Brother and Sister
Page 13
So Cora came to Balmoral shyly and gratefully, and hung Indian bedspreads on the bacon-scented walls and made a little shrine in one corner with joss sticks and a tea light and a cross-legged god with his eyes shut. She brought with her, too, items that Betty found quite hard to bear, bed linen in burnt orange, a Mexican rug in brilliant colors, peculiar lamps she had made herself out of bits of driftwood or car parts, paintings of nudes.
"Grit your teeth," Don said. "Not a word."
He'd got very thin lately, especially in the face, worn down by years and years of never being quite free of pain.
"The joss sticks—"
"Better than drains," Don said. "Better than kippers. And she's quiet. Most days you'd never know she was there."
She was quiet. She played no music in her bizarrely appointed room and if she turned her television on—you could almost have covered the screen with your hand, it was so small—she must have had the sound down almost to off. If Betty went in—she always knocked, family or no family—Cora would be embroidering something in primary-colored wools or doing some of her pen-and-ink drawings (not to Betty's taste) or reading, curled up on her bed under a striped blanket thing it gave you a headache to look at. When she went out to work, to teach her evening classes or the supplementary art classes she taught at neighboring schools for children with learning difficulties, Betty almost never heard her go. Sometimes she'd hear the front-door latch but mostly she'd just be conscious, with the kind of antennae she supposed mothers had, that Cora wasn't there. She ate with them at teatime but that was only because Betty told her she had to, that she had to have one proper meal a day, and once a month, at the kitchen table, Don made her go through her accounts. He'd made her buy an account book, and make lists of incomings and outgoings, and every month he explained to her, very patiently, that paying more out than you have coming in means debt. Cora would gladly have turned all her earnings over to him and had him dole it back to her, like pocket money, but he wouldn't let her do that.
"I won't be here forever," Don said. "I won't be here to do your thinking for you."
"She's like a child," he said to Betty afterwards. "Get her onto money and you'd do better with a quick five-year-old."
"But she's clever," Betty said, thinking of the books in Cora's room, the way she could fashion and invent things, her talent for explaining how you use your hands to make a pot, stitch a buttonhole.
"Not for figures," Don said. "And you need figures."
In some ways, she supposed, Betty thought of Cora as a child still, as someone who couldn't be expected to shoulder the full burden of adult life. And maybe something had happened long ago, in that traumatic year when she was sixteen, that had arrested her, that had made her, at some profound level, either unable or unwilling to develop any further, to venture deeper into a world of expectation and feeling that might only bring more pain. She'd never had any real relationships, for example, no boyfriends, not even the kind of undemanding male companions some of Betty's friends had, who went with them to the pub, or Bingo, or outings to the Dales. It wasn't that Cora seemed anti-man, but more that she didn't seem to see them, let alone need them. Sometimes Betty would catch one of her guests eyeing Cora, speculating, puzzled but slightly fired up by Cora's indifference, Cora's faded but still distinctly present prettiness. She'd want to say, "You leave her alone. You'll only upset her." And they would, if they persisted. Betty didn't want Cora upset, ever again, and as long as she'd got Cora safe, among her gods and her blankets, in the little room next to the kitchen, she would see to it that it never happened.
Cora sat in the doctor's waiting room. It was a new waiting room, tacked on to the old surgery, decorated with a false, childish brightness and hung with posters about nutrition and sexually transmitted diseases. Cora didn't look at them. Food didn't interest her, and sex, having led her down into the darkest pit of her whole life, was something she didn't even think about. Why should she? After all, nuns presumably didn't either, and it didn't kill them, did it?
She shifted her hands in her lap. Her hands were why she was here, really, her hands and arms and now, if she was honest, her hips and knees too. Dad had had arthritis, after all, he'd been crippled with it, his poor old hands like a throbbing bunch of roots. Cora knew about the throbbing. There were some nights when the bones and joints in her hands hurt so much she'd have given anything just to slip them out of her skin and lay them on the Mexican rug to go on hurting all by themselves, far away from her. She didn't like to think—couldn't think—what she would do if her hands got too stiff and painful to use. She looked down at them. They looked perfectly normal still but they belonged to someone in their mid-fifties, and Dad had begun to be crippled up with arthritis earlier than that. But then Dad had been a miner, and working all those years deep underground had to be one of the least natural, most body-challenging ways that anyone could spend their life. He'd have agreed with that. He always saw his arthritis as a punishment for obeying his father in going down the mines instead of working on the land as he'd wanted to. Dad was very puritanical, very keen on punishment. Cora looked at her hands. Maybe her arthritis was a punishment too.
She looked at the clock. The doctor was already twenty minutes late in seeing her and there were a lot of people in the waiting room who'd been there when she arrived. She leaned forward and picked up the nearest magazine, a battered copy of one of those women's magazines that try and persuade their readers that, despite the emphasis on eyebrow-shaping and sex, their hearts are actually in important social issues. Cora flicked idly. Girls gazed out, flawless, improbably arranged girls, girls of a kind never seen on any high street, in any supermarket aisle. Cora sighed. There was a piece on aphrodisiac food, a piece on seductive lighting, a piece on getaway weekends with the emphasis on romance. Cora thought she would rather stare into space than glance on. She turned one more page.
"Roughly," said a headline in bold black type, "one woman in twenty-five has had a child adopted."
"Think," the article went on in slightly less emphatic type, "Just think. We have no word for the mother who surrenders her child for adoption, do we? Is this because she is expected to disappear? It wasn't always like this. The medieval world saw no stigma in illegitimacy, after all. It was capitalism that made a child a dependent, a liability, because it couldn't support itself. That's all! So what's gone wrong?"
Cora closed the magazine. Her mouth was dry. She could now see, on its cover, in purple capitals, the words "UNMARRIED MOTHER?—CAN'T WIN!" She put the magazine down very carefully on the pile she had taken it from and stood up. She couldn't stay, she couldn't wait. At this precise moment, it didn't seem to matter how much her hands hurt: it didn't seem to matter, actually, if they simply fell off.
She found a bench in the park with, blessedly, no one slumped moodily on it already. Northsea Park, instituted by civic-minded Victorians, occupied some high ground above the lower part of the town, thus giving both a view out to the gray sea above the uneven lines of rain-washed slate roofs and a healthy dose of sea air. The wind from the sea had blown most of the carefully planted trees back against the slope, making them look as if they were painfully trying to ascend it, and thus also removing any shelter they might have given to the seats placed thoughtfully in front of them.
Cora sat down and shrank herself back inside her coat. Trust her to pick up that magazine of all magazines, trust her to go on looking at worthless rubbish just one page too many. So much of her life had been dedicated to making sure that these accidents didn't happen, that she didn't get into situations where she would be reminded, and in consequence dragged back to a place she could hardly bear to remember, let alone revisit. There'd been a colleague at work once, a woman with a social-science degree who taught classes in citizenship, who'd been very keen that Cora should unburden herself, should recall every last word and deed from that dark time, so that she could do more than just limp along through the years, getting by, and really start to live again.
But Cora wasn't in denial. Cora was instead in a place of privacy, where all the things she knew had happened, had been felt, had been said, were to be kept safe and not spread out for someone else to pick over, like rubbish at a car-boot sale. It was acutely painful going back to the private—private, not secret—place where all these memories were stored, which was why Cora had chosen to do it as seldom as possible, but that didn't mean Cora was remotely pretending that what had happened hadn't happened. She wasn't denying anything, she finally told the citizenship teacher with the energy that was the closest to anger Cora ever got, but she was guarding something, and she had a right to guard it, thank you very much, because it was hers and it was precious, however much heartache it meant. And, she added as an afterthought, her personal growth was her business, and if she chose to stop growing that was her business too, and hers alone.
"You haven't lived my life," Cora said. "Nobody's lived it but me."
Yet, she thought now, sunk down inside the collar of her coat and staring over the dark gray roofs to the paler gray sea and sky and the wheeling gulls, you couldn't blame the woman for trying. She taught citizenship, after all, her mind was geared to the communal, to the collective, it wasn't the kind of mind that could understand the safety of living your life on your own without manipulation or disturbance. If she was honest, Cora had felt like that—separate, contained—even before the baby and all those horrors. Perhaps it was that extra sense of self and distance that had caused her to allow Craig Thomas to take her to that party where they put something in her cider, and where the sailor was. Perhaps she thought, somehow, that she wasn't touchable, that she was far enough away in her inner self not to be affected by the cider or the sailor. When Mother had, among all the other accusations, screamed at her that she was such a slut she didn't even know the sailor's name, it had seemed to Cora that this was just part of her pattern, part of her not belonging—not needing to belong—to a world where everything had to have names and labels. Why on earth should it matter knowing someone's name, when you could hardly remember what he'd done to you? Or, to be fair, and Cora wanted to be fair on account of the baby that came after, what you'd done together? Cora had never blamed the sailor, never wanted to, had never blamed Craig Thomas or the spiked cider. If she'd blamed them, the baby would have known it, wouldn't it? The baby would have known, she was sure, that it wasn't wanted, and Cora wasn't having that. Oh no. Cora was, had always been, very clear about that—she'd wanted that baby from the moment she knew it was coming, and she'd never stopped. Ever.
It was other things that were less clear, things that happened after her baby was born, things that were said, things she was told. She remembered them all talking at her, social workers, the adoption people, her parents, and they said to her that if she was selfish enough to keep the baby that showed she was immature and an unfit mother. When she said that maybe if she had enough support she could manage with the baby, even finish her schooling, they said her feelings were not now of consequence, that she had used up her share of indulgence in that department with her promiscuity and her fertility. When she said what about bad luck, what about all those millions of women who have sex outside marriage and don't get pregnant, they told her that if she wanted to get away without a stain on her mental-health record she would do well to accept that there was a wonderful social mechanism in place—adoption—which would give her baby the chances that she, having given birth outside marriage too young, in poverty and in the wrong class, would be totally unable to do. Did she want to be that deviant? Did she want to be that destructive? If she wanted to repair the damage she'd done to an innocent baby, she should let it go.
"If you really love that baby," the social worker said, sitting there with Mother beside her, their eyes like jet beads, "you should give her up to a proper home and parents."
Cora gave in. Worn down she was, worn out, nothing left to fight with, powerless. Looking back, she realized that there hadn't even been someone to rehearse the options with, not even Betty, despite hearing Mother and Betty screaming at each other like fishwives in the kitchen, and Dad going coughing off to the pub where the talk could be relied upon never to touch on women's things. Alone in her bedroom, disgraced, guilty, dirty, broken-hearted, Cora told herself that nothing would ever hurt this much again, that in order to stay alive for—Samantha (only whisper her name, whisper it in private), even if she never saw her again, she must live life in such a way that she never need plunge in again, never be in that seething mess of things where other people could tell her what to do.
It was getting cold. Cora's hands in her coat pockets, tense with the tension of her thoughts, were beginning to stiffen and throb. Someone at work said stay off cheese and chocolate; someone else said try extract of green-lipped mussels. They came from New Zealand or somewhere and you could get them in the health-food shop behind the Parade. Sounded disgusting. Cora stood up, painfully flexing her fingers. She'd make another appointment to see the doctor, she'd go round to the surgery on the way home, and make it now. What was arthritis anyway, compared? When did pain, however acute, in your body ever hold a candle to pain in your mind and heart? Yet that other pain—well, Cora wouldn't have been without it now, not for a moment. If it went away, if her mind and heart were cleared and calmed, she'd be scared that her love had gone, and that was the most unthinkable thought of all.
"She never gets letters," Betty said. She had propped the envelope against the china cottage in which she kept sugar, just as Mother had always done.
Don was reading the paper, the editorial page where all the rabid opinions expressed consoled him in his own abiding moderation.
"Perhaps it's a job offer—"
"From London?"
"Why not? Why shouldn't they need art teachers in London?"
"Not Cora—"
Don shook the paper.
"You don't know."
"Of course I don't know. But I'm wondering." Betty looked at the clock. "She should be back by now. Her appointment was two-thirty."
"They're never on time—"
"It worries me," Betty said. "She'll never have said how bad it is. You can tell, just by looking at her, how bad it is, but she won't say. She never does. She's never said how bad anything is, ever."
"Makes a nice change then," Don said, "from the rest of us."
Betty picked the envelope up again.
"Not typed," she said. "Handwritten."
"Boyfriend."
"Don't be daft."
Don looked up from his papers.
"Betty," he said, "as it's for Cora, whatever it is, it won't stop the clocks. OK?"
CHAPTER TEN
Polly had decided that, when her uncle David came round, as her mother had said he was going to, she would sit on his knee. She had taken to doing this lately, capturing all the men who came to the house—Titus from Daddy's office, Grandpa Ray from the Royal Oak, even her father if he looked as if he might be paying attention to her mother—by hitching herself into their laps and staking her claim on them. Her uncle David always said he liked her on his knee. He said Ellen was too old for it now, and Petey was too wriggly and Daniel was a boy, so that only left Polly. Polly, safe inside the clamp of his forearm, could then survey her mother from her citadel, with a cool and appraising gaze which left Nathalie in no doubt that, as a mother, she was somehow currently being found wanting.
"You're getting quite heavy," David said.
He was wearing a green jersey and the sleeve round Polly was speckled with little twiggy and grassy bits that had got caught in the wool. Polly began to pull some of them out, with elaborate concentration. Nathalie, across the kitchen table, was wearing the kind of expression that usually led to Polly's being asked to go and play in her room for a while. Polly didn't want to play in her room. There was something about the atmosphere in the kitchen, and David's being there, and
her mother having poured some wine out even though it wasn't nearly dark—grown-up drink, in Polly's view, should only begin after her bedtime—that made her feel she didn't want to leave, that she didn't want to be left out of anything that might be happening. When her mother looked as she was looking now, as if there was something secret inside her that was longing to burst out, Polly had no intention of missing the bursting. She began to lay the tiny pieces of twig from her uncle's sweater sleeve in an elaborately neat pile on the table.
"Polly," Nathalie said, leaning forward, "would you go and play with your Barbies for a while?"
"No," Polly said politely. She balanced a fragment of feather on her pile.
"Polly—"
"I am very comfortable," Polly said, leaning closer to David's sleeve to examine a shred of grass very minutely.
"Polly," Nathalie said in an extremely level voice, "I want you to go and play in your room for just five minutes and then you can come back and have a bag of your special crisps."
"Or," Polly said, "I could have them now. Here."
David's arm moved a little, loosening his hold on her. She felt his mouth come down against her hair, near the ear that wasn't very good at hearing things.