Mothers and Daughters

by Fleming, Leah

‘Thank you so much for showing us round. We’d love to see it again in the summer when you’ve done the back garden. Are you getting in a maternity nurse for your confinement?’

  Connie smiled. ‘I don’t think so. We’ll manage.’ She didn’t want anyone living in their house. What was wrong with how things were now? She loved all the friendship and collective effort that had gone into their homemaking. Those remarks about Nigel had really hurt but she must learn to swallow her fury. There was more to her new life with Paul than she had imagined.

  Before they took him into partnership he’d been vetted, and his wife alongside him, wined and dined and given the once-over. She understood why they must fit into the ethos of their set-up but the rest sat uneasy on her.

  The fact that Esme had been one of Crompton’s Biscuits clan did hold some clout, distantly related to the famous spinning wheel inventor, Samuel Crompton of Hall’th Wood, near Bolton. The fact Connie was a university graduate and a grammar school scholar also went in her favour. Winstanley was still a name worthy of comment in the town.

  If only you knew the half of my history you’d not have been so keen on Dr Paul’s young wife, Connie mused, but that’s for me to know and you never to find out. That’s why I’m going to a private clinic. You play the ball where it lands, and she’d just scored a rounder.

  Zoe’s birth was natural, lengthy but straightforward. She slid into the world, took one look at her anxious parents and howled. Connie cried at the sight of her. She had so wanted a boy, deep down, an ally, not a rival, and a reminder of the baby she’d already given away. Paul held the tiny mite in his arms and cried. They were soul mates from that second on, and Zoe was very much her own person.

  ‘Why do all babies look like Winston Churchill?’ Connie quipped, eyeing up this new arrival for any imperfections. So full of life, curious, already the baby’s eyes flickered around, finding the light, searching her mother’s face, squinting with fierce concentration. They had loads of names for a boy – Alexander, Phillip, James – but only one girl’s name came to mind, they could agree on: Zoe, Zoe Esme Jerviss.

  It was Joy who held her and swooned, ‘I want another baby. I want another. I thought you’d go for Anastasia,’ she said, ‘but Zoe is a lovely name.’

  Connie felt she should have told Joy then how it was that the name was already used but the moment passed and she let it.

  They chose something Greek with no strings and it suited this bundle of life. Connie and baby stayed in the clinic for a full two weeks, receiving visitors, cards, presents and revelling in the wonderful bouquets, cards, telegrams. She wrote to Yaya Papadaki enclosing a Polaroid snap of the two of them. Here was another girl, what a disappointment! Stelios would be raising his hands that Paul would have a dowry to find when the time came. Everyone thought how clever she was, how beautiful Baby looked in her wicker crib edged with net and lace in her little nursery decorated in white with great murals painted on the wall by Nigel as his gift to the baby. It was the funkiest nursery in the town, but it didn’t meet with Marianne’s approval.

  ‘She’ll never sleep a wink with those colours.’ And for once the matron was right.

  This was no fantasy baby, who slept through the night at three weeks, who took to the breast when it was offered, like a native. This was Zoe, like her namesake, feisty, fighting the breast, screaming through the night, so they took to driving her round the block in the dark. Connie was desperate for peace to sleep, to think her own thoughts, but Zoe had other ideas. Nothing she did seemed to pacify her, and yet when Paul took over the baby, she relaxed and fell asleep on his shoulder.

  ‘What am I doing wrong?’ Connie cried to Rosa. ‘I don’t think she likes me very much.’

  ‘Nonsense, just relax. She senses your tension and tenses up. It gives her wind,’ came the calm reply. Why was Rosa, who had so much to complain about, the one whose door was always open for a fag and a scream?

  Try as she might Connie felt afraid of her daughter. The power of those blue eyes eyeing her up, dismissing her futile efforts to be the perfect mum, was electric.

  Just keep her busy, keep on the move, pushing her around in Joy’s Silver Cross pram, visiting the shops, into the park, across town to see Rosa, anything to stave off the moment when they were alone together. Connie was exhausted, disappointed and lonely.

  It didn’t help that Paul was worked off his feet. He was never at home when she needed him. His half-day off seemed to get nibbled at the edges by unfinished visits and phone calls. There were practice meetings, drug reps taking them out for dinners, paperwork and filling in for the others in emergencies. No one warned her just what hard work it was being on call, trying to calm down patients in distress when Paul was already on a night visit, and all against the background of a wailing child.

  How she wished she had old Dr Valium’s prescription in her bathroom cabinet. How would she ever have coped on her own, with little Anna? What a fantasy that was. This was the reality of motherhood. She was on her own, full stop, but they had to come to an accommodation, to some truce. What was wrong with Zoe? It felt so personal, as if her baby looked at her, screwed up her face and said, ‘I don’t rate you much as a mother. But my daddy is wonderful, so let’s get on with it and you can tag along.’

  It was as if that wailing bundle of energy just climbed into bed between them, separating them so they could only wave to each other from separate tracks.

  One night when Paul was out on call and Zoe screamed and screamed, Connie shut the nursery door and ran into the night garden, far from the noise. I could kill you, she cried. Nothing I do is good enough for you and I can’t cope any more. This can’t go on.

  She sat on the bench, sobbing. Why wasn’t there anybody to put their arms around her and tell her she was doing a good job? She felt so alone and helpless. No one told her it would be like this. Now she knew why girls needed their mums at such a time of crisis, someone to take over, someone to console, but midnight was a lonely place to be with no comfort at hand.

  ‘Don’t leave Baby on her own, she needs you,’ came a voice into her head. ‘Go back in and tell her who is boss, try loving her and she will love you back.’ Where did these words come from? What if she was choking or being sick in her distress? What if something terrible happened to this baby?

  Connie raced through the garden up the stairs two at a time as she heard the rasps and little sobs of her crying child. Zoe was only a tiny baby in a strange world. I’m the grown-up here and she needs my comfort, she thought. Suddenly from nowhere a wave of such protective love and tenderness washed over her and she flung open the door, relieved to see Zoe was still breathing.

  ‘Mummy’s here … Come to Mummy.’ She gathered up the hot bundle with such concern. ‘There, there. Perhaps if I sing you a lullaby, it’ll get better.’

  The words and the tune to that famous ‘Liverpool Lullaby’ came into her head. She rocked the baby and sang some new words of her own.

  How I love thee, baby mine

  I’ll climb the stars to make them thine

  I’ll fetch the moon right to your door

  To shower your head with sleepy dust …

  Zoe settled snuggled into her breast and sucked until she was drunk. You are mine, Connie smiled. No one will take my baby this time … no one in the world. You are, all I have and I’m the only mother you’ve got. We’ll muddle along somehow.

  When Paul found them later they were curled up together, dead to the world. The first of many battles had been won that night.

  Connie smiles, thinking of Zoe, now a mother of two, herself a busy GP. Over the past few years she’s been a source of strength and pride. Somewhere along the line they must have been good enough parents. Best of all she was there for her daughter when Sam and Susannah came along. It’s always good when parents become friends in later life, but it’s a gift not a right.

  It was Zoe’s suggestion that Connie came out here alone to sort out this business once and for all. Her
children love Crete as much as she does.

  After that first visit she and Paul had never stayed away long, and it got easier after the Colonels were deposed and even better when Greece was brought into the EU. That’s when the tourist rush really began.

  Connie and Paul have no need of a plot of land. There’s always a family house at their disposal for a couple of weeks or more. First they came with baby Zoe, and then after Alex was born three years later. The children came out with Connie when they could to learn the language and meet Granny Ana’s relations, who spoiled them rotten. Even Paul tried to muster some of the language, but gave up, promising that when he retires he’ll try again.

  Doctors in the seventies and eighties had it hard, on call night and day, extra clinics and constant change within the NHS. There never was time for Connie to have a full-time job. When she married Paul and his job she became married to the phone night and day, but she did try running the pre-school playgroup for a while, taking over Brownies when Auntie Lee retired, helping in The Silk Route when it expanded into the Country Style Homemaker outlet. This gave Joy and her new partner, Harry, time to go on trade visits to Thailand and the Far East. Kim was trained up to be the heir to the Empire.

  Connie smiles, thinking how she struggled against her role as a doctor’s wife but with middle age gradually she got sucked into its way of life. If she was bored and put upon, neglected and left to her own devices, she created her own social life. She grew used to finding a way through to be herself, training first in listening skills, and then for a counselling certificate. Then she was asked to be a magistrate, though no one in that role was expected to harbour a secret like hers, a secret loss that never diminished. However long ago it happened, every time she looked at Zoe and Alex the pain of it stabbed her heart.

  ‘The Manchester plane’s landed, Connie.’ One of the reps tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Sorry about the delay but they’ll be a little while yet. I’m afraid three British planes have landed at once and you know what that does for baggage!’

  Connie began to feel the panic rising. Will there be anyone on that plane for me? Even now she couldn’t be sure.

  This is the final piece of the jigsaw … I’ve waited for the right time to open my heart; all those dutiful years of parent evenings, charitable committees, seeing Zoe and Alex through the difficult years to university and beyond, the prospect of retiring, all our plans for the future. There never seems a right time to go in search of the truth.

  But fate had other ways of pulling her up short, she sighed.

  Here I am waiting, and all because of a little lump …

  29

  The Cancer Eye, 2005

  One night when they were christening, the new mattress of the antique French bed Paul had bought for Connie’s approaching sixtieth birthday, he paused, holding his fingers over her breast.

  ‘How long have you had this lump?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, stop being a doctor!’ Connie laughed. ‘What lump?’

  ‘The one I can feel here,’ he replied, fingering into her breast. ‘There’s a thickness, and it’s hard. Feel?’

  ‘That’s not a lump, it’s just my breast, being my breast,’ she whispered.

  ‘Sit up,’ he ordered as he palpated round her right breast, and in the soft candlelight she could see he wasn’t joking. He led her own hand under the nipple to the round thick spot. ‘And when was your last checkup?’

  ‘I think I’ve got one soon,’ she said, her heart sinking.

  ‘I want you to see Alison tomorrow. She’ll refer you to the Breast Clinic immediately.’

  ‘You’re joking, I’m fine. I’ve been off the HRT for three years now.’ After the last episode of bad research results they’d agreed it wasn’t worth the risk her taking it any more, what with her mother’s history. They’d been so cautious, but Paul was right. There was something as hard as a rock inside her. How could she not have noticed this?

  They sat drinking tea until dawn and suddenly she kept fingering round the thickness.

  ‘Have you not been examining yourself?’ Paul sighed.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to but I never get round to it,’ she confessed.

  ‘Oh, Connie! I thought you of all people would know what to look for?’

  Then everything went into overdrive – appointments, mammograms, ultrasound scans, revealing a tumour that was certainly no benign cyst. In the days that followed Zoe and Alex rallied round. Joy, Rosa and Neville came to cheer her up.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ Joy smiled.

  ‘But what if it’s gone walkabout in my lymph glands? What if it’s all too late?’ Connie tried to put a brave face on her terror, drawing strength from the kindness of friends who had been through the ordeal themselves. She was being admitted to a special club of women who showed her their scars and talked of chemo and radiotherapy, prosthesis, reconstruction; a whole new vocabulary to learn.

  Suddenly her busy world shrunk to a hospital bed, a kindly consultant and a wall plastered with pictures of Zoe’s children, Sam and Susie, and Alex’s new daughter, Esme-Kate. Why? How? Why now? Her mind was racing with the possibilities of a mortal wound. What if it was all too late? There were cards and a florist’s shop full of encouragement and hope.

  ‘If anyone can wrestle this thing to the ground, you will, Connie!’ Rosa and Marty wrote.

  Zoe gave her reams of Internet information and books to read. Paul went quiet, and the night before the op sat on her bed, holding her hand. ‘I know it’ll be all right, but whatever it takes I’m not going to lose you or let you go. We’ll battle this together.’ She saw the tears in his eyes.

  ‘What did I do to deserve you?’ she replied, knowing, for all their scraps and the ups and downs in their marriage, it was a good one.

  Why was this happening to them now? Why not? There were thousands of women like her each day battling with the same diagnosis. Was it the years on the pill or HRT? She was slim and fit enough, didn’t smoke now. It wasn’t fair, and yet she supposed there was always a randomness about life; it was just another of its little challenges to overcome.

  But it was Neville’s card that challenged her the most, with just a few words of Quaker wisdom he’d been given by a friend: ‘Look thy sorrow mightily in the face and fathom it.’

  What did that mean? Standing staring cancer in the face was not for cowards. How dependent she now felt on the good offices of Paul’s colleagues, putting her trust in their skills to give her a second chance. And why should she be so lucky when others weren’t?

  I’ve done my job, passed on my genes to the next generation, who in turn have passed on theirs, she mused. Perhaps she was redundant in that respect, but not ready to pop her clogs and go quietly. I’ve only just got my bus pass, she laughed, but to lose a breast and the possibility of further, wearisome treatments was not on her agenda.

  She lay alone after the operation, sore, tired, tearful and suddenly aware of Neville’s words. The news was better than she had hoped. Her chances of remission were good. The lymph glands were clear. Perhaps there was a future after all, but the shock of it would take some time to settle down.

  ‘You’ve got to live for now. The past is over. The future, who knows … The present is all we’ve got. That’s how I got through,’ said Rosa. ‘I kept thinking of running my dancing classes again and having my own child. You have to be positive, Connie. Now you’ve got a cancer eye.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It sees things differently. It’s the eye of someone who’s had a brush with their own mortality. It looks to see what really matters to you. It makes you do all the things you’ve dreamed of. Don’t make too many plans and get bogged down. Just sort out any unfinished business and follow your heart. You’ve been given a gift of a second chance. Go for it, kiddo!’

  Joy brought diet plans, vitamins and goodies to build up Connie’s strength. ‘When you’re stronger we’ll take days out, all of us. Your illness has brought me up sharp, made me take sto
ck of my own life and slow down to rethink my priorities. There’s so much of the world I want to see. I’d love to take Mummy back to Burma, if we can get permission. It’s not the world she knew but I’m going to give it a try. Now is what matters!’

  On the sixth night after her operation Connie couldn’t sleep, her drain was slow to clear, her mind racing and she felt very alone. Fathom it. She knew from the practice how hidden grief could make people sick. Who was it that said that the mind can forget bad things but the body never forgets? This tissue rock of sadness and regret had grown quietly in her breast, close to her heart. This lump of sadness, never acknowledged, had turned rotten. Fathom it.

  Yes, there was unfinished business in her life. Much as she loved her two children there was always the one she’d never held for long, the child she still held close to her heart, now grown to an adult, the child she could never forget.

  No one can weigh such grief or the cost of it. All those lost years when she’d done nothing to find her – it was never the right time; the children were too young; the promises she made to those long dead; a myriad excuses. Who was there to hurt but herself?

  If ever there was a right time to change things, it was now. The future was uncertain. Fathom it.

  In the wee small hours of the night, she was doing just that. For years she’d skirted round this hole in her heart, patched it, darned it with silken excuses, filled the gap with busyness. But it was always there, this unfinished business.

  So no more shillyshallying: it was time to open deeper wounds than the visible scar on her chest. That tissue would heal given time but the other wound must weep and heal as best it could. Why not start to search for information that was rightfully hers? There were new laws and guidelines for mothers such as she. Attitudes were changing. She had rights too. Time to share her secret, to ask for help, to make some meaning out of this brush with death.