Living In Perhaps Read Online Free Page A

I just look steadily back at her when she uses
that name. I don't even blink.
    'Only sheep,' I replied.
    'It must be a very big garden,' Lorna said. 'I make that forty sets
of steps.'
    Either she's innumerate or she's trying to catch me out. I tend
to think the former.
    'Yes, it is a big garden,' I replied. 'There are yellow tulips, and
white seats to sit on.' I wondered how much detail I could go into
before she realized. 'My favourite seat is by a sundial,' I said.
    But, actually, she has never come out into the garden here with
me. When you go outside you always have to be with a member
of staff, or in sight of one, at least. Lorna has never come and sat
with me in front of the sundial, and looked down the path
between the long beds of yellow tulips.
    But every day she must climb the hundred and twenty steps,
the twenty-four sets of five steps, to come to her place of work.
And not notice them? Now, that is what I call unobservant.
    That spring, when I turned nine, I started piano lessons. It was a
very Carolyn sort of thing to do. I'd badgered away at them to let
me. We had an old upright piano, black as ebony, standing there
useless in the lounge. It had come from my mum's own mother's
house, apparently, along with the noisy pendulum clock on the
mantelpiece and the convex mirror above it, a circular eye that
made your top half bulge weirdly when you peered up into it. All
these things were old . Old was not desirable, or attractive. They
only kept them out of sentiment, and a sense of duty. They liked
things spick and span and new; things they had chosen themselves
from the big stores in town; at least then you knew where
they had been. The piano took up space, and always needed dusting,
and nobody could play it. 'Why not?' I kept on. 'Why not, please ?'
    My mother took me the first time. We walked. The roads round
our way are flat, and perfectly straight, laid out on a grid pattern.
I was surprised to find that the house where I was to have piano
lessons was just like other houses. I had imagined it would be
enormous and grand. The sound of musical instruments would
drift out from tall, open windows. There ought to be huge trees
around it, and hedges and lawns, and a wide flight of stone steps up
to the front door. I didn't recall imagining this beforehand; it was
just that when we got to the little pebble-dashed semi I realized that
that was what I'd expected. Not a concrete path, rose bushes snicked
down to their knuckles, and a holder for milk bottles in the porch
with a dial to tell the milkman how many to leave.
    My mother rang the bell. The door was opened just a foot wide
by someone who peered round it suspiciously: a youngish
woman, dumpy, with rollers in her hair. Was this the musical
type?
    'I'll take you through to Mum,' she muttered.
    We squeezed awkwardly round the door and into the narrow
hallway. A big pushchair took up most of the space. I noticed a
little boy at the back of the hall. He was bumping a push-along toy
crossly against the skirting board.
    We were shown into the front room. The piano was there,
along with a dining table piled with folded ironing, a mirror
engraved with flowers, a kitten calendar on the wall. So disappointingly domestic .
    Another dumpy woman, much older, dressed in a grass-green
Crimplene frock, turned round to us from the piano bench. She
looked like anyone you might see walking down our road,
pegging out washing, getting off a bus.
    'So this is Carol. I'm Mrs Wallis.'
    I gave her a tight smile. My mother hovered, somewhere
between the ironing and the mirror.
    Mrs Wallis pointed to the bench, and I sat down. She showed
me how to find middle C, which I already knew. And so we began.
    If someone was having a lesson when you arrived, you waited
on a seat in the dark hallway. The busy times were after school on
weekdays and on Saturday mornings. The little boy could sometimes
be heard crying, or his mother shouting, or someone would
run noisily up the stairs. All quite