When they argued, which they usually did, the arguments were always comfortingly familiar. Even when their time together was dominated by a carefully enumerated litany of his current top ten flaws, she always gave off a warmth that somehow made him feel at home.
Talking to her was like a sauna of the ego – a full Finnish one where they strip you naked, send you out into the snow and beat you with branches. While it was happening, you felt nothing but discomfort; once it was over, a quiet inner glow told you that you had done yourself some good. Contact with his mother was, in essence, a gruelling form of masochistic pampering.
In the six months since moving to Edinburgh, Daniel had been surprised to find that he missed her and his sister, Rose, more than he missed his friends. For a man in his mid-thirties this was clearly not healthy, but the ease with which he’d walked away from the network of London-based friendships that had sustained him since his childhood had taken him by surprise.
Almost all his old, close friends now had children, a process which, one by one, appeared to have turned them into zombies. When he saw them at weekends, attempting to do his duty to show an interest in their families, he often ended up feeling like a foreign exchange student: he tried his best to communicate, but usually found it impossible to tell what was being talked about, where the conversation was going, or whether or not everyone else in the room was secretly bored of him and desperate for him to leave so they could get on with their lives. He always felt less like a visitor, more like an interruption. When he succeeded in dragging his friends out to the pub to see them alone, they always had the glazed look in their eyes of an ageing boxer who’s been punched in the head once too often. It was as if the ghosts of their children were still there in the pub with them, running invisibly round the table, destroying their father’s ability to focus on one topic of conversation for more than thirty seconds.
The only friends of Daniel’s who didn’t have children also tended to have no girlfriend, and as a result seemed to be incapable of leaving home without going on the pull, which gave them an attention span barely any longer than the punch-drunk fathers.
As the number of Daniel’s friends capable of sustaining a coherent conversation dwindled, he began to feel as if friendship as a pastime was becoming an obligation rather than a pleasure. A few hundred miles’ distance, he thought, might revive these friendships over the phone, with fewer dutiful visits to drag things down. But since arriving in Edinburgh, his phone bills each month revealed more calls to the local curry house than to any London number.
This had been the strangest discovery to come out of his move to Scotland: he simply did not miss his friends. Erin, on the other hand, stabbed into his thoughts on an hourly basis.
Two Weeks Earlier
Mother’s Day
It was not that Mother’s Day meant anything to Helen. She didn’t really believe in it, and had no expectations of it. But as she walked downstairs, wrapped in her ancient padded dressing-gown, there was a brief, irrational moment when she thought that maybe, just this once, there would be a card from her son. She wasn’t hoping for flowers or chocolates or even a phone call, but a card – a tiny indication that he remembered who she was and what she had done for him – would have breathed life into her day.
The doormat, of course, was empty. It was Sunday. There wasn’t even a delivery. A solitary pizza take-away leaflet mocked her hopes of filial devotion.
Helen crumpled the leaflet in her fist and jammed it into the kitchen bin. She was trying to give up breakfast. Bread was the fashionable thing to avoid these days, and toast was the only food she could face in the morning. She gave herself a black tea and dutifully worked her way down a banana. There was something depressing about bananas: the cloying noise they made as you chewed them; their garish, pseudo-cheerful colour; the useless spent bulk of their skin after you’d finished. The only reason for their popularity was probably that you could eat one without getting your hands sticky.
This is not healthy, she thought to herself. Here I am, a grown, intelligent woman, passing my time mentally listing to myself the pros and cons of bananas. My head should be filled with more interesting things than this. I should be doing more with my brain.
At least it was a book-group day. They called it a book group, though it wasn’t really a group, and they didn’t actually bother with books any more. It was just a regular social occasion: the last Sunday of each month, Gillian, Carol and Helen got together for morning coffee and a chat, the venue rotating month by month between their respective houses. This was the rump of a gathering of mums that had formed around a local playgroup roughly thirty years earlier. They all had children the same age, and they’d regularly got together to relieve the boredom of early motherhood. Though some had come simply for a break in the routine, these three had genuinely liked one another, and their sons could – at a push – be persuaded to keep one another entertained without too much noise or bloodshed. There had only ever been one hospitalisation.
The group had swelled and shrunk, as various people moved in, moved away, gave birth, changed schools and got divorced. At its peak, one year there had even been a camping holiday involving more families than could ever hope to go away together without a major social catastrophe befalling them. But through everything, over more than three decades, Gillian, Carol and Helen had remained neighbours and friends.
They had stopped gathering once the children hit secondary-school age, and though they all remained more or less in touch, they didn’t meet up as a group for more than ten years. Then, with their kids all in their twenties, all having left home, Carol had suggested they start up the Sunday morning coffee routine. It was Gillian, frustrated by the fact that all they seemed to talk about was their children, who suggested turning it into a book group.
This was a success for a while, not least because it got rid of some of the more irritating women, but it wasn’t long before people stopped reading the books and, even if they had read the books, stopped talking about them. Eventually, all that remained was Helen, Carol and Gillian, and their Sunday morning coffee. As far as Helen was concerned, this was more or less perfect. It was, though she could barely admit it to herself, the highlight of her month.
When Helen had first moved out from Kensington to Pinner, she had initially scorned and pitied the suburban women around her. In choosing the house, she had been far more concerned with the life she wanted to get away from than with worrying about what she was moving towards. She had only really thought about the house and the garden, not about the community she would have to fit into.
She soon realised that this short journey of a few miles up the Metropolitan line had, culturally, almost taken her back to Derby. These women had clearly never been to the kind of parties that were part of her weekly routine. They seemed about as worldly as Helen thought she must have been when she first arrived in the capital. Every one of them gave the impression of having lived through the whole of the sixties without smoking a single joint or sleeping with anyone other than their husband. They rarely even went to the centre of town; their suburban little parade of shops somehow appeared to satisfy all their needs. And the way they dressed made Helen want to grab them by the arms and shout, ‘Have you not looked in a magazine for the last five years? Do you never open your eyes?’
At first Helen told herself that she only socialised with these women for Paul’s sake – to provide him with friends – but as the years went by, though she never quite lost her horror at the way they dressed, and though she always clung on to a notion somewhere in her soul that she was simply passing through suburbia out of parental convenience and was at heart a genuine metropolitan, her aloofness slowly dwindled away. She never quite admitted to herself that she was the same as them, but she did gradually come to acknowledge that they had so much in common, the differences had ceased to matter.
They had watched one another’s babies grow through childhood into adolescence and adulthood, while slowly seeing each
other getting old. They had cajoled, advised and comforted one another through the cement mixer of parenthood. Proximity and shared experience, year by year, knitted their lives together. Outside of family, Helen had never shared an intimacy deeper than that she now had with Gillian and Carol. Her friendships, in the end, had been as important to Helen as her marriages; if nothing else, they had lasted longer.
Even so, after more than three decades, she’d still not built up the courage to give them a talking-to about their clothes.
As Helen poured the tea and handed round the plate of neatly overlapping biscuits that she had laid out a good hour before the arrival of her two guests, she pointed out that it was Mother’s Day.
‘Ha!’ said Gillian.
Helen didn’t even need to ask what that meant. Though Gillian was in the habit of talking far too much, she also had a knack of compressing complex thoughts into very small packages. ‘Ha!’ somehow said it all.
‘Any cards?’ said Helen.
‘Oh, Matt buys me a weekend in Paris every Mother’s Day,’ said Carol, her voice heavy with wistful sarcasm.
‘Nothing at all?’ said Helen.
‘Do people really get things?’ said Carol.
‘The shops are all crammed with stuff. Someone must buy it,’ said Gillian.
‘Nothing from Daniel?’ said Helen.
Gillian rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t think Daniel can even remember our phone number, let alone our postcode.’
‘What’s wrong with them? I mean, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THEM ALL?’ said Helen, her teacup rattling in her hand as a nebulous anger rose up within her. Helen didn’t quite know what it was she was angry about, but since she was among close friends, she felt that the best way to find out was simply to carry on talking and see where it took her. ‘They’re grown men! They’re not children any more. You expect them to hate you for a while when they’re adolescents, but they’re supposed to grow out of it, aren’t they? We should be on civil, adult terms by now. They should be grown-ups. They should have children of their own. They should be going through what we went through, and realising what sheer bloody hard work it all is, and . . . I mean . . . we’ve waited thirty years for a bit of understanding and gratitude, and I’m sick of it.’
She sat back in her chair and sighed, feeling rather pleased with her rant, even a little flushed and exhilarated, like after a hefty spring-clean.
‘You’ll be waiting another thirty years if what you’re after is gratitude,’ said Gillian.
‘Well, just some communication would be a start. Paul doesn’t want to speak to me any more. He thinks I’m boring and stupid and he talks to me as rarely as he thinks he can get away with, and when he does, he tells me as little as possible.’
‘Children are supposed to think their parents are boring and stupid,’ said Gillian. ‘It’s a natural cycle. It means you brought him up well and gave him higher goals in life.’
‘Are you saying I am boring and stupid?’ said Helen.
‘I’m just saying it’s normal,’ said Gillian. ‘Especially with boys. And there’s no point in feeling angry about it. Is there, Carol?’
Gillian turned to Carol for support, noticing as she did so that Carol had a strange, intent look in her eye. Helen noticed it, too, and they both stared at Carol, waiting for her to speak. It was a long wait.
Though Carol didn’t usually even register Mother’s Day, and had never encouraged her son to mark it with cards or gifts, the previous evening she happened to have spoken to Matt on the phone, after which she had been surprised to find herself close to tears. They had not argued, Matt had not been rude, or any more dismissive of her than usual, and they had not even suffered any particularly long silences. There had simply been something in the air between them that made Carol want to grieve. The essence of it was that there had been nothing between them. Carol frequently had more satisfactory and open conversations with strangers.
After putting the phone down, she had sat and watched the news with her husband, as she always did, but as the images of global mayhem flashed in front of her eyes, not a word from the TV sank in. It had never occurred to her that grief was a sensation you could feel for a living relative, for someone you still loved. Matt was still entirely alive and healthy, but their relationship, she realised, had died. All that remained of it was the faintly humiliating one-way flow of her love. Matt, her one and only child, the focus of her life, thought of her as simply another chore, on a par with doing the laundry and emptying the dishwasher. Never before had she felt quite so old and useless.
‘They’ve ditched us,’ Carol said, eventually. ‘They took everything we had to give, for years on end, and now they think the odd grumpy phone call every other week is enough to pay off the debt.’
‘That’s how it works,’ said Gillian.
‘Well, it shouldn’t,’ said Carol, her voice trembling with constrained emotion. Helen had given her a thought. Perhaps she was not, after all, old and useless. Perhaps, for once, she should override her natural instinct to assume that every problem was her own fault, and she should consider the idea that maybe the fault was with Matt. Maybe he was young and useless.
‘No, it shouldn’t,’ said Helen, delighted to be backed up. She found herself smirking at Gillian, the two sharing a little worried-amused glance at Carol’s strange mood.
‘Of course it shouldn’t,’ said Gillian. ‘But if that’s how they want to behave, we just have to live with it.’
‘Why?’ said Carol, rounding on Gillian, as if suddenly angry with her.
‘What do you mean, why?’ said Gillian.
‘Why do we just have to live with it?’ Carol snapped, waving a half-eaten biscuit sharply through the air.
‘What’s the alternative?’ said Gillian. ‘You think being eaten up with resentment is going to improve anything?’
‘Well, maybe instead of just sitting here, moaning, we should do something about it,’ said Carol.
‘Like what?’
‘Think of what we did for them. Year after year after year. They owe us.’ As these words came out of her mouth, Carol realised she had never before thought about Matt in these terms. In the past, she had been angry with him about specific things he had done, and there had been times when she’d expected him to apologise and mollify her, but she had never before thought in terms of one big outstanding debt of love on which her feckless and ungrateful son was defaulting.
‘What do they owe us?’ said Gillian.
‘Well,’ said Carol, floundering for a way to express her grievance, before suddenly thinking of something that got to the heart of it all. ‘Grandchildren, for a start.’
‘Ha!’ said Gillian.
‘They’re thirty-four!’ continued Carol, sitting forwards in her chair and putting down her tea. ‘It’s time. And not one of them has married, or even settled down, let alone produced any children. We should be grandmothers by now. We should be surrounded by little people who adore us and think we’re wonderful, but who never keep us awake all night, and who we can hand back when they have a full nappy. That’s the payback. It’s what we’re owed.’
‘It would be nice,’ said Helen, ‘but it’s not going to happen.’
‘Why not?’ said Carol. ‘Why are we being left out?’
‘Maybe they just need a bit longer,’ said Gillian. ‘It’s bound to happen eventually.’
‘WHEN? Next year they’ll be thirty-five. That’s not even young. That’s middle age. They’re almost middle-aged, and they still want to live like children.’
‘It’s not middle age.’
‘It’s not young,’ said Carol. ‘If they were women it would almost be too late.’
‘You’re being hysterical,’ said Gillian. ‘They’re not women, and it isn’t too late.’
‘But it’s not like they’re on the brink. They’re not even close. Any of them.’
‘That’s just how it is,’ said Helen, thinking to herself that in Paul’s case there was a far bigge
r impediment than his age.
‘But why?’ continued Carol, still angrily waving the remnants of her biscuit. ‘If they’re not going to do it, I suppose that’s their right, but are we just going to sit here and not even find out why? Maybe it’s something we did.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ said Gillian.
‘Let’s go and find out,’ said Carol. ‘We can’t force them to have children, but we can at least make them give us an explanation. They can’t deny us that.’
‘They can,’ said Gillian. ‘And they probably will.’
‘Well then, maybe we’re making it too easy for them. Maybe it’s time to force the issue.’
‘How?’ said Helen.
‘By not going away so easily. By not giving up.’
‘Not going away?’
‘Yes. What if we went? To visit. And stayed,’ said Carol, the idea only popping into her head at the moment it came out of her mouth. If there had been any pause between thinking it and saying it, she would probably have dismissed the thought as ludicrous.
’Stayed?’ said Gillian.
‘Just for . . . maybe, a week.’ Carol still didn’t quite believe her own proposal, but now she had started, it seemed worth batting the idea around, just to see what the other two thought – to get to the core of why it was that such a simple notion should seem so outlandish.
‘A week!’ Helen almost spilt her tea.
‘Yes. They lived with us for long enough. They ought to be able to cope with a week the other way round,’ Carol said, defiantly.
‘They’d never agree to it,’ said Gillian.
‘So we wouldn’t give them the chance to say no.’
‘How?’ said Helen.
Otherhood Page 5