TEN
For a moment there had been lightness and air streaming in through the windows. The day was turning out all right. Penny was back in Mrs Bell’s yellow classroom and the conversation was easy and animated. They were having one of those lessons resembling a class chat, flipping casually through the first two hundred pages of their set texts, drawing up points, coming up with ideas. They had begun with a brainstorming session, and the board was full of words and phrases of different sizes and connotations, written by different hands. It was something Vince had learned from one of his seminar tutors at college and Mrs Bell was trying it out. Mrs Bell wasn’t convinced; to her the board just looked a mess. But Vince was leading this session, getting involved and agitated whenever somebody made a point, waving his arms and drawing arrows between the nouns and adjectives on the board. This was one of those sessions on the set texts that they taught together and sometimes she had to hold back from taking over and also from shouting out her own ideas. She thought he was getting too abstract. Now and then she would look at the pupils’ faces and they would appear confounded and cross. All except Penny, who seemed to be with him the whole way along. It was as if he couldn’t do wrong in her eyes. Then he would seem to gather the others up again, with some glib joke at the expense of the book or the writer.
Mrs Bell thought that was all right up to a certain point, but you couldn’t beat a proper close reading. Nothing like getting right in there and reading line by line, pulling it all to bits like remaking a bed. Vince was just walking round and round it. The startling image came to her that, teaching, Vince treated the book and its author like a patient in a sickbed. A begrudged sickbed and he was one of those young, obnoxious doctors showing off. Whereas she wanted to give the patient a good scrubbing and feed them soup and bring them flowers. Her attention was straying. The lesson wasn’t moving fast enough. She would have to tell him.
The lesson was making Penny forget her dismal start to the day, but then there was a smart rap at the door and the secretary shoved her head in to ask if Penny could be excused for a few minutes. Immediately she knew what this meant. When she stepped outside, into the dimly lit cloakroom and corridor, the secretary turned on her heel and left, duty done. Liz was standing there at the mouth of the corridor, looking immaculate and helpless.
The walls were institution green, filled with reproduction van Goghs. The atmosphere was just like the dense, seaweedy feeling in her dream about being in the caves. She was back in her diving suit.
‘Hello,’ she said to Liz.
Liz was admiring the reproductions. They were badly printed, too bright, and jarred against Penny’s nerves. She thought, This is how I dream, with volume and colour turned up too loud, like a telly that has to compete with the neighbours’. No wonder I can’t sleep at night.
‘I’ve been worried.’
‘That’s why I came to see you. I thought you might be. Silly!’ Liz avoided mentioning the note.
‘So. What’s happening, then?’
Liz took a deep breath. Her composure was cracking; Penny could tell by the fact that she was blinking more often than usual, plucking at her false nails. ‘I won’t pull the wool over your eyes, Pen. I couldn’t do that. So… I’ve invited him to dinner tonight. You can meet him.’
Her daughter nodded slowly. Then, ‘What brought it on?’
‘You’ve grown up. You can handle this now. It was an impulse thing. Like shopping. I felt the need.’
‘Like shopping?’
‘I didn’t mean that to sound… frivolous.’
Penny didn’t look convinced by this, but Liz was being honest. She wanted to say, but couldn’t quite, that shopping was one of the most serious things she knew. Anyway, Penny knew that already about Liz. But here and now there seemed to be no proper context to say it, to talk about the anxiety Liz felt about shopping. How serious she felt when the mirrors in shops caught at her attention, made her feel conscious or ashamed. How she felt the need always to buy something else, something she thought she needed. Penny should understand this compulsion of hers.
Penny said, ‘What if I don’t want to meet him?’
‘He’s lovely. You will.’
‘Mam .. . you were careful, weren’t you?’
‘Absolutely. I’m not as stupid as I look. You can understand this, can’t you?’
Penny was staring fixedly at the bed in one of the pictures. It was bowed under pressure. All the furniture in the Dutchman’s colourful room was warped by the use of its owner.
‘You want to bring us together to see how we react to each other. How we affect each other. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You bring people together for experiments.’
‘I’ve asked you to grow up very quickly. Penny. But I have to ask you for this one last thing.’
You provoke, Penny thought. On purpose. The person Penny’s father had become, the person he had wanted to be in order to be himself, not only partook of but also created life. It was his mothering urge.
Penny turned to look at her. The composure was really gone now, as startling as if the wig had slipped off. The mascara was running, the flesh tones patchy, fake. Under her Obsession there was the faintest tang of sweat.
‘What last thing?’ She was fascinated by this face in the process of deconstructing before her. It was between states and its tears could have been from exertion.
‘That you accept this relationship. Accept that it is what I need now. That you will let go of that part of yourself that wants to keep me whole for ever.’
‘I’ll accept anything.’
