Mothertime

by Gillian White

  Why couldn’t she do that?

  Oh, why couldn’t she promise them that?

  Why would that have been so much more dangerous than pushing remorselessly on, grimly stripping the tree in a kind of clumsy fever, behaving like the hateful creature she had become. She’d stared at her own reflection which was bright in her children’s eyes. She’d wanted to stretch out her arms but knew that her children would recoil from her touch.

  Caroline Townsend, frightened to make promises in case she can’t keep them, terrified of her children’s love, scared to betray such a precious thing, doesn’t know how to beg for love, cannot cope with rejection. How much easier it is to be feared and hated. How much simpler it is to keep company with those who don’t really matter, to fall so swiftly into meaningless love so that when you lose them it doesn’t really hurt. And yet every passionate experience seems to have been a sort of death, every sexual intimacy a kind of murder.

  Shit. Just another tomorrow gone up in smoke. And then what happened? Ashamed again, she forces her sluggish brain to remember. Did she have another drink? She must have done; she must have given in and followed the pattern—loud, ugly, uglier, demented, turning in dread from her children’s touching needs. Had she staggered down to the gym in some misguided attempt to find Robin in his lost, secret world, had she turned on the sauna and somehow managed to lock herself in?

  How else could she be here? How long has she been here?

  But she hadn’t been wearing her black wig when she went out on Christmas Eve, had she? She had been wearing the chestnut. So somebody else must have put the black wig on the floor—and what else? What are those crispy pieces of paper?

  Her hands are trembling as she reaches down and brings the pages to a comfortable eye-height. It is an effort to move her head, unbearable to let it drop down; any extra weight on her neck is purgatory. She holds the menus as steady as she can and it doesn’t take long to read them. Christmas Day lunch. Boxing Day lunch. Christmas Day tea. Her smile hurts. Her skin is tight as a layer of dry parchment. Caroline used to write menus once. She drew them out carefully, just like this, and put them in front of her dolls as they sat on the chairs at the table. It was a large table and you could hardly see the dolls’ heads even though they were raised as high as could be, on cushions. Really, there should have been people at the table but more often than not, as a child, in those long-ago rooms where memories lie, Caroline Heaten ate her meals in the company of crimped-haired dolls with puckered pink lips. When you are little you don’t have the privilege of choice… whether to be loved or not.

  Her children know she is here.

  Well, why on earth haven’t they let her out?

  Who else knows she is here?

  For Christ’s sake, this is bizarre!

  Maybe she should bang again but she hasn’t the energy, and a creeping dread is swamping her. Doubt and fear are cooling agents, protecting her from the fierce sauna heat. She doesn’t want to bang any more; she wants to keep very quiet, to be left on her own to think and prepare—but for what? Will her children come, or have they decided to leave her here to die?

  Can she honestly blame them if they have decided to do that? After what happened upstairs, after she, the weary old whore, tried to destroy their happy Christmas in a stupid contradiction of feelings. As a child Caroline often wanted to kill or destroy those that hurt her most. All of a sudden Caroline wishes she was merely waiting for men with syringes: at least she could fight and curse, at least she could kick and hurt. But if her children come, what then? If they won’t let her out, what then? But there’s Ilse and Mrs Guerney… Christmas Day is obviously over and Boxing Day has gone by without her being aware of time passing. If it’s later than that then Mrs Guerney will be in the house every morning and Ilse ought to be there, too.

  How is it possible that no one has missed her? There must, at least, have been telephone calls.

  Mrs Guerney cannot know. The stolid, sensible Mrs Guerney would never take part in anything as extraordinarily sinister as this, whatever the reason. And then there’s Bart, Bart with his swooningly marvellous fingers and his frenzied, half-manic: ‘Let’s fuck!’ But Bart doesn’t want to meet any more, Bart has decided to stay faithful to his wife, poor cow. Caroline remembers the row, lets her head fall into her hands and groans. What a mess what a mess what a mess.

  Oh God I feel so sick.

  The scraping at the window has ceased, overtaken by the lightly rumbling sauna. She starts when she hears the tinkling sound, unmistakable; even the words of Sacha’s favourite song, so familiar, spring to mind: ‘We’re walking in the air…’ Caroline tenses. She stops breathing. She can smell herself—cornered animal. Her fists clench so hard that her nails dig into the flesh of her hands. Her eyes are wide now, and startled to a feverish brightness. A wintry shiver runs through her bones as the Christmassy sound of bells comes again, reverberating with a miniature sorrow, oddly unreal in the bleak wintry expanse of the gym.

  ‘We’re walking in the air…’

  They put her here, with their smooth, innocent skins and their impassive faces, with their short-cut nails and their heads that smell of sweet green shampoo. With their impossible expectations. Her jailers are coming and she cowers, while a perilous tingling shoots through her limbs like the pricking of millions of needles. She knows very well that they are coming, but what are they going to do? Caroline is frightened. She is terrified of her five children and totally dependent upon them. There are no shadows in this wooden cage and no hiding places, only the bench, and she can hardly crawl on the floor and try to hide under that. Achingly sad, vulnerable, she doesn’t know what to put on her face, she has nothing, no refuge, no means, nothing to allow her to cover up, nowhere to hide.

  No defence against this.

  And no drink in her hand.

  Twenty

  WALL-EYED WITH WONDER, LOT Dance catches a snowflake on the finger of his glove and, using the utmost delicacy, deposits the tiny flake in his mouth. He closes his eyes the better to taste it. In order to see more clearly and to react more quickly, he has ceased to take his daily medication and this is why he can enjoy the snowflake so.

  A hurrying stranger, passing on the other side, notices him, thinks he’s a tramp and looks away. But the stranger carries the image of the man with the classical, tragic face and wonders, deeply moved, what dreadful things he has endured in his loneliness. He imagines him laughed at, jeered at, spat at, lying sick and untended beneath some ungodly arch. Or sitting in a stiff chair, too small for him, down in a charitable crypt. How many days does he spend like this, trudging the dismal streets? Perhaps it’s all the same to him where he is.

  Lot would tell the stranger not to be so ridiculous.

  Who is Lot? What is he all about? Well, Lot is not a tramp. He has a home and a family and his mother, embarrassingly, still tries to hold his hand in the street, but the stranger isn’t so wrong. There is Lot’s life and there is Life—the monstrous power which charges over the earth, carrying out its plan which has no use for individuals, needs no individuals to exist. In its slathering jaws it got hold of beautiful Ruby, used her, then tried to toss her on the scrap-heap. Lot is tougher; it hasn’t done that with him yet, bloody hell, not quite—Lot keeps his eyes open. But it’s the enemy, that’s the point. Everyone’s enemy. Everyone’s in the same fix. Sleepwalkers and the groping blind wrestling with a monstrous antagonist. Everything it does is an attack. Everything that happens is a trap. Everything that Life, that growling monster, gives, every experience, every pleasure as well as every disappointment, is a plot to foil, is a move against, against arousal from the dream. Life is an evil scientist mixing stimulants and sedatives in exactly the right proportion to keep human beings in the proper state of stupor for its own purpose.

  So Lot must keep on his toes.

  Sometimes, when he’s upset like this, every day feels the same. There is no tomorrow. There’s just a day and a night, a circle wheeling from light t
o dark, from dark to light—just alternating light and dark.

  Oh yes, the world according to Lot Dance is a strange one, full of misunderstandings and false messages. He does not see things like you or I do, and his needs and his loves are relatively simple. But he is not harmless. Thoughts of retribution, when they come, capture his soul completely. That hateful Caroline Townsend had better bloody well watch her step.

  So here he is now, outside in the darkening afternoon where the sky is a bruised blue-yellow, furtive yet with an air of mission about him. Although Lot tries to connect to this pure white world of bewildering snow, the icy wind, the frosted branches above him, they are like ghosts to him, piles of ashes or whirls of dust, not recognisable like the solid things that are his—like his boxes. They belong to the big world, they are nothing to do with him and he does not want to see them. So there.

  His fury is manageable now, and smothered. The fiery convulsions of rage he suffered for hours, alone while he ripped blankets and towels to shreds in his room on Christmas night, are reduced to a mildly beating pulse. There is not a lot more he can do for today. It is time for reverse action; it is time to pack up and move on.

  Since his very traumatic experiences of Christmas Day, Lot has been far from idle. It is very annoying when he is trying to plan, to find that he cannot see himself, for he remembers in pictures and can never quite spot himself in these pictures. Where has he gone? If he remembers a group round a piano, or in a garden, he can see the other figures but never his own. He takes to muttering, ‘Why am I always absent?’ The bar stool or the armchair he sat in is there, but it is empty. Look. Now he can see his glove, his sleeve, his boot if he puts out his foot. If he could once see himself from top to bottom, back to front, what a help that would be. How can he put these bits together? It is all so bloody unsatisfactory.

  Despite these debilitating handicaps, after a few false starts he managed to trace Caroline Townsend’s address and telephone number by consulting a friendly man in a frayed Afghan hat who was keeping warm in the library, and he phoned from the station after his arrival in Highgate this morning, fully expecting the telephone to be answered by a child because it is holiday-time and he has noticed how children, even when adults are around, generally rush to answer. Pretending to be Bart, he realised this method of communication—a hasty message—would sound strange, coming from a lover, but he had prepared a quick explanation—no time to talk… somebody coming… that sort of thing. But Lot was thrown into confusion when the telephone was not answered by one of Caroline Townsend’s five children. The woman was abrupt with him on the phone. She read him a note, she said to him crossly, ‘How come you didn’t know she’d gone to Broadlands? I thought you two were close.’

  Lot, confounded, unable to think of a quick enough answer and with his mind wheeling out of control, started to stutter and so he put down the phone, cutting out the sharpish, ‘Hello? hello?’ with an impatient frown. Damn it. The last thing Lot wants to do is to make things worse. He merely wants to punish the woman who has hurt Ruby so deeply.

  His hectic drifts of thought led him to plan on an assignation. He wanted to lure her out of her house. He decided on the Fat Controller Café, the one with the sticky red seats and the plastic daisies and every petal smells of onions, the one beside the station. Not the sort of place which his brother, Bart, would normally frequent but the best of a bad job. Not many places were open because people were still at home enjoying their holiday. The last thing he’d imagined was that his victim might have gone away.

  ‘Patience, Lot, patience,’ he muttered sternly to himself. The next time he rings he is going to pretend to be somebody else. Lot does not like trying to be Bart.

  She has gone to Broadlands. But where is this place, Broadlands? Is it a hotel? How can he find out and how much money will it cost him to get there? Worry worry worry, but his sense of justice resigns him to the chase.

  When he gets cold, when his feet burn in his boots and his eyes stream in the bitter air, Lot dismisses the tempting picture of his own cosy room and his welcoming gas fire. He stamps flat pathways round the trees in the snow and remembers that tragic image of Ruby, the beaten creature she’d turned into on Christmas Day, huddled at her own kitchen table, swollen-eyed, red-nosed, as in her choking voice she broke down and confided in him, sharing her terrible problems.

  ‘No, Lot, they were not dancing, they were fucking.’

  He claps his hands. He blows out white streamers, fierce as a bull, and his eyes are as glittery-bright. Not red eyes, but navy. Ruby trusts him. He will not let her down.

  He might as well check out the place as Starsky would, as he was here and so near. There was only one window Lot could reach in the tall, superior Camberley Road house and that was down the basement steps—a dark little window in the cellar. One day he is going to have a house like this—although this house is not Lot’s sort of house at all, there is something prim and stiff about it—with a wife and children and curtains with dressing-gown ties round their waists. Lot’s first glance at the house felt as if it was received with a snub, as if it disapproved of him—although why should it? Why the hell should it, carrying its turmoil of moral disorder as it did? But, after crossing the street with stealth, looking this way and that, as taught, he sneaked down the steps, stuck his hand through the bars and scratched at the blanked-out surface of the glass, only to discover that the white paint was on the inside.

  Damn it.

  Lot’s head feels like a house; it feels as static as a room with four walls entirely crammed with inanimate objects. He hasn’t even been able to see inside and Lot is interested in houses… all sorts of houses and their contents. Especially beds—monster four-posters, brass beds and iron beds, camp-beds and airbeds. Stairs, too. They are aggressive, they climb and wind. And there might be lots of bottles inside this house, innumerable bottles which catch the light on the glass shelves of bathrooms, hundreds of jars of face cream and shoes of every description, enough clothes to fill an aircraft hangar and books and writing paper. Books full of print that were once read but are now forgotten, writing paper covered with scrawled lilac words, or emerald green, words someone once wrote but cannot recall. Pens, pencils, cigarettes and wine.

  Lot can remember the things that belong to people, more accurately than the people themselves. Even Ruby, whom he remembers more vividly than anyone, her scarves and berets are more definite than her face. He can’t see her separate from her clothes, her furniture, Bart or her four children. Always he sees her surrounded, embedded, mixed up with the smell of home-made marmalade and the other junky stuff of her world. To visualise Ruby, Lot must put her in a frame.

  He is here for Ruby.

  He had only just retreated to a safe vantage point in the park when a blond-haired lady in blue came strutting by with a silver airline bag. Who could she be?

  She could be a bird pecking along.

  Lot emerged from behind his tree, curious to see if this could be Caroline returning. Maybe Broadlands was a shop, maybe she’d just popped down the road for a loaf of bread or a cream horn. But this younger version of Marilyn Monroe, tossing her curls and pouting her lips as she minced along the road, staring at him nervously, checking over her shoulder to see if he was still there, she was not Mrs Townsend… with her vastly padded shoulders she could well be a model or an actress, but she was not old enough to have five children and Lot didn’t think she was Bart’s type.

  Lot realised with alarm that the lady thought he was following her.

  He imagines Bart’s type to be his type… soft in motherly cashmere with curly hair, little pearl earrings, and wearing pretty, gentle dresses of a rosebud print. Doesn’t drink. Doesn’t swear. Ruby could be his type, if she tried, if she took off her jeans and her make-up and wore white shoes with tiny heels with bows on the backs. Princess Diana might make the grade. Lot has never actually met his type of woman yet, not precisely. He has only ever seen one on telly—and that was Angela Rippon. He is
never out of the hostel on a night when they show Come Dancing.

  Once again he retreated to a hidden place in the park. Once again he stood, still as a tree trunk and just as dark in his long black coat, watching patiently. At twelve-thirty an older woman left the house wearing a fashionable felt hat, an RAF jacket and carrying a Union Jack carrier bag. She reminded Lot of the bossy hostel administrator who comes in and puts the fire on in the office two days a week, the woman who counts the biscuits. But this one strode off busily, head down, watching for treacherous ice on the pavements. She bustled along against the gathering wind while every now and then she glanced towards the park as if she was expecting to see someone there, but she couldn’t see him because Lot stood back, well out of sight.

  No more can be done. He has successfully located his target’s house and he knows some of the people that come and go. His telephone call was unproductive and he could not see through the cellar window. Caroline Townsend is not at home and so he must seek her elsewhere.

  He is cold. He is hungry. There’s no work today, the workshop has closed until the sixth of January and nobody knows what to do with their time till it opens again. Back at the hostel everybody will be hanging around gormlessly, sitting in rows down the refectory table, playing crib, drinking tea and fugging the reccy with smoke. Watching telly, faces as puckered and blank as the sad balloons. Depressing. If Lot returns, he will go to his room and finish some more of his boxes… the sackful he specially requested to take home. He likes to have something to do with his hands and he’s finished the sweater he’s been knitting for months. He is wearing it now—a reggae stripe with a polo neck. Slightly itchy.