‘Your grandfather died when I was only eight or nine,’ Mum says. ‘He was a lifelong smoker and got lung cancer.’
‘What about your mum?’
‘We fell out.’
She leaves it at that for a few moments but when I don’t reply, there’s nowhere else to go.
‘It goes back a long way,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure we ever got on that well. I was a daddy’s girl when I was very young. All my earliest memories are of doing things with my dad. I remember being on his shoulders one time down by the river. It’s like a photo, a specific moment. I can’t remember why we were there or what we did before or after but it’s so clear that I can picture him now.’
Harry stumbles off the chicken and grabs the mini football from Mum’s bag. He then kicks it ahead and sets off towards the climbing frame.
‘I think my mother always resented that,’ Mum adds. ‘I’ve tried to think of things we did together – either me and her or as a family – but there’s nothing. Either we didn’t do them, or I’ve forgotten. After Dad died and it was only us, we lived largely separate lives.’
‘Didn’t you say you were only eight or nine?’
‘Yes – but I used to be out a lot. I’d be over at Georgie’s house, or we’d go somewhere. Even if I was at home, my mother and I didn’t do a lot together.’
‘That’s not the same as falling out…?’
A nod and a long, wistful pause. We watch Harry kick his ball around, stumpy little legs unable to move as quickly as he’s trying.
‘It was before you were born,’ Mum says. ‘I guess I was sixteen or seventeen. It sounds young – and it is – but I’d raised myself in some ways because we never talked about anything important. I felt older. Anyway, I was seeing Max and she didn’t like him. I’m not sure if it was specifically him, or if she would’ve had a problem with any boy I started seeing. Although we hardly did anything together, she thought women should be stay-at-home types. You marry up, preferably to someone with money; then cook, clean and have babies. She had always been a housewife and thought women with careers were trying to show off. I guess she was the ultimate anti-feminist.’
It sounds like the type of attitude from the nineteen-thirties or forties, not anything that feels relevant now. I find it hard to imagine why someone would think like that. Mum must read that.
‘It was a different age,’ she says. ‘Times have moved on quickly for your generation. You can never know how much things like the Internet have changed everything. It would have blown her mind. She thought women should be looked after and that men should go out and do the work. She didn’t want me to stay on at school after doing my exams, let alone go on to have any sort of career. She’d have hated the idea of me owning a coffee shop and going on to marry a taxi driver. It’s all the wrong way round. I think that’s why she didn’t like Max. He was a village boy. Everyone knew the Pitmans and that was all he was ever going to be. She wanted me to start hanging around with the sons of doctors or lawyers. I’m not sure how she expected that to happen…’
After amusing himself for a while, Harry kicks the ball back in our direction. To me, it always seems as if he’s on the brink of falling over. I guess all toddlers are like that. Caring for one must be like looking after a drunken friend after a long night on the lash. It’s mainly trying to stop them falling over and walking into things.
‘Ball,’ Harry says.
This apparently means a lot more to Mum than it does to me. She boots the ball off towards the sandpit and Harry bundles after it, swaying from side to side like a true alcoholic.
‘What did your mum think about Dad?’ I ask.
‘My mother and I were pretty much done with one another by then – even though I was only seventeen. He was the son of a dentist, everything she wanted, but I kept them apart. I didn’t want her poisoning things – and that’s exactly what she would have done.’
‘What happened when she found out you were pregnant?’
It’s a simple question and yet it’s this that is perhaps the key to everything. But if I was expecting a big moment, it doesn’t happen. Mum continues to watch as Harry brings the ball back with a series of kicks. He hunches in front of us, like a puppy waiting for the stick to be tossed, and this time I give the ball a boot. It kicks up over the edge of the sandpit, spinning and bouncing onto the grass on the far edge of the playground. Not that Harry cares. He toddles off after it, full of joyous glee.
‘When I told her Dan and I were expecting, she told me to “do something about it” – that’s a direct quote – or move out. I chose to move out. Dan was great in those days. He borrowed some money from his dad. We’d paid it all back in a year, but we ended up in the old house where Mrs Winter now lives. I hardly saw my mother after that. I’d visit but she wouldn’t answer the door. She didn’t want to know anything about you and I figured that was on her. I wasn’t going to force her to spend time with a granddaughter she didn’t want to know.’
‘You said Dad was great in those days…’
Harry is back and Mum gives the ball another kick. I never knew kids were this easy to entertain.
She doesn’t reply, so I ask what I really wanted to: ‘Would you have divorced if it wasn’t for what happened?’
It takes another kick of the ball before Mum answers. ‘Maybe. I guess you were the catalyst. We wouldn’t have argued in the street if it wasn’t for that… but perhaps we would’ve done in the future.’
‘It sounded like you were happy…?’
There’s another long pause.
Mum’s bag must reinvent the laws of transdimensional physics because there is seemingly no end to what’s inside. This must be another one of those things about being a mum – when leaving the house, all eventualities must be prepared for. From nowhere, she pulls out a bucket and spade and we head to the edge of the sandpit where Harry starts to build sandcastles. By ‘build’, I mean he starts to throw sand around.
‘I think we were too young,’ Mum says. ‘Your father and I. We had everything really quickly. House, marriage, daughter. I was in my early twenties. He was a little older, so I don’t think it affected him the same way but, for me, where was there to go? I was working in a supermarket but didn’t have much in the way of qualifications. I neither had the career I’d wanted at one point, nor had I married up to be some super housewife in the way Mum was after. I was stuck between the two and I didn’t know what I wanted…’
She tails off but takes a deep breath and it takes me a few seconds before I realise that it’s what she hasn’t said that’s important.
‘Max…’
Mum continues to stare stoically towards the sandpit.
‘Your father doesn’t know… or I don’t think he does. I never told him. It was a one-off at the time, a couple of weeks before you disappeared. An accident. It’s not like we were ever going to run away together, but I guess I wondered what things might’ve been like if I’d ended up with him instead of Dan. I wish it had never happened…’
I’m not sure what I should be most surprised about: the fact she cheated on my father with Max – or that she’s telling me so openly.
‘Does that make you hate me?’
I turn to face her and Mum’s bottom lip is bobbing.
‘Why would it?’ I reply.
‘I’ve never told anyone before. Only Max knows. I think it’s probably why I was so angry with your father – I was furious with myself.’
It’s the first time I’ve realised that my parents share the same secret. My father and mother blame themselves for what happened but, at the time, they took it out on each other. They don’t know how the other feels.
‘I remember when I shouted at him outside the house, wanting to really hurt him,’ Mum says. ‘I was feeling guilty because of what happened with Max and then you. All I could do was try to make him feel it, too. If you’d not disappeared, perhaps we’d have been fine – but maybe I wrecked everything when I spent that evening with Max. Eve
n if your father had known and chosen to forgive me, I wasn’t forgiving myself.’
‘But you ended up marrying Max…’
She nods, twiddles the wedding ring on her finger. ‘It’s not like I started seeing him straight away. Believe it or not, except for that one time, we didn’t do anything until after the formal divorce from your father. I was on my own for a while but loneliness changes people. It changed me.’
From talking to both Mum and Dad about the same incident, it’s incredible how little they seem to know of one another from the time. It sounds like she’s spent a lot of time thinking things over to the point that she knows exactly what her relationship with Max means. She didn’t want to be alone and so she took what was there. It’s not the worst reason to end up with someone and it’s not like I have the experience to judge but it feels as if my mother and father’s marriage was doomed from the moment they got comfortable.
Mum takes her shoes off and stretches out onto the sand. Harry takes this as an invitation to start brushing sand over her feet, giggling the whole time.
‘You said your mum told you to do something about it when you told her you were pregnant. Does that mean…?’
Mum sits unmoving for a moment as Harry slowly starts to bury her feet.
‘She didn’t believe in abortion. She’d have disowned me if I’d even suggested it, let alone had one. That’s not what I wanted anyway. I said you were unplanned but not unwanted. Your father and I wanted to have a child. I know it sounds strange because we were young – but that’s another recent thing, too. Go back to the sixties or before, my Mum’s age, and it was common for women to get married and have children before they were twenty.’
‘What did she mean by “do something about it” then?’
‘Adoption. She’d have seen me give birth and walk away. It was part of the whole marrying up thing. I think she got it from her mum. You’re probably a little young to see what the class system is like in this country. It’s nothing like as bad as it used to be – but there was a time when, for women especially, the only way to better oneself was to marry a man with a good job and rich family. In her own way, she was trying to do me a favour. She wanted the best for me, but her idea of that was all about patriarchy. She thought nobody important – no man – would be bothered about me if I’d already had a child by someone else.’
Harry has finished pushing enough sand around to bury one foot, so he makes a start on the other. From the way he’s laughing, it’s the funniest thing he’s ever done and there’s a part of me that’s so envious. He’s fed, he’s loved. There’s somewhere comfortable for him to sleep and he’s far too young to understand all the complexities of life.
‘Nattie’s mum said you disappeared for almost a year...?’
Mum turns so sharply that she accidentally kicks one of her feet out from the sand. Harry tells her off but doesn’t seem too bothered as he starts to push the sand around again.
‘She said that?’
‘She said you weren’t allowed out for a whole summer and then a few months past that. It was when you were about sixteen or seventeen. Sometime after your exams.’
Mum twists back to the pit and stares off towards the furthest end of Ridge Park, where there’s only shadow and trees. ‘I didn’t know she remembered that. It’s been such a long time.’
‘What happened?’
She breathes in and out and then stands, flicking the sand away from her feet and picking up Harry. He grumbles at her as she starts to clean him up.
‘Mum…?’
‘I don’t think I want to talk about that, Olivia.’
She sounds firm but not angry.
Harry is busy fighting against having his shoes put on. Whenever Mum gets one sock on him and starts on the other, he picks off the first. He finds it hilarious and, in the end, I have to hold his arms as Mum slips him into his socks and shoes. That done, she straps him into the pushchair and gives him a plastic beaker with a teat on top. He grabs it and sucks on whatever’s inside.
‘Juice!’ he declares.
‘Can I ask you something else instead?’ I say.
‘Of course.’
‘If your mum wanted you to think about adoption, why didn’t you?’
I think she’s going to say it’s because of my father, something about the strength of their relationship at the time – but it isn’t that at all.
She’s brutally firm. ‘Because I was tired of my mum telling me what to do.’
Twenty-Six
It’s my first Sunday morning in Stoneridge and, as I probably could have guessed, the place is dead. In fact, if there actually was a funeral, it would probably be a bit livelier. At least there’d be a procession of sorts, a few mourners, a buffet at the Black Horse. Instead, there’s not even that. Except for Harry and Mum, Ridge Park is empty, as if there’s some weird bylaw of which I’m unaware that children aren’t allowed out on The Lord’s Day.
The High Street is like something out of a zombie movie the morning after everyone’s turned. All the living have been eaten and everyone’s traipsed off in search of the next meal. I’d have thought there might be some trade but Via’s is closed and so is the sandwich shop at the other end of the High Street. The only place apparently open is the Black Horse but I need to be sober enough to drive and don’t want the temptation of what ‘a quick one’ could lead to.
The church bells were ringing at an ungodly hour this morning and there was some service going on when I woke up. That’s over now and the rows of double-parked cars have disappeared from the road outside. With the empty streets, the village is more picture-postcard than it was before but it’s hard to escape the unnerving sense of being watched as I walk along the middle of the road. There can’t be many places in the country where a person can get away with that without having some angry 4x4 driver steaming up behind, mobile phone in one hand, righteous indignation spewing angrily as they pound the car’s horn with the other.
With an hour to kill, I don’t know what to do with myself. If the pub isn’t an option and everything else is seemingly closed, what else is there?
I find myself heading towards the church, mainly because it’s the village’s focal point. It’s only when I’ve traced the low stone wall and gone through the gates that I realise I’m looking for something.
There’s a path that leads to the front of the church, where the stone arch towers high. The church doors are open, though there’s nobody in sight. As with the rest of the village, there is green everywhere. Flower beds line the church itself and then its grass is interspersed with gravestones. Some are traditional with a rounded top, others are flat and embedded in the ground.
Some of the older ones have engraved dates back to the 1800s. Many of those are covered with a mossy gloss and there’s one I find that has some sort of worm infestation attached to the lower corner.
There seems to be little order to anything. Old graves next to newer ones, clean ones next to stones that don’t look like they’ve seen any attention in decades. The only area that’s noticeably different is the furthest corner out towards the woods, which has its own white picket fence. It’s the children’s cemetery and, instead of similar-looking stones and crosses, there is a host of windmills, lanterns and ornaments. Everything is adorned with multicoloured ribbons and soft toys.
I’ve drifted past the adult graves but here I stop and look at every one. The first is for a three-year-old boy – ‘God took you too soon’ – and then there’s a six-year-old girl named Olive who died twenty years before I was born – ‘Never forgotten.’
There are some for children who have the same birth and death date and I can do little but stare, wondering what happened. Was it a stillbirth? A complication in the hospital? It’s like staring into the abyss, picturing the worst that humanity might have to offer.
The final grave is for another six-year-old. Melanie Price died thirteen years ago. She was probably in the same class and yet somehow forgotten to all but he
r parents. There are no clues as to how she died but, whatever it was, she must have made the mistake of leaving no mystery. Olivia Elizabeth Adams lives forever; Melanie Price is gone.
I wonder if Mum ever thought about adding a grave to this plot and what it would have said on the front. ‘Never forgotten’ is probably the best it could have got.
After the devastation of the children’s area, it’s hard to be as affected by the rest of the graveyard. An eighty-year-old had a good innings compared to the baby with the same birth and death day.
I continue on a loop around the cemetery, making cursory glances to each of the names until, almost unexpectedly, I find the one marked Eve Hanham. It’s next to Ged Hanham, both horizontal stones tucked away in a dewy corner. The grass around the edges is short – but it’s only from a mower; nobody has been around with a trimmer to do a neater job. Mum clearly doesn’t spend a lot of time here. Even some of the older graves have flowers on top – but neither of these. A greasy layer of green-brown sludge has invaded the grooves on both stones; but my grandmother’s in particular looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned anytime recently. It’s more green than grey.
My grandmother.
Today was the first time I had a name – Eve Hanham – to go with my dark thoughts.
What sort of person wants their own daughter to give away a grandchild? How is that a thing? It’s easy to abdicate responsibility by saying it’s a generational thing, but that isn’t an excuse, not when other people’s lives are involved. If so, where does it end? Slave masters were misunderstood do-gooders trying to give immigrants a purpose? Ku Klux Klan members didn’t know any different? Sometimes a line has to be drawn to say that it’s not about generations or a change in attitudes. It isn’t younger people versus older, men against women or straight versus gay.
It’s about arseholes being arseholes.
The witch beneath my feet doesn’t even know what she’s done.
I poke my head up and look back towards the main area of the church, checking for movement. There’s no one there, nor is there anyone mooching around the rest of the cemetery.
The Girl Who Came Back Page 19