and times when he might say ‘Eric’.

When Mrs Lawrence, or Penny, had these little grownup chats with him, even talking about her brother Roy, she would suddenly seem to remember that he was just a child and say, for example, ‘But shall we have a game of snakes and ladders?’

There was a whole cupboard full of games. Games!

Or—much more interestingly—she might look at him with a sudden soft expression which Ronnie, to his surprise, could quite accurately interpret as her wishing he was hers, and which might melt even further into a look that almost seemed to say that he was hers—so her wish had come true. It was a quite wonderful look and it was quite wonderful to see the way it turned from one thing into another. And it was much better than any game of snakes and ladders.

These conversations—or games or looks—occurred when Mr Lawrence had to go into Oxford by himself. When Ronnie returned from school he and she would have an hour or so together. Their little chats (though Ronnie mainly listened) always seemed to reveal something new. For example, one day Penny said that Mr Lawrence would be staying all evening in Oxford and wouldn’t be back till late. This was because he was giving a show. A show? Ronnie felt sure that Mrs Lawrence was teasing him and was daring him to ask, ‘What kind of show?’ And so he didn’t say it, which would have been falling into some sort of trap.

Yet he enjoyed being teased and it seemed that Mrs Lawrence enjoyed teasing him. And it was true that Mr Lawrence didn’t return till late that night and Ronnie, in his bedroom but woken by sounds below (the car being eased into the garage), distinctly heard Mrs Lawrence say, ‘How did it go, darling?’ And then Mr Lawrence say, ‘Not bad.’

Such snippets of adult life were like nothing Ronnie had known before. They were like something you might see in a cinema, a place where he’d only ever been twice.

And yet everything might turn around. Penny Lawrence often wore a big floppy cardigan with large side pockets into which she would thrust her hands and waggle them, as if she was trying to sprout wings. Or just for the fun of waggling them. She was just like a girl. A girl! He could see how she must have done this same waggling thing when she was a child—done it in this very house in front of her grandfather and her stuck-up brother Roy—and had never got out of the habit.

Ronnie began to like Penny Lawrence very much—or he understood how Eric Lawrence might like her. And he liked Eric too. He would start to wonder, though quickly put a stop to this thought, what his mother might feel if she could see him and Penny Lawrence having their chats.

And he could never picture his mother as a girl.

•   •   •

Soon after his arrival at Evergrene a system of postcards had been instituted. His mother might write: ‘All well here—Love Mum.’ And Ronnie might write back: ‘All well here—Love Ronnie.’ These postcards, though he didn’t know it, were not unlike numerous postcards servicemen would send home, which had to be short and sweet for reasons of censorship.

Ronnie would be encouraged by Mr Lawrence to say more, to describe his life at Evergrene, his visits to Oxford even, but Ronnie was inclined not to do this. He did not want his ‘All wells’ to betray anything more than just that—though he had been urged, with some coughing and embarrassment on their part, to state that Mr and Mrs Lawrence were ‘very nice’. Which was true.

And how could he possibly convey to his mother such things as the fact that Eric and Penny sometimes had friends round, other grown-ups, for the evening—on the nights when Eric wasn’t doing his warden duties (or giving a ‘show’). Lying in bed, he could hear them talking and laughing. And once, before their evening started, they’d got him to come down, in his pyjamas, to be introduced or just displayed, and when he’d gone back up the stairs he’d plainly heard one of the visitors say, it was a woman’s voice, ‘What a charming little boy.’ Then he heard Penny Lawrence say, ‘Yes, he is.’

He’d never been called that before, never imagined that he might be called it. Charming.

But the most remarkable thing was that, though it was just Mr and Mrs Lawrence having a few friends round, they were all dressed up, the women in particular had nice dresses and necklaces and sparkly earrings and had done things to their hair (you couldn’t have imagined Penny doing her waggling thing). It seemed to Ronnie that they’d all changed, that the women had become beautiful and the men handsome, that they were all charming—yes, that was really the word. Everyone was charming, they had drinks in their hands. Was this what was meant by putting on a show?

Over in one corner of the sitting room (as he’d learnt to call it) was a table that he’d never seen before. It was square and had a surface that was entirely bright green. On it were a couple of packs of playing cards, neatly stacked, but there was something else. A top hat. Yes, a top hat. Not an object that Ronnie was familiar with, but he was not mistaken. It was turned upside-down, brim uppermost, so you felt it might be being used as