Wren had never had to fight her corner when it came to being or becoming a young woman; her father had been curiously brusque on the issue of women’s careers andeducation. ‘You’ve got a brain,’ he’d told her when, at twelve, she first expressed an interest in teaching. ‘Why not? Your mother – she could’ve done anything she wanted with a brilliant mind like that. She was top of her class at university when we met – a far better scholar than me.’
‘But she doesn’t do anything now,’ Wren had replied, the enormity of the future rising up around her. ‘She just looks after us. And the house.’
‘And very nobly she does so. The point is, she could have done anything. She had choices . The world is out there for you to explore, Little Wren. I hope you’ll exercise your choices sufficiently.’
At times like these, from the youngest age, the idea of the future crashed in on Wren, so that she felt the way she did in those dreams where she was running and arriving nowhere. She would observe her parents and their friends, listening in on their dinner party chatter from the top step of the stairs or dawdling in the hallway beyond the dining room. Between the clink and scrape of cutlery on china, the earnest talk and jovial laughter could set her ill at ease for days: talk of joblessness, the starving millions, poor Sophie Hopkins who’d lost another child. How do you lose a child? she would fretfully wonder. Are the people starving because there are no jobs? Low voices and concern over Jill and Tom Springfield, who were absent tonight – going through a divorce – and Wendy-Anne Charlton from her class, recently removed from school because of concerns at home . Met Office fears for the rise in the tide table – the plight of the dolphins – the fence at the back of the house that was sure to blow straight through the patio doors if we get another storm like the one last week . Each of these things, filtering into Wren’s young consciousness, were in themselves manageable, if somewhatbleak. But it was the creeping accumulation of her fears which could, at times of uncertainty and fatigue, reach out to grab at her ankles and send her scurrying to her room in a fog of terror. There she would fashion her pillows and blankets to form a small, dark cave, into which she’d crawl, surrounding herself with the reassuring company of her careworn bears and Raggedy Ann. At best she would slip into fitful sleep, before Dad stopped by to kiss her goodnight and straighten her bed sheets; at worst, she would remain there awake for hours, wishing herself rather dead than alive and responsible in some way for the ever-shifting state of the world.
She spoke once of these terrors with Laura, many years after they had first manifested themselves at the age of nine, on a night in January when a gin-loaded pal of her parents’ crashed his car on the way out of the drive. Wren had seen the whole thing from the landing window, where, fuelled by the disquieting stories the grown-ups had been sharing over dessert, she had gradually convinced herself that according to the law of averages at least one of her parents was likely to die prematurely. The friend was fine, no more than a small bump and a bruised ego, but that made no difference to Wren: it could have been a lot worse.
‘Does the future frighten you?’ she asked Laura, who was sitting, her legs stretched out across Wren’s, at the other end of their futon in Victoria Terrace, the student digs they had moved into at the start of their second year.
Laura leant out, her hand feeling around the carpet for her cigarette packet. She passed one to Wren and flipped open her lighter, drawing deep to ignite her own cigarette before passing it along. ‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know – jobs, children, nuclear war. Breast cancer. Loneliness – anything.’
Laura rubbed the thumb of her cigarette hand along her jawline. ‘Hmm. Yes and no, I guess. I mean, the
‘But she doesn’t do anything now,’ Wren had replied, the enormity of the future rising up around her. ‘She just looks after us. And the house.’
‘And very nobly she does so. The point is, she could have done anything. She had choices . The world is out there for you to explore, Little Wren. I hope you’ll exercise your choices sufficiently.’
At times like these, from the youngest age, the idea of the future crashed in on Wren, so that she felt the way she did in those dreams where she was running and arriving nowhere. She would observe her parents and their friends, listening in on their dinner party chatter from the top step of the stairs or dawdling in the hallway beyond the dining room. Between the clink and scrape of cutlery on china, the earnest talk and jovial laughter could set her ill at ease for days: talk of joblessness, the starving millions, poor Sophie Hopkins who’d lost another child. How do you lose a child? she would fretfully wonder. Are the people starving because there are no jobs? Low voices and concern over Jill and Tom Springfield, who were absent tonight – going through a divorce – and Wendy-Anne Charlton from her class, recently removed from school because of concerns at home . Met Office fears for the rise in the tide table – the plight of the dolphins – the fence at the back of the house that was sure to blow straight through the patio doors if we get another storm like the one last week . Each of these things, filtering into Wren’s young consciousness, were in themselves manageable, if somewhatbleak. But it was the creeping accumulation of her fears which could, at times of uncertainty and fatigue, reach out to grab at her ankles and send her scurrying to her room in a fog of terror. There she would fashion her pillows and blankets to form a small, dark cave, into which she’d crawl, surrounding herself with the reassuring company of her careworn bears and Raggedy Ann. At best she would slip into fitful sleep, before Dad stopped by to kiss her goodnight and straighten her bed sheets; at worst, she would remain there awake for hours, wishing herself rather dead than alive and responsible in some way for the ever-shifting state of the world.
She spoke once of these terrors with Laura, many years after they had first manifested themselves at the age of nine, on a night in January when a gin-loaded pal of her parents’ crashed his car on the way out of the drive. Wren had seen the whole thing from the landing window, where, fuelled by the disquieting stories the grown-ups had been sharing over dessert, she had gradually convinced herself that according to the law of averages at least one of her parents was likely to die prematurely. The friend was fine, no more than a small bump and a bruised ego, but that made no difference to Wren: it could have been a lot worse.
‘Does the future frighten you?’ she asked Laura, who was sitting, her legs stretched out across Wren’s, at the other end of their futon in Victoria Terrace, the student digs they had moved into at the start of their second year.
Laura leant out, her hand feeling around the carpet for her cigarette packet. She passed one to Wren and flipped open her lighter, drawing deep to ignite her own cigarette before passing it along. ‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know – jobs, children, nuclear war. Breast cancer. Loneliness – anything.’
Laura rubbed the thumb of her cigarette hand along her jawline. ‘Hmm. Yes and no, I guess. I mean, the
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