Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

Author:Hilary Mantel [Hilary Mantel ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007354887
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Third Floor Rising

The summer of my eighteenth birthday I had my first job. It was to fill the time between leaving school and going away to university in London. The previous summer I’d been old enough to work, but I had to stay at home and mind the children, while my mother pursued her glittering career.

For most of the years until I was sixteen, my mother had devoted herself to the care of a sick child. First it was me, until I went to senior school. Then I got abruptly better, by an act of will on my mother’s part. My high fevers ceased, or ceased to be noticed, or if they were noticed they stopped being interesting. My youngest brother, his struggles for breath and his night-time cough, were elected to my old place in the household’s economy. In my case I had been to school sporadically, but my brother didn’t go at all. He played by himself in the garden under a pewter sky, with the fugitive glitter of snow behind it. He lay on his daybed in the room with the television blaring, and turned the pages of a book. One evening we were watching the news when our whole room lit up with a sick white light, and a bolt of ball lightning ripped the lower limbs from the poplar tree and blew the glass from the window frame, whump, fist of God. The shards were strewed over his crocheted blanket, the dog howled, the rain blew into the wreckage of the room and the neighbours squeaked and gibbered in the streets.

A short time after this my mother answered an advertisement for a saleswoman on the fashion floor at Affleck & Brown, which was a small, cramped, oldfashioned department store in Manchester. She had to walk to the station and then travel by train, then walk again to Oldham Street. This was a wonder to me, because I thought she’d given up going out. To do the job she had to have white blouses and black skirts. She bought some at C & A, and this amazed me too, because in our house we got our clothes by less straightforward methods than purchase: by a process of transmogrification, whereby cardigans were unravelled and reappeared as woollen berets and collars were wrenched off to extend hems and what were armholes for the stout became leg holes for the lean. When I was seven I’d had my winter coats made out of two that had belonged to my godmother. Pockets, lapels, everything was miniaturised: except the buttons, which were the originals, and stood out like banqueting plates, or targets for an arrow on my pigeon chest.

My mother had been to school in an age when most people didn’t take exams, and she hadn’t much to put on her application form. But she got the job, and soon personal disasters began to overtake the people who had appointed her; with them out of the way, she was promoted first to deputy and then to manageress of her department.

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