Mother Can You Hear Me?

by Margaret Forster

  Three times a year they went to St Erick, she and the family, three times only, a week or less at Easter, Whit and during August. They crammed into her parents’ house and their goodwill evaporated in a matter of hours. From the moment she went through the front door Angela felt suffocated not only by the pungent smell of lavender polish too thickly used and rose pot-pourris too regularly renewed but by the memories of living there. Sometimes on train journeys looking out of the window at rows and rows of featureless houses Angela would think how awful it must be to live in them and then experience a physical thrill of shock as she remembered that once she had done. When Grandad died, outliving Grandma by a mere six months, there had been some talk of moving into their house but Mother had refused to consider it. It was, she said, a horrible place with big draughty rooms and difficult stairs and no garden. It was built in Queen Victoria’s time, she said, and looked it. Only Angela, aged twelve, had wanted to live there. She had wandered about the house while Mother ministered to Grandma in the one used room and it excited her. Upstairs, there were four huge bedrooms with wide bay windows, the sort of windows where you could make a seat and sit there reading a book like children did in the books themselves. They could each have a room instead of she and Valerie sharing, and Tom and Harry squashed into a box room that was like a slit. But Mother was adamant. They would sell the grandparents’ house and divide the money with Father’s brother and sisters. So they stayed in their council house—‘at least it has modern comforts,’ Mother said—and used their share of the money to decorate it from top to bottom in flowered wallpapers and cream paint. They bought a new dining room suite, though they did not have a dining room, and a greenhouse and put the rest away for a rainy day though by then it was hardly enough to buy a couple of good umbrellas. Father, who would have liked to have a car, was a little disgruntled after the whole business was over, but Mother was given a great deal of innocent pleasure.

  The house was like thousands of others, literally so, one of a mass-produced lot that sprang up to deface the landscape before the war. Mother had chosen theirs herself and was proud of it. Her uncle was brother-in-law to the town planning officer and he told her to take her pick. Mother chose a two bedroom-with-boxroom and a washhouse attached. It was all they could afford at the time, she said. There was no bathroom and an outside lavatory but then bathrooms with lavatories upped the rent considerably. When, at school,’ Angela studied briefly the rudiments of architecture it made her laugh to think of their council house ever being designed. Designed? Windows, doors, building materials—who ever considered anything but cost where council houses were concerned? ‘We were so lucky,’ Mother said, and felt guilty about using her uncle’s influence. ‘We got the best two-bedroom one on the estate,’ she said. Nobody else’s soul was seared by living in that graceless shelter, except Angela’s, and she could take her fancy notions elsewhere.

  She would have liked to buy Mother and Father their own house—something pretty and old—but they would have none of it. When marriage to Ben made her prosperous she offered them, with Ben’s full approval, a charming cottage high up on the hill behind the town, a hill with a view of the river far below and easy access to the countryside around. They said no. They thanked her and admired the cottage and refused. They had neighbours on the estate, they had always lived there, they didn’t fancy moving; not now, not if she didn’t mind. So Angela put in a bathroom for the council’s benefit and had a telephone installed and Mother and Father pronounced themselves well content. Only when Angela and her family came did the house suddenly seem too small, but to admit it would not have been considered. ‘Plenty of room,’ Father would say, even when confronted with absolute evidence that this was a lie. Angela and Ben slept in the spare double bed with Tim on a camp bed beside them. Sadie slept on another camp bed in the bathroom which had once been the box room. Max and Saul slept in Mother and Father’s old room. ‘Plenty of room,’ Father said, and, ‘Always room for your own family.’

  Before Sadie was born, Ben brought home a strange and colourful toy clown that he had seen in a shop window. It was big and fat with long spindly legs and a lolling head. The stomach of this stuffed creature was yellow, the arms orange, the rest brown. Angela decorated the whole of the baby-to-be’s room round it. She painted all the walls a vivid sunshine yellow except for one, above the mantelpiece, which she covered in dark brown cork. Later, children’s drawings would be pinned upon it because of course her children would be given crayons as soon as they could hold them and she would know how to treasure their efforts. There was an orange rug on the shiny wooden floor and an orange blind on the window. The room was at the top of the house, on the top floor, overlooking the long, tree-filled garden. In the last stages of her pregnancy, Angela haunted it. She imagined the delight of the child who would have it. She sat at the window in a rocking chair and tears came into her eyes as she thought about it. Sadie turned out to be indifferent to her room. As soon as she was old enough, she neglected it. The cork remained brown and bare—no pictures were ever drawn for it, or if they were, Sadie immediately removed them and took them downstairs to pin in the kitchen. The many open shelves had untidy little clusters of things dumped upon them and never looked organized. The big work table was filthy with scraps of plasticine that had hardened and was allowed to collect dirt. ‘You say it’s my room,’ Sadie said when Angela called it a dump, ‘then you want it to be like your room was at my age.’ Angela was wise enough not to say she had never had her own room, that that was the point, the reason for her distress. She and Valerie had shared a bed in a room so small they had to turn sideways to get between the enormous wardrobe and the bed itself. There had been no beautiful spacious room in which she could take a pride, no private place to which she could retreat to read. But then Sadie never read and wasn’t private. It was clear from the beginning that Sadie was not a solitary creature destined to love a room high up and secluded. Eventually, she moved. They had the old coal cellar next to the kitchen made into a room, intending it as a study, and Sadie begged to have it. There was barely room for her bed and no room at all for clothes or belongings. Everything she owned was either crammed into a cabin trunk or draped round the walls on hangers and hooks. She maintained she liked its smallness and darkness. Angela never went into Sadie’s room unless she had to, and then claustrophobia overwhelmed her to such an extent that if the door had been accidentally shut, she would have screamed.

  Ben humoured her but prophesied doom, a rare thing for him to do. The children were glad only that they did not have to stay at Grandad’s and be harangued for their sins. Angela merely counted the days of freedom left and worried incessantly. She knew the place, she knew the hotel, she was completely familiar with exactly what to expect in the way of weather and she had made her decision to go because it was an experiment worth trying. Neutral ground, she told herself repeatedly, might solve all their problems. They would be on display and Trewicks displayed rather well.

  Already, Mother and Father had had three weeks of anticipation and whatever the outcome would have many more of enjoying their unexpected holiday in retrospect. It did not even have to be a success for them to do that. Angela could remember several shared holidays with Mother and Father—holiday homes rented on freezing beaches—which had been totally disastrous but were now gone over nostalgically. It was the going away together that mattered. They remembered that—the public exhibition of unity—and forget the arguments, forgot how rude and naughty their grandchildren had been, forgot their disapproval of how Angela and Ben brought them up. They remembered only what they wanted to remember and their version of it.

  Perhaps the same would happen again. And this time, there was the hotel to consider. Mother and Father had never stayed in an hotel, not ever. Boarding houses had been the pinnacle of their achievement, and even then they had to go back thirty years or more to remember when last they had graced such an exclusive establishment. All through Angela’s childhood Mother had written o
ff inquiring prices at selected boarding houses—stayed at and vouched for by better’ off folk—but they had always been too high. She never went to stay in a boarding house and was envious of those who did, until Aunt Frances told her they were only a kind of cheap hotel and not to be mentioned in the same breath as the real thing.

  The things that might worry Mother and Father had been taken care of. Their bedroom would have a bathroom attached and all round would be Angela and her family forming a solid block of Trewicks. The hotel was at the seaside, near the small town of Port Point, Father’s favourite place in the whole world, not that he had ever ventured far into it. For something like fifty years he had gone every Sunday to Port Point to fish and walk along the cliff. Angela alone of the children had liked to go with him, but loving the sea rather than Port Point. ‘The King would have come here, you know,’ Father would say, ‘only there was no hotel big enough.’ ‘What king?’ Angela would ask, suspiciously, but Father didn’t know. The fact that the king—any king—almost came should have been enough for her. Father said the reason he almost came was for the air which he had rightly heard was purer in Port Point than anywhere else, but Angela thought he must have wanted to come for the quiet. Port Point was not pretty, but it was quiet. It had a green and several streets of dull terraced houses and a cobbled main road along which stretched the shops and hotels. It was high up and open and apart from a few copses of pines totally exposed to the Atlantic winds which swept across it all winter and half the summer. ‘Bracing,’ Father would say, ‘get that in your lungs and feel the difference.’

  All one usually felt was exceedingly cold, to the point of numbness. A mile past Port Point there was a headland sticking out into the Atlantic. There stood a convalescent home and two hotels, both much admired by Mother and Father, who had never been in either. Sometimes, after Father had marched them along the cliff from Port Point, they would ogle the hotels, especially the bigger and more Edwardian of the two, and Father would say something about when his boat came in. The sea was a mere hundred yards away on one side and along the other was a narrow road leading onto the estuary. If the weather was good, it was the most perfect spot imaginable. If it was bad, there was no hope, not for Mother, not for the one person the holiday had been arranged for. The real killer would be a strong cold wind, the most likely thing of all on that particular part of the north Cornish coast—cold winds and drizzle, a combination so frequent it was sheer madness not to anticipate it.

  Angela did anticipate it. Her anticipatory imagination was in excellent working order. The point was, Mother and Father would still get a change of surroundings with very little effort on their part. They would have the excitement of staying in an hotel. They would have all their meals made and the novelty of choosing from a menu and the stimulus of other people around. Father could tramp into Port Point every day. The children could run wild and not be noticed. It would be better than nothing—it would prevent that coma of depression into which she herself fell under the strain of trying to cope, of trying to make Mother and Father happy. It would throw a smokescreen between her and the Angela they wanted and in it she could hide.

  She grew more and more silent as the day to drive down to St Erick approached. She had nightmares in which Ben was called away and she had to manage Mother and Father herself. It could not be done, not for a week, not with the children squarely on her back too. Ben was the ideal son-in-law. Often, Angela found herself apologizing for Mother and Father and the way in which inevitably they were made his concern as well as hers, but he bore no resentment. He said they took each other’s parents on—but he had none himself, a vital difference Angela harped upon. She envied him so passionately his orphan state that it frightened her. If Mother and Father had been Ben’s parents how tolerant she would have been, how kind and considerate, how anxious about their welfare, how easy she would have found it to be objective about their troubles. If her parents, like Ben’s parents, had been killed in a car crash when she was twenty how deeply she would have mourned them, how sincere would have been her tears. And how liberated she would have felt.

  But Mother and Father were old and alive and eagerly awaiting her arrival in St Erick. Waiting for Angela to solve all their problems. She would whisk in and organize them and liven them up and they would not feel lonely and deserted and failures for a week at least. ‘You will help, won’t you Sadie?’ Angela pleaded. Sadie grunted. ‘You will talk to them and try to understand why they are as they are?’ ‘It’s so awful,’ Sadie said, ‘Grandad’s so stupid and Grandma just sits and we just have to sit too. It’s agony.’ ‘I know,’ Angela said, ‘but look at it from their point of view.’ ‘I do, but you go on so—I mean, what do you expect us to actually do?’ ‘Just be cheerful. And look for ways to please them. And make them feel wanted. That’s all. And don’t sulk or fight with Max—just try to be a little less selfish for once.’ ‘It’s all hypocrisy,’ Sadie said.

  After Tim was born, Angela was ill. Sadie was nine, Max seven, Saul six and that was meant to be that, their family complete. But Angela’s doctor made her come off the pill ‘for a while anyway’ and she became pregnant in spite of the most careful precautions. She would not have it that Tim was a mistake—she had made no mistake. He was an accident and that was different. An abortion was available but to her own astonishment she found she could not bring herself to have it. There was a small corner in her heart that had not quite done with babies, and though it was irrational and silly, and though she had only just gone back to teaching and was enjoying it, she went ahead and had Tim. Mother and Father were shocked. Knowing they would be she did not tell them until she was six months pregnant and then when she broke the news she went to great lengths to point out that she wanted the baby and that they were not to think of it as a catastrophe. But they did. The baby was thought of by them as a disaster—‘as if you didn’t have enough already’—and there were so many unpleasant innuendoes in everything they said about her unexpected pregnancy that Angela felt like a criminal. They both prophesied doom and as it turned out they were nearly right. She was five days in labour and then had a Caesarean. Tim was a pitiful not-quite-five-pounds baby who had to stay in an incubator for a month. Mother and Father’s concern was deep and genuine—and burdensome—but the element of ‘we told you so’ hard to endure. Then as soon as she came home, Angela developed glandular fever. It took her four months to climb out of the appalling listlessness and exhaustion that sapped every ounce of her already depleted strength. She did not have to be told that she needed a holiday. Valerie came, a heroine, and looked after the children and Angela was taken off to the sun, too weak to resist. With her own feebleness so apparent, she had thought the children, especially Sadie, would understand why she had to go away, but they showed no signs of doing so. Sadie in particular was resentful. ‘The baby will cry for you,’ she said accusingly, ‘you know he will. He’ll cry and cry.’ When the plane took off for Greece, Sadie’s hostility haunted Angela—she saw her daughter’s cold, tight little face staring at her with what she imagined was hatred. The entire two weeks she was away she woke up at night sweating with terror as Sadie’s, shrill voice rang in her ears saying ‘But what about us? What about us?’ Suppose the plane crashed, suppose one of them was killed while she was away, suppose they were all wretchedly unhappy—it would be her fault for putting herself first. Mother had not gone off to the sun after an illness. Mother had carried on. She had always been there, putting them first. Though she grew tanned and put on weight and felt human again for the first time since Tim’s birth, guilt tinged every day. When she went home, to find everything in perfect order, it was Sadie’s smile that meant most. Ben said she was a little tyrant but Angela saw it differently. Sadie had been afraid. Sadie had estimated correctly her mother’s importance in her life and shuddered at the thought of what would happen if it was removed. Sadie was nowhere near ready to go her own way and until she was—until that blissful day—the truth of her deepest fear had to be ac
knowledged.

  ‘Couldn’t I stay here?’ Sadie said, the day before they were due to go.

  ‘No, you could not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because this is a family holiday.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like family holidays. I’m not a child any more—you’re always telling me I’m not—I don’t like any of the things we do on a family holiday. I hate walking. I hate touring round places.’

  ‘It will do you good.’