Gina had realized by the time she was twelve that they were at a crap school. By sixteen, she had found out about sixth-form colleges and that there was one in a town some way away. She applied, was accepted, got hold of the town’s local paper and tracked down a bedsit in the home of an elderly widow, and then took the proposal to her mother. She had already squared matters with the college, who clearly approved of her powers of initiative.
And so it all began. Partial flight from Allersmead at sixteen, full flight to university at eighteen. Detachment thereafter.
“You have an extremely skimpy past,” says Philip. “Or should one say an embargoed past? Do you realize that?”
“I’ve had too much of other people’s,” she replies.
“Oh, indeed—we all have. But you’re the opposite extreme. Information has to be extracted with pincers.”
Gina smiles.
“I’d known you for a couple of months before it became apparent that you had a family. I was beginning to think orphan status, or care of the local council.”
She laughs. “As if . . .”
“And thereafter is not exactly an open book,” he continues. “Radio Swindon has been mentioned—the early days. Some significant assignments since.”
“It’s all in the CV,” says Gina.
“I know. I’ve read it. It’s between the lines I’m interested in.”
“You know about David. You know about my various run-ins with my editors.”
“Indeed. All in the public domain, so to speak. It’s the defining moments I’m after.”
“Oh, those,” says Gina.
They are in the French bistro, which has supplanted the Turkish place. Gina is off to South Africa next week. Both are aware of looming separation.
“The thing is,” she says. “Does one recognize them? Not at the time, that’s for sure.”
“But they surface, don’t they?”
“So does a whole lot of rubbish. Stuff you remember that’s neither here nor there.”
“Ah, that’s not for you to say. Deeply revealing, perhaps.”
Gina reflects. Then: “We’re walking to school and there is a caterpillar with a green stripe down its back on a fence, and Roger puts it in his pencil case. Revealing of what?”
Philip shrugs. “You’d have to take that to a professional.”
Further reflection. “I’m in Bosnia, I think, and our cameraman is sitting by the side of the road eating a slab of bread and cheese. He puts it down for a moment, and a stray dog sneaks up and scoffs it.”
“You’re cheating,” says Philip. “You’re deliberately serving up the junk.”
Possibly. Probably. Gina knows that she is perhaps economical with self-exposure. Why? Well, that too is presumably a matter for the professionals. Suffice it that she prefers not to release too much of all those retrospective moments, even to Philip, whom she loves. One’s interior life is murky enough, in its way; no need to display it to others.
Different kinds of murk, there are. The murk of moments you would prefer to obliterate, when you did something stupid, unpleasant, regrettable. That cameraman: the coda to the dog-and-slab-of-bread moment is that she slept with the man that night, a guy she hardly knew, might not see again, didn’t much care for, and why the hell did she do that? Murk.
But there is that other kind of murk—the times that have slid away into a sort of mist, stretches of time into which you peer, when you see some of what happened, and grope for the rest.
She is in the hall, messing about, pulling faces at herself in the mirror above the table. There is no one else around, which is exceptional, at Allersmead there is always someone else around. She can hear voices from upstairs—Roger and Katie, with Clare piping up from time to time. The others are maybe out. Ingrid went off somewhere, earlier on, which is unusual also. Ingrid has been peculiar lately.
The door to Dad’s study is slightly ajar, and now she hears voices from within. Dad says something, and Mum breaks in, audible, with the pitch that means she is in a state.
“You have to talk to her.”
Dad’s reply cannot be heard.
Mum again, shrill: “If she goes, goodness knows what . . . She mustn’t take Clare.”
Gina is idly interested. Take Clare where, and why?
Dad says, “I doubt if we have any right to prevent her.”
Mum, at danger level: “Don’t you care?”
Nothing from Dad. Silence.
Mum, quieter now, dangerous in a different way: “This is a family. Clare is part of it. And the situation is all your responsibility. Is it not?”
Dad says, “I am hardly likely to forget.”
Mum is now inaudible. There is a brief flow of sound from which there lifts the occasional words: “. . . hurt . . . shock . . . young . . .”
A silence. Then Dad says, “Indeed. An aberration for which I have paid dearly.”
A what? What has Dad paid for? Gina is now quite attentive, alert to tension, to adults behaving oddly as much as to what is being said. Why are they talking to each other like this?
A floorboard creaks. Someone is moving in the room. As her father opens the door, Gina shoots into the kitchen, just in time.
Radio Swindon seems very far away. Gina today is not exactly a household name, but her face would seem vaguely familiar to very many people. In the Radio Swindon days she was a girl with a microphone, waylaying town councillors and businessmen and people in the street, politely insistent; now, she has the authority of her network, her attendant crew—she is not so easily brushed aside. But she doesn’t feel much different, the game is the same. You muscle in where you may not be wanted, you ask people questions that they may not wish to answer; but also, you inform, you reveal, you communicate. It’s a perverse way to earn a living, she sometimes thinks.
She was programmed from an early age, that is how it now feels: the need to question, to investigate, a certain relish for argument. She cut her teeth on that minister for education, perhaps. She remembers an enjoyable frisson of indignation at this patronizing figure, empowered by status, hectoring the impotent young. I may be young, she had thought, but I can field an opinion or two.
She had considered politics as a career, and then veered away, seeing politicians as self-serving, professionally glib and versatile. Either you bludgeoned your way to the top, or you served time as a quacking backbencher.
Radio Swindon may be far away, but Gina sees that time as climactic. That was when she realized what she wanted to do, what she was going to do. She loved the wayward nature of an interview, its unpredictability. The centenarian who would suddenly erupt into blasphemy, giving pause for thought to the studio editor; the dangerous shoals of vox pop—even in Swindon they could startle you.
Outside a primary school she seeks views on family size from waiting mothers. A parenting guru has advocated two as the ideal extent of a family—three at a pinch; there has been much press comment. Gina feeds some leading questions, hoping to get someone to say that this is the first step towards mandatory limitation, along Chinese lines. The mothers are for the most part uncooperative and their opinions anodyne: it’s nice if you get one of each, then you feel you can stop; of course there’s always the accident, isn’t there? (A giggle.)
Then a woman says, “How old are you, love?”
Gina smiles, trying to deflect. The interviewee does not do the questioning.
“Younger than most of us anyway. No kids?”
This won’t do. “Well, no,” says Gina. “Tell me, do you think people should be limited to two children?”
The woman says, “You wait, my dear. When you get started you won’t be counting them out. They happen or they don’t. How many in your family—brothers and sisters?”
Gina smiles again, parrying. “Suppose there was legislation limiting family size—would you go along with that?”
“How many?” insists the woman.
“Six,” says Gina crossly.
“Catholic
s, were you?”
This is getting out of hand. “No,” says Gina. “Would you personally be prepared to . . .”
“Six and not Catholics,” says the woman. “Then either your mum was put upon or she was a glutton for punishment. So how was it for you, in a family that size?”
Gina is on the back foot now. “Actually, that’s not really quite the point,” she says.
“Come on,” pursues the woman. “Don’t tell me you weren’t at each other’s throats half the time. Boys or girls, were they?”
Enough. Gina knows when she is outmaneuvered. Close the interview, as gracefully as possible, and move on.
Now she is thirty-nine and then she was . . . what? Twenty-two or -three. She cannot see that other self—cub reporter harassing older women who became justifiably resistant. You do not see yourself in those earlier incarnations, you remain the observer, the center of the action, the person for whom something is happening. Each slide is suspended, it hangs in the head—over and done with but going on forever.
And what about this one? Earlier? Later? All she knows is that she is—was—in the Allersmead kitchen with Sandra, and Ingrid, who is ironing. What have they been talking about that led up to this? Gina does not know, only that what was said next has crystallized in her head, just this exchange.
Ingrid looks up from her ironing. She addresses Sandra: “It was Gina’s birthday party. Of course you did not mean to push her. Not so as to hurt her. Just, you pushed a bit.”
They stare at her.
“How do you know?” says Gina.
Ingrid shrugs. “I saw.”
Gina turns to Sandra. “Do you remember?”
Sandra looks away. “Not really. I remember . . . the fuss. I was seven.”
She probably did, thinks Gina. It fits. Did Mum know? Does Mum know?
Gina turns to Ingrid. “Does Mum know?”
“She did not see,” says Ingrid. “Only I saw.” She sounds distinctly smug.
Gina laughs, startling all three of them. “And all this time you’ve kept shtum. Why?”
Ingrid is intent upon the ironing. She spreads a sleeve upon the board, smooths it. She shrugs. “It was something that only I would know. I liked that.”
Gina addresses Sandra. “I forgive you. It was an inexcusable act of aggression but I forgive you.”
Alison walks into the room. “Forgive her for what, dear?”
Ingrid looks as though she may be about to speak.
“For helping herself to my shampoo,” says Gina. “How magnanimous can you get? Eh, Ingrid?” She beams upon Sandra (upstaged, wrong-footed) and sweeps from the room.
A family is a coherent mass, a set of people united because that is the way it is, progressing thus from day to day, year by year, and who is to question the matter? The component parts of this mass may make their individual sorties into the outer world—they may go to school, go to work, go shopping—but they always roll back into that self-contained unit. Until, in the nature of things, fission takes place—but at Allersmead that was a long way off, unthinkable even, for what now seems to Gina an eternal present. There was Allersmead, and its inhabitants, except that now and again there might come a moment of observation, of evaluation.
She watches Clare one day and sees that Clare looks like Ingrid, very like Ingrid. Has she never seen this before? Well, yes—but she has never thought about it before.
She thinks.
Roger and Katie look like Mum. Paul looks like Dad. Sandra and I have a bit of each. Whereas Clare . . .
People do not get to look like each other because they live in the same house. It is to do with genes.
She nurtures these thoughts for a while. Eventually, she mentions them to Paul, who just looks puzzled. When she raises the matter with Sandra, in a rare confiding moment, Sandra is not puzzled; she is brisk. “Yeah,” she says. “I know. I’ve noticed too.”
But Ingrid has no boyfriends. Ingrid has no life beyond Allersmead, so far as anyone knows. That Jan who came to Crackington Haven is in the future still. I was five when Clare arrived, thinks Gina. Sandra was four. That was well before Ingrid went away that time. Ingrid had been here all along, and nowhere else. And she has always stayed. They are both thinking this, but neither comments. Merely, Sandra’s eyebrows lift.
“So why did she stay?” says Philip. “Why didn’t she just take Clare and go? It doesn’t look as though she and your father were exactly . . .”
“A unit?” says Gina coolly. “Oh no. If they ever had been.”
“So why?”
“We were a family, weren’t we? Families are indissoluble.”
Philip is interested. Allersmead interests him. Gina is amused rather than irritated by this interest, knowing that this is the way he is. He inquires, he is programmed to pursue. And she likes that quality. Moreover, she can glimpse through his eyes—she can see Allersmead as he sees it, as a baffling, intriguing phenomenon. Whereas for her it is just the immutable fact from which she has arisen.
Indeed, these days she does not much think about family, and Allersmead. From time to time, she touches base with Paul. Occasionally her mother will ring. And of course that eternal present drifts back, reminding her that a person is forever hitched to an elsewhere, to the other time and place.
Today, she is everywhere—in the flat, in the office, out and about in London, in a plane, stepping off a plane into one of those alternative worlds that make up the globe. She has been everywhere for years now, miles and miles from Allersmead. Allersmead lies submerged beneath many layers of subsequent experience, some of which has revealed to her something about Allersmead.
Gina considers marriage to be a curious institution. Nowadays people do not so much bother with it. Perhaps in due course it will wither away entirely. It would seem to survive because it has a legal significance, and a religious one for some, and a fair number of young women still like to dress up and be the center of attention for one ecstatic day. And of course it has been replaced by something very similar, if not so legally hazardous. Living with someone is marriage without the red tape. The pleasures and perils are the same.
Around the world, Gina has seen and noted the subservient role of married women in many societies. Women cook and mind the children. Ring any bells, does that? She sees Alison in the kitchen at Allersmead, serving up meal upon meal upon meal. She does not have to fetch the water from a well, or grind the corn, or milk the goat, but her life’s work has been the provision of food. How lucky that she actually enjoys cooking, thinks Gina.
Subservient. Subservience implies inferior status, doing what you are told, or what is expected of you. But Mum did what she did because that is what she wanted to do. Dad was fed and watered like the rest of us, and no doubt would have spoken up if service had ceased, but he did not instruct.
What did he say to her indeed? Listening, Gina finds the airwaves rather silent here. They didn’t say much to each other, she finds. Mostly, Mum is addressing everyone, or attending to a particular child. Dad is making some comment, very likely sardonic, or is silent, or is simply absent, segregated in his study. She does not hear her parents discuss the state of the nation, or even what to do at the weekend.
She thinks of the dialogue between Philip and herself—the daily, ongoing dialogue. She sees her parents afresh. She wonders about this strange, required system that sets two people alongside each other, in bed and out of it, this precarious conjunction.
She is young—seven perhaps, or eight. They are on a beach, it is the summer holiday, and she is paddling in the surf. She turns and looks back, and sees her parents quite small and far away, sitting side by side on a rug. Dad is reading. Mum is putting sun cream on Katie and Roger. All around are other groups, other families. She sees that the world is made up of families, everyone is thus hitched, thus identified. The beach is composed of these units—self-sufficient, self-contained, alien from one another: the only known faces are those of her mother and her father and her brothers and si
sters.
David once said to her, “You don’t need me. You like me—possibly you love me—but you don’t need me.” She heard this as a reproach, a criticism, but knew that he was right, and saw the end of their time together, like a bank of cloud on the horizon.
David is with someone else today. They have a child. Gina sees now that he had needed her, and that this imbalance was at the heart of the difficulties into which they had fallen. Perhaps need is the crucial element in any relationship, the necessary bonding material. Sexual need, emotional need, material need. But both parties must be needy, in one way or another, or things will run amok.
She does not care to assess the levels of need where she and Philip are concerned. Occasionally, gingerly, she squints at her own need and sees it quite emphatic—healthily so perhaps. Him too? No, let’s not go there. Fingers crossed.
“The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife.” She hears that nursery song; you played that game at birthday parties, in a circle, one person in the middle, Mum chivying people into position, the windup gramophone wheezing out the tune (they were the only family still to have a windup gramophone; visiting children gawped). “Everybody sing now,” cries Mum. “‘The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife . . .’ ”
The farmer needs a wife to cook and wash and milk the cow and to provide him with strong farming sons. But the wife doesn’t want him, or so Gina seems to remember, she wants a child—the primordial urge. But actually the wife would have needed him, even if she didn’t want him, because in the early modern period and beyond (Gina’s history module at university prompts her) the position of an unmarried woman was dodgy—you needed a man to supply food and shelter, to give you social status. See Jane Austen, see the plight of girls in the man-deprived years after the First World War.