by Elisa Lodato
‘Oh yeah,’ Helen laughed, her voice cracking on the effort. ‘Jean would love that, wouldn’t she?’
My mother was sobbing, the sound infantile and repetitive. Her nose had started running; she wiped the snot ineffectually across her face with the back of her hand. Helen reached out for her.
‘When are you going?’
‘Sometime next month. We’re going to stay at my aunt’s for the first few days.’
‘You don’t seem very upset.’
‘I am. But I can’t do anything to change it.’
My mother continued crying, her head bent. Helen reached out to try and hug her but because of their position – cross-legged and facing one another – she couldn’t bridge the gap.
‘It’s only a few years. When I’m sixteen I’ll come back. I’ll get a job round here. We could get a flat together or something.’
My mother rallied at the thought of living with Helen; she pulled the corner of her mouth to the side in a small smile.
Helen reached out to touch my mother’s elbow and gently pulled her sideways, down to the ground. My mother untangled her legs and lay by her side. They turned to face one another for a few seconds before my mother kissed Helen on the mouth. And then she opened her lips for Helen’s tongue.
Helen started unbuttoning her own dress, fumbling to go further while the sun and mood was upon them. My mother lay there and watched, wondering where Helen’s body might take them. And then there was a third voice. My mother froze as Helen put her gnawed thumb immediately to her teeth in an attitude of absolute terror.
‘What on earth are you doing? Put your dress on at once!’
My grandmother’s ankles were visible through the shrubs, bent and ready to pounce as she peered down through the foliage.
‘Nothing, Mrs Lambton.’ Helen was frantically contorting her shoulders in order to pull her dress back upon them. Her fingers were shaking and ineffectual as she tried to do the buttons up.
‘Helen Saunders, you are a disgusting girl. And you’ve tried to make my daughter as disgusting as you are. I want you to get your things and leave this house.’
My mother began to cry. And plead. ‘Mum, it was me. It was my idea. Don’t blame Helen.’
‘Katharine, go up to your room at once. You will wait there until your father gets home. Helen, you will do as I ask. Come on! Quickly!’
Helen was marched from my grandparents’ house and told never to return. My grandmother didn’t know the injunction was unnecessary; that Helen and her family would move to Poole a week later. She didn’t know that she’d denied my mother and Helen a proper farewell. The only thing that was evident, immediately, was that my mother withdrew from everyone the day Helen was sent away.
Helen made good on her promise and returned to Kingston, where she did her teacher training. But not until she was twenty. By the time she got back in touch with my mother, in January 1981, she was already pregnant with me and about to be married to my father. Helen was the woman Nicola remembered at the back of the registry office, her head down, as my mother promised herself to a life she didn’t want.
The larynx was intact and unremarkable.
She attended their wedding as a mourner would a funeral. And in February 1981, just ten weeks before I was born, Helen went to visit my mother in her new home.
My mother – large and lonely – was delighted to see Helen at her front door. It wasn’t the first time they’d met since Helen took up her place at Kingston Poly – but it was the first time they’d been alone since my mother’s wedding.
The flat was on the first floor of a neat and tidy modern building. It was set back from the road and skirted by parking and perfect lawns. My mother opened the door to allow Helen inside and hugged her as soon as it was closed. She was warm and urgent in her embrace as Helen tried to maintain balance and some space between her and my mother’s bump. I was the foetus that forced distance.
My mother showed her into the sparsely furnished living room. There was just one armchair and a small two-seater sofa. In front of the armchair, in weak improvisation of a footstool, was an upturned cardboard box. On the floor beside the armchair, rising up as a makeshift table, was a pile of books providing precarious balance for a half-drunk cup of tea.
‘Where’s Richard?’
‘Working. He’s got a job as a clerk at the National Westminster in Kingston.’
‘Well, that’s a start,’ Helen said, surveying the room.
‘Sit down. Let me make you a cup of tea.’
Helen followed my mother into the small kitchen and watched as she filled the kettle, squashing her bump against the sink in an effort to do so.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘OK,’ my mother said, placing the kettle down on the hob and reaching for a box of matches on the windowsill. ‘Bit tired, you know.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ she said, striking a match and igniting the urgent gas. She turned back to face Helen.
‘Me too. It’s nice to see you looking … so well.’ She reached out a hand and touched the bump nestled safely beneath my mother’s breasts.
‘Why didn’t you stay?’
Helen, thinking for a moment my mother was referring to the move to Poole, stared at her blankly.
‘At the wedding. Why did you leave so quickly?’
‘Oh! I didn’t think Jean would be happy to talk to me. Do you?’
‘I would have been. Pleased. I’ve missed you.’
Helen stepped back to lean against the wall. She folded her arms and stared down at the criss-crossed flesh.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Do what? Get pregnant?’
‘I understand why you’re pregnant. Or perhaps that should be how. No, why did you marry him? I presume Jean was involved somewhere along the line?’
My mother reached out to touch the kettle handle though it was still far off boiling. She was facing away from Helen, her head bent over the stove. ‘I had no choice. The baby is due in a couple of months. And Richard is a good man.’
‘You always have a choice. You had a choice a few months back.’
My mother turned to face her. ‘I didn’t.’
‘You did,’ Helen countered. ‘You might not have liked the options, but you had a choice.’
‘Listen to me. I can’t explain it, not properly, but my body wants to have this baby. Can you understand that? She’s deep within me. She’s part of me. And I felt, even before the accident, that I had to have her.’
‘Her?’
‘I think so.’
‘And what will you tell this girl as she’s growing up?’
‘What do you mean?’ The kettle had started whistling.
‘Will you ever explain that you like women? That you loved me?’ Helen’s voice cracked. ‘Will you ever tell her how we loved each other when we were girls? And that here we are in our twenties and that feeling clearly hasn’t gone away?’
The whistle was sharp and shrill over the bubbling water. My mother hung her head, her bump rising to meet her heaving chest. Helen walked purposefully over to the stove and turned off the gas.
They took their cups of tea into the living room and sat down together, sipping into the silence. My mother kept glancing up at Helen between sips, as if to check she was really there. They began talking about other things: Helen’s shared house in Kingston, the teacher-training course, anything to avoid the direction my mother’s life was going in. She stayed on for lunch, helping my mother to make sandwiches in the kitchen, sensing how much she needed her. How much she enjoyed having her near.
At around two o’clock, Helen stood to leave. She walked over to where my mother was sitting in her armchair and put both her hands out. My mother smiled and held her own out. She allowed herself to be pulled up with a heave and they hugged again. ‘I better go. Will you be all right here?’
‘I’ll be fine. Richard will be home in a few hours.’
Helen looked steadily at my mother’s face, her lips. She raised a hand to her face and with gentle fingers traced the line of my mother’s jawbone. It was a goodbye they both understood: tender and temporary. My mother closed her eyes and reached for Helen’s hand, holding it in place against her face. She bent her neck and allowed her head to rest on it. Helen stepped closer, cupping my mother’s face, and kissed her softly on the lips. They only stopped when they heard the scratch of an uncertain key in the front door. After several failed attempts, the lock was successfully rotated and someone entered the quiet flat.
‘Katharine? Are you home?’
Helen and my mother stood close and still as they heard my grandmother walk into the kitchen and lift bags of shopping onto the work surface.
‘I’ve brought you some bananas. And a few pears. Bought some for myself too – you know how Daddy likes a pear. Here you are,’ she said, walking into the living room and pulling her coat from her right arm, squinting as she shook her shoulders at Helen. ‘Who’s this?’
Helen looked at my mother. Willing her to take control. ‘It’s me, Mrs Lambton. Helen Saunders.’
My grandmother, to her credit, kept her composure. She pulled her coat back on and drew herself up. ‘Helen. I wondered when we’d see you again. And what are you doing here? Have you come to congratulate Katharine?’
‘Something like that.’
My grandmother nodded and bit her lower lip. She walked towards my mother and at the last minute reached out to feel the side of her half-empty cup of tea, on top of the tower of books. She picked it up and held it as she said, ‘I’d like you to leave, please. Katharine needs her rest.’
‘With respect, Mrs Lambton, that’s not for you to say.’
My grandmother smiled down at the floating milk skin and returned a look of complete equanimity: ‘You are not welcome here. You weren’t welcome at the wedding, and you’re not welcome now. Please leave.’
‘I wanted Helen to come here today.’ My mother’s voice was quiet. Just about audible.
‘And I’m sure I know why! You are a married woman now. And about to have a baby. Have some self-respect and tell her to go.’
‘And you have some self-respect and let your daughter live her own life!’
‘How dare you speak to me like that.’
‘How dare you! You’ve backed her into a horrible corner. Told her the life she wanted was disgusting. Put your middle-class pride above her happiness. The only person who should be ashamed here is you.’
My mother sank down to her armchair in defeat. Helen turned to her in rage and pulled at her right arm, but she wouldn’t get up. ‘Kath, stand up for yourself! Tell her where to go! This is your home now. Are you going to let her dictate who you can and can’t see?’
My grandmother sneered at Helen’s bent form, entreating my mother to action. ‘You really are a most offensive creature.’
‘And you really are a fucking cunt.’
My grandmother opened her mouth in speechless shock. And into this open chasm of dismay came a prolonged and painful shriek. Except the vocal cords coming together, tight and small, to emit the sound, did not belong to my grandmother. They belonged to my heavily pregnant mother, whose loud and inelegant wail suddenly forced attention on her. She put her hands up to her ears and allowed the profound conflict within her to become amplified. The cry deepened and became more guttural as she ran out of breath and pulled for another one to replace the first. The screaming went on and on. It was both alarum and wail until Helen knelt down beside her and cupped her face, gently unseating the hands my mother had clamped there. She was shushing her, just as she had the evening I heard them argue, and slowly the wet notes of reassurance reached my mother, whose deep breaths continued in waves, carrying less and less sound each time. As her breathing returned to normal, Helen got closer. She toppled the tower of books and sat down on the armrest. My mother leant against her instinctively, resting her head and closing her eyes against Helen’s strong arm as my grandmother marched to the front door and let herself out with a slam.
I left Twickenham at around three thirty and decided there was still time to drive to St Pancras and meet Andrea off her train. Roadworks and congestion on the A4 meant it took over two hours to get there. The journey through London gave me plenty of time to think. I wasn’t shocked by my mother’s homosexuality. Her love for Helen made perfect sense. It was suddenly so self-evident: their close intimacy after Christopher’s birth, her summary rejection of my father, the intense conversations in the evening. And then I thought of her words to my grandmother that afternoon outside the bathroom, how she’d accused her of making her life ‘thoroughly miserable’. By miserable, she meant repressed. She’d been directed by my grandmother’s fussy love into a life where she wasn’t free to love the only friend she had in the world. I thumped the steering wheel for her; for the life she hadn’t been strong enough to own, appalled that she’d gone to such lengths to keep her truth from me. As I stared at the third set of temporary traffic lights I encountered that afternoon, I saw that my grandmother had done a thorough job on her. And, by consequence, on me. I felt the fragment of my mother’s dishonesty within me. The piercing shard that led me to seek out David and shred all that was good in my life.
People talk about coming to terms with a person’s death. I’ve heard and accepted the platitude many times. It’s always well-meant, and its meaning is that you must accept the permanent and inarguable absence of someone you love. But that’s what I raged against that terrible afternoon in the car. The terms. That the revelation she’d loved me but never trusted me with the truth came when there was no more of her to ask. When I was a lost daughter, sifting through her body parts, looking for the woman that was my mother.
I phoned Andrea just after five, when it became clear I wouldn’t be there when she arrived.
‘I’ll head to the champagne bar, in that case. Come and find me when you get here.’
‘I won’t go into it now but I really don’t feel like celebrating.’
‘I’ve had an old man’s groin in my face since Market Harborough. And now I don’t. I think that’s worth celebrating.’
I parked on a side street just after six and ran to the station. I needn’t have worried: Andrea was already well into her second glass, the bubbles removing all memory of an uncomfortable journey. I wanted to join her at the top of her tall glass. I wanted to taste the sharp fizz and forget it all. She lifted the bottle from the ice bucket and, grasping it too close to the neck, her fingers whitened as she poured it unsteadily into the glass. ‘Cheers, me dears.’
‘Thank you. Sorry I’m late.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m just pleased you’re here. I assume we’re going to get something to eat?’
‘If you want. I’m not massively hungry, but we can.’
‘We need to. I’ve got literally nothing in my fridge.’
‘Andrea, do you know what literally means?’
‘Yes.’
‘It means there’s absolutely nothing in your fridge. How can that possibly be true? Are you telling me you don’t have butter or mayonnaise?’
‘I don’t eat butter.’
‘But you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Everyone says literally now. It doesn’t mean what it used to. The man on the train literally had his cock in my face.’
‘I didn’t think, after the day I’ve had, that it would be possible for me to laugh again. But there you go,’ I said, raising my glass. ‘Thank God for the mentally defective.’
‘Cheers. So what’s happened? What’s so awful?’
‘Just stuff about my mother. And grandmother, as it happens. I’m still trying to work it all out.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Oh yes. Alive and demented.’
‘Was she at the funeral?’
‘She was, but only briefly. You wouldn’t have even noticed her. The care home arranged for her to attend the ceremony.’
&nbs
p; ‘So what did she do?’
‘She was an English teacher.’
‘No, what did she do to your mum?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, sipping champagne. ‘Well, I think I do. She was just very rigid in her views on everything. And I’m starting to realise it had more of an effect on my mother than, you know, than I first thought.’
‘Can you go and see her? Talk to her?’
‘I know where she is. I’m just not sure I have the energy for this,’ I said, lowering my forehead to the table. Andrea reached out to rest her hand on the crown of my head.
‘I worry about you, Laura. What with all the stuff with Tom. Why don’t you just give yourself a break for a little while?’
‘Because I just have to know,’ I said, looking up at her. ‘It’s completely mad, but there you go: I come from a long line of crazy women.’
My grandmother and mother were reconciled by the time my father left in 1991. With my mother on her own, my grandparents decided to begin drip-feeding – in modest monthly instalments – my mother her inheritance. This money, together with my father’s maintenance payments, allowed her to continue her simple existence. Her relationship with her parents wasn’t exactly loving, but it was warm, and she was close enough to notice, several years after losing my grandfather, that my grandmother kept forgetting things, that her movements were slowing down and she was sleeping more. In 2009, before her condition worsened, my grandmother agreed to the sale of her house. A proportion of it was set aside for her care in a residential nursing home in Southborough, an expensive conservation area in Surbiton. The rest of it went to my mother.
The care home was on a wide, tree-lined residential road. It was a wet, slightly chilly Thursday afternoon at the end of September. The Indian summer everyone had been so excited about had given way to a bog-standard autumn; the leaves lay in soggy piles on the pavement. I parked on the road and walked up to the gate. The building had been formed by joining two Victorian houses. The red brickwork, so coveted by the mighty of Surbiton, looked damp and unprotected. I was told to wait in reception while somebody went to tell my grandmother I had arrived. Ten minutes later, a young male orderly in his twenties came to escort me to her room. He had a tattoo on his left forearm of a wolf. I tilted my head to the right as I strained to get a good look at it. He glanced at me and smiled: ‘It’s a grey wolf.’