All My Mothers
Page 1
ALL MY MOTHERS
Joanna Glen
Copyright
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
Copyright © Joanna Glen 2021
Jacket design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Jacket images: Shutterstock.com
Author photograph © Eva Tarnok
Joanna Glen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008410582
Ebook Edition © August 2021 ISBN: 9780008410605
Version: 2021-06-09
Praise for The Other Half of Augusta Hope:
‘A therapeutic dose of high-strength emotion’
Guardian
‘This gem of a novel entertains and moves in equal measure’
Daily Mail
‘Keep the tissues close’
Good Housekeeping
‘An irresistible message of redemption and belonging’
Red magazine
‘Full of the reality of hope and despair in everyone’s lives’
Miranda Hart
‘Heartening and hopeful’
Jess Kidd, author of Things in Jars
‘It’s going to be all over every book club in Britain before you can say Burundi’
The Times
‘Mesmerizingly beautiful’
Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus
‘An extraordinary masterpiece’
Anstey Harris, author of Where We Belong
Dedication
In memory of my beloved mother,
Jennifer Simmonds.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for The Other Half of Augusta Hope
Dedication
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part 2
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Part 3
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Acknowledgements
Postscript
About the Author
Also by Joanna Glen
About the Publisher
To Beth from Eva – March 2008
From the beginning, there were bumps under the rug where things had been swept, which meant I couldn’t walk the way other people did.
Free and easy.
With a bounce in my step and my head held high.
That’s the way I want you to walk, Beth.
I’ve swept nothing under the rug in this story.
Our story.
The story of you and me and your mother.
Part 1
Chapter 1
We’re supposed to begin as the apple of our mother’s eye.
But I was more the maggot in the apple.
Speaking of my mother’s eyes, they were always darting about, as if she was following a fly, and not seeing me properly.
My father (who veered between London and his family’s estate in Jerez de la Frontera) seemed to see me better. We liked to talk, he and I, and I often had the feeling that he was on the cusp of telling me something important and deciding against it.
Perhaps you’d like to hear about the little girl I was.
I was full of the most unbearable longing.
The Portuguese have a word for it: saudade – a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never existed. My saudade was like travelling in
a car on a dark road and seeing, for a second, a lit window, and then, very quickly, not seeing it.
I grew up in a smart part of London called Chelsea, like the football team, although I can’t imagine that any of our neighbours were interested in football. They were interested in expensive cars and chauffeurs and the shape of their bay trees, which sat on highly polished steps around our private lawned square, in which there was a golden-rain tree, a row of cherry blossoms and beds of tall tulips in spring.
Our big posh house, at the corner of the square, was four storeys high, with a shiny black front door. My father’s domain within the house was painted white with splashes of multicolour made by his modern Spanish paintings. It included the tiled hall, his study, packed with books from floor to ceiling, and the garden room, which led onto a courtyard.
When we first arrived in Chelsea from Spain, my father asked Rory the gardener to turn our courtyard into an Andalusian patio, sending him off on an aeroplane to Córdoba because the patio-gardeners of Córdoba are the best of anywhere in the world. (And, although he was wrong about most things, my father was right about this.)
On the ground floor there was a large kitchen, for which my father had bought black chairs with chrome-tubed legs that didn’t meet my mother’s approval. Next to the kitchen, there was a small apartment I never visited, where Mean Mary, our housekeeper-nanny, lived.
The rest of the house (except the roof terrace) was my mother’s domain, and from the first floor to the fourth, it was rouge-pink, with ruched rose curtains and pink velvet sofas, my mother having rejected the teak and oatmeal fashionable in London circles at the time. There were thick carpets and fat cushions and triple-lined curtains, too heavy for my small hands to draw.
The school I went to was St Hilda’s – a smart little private school, where smart little girls wore olive-green and grey uniforms.
I started there on 5 September 1979, the same day as Lord Mountbatten’s funeral, which was taking place down the road at Westminster Abbey.
‘The queen is extremely upset,’ said my mother.
‘Did she phone you?’ said my father, not looking up from his enormous newspaper, which he held in his outstretched arms. The backs of his hands were covered in black hair. In fact, all of my father was covered in black hair. It burst out of his shirt collar and the tops of his socks, like those chimpanzees they used to dress up for tea adverts.
My mother stepped past him.
Her blond bob shimmered with Elnett hairspray.
She looked like my Barbie doll, which I never played with.
She took my hand, and I could feel her brittle fingernails against my skin.
In my palm, I felt the imprint of some softer hand.
A long time ago.
In some other place.
With some other feeling.
And here came the saudade longing, strong enough to break me in two.
Our hands fell apart as we walked, like they always did.
In the playground, you couldn’t move for mothers’ legs: tan-stockinged; bare and stubbly; fat as hams; or covered by enormous bell-bottom jeans.
Above me, the mothers gesticulated and shrieked.
One tiny girl was completely enveloped in her mother’s lion-mane of hair, sobbing. Her mother was saying, ‘I love you, darling,’ over and over again, as if one of them was about to be taken off to be shot.
The girl’s grey socks and polished brown shoes were spattered by tears.
One girl was making her baby sisters laugh by pulling funny faces and crossing her eyes. She was laughing her head off. So was her mother.
I loved this girl immediately.
I felt a kind of fizzing sparking feeling inside me right there in the playground as I wondered what it would be like to be her.
To be happy.
I moved a little closer to her.
I wondered what it would be like to laugh and laugh and laugh.
I loved her dark curly hair.
I loved the way one of her socks had fallen down to her ankle.
The girl stopped making funny faces and turned around.
‘I’m called Bridget Blume,’ she said. ‘Shall we go in together?’
Chapter 2
I followed Bridget into the classroom, anxiously.
There was a balloon for each of us, cut out of coloured card, blu-tacked to the wall, high up, underneath the Victorian cornicing.
Eva Martínez-Green, it said on my lime-green balloon.
31 January 1975, written underneath my name.
My birthday.
Always a strange nervy day, my mother’s eyes darting about worse than ever, my father over-cheerful and all of us nauseous with sugar-icing.
I could read by the time I arrived at St Hilda’s, Spanish and English: my father had started me off, and I’d kept going – there was nothing else to do. I had no brothers or sisters in my house to distract me. I asked my mother and father daily for a kitten. And daily they said no.
I was a bit disappointed that our teacher, Miss Feast, had chosen lime-green for my cardboard birthday balloon. I don’t think lime-green is anyone’s favourite colour, and it felt like a slight against me.
Miss Feast paused, opened a thin black hardback book and broke the silence with unfamiliar names, which would turn into girls, girls we would love and hate for seven years, who would run like ghosts through our memories.
‘Lily Betts?’
‘Yes, Miss Feast.’
With a little sob – she was still convulsing from the separation from her mother – like a newly dead fish.
‘Bridget Blume?’
‘Yes, Miss Feast.’
The happy girl from the playground, gorgeous as anything, all blue eyes, smiles and hope.
I smiled at her.
She smiled back.
Bridget Blume liked me.
My mother didn’t exactly seem to dislike me, but she skirted around me as one might an unpredictable horse. My father quite liked me and, when he was home, he hung me upside down from my ankles (as some men do) or else he read me storybooks, which I preferred.
Onwards we went through the alphabet.
‘Eva Martínez-Green?’
‘Yes, Miss Feast. And also,’ I started, in a very quiet voice, because there were eyes everywhere looking at me.
Miss Feast raised a dark eyebrow.
I stammered: ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, Miss Feast. But it’s Eva as in ever. Not Eva as in evil.’
Miss Feast smiled at me, and the mole above her lip quivered.
‘I will remember that,’ she said. ‘Forever Eva.’
Forever Eva – a name made especially for me, by Miss Feast, the actual teacher!
The syllables seeped through my skin and circulated in my bloodstream, making me warm inside. Nobody else – at all at all at all – had been given a special name in the course of our first registration!
Oh, the untold joy!
Chapter 3
‘Are we ready to read?’ sang Miss Feast.
‘Yes we certainly are!’ we sang back, as we’d been taught, as Miss Feast didn’t like untidy words flying about on the classroom air.
She gathered us around her like a clutch of green chicks, and Bridget Blume wriggled over to me on her bottom and took my hand. My heart started racing. I looked down at our hands wrapped up in each other – my brown fingers and her white fingers. It was the nicest thing I’d ever seen, and the nicest feeling I’d ever had.
‘The Rainbow Rained Us!’ said Miss Feast.
We all listened, spellbound, as a small rabbit threw a stone at the rainbow from Noah’s ark (Miss Feast turned the page) and the rainbow broke apart into hundreds of multicolour mothers who repopulated the earth with their children (Miss Feast turned the page) because the original families – along with every living thing except the ones on the ark – had all drowned in the flood, though this unfortunate fact wasn’t mentioned.
Miss Feast let us pass the book around, an
d Bridget and I had to undo our hands. I remember running my finger, mesmerised, over the slightly textured splashes of gorgeous reds and blues and golds and greens, which were forming into mother-shapes, and I was shivering all over, and the saudade longing was making griping pains in my belly.
‘Please pass the book on, Eva,’ said Miss Feast.
The sound of my name made me blush.
‘Aren’t mothers wonderful?’ said Miss Feast.
The other girls all nodded – all nodded.
The wonderfulness of mothers was not a subject for debate in our classroom, and this was a terrible moment because I knew for certain that my mother wasn’t wonderful, and she was supposed to be.
(My poor mother, you’re probably thinking, and that’s right, but she’d made her bed – and now she had to lie in it. And she did love lying in bed.)
‘Turn to the person next to you!’ said Miss Feast in her sing-song voice. ‘And tell her about your mummy! Anything you like!’
My heart was trying to leap out of my chest because I couldn’t think of one thing to say. It was as if I didn’t know my mother, as if I’d never got beyond the surface of her. My panic rose as things came pouring out of Bridget’s mouth: her mother was an artist; she loved patchwork; and pinafores; and clompy boots; and telling the truth; and the sea; and making birds out of feathers; and cakes with butter icing; and on she went, smiling and sparkling, until Miss Feast blew her whistle and reopened the book. She held it outwards, so that we could see each different-coloured mother as she appeared on her own lusciously illustrated double page, with her happy, matching family.
There Blue Mother stood in a mesmerising cornucopia of blues, at the edge of the turquoise sea, laughing, the wind in her hair, surrounded by her blue family.
‘Blue Mother is free and open and speaks from her heart.’
She sounded exactly like Bridget’s mother – utterly perfect.
Miss Feast turned the page: Green Mother was serene and beautiful, barefoot in a glimmering field beside a mossy waterfall, her green daughters aloft in the grass.
‘Green Mother is full of hope and healing.’
Miss Feast turned the page: Gold Mother, standing by her gate, a little sinister, seemed to be welcoming children into her perfect golden garden for a treasure hunt with prizes.
I didn’t like her at all.
Grey Mother was soft-faced, wearing pince-nez glasses in a room full of rickety bookshelves, with a globe and an atlas.