Mothertime

by Gillian White

  Lot’s heart beat like a hammer. ‘Is that Mrs Townsend?’

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘I’ve had a terrible time trying to get hold of you.’

  ‘I’m not often in, I’m afraid. I’m very busy at the moment. How can I help you?’

  ‘There are some important tax matters that I’d like to discuss and I wondered if I might make arrangements to…’

  ‘I do not deal with tax matters, Mr Walsh. You’ll have to get in touch with my accountant for that, and anyway, who are you? What department are you from?’

  ‘It’s a matter of urgency and I feel we should meet.’

  ‘What is this? Who are you?’

  ‘Where have you been all this time, Mrs Townsend?’

  Damn! He’d gone too far, too quickly. The phone went dead and he was left hanging on, so near yet so far… but wait a minute—if he knocked on the door now he would find her in!

  He battered his way out of the booth and hurried down Camberley Road, hanging on to his hat and clutching his coat tight around him. He cursed the slippery pavements. Up the steps he went, the steps he had watched with such patience over so many days and nights. It was evening-time, the pineapples, one either side of the door, shone out a pale, pallid light and heavy rain obscured all but the pool of porch-light he stood in. He pressed the bell. And again. Each time water ran up his sleeve and he shivered. Lot stepped back when a small boy opened the door, very composed and in a grey uniform. Very polite, he said, ‘Yes, can I help you?’

  If he stretched and stood on his toes, Lot could just see the other children, bunched there, further up on the stairs, watching and listening. He tried to step inside but the boy kept the chain on the door. ‘I have come to see Mrs Townsend.’

  ‘She’s not in,’ said the good-looking boy with a stubborn tilt of his chin.

  ‘But she must be in. She is in! I’ve just been speaking to her on the phone, not two minutes ago.’

  The boy pushed the door further closed so Lot was forced to listen through a crack. ‘She had to go out, in a hurry. Why did you want her?’

  ‘Important matters I have to discuss. I have been trying to explain for weeks now.’

  More than a spark of interest then—unease? ‘Are you Mr Walsh?’

  He did not want to alarm the child. Lot excitedly moved his hat from one side of his head to the other. A hard drip of rain was hitting his ear, leaking from the porch gutter.

  ‘Yes, I am Mr Walsh.’

  ‘I will tell her you called.’ And the door was closed. If he hadn’t removed his hand in time his fingers would have been cut off. Lot found himself standing there feeling silly with his mouth still open, foiled once again. Why were her children hiding her? Why was the woman so afraid to venture out into the world?

  But he’d spoken to her! He had managed that. He went home that night disappointed but hopeful.

  And that is the nearest he’s been till this morning when he made the mistake with his damnfool alarm.

  He’s given up arriving early because he has learnt that there is no point. At Camberley Road the morning routine hardly varies. The children set out together and they split when they come to the end of Camberley Road. Sometimes the cleaner uses her own key, sometimes the children are still there to let her in. But this morning he stands and he watches beside his tree and he sees four children come out of the house… sometimes this happens… and when it does he assumes one of them is ill. Children are like that, after all—colds and snuffles. He used to try all ways to get out of going to school himself. It’s the second child, the second eldest, who’s missing. And he’s hanging around hardly taking any notice when he sees the cleaner turn the corner and approach the house with her Union Jack carrier bag as usual. And just as Lot is about to turn away, the navy door opens and out comes Caroline Townsend. It must be her—it must be her…

  She carries a briefcase. She’s so small! Her head is wrapped in a scarf and her trenchcoat is swinging behind her; she walks with a confident stride. She glances back down the road, sees the cleaner and raises her hand in a brief wave before hurrying on.

  The next-door neighbour, coming out of his house at the same time, tips his hat to her but although she smiles she does not pause.

  Way down the road the cleaner stops and screws up her eyes. She raises her head like a hunting dog and she calls, ‘Cooeee! Mrs Townsend! Mrs Townsend! Just a sec.’ And then she clutches her hat, lowers her head and flops along on her stout, stumpy legs. She wobbles all over as she goes, looking up every now and again to avoid the dangerous lampposts. But she’s too old for running and Mrs Townsend’s almost round the corner by now. The older woman grips her chest and stops and pants dangerously; her shoulders droop and her bag hangs heavily at her side. She hasn’t been able to keep up and Mrs Townsend’s gone. She’s going so fast, striding out so briskly that she must have caught up with her children.

  The cleaner calls out feebly, ‘Mrs Townsend!’ But it’s no use. She hasn’t got much of a voice left and her employer can’t hear her.

  In his excitement Lot almost forgets to follow his prey. He is tempted to go to the aid of the cleaner because she’s standing there puffing, close to collapse after her brave athletic effort. But pulling himself together just in time Lot comes out of hiding and, going at a pace that’s closer to a run than a walk—he doesn’t want to attract too much attention—he hastens up the road after Caroline Townsend and it takes him about four minutes to reach the corner.

  It’s too late. There are not four children at all… but five. There they go, sauntering along the road, three going one way and two the other as if it’s any other morning, as if their mother had not, just a moment ago, been rushing along behind them.

  Lot stands on the junction, baffled, scratching his head. Strange though, very odd, because as well as an overstuffed satchel, this morning the second child, the one who he thought was originally missing, is carrying what looks like her mother’s briefcase.

  This is too much for poor Lot to bear. Frustrated and angry, he can’t give up now, not when he’s come so close. He knows Caroline Townsend exists, he knows she is there, and so that’s why he’s going to come back to Camberley Road tomorrow night after dark and break in through the cellar window.

  Twenty-nine

  SHE SITS QUIETLY FOR a long time, and then, ‘You call yourself a Christian and yet you can do this to me! Three months and God knows how many days you’ve kept me here… not knowing what’s going to happen next, never knowing what ridiculous game you’re going to play, robbing me of everything, leaving me with nothing, no dignity, no pride! You seem to think that you’re going to get away with it, well screw you, Vanessa. Screw you!’ She weakens again, ready to cry while her words ricochet madly about in her head and she realises dimly that if she goes on much longer at this pitch she’s going to fall into a faint like she did last time. She will wake up with that disgusting odour cloying the air all around her, a rancid stench she could not identify until gradually, feeling the soggy stain down the front of her dress, she became aware that she was lying in a pool of her own sick. ‘Last week you said you were going to let me out but you lied! You lied! I’m talking to you Vanessa, damn you, I know you’re out there! Can you hear me? I know you can hear me so why don’t you speak?’

  She should sound powerful in her rage but she doesn’t, not any longer. By the time she stops yelling the world is topsy-turvy, her words are disjointed and she hardly knows who she is any more.

  She doesn’t even know if she means what she says.

  ‘I should break your neck, you fucking little shit,’ Caroline Townsend trails off in a voice that is full of contempt and revulsion. Weakly she returns to sit down on her bench while she winds a piece of new, softly curling hair round her finger. ‘And so help me when I get out of here I am going to do that.’ But this last sentence is murmured so low and despairingly it cannot possibly be heard outside the walls of the sauna.

  There’s nobody there to
hear anyway. Caroline is alone. The children aren’t due for another half-hour. She weeps until her body aches.

  She continues to whisper to herself; on and on her own voice goes, a gentle monologue lulling and soothing, infusing herself with a sense of repose because she knows from experience now that this is the only way to get by, the only method of staying sane. She even strokes herself with her hands, pretending that they are somebody else’s, long, gentle strokes that are cool and calming on her brow. ‘You’re all right, Carrie, you’re all right. Nothing’s going to happen. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Now why don’t you go over there and fill your cup. Try taking a sip of water.’

  It’s not that she’s suffered any violence in her long, warm months of solitary confinement. It isn’t that she’s been starved, or abused, or deprived of light, books or music. In a weird way she has acclimatised to it very well, a life without any pressure. She doesn’t have to pretend to be anything other than who she is. And her children have never threatened her with anything more than a rise in the temperature of her cage. They didn’t have to do that. She took great pains to do everything she was told. Apart from the occasional unpreventable outpouring of rage—and only when she knows it is safe to do that—she has obeyed their every command. You cannot trust children… not in the same way as you might trust an adult. She feels like Gulliver, bound and held down by little minds. And she’d soon learned she had nothing with which to bribe them, or to threaten them, or to fool them.

  Quite often she weeps like this when they leave her.

  But she felt she had been attacked. Day after day, night after night she lay in her prison licking her wounds, ashamed of the grotesque crime committed against her almost as though she’d been raped. She squirmed at the idea of ever telling a living soul. Whatever else, what has happened between herself and her children must forever remain a secret. She felt befouled, even though she was encouraged to keep herself clean, even though they brought medication for the ailments she complained about—her aching bones and her headaches, her mouth ulcers and her sore throats. Oh yes, and true to their word they allowed her her Walkman, with a boxful of carefully chosen tapes, vetted by Vanessa—classical music only, none of her old sleazy Tina Turners or the wonderful Marianne Faithfull.

  She has become possessed by food. It is fun for her, a pleasant game trying to guess what they’re going to bring. Every time it arrives, pushed in through the pipe-hole, she must eat it, she must finish every last crumb on her plate. She has become fat, cherubic, like a Rossetti angel or one of those ancient, languishing Madonnas with a revoltingly white, slug-like child at her breast. Her hands, which used to be long and sinewy, have become chubby—even her finger-ends look square. She has set herself time for exercise. Four times a day, after food, she paces her cell, fifty times across and back, and she does step-ups on and off the sauna bench but even so she is fat, but she is not unhealthy. She is not unhealthy in the way she was before she became a prisoner.

  Caroline Townsend never thought she would ever be free of alcohol. But now, the thought of a drink makes her shudder; the thought of a cigarette in her new, sweet-smelling mouth seems foul. Over and over again she’s asked for a mirror but up until now the children have refused her permission. ‘You’re not vain like that any more, Mother,’ says Vanessa. ‘It’s not what is on the outside that counts, you have to feel beautiful from within.’

  Caroline cannot bring herself to reply to that sort of inane remark.

  Sometimes, at the very beginning of her captivity, she cried, pleading hysterically, but her children refused to come near her when she was doing that. At a regal nod from Vanessa they cut short their visit and left her alone. She thought about slicing her wrists with the bits of glass from a broken bowl, but something warned her that, even if she succeeded, even if she was very brave and cut through a vein, they would not let her out. They did not care if she died, but that was not their intention. They did not want her dead. At first she prayed every day to a God in Whom she did not believe. She prayed that Robin would come and save her. Even then, even in those first slow weeks, she believed she loved Robin, and thoughts of him hurt her heart. But slowly and relentlessly in her lonely hours she gradually began to see that her pursuit of him was not a need any more, but a habit, so deadly precise, so predictable that it was obscene. She gradually began to understand that Robin and everything about him had become nothing more than an evil storm in her own heart.

  Calmly rising to his full height he used to say to his friends, ‘Excuse her.’ Wagging a sarcastic, hypocritical finger he used to scorn, ‘Why don’t you have another drink, Caroline. It’ll help you become more interesting and that is obviously what you want.’ There was a hard metallic edge to his voice—a new edge. The house was full of flowers then, she used to make sure it was always full of flowers… and how was it possible that no one but she could smell the stench of the sickroom under the blossoms?

  It was true—from the moment she first got pregnant, he immediately embarked on a subtle mission to destroy her. She’d had her fling and now that he had made her a Mother she must settle down to looking after her children and be Good. She was such a child that the very word ‘Mother’ frightened Caroline. There were so many examples of Robin’s incongruous behaviour, all the more sinister because they were so commonplace. And Caroline saw how influenced he was by the whip of religion held over him by his mother.

  Having had no family life of her own, Caroline made an awkward mother; with no model to base herself on she was vulnerable. In spite of the milk she couldn’t breastfeed though she tried at first, for Robin’s sake. Too ashamed, too confused, she couldn’t tell him why. She was a model, an actress—her breasts were as important to her as Robin’s craggy television face was to him, and in this world of men she might have to depend on them one day. If she had told him this, the scorn in his eyes would have slain her. So she tried. She struggled with a great reservoir of love which she did not dare release, unable to understand her own anger. It was horribly painful. She ended up like a cow, milking herself with an ugly machine while waves of misery swamped her, transferring her milk to Tupperware bottles which were kept stacked up in the fridge.

  What was she born for?

  The answer was plain in Robin’s eyes, so baleful and accusing. At the end of the day she was born, as all women were, to give birth.

  She could not bear the way she sounded. Yes, oh yes, it was perfectly true, it was as her own mother told her—she was a person impossible to love.

  Even their lovemaking changed and she was afraid that Robin was being unfaithful. Ordinary and boring as she was—perhaps her hair was wrong, or her face—she tried all ways to make herself more appealing. Sex was not for pleasure any more—it should only be enjoyable when it was part of a nobler scheme, to procreate. His glib insults over anything she did when it came to the kids, oh God, why did she try when right from the start she was doomed—and she soon became apprehensive. If Robin was around she hardly dared pick up her baby. A light sleeper, Robin woke instantly in response to a baby’s screams and by the time Caroline dragged herself out of the deepest slumber, chilly, miserable and indecisive, he had warmed the bottle and was rocking the guzzling child, tightlipped. ‘I’ve got to be up before seven,’ he would say, cold and blaming. And there she was, standing at the door in her negligée, not like a mother at all but more like a slut, slick with face-cream.

  ‘I was on my way, don’t worry. It just takes me longer to get going, that’s all. You go back to bed, I’ll do it.’ But jittery, frantically trying to do well, she was rough. She didn’t dress them correctly, she couldn’t manage money, she couldn’t even get up in time to take the kids to the park with Robin on a Sunday. But then, one morning, she was shocked to hear him whisper, ‘Don’t disturb your mother, she needs her sleep.’ Poor, hopeless, inefficient Mother. Such an innocent start to that slow, insidious conspiracy. And they’d creep around the house getting dressed and they’d go out wearing unsuitable cl
othes and laugh about it together when they got home.

  She began to feel like a child to her children.

  At twenty-five, there she was with modest attainment and thwarted ambition, nothing very much to say except that she was pregnant again. Robin’s media friends, some of them the most awful, conceited people, were not Caroline’s friends… she realised she didn’t have very many friends of her own any more, they’d been driven away by Robin who called them embarrassing. The arguments started. She’d interrupt his conversations just to let people know she had views of her own, and he would pause politely and raise his eyebrows and say, ‘Well, that’s certainly another way of looking at it, Caroline, but as I was saying, Alan…’ Everyone started to take that attitude—oh, don’t worry she was always invited—she went everywhere with Robin but among the witty women she was the one with nothing to say and nothing in her head worth listening to. Pretty and amusing, she could talk about people and things but she didn’t have a clue when it came to the larger issues and the starved and undeveloped side of her sat at the table struggling for words.

  If she grumbled she was a dissatisfied wife and a nag. ‘Darling, you make no sense,’ he’d say. ‘You are making a fool of yourself.’

  If she strayed into his study while he was working she immediately knew she was a nuisance, so she never stayed long. His real interests lay with himself—his work, his children, his house and his furniture—and now she’d given him the children (he’d obeyed his promise to God) his wife was only a piece of that furniture, a piece full of unfortunate flaws. His passion found its release in his work and going to Mass on a Sunday.

  ‘Why must you look so hurt all the time?’

  So that’s pretty much how it was. But it was like that for a very long time. They stopped calling her Mummy—she can’t remember either of the twins ever calling her that—because Robin so often referred to her disparagingly, using that freezing cold title ‘your mother’.