‘Oh, I’m sure.’
‘How many children do you know?’ I said.
‘Not that many. Any children I did know are all grown up.’
‘Do you buy them presents and things?’
‘No. I send money to my brother’s children. Phoebe and Jack.’ She rubbed her face. ‘I last saw them when they were teenagers. They’ll be in their thirties now.’
‘That’s – quite a gap.’
‘Yes!’ she said, her voice hard and bright. I was unsure of the undercurrents swirling, but the champagne had made me bolder, and I wanted to keep her talking.
‘Did you grow up in London?’ I asked her.
‘All over the place. My father was a senior officer in the army. When he left the army, we settled in Essex. On the border with Suffolk.’
‘Did you like it?’
Connie exhaled heavily. ‘Like isn’t the word I’d use. My father was away a lot, particularly when I was little. He was one of the first to arrive at Bergen-Belsen in ’45.’
‘Oh my god.’
‘Yes. For the rest of his life, whenever anything to do with the Holocaust was mentioned on the wireless or the television, he’d turn it off. My mother was distant. Maternally underdeveloped. Here, do you want another bauble? This one’s beautiful.’
I took the deep fuchsia bauble she’d lifted from the box. ‘Does one develop, maternally?’ I said.
‘Of course,’ said Connie, as if I’d said a very stupid thing. ‘One has to. From the little I know of it, I imagine it’s all rather a shock.’ She paused. ‘It was the times, of course. She’d pass her children over to the nanny. I’d see her for an hour after bath time. She wouldn’t read stories. She’d sit me in our drawing room. God, it was cold. Ask me questions about my day. My day! I was six!’
I thought about Lucia. ‘Oh, I think six-year-olds have things to say,’ I said. ‘And at least your mother asked you questions.’
‘I don’t remember what I ever answered. I don’t like questions,’ Connie said.
Feeling rebuked again, I didn’t reply. Connie sighed and leaned back in her armchair. ‘There’s something very meditative about watching someone else undertaking a manual task,’ she said. She held up her hands and examined them. ‘Even if these days it’s laced with a sense of regret.’
‘How are they at the moment?’
‘They’re all right. I hate being outside in the cold, because they really start to ache. Sometimes to the point that I’d quite like them to be chopped off. They’re so useless. But then it’s warmer, like now, and I feel less frustrated.’
‘You got such a big tree,’ I said.
Connie laughed. I continued to dress the tree, selecting baubles as she watched me, the two of us in companionable silence. Outside, cars drove past intermittently, the sound of a front door closing, harried voices of those trying to get their shopping in whilst wrangling children. It was a white, bleak sky above, a bland day, a day to be indoors. Suddenly, I was very grateful for the tree.
‘I was very attached to my father,’ Connie said suddenly. ‘He’d come back from being away, and I used to feel such a thrill hearing his car pull up in the drive. There was always this smell of starched khaki and cigarette smoke. They always say army men don’t know how to express affection, but it isn’t true. He was very present with me. That’s what your generation say, isn’t it? Present?’
‘I guess so.’
‘But when I thought about it later on, I realized for a lot of the time, he was treating me like a boy. A son. Talking to me as an equal. Letting me hold his guns. With my short hair and my skinny frame, pre-puberty, I suppose I could have been a boy. But it didn’t last. My little brother Michael started to fill those shoes, and I turned into a woman. A woman who wouldn’t even do the normal thing and find a nice chap and get married. That would have been something he could have understood. But I was never going to do that. I let him down.’
‘Surely not.’ I went over to the fireplace and placed another log on top of the flames, luxuriating in the heat coming from the centre.
Connie smiled. ‘Of course I did. It wasn’t flower-power on the Essex borders, I assure you. This was the early sixties. Same-sex relationships were still illegal for men, and they didn’t even think about women having them. It wasn’t really a concept to the average Englishman.’
Connie leant over the armchair and plucked out another bauble, this time a clear glass ball that had been lightly glued with a smattering of fake snow. ‘I honestly don’t think my father knew what a lesbian was,’ she said. ‘He’d studied Classics, so you’d hope he’d have some sympathy for same-sex romance, but that respect was reserved for Homer. When I finally told him I was never going to get married, he looked at me like I was from another planet. I didn’t bother spelling it out for him.’
‘That must have been hard.’
‘Oh, it was ridiculous, really. That’s what I think now. Although at the time, I was naive enough to be surprised.’
‘You’d assumed his love was unconditional.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘I think it was more that I thought what he’d seen in Germany might have changed him. Take love where you find it, that sort of thing. And he disappointed me. He loved me, I knew that.’ Connie stared into the depths of the tree. ‘And I loved him back, that was the awful thing. I loved him so much. But then I began to think of him as pathetic, and that’s when you’re really lost with a parent. A sense of defeat leaks in.’
‘Did you have to leave home?’
‘No. But I wanted to. I’d been at Manchester, then I moved to London. Sofa to sofa, relying upon the largesse of friends.’ She sighed. ‘Did three hundred jobs, all appalling in their different ways. Wrote in any free hours I had. Nearly eight years of that. Christ. It’s so long ago, now.’
‘Did you ever go back?’
‘Sometimes. I began to visit home less, when I realized my father was never going to be capable of dealing with who I was. He’d probably guessed by then, of course. But he never acknowledged it.’ She paused. ‘I felt . . . invisible.’
By now, I’d taken a seat in the opposite armchair. To see and hear Connie in full flow like this felt like an enormous privilege. It felt rare. In that moment, I forgot about mining her for my mother; I just wanted Connie’s story, to be closer to her, to understand who Connie really was. ‘What about your mother in all this?’ I said.
‘Oh, she just followed suit,’ said Connie, staring into the flames of the fire. ‘She didn’t ever really have it out with me. My parents seemed . . . put off by me in a way they couldn’t verbalize or possibly even understand themselves. They never said anything abusive, but it was alienating. I know it’s not always the case, of course. I know often there’s love. Acceptance. But it was a different time. I couldn’t stand being near them.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Ah well.’
‘Was it – always women for you, Connie?’ I said.
She looked up at me. ‘I expect so. But there were dances I went to, as a teen. The strutting boys, the preening girls, the pairing off on the dance floor – all that. I danced, too. All very heterosexual. But I did prefer to look at the girls. The back of a neck, the shape of a hand, the way a smile caught my eye. We were all of us a bit of a hormonal jumble, I suppose. None of us had the education about it, or were taught words for it. But maybe I knew even then. My first time I was fifteen. A girl called Virginia.’ Connie smiled and looked back at the fire. ‘What a name for a first time. Virginia Lawrenson was three years older than me and she kissed me by the drains behind the youth club in Manningtree. I still remember it. A month later we ended up in her bedroom. And a month after that, she was married.’
‘Poor Virginia,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know. The Virginia Lawrensons of the world had it easier in many ways. Her husband was a decent chap.’
‘I’m am really sorry,’ I said again. ‘If it’s been – hard for you.’
Connie looked uncomfortable
. ‘Oh, I don’t need you to be sorry, Laura,’ she said, taking another slow sip of champagne. ‘You manage. Find friends. Protection. Not many people thought I was a lesbian. I passed as a straight person, I suppose.’
‘Did you . . . do that on purpose?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve not cared to think about it much. I never felt the need to go on marches, shave my head, hate all men, any of that. But maybe I buried it. I suppose I was always more interested in getting the things I wanted for my myself. The personal over the political.’
‘Aren’t they supposed to be the same thing?’ I said.
Connie laughed. ‘Of course, and I suppose that makes me a selfish narcissist.’ She looked away. ‘I liked to think the fact of being who I was as a radical act in itself. But maybe that was lazy. Maybe I did hide. I don’t know. If anything, I always felt worse for the women I was in love with than for myself.’
My heart felt strange. ‘Why did you feel worse for them?’ I said.
Connie sighed. ‘I could never love them easily. I knew I loved them, I just didn’t show it very well. I think they felt they were in love with a ghost.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d probed enough, and I didn’t want her to turn on me, clam up. Connie’s eyes were moist, her gnarled fingers resting on either arm of the chair as if it was a throne. She’d spoken so much, unpacking herself, and she looked exhausted. I watched as her face folded slowly into a picture of sadness. I wanted to go to her, to comfort her, to tell her that my mother was in this room, an old love, an invisible thread, tying together the ones she’d left behind. But I stayed where I was by the Christmas tree.
25
I kept thinking about the way Connie called herself a ghost. Up until this point, I’d considered that the only ghost in this house was Elise Morceau. Connie had, for reasons known only to her, opened up to me about her childhood – her father the army officer, who she idolized, and who would probably be diagnosed with PTSD if he was around now; her mother, who Connie claimed as the mistress of detachedness. Her brother Michael and his children: absent. And above all, I suppose, the fact of how her sexuality, and therefore her self, had been passively erased by those closest to her. What she’d done by talking to me – it felt like friendship, I suppose. An offering, given in trust. I glowed with the honour of it, and my heart ached for the young woman Connie once was, who felt she couldn’t be herself. I wondered if those feelings of alienation and the need for detachment had continued into her adult life as well, and I suspected they might have.
I had come to Connie’s with a clear intention, but now it felt my path was muddied and uncertain. As much as I wanted Connie to share herself with me, hoping that in doing so she would either deliberately or inadvertently bring me nearer to my mother – the vulnerability she had displayed underneath that urbane, intellectual toughness was making me feel guilty and protective. Perhaps I should just be here to look after her, I thought. Perhaps I should just focus on the woman who is here, and not the woman floating around in my head?
*
By the morning of Christmas Eve, Kelly was well entrenched in the English countryside, no doubt chopping logs. I loved the image of her with her swelling stomach, splitting dead trees with an axe. I was in the living room of our flat, wrapping all the presents for Joe’s family, tying them with excellent bows. I’d done my best to get nice things – body lotions and bottles of wine, a face cloth for Daisy, with apparent magical exfoliating properties that she’d probably take as an insult – but none of them were particularly special. My shoulders ached from leaning over on the carpet, trying to get neat lines on the parcel wrapping, in case Dorothy suspected, correctly, that this was all last-minute. My plan was to go up to Connie’s, give her her present (which I had spent considerable time on and was pleased with), stay for a glass of champagne, then leave her to it. This had been what she’d indicated she wanted. Then I would go down to Wimbledon to spend Christmas with Joe and his family.
Joe had gone for an early Christmas pint with a new friend of his I hadn’t met. His name was Charles, apparently, and he was very influential on social media in the London food scene.
It felt like more than one pint. Eventually, the front door opened and Joe wandered into the living room. ‘Hey,’ he said, looking down at the presents, the wrapping paper, the Sellotape, me, sitting in the middle. ‘You did it all,’ he said.
I couldn’t look at him. ‘I did. I went to Selfridges last night,’ I said.
‘Thanks so much. Was it busy?’
‘Very.’
‘I feel like I should have come with you.’
I continued to gaze down at the neat mound of presents. ‘How was the pub?’ I said.
Joe sat on the sofa and pulled out his phone. ‘Good. Charles is cool. He said there might be some opportunities for us with some pop-ups in the New Year. Once the stupid detox stuff is over. He’s going to put in a word for me at this new food festival in February in London Bridge. He’s doing all the PR for it.’
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Actually,’ I went on, ‘you should have helped me with the presents. These are presents for your family.’
Joe looked up at me. ‘Yeah. I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘But Charles was only available today—’
‘And last night, when I was in Selfridges?’
‘I didn’t know you were going to go,’ he said. ‘I was planning on going to get their presents this morning. You know that’s how I do it.’ He went back to his phone.
‘Yeah, and last year, we ended up spending far too much in a panic on things they didn’t even want.’
I stopped. I could hear myself. My pure, justified displeasure that would be so easy for Joe to turn into an accusation of nagging. It enraged me that my anger could so easily be deflected, deviated from its true path just by some deftly delivered defences from his corner.
‘But you’re so good at that kind of thing, Rosie,’ he said.
‘I’m not. I’m no better than you. But I can’t turn up to their house without—’
‘I never know what to buy,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you ever ask them?’
He finally put his phone down. ‘Because that spoils the surprise of Christmas,’ he said, and I thought I was going to scream.
‘Then why don’t you think about it for half a minute?’ I said.
‘I’ll give you the money for them,’ he replied, and picked up his phone again.
That was what did it. It was so careless, so lacking in any sense of responsibility. I thought of all the presents I’d bought for his family on his behalf over the years. A white rage flickered in my gut, every limb in my body a branching fury. I closed my eyes, willing it to stop, trying to keep it in. Then I realized I did not want to keep it in. I thought of Kelly. I thought of Connie. I thought of Connie’s mother, my mother. Dorothy. I thought suddenly about how much I hated money. I thought about how refreshed Kelly had looked after her rant. How tight our hug had been on our goodbye. I thought of her in a cottage hemmed by hedgerows, walking to the fields with an axe.
‘Connie needs me to stay with her this Christmas,’ I said.
Joe put his phone down again. ‘What?’
‘So I’m going to do that.’
‘But you can’t.’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘No. Mum thinks you’re coming. She’ll have made the food. She’ll have laid a place.’ His face was a picture of confusion.
‘She can probably remove the place,’ I said. ‘Unless she’s stuck it down with glue.’
‘That’s not funny,’ Joe said. ‘It’s Christmas.’
I DON’T CARE I DON’T CARE I DON’T CARE I DON’T CARE, I thought, the words running over and over in my head like one of those screens in a stock exchange.
‘Do you have to make fun of my mum all the time?’ he said suddenly.
‘What?’ I said. ‘I never make fun of your mum.’
‘It’s just – for once, Rose �
�� it would be really nice to know that you’re on our side, you know?’
‘What are you talking about? I am on your side, Joe.’
‘I just wish you could apply the same enthusiasm to you and me and our life together as you do to that old hag.’
‘Shut up,’ I said.
Joe looked shocked. I gestured with a sweep of my arm to the presents. ‘I’ve even done the name labels,’ I went on. ‘All of them. You just need to put them in a bag.’
‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘You’re just angry. You’ll calm down and it’ll all be fine.’
‘No, Joe. You don’t understand. You just don’t.’
He sucked his teeth. ‘Do you know what? You’re right. Actually, I don’t understand. I don’t know what the fuck’s happened to you.’
‘What?’
‘Ever since you took that job.’
‘Don’t blame my job, Joe. Don’t you dare.’
‘But it’s fucked up. It’s changing you.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ I said.
‘It’s just been so shit between us—’
‘It was shit before I took the job, let me assure you.’ I got to my feet and stood in front of him.
‘Rose, what’s happened to you?’ he said, adopting this expression of bemusement which enraged me. Joe loved to appear like the rational one, the one who has tried his best to reason with me, to get on my level, but who has good-naturedly had to conclude that I am beyond help.
‘What do you mean, what’s happened?’ I said.
‘You’ve changed. It’s scaring me. You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring you?’ I said.
Joe leaned back against the sofa and surveyed me with pity. ‘I can’t deal with you when you’re like this,’ he said.
‘Grow up, Joe. Just grow the fuck up,’ I said. I wanted to go and kick the wall but I held myself together.
Joe’s eyes widened. ‘I can’t have a conversation with you when you’re hysterical,’ he said.
‘I’m not hysterical. I’m just angry. And I have a right to be.’
‘Keep your voice down, for God’s sake. You’ll wake up the neighbour’s baby.’
The Confession Page 18