Free You Must Be Sisters by Deborah Moggach

they?’
    ‘Most of ’em.’
    ‘But you do wear gowns to lectures, don’t you?’
    She laughed crushingly. ‘Heavens no! Hardly anyone does. It looks so silly.’
    She heard him give a small grunt; a hurt sound. I like to please him, but I like shocking him even more, she thought. Why?
    They walked around the corner and into another lovely street, all mouldings and balconies. From an open window Laura could hear a Bob Dylan song, as familiar as the thump of her pulse. Looking down into a basement window she could see rush matting and bookshelves. Looking up she could see, hanging from an upstairs ceiling, the sort of round white paper lampshade that no doubt she would buy when she left Hall and moved into a room of her own. The sense of a thousand identities the same as hers gave her that familiar obliterated feeling. If only she could talk to her parents about feelings like this! Then they wouldn’t be walking along in rather boring silence. How different from her walk through these same streets with Claire, Claire who understood everything. Her parents, by contrast, understood hardly anything at all. Then she thought with sudden honesty: partly because I don’t tell them.
    They arrived at the pub. It was humming with voices; people spilled out on to the pavement. Mike was in there somewhere; he’d make up for that vision of grey stomach. She wanted to make up for it; there was something about that disappointed grunt that made her feel guilty.
    ‘It looks such fun!’ said her mother. ‘All these young people.’
    Inside it was packed; thick with smoke, hot with bodies. Laura searched for Mike’s face but she couldn’t see it. The three of them edged their way to the bar.
    ‘Morning, Guv’nor!’ her father shouted in his hearty pub voice. In pubs he changed; he also for some reason liked to call the publican Guv’nor. Why did he?
    ‘What?’ The man leant forward as far as his belly and the counter would allow.
    ‘Anything on the old menu? Bristol specialities?’ It surprised even his family sometimes; they could forget how different he became in public places. Not at all his usual, meekish self. ‘Anything in the grub line?’ Facetious too, oh dear.
    The man said, as if only idiots would ask: ‘No food on Sunday.’
    ‘Goodness, not even a packet of crisps?’ Oh how piercing her mother’s voice was! Laura felt ashamed of being ashamed of her, and still she blushed. Next to all the grubby T-shirts her mother’s hat looked so very cherry-pink.
    ‘Never mind, Guv’nor,’ said her father. ‘We’ll console ourselves somehow, won’t we, ladies?’
    Half of Laura wanted to disown the Guv’nors and the cherry hat and obliterate herself amongst the T-shirts. Yet half felt threaded to these two, fused with them. It made things so complicated, the fact that she did love them. The way, for instance, that now it was acknowledged that she smoked, her father would offer her a cigarette as he was offering her one now with a certain grave courtesy that she found in no one else; as if, regrettable though it was, she would honour him if she took one. And the way he cupped her elbow and steered her through the crowd. Somehow he always made her feel special. She liked his little ceremonies, for there was none of this ceremony about her friends.
    ‘I must say, this is a charming place,’ said her mother. ‘So Olde Worlde.’ She took her glass of sherry and sat on the window ledge, like a practised hostess, including everyone in her smile. Laura shrank yet perversely she was touched. In the face of the barman’s indifference they were both so doggedly polite, so bright in the face of setback. How loyal she could feel towards them in sudden moments; yet she would rather die than ask that spotty specimen who was blocking her mother’s view and waving his cigarette smoke in her face to move over just a fraction so that they could all be more comfortable.
    Laura sipped her drink, watching her mother looking