Chris was right, though I’d never noticed it before. I’d only met Cedric once; an eccentric bachelor who lived in Tangier. But his feet turned slightly in, like Isaac’s, his shoulders were narrow, he bumbled.
‘— Only in build, I mean,’ Chris added, for Cedric liked limp brown boys. ‘I hope he finds a girlfriend soon. Might, you know, sharpen him up a bit.’
I couldn’t deny that would be an improvement. ‘But don’t ever say things like that to his face. It’s a very sensitive age.’
A sullen voice behind us said, ‘That’s typical. Always patronising us. I’m going to tell Isaac what you said.’
And that, I’m afraid, was Susy, who had come into the front room silently and stood there eavesdropping. She must have been very cross to have bothered to talk. Susy was mostly too lazy to talk. It was her characterising trait, being lazy; not the most auspicious characterising trait.
I find it hard to describe her, partly because of all that’s happened since, but I always did find it hard to describe her…
There’s no way of saying this which doesn’t sound odious. Think the unthinkable. The truth about Susy is that she was very pretty in a slightly common way.
I’m trying to be truthful, not likeable. Susy herself was immensely likeable. Not to me or her father as a teenager, that would have been too much to ask, but to other children, when she was small, and their mothers, and teachers, and next-door neighbours, and dentists, and people choosing teams or partners or princesses for the school play. And she didn’t look common as a child. No child looks common, however pretty — few things smaller than the norm look common.
When I first met Susy she was four years old with fair curly hair and dark red cheeks. It was summer, she had been out in the sun, her small pointed nose was prettily freckled and her mouth was what people have been calling ‘a rosebud’ ever since metaphors about lips began.
She smiled at me with all her might. The rosebud opened in a dazzling smile. Of course I wasn’t her stepmother then, I belonged to the ninety per cent of the world whom Susy effortlessly charmed. I confess she looked like a bonus that day; I’d have Chris, with this lovely little girl thrown in… alas, her bonus-value didn’t last long once she realized I would be replacing her mother. She was violently sick at our wedding, a stream of pink vomit, mostly jelly, all over the carpet and my good snake shoes.
She retained into adulthood one unusual feature, her long green slanted eyes, a direct import from her mother’s face where they looked fierce and intelligent. But Penelope had a triangular face, cat-like, not at all like her daughter’s. As Susy moved through her teenage years and grew larger and riper by the hour, her face stayed childishly round. She had melon-like breasts which made people boggle and profuse yellow hair which didn’t darken till she was fifteen or sixteen, by which time she’d learned how to dye it. She was a statuesque blonde; men stared at her. Possibly it annoyed me a little.
My slenderness annoyed her too. Her green eyes, rather diminished in size by the heavy pink cheeks underneath them, would stare at my thigh in tight black trousers pressed flat on the table where I perched, pressed out to twice its normal width but still only the size of one of her arms. Her eyes would narrow, then she’d look away, and yawn dismissively.
At least in her teens she was not too lazy to take a bit of interest in her appearance. She favoured mini-skirts and fitted tops, which never did quite fit her. Perhaps I should have praised her more, for her interest in her looks didn’t last. Later on, to judge from photographs and the rare and sorrowful times we met, she just grew bigger and bigger while continuing to dress in the fashions of the 1980s. On Susy’s flesh this somehow looked tarty and cheap, not dated and spinsterish.
Naturally I was anxious when the breasts began to impinge on me. She was so immediate, so lush — she made me feel bloodless and insubstantial. And her transformation from a pretty little girl was so startlingly quick, leaving the rest of us thinner, paler.
It was Chris I was worried about. Here we were suddenly living in a house with an immensely nubile woman. She didn’t stop sitting on his lap. She didn’t stop giving him six kisses at bedtime; look at it another way, he didn’t stop her. And her total lack of modesty!
I met her one morning skipping down the landing in nothing but a pair of pants, with a towel flung inaccurately round her shoulders so that two astonishing new-grown breasts stuck out towards me as she stopped to talk. The nipples were three times the size of mine! Susy didn’t seem to know they were there.
‘Is there any shampoo I can borrow?’
‘No. I mean yes. You’ll get cold like that.’
‘You’ll have to tell her,’ I said later to Chris. ‘She can’t go round the house with no clothes on. It’ll upset her brother.’
‘You tell her. You’re a woman.’
‘She’s your daughter… she’ll think I’m jealous… I am a bit jealous, actually.’
Chris stared at me amazed. ‘Jealous of my poor clumsy daughter? You must be mad. Of Susy? She was such a pretty kid, but she’s turning into an elephant.’
‘An elephant with tits.’
He winced. ‘I don’t like you talking about her like that…’
‘You said she was an elephant!’
‘I don’t like the word “tits”, not about my daughter. Oh come on, Alex, she’s still my little girl, I feel protective about her…’
‘Quite right. She’s going to have to be protected. To start with, she’s going to have to wear some clothes.’
His preceptions were oddly blinkered, I suppose because he censored any thought of sex.
One time we had Chris’s boss Darryl to dinner. He was superficially loathsome, with no hint of depths beneath, and delivered his trite opinions in a loud unfunny monotone.
He delivered them to Susy, or Susy’s forehead, since she stared at her plate, or tried to wiggle his opinions under her chin and towards the amazing shelf of flesh she was attempting to hide under her salmon salad. When he wasn’t addressing her directly, he stared at her with that dreadfully embarrassing fixated glare which seems to consist of compressed sperm that will have to get out before they kill their owner.
But Christopher had noticed nothing amiss. ‘Darryl was just being kind to her.’
‘You’re blind,’ I said. ‘He was crazed with lust.’
‘I think you’re weird, Alex. But I did notice that her clothes didn’t fit. We don’t want her to let the side down.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘she was a triumph. He couldn’t have been more impressed.’
As she grew older she must have known her power. The boyfriends came in an endless stream. I’m sorry, that sentence was unfortunately phrased, and unfair to her; I am sure unfair — and yet all these years later I’m sure of nothing. Were they innocent, all those eager visits from boys bearing gifts of flowers and chocolates?
I think they were. I believe they were. I know now that I insulted her when I kept talking to her about contraception, and pointing out how important qualifications were in the modern world. She wasn’t stupid, we told ourselves, not always convincingly. She had a sense of humour, and good taste in movies, and seemed to like boys and small children… she was brilliant with the toddlers our friends brought round, but there wasn’t much else which seemed to hold her interest. She floated along in the middling stream of her middling private school.