by Meg Mason
She never asked me why I had rung on that occasion or this one – she knew I called in panic, in boredom, in loneliness, when the silence of the house became unbearable. I did not notice for a long time that no matter what time it was, my mother never sounded drunk.
In between, I walked until I could feel my heart beating. Mostly the towpath, across Port Meadow or, early enough that it would be empty of students and tourists, through the park of Magdalen College. The deer grazed and ignored me.
Then, although she did not ask, I began to tell my mother what had happened, about my marriage, and children, and Patrick. She told me to say what I liked; nothing could shock her. She said, ‘I’ll see the most poisonous thing you’ve ever said to him and raise you something much worse I’ve said to your father.’
I told her that, to begin with, I was angry because he hadn’t noticed there was something wrong with me. That is what I thought. But he could not have missed it. It must have occurred to him at some stage, or he had known from the beginning. Whichever, he didn’t do anything because he liked it that way. That was so obvious now – me being the problem, Patrick getting to be the hero. Everyone thinking he was so amazing for putting up with such a difficult wife. Save lives all day at work, comes home and keeps going. Everyone thinking, what a busman’s holiday that marriage must be.
I said that he should never have accepted the way I treated him but he did because the only thing he cared about was having me, the thing he’d always wanted. He just accepted everything and always let it be my version of the story, believing that way he wouldn’t lose me. I said, not me – a version of me he made up when he was fourteen. I said he should have grown out of it like everyone else does, instead of marrying his own invention.
He gave up his own chance to be a father. He shouldn’t have let me take that from him. He shouldn’t have made me responsible for that.
I told her it was Patrick’s fault I am not a mother. I lied, but so did he.
For a long time I went on that way. Mostly my mother listened without saying anything. She never seemed shocked, even by the things I could barely bring myself to say aloud. She just said of course, of course. I’m not surprised. Who wouldn’t feel like that?
Finally, I exhausted myself. I said Patrick and I should never have been together. We had broken each other. Our marriage never made sense. And then I was quiet.
It had been nearly a month, hours and hours of every day, and as though it was now her turn my mother said, ‘Martha, no marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.’
I asked her to please not get philosophical.
Her thin laugh annoyed me. She said, ‘Alright but Maya Angelou –’
I cut her off. ‘Please don’t Maya Angelou me either. I know I’m right. We were dysfunctional. We made each other dysfunctional. I had to be the one to end it but I know it’s what he wanted too. He was just too passive to do it. Of course it’s sad, obviously. But it is best for everyone. Not just us.’
‘Yes – well.’ My mother sighed. ‘What time will you get there tomorrow?’ She had seemed about to say something else.
I asked her what tomorrow was.
‘Christmas Day.’
I was quiet for a minute, trying to imagine it, driving by myself to London, seeing my father, facing Ingrid, the chaos of her children, Rowland’s excruciating conversation, the endless, pointless friction between Winsome and my mother. Her drinking. ‘I don’t think I can. I think it’s too many people.’
‘It’s only going be Winsome and Rowland, me and your father. Sorry, I thought I told you that. Your cousins are elsewhere. Ingrid and Hamish have taken the boys to Disneyland. I have no idea why. And for ten days – you could do every room in the Louvre twice in that time.’
She waited for me to ask where Patrick was, then after a moment of silence said, ‘He’s gone to Hong Kong. It will be a difficult day. I know. But will you come?’
I said no. ‘I don’t think so. Sorry.’
My mother sighed again. ‘Well I can’t make you. But please think about whether you need to make yourself more miserable than you already are. Spending Christmas alone, Martha, I’m not sure. It will be very bleak. And if I can say so, I would just like to see you myself.’
As soon as we hung up, I went for a walk. The thought of the towpath, doing it again, exhausted me and I went another way towards town.
*
Broad Street was crowded. I felt dazed by the concentration of people with plastic bags, coming in and out of shops, buying shoes and mobile phones and things from Accessorize. Babies cried in their prams, hungry and overheated. Children lagged behind their parents or strained ahead on safety reins.
Mothers were shopping with teenage daughters who walked with their heads down, texting. A girl stormed out of River Island, letting the door spring back on her mother who was trying to keep up.
The girl didn’t ask to be born, her mother could just fuck off. She got out her phone and the mother, who was beside her then, said that was it, Bethany. She’d had a gutful. They walked off in opposite directions. I was in the mother’s way and she stopped in front of me, close enough that I could see her earrings were tiny candy canes. For a second we were face to face, looking directly into each other’s eyes, but I do not think she saw me. I went to step aside but she wheeled around and began chasing after her daughter, holding her purse above her head and waving it like a white flag.
I walked on slowly, staring at the faces of people coming towards me, jostling past on both sides, wondering if any of them had burned their own houses down and if they had, how long it was before they could come out and walk around and want things from Accessorize.
I went into a Costa and bought a muffin. I was not hungry and, back outside, I tried to give it to a homeless man sitting under a cashpoint. He asked me what flavour it was and when I told him he said that he didn’t like raisins.
I kept walking to the covered market. Standing outside a sweet shop, I called my mother. There was a child sitting at a high table in the window with his grandmother. He was eating ice cream. Even though he was holding it with mittened hands, and still wearing his parka and woolly hat, his lips were violet.
She picked up and asked me if everything was okay.
‘If I come tomorrow, will you not drink?’
There was no pause. She said, ‘Martha. You asked me to stop. The day you called me from the train.’
‘I know.’
‘Well I stopped,’ my mother said. ‘I haven’t had anything to drink since then. After you hung up, I tipped it all down the sink. In the language of group –’ she said the word as though it had a capital ‘– it has been two hundred and eighteen days since my last drink.’
We had never – Ingrid, my father, Winsome, Hamish or Patrick – none of us had ever asked her to stop. Out of loyalty, or sensing the futility, we had never even discussed doing so among ourselves.
I had not noticed I was smiling at the boy with the violet lips. He stuck his tongue out at me.
My mother said, ‘Are you laughing?’
I said no. ‘I mean, yes. But not about you. Something I’ve just seen.’ I said it’s good. ‘That’s good.’
*
It was mid-afternoon, already beginning to get dark, when I arrived at Belgravia. I had woken up not intending to go and spent the morning on the sofa watching television with the lights off, trying to convince myself that I did not feel guilty about disappointing my mother, that the sick feeling and tightness in my forehead was the first symptom of a migraine, and that I had not sunk so far into despair that by the time Mary Berry’s Absolute Christmas Favourites came on at noon I wondered if I would stop breathing.
Winsome opened the door and looked ecstatic to see me, her unshowered niece who was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants under her coat and holding a hostess present she had purchased at motorway services. She fussed excessively over my coat and expressed too much gratitude for the p
resent, then ushered me into the formal living room.
I had not come with the expectation of feeling better. I had come because I did not think I could feel worse but when I entered the room I felt an instant and perverse nostalgia for those hours of cloistered misery at the Executive Home. Seeing Rowland and my mother and father sitting in the overwhelmingly empty-looking room, each opening a very small present, I felt indescribably worse. I had done this. I was the reason Ingrid and my cousins had chosen to be elsewhere. The room hummed with their absence. There was a separate undercurrent of sadness that was so palpable, a stranger coming in would have inferred a recent bereavement. It was Patrick’s not being there. I had accomplished that too. And like my aunt, my parents and my uncle were absolutely thrilled to see me.
My father came over and hugged me, patting me on the back at the same time like I had done something praiseworthy in turning up at Belgravia, late, unannounced and disrespectfully dressed, on the most important day of the year for my aunt. And she had set aside lunch for me – on the off chance, Winsome said, hope against hope! – that I would surprise them all. And Rowland, who always went to such great lengths to avoid acts of service, told me to sit down and he’d go and get it.
My mother waited until last and held me for as long as my father had but afterwards, instead of releasing me completely she held me at arm’s distance, her hands just below my shoulders, and said she had forgotten how beautiful I was. She was not drunk.
And I shook her off. And when Rowland came back I said I wasn’t hungry. And when my father quoted me a line from the novel he was reading at the time, claiming to find it both hilarious and apposite, I just shrugged and when Winsome came over to me with a present that she’d had under the tree – hope against hope et cetera – I opened it and said I already had a vase and could not, anyway, foresee a time when I would receive flowers. And then I said I was leaving, and declined to take it, then and for a second time at the front door.
*
The line from my father’s book was hilarious and apposite. ‘The cremation was no worse than a family Christmas.’
*
I called my mother early the next morning while I was getting dressed. As soon as she answered, I started talking about yesterday, how horrible it was without the others. Not Patrick obviously. I was glad he wasn’t there. Repetitiously I said, ‘It’s best for him as well. He wanted –’
She said, ‘No. Stop.’ Her patience was expended. Her voice wavered. ‘You don’t get to decide what is best for other people, Martha. Not even for your own husband – especially not your own husband. Because, incidentally, you have no idea what Patrick wants.’ I wanted to say something to stop her but my mouth had gone dry, and she continued. ‘From what I can tell, you’ve never made an effort to find out. Sometimes I wonder if you thought it was going to be easier just to blow everything up. Tip, tip, tip, kerosene everywhere, match over the shoulder as you walk away. Incinerate the lot.’
She stopped and waited. I said, ‘Why are you saying this? You are supposed to be on my side. You have to be nice to me.’
‘I am on your side. But I was ashamed of you yesterday. You embarrassed yourself, and everyone else. You acted like a child. Not even taking the vase –’
I shouted at her. I told her she was not allowed to tell me off.
‘No actually, I will. Somebody needs to. You think all this has happened to you and only you. That’s what I saw yesterday. It’s your terrible personal tragedy, so you’re the only one who’s allowed to be in pain. ‘But –’ she said, my girl ‘– this has happened to all of us. Do you not see that? Not even yesterday? This is everyone’s tragedy. And if he’d been there, you would have seen it’s most of all Patrick’s. This has been his life every bit as much as it’s been yours.’
I told her she was wrong. ‘He’s never felt the way I have. He has no idea what it’s like.’
‘Maybe so but he’s had to watch you. He’s had to hear his wife say she wants to die, see her in agony and not know how to help her. Imagine that, Martha. And you thinking he liked it that way! He stayed with you through it all, no matter the cost to himself, and in the end he is hated for it and told to go.’
‘I don’t hate him.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I never said I hated him.’
‘Even if that were true, for everything else you’ve said, let me tell you, anyone except Patrick would have left you a long time ago, without needing to be asked. You lied first, Martha. He didn’t make you. Nobody did.’
I felt sick. My mother exhaled heavily, then kept going. ‘I am not saying you haven’t suffered, Martha. But I am saying, grow up. You’re not the only one.’
She stopped and waited until I said, ‘How do I do that?’
‘What? I can’t hear you when you’re whispering.’
I said, slowly, ‘How do I do that? Mum, I don’t know what to do.’
‘I would ask your husband for forgiveness and,’ she said, ‘consider yourself very lucky if he gives it to you.’
35
I DIDN’T CALL her again. At the end of the week I got a letter.
It said, Martha. You know as I do that the conversation we’ve had over these weeks is finished. What happens next is your choice but I hope you’ll consider the following in making whatever decision you do.
All my life I’ve believed that things happened to me. The awful things – childhood, my mad/dead mother, disappearing father. That because she had to raise me, I lost Winsome as a sister. Your father not succeeding, this house, living somewhere I can’t stand, my drinking, my becoming a drunk. On and on it goes, all of it happening to me.
And then – you. My beautiful daughter, breaking when she was still a child. Even though you were the one in pain, even though I chose not to help you, in my own mind it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like. Nobody can be held to account as long as they’re suffering and I made you my unassailable excuse for not growing up.
But then I did grow up – age 68 – because you made me.
I know it hasn’t been that long but this is what I have been able to see since then: things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.
I always thought your illness happened to me. Now I choose to believe that it happened for me because it was why finally I stopped drinking. I did not start drinking because of you and your illness, as I’m sure I let you believe, but you are the reason I stopped.
Perhaps what I think is wrong. Perhaps I’m not entitled to think of your pain that way, but it is the only way I can think of to give any of it a purpose. And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something?
Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?
And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn’t in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are which is, in part, a product of your pain.
You do not have to believe me about that but I know – I do know, Martha – that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on. If you want to, you can put all of this right. Start with your sister.
*
I put the letter in a drawer and picked up my phone. There was a message from Ingrid. They had been back for days but we hadn’t spoken since she drove to Oxford. I had texted but she never replied. Her me
ssage said, ‘Get drain unblocker stuff on the way home because the bath isn’t emptying. sorry for sexting you while you’re at work.’ Eggplant emoji, lipstick mouth.
While I was still looking at it, the grey dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.
‘That wasn’t for you obviously.’
I sent her the rosary, a cigarette and the black heart. I started another one, the road and the running girl, and didn’t send it, because if she knew I was coming, she would be gone by the time I arrived.
*
She was in the front garden, sitting on a neglected outdoor table, legs dangling, watching her sons ride their bikes into each other on purpose. In spite of how cold it was, all three of them were wearing shorts, and T-shirts from Disneyland. She turned around when they called out to me, but showed no reaction as I walked over waving stupidly until I was all the way there.
‘Hello Martha.’ It felt like being stung, my sister greeting me as though I was a friend, or no one. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To give you this.’ I handed her a plastic bag with the drain unblocker stuff in it. ‘And also to say sorry.’
Ingrid looked in the bag and said nothing. Then, ‘Excuse me –’ leaning sideways to see past me to where her sons had started skidding their bikes on purpose, which they knew they weren’t allowed to do – she started shouting at them – because they knew it wrecked the grass.
There was no grass, it had been wrecked since the afternoon they moved in and, although they ignored her, she repeated her warning to them at the same volume every time I thought she had finished and tried to say something.
The rain that had been falling all morning had stopped as I was getting out of the car, but the sky was still dark and each small gust of wind shook water from the trees. I waited.
Ingrid gave up and said, ‘Go then.’