“What did you call me?”
He opened his eyes, looked at her. “You heard.”
Maybe I should start to smoke. Drink more. Or I could be healthy. I could run. Nathan runs . . . All the time, every day, he runs.
Mary wanted a habit. More specifically, a bad one, but any one would do. She sat in the sand cave, a spring scurry of wind jostling the door and Eckless bellyflopped into a quiet dream near her side, and she felt the need of something.
Everybody has habits, for goodness’ sake. Beyond dog-walking and short stories. People get obsessed. That’s a thing they do—it’s a part of their normality. And I haven’t got . . . not properly. I mean, bloody hell, if I laid out a map of my current life it would have gaps all over it. Whole countries unaccounted for. Sodding continents . . .
She’d hated missing Jonathan, but not missing him was worse. Now, when she tried to move her mind across the form of him or the part of herself that had grown to answer him, there was no response. Her emotions had become evasive, callused over, deafened by sudden, sucking depths.
But, still, there was a need in her for something—it was quiet, but it was there. She should find it a focus before it turned on her, before she ended up like Ruth and Lynda: baking and pining and swimming and piercing their lives away.
But you can’t have any fun without knowing what you would want to have fun with. Or who—who you’d want.
Her thinking stalled, became clotted with an oddly attractive unease.
But if you do know. Who you’d want . . .
She stroked the sand and stared beyond her lamp’s light into the permissive dark. Something was turning, gloved in her chest, spreading its fingers slowly with a soft, smooth heat. His giving against her, a kind of admission in the pressure of his arms, a change: the mildly peach-skin nap of the skin between his eyebrows when she kissed him: unlikely things to think of and to find so good.
Nathan.
“Is this wise?” Unusually, it was Richard who sailed her over to Ancw. He rarely left Foal Island, but apparently he’d needed a trip today—had specially asked to take Mary across, to take himself away. His touch with the boat, she found, was appreciably subtle, gentle. Not taking silence for an answer, he shouted to her again, across the engine din. “I said, do you think this is wise?”
“I don’t know. Really. I have no idea of why I’m doing this.” Which is much the same thing she’d said to Bryn when she asked him to find out her mother’s address. “But there are just . . . things happening, changes going on and I want to—to sort things out, I suppose.”
Richard navigated onward, his expression on the doubtful side of non-committal.
Well, I don’t know. I’m not going to lie. But it feels right, with so much going on . . .
She sidestepped what exactly the goings-on might turn out to be.
I have every right to see her. Bryn agreed with that. She is my mother.
A tiny spike of anger nudged at the back of her throat. This didn’t bode well for the trip. She tried to reassure her thinking.
Nothing is anyone’s fault—not mine, not hers. I’m just going to go and finish things. Or start them. Or both. It won’t be a problem, we don’t know each other, we don’t need each other.
She had to swallow again.
I’ll go and I’ll ask about my father. Definitely that. And then maybe . . .
Romantic advice from a woman who wished her husband dead and forgot about her child.
Oh, fuck, why am I doing this?
Richard watched her calmly and fiddled at his chin with his good hand—he was growing a beard again and the new hairs were troubling him. “My mother and I didn’t get on too well.” It seemed strange for him to have to yell this, but he appeared quite happy, confiding at the top of his voice. “When I hit thirty—funny age, thirty, the point where a great many types of shit start to hit a great many fans—I went home to see mine—my mother. We hadn’t been estranged or anything, we’d simply spent a couple of decades being excruciatingly polite. While she ice-picked me in the back at every turn. Politely, though—of course. So I turned up, confronted her—she was laying the table at the time and didn’t stop, which annoyed me more than almost anything else she’d done.” He halted, perhaps drawn into one of his habitual distractions, perhaps remembering. Mary found her patience was shorter than normal.
“What happened?”
“Hm? Oh, nothing. I didn’t feel any better and she didn’t change. It gets too late to change, sometimes, and one shouldn’t try. Same thing with my arm—a condition not amenable to alteration.”
She nodded, not knowing why, but feeling some response was needed, although Richard’s attention—apparently—was now fixed on a high, milky blossom of cloud to their south.
Bryn had told her not to get her hopes up, too: his voice sounding impossibly distant, which was only a trick of the line, but still set her bellowing that she loved him and hoped he was fine. She found that she didn’t like raising her voice to say personal things. It seemed to make them mean less. Bryn had said he’d caught a bit of a cold but was all right now. They’d told each other their respective weathers. She’d wanted to touch him.
To touch who, exactly?
A flare and swim of need took her briefly, tightened her jaw.
Bryn? Who?
Nathan hadn’t come to the jetty to see her off—he’d said he was expecting a call and would have to be at Joe’s place. He’d listened to her plans, smiled quickly, said that she ought to do what she felt was right and then explained that he had to rush.
She’d wanted something more. She had undoubtedly wanted something more.
Nathan, penned in the Lighthouse, but awaiting no kind of call, felt Mary out at sea, withdrawing, hauling his nerves along with her until they tore. She’d packed up his logic and taken it with her.
She’ll love Maura better than me. Maura will tell her bad things. She’ll come back hating her father, fucking hating me.
Shit, don’t let me lose her.
His mouth tasted of burning and of fear.
Don’t let me lose her.
He folded his arms around his head, didn’t drink the drink that Joe had left him.
Don’t. Just don’t.
Bus from Ancw, train to London, Underground to the Elephant and Castle and then the bus to Peckham Rye.
Maura had explained it—the best route to take—patiently, precisely, as if she’d expected the call. And Mary had known the voice at once, recognised it completely with a soft turn in her blood. And years of quiet Christmas cards and cheques sent at her birthday had opened and split back to the days when mother and daughter must have spoken, when they must have known each other well, when they must have had things in common, of which Mary now found she had barely any convincing memory. At the end of the call, she’d kept holding the dead receiver and wished that she could cry.
From Peckham Rye on foot.
A short walk by streets she’d tried to teach herself, according to Maura’s instructions and the A–Z. Mary didn’t like to go round London with a map in her hand: an opened indication of bewilderment and muggability.
She was nearly there.
This’ll be fine. This’ll be fine. I don’t need anyone with me. This will be fine.
I would like somebody with me.
This will be fine.
It surprised her that she wasn’t feeling nervous. In fact she seemed unable to feel at all. She passed patchy, stringy gardens and loose, Sunday afternoon children, running down shallow perspectives of repeating window frames and doors, and might have been numbly on the way to meet any stranger. Walking through small, harassed streets, brick terraces, she could have been in Roath, or Canton, or Capel Gofeg, or a daydream of her own.
But I’m not, I’m in London, in Nunhead, in the street where my mother lives . . . I ought to be able to be here. I ought to be aware. Or at least ready. I can’t even tell if I’m that.
After all this time, she’s still
taking things away, leaving me empty.
I should just go back now. I should just go home.
Checking numbers now, searching for twenty.
I only want her to tell me that I won’t be the way she was. I want to know that I can marry, can be normal, can have children that I’ll like.
The gate, the path with the dusty hedge to either side.
But nothing is anyone’s fault. Not hers. Not mine.
The door. Her mother’s door. Maura Lamb’s door.
Not mine.
An urgent lash of panic shivered her breath, made her realise that she was sweating, made her hand unsteady when it reached for the bell, made her disbelieve the sound of footsteps closing, as her heart flinched and then there was only numbness again.
“Underwear, that was the thing. To be honest.” Maura took a hissing sup at her cigarette, not looking at Mary. “He started buying underwear for me— the silly, uncomfortable things you might expect. I let him. Why not? But then he wanted to buy it all. He only wanted me to wear things that he’d chosen, nothing else. Then he suggested I should change my hair to please him, when—as it happened—the style he was after would never have pleased me. I started to get a feeling of suffocation. Ownership.” Another drag, this time less fierce. “And then there was that whole thing of being the professional man’s wife. Not myself. I lost my name. I’m not saying he intended I should disappear, but in the end it seemed that he really didn’t mind if I only existed by way of him . . . As if I was someone that he was imagining.”
Maura didn’t speak with malice, only in words that seemed slightly over-rehearsed, or as if she were giving her explanation cautiously, avoiding too much conviction, or unpredictable heat. Then she faced Mary, something fragile in her eyes. The hand holding her cigarette wavered before she could rest it on the arm of her chair. “This will all sound very petty . . . a list of things to rise above. I do realise.”
Mary shook her head, but had nothing to say—it seemed, nothing to think. All she could do was watch her mother: the eyes that were almost Mary’s eyes; the hands that were her hands, but slightly fuller, the nails more cared for, but—here and there—nicotined; the face like a somehow more finished version of her own, more settled, more dismayed.
“Do you always stare?” Maura crushed out her cigarette, smiling, not unkindly. “You’re thinking I look like you, aren’t you? When, actually, you look like me. Of course, if we knew each other . . .” She pondered the ashtray, as if she’d forgotten what it was. “If we knew each other, we wouldn’t notice the resemblances. We’d only be ourselves.”
“But we don’t. Know each other.” Mary saw the quick break in her mother’s expression, and then the tidying away of pain.
I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t. I don’t want to be angry.
I don’t want to be angry out loud.
Maura had cupped her hands in her lap and was peering at them hard, head low. “I had to leave, Mary. I had to leave both of you. I didn’t want to. I’ve always thought of you . . .”
Mary shut her eyes while the words tugged in her, twisted something loose.
I didn’t want to Ididn’twanttoIdidntwanttoIdidnt.
She wanted to hold someone, but only sat and clenched her fists and listened while Maura’s breathing caught and then steadied. “I always knew Bryn and Morgan would be great as, as parents. Better than me.” It seemed that she almost paused for Mary to comment, but then changed her mind and pushed on. “I wouldn’t have been good with you. After the divorce, it took a long time to be—I don’t know—over with him. And I did have to leave him. There was no other way.” She blinked up at Mary, having plainly cried just a very little, quietly, beneath her words. “You didn’t ever think it was your fault? I didn’t leave you thinking that?”
At once, Mary felt a grey, hollow kick in her chest. The tears of strangers did not usually affect her.
A stranger who’s my mother.
The hollowness turned live in her, raw. “I . . . No, I didn’t think it had much to do with me. It even seemed . . . normal. Maybe because I was so young. I mean, I’m sorry . . .”
I’m not sorry. You should be.
She couldn’t prevent herself from causing a little hurt. “I don’t really remember the way things were before the Uncles—not really. And you can’t, well . . .”
“You can’t miss what you can’t remember. I know.”
And then she couldn’t prevent herself from wanting to take it away. “I didn’t ever forget I had a mother. But the Uncles were the ones who were there. They were very good.” Her breath failed at the last word, thinking of Morgan, while she saw Maura try to be pleased at being so easily replaced.
“I didn’t forget you, either. But in the end, it seemed wrong to keep coming back and unsettling things. You made Bryn so happy.” She shut her lips quickly, glancing away. “And, when I left your father, everything seemed very hard to do—I hated to go out, I couldn’t stand noises, I was afraid of my own temper, I—”
“I know you don’t want to say . . . but what was he—was he very . . .” Mary couldn’t think of any word to say other than bad, which seemed an entirely ridiculous choice.
“He was very himself.”
They both paused to consider what that might mean and Maura lit another cigarette, hungry-mouthed.
The silence seemed to swell and then recede against Mary. Twice she felt ready to speak and then couldn’t quite catch the rhythm of the room, the dodge and press of tension between them. She waited, sighed back a rush of stage fright. “Is he alive?”
“What?” Again Maura’s face masked over, hid everything but the first light of fear in the eyes.
“Someone is writing to me. He never gives his name, but he says that he’s my father. He seems to know me. Is he alive?”
Maura crushed her cigarette before it was half-smoked. “I did intend to tell you—”
“Is he?”
“But then it didn’t seem possible.” She frowned. “He couldn’t ever have come back to us. I couldn’t have stood it if he had.”
“Is he alive!”
They each recoiled a little after her shout. Mary folded her arms: a quick, strong thought of Nathan coming with the hug of her own arms against her. She lowered her voice, “I only want to know,” but she believed it already. “He is, isn’t he? Alive.”
“Yes.”
The pressure that had built between them darted away. Mary thought she felt it rock at her spine as it left them. “Did you say yes?”
“Yes.” The air juddered, paused again, but Maura said nothing more.
“But you aren’t going to tell me who he is, where he is.” Mary understood already, this could only be a statement, not a question.
“He’ll tell you. If he’s written to you, he’ll tell you when he thinks it’s time. If he hasn’t done it yet, it’s because he’s . . . nervous. He can be that way. And I can’t . . . do you see that I can’t contradict him?”
“No. No, actually I can’t.” A wordless pulse rose behind her eyes when she closed them, the colour of old bruising. “I cannot see why neither one of you will tell me my own father’s name.”
“Have you written back to him?”
“He didn’t give his address. The postmark is always from London, that’s all.”
“From London?”
“Yes. Wouldn’t it be?”
“Oh, there’s no reason. No, no reason, I suppose. I just didn’t know we were in the same place. Not that London isn’t big enough for us to miss each other.” A twitch of a smile appeared at that—miss each other. “Look, I took us away from him. I had to. If I had the choice again, I . . . Well, there’s no point thinking about it. The choice I’m making now is that I don’t want to take this from him, too. He will tell you in his own time. I know him—he doesn’t give up.” She smiled more, then covered her mouth with her fist, her look briefly fierce and then emptied. “He really doesn’t ever give up.”
For the first time, they met each other without reservation.
Maura nodded, eased out a breath, began, “When I met him in the beginning, he’d write me notes. We didn’t really speak. Because he wasn’t good at speaking and I didn’t want him to be. I was already in a relationship—nothing deep, but nothing unpleasant, either—and I had no need of anything more, but he kept on—your father—he wouldn’t let it drop. I’ve never known anybody be so perseverant—so obsessive, actually. Obsessive would be a better word.”
The evening had dimmed, but neither one of them made a move to switch on a light. Mary guessed that for both of them this would make things easier—to be nothing but voices inside a thickening dark.
The end of Maura’s cigarette glowed. “Not that it isn’t attractive when somebody puts that much effort into . . . nothing but you. And he wasn’t, I suppose, unattractive in himself—very funny when he wasn’t nervous, bright—but very, very serious, too. Everything mattered a little bit more than it should. The things he cared about . . .” She stumbled to find the word, or to avoid it. “The things he loved had to be his, absolutely his.” Maura broke off again with a short sigh, apparently impatient. “And even that isn’t so bad. It can feel very good to be wanted so much. Feeling owned, that’s different. That stops you being a person any more. He would have to take trips away and then I wasn’t needed and I wasn’t supposed to need him. Or he’d be working, typing all night upstairs—or not typing, just thinking of typing—either way . . .”
“Typing?”
Maura seemed startled. “Oh, yes. Of course, you wouldn’t know. When I met your father, he worked in a publishing house. He was a reader, assessed manuscripts to see if they were fit for publication—him and this lunatic friend of his. Then both of them wrote a book. Your father’s was the less successful one—I think it was too literary, a bit obscure—but he kept on going. That determination again . . .”
Maura turned to her, examining Mary’s face, seeming to search her for traces of the man she couldn’t name. “I suppose I might have expected you’d write—the house was full of it: books, papers, the people they attracted.” She might have been describing any unpleasant infestation. “I gave birth to a daughter, but he gave birth to books, one novel and then another—something far more important than a child. He never gave you his time, not properly: it was all about the books—one way or another, it was always about the books.”
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