All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  I grew taller in my seat – Eva from Iberia.

  ‘Córdoba, at this time, was the most extraordinary place,’ she said. ‘A city of nine hundred public baths; tens of thousands of vibrant shops selling rich fabrics or Arab slippers or tapestries or prayer mats; hundreds or perhaps thousands of mosques; a total of seventy capacious libraries, and the caliphal library holding some four thousand volumes at a time when the largest library in the rest of Europe held four hundred!’

  And taller.

  ‘A young Muslim, probably in his late teens, called Abd al-Rahman abandoned his home in Damascus after his whole family, the ruling Umayyads, were murdered. He set off on horseback on an extraordinary journey …’

  I pictured his route – alone on horseback, how thrilling – through Palestine, the Sinai, into Egypt, to Morocco.

  ‘He crossed the narrow straits from Morocco and became the first ruler of Islamic Spain,’ said Dr Jameson.

  ‘Europe’s never been Islamic,’ said a boy at the back.

  ‘Except that Spain was,’ said the speaker. ‘Far out on the Syrian steppe stood the mysterious walled city of Rusafa, where Abd al-Rahman’s family had been murdered. He began to build a new Rusafa in Andalusia, in the south of Spain, filling it with things from his childhood, thousands of palm trees, a memory palace …’

  A memory palace?

  I thought: I have my very own memory palace in Córdoba too – a flower-draped patio, with a wagon wheel leaning against the wall and an ancient stone angel in the centre. I have a history. I am somebody. It’s just I don’t know exactly who. Not yet. But I will find out.

  ‘As the first Emir of Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman responded to the dhimmi – a word for special protection – in a particularly generous way, protecting the two other peoples of the Book – the Jews and the Christians – as his brothers and sisters, and kindred spirits.’

  I thought of my father saying, we all lived together for 250 years – Jews, Muslims, Christians.

  My father!

  Nearly ten years since I’d seen him.

  I thought, I must get to Córdoba, somehow – it must be possible.

  ‘And,’ Dr Jameson continued, taking off her jacket to reveal a crumpled blue linen dress, ‘perhaps Europe has never been as enlightened as it was for those glorious years of tolerance and coexistence in Córdoba, with the Muslims, the Jews and the Christians living alongside each other in what is now known as the Convivencia.’

  What did my father say? Religion always starts well and ends badly. So many things that start well end badly.

  ‘Any questions?’ said Dr Jameson.

  ‘What happened?’ said a girl at the end of the row. ‘How did the Convivencia come to an end?’

  ‘It wasn’t the Andalusians who started to fight each other,’ said the speaker. ‘It was Berber Muslims from North Africa who had a different application of the dhimmi. And it was the crusading Christians from Latin Christendom. They met on the plains of Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Ready to kill each other for God.’

  She paused, and then said again: ‘Ready to kill each other for God. Think about that. It happens in every era.’

  ‘What about the Jews?’ said someone, and I saw Mr Blume in his study playing the Quartet for the End of Time, which didn’t stop the guards killing the prisoners at Stalag VIII-A.

  ‘The Jews had prospered magnificently in old Andalusia,’ she said. ‘But when the Black Death came, they were blamed for it. It’s strange how often the Jews get the blame, isn’t it? People said that God was so angry about the intermingling of the three faiths that he sent down a plague. An edict expelling every Jew from Spain was signed on 31 March 1492 by the Catholic kings. And the Sephardi Jews, along with the Muslim Moors, who had all contributed so profoundly to Andalusia, were gone.’

  Human beings really are a terrible idea, I thought.

  Chapter 53

  When Michael came home from Cambridge for the summer, his mother said that she was perfectly happy for us to sleep together from now on, and she stared at us with a greedy look on her face. On Saturday evening, we had sex underneath the duvet, trying not to make any noises, and Michael wrapped the condom in practically a whole roll of loo paper like a miniature mummified baby.

  Afterwards, weirdly, I thought of Bridget, how she never wrote to me any more, how much I’d like to see her, how much I’d like to be back in her bedroom, instead of Michael’s, with our beds pulled together and the mountains of pillows and the old-fashioned eiderdowns.

  On Monday morning, we had sex in Michael’s en-suite shower in a wordless sort of frenzy, and I got shower gel in my eye. Then we did it again on the carpet. Michael made another mummified baby, and when we went downstairs, he asked his mother for more loo roll.

  She said, ‘You got through that quickly!’

  I nearly died.

  ‘What’s happened to your eye?’ Michael’s mother asked me as she drove me to school. ‘It looks very red.’

  I made a strange gesture with my hand meaning nothing.

  ‘You are using the right sort of contraception, aren’t you?’ she said when we stopped at the traffic lights.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry!’ I said, blinking my red eye and wondering how she’d guessed it had something to do with sex, in which eyes weren’t usually involved, as far as I knew.

  ‘I’m happy to run through the options with you,’ she said, sounding curiously energised about her son’s contraceptive choices.

  ‘No,’ I said, looking out of the window. ‘It’s all fine.’

  We drove along quietly, and while I blinked, she morphed effortlessly from contraception to my essay on Augustine, and how I needed to develop my argument in a slightly different way to gain full marks, she’d read the descriptors.

  ‘So, History at Cambridge,’ she said, once university discussions started at school. ‘If you don’t take a gap year, you and Michael will overlap for a year.’

  I’d done quite enough overlapping with Michael.

  I needed some space around me.

  ‘Gap years are completely unnecessary,’ she went on. ‘There’s plenty you can do during the holidays.’

  In the holidays, I went out for a strained lunch with my mother, who was pale and faraway, trying a period of rest at Granny and Grandpa Green’s. Then I went to Crete with Michael’s family, staying in the villa the Orsons had bought, overlooking Mirabello Bay.

  Chapter 54

  In the autumn term of Upper Sixth, Michael’s mother and I were in the car on the way home from school when I took a deep breath and said, ‘I’m not applying for Cambridge. I’m applying for Edinburgh.’

  She stared ahead at the road, and so did I.

  ‘That’s too far from Michael,’ she said.

  ‘At Edinburgh, I can specialise in Medieval Córdoba – 750 until 1492.’

  ‘Eva, that’s ridiculously narrow,’ she said. ‘And Edinburgh is miles away.’

  ‘But Professor Wells at Edinburgh is the expert on the Convivencia,’ I said calmly.

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ she said.

  ‘What point?’

  Was she actually bothered about my future or only my proximity to her son?

  ‘It’s not about your particular interest,’ she said. ‘Your degree’s your passport to the next thing. You always need to have your eye on the next thing.’

  Our eyes were firmly on the road.

  ‘I don’t know what my next thing is,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, as we stopped at the lights. ‘Nobody does. And if your eye is always on the next thing, you can never enjoy the current thing. I just want to lose myself in medieval Córdoba for three years.’

  ‘You’re being totally naïve,’ she said.

  ‘None of us knows what will happen next,’ I said. ‘You probably thought you’d be a top barrister. But in the end, you weren’t.’

  ‘I could easily have been.’

  ‘Exactly, you could have been, but you weren’t. And yo
u wouldn’t have known that.’

  ‘I’m getting all of you where you want to go,’ she said curtly. ‘That’s my job.’

  No, it isn’t, I remember thinking.

  Mothering is a serious technical difficult job when children are small. I know this now very well. Then children grow up – and the job turns into a relationship. But, I realised, nobody had told her this. She didn’t know that she’d been made redundant.

  And, even though she was impossible in so many ways, that makes me sad now.

  She’d given so much of herself to find her children’s potential and, along the way, she’d lost her own.

  Chapter 55

  In my bedroom, I took out my diary, and I read the note Barnaby Blue had written to me seven years earlier. I stared at the xx, and realised, to my surprise, that I still really wanted to kiss him, when I should only have been thinking about kissing Michael.

  But aren’t the un-kissed always going to be more exciting than the already-kissed, I wondered, and if that was the case, how did anyone ever risk getting married?

  I read Barnaby’s note, which I knew off by heart.

  I feel so sad that some days I want to die too. But M taught us how to live. And maybe that was the point of last summer. So I’m going to try to live, and will you try too, Eva? I wonder who will end up in your locket!

  I picked up my locket, thinking how badly I wanted to live again, the way I had with Bridget.

  Michael’s mother came in without asking.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said, grabbing the locket.

  ‘I found it on a beach in Dorset with my best friend,’ I said, feeling my breaths shortening. ‘When I was ten.’

  The time that I was happy.

  It seemed a long time ago, being happy.

  Bridget still didn’t write, so I didn’t write either.

  When Christine left, I took out the blossom-and-butterflies card with Jean’s phone number inside it.

  I dialled the number.

  ‘Jean, it’s Eva,’ I said, and to my surprise, I felt a terrible welling in my chest, and couldn’t speak for some seconds.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said Jean.

  ‘How’s Cherie?’ I gasped. ‘She doesn’t really say anything in her letters to me.’

  ‘I feel as if she’s on the way up,’ said Jean.

  ‘Is she coming home then?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Jean.

  ‘I’m making decisions about university,’ I said. ‘I want to study Medieval Hispanic History, focusing on Córdoba, and neither Oxford or Cambridge offers a course like that.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jean. ‘You must do what feels right.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And do you think I might be able to go and live in Chelsea again at some point?’

  ‘I need to work out what’s going to happen to Nigel,’ she said. ‘Then I can come back.’

  A big hiccup of tears surprised me from nowhere.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Jean.

  ‘And how are you and Nigel?’ I said, trying to sound normal.

  ‘It’s strange without Mother,’ she said, ‘although she was a very difficult woman. All she wanted was a son. And after Nigel was born with Down’s Syndrome, all her dreams were crushed. I suppose she was depressed.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you do,’ she said. ‘But the difference is that your mother loves you.’

  ‘Does she?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  There was a pause.

  I felt it might be my moment.

  ‘Jean,’ I said. ‘I need to ask you something.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I don’t think Cherie is my mother, and I didn’t know who to tell.’

  There was another pause, and a sob gasped up my throat.

  ‘Do you know if she is, Jean? It would really help if you could tell me.’

  ‘Of course she is,’ she said.

  ‘But I look nothing like her.’

  ‘You’re the image of your father,’ she said.

  ‘Are you honestly sure?’ I said, my voice trembling.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said, and I couldn’t catch the tone of it, how sure her sureness was.

  ‘She might not have told you the truth,’ I said.

  ‘She does tend to confide in me, Eva,’ said Jean, quite convincingly. ‘So you can put that thought right out of your head.’

  She paused.

  And said again, ‘Right out of your head.’

  ‘Also,’ I said, ‘sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe. Do you think that’s normal?’

  Chapter 56

  Michael went crazy when I said I wasn’t applying for Cambridge.

  He said why wouldn’t I want to go to the best university in the country.

  He said he could stay on after his degree was finished, and we could live together. Or, if the Cambridge course wasn’t right, I could go to university in London, and he could do an MBA at King’s or UCL or LSE, or get a job. And we could be together every day and every night. (This sounded a bit exhausting: I didn’t sleep very well when he was in the same bed as me.)

  ‘Well, I’ll think about applying for London,’ I said.

  To keep him quiet.

  Did I ever love Michael?

  That’s what I’m wondering.

  I remember sitting on the window seat watching him arrive from Cambridge, park the Mini and crunch over the gravel. I’d walk slowly down the stairs, and he’d hold out his long bronze arms, with his head slightly tilted.

  I’d stop halfway down and say, ‘Yes! And how can I help? Were you looking for something in particular?’

  Something?

  Objectifying my actual self!

  What was I thinking?

  ‘I certainly was,’ he’d say, racing up the stairs and taking me in his arms.

  Michael bought me a diamond necklace for Christmas, and his mother (alarmingly) bought me a matching diamond bracelet and a tiny oval-shaped photo of Michael exactly the right size for my locket, showing she’d been snooping about in my bedroom. I put the photo in the locket, clipped it shut, put it in my drawer, then opened the drawer, opened the locket and took the photo out.

  Granny and Grandpa Green sent me a Christmas card (with a sizeable cheque) from the Maldives, explaining that my mother was back at Home Place, and that this was for the best.

  That spring – it must have been April because the gardener had put my orange trees back on my terrace – I stopped sleeping.

  Some nights I lay on the sunlounger, inhaling the heady scent of orange blossom and dreaming of Córdoba. I breathed, in and out, in and out, and I counted sheep and stars, and I tightened and relaxed every muscle in my body, but I still didn’t sleep.

  I felt sick and fearful and on edge.

  I thought constantly about Bridget.

  The way we’d lost each other.

  The way Michael didn’t fill the space she’d left.

  The way I couldn’t stand being at Fairmont House any more.

  And then it came to me, with a jolt.

  I’d never told Bridget I was here.

  Here I was refusing to write to her like some vengeful arse, and perhaps there was a whole bundle of letters waiting for me on the mat in Chelsea.

  I had to get back there.

  Quickly.

  Then I’d be able to sleep.

  Feel normal again.

  I spoke to my form tutor, Miss Hadley, and she smiled and said that a solution would be found, who should she phone?

  I suggested she might phone Jean, because we absolutely couldn’t disturb my mother, and my grandparents were unlikely to be especially helpful.

  When Jean agreed that she would come back to Chelsea to be with me, Miss Hadley phoned Christine.

  ‘Was she cross?’ I said to Miss Hadley.

  ‘I said how grateful you were to her,’ said
Miss Hadley. ‘I also said it was very normal for pupils to feel the pressure of A levels, and it was very normal that you wanted to take your exams from home.’

  ‘What did she say?’ I said, trembling because, deep down, I was frightened of her, like I was frightened of my mother, but slightly more.

  ‘She said she understood,’ said Miss Hadley.

  But when I got back to Fairmont House, I knew that she did not understand.

  ‘I couldn’t have done more,’ she said icily.

  ‘You couldn’t,’ I said, clutching my hands together to stop them shaking.

  Chapter 57

  Granny and Grandpa Green came to collect me from Fairmont House, smelling faintly of Ambre Solaire.

  ‘We’re so grateful to you for having Eva,’ Grandpa Green said to Christine Orson, who’d had a blow-dry in preparation for their arrival.

  ‘It’s been a total pleasure to help,’ she said, glowing with her own goodness.

  ‘This is for you,’ said Grandpa Green once we got in the car, handing me a blue box.

  Christine Orson gave up waving at us and went inside.

  When I opened the box, it had a glass paperweight in it, engraved with the name of the cruise-ship they’d been on, and I strongly suspected they’d been given it for free.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I said. ‘It will be very useful.’

  ‘Well, we thought with all the studying …’ said Granny Green, her sentence trailing off nowhere as we set off.

  Soon I was back on our tiled Chelsea porch, flanked by my leathery grandparents and their peeling noses.

  ‘Your mother’s hoping to join us sometime soon,’ said Jean, letting out a big burst of paint-smell as she opened the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to Jean, and I felt tears in my eyes seeing her flowery skirt and her kind face again.

  I looked anxiously for a pile of letters with Bridget’s writing on, but the hall shelf was empty.

  Jean’s brother, Nigel, came walking down the hall, wearing bright blue suede loafers. He looked, yes, rather dapper – and I hadn’t expected him to. He threw his arms around me, and he smelled of sandalwood.