They hadn’t looked at anything much tonight, apart from the frosted pitcher of margheritas Serena had called for.
“You must make sure that you are cleverer than I am,” she told Wendy.
In Covent Garden they dodged past crowds watching street performers and Serena made clucking noises. “I despise jugglers. When I see them walking on stilts I long to push them over.”
“On the Royal Mile in the Festival, there were fire-eaters,” said Wendy.
“Now that, I love. I would stop to watch a man eat fire.” She stopped. “Will you come to the opera with me? Your aunt never will. She went once and loathed it. She kept riffling the programme and asking how long until the interval. She made me take her to see Cats and Starlight Express.”
“Aunty Anne would like shows with lots of dancing in,” I said, thinking of her legs and her vaunted high kicks.
“Oh, her and dancing,” said Serena.
That morning, a postcard from Timon.
‘Bed and breakfast in the western isles, hon. Filming the sky. I’m filling tape after tape and I haven’t written a word in days. Snow on the mountains and Belinda tramps around like Julie Andrews. XX.’
And a very short letter from Mandy.
‘Happy New Year and I’m still in the Professor’s house, where he cooks for me and makes me put up my feet while I write page after page. He says I must have a novel ready—even a very short one—by the time my story comes out in BritLit Four, that anthology I’m in. Blackpool has come up very clear in my writing and it worries me that I’ll never go back, or if I do, it won’t be the same. Of course, it’s not the same. Our Linda’s married the insurance man, all very sudden and quick—did you know? They’re in Luxor. Love to you—Mandy.’
“Your sister Mandy has it all sorted out, doesn’t she?” Serena said. “I think she has made some admirable choices.”
“I think she should have stayed in Manchester,” I said. “Done her studies and not got mixed up in the world of men.”
“A woman’s lot,” said Serena. “You have to get mixed up in the world of men. No mistaking it. Mandy can go off, eventually, if she wants to study women’s issues, if that’s what she wants. But she has to have truck with the world of men. Men are fixed in space, you see, Wendy. They are the solid objects women have to negotiate and slink between. A woman has no real place in this world and she has to make a strength out of that. We can fix ourselves anywhere.”
That seemed true of Mandy, of Aunty Anne, of Serena herself. Then I thought of our mam, who stayed most persistently in the same place, in Blackpool, with her kids. In her case it was the fella who moved out, who made a change in his life. Similarly, Timon was the changeable one, who picked up and moved on and threw in his lot with someone he’d just met.
Serena just said, “Gender can be very fickle. People eventually find their roles. It takes money or bravery, or both.” She eyed me. “Maybe you will have both.”
THIRTY-ONE
They were at the Tate looking at an installation called ‘On the Farm’ when Serena first properly broached the subject of her past. The exhibition was of severed animal heads afloat in glass pots of various sizes, ranged in a group on the floor. There were twenty-four of them: the largest a bull’s glaring, neckless head and the smallest, a newly-hatched chicken’s, which looked like a ball of yellow fluff. All of them were being left to deliquesce gently in their columns of glass.
“It’s quite affecting,” said Serna, stalking round the wooden floor. “Seeing the flesh dropping off like this. It makes you want to return again and again to see their progress.”
Wendy said gloomily, “This show will run and run.”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said Serena, realising. “And you in mourning still. This is terrible of me. Let’s go and look at the Rothko’s instead.”
So in a room of canvases that were just slabs of wet-looking paint, Serena began to talk to herself. “I remember being tiny, in a very expensive school and I stuck out like a thumb. A sore thumb, I mean, and I suppose I was too much like you: the under-achiever in my class. I sat at the back and I was staring at the sky while we were talking French. They made us learn French early. Mine is very imperfect. I was staring at the sun, daring myself to stare straight at it, stare it out. I like these Rothkos because they are all one colour, like light. The after-image of looking at a clear, sun-filled sky.”
To Wendy her sky seemed a bit murky.
“And I sat one day and I saw the plane before the rest of the class did. Soon the noise was unmistakable. It was enough of an event, or the lesson was boring enough, to make all of the girls jump up from their desks—the desks were the colour of toffee, I remember, sticky with varnish—and rush to the windows. We watched the small plane circle and circle, as if it could write a message for us. Even our teacher, Mme. Merle, came to see.
“We watched the sun glaring off its windows and wings. It came in lower, passing over us and we even worried that we’d be bombed. Still we watched. Then, incredibly, it brought itself down and landed safely on the neat green fields beyond our windows. It slowed, slowed and stopped. Well, we cheered and clapped and begged to be let out to greet the pilot. Before we could move, or Mme Merle could give in, the door on the small plane opened and the pilot stepped into the sunshine. She was in black, with a leather helmet, goggles, everything. “It’s a woman!” someone shouted
