You Be Mother

by Meg Mason

‘Studies be damned, Abigail. It’s simply that you can no longer look at these lovely rolls,’ she prodded the dense white of Jude’s thigh, ‘and say it was all you.’

  ‘No,’ Abi said with fresh sadness. She hadn’t thought of that. ‘Now it’s a bit of Elaine as well.’ Abi dipped her chin and kissed Jude on the head. Phil took a tissue out of her basket and tucked it into Abi’s hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ Abi said. ‘You’ve made me feel so much better. Stupid Brush.’

  Phil looked at her quizzically.

  ‘Oh, it’s what I sometimes call her. Just in my head. Because of her bristly hair that looks like the sort of brush you have in the lav.’

  Phil laughed and Abi felt doubly consoled. Against the prospect of Phil’s leaving suddenly, she ventured further conversation. ‘Polly’s your oldest, and she lives in London, is that right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ Phil said, crossing one leg elegantly over the other. ‘Married to another lawyer, Mark. Well, he was a lawyer, I should say. Now does something in finance that requires him to bellow into a fistful of phones when we’re trying to dine. Very nice, but you know, intensely conventional. They’ve got two boys, six and eight, both as smart as paint. Then Brigitta, she’s also in London, a working girl.’ Phil leaned over and gave Abi a nudge. ‘Not in that sense, I should say. An actress, although whether that’s more gainful . . . No chap. As far as I know. Then James of course, was between the girls, and Freddie. My last little treat of a baby. Although he’s gone rather wildly off course, I’m sorry to tell you. Was somewhere in Asia, last we all heard.’

  Phil’s face drooped into sadness, and she held out a finger so Jude could wrap his plump hand around it.

  ‘Is he . . . as in . . . is he missing?’ Abi asked earnestly.

  ‘No, dear.’ Phil laughed. ‘He contacts me whenever he’s near a bank.’

  ‘Oh right. Four kids though, gosh.’

  ‘Well, I always thought three had an air of indecision to it,’ Phil said, withdrawing her finger before Jude could get it all the way to his mouth. ‘Yet this is where we find ourselves.’

  ‘It’s a shame none of them live around here,’ Abi said, feeling the opposite.

  ‘Yes, I do wonder why I went to the trouble of having quite so many if they were all going to desert me in one way or another. The best I get now is a lot of these blasted text messages.’

  Leaning into her basket, she took out her phone and held it at arm’s length. ‘Briggy this morning, “Having dinner with Pol and boys, driving all mad but say hello granny, missing you. Call soon x.” Tell me, Abigail, quite what the point is of a message like that?’

  The word granny lodged itself in Abi’s hearing. As she shifted Jude in her lap, her mind was invaded by the image of Rae sitting alone in her front room, snipping carefully around the head of Kate Winslet spotted in Waitrose. She was yet to reply to her mother’s text from earlier that morning, about a controversy involving two Strictly contestants . . . ‘. . . who are abit that way,. It’s an abscess Pat’s got. on the foot.’

  ‘I suppose texts can be handy if you’re not able to ring up,’ Abi said.

  ‘Why can’t you ring up, though?’ Phil insisted.

  ‘I don’t have international . . .’ Abi stopped herself, realising in time that Phil meant it rhetorically. She was asking about daughters in general.

  Still, just then, Abi considered putting her right about Rae. She would not have to tell her everything – the staying in, the scrapbooks, Pat – but she could clear up their misunderstanding by explaining that it really felt like Rae was dead. Grief had turned her into a shadow, a sort of half person, leaving Abi with the bones of a mother, but not the flesh. It might earn her another ration of Phil’s glorious sympathy, her easy, warm understanding. Abi opened her mouth to speak. ‘So, did you work before you had kids?’

  21.

  The longueurs

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Phil said, re-angling her hat. ‘Well, after a fashion. I was married at twenty-four, but we were nine years before children, which in those days was an age and I think everyone had written Frederick and I off as breeders. I was a painter. Trained, I should say, not a dreaded dabbler. But just as my career was reaching a low peak, we found out Polly was on her way and the whole business was put away. Lost under a pile of cloth nappies, Frederick used to say. Although to be perfectly frank, I had a girl who helped me with that side of things. But of course in those days, we didn’t have such a mania for working as your lot. Truly, Polly works like a woman possessed while whatever Polish girl she’s got stuck up in the loft-room minds the babies she paid thousands to conceive. I shouldn’t be disloyal.’ Phil held up her hands in surrender. ‘I only mean to say, I couldn’t have done it. But then Frederick always said I was a terrific rester. An eleven o’clock peaker, in his words. Any bursts of endeavour are really only to support more resting.’

  ‘Do you paint anymore? For fun or anything? Stu does. Well, he draws. He did a sketch of Jude the other day but apparently babies are really hard because their heads are so giant compared to their bodies. I thought it was good though. It’s just his thing on the side.’

  A small bank of clouds was gathering behind the city towers that glinted on the other side of the harbour and Phil stretched, but seemed in no hurry to go. ‘Likewise, I suppose. I get my things out and then I put them back immediately. Since Frederick, I haven’t any will. It feels too much like make-work, which at my age you acquire a particular dread for. Perhaps it would help break up the longueurs, but when I see a woman of my age setting her easel at the Point, it’s everything I can do not to kick the legs out on my way past. What about you? What was your line, before the advent of little Jude?’

  ‘Oh, I was doing social work at uni. But it wasn’t really for me, so when I had him I didn’t mind giving it up.’

  ‘Why did you choose it in the first place then, dear?’

  ‘I thought you had to do something you already knew how to do. And I’ve always done a lot of care work.’ Helping her mother out of the bath, bringing a milky Horlicks up to her room, removing it untouched in the morning. ‘And I’m probably naturally quite good at it. Not to brag, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re in any danger there.’

  ‘Plus, I could get in with just GCSEs and not hang about for A Levels.’

  ‘Oh.’ Phil looked surprised. ‘Did you not finish school?’

  ‘Not quite, no.’

  Phil rewrapped the towel around her shoulders against a stiffening breeze and motioned for Abi to continue.

  ‘I was in at a posh academy. Well, not posh but you know, a school for clever girls in another bit of London. My dad had always wanted me to go there so I sat the test, for him really, but then they all turned out to be posh.’ Abi touched her finger to the place above her eyebrow. ‘They said my fees would be covered but it turned out there’s more to it than that. Trips and whatnot. The blazer was eighty pound, just on its own. And you had to have the exact right one. You couldn’t make do with similar. I got an after-school job on the till at Greggs – that’s a not-very-nice bakery? – but I still couldn’t cover it and then I didn’t have time for all the homework. I don’t think the other girls had jobs, generally speaking.’

  Phil listened with her index figure curled against her chin like a question mark.

  ‘So once I’d done my GCSEs, I just stopped turning up. I was in the top set for everything. Before I, you know . . . stopped going.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Phil said. ‘There’s something to being a finisher though, isn’t there? Perhaps you’ll take up a little something here when the time is right. When Freddie started to flounder, I remember his father saying that an arts degree is one thing but half an arts degree is precisely nothing.’

  She removed her hat as the clouds moved in front of the sun. ‘Well, that turned out to be rather portentous. Not to return to Woolnough woes but I do blame myself, Abigail. I let him off too much, but we mothers aren’t as good at being really, reall
y tough with them, are we? Perhaps I should have been harder on him, but then Frederick could be formidable and of course you find yourself seeking to be the balance.’

  Abi moved to say something placatory but Phil would not brook interruption. ‘No, I did, I went wrong with him. He adored his brother and it was such a blow to him. He took it the hardest of the children I think, but at the time of course you don’t notice, or you can’t notice. All your energy goes on simply trying to get yourself up every morning and simply not drowning in it. And my prize is a lot of ruddy text messages. Anyway, enough of my dread regrets. If you don’t mind my asking, what is it you and Stuart do for funds? Are his parents rather helpful, when they’re not interfering?’

  ‘Stu does loads of shifts at the pub he works at, and that covers us for groceries and whatnot, but it is his parents’ flat we live in. Actually, I think I might live next door to you. I think I saw you down below, if you’re that pinkish house with the big windows on the side?’

  ‘The Arts and Crafts, yes. Really?’ Phil said, standing up with an oof sound. ‘I’ve often wondered how much those flats overlook me. I’ll be careful not to do anything illicit on my window seat from now on. But you were saying?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Abi got up. ‘And then on top of all that I’m still getting my child benefit from the UK, because I haven’t told them I’ve moved here.’ To impress Phil with her frugality, she said, ‘I’m trying to save that for Jude when he’s older. So mostly, I’m just being as careful as I can and using my student tricks, Weetabix dinner and whatnot.’

  ‘Abigail,’ Phil said sharply. ‘You must let the authorities know you’ve left, immediately. You could get yourself in all kinds of difficulty. Tell me you will, please, girl. That’s beyond a fib. It’s simply not worth the trouble of a continued falsehood. Perhaps that’s forty-four years married to a barrister, but I cannot bear any kind of lie.’

  Something acid flooded Abi’s mouth and she swallowed hard against it. As they made to leave, she avoided Phil’s eye.

  ‘Lord, look at those clouds,’ Phil said at the gate. ‘We’ll get a buster tonight if we’re very lucky.’

  ‘What’s a buster?’ Abi asked.

  Phil clapped her hands together. ‘Perhaps I won’t say, and we’ll let you have a lovely surprise. Give me a wave from above when it comes. And in the meantime,’ Phil took out her phone again and held it out, ‘why don’t you pop yourself in here. I haven’t got my glasses but it might be useful for the odd communiqué. Although I expect we could make do with two tins on a string between yours to mine.’

  She laughed in her high trill. Abi took the phone and did as Phil asked, without the excitement that such a grand invitation deserved.

  * * *

  That night, Abi fed Jude to sleep on the mattress, turning over her conversation with Phil. She could not bear a lie. You could get yourself in all kinds of difficulty.

  But Abi needed the money. The twenties and tens that Stu was still giving her every few days could be eked out to a point, but the fortnightly payments ticking up at home were her safety net. She extracted her arm from beneath Jude and left the room. The sultry heat of the day hung in the dark flat. In the kitchen, Abi leaned against the fridge and drank from a TetraPak of vanilla custard. She would wait a bit longer, then cancel the payment when Stu announced the permanent solution to their money situation that had been promised a fortnight ago. As she stood thinking, the trees outside the kitchen window began to toss their branches about messily. She turned to the window and watched as wind tore across the harbour, enveloping the building with a loud rush as it reached her.

  The window flew off its latch and a gulf of cold air filled the kitchen.

  ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,’ Abi said out loud, hair whipping around her face as she leaned over to close the latch. The wind in the narrow passage between the flats and Phil’s house rose like a roar, and Abi ran through to the living room, slid the window open and watched Phil’s door fly open against its hinges. Abi squinted against the swirling grit and saw Phil step out and wave, shielding her eyes and trying to keep Domenica from escaping.

  She waved back, exultant, and shouted, ‘A buster! It’s a buster.’ Her voice was carried away by the gale. Phil turned, tugging Domenica by the collar, and shut herself back inside. Abi stayed where she was, watching the trees bending at their trunks, the harbour whipped to a frenzy, until she heard Stu’s distinctive footfall up the stairs.

  ‘Yes!’ he said, throwing the door open. ‘I was hoping you’d think to open everything up. Feel that, babe.’

  ‘It’s a buster!’

  Stu sat on the sofa and patted the space beside him. Abi sat down. ‘Hey, sorry about this morning. I was so wrecked, that’s all. And you’re doing well with Jude and everything. I’m the one who’s struggling. So just . . . don’t worry what people say.’

  Which people, Abi wanted to ask. What do they say? But instead she rested her head against his broad shoulder, glad for company and relieved by the cool air whistling through the room.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘don’t worry about it.’

  ‘And now you’ve nailed the cross-breeze, so that’s another thing.’

  * * *

  Somewhere below, Phil was locking the kitchen door that rattled against its bolt. After wedging it shut with a rolled newspaper, she dialled Brigitta, not bothered to check the time. There was no answer. Polly’s phone went to the funny American voice that meant it was turned off. She gave up and took herself heavily up to her room, listening to the howl outside as she tried to fall asleep and feeling for all the world as though she were lost at sea.

  22.

  Their train is stuck at Potter’s Bar

  The phone was in her hand, but when Brigitta saw the number she slipped it, still ringing, into the pocket of the enormous Max Mara camel hair coat she had found in her mother’s wardrobe before leaving Sydney. It is so wasted in the Southern Hemisphere, she had thought at the time, slipping it off the wooden hanger and carting it off to her room.

  She knotted the belt more tightly around herself and pressed on along City Road towards the Barbican, for a last-minute Sunday call. She needed to be on form when she arrived and hearing her mother’s voice immediately beforehand would make her woolly and distracted. What no one in her family, and least of all Phil, seemed to understand was that any part in a new piece by the current Playwright Laureate was a huge thing – no matter how many actual lines you had. Her agent, a six-foot New Yorker with a man’s voice and unwavering fidelity to plum-coloured lipsticks, had called it a coup for someone who was so new on the circuit.

  Brigitta found out that the part was hers a fortnight before her father’s stroke. As she trudged towards the theatre, she tried not to think that in a computer somewhere would be the two business class flights he booked immediately in the name of Woolnough, departure date not yet elapsed. ‘Get us two for opening night, will you darling? Philly and I wouldn’t miss it.’

  Brigitta loved her father desperately, even though Polly was, if not his favourite, then his closest ally. It was an open secret, but it didn’t matter anymore. She missed him more and more with each passing hour. Phil had found him on the bathroom floor, when she’d gone in to join him in evening ablutions. As ambulance men took away the body, a police officer had helped her phone Polly, who had taxied over to Kentish Town in her pyjamas and overcoat at four o’clock in the morning to tell Brigitta. He had hit his head on the edge of the bath on the way down, Polly said through choking sobs, but would have been dead already. The sisters stood in the mail-strewn stairwell of Brigitta’s building, holding each other and crying until the ground floor lady came out to ask if they needed 999. They flew back to Sydney together as soon as they could to arrange the funeral. It took place on the last day of November, and the cemetery had been carpeted with jacaranda flowers, lilac and brown.

  The day after the service, Brigitta had called London to tell her agent there’d been a death in the fa
mily and she would have to withdraw from the production – her agent understood, she said, but felt obliged to point out that Brigitta would be closing a door not easily reopened.

  Torn, Brigitta had made a plan to fly back to London in the middle of January. The production didn’t start rehearsals until the fifteenth, which would give her the best part of two months with her mother, and a day or so in London to prepare. Still, Phil had been awful about it when Brigitta told her after the quietest Christmas they’d ever had. Her mother had cried and howled and blown her nose into a paper cocktail napkin left over from the wake, the running dye staining the underside of her nose. Red had been the only colour the caterer had to offer but Phil had gone berserk about it as guests poured into the house, shouting that Frederick Woolnough was not the sort of man you commemorated with a bowling club serviette in your hand and to hell with it, why not put out sausage rolls as well. ‘Cut on the bloody diagonal,’ Phil had called after the caterer as she fled to her van. ‘And a plastic bottle of sauce, why not, and people can do their own!’ The memory of her mother’s many outbursts during that time still made Brigitta quake.

  Although, more recently, she had remembered those weeks with a rising sense of indignation. No one had raised an eyebrow when Freddie took off two days after the funeral, duty to family apparently done and the job of managing some divey beach bar in Indonesia by then more pressing. Polly could do as she pleased, exempted by a proper job, a husband and the start of a new school term. Only Brigitta’s plans were picked over by the family corporate. It was all so unjust.

  Fuck! Brigitta thought, beginning to cry. This is why she was right not to answer her phone. She wiped both cheeks on the cuff of the Max Mara and hoped she didn’t look like a dog’s breakfast, as she punched in the stage door code and let herself in.

  Guy was on stage, seated with the main players in a circle of high stools. They had scripts in hand, open to the final scene. All were wearing versions of the same actory uniform Brigitta had on beneath the coat – leggings, a sweater that fell off one shoulder, thin scarf wrapped twice around her neck. Brigitta’s hair was twisted into a loose knot on top of her head. Polly called it her Thesp in Training look.