Living In Perhaps by Julia Widdows Page B

table by the door of the front room, and she was going to charge
fines if anyone didn't hand the books back pretty quick. It didn't
work – nobody borrowed anything. And they wouldn't have paid
up, anyway.'
    For all the books there were in the house – propping up the
front-room walls, languishing in piles on the landing, sitting on
the sill in the dining-room window under the damaging rays of
the sun with the tasselled tails of other people's bookmarks hanging
out – they were not a bookish family. I never saw any of them
but Tillie with a book in her hands, and I'm sure she was just looking
at the pictures. Barbara, to my knowledge, never opened
anything but a magazine, and Tom thought of all books as school
textbooks and therefore beneath his consideration. Sometimes to
get up the stairs I had to squeeze past Sebastian, crouching on the
bottom step, scanning that week's Beezer with great concentration.
Mattie was very partial to individual letters, finding them everywhere
– W in the house gable, Ls in the banister rails – but had
trouble cementing them into words. Only Isolde impressed me with
her knowledge of books, as with her knowledge of everything,
which she seemed to gain by osmosis, extracting information with
her X-ray eyes, like an alien invader who can suck your whole
history out of your brain in less than a second.
    To say my tastes were catholic would be an understatement. At
junior school there was one lesson a week when we could visit the
school's library, a dank room next to the sickbay. Everyone fought
over the Tintin books, which were just like comics only in book
form and for some reason allowed in the library. To help the slow
readers, I think; to encourage them that not all books were deadly
books. Of course, I never got one. Never fought hard enough
in the scuffle. I had to take out what was left, I got the deadly
books – Children of the New Forest , The Old Curiosity Shop .
They were printed on hard lavatory paper, in tiny writing, and
smelled of must. I couldn't ever get beyond page one. There was
nothing to interest me, and, anyway, what they really smelled of
was school.
    But the books I borrowed from the Hennessys felt different.
In that first armful I took there was a book called Scoop , which
was sort of funny, and another called Tales from Shakespeare ,
where at least all the tales were fairly short. There was Emma ,
which I couldn't get on with at all, despite the title which attracted
me, and a picture book, a book of paintings by an artist called
Van Gogh. He seemed to use very thick layers of paint, and
rather eggy colours, which I didn't much like. There was a
horrible navy and yellow one with a field full of wavy lines,
and another of an ugly man wearing a fur-trimmed cap and a
bandage. Some of the paintings were only shown in black and
white, which made them even worse. But the book itself, its heavy
shiny paper, the layer of tissue in front of each colour plate, and
its small blocks of print surrounded by acres of luxurious white
space, fascinated me.
    Tillie caught me lugging this one back. 'Oh – do you like him?'
she asked.
    I stopped dead in my tracks. Guilt suffused me, whatever Isolde
had said about it being all right to borrow. I like to think that my
mouth was not hanging open. I'd like to remember that I made
some trenchant statement, but of course I didn't. I couldn't.
    But Tillie was kind, and said, 'I'll find you something else about
painting, if you want.' I nodded. I might have whispered, 'Yes,
please,' but only because I'd been brought up to be polite to
adults.
    She looked out a huge book of Dutch paintings for me, which
I took home and never wanted to bring back. There were flat
white winter landscapes, and bowls of fruit and flowers and dead
gamebirds which looked so lifelike, if a dead bird could be said to
be lifelike. There were plump plain women corseted up to the eyeballs
in voluminous plain dresses. I loved the light, the crystal
clear images, the