All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  ‘You know, the future.’

  We have no future.

  ‘We never talked about any vision.’

  ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ said Michael again.

  ‘I could not be more not-pregnant,’ I said.

  ‘What a relief!’ he said.

  ‘But what I’m about to tell you may not be a relief,’ I said.

  His ears went red. I couldn’t stop looking at his red ears, with the waves of blond hair around them, and stubble forming on his cheeks, when he used to get it only on his chin and upper lip.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said.

  ‘You know how my periods are really bad,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you’d been unfaithful,’ he said, taking a deep breath.

  I have, I thought, but only in my head.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got endometriosis, Michael.’

  He kept driving.

  ‘Is that bad?’ he said, sounding anxious. ‘Don’t tell me it’s some terminal disease, Evs?’

  ‘Not exactly terminal,’ I said. ‘Well, not for me.’

  ‘Well, who else would it be terminal for?’ he said tautly.

  For us, I thought, and that would be easier than finding words for the real reasons.

  ‘Michael,’ I said. ‘I may not be able to have children.’

  He stopped at a red traffic light.

  ‘Hold on hold on hold on,’ he said.

  The light turned amber.

  Then green.

  When we pulled up in front of the pond, where the carp are not coy, my heart was racing, and there was a man erecting what I assumed would be a line of flamed torches to welcome guests to the party.

  ‘Do you think you could take those ankle chains off?’ said Michael. ‘My mother thinks they’re for prostitutes.’

  Why do you always tell me what to wear, I thought, when all you ever wear are pale blue shirts.

  I took the anklets off and put them in my full jacket pocket.

  I looked up.

  The garage had gone.

  I couldn’t stop staring at the empty space.

  ‘I can’t believe you told me now, just before the party,’ said Michael.

  ‘I kept looking for a good moment to tell you,’ I said. ‘But there isn’t really a good moment for saying something like that.’

  ‘But not just before my parents’ big party …’ he said.

  Calm down about this party, I thought, it’s so typical of rich people to get worked up about parties.

  ‘You knocked down the garage,’ I said.

  ‘We couldn’t bear looking at it,’ said Michael.

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  There was just an empty space, with two spindly sapling trees, which reminded me of Billy’s skinny legs.

  Christine came out.

  I felt my body stiffen.

  Her nose had grown longer, or was that my imagination?

  She tried to smile at me.

  And I tried to smile at her.

  Chapter 81

  The air was electrified with tension.

  There were people everywhere: flower-arrangers, cooks, stylists.

  ‘Such a shame you couldn’t get here earlier,’ said Michael’s mother.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Hugo, for pity’s sake, will you stop tripping me over?’ she said, as Michael’s father came to kiss me.

  ‘As you see,’ he said, ‘pre-match tension.’

  He looked grey and tired and fat.

  ‘Is anyone going to come and help me?’ said Michael’s mother, striding into the garden, her face all sharp edges.

  ‘Is Michael all right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ I said.

  ‘I hope you haven’t upset him,’ she said.

  Breathe, breathe.

  ‘We don’t need any more upsets in this house,’ she said, and I saw that she had a cold sore that she’d covered in gold-tan make-up.

  Michael went to the Mini to get my backpack, and I climbed the stairs.

  I watched him from the landing, and he looked like a man in a pale blue shirt. I thought of my father saying that so many things start well and end badly, perhaps all things, and I stared at the empty space where the garage used to be.

  ‘I think Mum needs us all downstairs,’ Michael called.

  ‘I’m just coming,’ I said.

  I rushed along the landing to Michael’s bedroom and I threw myself on his double bed face down.

  I don’t love Michael Orson, I thought.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Barnaby.

  How we were supposed to be the Blue-Greens.

  Naomi doesn’t love him like I love him, that’s what I thought, because, if she did, she wouldn’t say she wasn’t engagementy.

  That’s why I’m not engagementy with Michael Orson.

  Because I don’t love him.

  Chapter 82

  When the tears came, they were particularly wet and snotty, and they coursed down my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop them, but I had to. Because soon Michael would come up and berate me and his mother would be furious, and I urgently needed a tissue.

  Michael always had a neat little pack of tissues in his pocket, and there was his jacket on the back of the door.

  I got up and I reached into his pocket.

  But the thing I found wasn’t tissues.

  The thing I found was a padded envelope.

  You should never open other people’s envelopes.

  But I did open another person’s envelope.

  Inside it was a lump wrapped in a sheet of thin paper, with an elastic band around it.

  I took the elastic band off, and inside the sheet of paper was a green velvet box.

  And on the paper:

  Reset > rectangle.

  2.30 pm – 27.7.95

  Inside the green velvet box sat a sapphire and diamond ring.

  I turned hot.

  Then cold.

  I was looking at my engagement ring, which Michael had collected, re-shaped, at 2.30 pm on 27 July.

  How hadn’t he noticed that we didn’t get on any more?

  How hadn’t I had the courage to get out sooner?

  And how could I possibly get out now?

  At his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary party?

  There were noises on the landing.

  I shoved the receipt and the box into the envelope, and crammed it back into Michael’s pocket.

  Michael came in.

  I stared at this man who wanted to marry me, but didn’t know me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Mum’s going hysterical.’

  ‘Have you got a tissue?’ I said.

  He took one out of the pocket of his jeans.

  Had he even noticed I’d been crying?

  ‘I did at least think,’ his mother screamed up the stairs, ‘that if she only came back on the day, she might come and help.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Michael. ‘Tell me something I can do. Something quite far away from your mother, if possible.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I can feel this whole thing imploding.’

  We walked downstairs.

  Michael put his arm around my shoulders, and it felt strangely heavy.

  ‘Look at the weather!’ said his mother. ‘It’s going to rain. I just know it. If only we’d had it last weekend.’

  I helped some pale teenager put raffia around white napkins.

  Michael came over and said, ‘Thanks, Evs. We have to remember she lost a son.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know. Give me my next job.’

  ‘I’ve got to sort a few things for Mum in the study,’ he said. ‘The next thing is writing names on the pebbles. Here’s the guest list.’

  Perfect.

  What a relief.

  My hands were shaking.

  Michael was sitting at the computer in the study, with the window open.

  I sat at the garden table nearby, and I bre
athed deeply, and I wrote shaky gold names on grey pebbles, with flicky loops.

  I noticed that my ankle had a white stripe where my anklets had been, like a slave’s ankle-shackle.

  I thought, I am shackled to the Orsons.

  I could hear Michael on the phone, then his mother shrieking, ‘What the hell is this? Why are you looking up endometriosis?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t tell me she has endometriosis. Don’t tell me she’s infertile.’

  I got up, and I walked around the corner of the house and I opened the gate, which was garlanded with ivy and white roses, like you see in wedding photos, the kind of wedding photos I might have featured in, myself, chained to the arch at Fairmont House in a long lace dress, and I walked through the garage that didn’t exist any more, between the skinny sapling trees and past the Koi carp and the soon-to-be-flaming torches, and crunch crunch crunch over the gravel, and I kept walking.

  I caught a train, and I caught a bus, and I went and sat in Mongoose on the King’s Road. I ordered a glass of wine, and then another, and then another, and probably another. I felt inside my jacket pockets. My house key wasn’t there. My mother didn’t know I was in London, and nor did Jean.

  I ordered calamares and I closed my eyes and breathed deeply and imagined I was sitting in the tapas bar where I met Barnaby Blue, who was getting married, and I knew that Michael had re-shaped my round-or-oval engagement ring and turned it into a rectangle because I said round-or-oval was boring, and I started crying because that was such a sad thing.

  Sometimes you can’t solve the problems you’ve helped to create.

  Everything in life happens slowly, without you noticing, and one minute you’re a teenager eating toffee pancakes on the King’s Road, and the next minute you find an engagement ring that’s meant for you, and the time between flowed past like a river, because, maybe, I’d made the mistake of not having enough – any? – intentionality.

  Maybe Michael’s mother was right – but only about intentionality.

  I took my anklets out of my pocket and they’d all tangled up into a big knotted mess, and how does that happen, I thought.

  It’s not as if they can move.

  They’re chains, not bloody snakes.

  I’d had too much wine.

  The more I untangled, the more the chains tangled, and in the end, it was too much to deal with, and on my way home, I threw the whole knotted mess in the bin.

  Then I felt weirdly sad.

  Because I really loved those anklets.

  I walked, heavy-legged and veering left, into the square, passing the homeless man, who was fast asleep.

  I turned the corner.

  The study light was on.

  I was swaying as I looked at beautiful Nigel through the window, watching Tom and Jerry.

  I didn’t want to scare him.

  I knocked gently on the window.

  Nigel opened the door.

  He took me into his arms.

  He didn’t feel like a big Barnaby Blue bear.

  He felt more like Paddington.

  He laid his cheek against my cheek.

  ‘I’m going to bed, Nigel,’ I said.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ he said. ‘I love you, Evzy.’

  With the I.

  ‘I love you too,’ I said.

  I went upstairs.

  I crept onto the landing.

  The light was on.

  Every door was shut.

  I opened my mother’s door very quietly because I wanted to look at her, I don’t know why.

  The light from the landing crept towards the four-poster bed.

  I opened the door a little wider, and peered in.

  There she was.

  But wait a second.

  I creased my eyes.

  There was also someone else.

  Oh, look at that.

  There was Jean and there was my mother, all wrapped up in each other, in their nighties, with the eiderdown half-slipped off.

  Like a family of mice.

  Isn’t that what Bridget said?

  They all slept together, like a family of mice, in the tent in the garden, the last but one night of the holiday, when the cancer was creeping round Blue Mother’s body.

  I closed the door.

  Chapter 83

  Michael arrived in his Mini, still in his dinner jacket, with my rucksack, before anybody else was up. I was wearing one of my mother’s many silk dressing gowns, and I hadn’t slept.

  ‘I thought it was best for everyone …’ said Michael.

  I wondered how much he’d drunk.

  I’d never seen him looking so awful.

  ‘Nothing is ever best for everyone,’ I said, trying to sound calm, though not feeling it.

  ‘I’ve decided to be totally honest,’ said Michael, and he drew his hand down his face and stroked his slightly stubbly cheeks.

  ‘That might actually be best for everyone,’ I said.

  ‘We were supposed to be going away,’ he said, and he attempted a smile. ‘But I don’t think we are now, are we?’

  ‘You booked it so—’

  ‘I love you and I love Mum,’ he said firmly, as if he’d been practising in the car, and I saw her power and his weakness.

  ‘What does she say?’ I said, and as I said she, I realised how much anger I felt towards her – or was it anger? I didn’t know what it was. But it wasn’t a nice feeling.

  ‘She says I should end the relationship,’ said Michael quietly, and he took a deep breath, and I took a deep breath, and felt the air in my lungs like freedom.

  ‘She says you shouldn’t have hidden the endometriosis from me. That marriages don’t survive without children.’

  ‘I only hid it for three months,’ I said. ‘Three months when I don’t think we were planning to have any children?’

  ‘I do really want children,’ said Michael, with no guile, that was true, but with no empathy either.

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘It’s obviously been quite traumatic for me too …’

  He didn’t hear me.

  Did he ever hear me?

  ‘She’s desperate for grandchildren,’ said Michael, and how ridiculous to be expecting grandchildren, at our age, and how hurtful of him too. ‘And Johnny might end up in Russia.’

  How come Johnny could do what he liked?

  ‘It’s your life, Michael,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  ‘But it’s also hers,’ he said. ‘And she lost Billy.’

  I nodded.

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Should I tell Michael that Billy had thought of getting in his kayak in Mirabello Bay and never coming back?

  I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  ‘She basically says I have to choose between you and her, and I know she shouldn’t be asking me to do that, and …’

  Michael’s face was twisted.

  Choose, I thought.

  But don’t choose me.

  I opened my mouth, and closed it, like a fish.

  ‘… Dad says she can’t lose another son.’

  His voice broke up on son.

  ‘What does he advise?’

  It came out bitterly.

  ‘He says there are plenty more fish in the sea.’

  ‘That’s outrageous,’ I said. ‘That is totally outrageous. I actually can’t believe he said that.’

  I closed my eyes and I imagined myself swimming in a huge shoal of young women, with long hair flowing behind us like weed.

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘I thought your dad liked me,’ I said.

  Michael was biting his lip.

  I wondered if he was about to mention the engagement ring he’d had reset into a rectangle because circles and ovals are boring, if he was about to say that it had been shoved back in his pocket all wrong.

  But he didn’t say a word.

  We never ever spoke about that ring.

&
nbsp; I took a breath.

  ‘You know, Michael, your mother’s right,’ I said, and freed from him, I was able to be nicer. ‘I think you got a bit ahead of me anyway.’

  I took his hand.

  Michael started crying, really crying.

  I started crying too.

  I was crying, but also longing to be free.

  You remember Mr Blue saying that the emotions that we imagine to be far apart are also close together?

  I was full of joy that this relationship was ending.

  And full of pain too.

  It all ran together.

  Michael took his neat little pocket pack of tissues out of his dinner jacket.

  I didn’t think Barnaby Blue would carry around a neat little pocket pack of tissues.

  I stopped the thought in its tracks.

  We both wiped our faces with the tissues.

  When I looked at him, I remembered being fifteen again.

  But we were grown-ups now.

  I wondered if I was going to tell him about my mother and Jean all curled up like a family of mice.

  I knew I wasn’t.

  I hadn’t shown him my secret photo.

  I hadn’t told him about my memory palace.

  I’d never truly let him into my soul – just my body.

  Which was a sad and empty thought.

  ‘Evs,’ said Michael. ‘Why do you think Billy killed himself?’

  ‘There were probably a million reasons,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think Archie Morton was his boyfriend?’ said Michael.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  We hugged in perhaps the truest way we ever had, clinging to each other and crying so hard we couldn’t breathe.

  Then we separated.

  Smiled at each other with our tear-stained faces.

  And Michael left my life.

  Forever.

  Chapter 84

  ‘Welcome home!’ said my mother, coming down the stairs, not mentioning my hiccuppy sobs or my raw cheeks.

  I found that I was scrutinising her closely, following the revelation of the night before.

  ‘I’m so sorry but I’ll need to go straight back to Córdoba,’ I said, because all I could think of was getting away. ‘I hope you don’t mind. But shall we all have lunch together before I leave?’

  ‘I’ll treat you,’ she said, looking oddly calm. ‘Jean and I have found this wonderful little Italian with a roof terrace.’