Stop the Clock

by Alison Mercer

  Julia was already approaching the lifts, stopped and turned. ‘What?’

  ‘Is this yours?’

  Julia’s expression was horrified: I can’t believe I did something so stupid. She reached for the phone rather gingerly, as if Tina might be about to jerk it away, leaving her foolishly clutching at empty air.

  ‘Thanks.’ More of a growl than an expression of gratitude, but Tina knew that she briefly had the moral upper hand. She decided to press her advantage.

  ‘I’m sorry about you and Dan,’ she said. ‘I know me having William must have made things difficult.’

  ‘It didn’t help,’ Julia agreed, ‘but the real problem was you being you.’

  Tina swallowed. ‘Well . . . I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea.’

  ‘It’s not that I dislike you,’ Julia said, ‘though you’re not my favourite person, obviously. It’s that you have the things that I want. Or you used to.’

  She held up the phone and added, ‘Thanks for this. I’m expecting a call on it any minute. I’d have been scuppered if I’d lost it.’

  They came to a standstill next to the lift.

  ‘Up or down?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Oh, you take it, I’ll go for the stairs. I could use the exercise. We can’t all slob round and still have model pins.’ She glanced appraisingly at Tina’s legs and bounded off.

  Tina pressed the button to summon the lift. She realized that she was almost happy. As if happiness was a golden state she’d left behind, but which was now beckoning, soliciting hope and gleaming with promise, though it was impossible to tell whether she was remembering or anticipating.

  The Vixen Letters

  The sisterhood of motherhood

  Since I found myself unexpectedly pregnant last year, and began to write about becoming a mother, the number of letters and emails I receive has more than tripled. Some have been kind, not a few were exasperated, others offered useful tips and words of warning. Each and every message was written in the light of personal experience, though not all were from mothers.

  Whether parent, childless, orphaned or estranged, married, single, bereaved or divorced, all of us have mums. Even when they are absent, they remain uniquely powerful in our hearts and minds. That power is a source of strength, but it can also seem like a threat – and the best way to cope with a threat is to knock it down. That’s why teenage girls give their mothers hell – and that’s why we all love to indulge in the blame game. If it’s possible to find fault with Mother, it’s likely that fault will be found.

  We accept that children rebel against their parents and need to create space in which to become themselves – but don’t parents, too, feel the need to escape, not so much from their children, but from the expectation that they should take responsibility for every aspect of their child’s wellbeing and development? If, as an adult woman, I am unhappy, can it really ever be my mother’s fault? If she is unhappy too, whose fault is that? We live in an age that deems it compassionate to shift the blame from the criminal to the criminal’s upbringing. But is this really either kind or truthful?

  When you’re dealing with the weight of cultural expectation, from time to time you need to let off steam. You need to moan, mock, poke fun – and you need other women to do it with. Ideally, you need women who knew you when you were different – women who can remind you of the time when you were just you.

  They say you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. That means you can unchoose your friends, too, but that’s not a freedom to be used lightly. Beware of the contemporary vogue for friendship-purging, which means ditching all the connections that are apparently no longer of use to you, as if clearing out last season’s cheap fashion hits from the back of the wardrobe. Friendship is not a commodity; you can’t weigh the value of one against the other, and decide to keep this one and ditch the next. You decide that a friend no longer suits you at your peril, not knowing how you or she may change.

  Friendship is a gift. It’s the lightest and freest of bonds, but that doesn’t mean that it is without obligation. And if you have friends you can quarrel with, or let drift and return to, you have friends for life. Few friendships are based on ties that are durable enough to survive the weight of acrimony. And fewer still are sufficiently strong for you to be able to turn to your friends at your moment of greatest need, when no one else is there, and count on them to help you and see you through.

  It’s a great thing, the sisterhood of motherhood, whether we’re bickering or bonding. It’s so often mothers who hold it all together – when fathers die, or live elsewhere, or work every hour God sends and crawl back home to sleep. Mums just have to keep on going, trying, sometimes failing, then trying again to do what’s best for their children. We need all the help we can get.

  Much has been made of the tensions between different types of mother – the cake-baking home-maker and the briefcase-wielding careerist – and also between women with children and women without. (Which prompts me to ask, who stands to gain most from women fighting among themselves? Divide and rule is the oldest trick in the book. No wonder women still earn less than men.)

  Why did the Working Mothers and the Yummies have it in for each other? I think each clan was secretly envious, and thought the other had it easy; and probably there were more than a few would-be defectors on either side. I have to confess that back when I was a Childless Career Woman, I was guilty of underestimating how much discipline and self-denial goes into being an old-school, fragrant, nurturing wife and mother.

  Back then, I didn’t have much sympathy for the Working Mothers either, but in another couple of months I’m going to join them. As I’m a single parent, there was never much chance of me becoming a Yummy. But you know what? Even if I had a husband around, I’d still want a job.

  There’s a wise old saying that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Being a dependant is OK as long as Hubby keeps his side of the bargain, which is to stay married and pay the bills. But what if you break up and he loses his job, and you’re faced with trying to return to work in the throes of a downturn which is clearly far from over? If you’d been working all along people might have said your marriage hit the rocks because you neglected your husband, but at least you’d have the consolation of a pay cheque.

  This is going to be the last of these columns, so it’s time for me to say farewell, and to thank you for all your letters. With Mothering Sunday fast approaching, I’d also like to take the opportunity to say thank you to my own mother, who has been unfailingly staunch and supportive. I know I have disappointed her many times over the years, but she has never given up on me. I think it’s fair to say that there are some subjects on which we will never agree, but I’ve realized that disagreements, even long absences, do not show that love is over, only that it is changing.

  19

  Salvage

  WITH LUCY AND Natalie on board for Easter at the Old Schoolhouse, Tina had decided to extend the invitation to Dan. He was much less likely to misinterpret it as a romantic overture if her friends and their daughters were there – and it was a confirmation that he, too, had become someone with whom she wanted to have a lifelong, but platonic, connection. Besides, he had to meet Natalie and Lucy sooner or later. It seemed like a golden opportunity.

  She knew that she’d been a lousy friend at least some of the time – self-absorbed, neglectful, and the now-defunct column hadn’t helped. But the drama of William’s birth seemed to have lanced any remaining unspoken bitterness about what she’d written, and now that everything was out in the open and the air was definitively cleared, she and Natalie and Lucy had been getting on better than ever. Which was just as well, because they all had plenty of other things to worry about.

  She had learned that her job was safe, but Dan, after much deliberation, had decided to accept the offer of voluntary redundancy. ‘The writing’s on the wall for newspapers,’ he had said. ‘I want to try and get in on something new rather than go down wit
h something that’s dying. Might as well take the cash and cut my losses.’ He was currently exploring various options, all to do with websites. Tina felt nervous for him, but she could also see his point, and she had come to have some faith in his ability to transform difficult situations into promising ones.

  The fearsome features editor, Rowena Fix, had also opted to leave, and to Tina’s slight chagrin Julia had been appointed in her place. Tina’s one-time potential protégée had outstripped her; it was just as well that they had arrived at a truce. When she returned to work, she would be on general writing duties and, to a large extent, she would be at Julia’s mercy; if Julia didn’t give her decent features to write, she wouldn’t be getting any bylines.

  Losing her column had left Tina anxious and insecure, and ready to get away from it all for a couple of days. Not that escaping was straightforward. It took for ever to assemble all the clobber she would need, and fit it into the car: the travel cot, the sterilizer, the packs of nappies . . . endless kit, none of it dispensable. There was no way round it, once you were a mother, you had serious baggage.

  At least she had Dan around to keep an eye on William as she packed, and to help her lug stuff downstairs. They’d agreed to use her car – she’d refused to contemplate attempting the journey in Dan’s, for if it made it to the Old Schoolhouse, it sure as hell looked as if it wouldn’t be making it back again. Dan had briefly attempted to defend his shit-coloured, moss-sprouting rust-bucket, but almost immediately capitulated: ‘Why are we even arguing about this? You’re right. My car’s a crock. Let’s take yours.’

  As she pulled away from the tall, narrow townhouse with her flat at the top, she felt the breath sigh out of her body, taking her worries with it. In the morning she would wake up somewhere else: somewhere softer, greener, cooler, with a hint of salt in the air.

  Dan, who was in the passenger seat, turned to look back at William and pulled a series of increasingly idiotic faces to entertain him, then complained of a crick in his neck, whereupon she pressed play and The Wheels on the Bus CD started up.

  Dan made a plaintive request for the Sex Pistols – ‘If we don’t educate him now, we might have years of this!’ – and she told him to forget it. Dan groaned, then started singing along: ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes . . .’

  Tina had never heard him sing before; it was a pleasant surprise to discover that he sounded OK – in tune, warm and cheery. The London streets and traffic flowed past and around them. Her spirits lifted as they always did when she was heading west, towards the house and the stretch of sea that never seemed to change, however much she did.

  The place was filled with ghosts of her younger selves: loquacious child, stroppy teenager, restless twenty-something. But the effect of this superimposition of echoes and traces was not melancholy or eerie, it was affirming. The details of all her previous visits were blurred and softened, doubts and squabbles mixed up with pleasures and treats and good times. All that remained was a hazy intensity, an awareness that she had been both happy and unhappy there, and these emotions had made the lane and the house and the garden and the beach vivid to her, and were the source of her attachment to them. It wasn’t somewhere she could ever stay for long – it was too remote from the rest of her life – but it was somewhere she revisited in her dreams, and felt soothed by. She knew that whenever she went back, she would always feel welcome.

  She hoped it would come to serve as a reservoir for William’s memories of growing up, too. Paddling in rock-pools; collecting seashells; playing card games on wet afternoons; being indulged or ignored by his playmates, the offspring of his mother’s friends . . . The summers of his childhood presented themselves to her like the quick flicker of a pack of cards being shuffled.

  She imagined herself walking, in a year or two or three’s time, along the beach, with William at her side, his hand in hers. Would Dan be on the other side of him, ready to hold on tight, so William could swing suspended between them? She was surprised to find that she wanted it to be so – wanted it so badly that she felt tears come to her eyes.

  ‘OK, he’s asleep,’ Dan said, and turned the music off. ‘How about you give me a crash revision course on these friends of yours? The unofficial godmothers?’

  ‘Well, you must at least be able to remember their names. I’ve talked about them often enough.’

  ‘Sure, yeah, but how do I know which is which?’

  ‘I showed you the photos, didn’t I?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but they’re both going to have changed a bit since then, aren’t they?’

  She supposed this was true. Looking back at the photo of her with Natalie and Lucy on millennium New Year’s Eve, she’d been struck by how they had all begun to undergo the peculiar metamorphosis of ageing, whereby the generic fresh-faced appeal of youth is replaced by signs of character and experience.

  Lucy’s unthreatening prettiness had given way to something more self-aware and challenging, with a hint of stubbornness in the set of the jaw and a flash of resilience in the big brown eyes. And Natalie – mild, approachable Natalie, with her sensual mouth and muted, patient expression, as if she was always daydreaming about something she knew she could never have – was now present and alert as she had never been before. Her wistfulness had come into focus, and been transformed into both regret and hope. There was also a new edge of dryness and toughness to her that sometimes caught Tina by surprise.

  And as for Tina herself . . . she would like to think that she’d softened, but the truth was she probably looked even sharper and more cantankerous than before. It was hard to look gentle and benign after three months of broken nights.

  ‘Lucy’s the one with the hair,’ she said, ‘and the key thing to bear in mind, so that you don’t put your foot in it, is that they’ve both recently broken up with their husbands.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember that much. Not good news.’

  ‘No, I know, it’s dreadful, isn’t it? Still, at least we don’t need to worry about whether it’s catching,’ Tina said.

  ‘True, but I hope that doesn’t mean that I’m in for a whole weekend of you lot moaning on at me about how crap men are.’

  ‘They won’t, I promise you. Lucy seems quite happy now she’s got the house and a job and a young buck to keep her satisfied, and Natalie’s decided she’s probably a lesbian, although she isn’t out or anything, so watch what you say. Anyway, we do have other topics of conversation. Besides men, I mean.’

  ‘I know you do, and I bet I can tell you exactly what they are. Babies, children, work, telly, other women you know, celebrities and shopping. Am I right or am I right?’

  ‘Well, you know, and art, literature, philosophy and politics, in so far as they’re connected to any of the other things you already mentioned,’ she said.

  He laughed, and she thought: This is going to be OK. Maybe even better than OK.

  Traffic lights. While they were stopped . . . why not?

  She reached across experimentally and rested one hand on his knee.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said.

  He smiled back at her. God, those blue eyes! He really was rather gorgeous. How come she hadn’t realized that ages ago?

  ‘There’s no one I’d rather be with,’ he told her.

  Someone beeped her, and Dan said, ‘Er, Tina . . . I think the lights have changed.’

  A moment later both her hands were back on the steering wheel, and they were moving forward again.

  ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I’m knackered, and I’m really tempted to ask you to drive sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Well,’ Dan said, ‘temptation’s only any good if you give in to it.’

  It wasn’t what he said so much as the tone of his voice that persuaded her – the warmth of it, suggestive of untapped reservoirs of kindness.

  And in that moment she finally allowed herself to fall for him, though there was no sense of plunging down towards a hard landing; it was more like eas
ing into the comfort of a deep hot bath, and letting go of all the troubles of the day.

  She flashed him another quick smile and fixed her attention on the road.

  In the service station car park she turned to him and said, ‘OK, all yours, but this doesn’t mean I’ve turned into the kind of woman who lets a man do all the driving.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, and then she leaned across to kiss him.

  Natalie hadn’t been at all sure about the idea of setting off on the Thursday evening, straight from work, but Lucy had been adamant; she had no intention of spending Good Friday stuck on the motorway. Natalie had volunteered to drive at least some of the way, but again, Lucy wouldn’t hear of it. Perhaps she wanted to prove that she could handle the journey just as well as Adam had once done – or maybe she just didn’t fancy putting herself in the hands of a notoriously nervy driver. Natalie was generally feeling much bolder about tackling practical challenges – she’d told her parents that she and Richard were separating because she was gay, the M4 was quite unintimidating in comparison – but she would have to find some other way of putting her newfound faith in herself to the test.

  It was nearly one in the morning by the time they reached Port Maus. Matilda, Lottie and Clemmie were all soundly asleep in the back, and had been for hours. Natalie was horribly sleepy too, but felt obliged to stay awake to help with directions, and chat to Lucy and generally be companionable.

  The village was pitch dark; there were a few street-lamps along the three main roads, but the arterial lanes were unlit, and the inhabitants of the low thatched cottages were dead to the world behind their closed shutters. But it was a starry, moon-bright night, and as the road rose and fell it was occasionally possible to catch a glimpse of the black sea, shining and shifting under the still, dark sky.

  ‘I hope Tina’s there this time,’ Lucy said. ‘Remember when I turned up with Adam and Lottie for the millennium house party, and you two were still down the pub?’

  ‘Ah. Yes, I do. You know what that was all about. Tina had just told me she’d got together with the Grandee. Her top-secret lover. I think he might have been some kind of politician.’