by Meg Mason
Patrick said, ‘Even so –’
‘And they didn’t tell me it was another boy.’ Ingrid said, ‘I didn’t ask. I just assumed.’
Hamish made no reaction, except to say ah. Then, regrouping, said, ‘Either way we should settle on a name for her while we’re all present.’
Ingrid looked over to Winsome who was by then snipping the large bunch of grapes into many small ones and arranging them in a cut-glass bowl she had brought from home. ‘I would like to call her Winnie.’ And to Hamish, ‘Is that fine?’
He recited his daughter’s full name. My mother was by the crib, smoothing out wrinkles in the blanket. Hamish said, ‘What do you think, Celia?’
She said the name was perfect. ‘We need as many Winnies as we can get in this life.’
I glanced at my aunt and saw her produce a tissue from her sleeve, putting her back to the room to privately dab her eyes.
‘Actually,’ Ingrid said, ‘Winnie Martha sounds weird. Let’s just not have a middle name.’ And to me, ‘I love you though.’
*
I apologised to Winsome about the vase. I called her first, after reading my mother’s letter and triaging my crimes, letting myself address the smallest or one of the smaller ones first. I asked if I could come and see her and on the day, she invited me out to the garden where a table was preset for afternoon tea.
Even though, on Christmas Day, she had looked on the verge of tears when I’d said in the foyer that I didn’t want the vase, Winsome told me she had no memory of that incident, she said whatsoever, and patted my arm. I asked if she would forgive me anyway.
‘Forgotten is forgiven, Martha. I can’t remember who said that or where I read it but if I had a motto, that would be it. Forgotten is forgiven.’
I told her it was F. Scott Fitzgerald. The curator of @author_quotes_daily had been on a jag.
Winsome offered me a biscuit and asked me if I had any holidays planned.
‘How did you put up with my mother for so long?’
She said oh. Indeed. And then, ‘I suppose because I’ve always been able to remember what she was like before our mother died and I loved her enough to last.’
‘Were you ever tempted just to give up on her?’
‘Daily, I suppose. But you forget, Martha, I was an adult then and she was a child. I knew who she was meant to be. That is, who she would have been had our mother not died or perhaps, if we had had a different mother entirely. I would like to say I did my best, but I was not an adequate substitute.’
I accepted another cup of tea. Watching her pour, I told her I could not imagine how hard it must have been. Winsome said well, nevermind and I decided one day I would ask her about it, but not then because there was more sadness in the way she said those two words than could be managed by either of us, sitting at her garden table, having afternoon tea.
‘Forgotten is forgiven.’ For whatever reason, Winsome said it again.
I repeated it after her. ‘Forgotten is forgiven.’
‘That’s right. Difficult but possible. Unless you want it, Martha, I might have this last biscuit.’
*
Even with four under fucking nine, Ingrid is still Ingrid. Attached to every text she has sent since Winnie was born is a GIF called Sad Will Ferrell. He is sitting in a leather recliner that is vibrating at its highest setting, trying to drink wine and crying as it bounces out of the glass and runs down his chin. It is figuratively her though. It has never stopped being funny.
*
Patrick and I left the hospital after Oliver arrived with Jessamine and the Rory she is about to marry. Nicholas is in America now, working on a special farm.
My parents wanted us to go back with them, to Goldhawk Road, for dinner. Arriving, my mother asked me to come out to her studio because she had a thing she wanted to show me beforehand.
I said, ‘Am I allowed to? Nothing is on fire.’
She flicked her hand, refusing to be mocked, and once we were across the garden, she held the door open and ushered me in. The sensation of being somewhere I had been vigorously discouraged from entering for most of my life was still strange. I sat on a crate in the corner. It was crusted with globs of something white.
In the middle of the room, hidden under a dirty sheet, was some object that at its highest point touched the ceiling. My mother went over and stood beside it, crossing her arms and cupping her elbows with opposite hands in a way that made her look nervous.
She coughed and said, ‘Martha. I know you and your sister tease me for the repurposing but all I’ve been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before. I’m sorry if that’s a bloody metaphor for everything.’ She turned and dragged off the sheet. ‘You don’t have to like it.’
My lungs went hard. It was a hollow figure, woven like a cage from wire and what looked like bits of old telephone. My mother had melted and poured copper over the head and shoulders. It had dripped down, into the torso, running over a heart that was suspended somehow in empty space and glowed dully under the lights. She had made me eight feet tall, beautiful, and stronger than I was before. I told her I was fine with the metaphor. And in the shed, before we went out, I told her she was right – the things she had said on the phone and in her letter. I have been loved every day of my adult life. I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I’ve been forgiven for the unforgiveable things I have done.
I can’t say I have forgiven the things that were done to me – not because I haven’t. Just because, Ingrid says and it is true, people who talk about how they’ve forgiven others sound so arseholey.
*
My mother’s sculpture is too big to be in a house. Supposedly, I am being sniffed by the Tate lot.
*
Patrick and I are not living together.
The same day we’d said goodbye to each other in a corridor surrounded by our own furniture, Patrick turned up at Goldhawk Road and said, both of us standing outside the house, that he wanted me to move back into the flat.
I rushed forward, expecting that he would hug me but he didn’t and I withdrew my arms.
He said sorry. ‘I meant, and I will live somewhere else.’
I asked him what he was proposing in that case, if he wanted me as a tenant.
‘No, Martha. I’m just saying if we’re going to do this, I feel like we have to be careful. Two people who have ruined each other’s lives shouldn’t get a second go at it. But while we’re trying to –’
‘Please don’t say trying to make things work.’
‘Fine. Whatever we’re trying to do, while we’re doing it, I don’t want you to have to live with your parents.’
I told him his idea was weird. ‘But okay.’
I went inside, got my things and Patrick drove me home.
Winsome invited him to stay at Belgravia but he rented a studio. It is non-depressing, two streets away in Clapham, and most of the time he is here. We talk about various things: if the hinge on the dishwasher door can be fixed or not; how two people who have ruined each other’s lives can be together again.
When people discover that you and your husband were separated for a time but have since reconciled, they put their head on the side and say, ‘Clearly you never stopped loving him deep down.’ But I did. I know I did. It is easier to say yes, you’re so right, because it is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice.
*
Patrick woke up when the shit remake had finished and started looking for his shoes. I did not want him to go. I said, ‘Do you want to watch Bake Off with me?’
We watched the episode with the Baked Alaska. He hadn’t seen it.
At the end, I told him that Ingrid still thinks the saboteur took it out of the fridge on purpose. Patrick said there was no way. He said, ‘She just made a mistake because the pressure is so ex
treme.’ I smiled at him – a man who can work all day in intensive care, then characterise the pressure on a contestant in Dessert Week as extreme. He asked me what I thought. I told him I had been on the fence but now I could see it was no one’s fault.
We said goodbye to each other in the hall, he kissed the top of my head and told me he would come back tomorrow. I went to bed. I still think it is weird. There are days when I cannot bear it, days when he says it feels like nothing has changed, and days when it feels to both of us like so much has been lost it is beyond repair. But we are together in, Patrick says, injury time – time we are not entitled to – and so we are grateful. He has started referring to the studio as the Hotel Olympia.
I don’t have a baby. There is no Flora Friel. I am forty-one. Maybe there never will be, but I have hope, and either way, Patrick is always just there.
Quoted Material
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Unless I specifically tell you otherwise, I was always smoking another cigarette
Money, by Martin Amis
I wasn’t quite sure, but on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all around me, and not being bothered to do things, and laughing at the kind of joke other people didn’t think at all funny, and going for country walks and not being asked to express opinions about things like love, and isn’t so-and-so peculiar
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
The great revelation had never come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
What people are most ashamed of usually makes a good story
The Love of the Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cremation was no worse than a family Christmas
The Only Story, by Julian Barnes
You were done being hopeless
Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter
Forgotten is forgiven
The Crack Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald
‘Attack the day’
Archbishop Justin Welby, BBC Desert Island Discs, 21 December 2014
‘a woman who lies in a darkened studio thinking about her divorce for 192 pages’
Good Morning, Midnight, by Jean Rhys
A Note on the Text
The medical symptoms described in the novel are not consistent with a genuine mental illness. The portrayal of treatment, medication and doctors’ advice is wholly fictional.
Acknowledgements
Catherine. And James. Libby, Belinda and the staff, and freelancers, of HarperCollins. Ceri, Clare and Ben. Fiona, Angie, Kate, the Huebscher family, Laurel, and Victoria. Clementine and Beatrix. Andrew. Thank you.
And my aunt Jenny, who was all my Christmases growing up.
About the Author
MEG MASON is a journalist who began her career at The Times and has since written for The New Yorker, GQ and The Sunday Telegraph. Her work appears regularly in Vogue, Stellar, ELLE and marie claire. Her first book, a memoir of motherhood, Say It Again in a Nice Voice (HarperCollins), was published in 2012. Her second, a novel, You Be Mother (HarperCollins), was published in 2017. She lives in Sydney.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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First published in Australia in 2020
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The right of Meg Mason to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
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