Mothertime

by Gillian White

  ‘The little woman! That’s your religion speaking, Robin, I’m afraid, or your mother… You’ve never really liked women.’

  Everyone laughed at Frances with her hair as bleached as the desert sand and her bright red fingernails, but it wasn’t funny. ‘Caroline, why don’t you fetch some water? You must have drunk too much, you’re looking bleary.’

  If only she hadn’t fallen so sickeningly in love with Robin at the start, perhaps they might have worked this out. Perhaps Caroline would have been more forceful. Oh yes, she’d wanted children, but she’d wanted them in her own time. She’d wanted so much else, first. She was greedy, she wanted everything—but she’d never expected to lose her career and that wasn’t Robin’s fault, was it? Now, stout, placid-faced and big-breasted, the keeper of the Caithness vase and thus doomed, it was too late to find another identity. A wife and mother. Never to return to work? Never to use her talents again? If she waited until her children grew up she’d be too old to act. If she refused to have any more children then she would lose Robin. Caroline could stand up and argue, stand her ground and make a scene here and now at the table, or she could accept it. Shocked, she suddenly realised that either of these two women fiddling with their wine and their absurdly subservient men, would fall into bed with Robin at the drop of a hat—but he hadn’t chosen them. Confident and successful as they were, he had chosen her. He didn’t want competition: he wasn’t even interested in sex any more. He wanted a wife and a mother for his children. A breeder.

  But he doesn’t know me! He doesn’t know what I really look like. I am stuck in my own childhood, as far away from a mother as my own mother was.

  Robin hadn’t meant it but he’d made Caroline the joke, and when she dully got up to see to the coffee she knew, when she lit that secret, sympathetic cigarette, that the grin was still drilled to her face. She stood at the sink, dreaming balefully. Hell, things weren’t as bad as all that. She would have something to do tomorrow, after all. She would fill the morning with the washing-up.

  Twenty-three

  OF COURSE HE WAS with her at the birth, giving instructions and doing the breathing, as all good husbands are. The midwife, muscles straining and all powerful like a man, called Caroline a good girl. In order that he could be there, so that Robin could slot the event between the bulging pages of his filofax, the child was induced.

  They gave her a monster sanitary towel with nothing to hold it on with. It lay there, trapped between her legs, like a sodden dead rat. She marked the sheets, a childhood horror which merited the direst of punishments—and she lay in a nest surrounded by flowers, rank with blood and freesia. There was no other way to travel, so she painfully made her way down the ward with her hand hitching the thing between her legs but half-hobbling. Caroline the model, wincing with every pull of the stitches, backwards and forwards she went.

  Robin was enchanted. Vanessa was unique and quite, quite irreplaceable. Her skin was creased with the tiniest of wavering, cut-glass lines and she was downy with the soft fur of her packaging. Everything in which she was wrapped was white and delicate as the most expensive tissue paper, but the milk which dripped from Caroline’s breasts was a kind of oily yellow.

  Robin, noticing, asked the nurse, ‘Is that natural?’

  Caroline said, ‘I have been thinking about this and I would rather bottle feed, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Darling, you can’t mean that! Everyone knows that bottle feeding is second best.’

  But bottled milk is sterilised and purified, while her own might be tainted…

  ‘Well, we have to know now,’ said the nurse, pursed-lipped. ‘You should really have spoken up earlier and then we could have started the process of drying up the milk.’

  ‘She’ll breastfeed,’ said Robin firmly. ‘Well, of course she will.’

  ‘It’s no good if Mother doesn’t want to.’ The nurses flirted with Robin, ignoring the silly billy on the bed; they knew who he was.

  ‘Of course she wants to. She’s just a little nervous at first. Well, that’s understandable.’

  ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ the nurse said to Caroline when, at last, Robin had gone, and she could have been talking about somebody’s baby. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’ A very lucky girl shouldn’t be being so naughty! I mean, look at Mrs Vine over there, so blowsy and drab with her third draped round her neck, and no one to visit her yet. And look at sweet little Veronica, only sixteen, sobbing with happiness behind the curtains: ‘A natural mother, it’s quite amazing. What chance has she got in life?’ said Sister.

  And all the congratulations cards shouted down, they yelled at the face on the pillow:

  ‘A Baby Daughter… how Wonderful!’

  And it was. It was wonderful.

  That night, when all was as quiet as it could be, save for the squeaking of quick feet on lino and the muffled snores of mothers and children, Caroline, after watching for a while, rose from her bed and lifted Vanessa from her plastic crib. She took her into her rancid bed, she propped herself in a comfortable position, ungainly, ugly with her legs parted and her nightdress undone, and the stench of milk and blood and freesia and Body Shop coconut formed one heady, suppurating fragrance she knew she would never forget. And then she felt it come, in a redhot blast. The fierce surge of love was as powerful as the rush of milk from her breasts and just as uncontrollable. It was sexual… charged with the heat of the body… animal, not of the mind. To stop the love she would need tablets more powerful than milk-suppressants. She wept, she giggled with relief to find the love there, she’d read about women who couldn’t, she’d read about them and felt it was just as sad as those tortured souls who could not bear children at all. She’d even been prepared to wait… the love would come in the end, said the experts. But Caroline had no need to wait. In spite of her very worst fears, Caroline loved her child and compared to the tender thing she held in her arms, the part lost in the play sank into insignificance.

  How lucky she was! She was normal! She was a natural mother. Thank God.

  Wise, intelligent Robin, as usual, had been quite right.

  There was quite a crowd to bid them farewell because Robin had his own programme now, and was already famous. Everyone wanted to shake his hand but he couldn’t shake properly, everyone laughed about that, because he was carrying Vanessa so carefully.

  How lucky Vanessa was to be Robin’s child, to be brought to such a comfortable home, the cheerful nursery, clothes from The White House and a crib from Harrods, a beautiful mother—fulltime—an ambitious, adoring father and the richest God in the world looking down benignly upon her.

  ‘Careful, darling.’ Robin watched in case his wife arranged the carrycot cover too clumsily. ‘You go indoors and get comfortable. Put your feet up. Don’t stretch over to the back of the car, you’ll strain yourself. I’ll do it.’

  ‘But the case?’

  ‘I’ll bring the case in later.’

  She had no one of her own to whom she could show the baby. The few friends she had left Robin considered unsuitable; he kept them away. Robin’s friends were not the types to pop round and coo. No one had the time, for a start…

  The television play that she’d almost forgotten, Hermione and the Fire-Eating Bear, was a roaring success. Caroline couldn’t bring herself to watch it, although she was spending the evening alone and there was nothing worth watching on the other channels. Robin brought Caroline all the reviews. He brought them to her in bundles. The unknown actress who had replaced Caroline was acclaimed and feted by the critics. Why had she lost that part? Why had they changed their minds? Had she said something wrong, afterwards? Had something happened? But what was the point… She told herself she did not care; she had Vanessa, and Vanessa was no nine-day wonder.

  At one party they went to, Barry Kittow from the Observer said to Caroline, ‘How do we British manage to keep coming up with these astonishing talents? An unknown actress struts and frets on our airwaves, we’re infatuated by her skills, she dazzles
us all…’

  ‘That part, the part of Hermione, it was offered to me, right at the start.’

  ‘Sorry?’ His ash trickled off the crusty bread and fell upon the Camembert. If he stood back now he would grind that grape. He thought she was lying! For some extraordinary reason this chubby-faced man thought that she was making it up.

  Sometimes, alone and depressed, she dug out her old portfolio. She studied the glossy pictures and marvelled over the woman she once was in the days when it was so easy to giggle.

  ‘Why do your friends ignore me, Robin? Why do their eyes slide off me? Why do I feel so unequal, as though I have nothing to contribute?’

  ‘Most of them are extroverted people. You have to shove your way in, you know that.’

  She stopped him. ‘No, wait a minute, Robin. Please, please, think about this for a moment, take me seriously. If you were in my position, what would you say to them? How can I get back my self-esteem?’

  ‘You are the one person I know who doesn’t talk about herself, don’t you see! That’s why to have you around is such a blessed relief. Anyway, you have your opinions, your thoughts. It’s not what you do that makes you interesting, it’s how you interpret events and how you then put that interpretation over. What’s happened to your acting skills? They’re still there, aren’t they? Tell them your opinions. You are being silly. You are being boring.’

  When Robin was at work Caroline was left on her own with Vanessa. On her own in the lovely house with the hammock in the garden and the Silver Cross pram and the deep-freeze packed with good things from Fortnums. She wouldn’t let herself dance. When she danced she seemed to make anger, a wooden spoon stirring the contents of some malevolent black stew, and she knew she should not be angry. Caroline was a lucky girl with a wonderful husband and a perfect baby. She ought to feel fresh and cool, pretty-green, like a salad.

  ‘Perhaps we should get an au pair,’ said Robin, passing through. ‘You look tired. You must be doing too much.’

  Caroline, bewildered, was doing nothing at all.

  Caroline did not want some young girl around all the time to see her loneliness.

  Babysitters were easy and Robin vetted them carefully. At least once a month they went to the theatre or a concert. More frequently than that they were asked to a party or out for a meal, or Caroline entertained for Robin at Camberley Road, but she never made friends with the women she met although a few, like her, were just wives. All they seemed to talk about was their own men—or Robin. A good number of them, she noticed, flirted quite shamelessly with Robin but if he was straying she realised with horror that, because of his peculiar hours, she would be the last to know.

  She asked him outright. She said, ‘Are you sleeping with Jayne?’

  ‘I’m not interested in playing around. You and Vanessa mean the world to me and I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise that.’

  On a Sunday, before he went to Mass, he brought her breakfast in bed and the papers and then he’d come home and push Vanessa through the park looking proud.

  Caroline stayed in bed and slept in.

  Oh Caroline was so very lucky. Caroline had it all.

  If someone snapped at her in a shop she’d be unhappy for the rest of the day.

  When she went for her walk with the pram she learned how to clear her throat quickly and say good morning in order to work a voice that rarely spoke.

  Sometimes she dreamed about leaving, of walking out just like that. But she loved him too much and how could she leave her baby behind? She wouldn’t have dreamed of taking it with her, it was far too precious and it was Robin’s.

  When he came home at night he was usually tired and most of the evening was already gone. He’d have a drink. They’d eat and they’d talk… they’d talk about Vanessa; she’d said the word ‘dog’ for the first time today, she’d gone a bit red from the sun, she’d have to learn to keep that sunhat on. And then there’d be work he needed to do—the reading-up on personalities, histories and world situations, or he might have to watch a video someone said he must see. Caroline, exhausted for reasons unknown, was asleep most nights before Robin came up and it was he who got up in the nights to tend to the baby. Caroline slept so deeply she didn’t even hear the child cry.

  She rearranged the flowers. She liked to keep the house full of flowers. Flowers are flags. When Caroline was first in love she preferred the wild flowers she gathered herself, a riot of shape and colour; weeds didn’t matter at all, they came complete with their bugs and snails, they warmed the house like bursts of laughter. Now she bought them in defensive bunches, forced flowers, their stems often cut by elastic bands, from the greengrocer in the market. How could she love her baby as much as she did, and yet be a mother badly?

  ‘I need to get out of the house. I need a job. I have to make friends of my own. Surely you must see that I’m no good to Vanessa like this—bored, tired all the time. I think we should find a nanny.’

  ‘Fine. Fine.’ He sounded tired, pushed to the limits when confronted again and again with her whines. What a spoilt woman she was. ‘But what would you do? I love to feel you’re at home for me, for Vanessa. I think this is to do with post-natal depression. It might be better if you saw a doctor rather than went off at half-cock.’ She’d be tarnished by the outside world, too weak, too stupid or too immoral, in the way that female paupers were viewed in the eighteenth-century workhouse.

  ‘It wouldn’t be half-cock, and surely there’d be something I could do. I’m not stupid. I’m not ugly. I’m not ill—I’m just bored. I could go on a course, train for something… it’s not the money, after all. I could do something voluntary, work part-time for some charity.’ But she was wheedling, like a spoilt child.

  ‘Most of the working women I know aren’t terribly happy, Caroline. Actually, most of them would rather be at home, given the choice.’

  ‘If you said that in public you would be lynched.’

  Robin came to bed at the same time she did. Robin must find her attractive again—perhaps it was the new perfume she’d bought. She’d never used contraception because he was so fanatically against it. Within a month she was pregnant.

  ‘Why don’t you leave these ideas of yours until after the new baby is born? Give it some thought in the meantime. After all, you don’t want to tire yourself out. We’ll advertise for a cleaner.’

  Oh I’m sorry, Vanessa, I’m sorry. Would her melancholy mood be absorbed, with her milk, into her baby’s bloodstream? Would it mix with bone and sinew, turning the rest of her child’s life sour? ‘Very well, I’ll leave it. And after the baby we’ll look for a nanny and I’ll make a start…’

  Etc. Etc.

  And on and on and on and on and on it all went. Round and round and round.

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

  Twenty-four

  HE KNOCKS. HE WAITS. He knocks again before parting the dead bamboo-like shoots of lupins in the tiny patch of front garden and peering in through the kitchen window. By the time Lot Dance arrives at the canary house in Potters Bar—he has dallied his way here, as children do—he discovers his bright brother, Bart, sitting alone in the kitchen with his head in his hands, destroyed.

  ‘It’s only me, your brother, Lot. Open the door.’ Lot takes off his gloves and taps. ‘I’m like the wolf with chalk in his mouth, trying to get into the goat’s house!’ He chuckles. He presses his face hard against the pane so that his perfect nose is squashed flat. He widens his eyes to a hideous enquiry.

  Bart raises a tired head. He stares at the figure at the window as if he is seeing a stranger, with his eyes half-closed.

  ‘Open the door,’ pleads Lot. ‘I’m not the wolf and it’s parky out here.’ Then he goes back to the front-door steps, running his boots over the scraper while waiting politely for the door to be opened.

  Inside, into the warmth at last—Lot didn’t realise how cold he’d been, his face feels hard and slab-like—and the house looks as if a bomb h
as hit it. It smells of egg and cereal. Lot shrugs off his long coat and smooths the stiff wool of his crumpled jersey… he wants Bart to notice it—it was knitted without one mistake completely by memory from an old pattern he lost long ago.

  ‘She’s left me.’ Bart looks around with a hopeless sorrow in his eyes. His lips compress, his face looks as if it’s about to fall in on itself. ‘She’s gone. She must have gone in a hurry because she hasn’t cleared up and she never goes out without clearing up.’

  After following his brother through to the kitchen, Lot sniffs again, grimacing at the vague but pervasive whiff of ammonia steaming from the cream-coloured kitchen pail. He says, ‘The nappy bucket needs a lid. Where is the lid? And how do you know Ruby’s gone?’

  But even Lot knows that Ruby’s gone. The house feels totally different this evening, as if someone’s suddenly come in and rolled up the carpets. A sigh seems to come from the little green gingham curtains, the ones Ruby made, and old crusts of toast on the draining board waiting to be put out for the birds remind him of Ruby being there.

  Bart doesn’t answer. He just nods dully in the direction of the kitchen shelf.

  The note, in Ruby’s thin, loopy hand, gives no real explanation for the drama. Lot reads it slowly. Like almost everything he has ever read, it will imprint itself on his mind so that he will never forget it. ‘What the hell’s going on here, Bart? You managed to fool me once but you’ll not get the chance to do it again. Why did you lie? I’m sorry I can’t be more grown-up about this. I’ve gone to Esher. I’ve taken the car. Feel perfectly free to go to her now, if you still want to. Love, Ruby.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ groans Bart. ‘That’s what makes it worse. I just don’t understand it. I thought we were beginning to work things through… shit… shit… and when I phoned Ruby’s house just now her mother said that Ruby refused to speak to me.’ He opens his hands, splaying his fingers in a way that makes them look as if they’re letting out water. He stares at his hands, as surprised as Lot is to see them quite empty. ‘What am I going to do, Lot? That’s the thing. I just don’t know what to do and I don’t know why she has gone.’