out at first was the mess of Keith’s dark curls and his naked young shoulders, tanned and muscular from the work he did; and then she saw how down inside the bag Penny’s head with its swirl of auburn hair like a fox’s brush was wrapped in his brown arms against his chest.
She remembered that she had felt a stinging shock. Not heartbreak or any kind of serious sorrow: she hadn’t had time to do anything like fall in love with Keith, and anyway, love didn’t seem to be quite what it was that could have happened, if things had gone differently, between them. It was more as if she felt that, if you put the two of them alongside Keith Reid, it was in some obvious way she and not Penny who was his match, his mate. Penny all through the loud debate of the night before had sat quietly while Caro met him, point for point, and smoked joint for joint with him. Also, there was unfinished business between her and him: some contest he had begun and had now abruptly – it made himseem almost cowardly – broken off. Even as Caro recoiled, just for that first moment, in the shock of finding them, she knew she was learning from it something essential she needed to know for her survival, something about the way that men chose women.
Penny had given up after one year at art college and was living at home again with their parents in Banbury. She was thinking about going to do teacher training. Instead, she embarked on the relationship with Keith: it did almost seem, in retrospect, like a career choice. That whole long middle section of Penny’s life, twenty years, was taken up in the struggle with him: pursued by him; dedicating herself to him; counselling him through his creative agonies when he was writing; bearing his children; supporting his infidelities, his drinking, his disappearances, his contempts; making every effort to tame him, to turn him into a decent acceptable partner and father. Then when Penny had finished with him once and for all, he slipped without a protest into cosy domesticity with his second wife, as if there hadn’t ever been a problem. —I was just the warm-up act, Penny joked about it now. —Softening him up ready for the show with Lynne.
Through all of it, Caro had supported her sister: sometimes literally, with money, mostly just with listening and company and sympathy. When Keith went back to live in Wales and got Welsh Arts Council funding to make the first film, Penny had two small babies. Instead of finding a house in Cardiff, even in Pontypridd, Keith had insisted – on principle – on taking her to live in a council house on the edge of a huge bleak estate on the side of a mountain in Merthyr Tydfil where she didn’t know anyone, and no one liked her because she was posh and English. It was half an hour’s walk with the pushchair down to the nearest shops. When a job came up in Cardiff, Caro moved therepartly to be near enough to help (she was also escaping the fag end of a tormenting love affair): most weekends after work she drove up to Merthyr to give a hand with the kids, take Penny to the nearest supermarket, and try to persuade her to pack up her things and leave. Penny had made the house inside gorgeous on next to nothing, with rush mats and big embroidered cushions and mobiles and chimes pinned to the ceiling; she painted the lids of instant coffee jars in rainbow colours and kept brown rice and lentils and dried kidney beans in them. But the wind seemed never to stop whistling around the corners of the house and in through the ill-fitting window frames, setting the mobiles swinging.
Keith usually wasn’t there and if he was he and Caro hardly spoke. One strange Saturday evening he had had a gun for some reason: perhaps it was to do with the film, she couldn’t remember, although that wouldn’t have explained why he also had live ammunition. He had claimed that he knew how to dismantle it, had taken bits off it and spread them out on the tablecloth in the corner of the room where
She remembered that she had felt a stinging shock. Not heartbreak or any kind of serious sorrow: she hadn’t had time to do anything like fall in love with Keith, and anyway, love didn’t seem to be quite what it was that could have happened, if things had gone differently, between them. It was more as if she felt that, if you put the two of them alongside Keith Reid, it was in some obvious way she and not Penny who was his match, his mate. Penny all through the loud debate of the night before had sat quietly while Caro met him, point for point, and smoked joint for joint with him. Also, there was unfinished business between her and him: some contest he had begun and had now abruptly – it made himseem almost cowardly – broken off. Even as Caro recoiled, just for that first moment, in the shock of finding them, she knew she was learning from it something essential she needed to know for her survival, something about the way that men chose women.
Penny had given up after one year at art college and was living at home again with their parents in Banbury. She was thinking about going to do teacher training. Instead, she embarked on the relationship with Keith: it did almost seem, in retrospect, like a career choice. That whole long middle section of Penny’s life, twenty years, was taken up in the struggle with him: pursued by him; dedicating herself to him; counselling him through his creative agonies when he was writing; bearing his children; supporting his infidelities, his drinking, his disappearances, his contempts; making every effort to tame him, to turn him into a decent acceptable partner and father. Then when Penny had finished with him once and for all, he slipped without a protest into cosy domesticity with his second wife, as if there hadn’t ever been a problem. —I was just the warm-up act, Penny joked about it now. —Softening him up ready for the show with Lynne.
Through all of it, Caro had supported her sister: sometimes literally, with money, mostly just with listening and company and sympathy. When Keith went back to live in Wales and got Welsh Arts Council funding to make the first film, Penny had two small babies. Instead of finding a house in Cardiff, even in Pontypridd, Keith had insisted – on principle – on taking her to live in a council house on the edge of a huge bleak estate on the side of a mountain in Merthyr Tydfil where she didn’t know anyone, and no one liked her because she was posh and English. It was half an hour’s walk with the pushchair down to the nearest shops. When a job came up in Cardiff, Caro moved therepartly to be near enough to help (she was also escaping the fag end of a tormenting love affair): most weekends after work she drove up to Merthyr to give a hand with the kids, take Penny to the nearest supermarket, and try to persuade her to pack up her things and leave. Penny had made the house inside gorgeous on next to nothing, with rush mats and big embroidered cushions and mobiles and chimes pinned to the ceiling; she painted the lids of instant coffee jars in rainbow colours and kept brown rice and lentils and dried kidney beans in them. But the wind seemed never to stop whistling around the corners of the house and in through the ill-fitting window frames, setting the mobiles swinging.
Keith usually wasn’t there and if he was he and Caro hardly spoke. One strange Saturday evening he had had a gun for some reason: perhaps it was to do with the film, she couldn’t remember, although that wouldn’t have explained why he also had live ammunition. He had claimed that he knew how to dismantle it, had taken bits off it and spread them out on the tablecloth in the corner of the room where
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