Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  Gigi wasn’t that mother. But she wanted, now, to make this moment stop, and change how it was going to go.

  ‘I know you’ve all only just met Caitlin. I’ve sprung her on you, a bit. I know. So I may as well spring something else on you, while I’m at it …’

  Gigi looked desperately at Richard, but he was staring at Olly. His fork was halfway to his mouth. Dark meat, with gravy dripping.

  ‘We’re planning on getting married. So I suppose … we’re engaged …’ He reached down to the table and picked up Caitlin’s hand, bringing his mouth down to kiss it. She couldn’t see his eyes.

  Gigi’s heart pounded. Maybe she should have thrown Bernard.

  Tess

  Week 8. Maybe. You’re three times as big as when you got going. You’re the size of a pomegranate seed. That put a new spin on my couscous, butternut squash and hummus salad, I can tell you, baby mine. You even have early brainwaves, although I don’t know much about that stuff and I’m not clear what that means. I don’t think you’re having deep existential thoughts at this point. It’s taking all your energy to grow. You’ll never do so much, so fast, in the rest of your life as you’re doing now. And a heartbeat, you have a heartbeat. You’re pretty prehistoric-looking, in truth, like a kind of angry, determined, kidney-bean thing with tiny fists. You’re all heart – it’s big – like a third of the size of the whole of you – and vivid red. You’re a bit freaky, no offence. I keep wondering if I love you, but it’s such a wonderfully weird thought; mostly I think I’m fascinated by you. I hope that’s not the wrong thing to say. The site says your heart beats three times as fast as an adult heart, so now I take a moment and listen to my own heartbeat, my palm on my chest, and try to count the two extra beats between mine and yours, but it’s too fast and I can’t really do it. My boobs hurt like hell, and I dislike getting up when the alarm goes off marginally more than I have done before. I’d like to curl up and sleep more. I haven’t been that sick. There was that first time, and three or four more, but just in the morning, and mostly I was queasy, not full-on nauseous. Like when I went on a ferry when I was a kid. And I’m glad about that. I hate being sick. One girl I worked with was sick in her handbag on the Tube. Maybe I won’t get that. Not everyone does, I know. I wonder whether my mum did but I can’t ask her. Might as well rent an advertising hoarding opposite her house and hang a poster. Nope – I’m not ready, although the website says it’s okay to tell loved ones now, and start thinking about your birthing team (what’s wrong with doctors, midwives and the people who bring you the good drugs? That sounds like a winning team to me). Nope. You’re still my secret …

  I keep thinking about Donna. My mother. Trying to remember what she was like when I was little. Searching out my earliest memory of her. But my earliest memories are of Iris. The recollections of bedtime storybooks read in bear-hugs, and cool hands on my hot forehead, and breaking eggs into bowls to mix cakes, are all Iris. It frightens me a bit that I can’t remember the Donna of my childhood nearly so well. That a lot of those fragments are of Donna tired, or cross, or just absent. It frightens me a bit that I call her Donna, think of her as Donna, more than as Mum. Iris doesn’t seem to have passed on all those nurturing, calm and capable mothering traits to Donna. What if I don’t have them either?

  It’s Christmas. I thought I’d do it now. Like maybe I’d put a big red bow around my pregnancy test – the one I’ve kept, stuck at the back of my knicker drawer – and lay it under the tree for Sean. Maybe we’ll be like a Hallmark made-for-TV movie.

  You keep going, baby mine. Whatever is happening out here, what’s happening in there is under way. Out here I don’t look any different. No one is treating me any differently because no one knows. A woman got on my bus the other day with a BABY ON BOARD badge. No bump. Perhaps she thought she might chuck up in her handbag and didn’t want everyone else to think she was a lush or a junkie. But already happy for even strangers to know. I bet she’s told her loved ones and is even now assembling her birthing team. I’m the freak.

  Apparently, it’s understandable for my hormones to be all over the shop right now. So that’s why part of me wants to be told not to lift heavy objects and to be given seats on the train and to buy tiny white clothes, and feels irrationally, tearfully angry about the people who aren’t telling me and standing up for me and selling me tiny white clothes. Iris, Sean, and the strangers on public transport and in shops. Even though I know they can’t because they don’t know. Pretty bloody crazy, huh? I bought some folic acid because the website said it was good – I think I’m a bit late, but I’m taking it now. I was mad at the assistant in the chemist’s for not saying something. And they’re never supposed to say something. When you buy condoms, or tampons, or thrush treatments. That’s their job – not saying something.

  I bought you a Christmas present. How ridiculous is that? It was this stupidly soft and strokable grey rabbit, about six inches tall. I was in the M&S Food Hall and it was by the gift cards, and I just put it in my basket. When I got home and unpacked the food, I didn’t know what to do with it. It’s in the knicker drawer with the pregnancy test. But it’s yours, baby mine. Merry Christmas.

  The hospital ward had done its best to make itself festive. They were doing pretty well, considering the patients either didn’t know they were there or didn’t want to be, and the visitors were mostly passing through between present unwrapping, the Queen’s broadcast, and falling asleep with a box of Roses and a Baileys Chocolat Luxe in front of an Agatha Christie film. The nurses were resolutely cheerful, although she was sure most of them were missing something better by being here. There were paper chains and tinsel hung across curtain rods, and a small tree at one end by the double doors was strung with fairy lights. An open tin of Celebrations sat on the counter of the Nurses’ Station. There was a quiet soundtrack of Christmas songs playing.

  Tess’s mum had promised to meet her at 11 a.m., but she wasn’t here. Iris was asleep, flat on her back like a corpse, sheets and blankets neatly tucked in on either side, her arms laid at her sides. The mask of last week was gone, as was a lot of the paraphernalia – the tubes and the monitor – that had been there while the infection rampaged, and her breathing was even and peaceful, although she was still very pale and fragile-looking. Tess realized she missed the machines – they’d been proof of her being alive, and now, with everything gone, lying this way, she actually looked dead, apart from the shallow rise and fall of her chest. She looked smaller, and older, and frailer. Her hair needed combing, and Tess itched to do it, but she didn’t want to wake her. She sat watching her, a thin plastic cup of thin plastic-tasting tea in her hand, feeling what Christmas spirit she might have had earlier wane, and her irritation towards her mother rising.

  She’d left Sean to get here at the agreed time. They’d opened their stockings in bed. She’d asked him, and he’d agreed, to let the subject of New York rest while she dealt with Iris. She felt bad about using her grandmother as an excuse. That wasn’t really it. If she’d wanted to go, if she’d been free to go, she’d have said yes, and that would have been that. At least it seemed possible it might have been that way. Now there wasn’t so much an elephant in the room as a Big Apple. And a tiny baby.

  She’d kissed Iris’s cheek when she’d arrived, and now she held her hand. She wanted to talk to her, that was what she normally did, but she felt self-conscious in a ward unusually full of visitors and forced gaiety, so she stroked her hand, and sat.

  Sean hadn’t come with her. He patently hadn’t wanted to, and the only other time he’d come, earlier in the week, he’d stressed her out, so she hadn’t pushed. Today she’d come down on a coach and taken a taxi from the station. Sean had said he’d pick her up at midday; they were due at his parents’ at one. It didn’t occur to him that the last thing she might feel like after this was sherry and charades with his family. It was what had been arranged. She knew he planned to tell them about New York and that the question of her own future would hang in the
air. She dreaded the inevitable questions.

  She’d determined that she’d speak to Donna today, and now she wasn’t here. It was far from the first time she’d felt let down by her mum. This would be the fourth Christmas in a row she hadn’t spent the day with Donna, although it had been sporadic even in her teens and throughout her twenties. Donna didn’t really ‘do’ Christmas. She was a rabid atheist, and a declared non-materialist. And clearly not a big fan of family. A Goan yoga retreat was more her bag. For several years now, she’d gone to India for at least three weeks, always, and quite deliberately, across Christmas. ‘You don’t mind, darling …’ she’d always said, passive aggression and resignation dripping from every word, ‘you’ve got my mum … the gang of two …’ And the truth was, she was right. They were happier without her. If it wasn’t all Downward Dog poses and cocktails at sunset, Donna’s Christmas Day invariably began with a Christmas Eve hangover and an epic lie-in. Tess and Iris liked the morning service at church, neither a staunch believer, but both keen on belting out carols and being dressed before midday. She’d continued to spend the day itself with Iris over Sean since he’d been on the scene, usually meeting up with him on Boxing Day. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were for her grandmother, and if either missed Donna amidst their festivities, they didn’t mention it. Donna had a knack of calling from overseas just as they were about to sit down to eat or watch the Queen. Last year, she’d Face-Timed halfway through the Bond film neither of them were particularly watching, and Iris had peered curiously at her bronzed daughter, a palm-fringed beach behind her, repeatedly saying only that modern gadgets were amazing, weren’t they? Tess had been relieved when they’d hung up.

  Ritual and routine had only grown more important as Tess had been forced to acknowledge Iris’s illness, and now Donna’s bohemian lifestyle stood in even starker contrast. It sometimes – no, often – felt like Tess was the mother and Donna the child. The last two Christmases had been especially poignant. Sean had wanted her to be with him, but she’d refused his mother’s invitations. They’d been sad, those days. She’d tried to remember everything she and Iris usually did. But it was like doing those things with a stranger who’d never done them before. This, ironically, was easier.

  Even knowing what was happening with Iris hadn’t persuaded Donna to alter her plans. Not that Tess had expected it to. She hadn’t asked, and Donna hadn’t offered. Tess didn’t know where her mother’s aversion to family and convention came from. She felt like her own affinity had skipped a generation over Donna and come directly to her. Her mother was jealous, she knew, of Tess’s relationship with Iris. But they were just more alike.

  She had come to see that her mother was not an unkind or a malevolent person, but a careless one, raising selfishness to an art form. As an adult, Tess recognized it. And forgave it, to a degree, because she knew she was more or less okay. She had been almost enough as a mother – close enough. Tess had always been fed, and cared for, and, she knew, loved in Donna’s own fashion. She’d had a sense, always, of her mother’s unhappiness. As a child, it had been bewildering. But if it hadn’t been for Iris, the ballast in Donna’s storm, she knew she would have been damaged by it. Perhaps she had been anyway. Perhaps this weirdness about the pregnancy was less about Sean and more to do with Donna than she wanted to admit. She had constantly prided herself on emerging relatively unscathed from the comparative emotional wreckage of her childhood.

  Donna had divorced Tess’s father, Harry, when Tess was two: she had no memory of living with both her parents, and precious few of Harry himself, who had absented himself from his daughter’s life seemingly easily enough.

  When Tess was five, her mother had remarried Martin, Tess serving as flower girl, and she’d stayed with him for seven years. Tess remembered three or four years of shouting and door slamming, and then three or four more years of quiet, seething resentment before he’d packed and left. She saw more of him than of her biological father, but these days that had boiled down to two or three lunches a year where Tess looked at photographs of Martin’s new family and Martin apologized for making such a mess of his marriage to her mother, seeking perpetual absolution for something neither of them really held him responsible for.

  There’d been no more husbands, but for the rest of the time Tess lived at home, and, in the years since, there had been a rolling cast of ‘uncles’ and friends who’d come and gone. None cruel or inappropriate, but some kinder and more interested than others.

  While Tess was a child, Iris had papered over all the cracks. Her husband, Wilfred, had died the year before Tess was born, and Donna had no siblings. So there was only Tess, and Iris had lavished all her love and attention on her granddaughter. There had been long holidays at her house, and long letters during term time, when Tess couldn’t escape to Wiltshire, where Iris lived. Once Tess had grown up, Iris had talked about it more. ‘It’s my fault,’ she’d said. ‘I spoilt her. Your grandfather used to tell me so, but I wouldn’t listen.’

  Tess had never believed that was it. There was something restless in Donna. She’d never been unkind, never neglectful in the crueller ways. She’d been inconsistent, and that was probably far worse. Unkindness would have chipped away at a child’s unconditional, dependent love. Inconsistency meant Tess had lived on the shifting sands of her mother’s life, and sometimes it had been hard.

  Tess remembered other girls, in the first term at university, crying for their mothers, heading home eagerly for reading weeks. For her, aside from the time she’d spent with Iris, university represented the first real freedom, and she’d loved it. She’d never gone home for more than a few nights since. And their relationship gradually became easier for it. The less Tess needed from Donna, the less Donna’s failure to provide it mattered. If Tess had shut her out, now, of her adult life, she hadn’t done so to be cruel or to hurt. It was a habit.

  But, with Iris’s increasing illness, it had become harder between them again. Tess felt unsupported. She felt protective of Iris, and hurt on her grandmother’s behalf. She couldn’t understand why her mother wasn’t sadder: when had she made the transition from truly caring to seeing her own mother as something akin to a burden? Maybe there’d been no transition. Perhaps Iris was now what Tess had always been: a duty, an unwanted responsibility. It was hard to co-exist with Donna, in this experience of Iris’s deterioration. If Tess wasn’t so tired, and so worried, she suspected she’d be angry, and then angrier still at the waste of energy.

  And she didn’t feel the slightest desire, yet, to tell Donna she was pregnant.

  Several people arrived to see the lady in the next bed, with a poinsettia in a pot. A small child climbed up on to her lap to show a prized new toy, one arm flung around her neck. The stocky solidity of the toddler made the old lady seem even more frail.

  And then Donna was there, breathless and mumbling an apology of sorts for her lateness. She kissed Tess briefly, but not Iris. Tess thought she barely looked at her as she sat down.

  For ten minutes they kept a superficial, quietly sing-songy conversation going across the bed.

  And the proper conversation was yet to be had. Tess kept her voice low and soft. It seemed unlikely Iris would hear or could understand, but still she almost whispered.

  ‘Can we go downstairs, to the cafeteria? We need to have a talk …’

  Donna grimaced. ‘Sounds ominous.’

  ‘Mum …’

  Her mother put her hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘Okay. Okay. Now?’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  She kissed Iris’s cheek, and squeezed her hand. Across the bed, Donna bent over her mother, and planted the lightest and quickest of kisses, almost as if she didn’t want to touch her.

  In the canteen, Tess asked for two pots of English Breakfast tea. Choosing a table near the window, the two of them studiously stirred and poured their drinks, not speaking.

  ‘You know she can’t go home from here, don’t you, Mum?’ Tess tried to keep her voice gentle.<
br />
  But the edge of irritation and defensiveness was immediate in Donna’s reply. ‘Who has said so?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘Not to me. She’s so much better. You said so.’

  ‘The chest infection is better. That’s true. But the chest infection isn’t why she can’t go home.’

  Donna shifted uncomfortably. Tess had tried to talk to her about this before – before this bout of infection, and long before – when Iris had been diagnosed. She was always met with this response. Her mother couldn’t bear to think about it, let alone talk about it. She had never really adjusted to the new reality of her own mother’s illness, Tess realized. It seemed extraordinary that there should still be an element of denial, but she knew part of her mother wanted to believe Iris was absent-minded, forgetful … that she was just old.

  ‘Mum. We’ve got to talk about this.’

  Donna’s tone was wheedling. ‘Today? It’s Christmas, for Christ’s sake, Tess …’ She gave a hollow laugh, hearing the irony for herself.

  Her mother had taken a piece of foil from the tray left on their table. She was smoothing out the wrinkles, methodically, with her fingernails. It meant she didn’t have to look at Tess.

  ‘I know. But you’ve … not been around a lot.’

  ‘Don’t have a go.’ Donna was belligerent now. So quickly. Tess considered leaving it, and realized she couldn’t. Donna would be on a plane tomorrow, and she might be gone for weeks. She didn’t have weeks.

  ‘I’m not, Mum. I promise. I know it’s Christmas. I know this is hard. But I honestly think we need to start thinking about a plan –’

  ‘We’ve had a plan. It’s been working well enough, hasn’t it? You make it sound like we’ve just left her to it.’

  Tess refused to rise. ‘I know that’s not true. But as she changes, obviously the plan has to change too.’