Oh, Love is handsome and love is kind,
And love’s a jewel when it is new.
But when it is old, it groweth cold,
And fades away like morning dew.
“Mummy, I know why you get cross with Daddy,” Emily said to me the other morning.
“Why?”
“Because he does wrong things.”
I knelt down beside her, so I could look straight into her eyes. It felt important to set the record straight. “No, sweetheart, Daddy doesn’t do wrong things. Mummy just sometimes gets very tired and that makes her not patient with Daddy, that’s all.”
“Patient means wait a minute,” she said.
I pick up Sayings of the World’s Great Religions from the bedside table and flick through it. There are sections on Belief, Justice and Education. I pause at the one on Marriage.
I have never called my wife “wife,” but “home.”
—The Talmud
Home. I look at the word for a long time. Home. Hear its rounded center. Picture what it means. I am married but am not a wife, have children but am not a mother. What am I?
I know a woman who is so afraid of her children’s need for her that, rather than go home after work, she sits in the wine bar to wait until they’re asleep.
I know a woman who wakes her baby at 5:30 every morning so she can have some time with him.
I know a woman who went on a TV discussion program and talked about doing the school run. Her nanny told me she barely knew where her kids’ school was.
I know a woman who heard down the phone from a baby-sitter that her baby took his first steps.
And I know a woman who found out her husband left her from a note that was read out to her by her nanny.
I lie there for a long time in the bed, maybe hours, waiting until I start to feel something. And finally it comes: a feeling both intensely familiar and shockingly strange. It takes me a few seconds to know what it is. I want my mother.
34
Home to Mum
HOWEVER HARD I SEARCH, I can’t come up with a memory of my mother sitting down. Always standing. Standing at the sink holding a pan under running water, standing by the ironing board, standing at the school gate in her good navy coat; bringing in plates of hot food from the kitchen and then clearing them away again. Common sense suggests there must have been an interval between bringing the plates in and taking them out when she sat down and ate with us, but I don’t remember it. Dishes, once they were let out of cupboards, became a “mess” to my mother, and a mess needed clearing up. You could still be in mid-forkful, but if the plate looked empty Mum would whisk it away.
My mother’s generation was born for service; it was their vocation and their destiny. The gap between school—routine, things you do because you must, bad smells—and motherhood—routine, things you do because you must, bad smells—was a matter of a few years. Those fifties girls had a window of freedom, but the window was seldom wide enough to climb through, and anyway what would become of them if they got out? Women like my mum didn’t expect much of life, and in general life did not disappoint them. Even when the men they served ran out on them or died too early from strokes and disorders of the stomach, they often stayed at their posts—preparing meals, hoovering, grabbing any ironing that was going from their children or grandchildren and never sitting down if they could possibly help it. It was as though they defined themselves in doing for others, and the loss of that definition left them blurred, confused: like the pit ponies who kept their tunnel vision long after they had been let loose in a field.
For my generation, coming to it later and sometimes too late, motherhood was a shock. Sacrifice wasn’t written into our contract. After fifteen years as an independent adult, the sudden lack of liberty could be as stunning as being parted from a limb; entwined with the intense feeling of love for your baby was a thin thread of loss, and maybe we will always ache like an amputee.
What my mum still calls Women’s Liberation had just about taken off by the time I was born, but it never reached the parts where my parents lived and, to a remarkable extent, still hasn’t. (If you live in London and read only certain newspapers, you would think that equality was a done deal, not some futuristic experiment still under scrutiny in select laboratories by men in white coats.) One summer, my mother grew her perm out and had her hair cut short in a feathery style that flattered her elfin features. Julie and I loved it, she looked so pretty and cheeky, but when my dad came in that night he said, “It’s a bit Women’s Lib, Jean,” and the style was grown out without fuss, without any more needing to be said.
As I entered my teens, it occurred to me that things were not what they seemed: although the men round our way took all the leading roles, it was the women who were running the show, but they were never allowed to be onstage. It was a matriarchy pretending to be a patriarchy to keep the lads happy. I always thought that was because where I came from people didn’t get much of an education. Now I think that’s what the whole world’s like, only some places hide it better than others.
* * *
IN THE PLAYGROUND, the children’s cries fill the air like starlings. The school is a red-brick building, with tall churchy windows, dating from an era when people had faith both in God and education. Over in the far corner, next to the climbing frame, there is a woman in a navy three-quarter coat bending down. When she straightens up, I can see she is holding a handkerchief which is attached to the bloody nose of a small girl.
My mother is a nursery school assistant. She’s been here for years now and basically she runs the place, but they still call her an assistant. Because they can get away with it—Mum doesn’t like to make a fuss—and because it means they can pay her less. The money’s terrible. When she told me how much I shouted with dismay; I could blow it on cab fares in three days. But if you use words like exploitation, my mother just laughs. Says she likes the job, it gets her out of the house. Besides, she has a way with children. If your three-year-old had a bleeding nose, believe me, you’d want my mother to be the one holding her hand. Jean Reddy is one of those souls who exude comfort like a human hot-water bottle.
When she looks across the yard, she knows it’s me instantly, but it takes another second before the pleasure floods into her face. “Oh, Kathy, love,” she says, coming over with the wounded tot in tow, “what a lovely surprise. I thought you were in America.”
“I was. Got back a couple of days ago.”
When I kiss her cheek, it’s apple cold. “Now, Lauren,” my mother says, addressing the sniffling child, “this is my little girl. Say hello!”
The ringing bell signals the end of Mum’s shift and we go indoors to fetch her bag from the staff room. In the corridor, she introduces me to Val, the headmistress of the primary school. “Oh, yes, Katharine, we’ve heard so much about you. Jean showed me the cutting in the paper. You’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you?”
I’m eager to get out of here, but my mother enjoys showing me off. The hand she puts on my arm as she steers me between colleagues reminds me of Emily at World Feast Day parading Mummy in front of her friends.
Parked in front of the school, the Volvo is filled with kids’ stuff. “How are they?” Mum asks as we climb in. I tell her they’re fine and with Paula. On the drive to the flat, we pass my old school and she sighs. “Did you hear about Mr. Dowling? Terrible.”
“He took early retirement, didn’t he?”
“Yes. A lass. Can you imagine a young lass doing something like that, Kath?”
Mr. Dowling was my head of history twenty years ago, a blinky soft-spoken man with a vast enthusiasm for Elizabethan England and the poetry of the First World War. A few months ago, some little cow in the fifth form punched his glasses into his face and he took early retirement soon after. Mr. Dowling, an archetypal grammar-school boy, had become one of the casualties of the comprehensive system—a doctrine of equality which means that all the kids round here who want to learn something are in cl
asses with kids who don’t.
“They’ll expect you to have read widely, Katharine, but we’ve very little time,” Mr. Dowling said to me when he was preparing me for Cambridge entrance. I was the only one in my year, the only one for as long as anyone could remember except Michael Brain, who got to Oxford to read law and was now at the Bar, which we were told had nothing to do with pubs. It was after school, in Mr. Dowling’s office off the library, with the electric fire with just one bar working. I loved being in there with him, reading and hearing the click of the filaments. We did the Chartists in a day, the First World War in a weekend. “You won’t know everything, but I think we can give an impression of you knowing the ground,” my teacher said. But I had the famous Reddy memory; England under the Tudors and Stuarts, the Ottoman Empire, witchcraft. I had the dates of battles down pat, the way my father memorized the pools: Corunna, Bosworth, Ypres—Raith Rovers, Brechin City, Swindon Town. We could wing anything, Dad and me, if we thought it would pay. Walking up the steps to take my seat alone in the exam room I knew I could do it, if I could only hold the knowledge in there for long enough. Must remember.
“Nice cup of tea. And I’ll do some sandwiches, shall I? Ham all right?” Mum is busying herself with the kettle in the kitchen of the flat. More an alcove than a kitchen; there’s room for only one person in there.
I never want to eat the sandwiches, but a couple of years ago I had one of those maturity leaps when I realized that eating wasn’t the point. My mother’s sandwiches were there to give her something she could do for me, when there is so much she can’t do anymore. Overnight her need to be needed seemed more important than my need to get away. I sit down at the Formica table with the fold-down flaps, the table that sat in all the kitchens of my childhood. (It has a black scab gouged out of the side by a furious Julie after a row with Dad over finishing her rutabaga.) As I eat, Mum puts up the ironing board and starts to work her way through the basket of clothes at her feet. The room is soon filled with the drowsy, comforting smell of baked water. The iron makes little exasperated puffs as it travels the length of a blouse or gets its snout into a tricky cuff.
My mother is a champion ironer. It’s a pleasure to watch her hand move an inch or so ahead of the little steam train, smoothing its path. She smooths and smooths and then she snaps the cloth taut like a conjurer and finally she folds. Arms of a shirt folded behind like a man under arrest. As I watch her, my eyes go swimmy: I think that after she’s gone there’ll be no one who will ever do that for me again—no one who will iron my clothes taking such infinite pains.
“What’s that over your eye, love?”
“Nothing.”
She comes over and lifts my fringe to get a better view of the eczema and I blink back the tears. “I know your nothings, Katharine Reddy.” She laughs. “Have you got some cream off the doctor for it?”
“Yes.” No.
“Have you got it anywhere else?” “No.” Yes, in a flaming itching belt around my middle, behind my ears, behind my knees.
In my pocket, the mobile begins to thrum. I take it out and check the number. Rod Task. I switch the phone off.
“What have I told you about looking after yourself? I don’t know how you manage with work on at you the whole time”—Mum jabs her finger in the direction of the mobile—“and the kiddies as well. It’s no life.”
Back behind the ironing board, she says, “And how’s our Richard keeping?”
I give a crumby mumble. I’ve come all the way up here to tell her that Rich has gone. I hated the idea of leaving the kids with Paula so soon after getting back from the States, but if I put my foot down I can do the journey here and back in a day. And I didn’t want Mum to find out that Richard and I were separated, as I did, down the phone. But now I’m here I can’t quite find the words: Oh, by the way, my husband left me because I haven’t paid attention to him since 1994. She’d think I was joking.
“Richard’s a good man,” she says, trapping a pillowcase on the curved end of the board. “You want to hang on to him, love. They don’t come much better than Richard.”
In the past, I have taken my mother’s enthusiasm for my man as a sign of its opposite for me. Her exclaiming over another of his supposedly miraculous virtues (his ability to make a simple meal, his willingness to spend time with his children) always seemed to draw attention to my matching vices (my reliance on cook-chill food, my working weekends in Milan). Now, sitting here in my mother’s home, I hear her praise for what it is: the truth about someone who has Mum’s gift for putting others before themself.
We had tea in this room the first time I brought Rich back to meet her. I was so determined not to be ashamed of where I came from that by the time we got here, after a hot and dogged ride from London, I had stoked myself up into a defiant take-us-as-you-find-us mood. So what if we don’t have matching cutlery? What if my mother says settee instead of sofa? Are you going to make something of it, are you, are you?
Rich made nothing of it. A natural diplomat, he soon had Mum eating out of his hand merely by tucking into heroic quantities of bread and butter. I remember how big he looked in our house—the furniture was suddenly doll’s furniture—and how gently he negotiated all the no-go areas of my family’s past. (Dad had walked out by then, but his absence was almost as domineering as his presence had been.) Panicked by the idea of Kath’s posh boyfriend, my mum, who always goes to too much trouble, had, on that occasion, gone to too little. But Rich volunteered to go to the shop on the corner for extra milk and came back with two kinds of biscuit and an enthusiasm for the hills whose sooty shoulders you could glimpse from the end of the street.
“Julie said that some men have been round here asking for money that Dad owes them.”
With one hand my mother pats her helmet of gray curls. “It’s nothing. She’d no need to go bothering you with that. All sorted now. Don’t go fretting yourself.”
I must have pulled a face because she adds, “You shouldn’t be too hard on your father, love.”
“Why not? He was hard on us.”
Chuuuussh. Chuuuuussh. The iron and my mother chide me simultaneously with their soft sighs.
“It’s not easy for him, you know. He’s that bright but he’s not had the outlets, not like you. In your dad’s family, there was no question of going on to college. Always liked the sound of medicine, but it was years of studying and there just wasn’t the money.”
“If he’s that clever, why does he keep getting himself into trouble?”
My mother ends conversations she isn’t keen on with a non sequitur. “Well, he was always very proud of you, Kath. I had to stop him showing your GCSE certificates to everyone.”
She folds the sleeves behind the last blouse and adds it to the basket. There is no sign of the two I bought her last year in Liberty’s for her birthday, or of other gifts. “Have you worn that red cardigan I got you, Mum?”
“But it’s cashmere, love.”
Since I’ve been working, I’ve bought my mother lovely clothes—I wanted her to have them, I needed her to have them. I wanted to make things all right for her. But she always puts everything I bring her away for best, best being some indeterminate date in the future when life will at long last live up to its promise.
“Can I get you some cake?”
No. “Yes, lovely.”
On the sideboard, next to the carriage clock purchased a quarter of a century ago with Green Shield stamps, there is a photograph of my parents taken in the late fifties. A seaside place, they’re laughing, and behind them the sky is flecked with gulls. They look like film stars: Dad doing his Tyrone Power thing, Mum with her inky Audrey Hepburn eyes and those matador pants that end at the calf and a pair of little black pumps. When I was a child that photograph used to taunt me with its happiness. I wanted the mother in the picture to come back. I knew that if I waited long enough she would come back. She was just saving herself for best.
Next to the picture is a silver frame containing one of
Emily on her second birthday, lit up with glee. Mum follows my glance.
“Gorgeous, isn’t she?”
I nod happily. No matter how battered family relations, a baby can make them new. When Emily was born and Mum came to see us in hospital and laid her hand, speckled with age, on the newborn’s, I understood how having a daughter could help you to bear the thought of your own mother’s death. I wondered then, but never dared ask, whether it helped Mum to bear the idea of leaving Julie and me.
There is a clatter of pans from the kitchen. “Mum, please come and sit down.”
“You just put your feet up, love.”
“But I want you to sit down.”
“In a minute.”
I can’t tell her about Richard. How can I tell her?
* * *
JULIE LIVES TEN MINUTES’ DRIVE from my mum. Streets in this type of estate were always named after plants and trees, as though that might in some way make amends to the natural environment that had been torn up to build them. But Orchard Way and Elm Drive and Cherry Walk look like cruel taunts now, pastoral notes in a symphony of cement and reinforced glass. My sister’s house is in Birch Close, a horseshoe of sixties semi-detached houses hemmed in by properties from succeeding decades, all full of good ideas from town planners for restoring a sense of community so carefully destroyed by town planners.
As I pull up in the Volvo, a group of kids who are kicking around on the pavement let out a noise between a cheer and a jeer, but as soon as I climb out and glare at them they scarper—even the thugs lack conviction up here. The front garden of Number 9 has a circle of earth carved out in the center of the lawn with one skinny rhododendron surrounded by clumps of that tiny white flower I always think of as being England’s answer to edelweiss. Parked with one wheel on the ribbed concrete drive, there is a trike that must have been abandoned when Julie’s kids were small; in its rusty yellow seat there is a dark compote of leaves and rain.
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