Mothertime

by Gillian White

  And Isobel watched with delighted eyes and sent her daughter-in-law pious verses at Christmas, illustrated with bloated Madonnas. The cardboard itself smelled of churches.

  And yet she still loved him… can you believe it! And she still wanted him. There was something she could not understand going on inside him, and the more he withdrew, the more precise and fastidious he became, the more desperate was Caroline.

  Courteous, understanding and considerate, nobody could call Robin insensitive and anyone could see that he was the world’s most wonderful father. ‘Aren’t you lucky, Caroline? He’s absolutely marvellous with the children!’ You don’t leave husbands like that, not unless you’re mad you don’t.

  Caroline said, ‘He has very firm ideas about family life, about children.’ Perhaps she was paranoid, filling her head with imaginary fears. It must be so, because everyone thought he was wonderful while they made sure Caroline knew that she was a mess. She was beautiful, but a mess. Oh, but she ached for love. She longed to find someone to play with. She pushed her pram through the park when the great solitary trees were decked in their reds and russets and yellows. She walked through the streets when it was dusk, when the shopfronts were ablaze with lights and illuminations, and then back to the park again where she’d try to get lost in the spindly woods, she’d try to identify the birdsong when the rust was on the bracken, as another day led to another, and another. And another. And once she ran home to the waiting house, pounding on the door like a terrified woman, feeling herself trapped, unable to get in or out, forgetting about her key.

  ‘If you’re going to tear around madly like that, you’d better leave the pram behind next time,’ said Robin, appraising her coldly. ‘Why don’t you let Mrs Guerney take them? After all, that’s what she’s paid for.’

  She was out of control and disgraceful.

  Thank God for Mrs Guerney. That bulwark of common sense arrived just in time. She came to scrub, to beat and to sweep, she came in time to prevent Caroline Townsend from losing her nerve completely. When she’d heard that Caroline had given up acting, given up everything, she called that a ‘monstrous occurrence’. Remembering the Caroline she used to know when they both worked in the photographic studio, the girl with such hope, such beauty, such poise, ‘What on earth has become of you?’ she asked, her big face almost rammed against Caroline’s own. ‘What have they done?’

  ‘I want something to do,’ cried Caroline. ‘I’m no use here any more and I’m desperate.’

  ‘Leave him,’ said Mrs Guerney firmly. ‘Take the baby, pick up your bags and go.’

  ‘I love him, and where would I go?’ And I am not fit to look after my baby.

  ‘Then fight,’ said Mrs Guerney, her eyes dark and casting themselves suspiciously around. ‘You were never a timid woman, Mrs Townsend. You were tough once, I remember. You’ll just have to get tough again.’ She sucked on a plastic cigarette. Mrs Guerney had only just given up smoking. ‘I hope you are up to it.’

  ‘Fight against what?’

  ‘You have married a man who does not like women. He is in love with the Virgin Mary, he is in love with his mother.’

  But it was years before Caroline dared pluck up the courage to go out to look for a job. By then she was steel, honed, shiny metal, tempered in the fire of humiliation and loss. But as fragile as a tiny little baby.

  ‘Mother, do you know anyone called Mr Walsh?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of Mr Walsh. Why?’

  ‘He’s been trying to get hold of you. He keeps phoning up and this evening he came to the door. Dominic thinks that he might be a plainclothes policeman.’ Vanessa is pale and nervous. She cannot continue for very much longer.

  ‘Perhaps he is.’

  ‘Or he could be a pervert. Ilse is worried. She says he sounds like the man she’s seen lurking in the park.’

  Last weekend, home from school, Sacha and Amber played down in the basement for most of the day. It was amazing… Caroline felt absurdly proud! Sacha brought down the tubular bells and Caroline taught them some French songs. The twins pushed a book through the pipe-hole and Caroline read them The Skin Horse.

  The children have taken to eating their supper down in the basement now and Caroline adores their company. Three weeks ago they brought down two standard lamps, five deckchairs and a round Chinese rug. Occasionally Vanessa lights a candle and leads the children in embarrassed prayer. They chat together now, as a family, except for the locked door between them to which they hardly ever refer because it would be too impolite. They come down to tell her what they’ve been up to during the day, they bring her their little problems and Mother listens. While Sacha and Amber are playing, while Dominic builds himself up on Daddy’s weights, the older girls listen to the radio play sharing toast and porridge with their mother.

  Caroline tenses and holds her breath when she hears Amber whisper, ‘Vanny, don’t you think that it might be a good idea to do what you said yesterday and let Mummy out? I think that I want to touch her.’

  Caroline says very gently, ‘Oh Amber, I would like it very much if you did.’

  Thirty

  IS MR WALSH A policeman?

  And who is the strange man who watches the house?

  ‘There he is again,’ Dominic would say, annoyingly excited, looking out into the night almost as if he welcomed trouble, peeping through the curtains, and Vanessa’s heart would drop, her eyes would go bright and frightened as she joined him at the window. She’d do her homework badly again and she might have to stay behind tomorrow.

  ‘Maybe we should just go right out there and ask him.’

  ‘No.’ Dominic was firm about that. ‘He looks like a nutter to me.’ Since Mother’s been a prisoner Dominic has, extraordinarily, stopped wetting the bed. More than any of the others he seems to enjoy the feeling of being in control.

  Dominic’s difficult. Out of all her four siblings Vanessa would have guessed the twins would cause the most concern but it hadn’t worked out that way—apart from the few times they nearly blurted out the truth, that is. When their little friend Jessie came to tea Vanessa, horrified, heard them discussing the matter quite calmly right there on the bedroom floor. They’d got out their tatty paper dolls; they had hundreds of them, in a box, cut from Mrs Guerney’s catalogues—a bizarre mixture of types and age groups: middle-aged women in bloomers and long, bone-ribbed corsets, men with peaked caps, in golfing gear, children in frilly swimsuits, and teenagers clad in jeans and leather.

  ‘Here’s Mother,’ Vanessa heard Sacha say in her dreamily soft play voice. Her hand hopped up and down as she moved Mother along by the neck, into the empty shoe box which stood upright on the carpet. Vanessa waited at the door and watched her sister fix the lid. ‘All safely locked away. Look, Jessie, she can’t get out. Even if she tries. Even if she jumps up and down.’

  ‘What have you locked her up for? I wouldn’t like to lock my mummy up,’ said little wide-eyed Jessie, poking a trembling lip with a finger.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Amber defiantly. ‘You can look after them much better. This is fun!’ And she went on in her elderly way, ‘Look, here comes a friendly child with some sweets. Think how pleased Mother will be to see her after such a long time all alone. And if she’s not pleased she can be punished.’

  ‘How? Punished?’ Jessie, alarmed by the frightening turn in the familiar game, went into a sulk and said, ‘Well, I don’t want to play it like this. If we let Mother out she could go and sit over there with Daddy, quietly. She could watch the telly. Look, here he is, waiting for her.’

  ‘Don’t you dare let her out! Don’t you dare! You’ll get into terrible trouble, my girl!’

  Jessie cried steadily—that was the sort of child she was—but Amber giggled to hear such a perfect interpretation of Mrs Guerney, and when Vanessa strode into the room the twins looked up with open mouths while comprehension dawned.

  ‘That’s enough of this game!’ Vanessa bore down on them, bending to clear up the mess. �
�Jessie doesn’t like it and you know you shouldn’t be playing it. What have I told you, again and again,’ she said in a firm, knowing voice, while for Jessie’s benefit she added, ‘You let your imaginations run away with you, you two! If you don’t behave yourselves better than this, Jessie will not want to come again.’

  Everything’s falling apart. She just isn’t old enough! And how can Vanessa be on the watch for this sort of thing, day and night? Time is passing her by. Tense and watchful, she daren’t go out in the evenings to the cinema with her friends, and she excused herself from the school play because of all the rehearsals. She is thirteen years old now, fourteen next March the tenth; she will probably never marry, she will probably never be a missionary now, or a doctor, or a nun. She has given up trying to be wise. She will hide under the stairs while sniffer dogs search the house. She will end up in a prison cell, shunned and scorned by the whole world.

  Last week, along with a cardboard swan on a string, supposed to be a mobile, the twins brought home their finished drawing books. They sit together at the same table in the classroom but, even if they work apart, the results are always eerily similar.

  ‘Amber, what’s this?’ Vanessa flicked through Sacha’s book and found the almost identical picture. Underneath was the ill-formed caption, Mummy’s room. ‘What did Mrs Brightwater say when she looked at these? Did she ask you what you meant?’

  Mummy’s room was a black, square box with a single light dangling like Miss Muffet’s spider—the hanging legs illustrated the width and length of the beam. Mummy was in there of course, standing up, with her multi-striped triangular skirt and her splayed, red-block feet. Her face was big and pink at the window and her upside down smile was scribbled in like a tunnel. She looked as if she was screaming. And hard black lines made the bars which banged vertically down the page.

  ‘But Mother doesn’t look like that any more!’ Vanessa could have sobbed with frustration. ‘How could you draw her like that? How could you?’ She wanted to shake them. They hadn’t done that to Mother, had they? They’d never been so cruel! ‘What did she say? What did Mrs Brightwater say when she saw this?’

  Amber, upset, taken aback by her sister’s angry reaction, stuttered, ‘That’s an old picture. We wouldn’t draw Mummy like that now, would we Sacha?’

  Sacha clutched her sister’s arm. She plucked the sleeve for extra support. ‘No, we’d draw her smiling.’

  ‘But what did she say?’

  Sacha frowned, remembering, and her glasses glinted dully. ‘She said it was a novel idea, didn’t she, Amber? She said she wondered what our mother would make of it when she saw it. Oh yes, and then she asked you, didn’t she, Amber, if you sometimes found it hard to get close to your Mummy.’

  ‘I didn’t know what she meant,’ Amber nodded emphatically. She kept nodding. On and on, until it became a game and she tried to make herself dizzy. It looked as if she might wobble her head off her neck. Vanessa grabbed her shoulders and stopped her. Shaking her head now, in lively defiance, Amber said, ‘I told her that of course we couldn’t get close because of the door.’

  Vanessa sank down on the sofa, letting her head rest in her hands. Where was God in all this? Where had He gone? When she couldn’t watch over the twins, why wasn’t God taking over? She couldn’t cope with this all alone, not any longer.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vanny. It could have been any door. Mrs Brightwater wouldn’t know it was that door. Everyone’s house has lots of doors. It could have been the lavatory door for all she knew. Couldn’t it, Sacha?’

  Life used to be full of doors but now Vanessa’s afraid to peer through any of them for fear of what she might find there. There’s nothing good. There’s nothing nice waiting any more.

  And school’s difficult. She is falling behind in her work and last week Sister Agnes called her in for a talk. ‘Is there anything wrong, dear? Are there difficulties at home? You know you can confide in me.’ Sister Agnes knew about Mother. Well, everyone knew about Mother in her heyday, everyone knew about the bad things Mother did around about the time Daddy left her. Mother flamboyantly told the world that she didn’t care but she wouldn’t have got herself splashed all over the papers, or done all those terrible things unless she had really minded. Everyone read about her behaviour and Vanessa’s best friend, Hazel Ledson, used to bring neat little cuttings to school, folded over in a long brown envelope. ‘You could make a scrapbook,’ she told Vanessa, enviously.

  ‘Perhaps I should have a talk with your mother.’ Was that a threat? Did she know? Sister Agnes sat at her desk and between her hands she rolled a thin black pencil. The nun’s eyes were grave and grey and Vanessa feared they could see right through her. ‘Or your father. We have his number. Well, I don’t believe you’re suddenly finding the work too hard,’ she went on in a cold, scornful manner. ‘You’ve never had any difficulty keeping up with the class before, so there must be some other explanation.’ But she didn’t really want to know. God was the one to be burdened, not a busy nun with a school to run and gall to apply every night, every morning. For an awful moment Vanessa imagined Sister Agnes’ reaction if she told her the truth. She’d recoil in distaste. ‘This is a very important year for you, Vanessa, you do realise that? Are you allowing enough time for your homework? Three hours a night, you know, at least three hours, Vanessa.’

  Vanessa did not care about Sister Agnes’ opinion any more and it was suddenly, horribly obvious that the nun had never liked her. Not as a person, she hadn’t. All she cared about was having a pupil who handed in good work and the minute something went wrong she imagined it was deliberate. Vanessa didn’t want it to be like this. She’d be working if she could… she’d be pleasing her if she could. Sister Agnes smelled of mothballs and chalk and she carried too many burdens. Let Valerie Anderson be her favourite now, why should Vanessa care?

  Concentration of any kind is difficult. Every time Vanessa leaves the house for longer than an hour she panics, well aware of the horror she’s left behind her, and how easy it would be for someone to discover their secret.

  If the central heating broke down Mrs Guerney would ring the company. They’d be down in the cellar with their little toolbags within half an hour—and how could anyone stop them?

  Mr Walsh could knock on the door with a warrant and demand entry at any moment.

  If the water froze (and it’s cold enough these days), the cleaner would contact the plumber. He’d be bound to go straight down to the basement.

  Daddy might even decide that the time was right to sell his equipment. Vanessa wouldn’t know. He could be deciding it right now. His hand could be on the telephone this very minute, organising the whole thing.

  Then, when she found the money gone, she was mystified. For the life of her she couldn’t work out what had happened. She kept the petty cash—sometimes they accumulated well over a hundred pounds at a time—in the back of her musical box. The back was held on by two easy screws and she’d often kept secret things there, stories she didn’t want Mother to read, poems for Daddy.

  She trembled when she discovered that twenty-five pounds was missing, because it wasn’t the fact that the money was gone, it was because someone must have discovered their secret. It had to be Ilse. If Mrs Guerney found it by accident, dusting, or maybe she’d drop it on the carpet and perhaps the screws weren’t in there securely, she would call Vanessa and demand to know why she was hoarding such a huge amount. Mrs Guerney would never steal it! Thieves should have their hands chopped off as far as she was concerned.

  But Ilse needed money. She needed it to buy all the clothes that made her attractive for Paulo—she’d only just bought herself a pair of new Timberland boots. She needed money to go to her raves and to buy rounds of drinks at the pub.

  Wearily, feeling old and tired, Vanessa came downstairs, turned off the TV and told the others. ‘It’s gone. I’ve checked and re-checked. I don’t know what this means…’

  ‘I took it!’

  There was a stunne
d, loaded silence as everyone absorbed this. ‘You took twenty-five pounds out of the kitty? Dominic! What for?’

  ‘A remote control boat, like the one Josh Collins’ got.’

  Camilla said, ‘Why didn’t you ask us, if you wanted something so badly?’

  ‘I didn’t know I had to. I didn’t know the money was yours!’

  ‘Can we all have money?’

  ‘Shush, Amber. No, of course we can’t help ourselves and spend money when we feel like it. For one thing, we have to be careful to use it sensibly, and for another, if we start filling the house with new toys and books people will get suspicious. Surely you don’t need to be told these things, Dom. Surely you understand. Where is the boat?’

  He was quite unrepentant. His huge brown eyes were calm and sure and the lashes swept his cheeks dismissively. ‘I went out with Jonathan last Saturday morning. That’s when I bought it. I keep it at his house because it’s next to the river.’

  ‘But why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I didn’t think it was that important. And I don’t see why we shouldn’t have money to spend. After all, it belongs to all of us.’

  ‘But it’s Mother’s money.’ But Vanessa wasn’t getting through. Dominic, impassive, uninterested, was propped in a corner of the sofa absorbed in his Gameboy, considering the whole discussion a boring waste of time.

  ‘If it’s Mother’s money, not ours, then it means we have stolen it and we shouldn’t be spending it at all,’ he said. ‘But it’s ours.’

  ‘And what about the Gameboy?’ Camilla demanded to know. ‘You said you were given it to borrow by someone at school and I thought that was a bit funny. You’ve had it a long while now. When have you got to give it back?’

  ‘I swapped it.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘My Walkman.’

  ‘How could you! Daddy gave you your Walkman!’

  ‘I can do what I like with my own things and you’re silly the way you are about Daddy. Just because he gives us presents it doesn’t mean anything so special. Daddy should never have let this happen. Anyway, we can buy our own things now, we don’t have to wait for birthdays or Christmas. We don’t have to be nice or good any more.’ The machine on his knee bleeped loudly and Dominic gave a heavy sigh. He regarded Vanessa vaguely, like someone coming out of a trance. ‘And I don’t see why any of you think you can tell me what to do. No one can tell me what to do any more. I can do exactly as I like. No one’s in charge.’