‘Don’t spare his blushes,’ Angela said. Valerie winced. Mother might be better but not so much better that facetious conversations across her bed were in order.
The District Nurse was perfectly willing to humour him—it was almost as if she considered it part of her job. ‘Well,’ she said, sticking a thermometer under Mother’s tongue, ‘you must be retired, so I know for a start you’re over sixty-five, don’t I?’
‘You do indeed,’ Father said. ‘Correct. I’m all of sixty-five as the song says.’
‘What song?’ Angela said, rudely, but Father ignored her and pressed his victim for an answer.
‘Let’s see,’ the District Nurse said, pretending careful deliberation, ‘well, sixty-nine I’d say—seventy next birthday, eh?’
‘Ten years out,’ Father said, triumphant. ‘Eighty next birthday. Now then.’
The District Nurse’s astonishment was clearly genuine. She repeated ‘never’ and ‘eighty next birthday’ several times as she busied herself with Mother.
‘Give him a medal,’ Angela said, but nothing would dampen Father’s sudden high spirits, until the District Nurse said she would like some more hot water and he and Valerie collided in the doorway in their haste to be the first to get it. Angela laughed.
Father turned on her furiously, all good humour gone, and held up a warning finger. She went on smiling steadily at him, refusing to give in, but to her disgust her heart pounded and her face felt hot. She still could not taunt him without fear of swift retribution. She carried in her head the memory of thrashings and ugly scenes and the inevitable humiliations that followed and though he was now powerless to hurt her, she had never quite stopped trembling. He couldn’t, of course, help it, any more than she could herself.
At two years old, the baby became Sadie, indisputably a person and a wayward person at that. Angela looked back to Sadie’s babyhood and wondered why she had found it difficult—why had she wanted her baby to talk so much, why had she wanted her independent? At every turn, Sadie crossed her. She would not eat her food, she threw appalling tantrums for no apparent reason, she was cross and difficult about the most simple things. Angela remembered how Mother had never lost her temper—only Father. Mother never shouted or smacked—only Father. With horror she began to realize that struggling to be like Mother was useless. Despair and depression made her so angry she frequently slapped Sadie or pushed her hard into her room, and then wept tears of remorse. ‘I’m sorry,’ she would say afterwards, ‘I’m sorry, sorry, I’m a horrible awful Mother.’ Miraculously, Sadie did not seem to hold it against her. Within half an hour after some appalling screaming match between them she would be humming cheerfully and only Angela would be gloomy. Will Sadie grow up afraid of me, she wondered, and the question haunted her. She had never been afraid of Mother, who was all sweetness and light, a constant haven from all the storms of childhood. With great patience Ben, her husband, explained that not every mother had to be like Mother. Sadie would take the rough with the smooth. But Mother was all smooth, Angela said. I am no use.
None of them wanted the District Nurse to go. Valerie made more tea and they all sat around drinking it in the sitting room, Mother left to sleep after the exertion of being washed. The District Nurse said she was quite sure Mrs Trewick would now go from strength to strength and complimented them all on the care they had taken. The crisis was over, she said. ‘Thank god,’ Valerie said. ‘Good,’ Father said, emphatically. Angela said nothing, knowing her silence was noted and held against her.
‘We’ll wait and see what the doctor says this afternoon,’ Father said, ‘then these lasses will want to get off home, but I’ll manage. They work, you know, can’t just drop everything, but that’s the way the world is these days. One’s a teacher, and the other’s a probation officer—what do you think of that?’
‘Haven’t they done well? the District Nurse said. ‘You must be very proud of them.’
‘And I’ve two sons,’ Father said, ‘in Australia, both of them, or they’d be here too.’
‘I doubt it,’ Angela murmured.
‘What?’ Father said. ‘Course they would. You watch your tongue, miss.’ Again, the warning finger.
‘I think I’ll have to be going,’ the District Nurse said. They were all fulsome in their gratitude, overpowering in their appreciation.
‘What did you say that for, about Tom and Harry? Eh? Daftness—course they would come to their Mother’s sick bed if they could—deliberately letting folk think they wouldn’t care—wickedness—what did you say it for?’
‘What do any of us say anything for?’ Angela said, knowing such affected talk enraged him.
‘You keep that sort of silly remark for London,’ Father said, ‘it won’t wash down here. We talk sense here. I don’t know what gets into you.’
‘You never did.’
‘You’re right there—damned right. All a waste of time. You struggle and sweat and do your best and what for? Nothing. Get away with you, go on. See what you can do for your poor Mother before she goes.’
‘She isn’t “going” anywhere,’ Angela said, but he had lumbered off on one of his invented important errands.
Mother fully recovered the use of her voice that afternoon, shortly after the doctor had been. It moved Angela to tears to hear her Mother speak, in a rough, husky whisper quite different from her usual light voice. The glory of someone returning from the almost-dead struck her as blinding—she could not but admire the determination, the love of life itself, that had kept Mother’s frail body and soul together. Her rejoicing at such a recovery was as genuine as Valerie’s and Father’s, though only a little while ago she had wished Mother finally dead to save her from future misery. In the evening, she sat with her while Valerie cooked and Father made endless telephone calls, booming out the good news to all and sundry, and kept to herself her vision of the grim months ahead. Better to forget that things were far from rosy—Mother’s lungs were still congested, her heart weak, her arthritis crippling, her sight fading, her hearing impaired. It would be weeks till she was up, weeks till she might stagger out, and meanwhile she would remain locked in mortal combat with Father pushing and domineering and fussing and annoying all at once.
‘You shouldn’t have come,’ were almost Mother’s first proper words, addressed to Angela. ‘Those poor children—left—all this way—’
‘The children are fine,’ Angela said, ‘and I wanted to come.’
‘It was good of you. I’m sorry you had to—I’m such an old nuisance—’
‘No,’ Angela said, ‘you are not. You’re not a nuisance at all—you’re my poor Mother and you’re not to worry about anything. Just relax and get better.’
Protecting Mother had been a lifelong occupation—from herself, from the cruel world. ‘Don’t tell your Mother’ was one of the first instructions Angela learned. It applied to anything whatsoever that might be considered disturbing news. Mother mustn’t be told anything nasty or distressing and that covered a wide variety of topics which grew ever more extensive.
Obediently, not wanting to be the one who made Mother sorrowful, who brought to her face that pitiful expression, Angela learnt to swallow her own fears, anxieties, worries, nightmares the better to shield Mother. Mother would embrace her and dry her tears without ever knowing what they were about, and soon Angela learned to control even those signals of distress. Mother never knew how at ten she was wrongly accused of stealing at school and subjected to terrifying interrogations by an overzealous headmistress who did not even apologize for them when the real culprit was found. Mother never knew swimming lessons were purgatory. Off she would go, twice a week, to the public baths to have lessons, paid for by Grandma, from a brute called Mr Shropshire who roared at her and poked her in the back with a long pole that had a nasty sharp hook on the end. ‘Enjoyed yourself, dear?’ Mother would ask, smiling, pleased that Angela was learning to swim because she could not swim herself and had always wanted to, and Angela would say �
�yes’ because she did not want to wipe the smile from Mother’s face.
‘I don’t know why God spares me each time,’ Mother was saying. ‘Sometimes I think it’s just to give your Father something to do.’ She looked hopefully at Angela, who evaded the issue. Conversations about what God did or did not intend were doomed to failure. Religion was Mother’s greatest comfort and it would be cruel to attack it—cruel and unnecessary. Lately, they had all encouraged Mother in her devotion to God and Jesus because it was such a relief to feel that she had something to put her faith in. Instead of mocking the texts pinned up round the house and deriding the religious messages in the printed pamphlets Mother collected Angela found herself nodding sagely at them and welcoming more. The last thing any of them wanted, at this stage, was for Mother to start querying Christianity and its meaning.
Father came in and stood at the bedside looking down at Mother with a maddeningly proprietorial air.
‘How are you feeling, Mam?’ he asked, head on one side.
Mother was too weak to give vent to irritation but there was no mistaking the beseeching look she cast in Angela’s direction.
‘She’s tired,’ Angela said, ‘obviously.’
‘Do you want propped up, Mam?’ Father asked, already dragging out another pillow and preparing to heave Mother around.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Angela said, she doesn’t want to move a finger.’
‘Oh, she has to move,’ Father said. ‘Must get her moving, soon as possible, that’s the way, or we’ll have her bedridden—oh no, she has to be got moving’—and with rough, hurried movements he shoved the other pillow under Mother’s shoulders so that her head flopped forward at the most uncomfortable of angles.
‘We have to get her moving,’ he said again, ‘and up to the bathroom. Do you want to do anything now, Mam? Do you need the pan, eh?’
Mother mutely shook her head and directed that look of appeal at Angela again, but Angela said nothing. She could not take on that burden again—it was no use Mother electing her as her champion to enter the lists against Father’s insensitivity and coarseness. When Father left the room to fuss over something else, Mother whispered, ‘You don’t know what I have to put up with.’
‘But I do,’ Angela said. ‘I know exactly—but he doesn’t mean it that way—he can’t help himself—that’s just the way he is.’
It was not what she should have said. It was not what Mother wanted her to say. It was not what she used to say when she lived at home and lashed Father with her tongue in Mother’s defence, steeling herself to take the brunt of his rage. Father only attacked Mother through being what he was, what he couldn’t help—since he worshipped her, he could never even shout at her let alone strike her. But he could shout at Angela and hit her when she went too far and on the sidelines would be Mother, the cause of it all and yet innocent.
It was always the little things that caused the scenes, the refinements. Mother would sit at the neatly set table eating her meal with great delicacy, cutting up her meat into small pieces and popping it daintily into her mouth, which she would then close while she chewed thoroughly. Father sloshed his food with gravy and drowned it in great dollops of sauce and walloped it into his mouth with half a slice of bread, losing half of it on the way up from the plate. A tiny shiver of distaste from Mother and Angela would say, ‘I think I’ll eat in the back kitchen. I don’t like eating with pigs—it makes me sick watching him.’ Things like that, silly, absurd, unforgivable things. Mother used her, and regretted it.
‘I think I’ll have to go home tomorrow,’ she said, ‘though I would like to stay.’
‘It was good of you to come,’ Mother said.
‘I can come again, soon.’
‘No, no—you mustn’t leave the children—I don’t like to think about it.’ The little tick in the corner of Mother’s eye, that nervous twitch she had had ever since Angela could remember, began to work again, feebly, overcoming the drugs that had stilled it during her illness.
‘The children are fine,’ Angela said, ‘Ben is so good they don’t even miss me.’
‘Oh, they do,’ Mother said. ‘All children miss their Mother.’
‘Well, mine don’t,’ Angela said firmly. ‘I’ve trained them not to. I’m not a Mother like you were.’
Leaving Sadie was always hard. Angela could hardly bring herself to go out in the evening when Sadie was asleep—suppose she woke and needed her?—never mind during the day when she was awake. The casual way in which other Mothers left their small children appalled her. Only with Ben in charge could she relax. On his day off she would sometimes dash into town and shop and when she came back Sadie was often standing with her nose pressed against the window, forlorn and sad: ‘Be sensible,’ Ben said, ‘you know perfectly well she’s quite happy with me—we have great games—it’s just when you come back she cries.’ But Mother never left me, Angela thought, not when I was tiny. Mother was always there. Small children were so pathetic, their understanding so physical. She promised herself that when Sadie could talk and understand, everything would be different, she would leave her without a qualm. But leaving her now, at two years old, was a betrayal. She had no right to want freedom from Sadie. Mother had never wanted it.
Ben rang up, sounding depressed, urging her to come home that day.
‘Wants you home, eh?’ said Father.
‘Poor man,’ Mother said, ‘he’s very good letting you come, very good. Some men wouldn’t.’
Angela laughed. ‘He doesn’t have much say in the matter,’ she said. ‘I do what I like and he has to put up with it, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, Angela,’ protested Mother, but she smiled slightly. Angela’s independent spirit had always thrilled her. She was convinced she had bred, by some fluke, a strong powerful fearless daughter in the image not of her craven self but of her dreams. It made up for the loathing she felt for her own weak character. Nothing pleased her more than a display of Angela’s strength. ‘Right from a little thing,’ she was given to saying, ‘you knew what you wanted and you were determined to get it. Not a bit like me.’ Every strident boast Angela came out with received Mother’s silent approval until she felt any hesitancy, any uncertainty, would be unthinkable. Often, Mother would openly admire her resolution just as her nerve was failing and then it was impossible to give up. ‘I couldn’t have gone abroad like this,’ Mother said, as they sat waiting for the taxi to take Angela, fifteen, to the station where she would begin her journey alone, to stay with a family in Avignon. ‘I couldn’t even have coped with London,’ Mother said, ‘I would have been far too frightened. And as for catching a boat train—and getting the right connection the other side—’ One by one she listed Angela’s fears. ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Angela said, ‘I’m looking forward to it.’
Valerie said she would stay a few more days, make a week of it, see Mother properly over the hump. They went to the shops together before Angela left and stocked up with tins and dried goods, things Father would use if they were provided. It was the only way to combat partially his frugal housekeeping.
‘It’s good of you to stay longer,’ Angela said, ‘it makes it so much easier for me to leave. I appreciate it.’ She hadn’t meant to be so abrupt and clipped. Valerie’s sloppiness made her abrasive.
‘Well, you’ve got the children to think about,’ Valerie said, but with no edge to her voice.
‘A wonderful let out. A job isn’t nearly as convincing, though it can’t be easy for you.’
‘No,’ Valerie said, ‘but I couldn’t put work before Mother’s health. It wouldn’t be right. If anything happened, I would never forgive myself.’
Quickly, Angela banged four tins of soup into the trolley they were pushing round the supermarket. It was like talking to Father and about as realistic.
‘What would we do,’ Angela said, ‘if Father dies or falls ill? Have you thought of that one? I wake up at night sometimes sweating with the fear of it. Mother would have to be put in a home.’
‘Oh no,’ Valerie said, hand poised above a packet of jelly, ‘never. I wouldn’t allow it. We would work something out.’
‘What?’ Angela asked. ‘I couldn’t have her, I just couldn’t.’
‘Then she would come to me.’
‘I couldn’t have Mother—it would kill me. We’ve got the space and the money and I only work part-time but I couldn’t—I would go mad. I’d disintegrate.’
Valerie picked a tin of beans off the shelf and put it carefully in the almost full trolley. She was a little flushed. Together, they walked towards the checkout point. ‘You used to say Mother would come and live with you when you were grown up, Angela,’ she said. ‘You used to get her to promise she would. Don’t you remember?’
They had fought over it. They had walked down the road pulling at Mother’s coat sleeves and shouting ‘Me! She’s going to live with me!’ and each of them clamoured for Mother’s agreement. Dancing and skipping along, five and seven, fighting over her, desperate to get her to commit herself but she would give nothing away. ‘When I’m old,’ she said, ‘you won’t want me.’ ‘We will! We will!’ ‘When you grow up,’ she said, ‘you’ll have husbands and you won’t love me any more.’ ‘We will! We will!’ they cried. ‘All right,’ Mother said, an arm round each of them as they turned up their adoring faces, ‘I’ll come and live with whoever wants me most when they are grown up.’ ‘That will be me,’ Angela shouted, and Valerie wept, because it sounded so final.
Father insisted on coming to the station with her, which prolonged the ordeal of departing. In some ways, it was worse than saying goodbye to Mother, who was much better about it than anyone had a right to expect. Mother in some strange way had always seemed to crave the arrival of long-dreaded painful moments—she was impatient to have done with them when the time came. She lay back on the white pillows looking frail and tired but also pretty in her pink nightdress with the lace edging round the neck, a last-Christmas present from Angeb The sun came through the net curtains and lit up the whiteness of her thick hair and the vivid blue of those large eyes neither daughter had inherited. There was a little more colour in her face and her expression, though weary, was free from pain, her forehead quite smooth and unfurrowed. She let Angela go with a smile and a willing pressure of the hand whereas Father, stern and unyielding in his dark trilby hat and stiff winter overcoat, was reluctant to let her escape.
Mother Can You Hear Me? Page 3