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Authors: Penelope Lively
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coming.”
“Gina?”
“Gina’s coming.”
So they will all be there. Probably. Oh, and Corinna and Martin, apparently. That’s a turnup for the books. They do not often come to Allersmead. Katie is nervous of Corinna; she’s so clever, and she looks at you as though you are being assessed. Martin’s not much better. He knows everything there is to know about Shakespeare, he’s written all these books; what are you to talk to him about? Katie has always slunk into the background when Corinna and Martin show up. Gina copes with them better, and Sandra, who doesn’t give a hang about anyone assessing her.
There is to be a family supper this evening, for which she will be in reasonable time, and then tomorrow a buffet lunch for some friends and neighbors. A couple of people who were at school with Mum, and her cookery class—the group who come to Allersmead once a week to learn higher cooking, Mum’s first-ever earning endeavor, and why not? And a few other people Mum knows and . . . Well, Dad doesn’t really have any friends, when you think about it.
Twenty-five years. That is a seriously long time. A seriously long marriage. Sitting there in the train, Katie inspects this expanse of time, reeling back like a length of track, as long as her life, and then more. At the far end of it stand her young parents, but these are people she cannot imagine. A young Dad? Goodness no. A thinner, fresher Mum? A childless Mum? No, no. Her parents are unchanging figures, unchangeable, set fast at some point long ago, much as they are now, much as they were—are—for the Katies who are still playing in the Allersmead garden, digging with Roger in the sandbox, being pushed into the scary cupboard, getting the fairy costume out of the dressing-up drawer, trooping down into the cellar.
Actually, I never liked the cellar game, she thinks. But you had to, if everyone else was. And she didn’t like it when Gina and Sandra fought, and when Paul got told off by Dad, and when . . . When what? When there was something stalking around, something uncomfortable, like shadows outside the window on a dark night, but not that, something inside the house. What do I mean? thinks Katie. I don’t know now, and I didn’t know then.
The train pulls into the station. She reaches for her backpack, gets off, goes outside to where the buses are, and oh good, there is a home bus waiting.
She gets off the bus at the end of the road and walks the last stretch to Allersmead. How many times has she done that? Every school day. Twelve school years. So multiply by . . . Oh, thousands anyway. She has walked along here aged five, and then up and up and up until eighteen, and it’s after A levels and she has an A and two Bs and Manchester will have her. That wall where there used to be a ginger cat sitting, and that lamppost to which she used to race Roger, and the drain into which they used to drop sweetie papers. She and Roger always waited for each other, and walked together. When Clare started school, they waited for her too. The others went separately, for the most part, as though they had nothing to do with one another. Paul, Gina, Sandra—solitary figures trailing a few yards apart. Sometimes Paul and Gina would join up, sometimes Gina and Sandra—generally, they straggled. She can see them still, in different incarnations—smaller, larger. Gina and Sandra in those maroon school tunics, but Sandra manages to make hers look elegant, something about the way she ties the belt, the way she walks.
If I have children, thinks Katie—maybe not so many. But such thoughts immediately evaporate—she cannot see beyond finals, sometimes not even as far as that. She lives still from week to week, month to month. Her head is full of her friends, the kaleidoscope of her relationships, of Chaucer and Donne and Middlemarch, and if she gets a holiday job might she be able to save enough to go to France with people in the summer. She is tethered still to
“Gina?”
“Gina’s coming.”
So they will all be there. Probably. Oh, and Corinna and Martin, apparently. That’s a turnup for the books. They do not often come to Allersmead. Katie is nervous of Corinna; she’s so clever, and she looks at you as though you are being assessed. Martin’s not much better. He knows everything there is to know about Shakespeare, he’s written all these books; what are you to talk to him about? Katie has always slunk into the background when Corinna and Martin show up. Gina copes with them better, and Sandra, who doesn’t give a hang about anyone assessing her.
There is to be a family supper this evening, for which she will be in reasonable time, and then tomorrow a buffet lunch for some friends and neighbors. A couple of people who were at school with Mum, and her cookery class—the group who come to Allersmead once a week to learn higher cooking, Mum’s first-ever earning endeavor, and why not? And a few other people Mum knows and . . . Well, Dad doesn’t really have any friends, when you think about it.
Twenty-five years. That is a seriously long time. A seriously long marriage. Sitting there in the train, Katie inspects this expanse of time, reeling back like a length of track, as long as her life, and then more. At the far end of it stand her young parents, but these are people she cannot imagine. A young Dad? Goodness no. A thinner, fresher Mum? A childless Mum? No, no. Her parents are unchanging figures, unchangeable, set fast at some point long ago, much as they are now, much as they were—are—for the Katies who are still playing in the Allersmead garden, digging with Roger in the sandbox, being pushed into the scary cupboard, getting the fairy costume out of the dressing-up drawer, trooping down into the cellar.
Actually, I never liked the cellar game, she thinks. But you had to, if everyone else was. And she didn’t like it when Gina and Sandra fought, and when Paul got told off by Dad, and when . . . When what? When there was something stalking around, something uncomfortable, like shadows outside the window on a dark night, but not that, something inside the house. What do I mean? thinks Katie. I don’t know now, and I didn’t know then.
The train pulls into the station. She reaches for her backpack, gets off, goes outside to where the buses are, and oh good, there is a home bus waiting.
She gets off the bus at the end of the road and walks the last stretch to Allersmead. How many times has she done that? Every school day. Twelve school years. So multiply by . . . Oh, thousands anyway. She has walked along here aged five, and then up and up and up until eighteen, and it’s after A levels and she has an A and two Bs and Manchester will have her. That wall where there used to be a ginger cat sitting, and that lamppost to which she used to race Roger, and the drain into which they used to drop sweetie papers. She and Roger always waited for each other, and walked together. When Clare started school, they waited for her too. The others went separately, for the most part, as though they had nothing to do with one another. Paul, Gina, Sandra—solitary figures trailing a few yards apart. Sometimes Paul and Gina would join up, sometimes Gina and Sandra—generally, they straggled. She can see them still, in different incarnations—smaller, larger. Gina and Sandra in those maroon school tunics, but Sandra manages to make hers look elegant, something about the way she ties the belt, the way she walks.
If I have children, thinks Katie—maybe not so many. But such thoughts immediately evaporate—she cannot see beyond finals, sometimes not even as far as that. She lives still from week to week, month to month. Her head is full of her friends, the kaleidoscope of her relationships, of Chaucer and Donne and Middlemarch, and if she gets a holiday job might she be able to save enough to go to France with people in the summer. She is tethered still to
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