All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

‘I don’t think M would recognise D,’ said Bridget, holding both my hands with both her hands. ‘It’s like he’s a different person already.’

  There was something different about Mr Blume.

  He looked smaller.

  As if Blue Mother had taken some of him with her.

  Chapter 37

  I wrote a thank you card for the painting to Mr Blume because, once people are dead, you can’t write to them. I also wrote a special letter to Bridget and a different one to each of the Blume children, thanking them for letting me be part of that last wonderful summer, the best summer of my life. I said I didn’t know if I would ever feel that happy again.

  Barnaby wrote back to say, on a piece of paper pulled out of a small spiral notebook, that this was what he felt too. And he also put xx at the end. I stared at the xx for minutes on end.

  Whenever I was at a loose end, I stared at the xx.

  And I was often at a loose end.

  He wishes he could kiss you, I told myself.

  It’s all he thinks about.

  Night and day.

  Kissing you.

  It’s just there hasn’t been the right time or place yet.

  I kept his note with the ammonite and the locket, and I trembled every time I read it.

  Bridget didn’t get into Lewis College where I’d got a place, and where I’d always wanted to go because it was named after C. S. Lewis who created Narnia.

  I kept quiet about this because I didn’t want Bridget to feel bad, and we agreed to go to Sutton Court, where we’d both been accepted.

  I can’t remember how I got this past Pink Mother. She was probably going through one of her in-bed phases.

  Bridget started her periods.

  Her mother wasn’t there.

  Inside the bag of sanitary towels and tampons which her father produced for her was a stem of silk lilies and a note from Blue Mother, which said (I’ve got the actual one here in front of me):

  Congratulations, Briddie! You’re a woman now – and what a wonderful woman you will be! The bleeding is a bit of a pain, but the best thing about it is that it gives you the chance to be a mother. Being a mother to all of you was by far the best thing I ever did in the whole of my life. Much much better than being an artist. Although perhaps mothers are artists! You are far more beautiful than any painting I ever painted. I love you always. M xxxx.

  When I read the note, the saudade longing came more strongly than I could remember, the longing to have been loved by a mother as Bridget had been loved by hers.

  ‘When you read that note that her actual hand had written,’ I said, holding back my tears as best I could, ‘did it feel as if she was somehow still here?’

  ‘No!’ said Bridget, swallowing. ‘It felt like she was on the other side of a massive wall, and there were no doors through it, and there would never ever be any doors in the whole of my life. Ever ever.’

  I couldn’t think of one thing to say.

  Mothers are artists, I kept thinking, mothers are artists.

  There must be something I can say about that.

  But what I said to Bridget was, ‘Are you using sanitary towels or tampons?’

  ‘Towels,’ said Bridget. ‘I can’t find my vagina.’

  Chapter 38

  An envelope came in the post with the Blumes’ address printed on the back.

  On the front was what had always been my favourite of Blue Mother’s sea paintings – the one with the choppy blue sea, and the bouncy clouds, and the sunlight caught on the sails of a yacht.

  It wasn’t my favourite any more.

  Because up behind the clouds the cancer bird was lurking, ready to pounce.

  I opened the card to see a printed message:

  Please forgive us for not responding individually to all your lovely cards and flowers.

  As we have lost our M, we have decided to lose our m.

  We will no longer be called the Blume family, but the Blue family.

  We’re having our name officially changed in M’s honour.

  This was Barnaby’s idea when we were all on our way home from Lyme Regis, our last moment of not knowing she was ill, our last wonderful summer together.

  And blue we are, heartbroken at her loss.

  We loved her more than life itself.

  For M, blue didn’t mean sad.

  Blue was the happiest colour.

  Her colour.

  Elemental.

  Like the sea.

  And the sky.

  Strange, yes, but then again, why not?

  Chapter 39

  On the second to last day of term, Bridget came into school, looking as if she’d been crying all night.

  ‘D’s had to stop working,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t concentrate.’

  I put my arm around her.

  ‘He’s too sad to look after us,’ she said. ‘So we’re moving.’

  They couldn’t be. They couldn’t possibly leave the house on Turret Grove with the parasols and the Indian throws and the squishy sofas and the wire chandelier full of feathered birds.

  I couldn’t bear to ask her where they were moving to.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be Fulham or Chelsea. Maybe it would be miles away – like Chiswick or Notting Hill or Clapham – and I wouldn’t be able to walk to her house any more.

  ‘Also, I won’t be going to Sutton Court in September,’ said Bridget.

  ‘But we’ve already been to the New Girls’ Day,’ I said. ‘And also I turned down a place at Lewis College because we promised each other we’d go to the same—’

  ‘We’re moving to Israel,’ said Bridget, ‘where my grandparents live. It’s D’s favourite country, and just smelling the Israeli air is apparently going to make him feel better. And also the oranges over there are really juicy.’

  I breathed deeply.

  And she breathed deeply.

  I felt dizzy and a bit nauseous.

  It didn’t seem possible.

  It was a bad dream, and soon I’d wake up.

  How could I live if Bridget wasn’t by my side?

  How could it be true that she would live thousands and thousands of miles away in a place I’d only read about in the bible, where people walked on water and came back from the dead and were shepherds?

  ‘I just can’t imagine not being able to look at your face every day,’ I said. ‘I love your face more than any face in the entire world.’

  ‘I love yours,’ said Bridget, and one tear came slowly down her cheek.

  She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  I gritted my teeth and breathed deeply and tried to let the right words come, one by one, carefully, knowing that each one was very very important.

  ‘I remember the first time you smiled at me,’ I said. ‘In the playground on the first day of school. And something happened inside me. For me, it was love at first sight. Your dad says love at first sight is like a chemical reaction. And that’s how it was for me. Like a fizzing sparking feeling.’

  Bridget couldn’t speak.

  But I hadn’t finished.

  ‘And the way you’ve always looked so happy to see me, every single morning,’ I said, ‘that has honestly changed my life. It’s made me feel as if there must be something nice about me.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Bridget, sobbing. ‘There are quite a few nice things.’

  We held each other as tight as one human being can hold another, and then we came apart and stood looking at each other, and said how much we loved each other, and we were so there and so together that I couldn’t imagine us ever being not there and not together, and I realised that Bridget’s blue eyes were the only eyes I’d ever allowed truly to see me because being seen is a scary thing. And I also realised that this was the kind of look a mother was supposed to give you. Every time she looked at you.

  And now neither of us had a mother to do that any more.

  Part 2

  Chapter 40

  A load of people were going to wav
e off Bridget’s family from Heathrow Airport, wearing blue clothes and carrying blue balloons.

  Pink Mother had agreed that Jean could take me in a taxi.

  But the closer it came, the more I knew I couldn’t do it.

  Wave off my only friend, who was my whole true life.

  Leaving me with my thin sliver of not-true life, which wasn’t even halfway to being solved despite the reams of notes and underlinings in my Quest Book.

  When I got out of bed that morning, I felt as if the floor was giving way.

  I went back to bed: there was no way that I could go to the airport.

  Jean didn’t try to change my mind or jolly me along, because I think she knew the only way out of sad was through sad.

  I lay listening to her smash the hoover into the stairs, and I imagined Bridget at the airport looking for me amongst all the blue people, and I cried so hard that I thought my heart would break into pieces and they would come sobbing up my throat.

  And that would be a good thing, living without a heart.

  Because who wants to live with one if having a heart makes you feel like this?

  I’d learnt what everyone learns eventually: love hurts.

  Pink Mother came in, and said quietly, ‘I told you to make some other friends, Eva. I could see that it would end like this. And I didn’t want this for you.’

  In a burst of grief-fuelled courage, I took a deep breath and said, ‘Out of interest, what do you want for me?’

  She froze.

  ‘What did you ever want for me?’

  All the colour drained from her face.

  ‘What is it, Cherie?’ I said. ‘My story?’

  She closed the door.

  I felt as if I was hyperventilating.

  Why would this woman never talk to me?

  It was true that these days, she didn’t shout or shriek or cry like she used to because, if she started to get het up, Jean would soothe her with her soft, calm voice.

  ‘You always said you wanted to go punting in Cambridge,’ said Jean the day after Bridget left, softly and calmly. ‘And I thought I’d take you.’

  It was a relief to get out of the silent house, where Pink Mother had taken to her bed, refusing to see me.

  Jean strapped an enormous bum-bag around the waistband of her flowery skirt, and we took the train, with a picnic and thermos flask, and we went punting in Cambridge, and it drizzled, and I put my cagoule on, and the views along the river were greyly beautiful, and I thought that I would like to go to Cambridge University one day, but Blue Mother was dead, Bridget had left me and I’d probably never see Barnaby again.

  I was still stuck in a quiet lonely house, with no idea about what had happened to me in the first three and a half years of my life, or who I really was.

  Chapter 41

  Once Bridget wasn’t going to Sutton Court, I refused to go there either.

  Pink Mother was still refusing to see me, and I’d started joking to myself that she was living inside the trompe l’oeil French garden she’d had painted onto the wall of the courtyard, no longer a gorgeous flowering Spanish patio. And perhaps my father was in there too – hahaha. Not so funny, really, for a grieving eleven-year-old to have no functioning parents.

  I listened through the door to hear Jean quietly coaching and coaxing her out onto the landing, and once or twice she wafted ghost-like through the house in her dressing gown, and when I bumped into her, she tried to act as if everything was completely normal between us.

  When I begged her to, Jean phoned the Registrar of Lewis College, and – hurray! – they still had a place. We went and bought the uniform together, and, oddly, Pink Mother made no comment.

  The day before term started, a letter arrived from Bridget, which began, in huge scrawled letters: WHERE WERE YOU?

  I folded the letter back into the envelope and put it on my bedside table.

  That night, I got into bed, picked up the letter and put it down again.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I turned on the light and looked around the room. My heart was racing, and everything was losing its edges. The yellow trim on my new blazer was turning into wavy lines and dancing off the lapel, and I felt as if I was falling into nothing, like the day of the baby photo display at St Hilda’s.

  I woke at four o’clock in the morning, and I stared at my uniform lying stiff and new on the padded chest, and, to my relief, the yellow trim had found its way back to the blazer lapel.

  I took out Bridget’s letter, and read the next line.

  I can’t believe you didn’t come to the airport.

  I got out of bed and put the letter in my inside blazer pocket.

  Around six o’clock in the morning, I put on my black pleated skirt and my black blazer with the yellow trim, and I knew how different my life would be if Bridget and I were meeting at the bus stop to go to Sutton Court together, and I thought, well, whatever you can’t believe, I can’t believe you went to Israel when we were supposed to be starting secondary school together. I hadn’t realised you could feel angry with people who were suffering more than you were.

  As I left my room in my stiff new uniform, Pink Mother appeared in her silk dressing gown, with all her hair scraped back in a towelling band. Her teeth looked bigger than usual, and she had a light coating of hair on her cheeks.

  ‘Hope it all goes well,’ she said nervously, double-knotting her belt.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder if you’ll talk to any boys,’ she said, and she nudged me with her elbow.

  It was most unlike her to do that, particularly when we were hardly speaking, and it turned me very stiff and serious.

  ‘I imagine I will,’ I said formally.

  ‘Ooooh!’ she said, nudging me again.

  I couldn’t imagine what was the matter with her.

  ‘See you later!’ I said, and ran downstairs.

  I was fifteen minutes early at the bus stop for the school coach, as was a new Lewis College boy, my age. He was wearing wire-framed glasses and had a little patch of whiteheads on his chin.

  We stood silently in the drizzle, and his glasses steamed up when we got on the bus.

  Chapter 42

  When Mr Norris, our form tutor (one of a number of dizzying new Lewis College terms) came in, wearing mustard corduroy trousers, most of my form totally ignored him. This was not at all like St Hilda’s, where we had to stop talking and stand up the second a teacher entered the room. It was strange seeing boys inside the classroom. They smelled different from girls – a bit like damp grass.

  My loneliness made a noise inside me, like buzzing, and it flew me up to the classroom ceiling from where I watched myself having no friends, as well as being myself having no friends, as if I’d split in two.

  At lunchtime, I went to the girls’ loos and I locked myself in a cubicle and took Bridget’s letter out of my inside blazer pocket.

  I can’t believe you didn’t come to the airport. I thought maybe there’d been a traffic jam or something. But I knew you’d come. And I couldn’t bear to leave without seeing you. We left it until the very last minute and then D said we had to go. I stood with my face against the glass. And you still didn’t come.

  I couldn’t read any more.

  I went to the library, picked out a book about personality types and hid behind a wall to read it. I did the quiz at the front. I was definitely an introvert. The world was, apparently, made for extroverts.

  I went on creeping around the edges of school life until the first Spanish lesson.

  The Spanish teacher was an Argentinian woman who reminded me of an eagle.

  A boy called Henry Steele, who already looked as if he might be prime minister, made a joke about the way we beat the Argentinians in the Falklands War.

  Señora García stared at him with her black eyes.

  ‘People died,’ she said.

  The class froze.

  She began to speak slowly in Spanish, drawing simultaneous ske
tches on the board to help the class understand. I hadn’t heard Spanish for a while, and the saudade longing started to throb in my belly. I felt for my birthmark through my skirt and thought of my baby photo and the wagon wheel and the gorgeous flowery patio.

  She made the class repeat, repeat, repeat.

  Then she turned and asked if anyone spoke Spanish.

  I slowly put up my hand.

  Everybody was staring at me.

  ‘¿Dónde naciste?’ said Señora García – where was I born, the worst of all questions.

  I froze.

  I blushed.

  ‘Jerez de la Frontera,’ I said hesitantly, and then I nearly said, or maybe Alvera, or Córdoba, I’m not sure, but that would have made me sound like a total weirdo because who, by the age of eleven, doesn’t know where they were born?

  ‘We have a holiday home near there,’ said golden Billy Orson, who was already one of the most popular boys in the class because he had a suntan and two older brothers, and knew the teachers’ nicknames.

  ‘¿Dónde?’ said Señora García.

  ‘Medina Sidonia,’ said Billy Orson. ‘But we’re selling it and buying one in Crete.’

  ‘Una casa en Creta,’ said Señora García, drawing a house on the board.

  Everyone repeated: ‘Una casa.’

  Una casa, una casa, una casa.

  I thought of my missing Spanish house whose walls were presumably just out of sight beyond the angel, no doubt glimmering and white like the photos my father used to leave on the desk in his study.

  The bell went, and we all got up to leave.

  ‘Are you Spanish?’ said Billy Orson, smiling, with his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Half,’ I said, as we left the classroom.

  ‘When are you going to be there next, you know, in Jerez?’

  I said, ‘I never go there.’

  He said, ‘Oh, where do you go?’

  I said, ‘I never go to Spain.’

  He said, ‘You’re Spanish and you never go to Spain?’

  I shook my head.