All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  ‘Cherie—’ I interjected.

  But he was determined to stick to his speech.

  ‘—was desperate for a baby,’ he said.

  I clenched my jaw to stop my teeth chattering.

  All these years not knowing.

  And what was I about to find out?

  My father reached across the glass table to hold my hand.

  I didn’t take it.

  ‘Eight years we tried for a baby,’ he said.

  Was I supposed to feel sorry for him?

  I felt, for a moment, sorry for her instead.

  ‘Did you love her?’ I said.

  He answered a different question.

  ‘It sent her crazy, waiting every month, and the baby never coming.’

  ‘It must have been really hard for her,’ I said, while at the same time thinking that she never acted like someone who was desperate for a child.

  ‘And with my other children in Jerez.’

  ‘Are you ever going to tell me about these other children?’

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘From my first marriage, four of them.’

  I certainly didn’t know.

  He couldn’t remember his own stories, couldn’t find his own nuts.

  Oh, his nuts – so much the problem, I suspected, his nuts!

  ‘So, the other four are older than me?’ I said, feeling my way. ‘And you have seven children, including me?’

  ‘Except that—’ he said.

  ‘Seven seems a bit greedy,’ I said, and the humour probably didn’t help anyone, least of all me.

  ‘Let’s keep the story going,’ said Carrie.

  ‘Your mother—’

  ‘Cherie—’

  ‘She couldn’t stand it in Jerez, living so close to the other wife and children.’

  ‘I don’t blame her,’ I said.

  ‘So she was mainly at the beach house, on the coast, in Alvera,’ he said. ‘I planted her two hundred palm trees.’

  Well, aren’t you the big hero, I thought.

  ‘Can we get to the point faster?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I was often here in Córdoba,’ he said, waving his arm around, in command again. ‘We have property around the city.’

  Property makes people feel powerful. I know that now. I feel much safer in the world. Much bigger.

  ‘And?’ said Carrie.

  ‘I’d seen Sister María Soledad out and about,’ he said.

  ‘And Sister Ana?’ I asked, feeling we were possibly getting somewhere.

  ‘There were seven of them,’ he said, and he cleared his throat to get back to his speech. ‘I’d seen Sister María Soledad out and about with a baby.’

  ‘A baby?’ I said, heart now thumping.

  Had one of the nuns had sex? Broken their vows? Had me?

  ‘Was the baby me?’

  My father ignored the question.

  ‘And this really was no place for a baby,’ he said. ‘The house was full of tramps and drunks. It had been left to them by some benefactor, but the idiot had left no funds for keeping it going. So I thought I’d do them all a good turn. Buy the house and sort it out for them.’

  He was the benefactor in the seventies who the Dominican nun had mentioned to Carrie.

  It hit me.

  What he was saying.

  ‘You bought me!’ I said. ‘That’s actually horrible. You bought me!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my father. ‘I saved you.’

  ‘You bought me.’

  We leant forward and faced each other.

  ‘They were looking for a couple to take the baby, so the baby would have a mother and a father,’ he said proudly.

  His trump card!

  ‘A mother and a father?’ I said. ‘How ideal.’

  Carrie’s eyes said, less of the sarcasm.

  ‘And the house was falling around their ears,’ my father went on. ‘Sister María Soledad was very grateful. She felt the baby—’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘You, yes, you – let me explain. She felt the baby needed a proper family life.’

  ‘A proper family life?’ I said, unable to stop my tone of incredulity – did the man have no self-awareness?

  ‘So that’s it. We got you and we spent the summer at the beach house. In the autumn, I took you both back to Jerez. But it didn’t work out.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Cherie said she needed to get back to London to be near her parents, then she’d be able to cope with you. So we went to Chelsea. Her parents were no help at all. And I couldn’t stand the rain.’

  Cope with me?

  ‘Did you actually adopt me or was it a few backhanders to your friends in high places?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  Carrie said, ‘I wonder if you should stop and let Eva take it all in.’

  I did my best to hold myself together.

  ‘My intentions were good,’ he said, and perhaps he believed that. ‘I can honestly say I thought it would work.’

  He held out his hand to me again, but there was no way I was taking it.

  What a cold bastard this man was.

  ‘So you’ve told me you’re not my father?’ I said. ‘Just like that?’

  He shook his head, looking something: wistful, winningly tragic.

  ‘And you don’t look the slightest bit guilty?’

  His expression didn’t change.

  ‘You don’t want to apologise for your deceit? Or your neglect? Or your total abandonment of a child?’

  Carrie took my hand.

  ‘You don’t have seven children – you have six,’ I said to him, slowly. ‘That’s why you never gave a shit about me. My whole life was a lie.’

  I drew my feet up onto my chair and hugged my knees.

  My not-father wrung his hands.

  ‘You were a crap father,’ I said, my voice breaking up. ‘But at least you were my crap father.’

  ‘So who is Eva’s mother?’ said Carrie.

  My not-father looked at Carrie and then at me, and his face gave nothing away, and he said nothing.

  ‘You must know,’ said Carrie. ‘And the least you can do is tell Eva.’

  He stammered.

  ‘Please,’ I heard myself saying.

  ‘You mother was a student, your sort of age,’ he said. ‘That’s what we were told.’

  ‘A student?’

  I let go of my knees and leant forward.

  ‘She came to Córdoba to study at the Facultad, in the seventies,’ he said. ‘Like you. It’s a rather nice symmetry …’

  Nice symmetry? Did he actually say that?

  ‘And she got pregnant?’ said Carrie.

  ‘She was a Muslim girl, originally from Peru, who’d come from London.’

  A Muslim girl.

  Wasn’t I supposed to be Catholic?

  Could I be both?

  Like the mosque-cathedral?

  Or C. S. Lewis’s wife, Joy?

  Or the Jewish Virgin Mary who presumably became a Christian because, if she didn’t, who would?

  I was burying my shock in questions, question after question, to stop me feeling.

  Like I always had.

  Now take it in, I said to myself.

  A Muslim girl from Peru who came to London who came to Córdoba?

  It was hard to imagine this girl.

  And much harder to imagine that this girl.

  Breathe.

  Was.

  My mother.

  I was shaking, and I knew it showed.

  ‘And my father?’ I said. ‘Who isn’t you?’

  ‘He was a priest. I don’t know anything else about him.’

  But priests weren’t supposed to have babies.

  ‘You never liked priests,’ I said.

  ‘It was a love affair,’ said my not-father. ‘Nothing … nothing fishy.’

  The ground had lost its solidity, and it felt like I was standing on something inflatable, which might not hold, which
made it much harder to speak.

  ‘So to be clear,’ I said, and my voice came out high and tremulous. ‘She gave me up, the girl from Peru – my mother?’

  ‘I think there was a lot of pressure on her from her own mother.’

  Pressure buzzing at the bridge of my nose, between my eyes, drilling through my temples.

  ‘Do you have a name for her?’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Sister María Soledad gave us a few details about her background. Her name and address. The birth certificate.’

  ‘A name? You have a name?’

  ‘A memorable name,’ he said. ‘Jhazmin Benalcazar.’

  My mother had a storybook name.

  I was someone.

  ‘Where’s that name from?’

  ‘Her family migrated to Lima from Palestine in the 1940s, and Jhazmin ended up in London as a teenager in 1967, the summer of love!’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Jhazmin’s aunt was marrying an English man. So she took her sister – Jhazmin’s mother – and her husband, with her. For a better life, I suppose.’

  ‘How can I get hold of her?’ I said urgently.

  ‘Tranquila,’ he said, with a calm-down-dear tone. ‘Of course her surname may well have changed, and the address I have is from twenty years ago.’

  ‘I can’t believe you bought me!’ I stared at him, still trembly, but calmer.

  ‘I didn’t buy you, Eva,’ he said.

  ‘What did you tell Sister María Soledad you would do for me?’

  ‘That we’d look after you as if you were our own, give you the best of everything.’

  Did he not see it?

  ‘And you one hundred per cent reneged on the deal,’ I said. ‘She wanted me to have a father and a mother.’

  ‘You had your mother.’

  ‘She was very ill,’ I said.

  My not-father said nothing.

  ‘You abandoned me,’ I said. ‘What do you think Sister María Soledad would have said about that?’

  He looked, for a second, frightened.

  The little boy with the blackboard of sins.

  ‘I’ll find a way to make it up to you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know how,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose we have to look forward,’ he said. ‘We can’t change the past.’

  ‘How convenient,’ I said.

  ‘May I take you to dinner this evening?’ he said.

  ‘Say yes,’ said Carrie.

  Her eyes bored into my eyes.

  ‘Say yes,’ she said again.

  I said yes.

  Chapter 91

  My not-father was waiting at La Bodega, and the waiters were fussing around him, showing him a range of tables, and it came to me how well he would get on with Michael Orson.

  We sat down.

  Carrie had told me to be firm and frank, but if my emotions got the better of me, that was OK too, because it would help him to see the impact it had all had on me.

  ‘The priest definitely didn’t rape my mother, did he?’ I said, my tone of voice firm and frank, though underneath I was fearful. ‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Sister María Soledad said it was a short-lived relationship, but he’d already signed up for the priesthood. He was a young man, and the family expected it of him.’

  ‘That’s something,’ I said, sitting up straight.

  ‘You know, Sister María Soledad wasn’t made for motherhood,’ said my father, swilling his wine around his mouth and saying yes, it would do, to the anxious waiter. ‘Not everyone is.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘You were solving your own problems, not worrying about the maternal qualities of nuns.’

  He coloured slightly, or was that my imagination?

  ‘So there were no thieves stealing photo albums at the beach house?’ I said. ‘I presume you know how ridiculous that sounded. Even to a child.’

  He shrugged, like someone in the wrong.

  I remembered my fake baby photo on the display board in the classroom at St Hilda’s, him pretending to be me, how strange and empty it made me feel.

  ‘You got me when I was three and a half, I assume?’ I said, and my voice was quiet now. ‘So that’s why you didn’t have any baby photos I could take to school?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘And I imagine you’ll have made a nice profit on the house too.’

  ‘I wasn’t particularly motivated by profit, Eva. I’m a wealthy man.’

  Oh, don’t say that, I thought, you remind me of Mr Orson.

  ‘The house is a total mess,’ I said, firm again. ‘I think you should do something before it falls down on top of Sister Ana.’

  ‘I’ll do it up at some point.’

  ‘Don’t you feel any responsibility? To anyone?’

  Now unable to stop my anger.

  ‘I’ll call by,’ he said. ‘I’m a busy man.’

  ‘So I was here in Córdoba with Sister María Soledad and the nuns from birth to three and a half?’

  Still angry.

  Feeling I was right to be angry.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We picked you up and headed straight to the beach house in Alvera with suitcases of clothes your … Cherie … had been stockpiling her whole life!’

  The lilac dress, the lilac cardigan, the lilac shoes, the lilac ribbon.

  They picked me up and took me away and dressed me up like a doll.

  ‘Cherie felt you didn’t take to her. You preferred me. You seemed sullen.’

  She wanted a doll, not a child.

  ‘I was probably traumatised. You’d just kidnapped me.’

  My not-father winced.

  But it was true.

  ‘Did you ever love her?’ I asked him, as I’d asked earlier.

  ‘In the beginning,’ he said. ‘But eight years trying for children nearly destroyed her. I honestly thought she’d be happy in London. I thought I could come and go.’

  ‘Perhaps you should try staying put somewhere,’ I said. ‘Being moored. Like the Darlings. Do you remember?’

  ‘I’d rather be Peter Pan,’ he said.

  We smiled at each other because Peter Pan was our secret, no one else’s – we didn’t have much, but we had Peter Pan.

  ‘That’s perhaps my problem,’ he said.

  So he at least admitted he had a problem.

  We ate quietly, looking at the table.

  ‘What would help make it up to you?’ he said, softer now.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.

  ‘Eva,’ he said, slapping his hand on the table. ‘That’s it! You can have the house. That’s how I’ll make it up to you. I’ll get the house repaired. And then when Sister Batty dies, it’s all yours. How about that?’

  Money had yet again bought him solutions for his bad choices. But also, wow.

  ‘I’m not really in the mood for being thankful to you,’ I said, ‘but thank you anyway. And don’t call her Sister Batty. You might get dementia too.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m strong as an ox.’

  ‘Everyone gets old. Even you.’

  A tiny tremble of fear in the skin of his face.

  Because nobody is Peter Pan.

  He gave me an envelope.

  ‘Everything I know is in here,’ he said. ‘Let’s see where you get to.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And thank you for dinner. And thank you for the house. And can we meet there this week to talk about the repairs? I want it to be safe for Sister Ana.’

  Too many thank yous?

  Had he bought my forgiveness with the house?

  Should I have said no?

  ‘I’ll speak to my men,’ he said in that grandiose voice of his, the one I like least.

  My men! How some men love to say my men.

  ‘This week,’ I said again.

  ‘You’re very bossy these days,’ said my not-father.

  ‘Why is it men don’t get called bossy?’ I said.
>
  He smiled in a way that looked like I was growing on him again.

  Chapter 92

  ‘Carrie, Carrie, Carrie!’ I yelled as I went into our room.

  ‘I’m just in the loo!’

  ‘He’s giving me the house!’ I shouted through the bathroom door.

  ‘What house?’ she shouted back.

  ‘Sister Ana’s house!’

  ‘The whole house?’ said Carrie, coming out of the loo. ‘Isn’t it massive? Do you think we could go and live there?’

  ‘It’s falling down,’ I said. ‘But he’s going to get it repaired. It’s rammed full of crap.’

  ‘We could make a start on the clearing,’ said Carrie. ‘And Sister Ana might like some company.’

  ‘Are we really staying in Córdoba, Carrie?’

  ‘We really are!’ she said.

  ‘You don’t think he’ll go back on his word, do you?’

  ‘Definitely not!’ said Carrie. ‘He’s feeling guilty!’

  ‘Isn’t this incredible?’ I said. ‘Or incredibly weird?’

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever forgive him?’ said Carrie.

  ‘What is forgiveness?’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to work it out, and I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘Well, forgiveness is just—’ said Carrie, and she stopped.

  She crumpled her brow.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Now I’m trying to describe it, I can’t. Is it a feeling, do you think, or a thing you say? Or maybe it’s something you do?’

  ‘But what exactly do you do?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I suppose forgiveness might be a great big house in Córdoba,’ I said. ‘Or at least that might be the start of it.’

  ‘No house would be big enough to make amends,’ said Carrie.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, and it hit me then.

  The size of his betrayal.

  We hugged each other, and I didn’t say anything for a long time, until I said, ‘If I take the house, will he think everything’s instantly OK? When it isn’t. Will he feel exonerated somehow? Back in the right?’

  ‘He might,’ said Carrie. ‘But if you don’t take it, what do you gain?’

  ‘Is gaining bad?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time for a bit of gain at his expense?’ said Carrie.

  ‘But is it greedy? Or immoral?’

  ‘If it is, let’s be greedy and immoral,’ said Carrie.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ I said. ‘And please could you be sure? I’d rather blame you instead of me.’