Mothertime

by Gillian White

  Lot clamped his lips tightly but his eyebrows beetled together like brushes and he hunched his shoulders right up to his ears. He turned his face to the wall. He would not allow Bart to touch him; he flinched when his well-meaning older brother laid a concerned hand on his shoulder. ‘Well, I can’t make it right if you don’t tell me, now can I?’

  Lot sniffed frostily and stared at an invisible spot somewhere on the ceiling: a prophet in turmoil communicating with Heaven.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ comforted Pat. ‘He’s in one of his funny moods. He’ll be all right in a little while. It’s probably all the excitement of the day.’ She talked about her youngest son with a peculiar mixture of mischief and sorrow.

  But Pat could afford to be proud of her Bart. He behaved himself impeccably all day. There was nothing he would not do to make life easier for Ruby. But she would not look at him, either. She would not catch his eye although she stared at him when his back was turned, asking herself over and over, driving herself to distraction: ‘How could you, why would you, what did I fail to do for you, and was this the first time?’ Her fondness for Bart felt like a photograph—she knew what it had once looked like, but no matter how she tried she could not recall it.

  She even agreed to play charades after tea. Once Bart, grave and awkward in the face of her hilarity, sent her a strange look which seemed to ask—how can you laugh? Ruby flinched but laughed harder. She giggled with Elspeth who flirted with Kurt, who was a nice boy despite the fact that he had no job, no money, and no qualifications. He was good at clowning around with the children. If anyone looked in from the outside and ignored Lot’s morose expression, they would say that the Dances were having a perfect Christmas, like the adverts showed… happy people with glowing faces although Lot refused to play any game. He would not even pull his cracker. He would not throw his streamer.

  ‘Will you kindly tell me exactly what you said to him.’ Bart is clearing up. Bart is worried. Lot is notoriously unpredictable.

  ‘I told him I was upset—well, hell, Bart, he knew I was upset, I was crying into the washing-up water. So I told him that you had been seeing some other woman.’

  ‘Oh God, no! Did you tell him her name?’

  ‘Probably. Poor Lot. I don’t remember much about it but I think I told him her name.’

  ‘And where she lives?’

  ‘I don’t know! Leave me alone, Bart! I’m sick of this. Do you really think it matters?’

  ‘And what was Lot’s reaction? I’m sorry, Ruby, I know it’s hard and it seems unimportant just now, but you really must think!’

  Ruby closes her eyes; she gives a deep, sickly sigh. ‘I don’t think there was any reaction. Not at the time. I don’t think he said anything much. He just sat at the table looking pained and beautiful and he didn’t comment at all. He went very quiet.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t said anything to Lot.’

  ‘Don’t take that bossy tone with me, you bastard!’ But Ruby’s outburst exhausts her. She is not strong enough to attack yet. She sinks back with a groan.

  ‘He doesn’t understand, you see.’

  ‘And neither do I. Not really. You try to be sophisticated, you try to tell yourself you’ll be different if it happens to you. Was it the sex? How many times did you lie? Did you shower at work, before you came home?’ Bart is her husband. She thought she knew Bart. But Bart has startled her in the way you are startled by a knife that is unexpectedly sharp. If he can betray me then he can abandon me also, and one day he can forget me… an experience that Ruby associates with death and old age, not motherhood or wifehood…

  ‘I’ve told you it was nothing and I’d give my right arm to be able to say that it didn’t happen. What more can I say? How can I make it right?’

  ‘You can’t. That’s the trouble.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Bart sounds afraid.

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘Well, I could have gone back with Mum and Dad.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Bart.’

  ‘If you’d rather I wasn’t around…’

  ‘You have to be around, Bart. I can’t cope with the kids on my own. Not now.’ This conversation is becoming absurd. What are they talking about with their circling voices?

  ‘Elspeth would have stayed with you.’

  A sudden sighting of her reddened knuckles, of her workworn hands, makes her burst into anger. ‘Oh Bart, for God’s sake shut up and just get on with the clearing up. Everywhere is a mess, I’m a mess…’

  ‘I am worried about you and I am worried about Lot.’ Bart crumples, he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, he looks lost, he looks as puzzled as Damian does when he’s about to cry.

  Ruby says, ‘Lot’ll be all right. He’ll have forgotten all about it by tomorrow.’

  ‘You don’t know him. You just see a handsome man, an innocent, but Lot is different. He doesn’t let things go, he carries his resentments around with him and when he was small, if he didn’t talk about them to anyone, these feelings got bigger and bigger until they exploded in terrible temper. When he was seven he smashed up a neighbour’s garden shed with a mallet and that was because he thought the man had insulted my mother. We’re always encouraging him to think out loud.’

  ‘Well, he’s not small any more, Bart. Lot has a gentle, sweet disposition, much nicer than most other people I know. Trusting and simple. You see him as a child, still. You all do it, particularly your mother, and I think that’s a big mistake. Lot is a grown-up man now and he doesn’t need anyone’s protection.’ Ruby thinks for a minute, and adds, ‘And he’s not stupid, either, he’s misunderstood. He knows the birthdays of every single resident in that hostel.’

  ‘He has always been able to do that. He remembers bus time-tables and train time-tables…’

  ‘And yet he’s wasted, buried away folding boxes. Sometimes I think that Lot is pretending, that Lot is inspired…’

  ‘He is not inspired, he is mad. Crazy. Drugged to the eyeballs. Enclosed in his alternative world. And he enjoys folding boxes. He feels safe folding boxes.’

  ‘Well then, maybe I should try and get a job folding boxes because I don’t feel safe any more, not at all.’ She feels like she feels when she’s giving birth, in pain, in need of help but desperately alone. And at the last birth, Bart had said to her, ‘If only I could bear the pain for you, I would.’ It was just thirteen months ago and he meant it. But now?

  Bart hovers uncertainly, wearing his stricken look. ‘I want to hold you, but I daren’t touch you Ruby, in case you push me away.’

  ‘Oh Bart!’ Ruby wants to scream and beat at the air, she wants to be destructive, like Lot, but she hasn’t the strength. It’s no good, Ruby cannot hold back the tears. Bart kneels beside her and holds her tightly in his arms while she whispers wetly into his neck, ‘You bastard you bastard you bastard…’ She flies to a pain more compelling than gravity.

  ‘I know, I know,’ and he rocks her gently. He strokes her hair from her forehead but the mess of daffodil yellow will not go back, not completely. ‘Let me carry you upstairs and put you to bed like a baby.’

  ‘You can’t get round me like this, Bart. It’s not as simple as that. You have made your bed…’

  ‘Please don’t punish me. I am not trying to get round you. I am trying to look after you.’

  ‘You have hurt me, I’m dying…’ her face crumples up and she knows how ugly she must look. ‘And if I asked you if you’d done this before you wouldn’t tell me, would you?’

  ‘Whatever I said you would not believe me.’

  She shakes her head. She feels as out of control as a drunk. ‘I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I won’t be able to trust you for years.’

  And if Ruby cannot trust Bart, then why should she tell him the truth? If she is embarrassed to remember, then why does she need to pass on the facts which are already fuzzy and faded, thank God. She’d been unaware of Lot
, then. She hadn’t considered Lot’s condition; she might have been all alone in the room, she had cared so little about anything, save for her anger and pain. She’d paced the kitchen in front of Lot, her head bobbing up and down like an agitated seabird as she shouted out loud, ‘I wish she was dead! I wish she was dead or in pain or frightened or tormented. I wish I was a man so that I could go round to her house and drag her out by the hair and batter her head in.’ Insane behaviour. Crazy words… none of them meant to be taken literally. And then she’d picked up the rolling pin and smashed it down into the butter. A ritual blow.

  Ruby frowns to remember. It is hard, with all the swimming going on in her head. After her performance Lot got up, he picked up the butter, still in its wrapping but dented down the middle—it was just out of the fridge so it wasn’t soft. Effortlessly strong, he took it in one of his delicate, tapering hands and squeezed it until the yellow sludge bulged out of its wrapping and oozed between his long thin fingers. She noticed the length of his nails and it was at that same point that Ruby realised how Lot’s distress had clouded the pure love in his eyes and she decided she had to stop. It was then that she turned to confront the washing up, it was then that she told him she felt better, that it takes two to tango…

  ‘They were dancing?’

  ‘No, Lot, I’m afraid they were fucking.’

  He did not say any more. Ruby thinks hard… no, that’s right, after that he fell silent.

  When Christmas is over she must go and see Lot to make sure that he is all right.

  Ruby allows Bart to carry her up to her bed. Well, what the hell? She doubts that her own rubbery legs will take her and with a bit of luck his back will go and he’ll convulse with a fraction of the torment she’s suffering. But it’s awful—she knows she still loves him because of the way she pulls in her stomach before he lifts her, to try and make herself feel lighter. More appealing.

  Eighteen

  AND NOW, ON THIS endless, nerve-racking, unnamed day after Boxing Day, Vanessa Townsend is convinced that her mother is going to die. She is not going to die of any ordinary illness, like broncho-pneumonia, angina, coronary thrombosis, meningitis or Legionnaire’s disease, oh no, none of these mundane afflictions. Caroline Townsend is going to die because she has been murdered by her children. She will find a certain kind of grisly fame; she will appear in a horrible grey way on the front pages of the newspapers at last.

  Of course they should have called a doctor. They could call a doctor even now, and get it all over with. All they’d have to do would be to ring Daddy or confide in the comfortable Mrs Guerney.

  As far as Vanessa knows, there have been no more manic outbursts from Mother. For a carefully monitored thirty-six hours, Mother has been lying on the floor of the sauna, half-hidden under the bench, shivering, calling out occasionally for a drink—sometimes her cracked voice is so mumbled they can’t understand what she wants and at other times her lips are pulled back into an ugly, soundless scream—and sleeping. Down there in her throbbing, humming wooden cage, Mother has become, like an Aga, the heart of the house in a way she never achieved when she was free. The black wig has been left exactly where Sacha pushed it. Mother hasn’t eaten a thing and she hasn’t spoken to them again, not directly. She hasn’t even been aware of their visits; she cannot have heard the dong of the tubular bells, Amber playing the first bar of The Snowman, very slowly each time, with her tongue twisting studiously over her lips.

  Vanessa and Camilla paid two harrowing, secret visits to the gym during the night, determined not to let the others know how worried they were. When they finally shared their worst fears over breakfast this morning, Vanessa had already decided they should tell Mrs Guerney the truth as soon as the cleaner arrived.

  But, ‘She won’t die!’ scorned Dominic, dead against the idea.

  ‘Well, she’s not messing about any more, Dominic. Any fool can see that.’

  ‘Even I can see that,’ said Sacha.

  ‘I don’t know how long we can let her go on like this.’

  Camilla said, ‘Next time we’re going to have to unlock the door and go in.’

  ‘Oh yes, and then she’ll spring on us.’ After a hoarse, gulping sob Sacha started to cry quietly, pushing a tired spoon through her Ready Brek.

  Maybe Vanessa should call for a priest. There might still be time to save Mother’s soul, although Mother, in her right mind, would shriek with horror at the very idea. Mother does not believe… in anything. ‘When you are dead you’re dead,’ she says with scorn, ‘and when you’re alive you’re bloody well dead most of the time anyway.’

  ‘That Bart fellow of your mother’s has just been on the phone,’ says Mrs Guerney, ‘so I read him her note.’

  ‘Bart?’ Vanessa frowns and catches Camilla’s astonished eye—men! What a nerve—so the anonymous phone call hasn’t worked, after all. No doubt Bart’s wife will be interested to learn about this latest development.

  ‘I must say I’m quite surprised he didn’t know where she’d gone. He did sound bemused when I told him. After all, they were that close…’ Mrs Guerney’s jowls tighten and stretch. ‘He wanted to make arrangements to meet her! He didn’t ask to speak to her. I think that’s rather strange, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s because Mother split up with Bart on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Well, there you go then. That’s why she departed so suddenly,’ and Mrs Guerney’s lips come together in a conclusive smack. ‘And that’s why the note is so hastily written. I daresay she was lucky to get into that place at such short notice.’

  ‘That’s why she had to go early this morning.’ Camilla is quick with an explanation. ‘If she hadn’t gone at once the sudden vacancy they offered her would have been filled. You can see on the note… she said she was sorry.’ Once you have started to tell lies it is almost impossible to pull back.

  ‘At least your father knows all about it so someone round here is accepting the responsibility for all this mess. He’s bound to be round each day keeping an eye on everything. Ilse can’t be trusted. Poor soul,’ and she doesn’t mean Ilse. Mrs Guerney switches the subject to Mother as she eyes the polished banister rail and gives it a final vigorous rub. ‘To suffer like that. My sister-in-law was just the same, only ever could cry when she’d had a drink… the rest of the time she went round pretending to be brave when really she was a very frightened person.’

  Mid-morning, and they follow Mrs Guerney with her fast manly stride downstairs to the kitchen. ‘Mrs Guerney, did you know that nine out of every ten men married to women alcoholics divorce them, while nine out of ten women married to men alcoholics stay loyal?’

  ‘Well, you can understand that in a way.’ Mrs Guerney is never daunted by Dominic’s statistics; she holds unshakeable opinions on most aspects of life. ‘Some women like to mother hopeless men but there aren’t many men prepared to put up with a hopeless woman. And drunken women are so much more of a problem. Drunken men are funny or frightening but drunken women are always considered disgusting. But anyway, Dominic, who told you that your mother was an alcoholic?’

  Dominic says no more but he raises his knowing black eyes to the ceiling.

  Mrs Guerney picks up her Pledge in a large hand as, with a heavy sigh, she moves on. When she is in the house life feels much more normal. She brings normality with her in the same brown-paper-bag, unthinking way in which she carts her slippers about. ‘My sister-in-law had to make do with the National Health.’

  Although Mother doesn’t know it, and although Mother would pour scorn on the concept, Mrs Guerney, is, in fact, Mother’s most loyal and genuine friend. She’s had a hard life. ‘I am perfectly prepared to treat triumph and disaster just the same,’ she says, ‘but how can I prove it when I’m still waiting for the triumph?’ Mrs Guerney enjoys taking her mind back to the early days when she first met Mother, to that time when Mother worked at a photographer’s studio, when she was sought-after and work was plentiful: ‘When that woman had the world at her feet
if only she knew it. You just don’t know how lucky you are,’ she’ll say, ‘compared to some poor children I know.’

  If she saw real cruelty, this bustling body would never stand by and watch. Although Mrs Guerney lives alone with her lady lodger (whose contributions to her income go undeclared) she loves children; she would wade into the breach with her hat at a combative angle and firmly put a stop to anything smacking of unkindness.

  ‘Your mother has had a great deal to put up with in her life,’ Mrs Guerney will say mysteriously. ‘She could have been anyone! She could have been a real star! She has the creative temperament, and those of us who have not been blessed with such talent must make allowances for those who have. To succeed you need a man behind you—you just have to look at the poets and they were all men! No, your mother is one of those women, unfortunately, who should never have fallen in love and got married. But there… she fell head over heels in love and wouldn’t be warned, so what can you do?’

  Three times in her life Mrs Guerney has allowed Mother to get under her skin. Three times she has threatened to leave, and on all three occasions Mother has been forced to back down. Life without Mrs Guerney’s regular comings and goings would be as strange as living on a seashore without the rushings and sighings of an in-and-out moving tide.

  It only takes a few moments after Mrs Guerney’s arrival in the morning to tell what sort of mood she is in. Sometimes her face, tightly pleated, signals the very soul of discretion; she refuses to be drawn, she rolls her eyes instead of speaking. But this morning she signals a willingness to open up, electrified into confidences by the drama of Ilse’s skulking man. Ilse returned soon after nine looking the worse for wear as usual, bursting with apologies and full of her short but perilous journey from the tube. ‘I ’ave been followed all the way up the road by this most suspicious-looking man who ’az been skulking behind the bushes in the park.’

  Mrs Guerney peered worriedly out of the window. She rubbed at the glass with her squeaking duster. ‘There’s no sign of him now, Ilse. Are you quite sure?’