Staring at the Sun Read Online Free Page B

daunted by how grown-up they were. How long would it take before she was as grown-up as that?
    They knew their own minds; they had opinions; they could tell right from wrong. She felt she could tell right from wrong only because she had been repeatedly informed of the difference; her opinions were twitching, vulnerable tadpoles compared with the honking frogs that were her parents’ views; while as for knowing your own mind, this seemed a bewildering process. How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place? A dog circling in pursuit of its own cropped tail. Jean felt tired at the very thought.
    The other part of growing up was getting to look like someone. Her father, who managed the grocery at Bryden, looked like a man who managed a grocery: he was round and neat, hitched uphis sleeves with a pair of elasticated steel bands, and seemed as if he was kind but had a reserve of severity—the sort of man who knew that a pound of flour was a pound of flour and not fifteen ounces, who could tell which biscuits were in which square tin without even looking at the label, and who could put his hand close, oh so close, to the whirring bacon slicer without shaving the skin from his palm.
    Jean’s mother also looked like someone, with her pointy nose and rather protuberant blue eyes, with her hair caught back in a bun during the daytime when she wore her bottle-green-and-claret WVS uniform, or loose in the evenings when she listened to Father and knew exactly what questions to ask. She had gone on salvage drives and helped collect thousands of tin cans; she had spent weeks threading strips of coloured fabric through camouflage netting (“Just like making a huge carpet, Jean”); she had baled paper, filled in at the mobile canteen, packed vegetable hampers for minesweepers. No wonder she knew her own mind; no wonder she looked like someone.
    Jean would sometimes stare into the mirror, inspecting herself for signs of change; but her straight hair lay sullenly flat on her head, and her blue eyes were marred by silly flecks. An article in the Daily Express had explained that many film stars in Hollywood were successful because their faces were heart-shaped. Well, there was no hope for that now; she was far too square-jawed. If only these bits of her face would start looking as if they belonged together. Oh, do get on with it, she sometimes whispered at the mirror. Mother once caught her at self-examination and commented, “You’re not pretty, but you’ll do.”
    I’ll do, she thought. My parents think I’ll do. But would anybody else? She missed Uncle Leslie. They weren’t allowed to talk about him nowadays, but she often thought of him; he had always been on her side. Once, they’d been walking up the long tenth at the Old Green Heaven, Jean carrying the sand iron in the good-luck position, and she’d asked him, “What will I do when I grow up?”
    It had seemed natural to ask, natural to assume that he would be more likely to know than she. Uncle Leslie, with his brown-and-white co-respondent shoes and his quietly rattling clubs, had taken the head of the sand iron and waggled it from side to side on her shoulder. Then he put his hand on the back of her neck and murmured, “The sky’s the limit, little Jeanie. The sky’s the limit.”
    Not much happened in the war at first, it seemed to Jean; but then it got going and people started to be killed. She also began to understand it better: who was trying to run Father out of business, and the names of his shifty associates. She felt fiercely about these foreigners with their underhand tricks. She saw a fat thumb with a dirty nail pressing down on the scales. Perhaps she ought to join up. But Father thought she was doing more good where she was. “Keep the home fires burning,” he said.
    And then the war brought Tommy Prosser. That was definitely an Incident. The billeting papers arrived on a Tuesday, the Wednesday was spent