Mothertime

by Gillian White

  Camilla closes the car door and says nothing. Vanessa watches Dominic’s lurching run, so eager to get away from the person he most loves. She knows that the minute the twins get inside the house they will ignore all their new, expensive presents and get out the box of catalogue paper dolls.

  ‘Phone me, darling, if you need to, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I will. Goodnight.’

  ‘Enjoy the turkey, and Happy Christmas!’ calls Daddy as, in his own protected pool of light, he drives cautiously away.

  Thirteen

  IT IS ARMED WITH the wig on the end of the Hoover extension tube that the five children pay their second visit to their mother. Dominic follows with his camera, carrying the torch, because Vanessa says they don’t want to attract attention, and if neighbours notice the lights being used after so many long months of darkness they might wonder what’s going on. ‘I doubt that the torchlight will show from the road,’ she says, ‘if you shield it with your hand and be sure to keep it pointed the other way.’

  It is already seven o’clock and there is no point in waiting around for the turkey. None of them is hungry after Suzie’s tea—nothing homemade, not even the sandwiches, Eileen wouldn’t have treated them like that—and the bird isn’t even tempting, but white and watery with strings of bloody mucus inside. They decide to turn the oven full up. The fan whirrs; it will not be ready until much later this evening.

  Vanessa raises her palm in a saintly gesture as they reach the basement door, and they stand for a while, she praying silently while the others listen.

  They had argued over which wig to bring, although not over the basic idea. They were all agreed on that. Without this essential cosmetic device, Mother would feel stripped and humiliated. It would be more cruel than depriving her of her clothes. But which wig? Going, alone, into Mother’s bedroom was an unnerving experience. The sense of her spilled from every half-opened drawer, from the talcum-powder-strewn shower floor, to the sticky dressing-table jars and the wilted flowers with the message balanced on the browning petals that had not fluttered down to the royal-blue carpet already—from Bart. The atmosphere in here was enraged and unpredictable; it was puzzling, it had something to do with experience of life, with being knocked down, and being grown up. Inside Mother’s room Vanessa always feels like a strict spinster aunt.

  ‘We must be careful to keep it exactly like this for when Mrs Guerney comes.’ Dominic is good at thinking in advance. Assaulted by the mess, Vanessa was on the verge of tidying up in an effort to calm the calamitous disorder that was hemming her in again as the visit to Mother drew nearer. Flustered by the suffocatingly hot, exotic room, yet she must keep her wits about her.

  Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Daddy’s things went up in a sacrificial blaze and the day after Daddy left, Mother did two things: she took to the telephone and she ordered the decorators in. Daddy’s departure heralded a whole sequence of disjointed, peculiar events. It was a time for keeping your head down, it was a time for drifting and flowing. The whole of the house was redone, even the kitchen. For months they lived amongst dust sheets, they moved between galvanised stepladders, they inhaled the intoxicating smell of paint and they moved from bedroom to bedroom as their own rooms were stripped and transformed. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was permanent. Mother was obsessed. One minute she was talking of waging revenge to her friends on the telephone, the next she was supervising the cowering workmen.

  ‘No warning! No—nothing! I still find it impossible to believe.’ The friends she chose were women who’d been abandoned themselves… and Mother knew several. She used to despise them for what she called their martyrdom but now she needed them. ‘I wouldn’t have him back if he begged me on his knees,’ she said, caving in on herself as she settled down in the telephone chair, frowning, examining each long nail in turn, her cigarettes and her lighter in her lap. If one of the children was on the phone already talking she’d press the disconnection buttons and say, ‘Move, please!’

  Even while she talked she studied her reflection in the hall mirror.

  Daddy predicted the recession a whole year before it happened. Privately he still says that it is bizarre the way the West is holding out hope to the newly freed Eastern countries, offering them a way of life that is already quite obviously doomed. ‘Unless there’s a brand new system, a whole new way of thinking, there is no alternative except absolute catastrophe. But there’s no one with the vision to give a lead.’

  Vanessa felt glad that everyone else was about to experience catastrophe. Why should they be suffering catastrophe in frozen isolation, almost unnoticed in Camberley Road? But then she felt guilty; she remembered Our Lord and His wounds, and at school she learned how important it was to suffer. Every night when she undressed she looked hopefully over her body for signs of stigmata but found only the vile lumps and bumps of adolescence.

  When she turns into a woman she’s going to lose Daddy.

  ‘Would we know if Daddy died?’ asked Amber tonelessly. ‘Would anyone tell us?’ Mother pushed her aside with a steely glare and nobody else could answer. Amber went straight upstairs and deliberately overfed her two goldfish; she showered the fish-food into the tank. In the morning they floated, fins up and silvery, on the peppery surface of the water. They buried them in a shoebox in the garden and Amber made them sing Greensleeves because it was sadder than any suitable hymn. ‘At least I know exactly where they are,’ she said, satisfied. ‘And now, if you wouldn’t mind, I think I would rather be alone.’ The children left her and watched beside the back door. She knelt at the edge of the grave and her hank of hair shone red as the Little Red Rooster as the dying sun caught it.

  It never appeared to cross Mother’s mind that she might have driven Daddy out. In her telephone act she’d be gayer than ever, betraying the tension in her face, ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s extraordinary. As far as I know, there is nobody else. He says he wants his own space… can you believe that, Jenny? I never used to believe in the male menopause but you have to wonder. He’ll be growing a beard and turning up at a men’s support group next, there’s bound to be something in Hackney. No dear, of course he hasn’t taken the children. Do they ever?’ And her loud, crowing laugh could be heard all over the house.

  She twiddled the diamond in the huge claw of her engagement ring. The children lowered their eyes when they went by, making it look as if they weren’t listening, and sometimes she’d crook the receiver in her neck and mime the pouring of a drink, opening her eyes very wide to communicate great urgency. Then someone would bring her a glass and the gin. But these conversations were so repetitive that eavesdropping soon became boring.

  She went to an exclusive shop behind Harrods where she bought thick carpets and enormous curtains that were so long that they trailed across the floor; she had the furniture re-upholstered and even the window seats got padded and the food tasted of turpentine.

  It was summer-time and the smell of mown grass was hot and sweet. Daddy came and took them for a walk in the park right opposite the house. There’d been so many questions she’d planned to ask but then Vanessa could think of nothing. She had never felt so dull and stupid in front of Daddy before.

  ‘Why are we all walking along like this?’ Amber asked them, small and straight, going along in front bearing the precious jar of beads from which she would not be parted. In her little sundress she looked just like a lavender painting. Daddy plodded heavily along, affected by the heat.

  They stopped by the lake to watch the boats and the people fooling about. They sat on the grass, a wasp wouldn’t leave Daddy alone and he flapped at it with his printed list of telephone numbers. He gave them to Vanessa… all crumpled to the shape of his grip… and he told her solemnly, with great effort, ‘If ever you need me, even in the middle of the night, I will be at one of these numbers. If I could have told you I’d be leaving, I would have done, but it just wasn’t possible. I didn’t like the way it happened any more than you did, but there was no other way. Just be
cause I’m not at home any more does not mean that I love any of you less, or care any less, or think about you any less…’

  ‘Daddy, look, the wasps are coming from that litter bin.’

  ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Sacha?’ Hopelessly he tried to capture her attention with the seriousness of his eyes.

  ‘It’s that can of Coke—that’s what they’re after.’ She would not listen to him. She picked up a stick and started to stir up the malodorous contents of the litter bin.

  ‘Amber’s fish are dead,’ said Dominic stolidly. He had turned his usual coffee-brown which made the whites of his eyes and his teeth shine. ‘Daddy, did you know that farmers commit suicide more than any other group of people except doctors?’

  Harassed and hot, frustrated by his inability to communicate, Daddy endeavoured to humour him.

  ‘Oh, and why is that?’

  ‘Because they are used to putting their animals down when they’re no use any more. If a farmer fails he feels useless, and so he puts himself down, just as he’d put down one of his animals. Usually they shoot themselves.’

  Very often the things that Dominic comes out with don’t make much sense, but Daddy was trying hard to understand. ‘Am I useless now, Dom? Is that what you think, because I don’t come home any more? Would you rather I was dead?’

  ‘I never said that.’ Dominic strutted about on the edge of the lake, looking very foreign in his gaudy knee-length shorts and bright yellow T-shirt, like one of the tourists. He pointed across the sparkling blue water. ‘I’d really love a remote-control boat like that. Josh Collins has got one of those. They’re divorced.’

  Daddy looked sad. He didn’t answer.

  There was a great fuss because Sacha got stung and Daddy had to buy her a green ice-lolly to hold against her arm—she insisted that only a green one would cure it. Camilla, who’d been quiet all day, said she’d done it on purpose in order to get more of Daddy’s attention.

  It was not a good day. That first, serious talk didn’t make anyone feel any better, in fact it was all very uncomfortable.

  Vanessa drew her knees up tight. She sat on a dust-sheeted chair and watched the television pictures of the starving children in their flat, brown land. There was an appeal but Mother said it was no use sending money which would only end up funding more wars. Vanessa stole a five-pound note from Mother’s handbag and put it in the collection box at St Mary’s. She lit a candle and prayed for Mother’s soul as well as her own. Amber looked round at the new, strange drawing room and said at the time, ‘Daddy won’t come back now, will he?’

  Camilla came back from a day with a friend with her ears pierced. Mother came out from her wallpaper book and went mad. ‘How dare you! How dare you do such a common thing! You will never be the same again! You have mutilated yourself, and you didn’t even ask me first!’

  ‘Did it hurt?’ Vanessa was terribly impressed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Camilla. ‘It was agony. And I enjoyed it.’ Just like Vanessa felt when she stole that fiver.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re another one with your father’s perverted ways, it’s bad enough putting up with your sister,’ snapped Mother, taking a sip of dry Martini as she turned one more of her monstrous wallpaper pages.

  ‘Every day we must come in here and muck it up after Mrs Guerney’s gone. Every day we must dig out some suitable clothes and drape them around to make it look as if they’ve been worn. Mrs Guerney has eyes like a hawk.’ Mrs Guerney, of course, was nothing like a hawk, more like an ordinary brown female blackbird, far too busy with the essentials of life to be preening her feathers or flaunting her colours. Dominic pushed a finger into a jar of cold cream. He sniffed it and read the label; he looked like an expert wine-taster. ‘Nourishing,’ he said with disapproval, and then he wiped his hands roughly clean with a tissue as if it was Mother herself that he’d inadvertently got stuck on his fingers. ‘We must even try and make it look as if the make-up has been used. And the bed. Detail is all-important.’

  Whenever he’s been with Daddy, Dominic begins to sound like his father. He tries to use his words and expressions and this is what makes people who don’t know him believe that he is precocious. To Vanessa he sounds much more defenceless when he does it, much younger than when he is being himself. Dominic’s not tough, he’s not tough at all.

  The twins stood on the threshold of the bedroom looking tired, with their fallen white socks exposing the sharp little shinbones of their stork-like legs. Sacha’s gaze was glued to the floor under the bed as if she was afraid that Mother would spring out, screaming a witchy shriek, and pounce on her.

  Vanessa drew them inside. ‘It’s okay, Sacha, don’t look so scared, it’s perfectly all right. You know that Mother’s not here, she can’t see what we’re doing.’

  ‘I know, but it feels as if she can.’ Sacha’s face was clenched tight, determined to survive no matter what Mother did.

  ‘Which wig?’

  Camilla had already opened the wardrobe where the wigstands stood on the shelf inside, six of them, heads stuffed with straw, stiff beige heads without eyes… one of them bald. They must remember to put the chestnut wig back.

  ‘Well, which one is her favourite?’

  ‘Which one is most likely to suit her mood?’

  There was a silence as they all considered this last point. Eventually Dominic said, ‘The black one.’ He picked it off the wigstand. It was well-brushed and cared for; out of all her possessions, her wigs were among the items over which Mother always took pride.

  ‘And what about a clean vest and knickers?’ When they turned to stare at Amber she said with her sweetest smile, ‘Well, she’s been down there for a night and a day.’

  ‘I suppose we should,’ said Vanessa to Camilla.

  Mother’s underwear was made out of silk, slippery and warm to the touch, lots of thin straps and lacy fringes. Sorting through it felt worse than anything they had already done, as if they were touching something far too personal, like Mother’s own naked skin, the cold, paper skin which Vanessa had run her fingers along when she’d found the rude pictures, before she’d burnt them. ‘Nothing too sexy,’ said Camilla. ‘After all, she’s only going to be stuck down there. She’s not going anywhere. Nobody’s going to see her.’

  ‘Unless we have to call the doctor!’ Sacha was hopeful. She sounded pleased, standing with her hands in the businesslike pockets of her white, starched apron.

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Sacha.’ But Vanessa has made this remark before, and it sounded as weak as it did the first time, ‘Mother’s not sick.’

  Behind her glasses Sacha rolled her eyes. ‘Well, she was jolly well sick yesterday. All over the carpet, too. And I was only asking. Can’t I ask?’

  With all the sedateness of a six-year-old child Sacha leads the procession towards the door of the basement, holding the black wig aloft on the end of the Hoover extension tube. She looks a little like Mother Augustus with that flapping white seagull cap on her head. She could be the chorister who wears white gloves, leading the choir at St Mary’s, carrying the cross.

  Vanessa is unaccountably upset. ‘Don’t do it like that. Don’t mock.’

  ‘I wasn’t mocking anything, silly. We’re having a ceremony and somewhere an organ ought to be playing.’ Yes, a deafening, minor chord striking deep into her heart. Vanessa can almost hear it; her ears are roaring.

  ‘I think we should ring a bell, the next time,’ said Sacha with proper solemnity. ‘For Mothertime. And it probably ought to be silver.’

  Fourteen

  IT IS MOTHER WHO is confined, so why does Vanessa suffer the angry, helpless frustrations of a prisoner, someone who has slipped off the edge of life? Trying so hard to make sure that everything is forgotten but hatred?

  They follow their leader with eyes like spies unsticking envelopes. The heels of their shoes clang round and round on the metal spiral steps.

  Amber holds the new menu preciously, close to her chest. Dominic
allowed them to tear a page out of his new art book so the menu for the evening is on smart, stiff paper with an oval border. Decorated with pen and ink holly leaves, red and green, there are two choices crayoned upon it in letters alternately blue, green and yellow: she can have ham salad and Christmas cake, or sausage roll and green salad followed by mince pie with cream.

  Amber is holding her breath and her cheeks balloon out as though she is swimming underwater. She crosses and uncrosses her legs, and shakes a frantic head in reply to Vanessa’s worried enquiry. ‘I’ve been! We can bring down some turkey later for a midnight feast,’ she whispers, puffing air between gritted teeth, letting the tension go.

  Camilla carries Mother’s change of underwear. She has folded it neatly and now it is in a carrier bag but she holds it out at arm’s length, not in the way you would carry ordinary shopping.

  Vanessa is aware that they bring their gifts like offerings and that Mother is sitting there encased in pinewood, hidden from the eyes of all but the chosen, a holy relic like the Shroud of Turin. Or poor, poisoned Snow White. Preserved behind glass and all the more powerful. But where do you draw the line between an acceptable relic and a graven image? The first, she supposes, exists to satisfy curiosity, but the second is a replacement of God. At the moment Mother seems more like the first… yet their world is already revolving around her.

  The atmosphere is as stale and ominous as the crypt that runs under the vast stone floors of St Mary’s, and you have to pay fifty pence to look at the old bones entombed there. This is sacred ground, too, where you might find bones, a place where evil has been done. Dominic prefers a trip to the vaults at St Mary’s where the air is the colour of hymn books to a visit to the London Dungeon, and he says the spooky word T O M B till it echoes off the crumbling walls. The gym is eerie in torchlight. Dominic directs the beam like an usherette at the cinema; the yellow cylindrical sphere exaggerates the metal and chrome, it picks out the cold stainless steel of the apparatus which takes on the menace of a torturer’s tools. Footsteps echo. The sauna hums. A dimmer light shines out through the porthole window, not nearly strong enough to be seen through the window out on the road, thank goodness. Sacha steps forward and kneels beside the pipe-hole, her nursing cap almost touching the floor as she calculates the angle and, like a chimney sweep shuffling his rods through his hands, she licks her lips in concentration as she pushes the wig through the hole on the end of the extension tube.