We puzzled our way through children’s books and flashcards and test extracts. It was good for me to realize that Claire was enjoying it too, much more than her short, slightly awkward conversations with her sons—she had been divorced for a long time, I found out.
Finally, eventually, like a musician tentatively picking up an instrument, we started to speak a little—haltingly, painfully—in French. I found it easier to listen than to speak, but Claire was endlessly patient—we had so little else to do—and so gentle when she corrected me that I couldn’t believe what an idiot I had been not to have paid closer attention to this wonderful teacher when I’d had the chance.
“Did you live in France—est-ce que tu habitas en France?” I asked slowly one dank spring morning, when the green buds on the trees outside seemed to be enjoying the rain, but nobody else did. It was always the same temperature inside the hospital anyway, a hermetically sealed ship disconnected from the outside world.
“A long time ago,” she replied, not quite meeting my eyes. “And not for very long.”
- - -
1972
It was, Claire knew, the daftest form of rebellion. Hardly rebellion at all, really. Still. She sat, fixed at the breakfast table, staring at her cereal. She was too old, at seventeen, for children’s cereal, she knew. She’d rather have coffee, but it wasn’t a fight she was prepared to take on. On this other matter, however…
“You’re not wearing those things to my chapel.”
Those things referred to a new pair of flares Claire had saved up for. She’d had a Christmas holiday job in Chelsea Girl. Her father had had a very difficult time reconciling himself to the fact that she was willing to take on the mantle of hard work (which he did believe in, very much) against the fact that it was very clearly taking place in a den of iniquity that sold harlot’s clothing. Her mother, as so often, must have had a word behind the scenes; she had never, and would never, dare contradict the Reverend Marcus Forest in public. Few would.
Claire glanced down at her denim-clad legs. She had spent her entire life being relentlessly unfashionable. Her father thought fashion was a fast track to eternal torment. Her mother instead had made her pinafores and long school skirts and dirndls for Sundays.
But working had opened her eyes, made her feel more grown-up. The other girls in the shop were twenty, older even, worldly wise. They discussed nightclubs and boys and makeup (strictly banned at Claire’s house) and found Claire’s life (everyone knew the Reverend) hilarious. The older, sophisticated girls took her under their wings, made her dress up in the latest clothes, cooing over her slender figure and undyed pale blond hair that always made her look, as far as she was concerned, washed out (although there weren’t many mirrors in the house). The boys hadn’t asked her out at school. She had told herself that it was because of her father but feared, inside, that it was something else, that she was so quiet, and uninteresting, and her pale hair and eyebrows meant she sometimes felt she was barely there at all.
As the three weeks passed, every day she grew a little bolder. It finished nastily one weekend, when her father was trying to write his Christmas sermon and she arrived back in from the shop with her eyes heavily made up, dramatically kohled in a shimmering emerald green with brown shading all the way around the socket and—most shocking of all—her eyebrows, colored in dark brown with a pencil one of the girls had produced. She had stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror of the strange, mysterious creature she had become, no longer pale and colorless. She did not look skinny and gaunt; instead, she looked slender and glamorous. Cassie had pulled her pale hair off her face and pinned back her childish fringe, and it added years to her. All the girls had laughed and insisted she come out with them that Saturday.
Claire didn’t think so.
Her father stood up, furious.
“Get it off,” he said quietly. “Take it off. Not under my roof.”
He didn’t get angry or shout. He never did; that wasn’t his way. He just told her exactly how it would be. In Claire’s mind, the voice of her father and the voice of God, in whom she believed completely, were very much the same. There was no doubt.
Her mother followed her to the avocado-colored bathroom and gave her a consoling cuddle.
“You do look lovely,” she said, as Claire furiously wiped her face with a brown washcloth. “You know,” she said, “in a year or two, you can go off to secretarial school or teacher training, and you can do whatever you like. It’s not long to wait, my darling.”
But to Claire, it felt like a million years away. All the other girls got to dress up and go out and have boyfriends with tinny old cars or terrifying motorbikes.
“That job…I thought it was a good idea but…” Her mother shook her head. “You know what he’s like. It’s driving him crazy. I just thought you needed a bit of independence…”
Then she disappeared and Claire heard, late into the night, a conversation, whispered, that she wasn’t meant to overhear, but could tell, always, by the tone that it was about her. It was difficult being an only child sometimes. Her father seemed to treat her as someone who wanted nothing more than to get into terrible trouble at five seconds’ notice, which drove her mad. Her mother did what she could, but when the Reverend went into one of his glowering sulks, they could last for days, and it made the atmosphere in the house very, very unpleasant. He was used to the two women in his life doing his bidding without question. But Claire yearned, more than anything else, for a bit of freedom.
The job was over, even after the shop offered to keep her on as a Saturday girl. She was desperate to do it, but it wasn’t worth the grief. So she remained in her role of working hard at school—they had mentioned university, but the Reverend wasn’t a huge fan of education for women and wanted to keep her closer to home than York or Liverpool. Claire didn’t really think it could happen. Sometimes, late at night after her parents had gone to bed, she’d stay up late watching the movie on BBC2 and feeling a tiny clutch of panic around her heart that she would stay in Kidinsborough forever, watching her parents get older and older.
Two months later, in early March, her mother came to breakfast with a sly expression on her face and an envelope with a stripe of red and blue airmail around the corner of the pale blue paper and looping, exotic-looking handwriting.