Mothertime

by Gillian White

  Vanessa says simply, ‘We would not believe you.’

  ‘I don’t normally tell lies. You must give me that, Vanessa. I’m honest.’ She bites hard at the inside of her mouth in order to keep her composure.

  ‘But we’re not ready to have you back yet. And we can’t see any positive changes.’

  Caroline’s heart sinks fathoms further. ‘No make-up, no wig, no soap, no drink, my skin is cracking and my eyes have gone raw… and you say you can see no changes! Christ! If you let me out now I swear I’ll say nothing. I won’t tell a soul.’ The intensity of her protest sounds like whining. ‘Ask the others, don’t make this decision yourself. The others are there, why not discuss it? Why not end this charade?’ She senses a twinkling chance and takes it.

  Vanessa’s smile is sad and distant, not without compassion. She is not impressed. Damn it, she holds all the cards.

  ‘Camilla’s going to make a turkey curry and we wondered if you’d like some. That’s really why we came down. We didn’t come to bargain or to talk. Not yet. Anyone can see you’re not ready yet.’

  At the thought of food Caroline’s stomach lurches. God knows when she last ate, God knows when last she felt genuinely hungry. Now, extraordinarily, in this intensely threatening situation she knows she wants food, and badly. It’s the lack of fags, it’s because her body is free of the booze and it hasn’t been free for… mortified, she can’t remember. Must be the last time she booked in at Broadlands. Against her will she is forced to accept the offer meekly. She turns her face from the window as she adds, ‘And perhaps you would be good enough to turn the heat down.’

  ‘If you eat your dinner we will turn it down because that’s what we already decided. Don’t worry, Mother, there is really nothing for you to get anxious about any more. Nobody’s going to hurt you. We are all here, we love you, and we intend to take proper care of you.’

  Oh dear God.

  Please don’t leave me!

  She ought to laugh. She really ought to be able to laugh at this farce and she would—Caroline would throw back her head and laugh with that old raucous laugh of hers that has rattled behind her through time like a tin tray falling down a staircase. Oh yes, she would laugh—if she didn’t feel so frightened, if she didn’t feel so despairingly low, so ashamed and horrified by the threat that has plagued her for most of her life: the terror that she might, alone and unloved in the dark, alone with the terrible burden of herself, go mad.

  Twenty-two

  FROM THE VERY BEGINNING Vanessa bewildered Caroline. She could not believe the baby was hers. Caroline could not believe that she was a mother. She looked at the other women in the ward, big and smug and satisfied. They smelled and they smiled like roses.

  She looked down into the plastic cradle, at the pink bundle of blanket, and sometimes it stared back at her out of dark, eternal eyes, as if it saw for ever, into the depths of her soul.

  She was frightened to pick her up. She felt that her baby was made out of glass.

  Glass, like ice, is a supercooled liquid—not a true solid.

  Imagine how you’d feel if you broke the Mastermind trophy, that Caithness vase, so spectacularly fragile, and how much more aghast you would be if it wasn’t your own but somebody else’s. How would you tell them what you had done?

  You might resort to writing a note.

  You might even run away.

  Why award a prize so ephemeral, why give something which wouldn’t stand a hope in hell if it drifted to the floor or to thick pile carpet? Are they trying to say that winning doesn’t really matter, that you shouldn’t need a prize? That the point is that success is all in the mind? If you dropped it, there’d be nothing left. You could go round saying you’d won Mastermind, but after a few years nobody would believe you. Do any of the winners or their spouses ever summon up the courage to go within yards of that vase? Is it ever brought out of the safe to clean or put on display? You must have seen it so you know as well as I do that not one shard would survive intact if it was dropped, and every trophy’s a one-off job—it cannot be replaced.

  Someone, some day, is bound to break every one of those Caithness vases because glass rarely lasts for hundreds of years. Some hapless cleaner, some rumbustious child, some doddery, drunken old uncle… but most likely it will be the wife trying to bring back the sparkle, trying to wash the damn thing up.

  It started before Vanessa was born. Robin had won the Caithness vase and Caroline was carrying it in her stomach. It wasn’t hers but she had the care of it.

  Eight months pregnant and Caroline grated the chocolate and melted it slowly, without allowing it to boil.

  A cover of pink crocheted rosebuds, too stiff for a baby Caroline thought, was given pride of place in the nursery upstairs because Isobel had taken such pains to create it. The nursery was a little-girl world, paid for, designed and ventured into with awe, by Robin.

  ‘What if it’s a boy?’

  ‘It won’t be a boy.’ In excellent spirits, he knew everything.

  No wonder it was a difficult pregnancy, a time of unease which increased under the strain of waiting, made worse because of the inescapable heat and the difficulty she had with her breathing.

  ‘It’s nerves,’ said Isobel knowingly, sticking her angry needles into a ball of grey wool.

  ‘It’s because I suddenly haven’t got anything to do, nothing but think about this, and Robin is so intense about it…’ Caroline’s eyes, shadowed and confused, settled on Isobel’s hard face and she felt afraid for herself. She was behaving unnaturally. How could she talk about disappointment, bitterness and sorrow—how could she grieve when she was about to experience the most precious event of any woman’s life—the birth of her first child—for Robin? To whom could she confess that losing her chance in the play after such struggling beginnings felt, unhealthily, like a miscarriage? How selfish she was and how shallow, with her pathetic urge for fulfilment. There’d been no real explanation for the director’s change of mind, just a glib and easy telephone call made by the secretary, and this made it worse. She’d fought so hard to get there.

  Birth! Birth! The word rang out like a church bell. She ought to be joyous, Robin said. In her frightful, matronly pastel dresses, in the ugly jeans with the stretch nylon stomach, in the huge white Aertex knickers which were the only ones that would fit, she ought to be fevered with happiness.

  ‘Don’t be too disappointed,’ said Robin, when she told him about the play. ‘Having a baby is much more important than any career, far more lasting than any transient success you imagine you might have achieved,’ and he strode off to his important work.

  She hated the loss of control, the slow but insidious manner in which nature took charge of her body, veining her massive breasts like a road map, taking her breath away. She hated the way Robin insisted on feeling the child with his hand pressed flat against her sexless bulge, taking such solemn soundings. She loathed the way he calmly removed a newly lit cigarette from her mouth with the warning, almost religious, ‘That’s not a good idea, Caroline, not now. You’ve more than yourself to think about now.’ Every trifling wicked thing she did felt like a new drop of sustenance on which the lump could grow fat, the lump, and the developing guilt, the desperation. Because how could she do this to her own child, how could she bring her girl to the world unloved and unwanted, as she had been?

  She dissolved the saffron in white wine. She needn’t lay the table yet. She played her loud music and danced so that for a while she could forget all else save for her energy and her yearning. When she danced like this, with the curtains drawn, on her own, she was beautiful again, like a goddess, enchanted and suddenly anything in the world was possible. But there she was in the mirror, hideous, lumbering around the room with manic bright eyes and a body like a sow’s so she turned down the sound and stood still again, legs throbbing, daunted by thoughts of the absorbed women in the relaxation class she must go to tomorrow.

  No one she knew seemed to giggle any more. S
he used to giggle. She used to giggle till she wet her knickers.

  By six-thirty she was ahead of herself; she had everything for the dinner party expertly organised. She skimmed off the excess fat from the juices in the casserole. What an interesting casserole—what a tasteful casserole dish. How lucky she was to be Robin’s wife with a home any woman would envy, an intelligent, supportive husband, handsome and successful. How dare she mope her way round this beautiful house that she kept so clean, so proudly? (When the baby was born, Robin said they would get a cleaner but up until then he considered the gentle exercise to be beneficial.) When she’d left home and been cut off by her father she’d never expected to find this standard of comfort again. How fortunate she was that she no longer needed to take humiliating work in order to pay the rent, that she no longer feared the landlady’s slippered tread on the stairs, that she no longer lived on tomatoes on toast, violently peppered for flavour, with the odd egg for celebration. Look at her now… a dishwasher, washing machine and rumble dryer, all German. Yes, oh yes, and Robin loved her, certainly Caroline ought to feel grateful.

  She had to be careful; she had to choose the menu imaginatively because Robin detested boring food, he’d been fed too much pap in his childhood, and the people he’d invited to dinner were favourite friends… ‘You will adore them, Caroline. Frances is such a fascinating woman, the sort of person you’re bound to gell with.’ He thought he’d ‘discovered’ Caroline, he thought he had plucked her from a life of despair as you might hoist a kitten from a fast-flowing river. They met in the BBC canteen, she after a disastrous audition she knew she had failed, he for a mid-morning rehearsal. She was impressed, you could even say she was overawed. When he offered to buy her a coffee she all but curtseyed, and she stuttered.

  He didn’t want the flotsam she’d mixed with spilling on to his own carpet—the first friend she asked home spent the whole evening toe-curlingly trying to get Robin to find him some work—and Caroline, she’d risen so fast and so high, she felt uneasy when she went back to her old bedsit world and the few friends she’d left there. ‘Alternative types, hangers-on, ne’er do wells’ he called them. ‘You don’t need people like that any more.’ They wouldn’t approve of him, either. They would be suspicious of his success and his luxurious lifestyle.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what attracted you to me in the first place,’ she’d say to him, laughing carefully into his merry brown eyes. ‘After all, in your own words, I was an alternative type and a ne’er do well…

  ‘It was your laugh,’ he told her, slapping her bottom. ‘And your fine, childbearing hips.’

  Oh, how she’d loved him.

  She removed the bones and the skin from the one and a half pounds of fresh salmon.

  Immediately after their marriage she’d kept in touch with those early friends, but now she was pregnant it wasn’t so easy, and Robin liked her to be waiting at home whenever he had a spare evening. He needed someone in whom to confide; he needed to discuss the stresses and strains of his day—and why not? Caroline’s friends were still in pursuit of success, she had nothing to talk about but Robin’s. ‘But what do you do all day?’ one of them once asked her, and although she always made herself busy she could think of no interesting reply. And Robin, well, surrounding his wife with the right sort of people, like eating the correct number of calories and wearing sensible, flat shoes, was essential for the wellbeing of his impending baby.

  She beat the whites of four eggs until very stiff but not dry. She went upstairs to wash her hair and to soak in the bath until half-past seven.

  ‘You look gorgeous!’ She glowed. Robin patted her stomach and frowned at the drink on the dressing table, picking it up and sniffing it as though it was drugged or poisoned. He threw his suit jacket down on the bed and tore off his tie on his way to the shower. A busy, bustling, important man. And handsome.

  ‘I was afraid you might be late again.’ She cursed as she smudged her mascara but the water was gushing and he couldn’t hear. She couldn’t hear him, either, although he was shouting through the sheet of steam. Just lately, in these last few months, it often felt hard to hear what he said, or be heard. She lay on the bed and she waited. Smelling divinely of soap and hot water, she propped herself up on the pillows, untied her negligée ribbons and waited for Robin to come out. He shook the water from his hair like a bounding dog with the white towel sawing his muscled shoulders. ‘Shirt? Shirt? Shirt?’ he called—the beat of a certain, satisfied song.

  ‘Darling, what on earth are you doing lying down? They’ll be here in a minute.’

  She stretched her arms above her head, feeling voluptuous in spite of her size. ‘It’s okay, there’s no panic, everything’s done.’

  ‘Oh come on, Caroline, you’re not dressed yet.’

  ‘I’ve only got to slip my dress over…’

  ‘And I’m not dressed either. Where is my white shirt?’

  She shifted and slid on the bedspread. ‘I want you, Robin. I’ve wanted you all day.’

  And then he stopped. He turned and he looked at her with his most sincere television eyes. She could be a famine, an earthquake, a war, something heartbreaking and nasty. She felt cool and calculating, like a whore chasing business. ‘And I don’t think it’s very wise, not at this late stage.’

  ‘They say it’s quite safe…’

  ‘They can say what they like, but I would rather not risk it.’ And he came and bent over her nakedness and he patted her stomach possessively again. ‘Come on, Mum,’ he said. ‘Cover up.’

  She shuddered. ‘You don’t care about me any more, only the baby.’ She started to sob.

  ‘That’s quite wrong. I do care. And it’s because I care that I don’t want to hurt you.’

  Caroline sprinkled the nuts in a wild swirl over the top of the pudding.

  Thin, suntanned Frances, in a kind of Armani battledress, sitting opposite, inspected a spoon when she said, ‘But aren’t you clever! This is gorgeous!’

  ‘Well, I’ve got plenty of time to…’

  ‘It’s always so nice to have a meal prepared without any fuss. And is it true, Robin, what they’re all saying about Martin Reid…’

  Why couldn’t she enjoy their conversation? Why couldn’t she, like a good wife would, fit in, take an interest in the gossip from Robin’s world? Surely all good scintillating stuff? But Caroline wanted to push back her chair and rest her head on her own knees, but she was too fat, she could never reach, and anyway she must not let Robin down. She interlaced her fingers tightly on her knee and listened to the conversation’s ebb and flow. Nobody offered to help when she got up to take out the dishes, and she came to dread each compulsory exclamation as the next course was set on the table. She wanted to shout, ‘You don’t have to, really! Just carry on talking—you don’t have to break off each time as if you are tipping the servant!’ Giantlike, now, every time she got up she was more ungainly, she moved more clumsily, she slurped her wine. A grin like a facepack hardened her jawbones. While the adults talked she played messy games in the kitchen. Every now and again she was brought in as a kindness as someone who needed cheering up… mostly by Sam, Frances’ husband, who was decent enough to feel sorry that someone was being left out of the group.

  Frances and Sam, Katie and Jasper, and how could Robin have ever imagined that she, haughty Frances and elegant Katie could possibly have anything remotely in common?

  Nobody was interested in her and her baby and anyway, why would they be when she wasn’t, either?

  It didn’t matter that what they were talking about was superficial nonsense, shoptalk, what counted was that Caroline was being so totally excluded. She wobbled and brooded for a good ten minutes, she licked her lips and asked weakly, ‘Have you got a family, Frances? Or are you a workaholic, like Robin?’ And she felt like somebody from Woman’s Own; she might just as well have been offering a knitting pattern on the end of that long pale needle of a stare.

  ‘I have two children from a previous mar
riage—they’re both away at school now, of course—but Sam’s not a father yet, are you Sam?’

  As if to excuse her, Robin joined in: ‘Caroline’s not too sure about motherhood at the moment, are you darling?’

  ‘Bit late for second thoughts.’ Katie’s profile was sharp-faced and thin as the Queen of Diamonds.

  ‘There’s nothing to it, nothing at all,’ quipped Frances. ‘Robin’ll pay for the nanny and then you can go back to work. That’s what I did.’ Frances craned forward and Caroline could see that her eyes were weak. She was a woman who vainly refused to wear glasses and she must have left her lenses at home. Her stare was the one that she used when she sent her reports against the sun from Beirut, Belgrade, Bratislava. ‘Didn’t Robin mention that you used to act? Did you have a stage-name that I might know?’

  Caroline slumped on her seat, her arms idly by her sides. ‘Oh, just bits and pieces. I never managed to pick up…’

  ‘Well,’ said Frances quickly, staring at her in amazement. ‘Never mind. Not everyone can be a howling success. I should think that being Robin’s partner is pretty much a fulltime job! Never a dull moment—lucky old you!’

  ‘And she can certainly cook!’ Jasper patted a shiny stomach before repositioning his limp lick of rusty red hair.

  ‘Caroline’s not interested in getting back to work.’ Suddenly Robin was serious, leaning forward, and the rest of the room fell silent. His face was pale and his fist was clenched round his napkin. ‘Motherhood has had to be different for you, Frances, partly because of your position—you could hardly leave your job at the moment, and Katie’s never wanted children although, in her books, she gives advice about other people’s. But it’s not like that for Caroline and there’s nothing worse than two people with careers in a family. I suffered from being an only child and I’ve always believed that there’s nothing more satisfying than a proper family life… that’s what I want for my children.’