All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  He explained to his mother I needed somewhere to stay, temporarily, and confidently told me it should all be fine.

  A few days later, he said again that it should all be fine.

  I told him my grandparents were sending the deposit to Hayworth Hall at the weekend. He looked panic-stricken, and he said, ‘I know my mother will come round! I’m her favourite!’

  Then he said he’d clinched it. Coming round, clinching it – it didn’t make me feel especially wanted. But I was used to that.

  Also, still no letter from Bridget.

  I waved the thought away.

  If she wasn’t going to write to me, I wasn’t going to write to her.

  If I didn’t want to describe sex, I didn’t have to.

  I was of course avoiding her for a completely different reason.

  If I wrote to her, I’d have to say how I was.

  And I didn’t want to find out.

  ‘I told Mum she’d always wanted a daughter,’ said Michael, looking rather pleased with himself.

  And that was that.

  I was moving into the guest wing, which had a large terrace, where the Portuguese gardener arranged my four orange trees. I smelled their sweet leaves and tried to imagine myself walking through the streets of Córdoba, where one day, when I was old enough, I would go. I felt alone and very small, as if I could see myself on the terrace from a satellite in space.

  I went inside and lay on the enormous bed. I closed my eyes, and inside my eyelids, I saw Bridget spinning a hula hoop. But I didn’t want to think about her. Or us. Or then. So I opened my eyes.

  I put my ammonite (no longer gold, but sad and dull), my crucifix and my Victorian locket on my bedside table, and I folded Barnaby’s note and Jean’s blossom-and-butterflies card inside my diary.

  I woke with a start in the night, feeling I was suffocating in the powerful smell of Christine Orson’s lilies.

  Chapter 50

  On my first morning at the Orsons’ house, Mr Orson disappeared to the city; Michael went to buy books from his university reading list; Billy played tennis with a neighbour’s son; and the cleaner sat on the sofa sewing name tapes onto all his clothes, even his boxer shorts.

  I felt oddly visible inside the house, as if I was twice my actual size.

  ‘How do I name his cricket box?’ the cleaner asked Christine.

  ‘Use this pen,’ said Christine.

  That was a terrible idea – what with sweat and pen and balls – but anyhow, and more importantly, Billy hated cricket, and this wouldn’t go down well at a boys’ boarding school.

  I felt, suddenly, scared for him.

  I went and read a book about the exiled Sephardi Jews of Córdoba under the pergola to take my mind off how horrible I was feeling, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the fun things Billy and I used to do together in our lunch breaks: the philosophising and the mashed-up Spanish and the dance we made up to ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’.

  I couldn’t get the lyrics out of my mind, and round and round came the thought that perhaps it was true – I should have been with him instead.

  I’d picked the wrong brother.

  The wrong sort of relationship.

  Perhaps it was better being a friend than a girlfriend at my age.

  I could hear Christine Orson on the phone to her friends.

  ‘Well, the school says it gives plenty of one-to-one attention …’ I heard her say loudly.

  And later, even more loudly, ‘If we back it up with tutors in the holidays …’

  And later, slightly less loudly, ‘They had no idea how to deal with his ebullience at Lewis. With better handling, I’m sure he’ll thrive. He’s actually very bright …’

  Billy came into the garden in his tennis whites, and he sat on the stone step by the pool, and his legs looked spindly and his face looked empty, and I felt a huge wave of love for him, so big it almost drowned me.

  I walked over to him, and I said, ‘I was thinking of that dance we made up to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”.’

  He looked at me as if he didn’t understand English.

  I was going to say that I should have been with him instead, like the song, but what came out was: ‘Are you nervous about boarding, Billy?’

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said, and he got up and walked away from me on his twig-legs.

  He walked away from me.

  Like I’d walked away from him.

  That’s what came to me.

  I’d done to him what my father did to me.

  Also, I was staying in his house and he was being sent away.

  Was there something I could have done that day?

  Should I have refused to stay?

  Would it have made any difference?

  As Billy walked off, Johnny arrived with his ravishing Russian academic girlfriend, Antonina, who wore a white bikini and a gold waist chain. I sat there trying to imagine why anyone would wear a waist chain.

  Every few minutes, Antonina took a mirror out of her bag and stared at herself, as if worried that she’d turned into somebody else since she’d last looked.

  I moved my chair under the apple tree.

  Billy was commandeered by his mother to help with lunch.

  I wondered why Johnny didn’t have to help with lunch.

  Was Billy doing penance for his lack of academic ability?

  Being the first Orson ever to get C grades at GCSE?

  Billy brought salad bowls to the table under the pergola and he sat down with an expression so blank you felt that all his feelings had retreated deep down inside himself and might never again be found. Rather like mine.

  Sometimes I couldn’t work out what I felt about anything any more.

  Except my secret photo and my passport – my heart still raced when I looked at those.

  But the quest was somewhat stalled.

  Michael rushed into the garden, sweating, slightly later than his mother had required, a point she laboured until he’d apologised for the trains being messed up.

  ‘Punctuality matters,’ she said. ‘You’ll find that at boarding school, Billy.’

  ‘Fucking boarding school,’ said Billy, getting up from the table, the sharp edges of his forbidden f-word making an enormous tear in Christine Orson’s film set, as he made off across the lawn, slamming the back door behind him.

  The rest of us, stunned into silence, ate with our cutlery clinking loudly against the china plates.

  Chapter 51

  On the morning of his departure, Billy put on his tropical fish swimming shorts, held his nose and slid down the slide into the pool. I remember having a horrible premonition that there was no water in the pool and he was going to smash himself to pieces. But there was water in the pool, and he didn’t.

  He left for Daunton Lodge, looking thin and small, with wet hair. He was wearing a grey suit, with an eagle crest on the pocket of his jacket, and his gold complexion was grey too.

  The next day, Johnny and Antonina went on holiday to South America, and a card arrived in the post for me.

  Dear Eva

  I hope all is well with you.

  Please send my best to Michael and his parents.

  I am being very well looked after.

  Good luck in the sixth form.

  With my love

  Mummy

  You are not Mummy, I thought, when I read it.

  I went up to my bedroom and stared at the headless grey woman and the mass of geraniums all over the white stone walls.

  I replied, Dear Cherie, saying I was pleased that she was being well looked after and everything was great at the Orsons’. She didn’t try the Mummy thing again.

  We wrote to each other once a week from then on – short stilted letters, like armour.

  Michael’s mother bought me a wardrobe of coordinating sixth-form clothes, skirts with waistbands (like my mother’s) and tailored jackets.

  Three weeks after term started, Michael and I set off to Cambridge in his mothe
r’s Mercedes, as Michael’s stuff wouldn’t fit in the Mini, and anyway his mother wanted to style his room.

  We got back to quiet Fairmont House, and his mother took out a gold necklace she’d bought me with a gold M pendant, which she fastened at the back of my neck, so that I was always wearing Michael.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said to her.

  ‘How was your day?’ I’d ask.

  ‘Oh, I was just sunbathing,’ she’d say. ‘We’re having crab salad/risotto/sea bream for supper.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  I would do my homework under the pergola, while she sat drinking wine and phoning her friends to boast manically about her children. This, and tennis, was what they did together when I was at school – the boasting definitely more competitive than the tennis.

  In the evenings, we’d swim lengths together.

  Then we’d go into the poolside sauna.

  She’d lie naked with her hair in a towel.

  ‘Don’t feel you need to keep your costume on,’ she’d say.

  But I did feel I needed to keep my costume on, thank you very much.

  When I had my period, I told her I didn’t want to swim.

  ‘Why ever not?’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re using towels.’

  I didn’t say I was using tampons and towels both together, and was considering putting a pillow inside my pants.

  My period pains contracted through my bowel, pinched my ovaries, cut me in half. But I didn’t want to talk to her about them. I couldn’t face the thought of all her solutions.

  ‘You could have that birthmark on your thigh removed, you know,’ she said. ‘I know just the man.’

  ‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s the same shape as the Iberian Peninsula!’

  ‘It’s a bit unsightly,’ she said. ‘What does Michael say?’

  I didn’t care what Michael said – it was my leg.

  Whatever the pendant said.

  And it is my leg.

  I quite liked my leg, still do.

  I was still Eva from Iberia, but the warrior in me had got hidden somewhere, and would certainly not be welcomed into the house by Michael’s mother, whose principal anxiety that autumn was the fading of her tan.

  She was furiously fake-tanning her legs in the pool changing room when she told me that a pupil had committed suicide at Billy’s school.

  ‘He hung himself,’ she said.

  I had no idea what to say.

  ‘Billy was apparently best friends with him,’ she said, vigorously rubbing her left breast. ‘He was called Archie.’

  ‘Are you going down to see him?’ I said, mesmerised by the malleability of her breast.

  She washed her hands with soap and a scrubbing brush.

  Then she wrapped an enormous grey towel around herself.

  ‘The priest is seeing all the boys,’ she said, in an efficient voice. ‘And he tells me Billy seems fine.’

  ‘Do they know why the boy did it?’

  ‘Personal problems,’ she said.

  Obviously, I thought, he’s a person.

  ‘Poor boy,’ I said.

  ‘Poor parents,’ I said.

  ‘I hope Billy’s OK,’ I said.

  She shook her head, like a horse ridding itself of flies around its eyes, and she said cheerfully, ‘Will you do my back?’

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ I said.

  ‘Just keep it even,’ she said, flinging off her towel.

  I started.

  ‘I’m so pleased he’s at a Catholic school,’ she said.

  I rubbed her back, frantically, up and down, hoping the tan would be OK and trying not to leave fingerprints on her buttocks.

  ‘Everyone says the priest is being amazing,’ she said. ‘He’s talked to them all individually.’

  I washed my orange hands.

  ‘Are you a Catholic?’ I said, thinking how odd it was that Michael and I had never discussed religion when it was one of my favourite subjects.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you couldn’t find a better way of living.’

  ‘Maybe you should consider becoming one then,’ I said, trying to be both logical and polite.

  ‘For children, I mean,’ she said, looking at her tanned self in the mirror. ‘And young people.’

  I wouldn’t counter her logic.

  ‘And schools,’ she said. ‘All the best schools are religious.’

  I sat on the wooden bench and felt tense.

  I tried to think of something to say.

  ‘Did you enjoy being a lawyer?’ I said, somewhat out of nowhere (Questions for Supper – I was getting the hang of them).

  ‘I loved it,’ she said.

  ‘Why did you give it up?’

  ‘Hugo felt there was only room for one big job in our marriage,’ she said.

  I opened my mouth to ask her if she regretted it.

  But then I changed my mind and said nothing.

  ‘I became CEO of our family!’ she said, laughing. ‘On a stonking salary!’

  ‘How’s it been?’ I said.

  ‘Well, let’s see how the boys turn out,’ she said. ‘So far, so good. One Oxford, one Cambridge. Two gorgeous girlfriends.’

  Poor poor Billy.

  ‘Do you really think you can make people turn out how you want them to?’ I said.

  ‘I see it as a mother’s job. To show her children the right way. To set them up for greatness!’

  I couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘You have so much potential, Eva,’ she said. ‘And if you listen to me, I will make sure you succeed.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘I think I’ll go inside now.’

  It was a relief to be in my own room, away from her. Why did she make me so tense, I wondered, when I knew she was trying to help me. How ironic that all I’d wanted was maternal attention, and now I’d got it, I couldn’t stand it.

  You’re never happy, I told myself, what’s the matter with you?

  When I went down for supper, she took a bag off the table and said, ‘You need to read these books. It’s vital to read around your subjects.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

  She was loving me in the only way she knew.

  A buying-things and bossing-me-about kind of way.

  Which is what love can be, I suppose, for lots of people.

  Keeping people on a string, like a puppeteer.

  But love is supposed to be a watering hole, where you come and go by choice, and leave refreshed. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyhow.

  Michael’s mother bought me designer dresses and diamond earrings, which I wore to black-tie dinners in panelled halls in Cambridge with Michael. We went punting with his friends, and drank champagne, and I realised that I was no longer that same young girl, teary in her cagoule, drinking from Jean’s thermos flask, on the Cam.

  Who was I though, instead of that girl?

  There were so many ways in which I didn’t know who I was that it scared me to death.

  I pushed that thought firmly into a special safe I’d made inside my brain, which locked on closure. On the door, it said UNWANTED THOUGHTS. There were quite a lot in there already.

  Chapter 52

  On Wednesday afternoons in the sixth form we had Enrichment in the newly built lecture theatre and, in a particularly private school sort of endeavour, we were making our way through the entire history of the entire world.

  This particular Wednesday afternoon, the deputy head introduced us to the speaker, Dr Lourdes Jameson, who had auburn hair with a wild, blown-about look, and big bosoms and a warm freckly face, and who was wearing boots with – look! – thick leather soles and – look again! – a gorgeous crinkly scarf.

  Dr Lourdes James carried her weight evenly, feet flat on the ground like Bridget, like all of them – there they were, standing in a line by the sea in my mind.

  As I sat staring at her, she started turning into Blue Mother.


  She caught my eye.

  I was all trussed up in my matchy-matchy clothes – a tidy cream collared blouse and my gold M pendant.

  She would think I was a posh uptight girl at a posh uptight school.

  And maybe I was.

  Would Blue Mother even like me any more, I wondered.

  Now that I wore tight skirts and belts pulled in at the waist.

  Would Bridget still like me?

  I couldn’t bear to think about her.

  It was over five years since we’d said goodbye, it came to me, with a blast of longing for what we’d had, for what I didn’t have any more, for who I’d been then and wasn’t now.

  Someone patted my shoulder in the row behind to say my jacket had fallen off my chair. I put on my fitted tailored grey jacket that Michael’s mother had bought me, and it felt horribly constricting.

  I don’t like myself – that’s what I thought when Dr Jameson smiled at me.

  ‘So, let’s pick up the story from about 750,’ she said.

  I settled into the start of her talk, anticipation fizzing like sherbet dib dabs.

  Abba and sherbet dib dabs on the way to Lyme Regis.

  Bridget’s sparkly blue eyes and wild curly hair.

  ‘You hear the term medieval and what do you think?’ said Dr Lourdes Jameson.

  ‘Backward,’ said the girl next to me.

  ‘Smelly,’ said some boy trying to be funny.

  Dr Jameson’s eyes twinkled at him.

  I still didn’t give answers out loud.

  ‘We may need to think again,’ she said, smiling as if she was holding in some great secret, which was about to burst out of her.

  She paused, took a sip of water and removed her crinkly scarf.

  Oh, Blue Mother’s crinkly scarf around the banister!

  ‘Where do you think you would find the most advanced culture in Europe at this time?’

  I felt a gauze of colour across my cheeks.

  I knew the answer.

  This was my history.

  I had a history.

  Various know-it-all boys made suggestions, none of them right.

  ‘The cosmopolitan and multi-religious culture of Spain,’ she said.

  One or two people looked at me.

  ‘And the zenith was in the city of Córdoba.’