So all I said to Molly was, ‘Cruel? I hope not.’ I didn’t want to cry in front of her, but the longer she stood there accusing me of being cruel to her father the more likely it seemed that I might. ‘It’s the Book Group night,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I have to go. It’s at Shirley’s.’
‘Go, then,’ she said, and left the flat before me.
*
I couldn’t concentrate of course. I’d liked the book – it was a biography of Katherine Mansfield and it had felt comforting to be absorbed in another woman’s life – but I sat silent most of the time, thinking that never in a million years would I have expected the children to side with their father against me. Well, that is a silly way to put it, of course they are not doing anything of the sort. I am the one who is seeing the situation in those extreme terms. How can I blame them when, to them, it seems that Don is over his obsession, or as over it as he ever will be, and has come back to us, and that I am the one rejecting him and can’t even articulate why. They see me as cruel, and that’s what it looks like. He is forgiven for his behaviour but I am not. He was seen as not being in his right mind – and now I am the one not in my right mind. They want me back, and I can’t find myself, that other Lou, that other mum I was before. This is afterwards, and it is how I am.
*
Judith rang just now. She wants me to come to a surprise birthday celebration for Molly – ‘… nothing much, a meal, that’s all, and a cake, and all her family here.’ I had to swallow hard. I should be the one organising a celebration. I am her mother. And I would have done, nearer the time. I had it planned in my head, not that Judith would believe it. I was going to invite everyone to dinner in a restaurant – hadn’t decided which one. Now Judith has pre-empted this. I couldn’t bear to argue and tell her it was my role to be inviting her – oh, let her do it. She loves it, she is in her element.
She said not to say a word to Molly, which is easy because I’ve hardly seen her this past week. She’s busy, with so little time left before she leaves again for Africa, and of course she’s staying at Judith’s – so cosy they all are, the rest of my family under the same roof. She’s popped in a couple of times, to collect things, but we’ve had only polite exchanges, nothing more. I asked if she was looking forward to going back, and she said yes, she was, she missed the landscape and she missed the children. ‘I’ll be back for good at the end of the year,’ she said. ‘I have to make the most of my time there.’ I asked her then if she was going to take up her deferred place at Leeds, and she said she would, and then do a PGTC. That surprised me. ‘You want to teach?’ I said. ‘Don’t sound so shocked,’ she said, ‘you know when we were little we always wanted to be teachers, like you.’
She said it in an offhand way, and she was speaking in the past tense, but still, I was touched. It’s true, of course, the bit about them both, when they were young, wanting to be teachers. They played schools all the time, taking it in turn to be the teacher. Molly was much stricter than Miranda. When she was the teacher I’d hear her shouting commands like a sergeant-major and she doled out punishments ferociously. I caught her once rapping Miranda’s knuckles with a ruler, really hitting her hard. I remember stopping her and saying I never, ever, hit a child – where on earth had she got this horrible idea from? Books, she said. She was only about eight at the time and the books she read were very limited, but she’d just been reading some version of a Dickens novel adapted for children, with gruesome illustrations of pupils being beaten. The power of literature!
Later, though, I seem to remember they went off the idea. When they were teenagers, teaching as a career became anathema to them – too dreary and uncool. Conversely, Don’s job grew in attraction. Advertising was cool, and they loved it when one of his adverts became popular and their friends quoted the copy back at them. Their father’s working life seemed quite glamorous to them – they were impressed by his agency’s offices in Marylebone – whereas my world was one they knew all too well and couldn’t wait to escape from. ‘Couldn’t you have done something else, Mum?’ Molly once asked me, and when I said I’d always wanted to be an infants’ teacher she groaned. I did once try, timidly, to defend my job, pointing out the satisfaction of being able to help a child read and write, but I never succeeded in making teaching sound fascinating, which to me it was and is.
Molly might make a good teacher but she hasn’t a temperament as suited to teaching as mine is. She is too bolshy. She’d find it a strain having to fit in with any rule or regulation of which she disapproved, and there will be plenty of those. And she has a temper, which she would have to control. In that one respect – temperament – Miranda would have made a better teacher. She doesn’t – didn’t – find it hard to accept direction. That was her undoing, in a way. She was too … No point in going on with this train of thought.
*
Paige’s mother asked to see me today. She hung about when she brought Paige, which was unusual – Paige isn’t one of those children who really needs to be brought to the classroom door. She asked, could she have a word about something after school? Not in front of Paige, though, she’d take her home first and come back, if that was OK. We fixed a time. All day I was wondering what on earth Paige’s mother wanted to see me about. Usually, when a parent requests ‘a word’ it is to complain and it isn’t difficult to predict what it will be about, but in Paige’s case I hadn’t a clue. So when Mrs York came out with ‘Paige is being bullied. She’s started wetting the bed. It’s that Haroun,’ I was astonished and not at all ready for the accusation.
The wisest thing to do in these cases is calm the parent down, encourage them to get whatever it is out of their system. It’s unwise to contest the truth of what you’re being told. If you do, arguments begin which get nowhere and the exchange can get very heated. But I was so surprised – the allegation was patently absurd – that I laughed. ‘Haroun?’ I said, ‘but he’s half Paige’s size!’ That, it seemed, had nothing to do with it. A bully, said Mrs York, could be any size. There were more ways of bullying than through physical strength. Hastily, I agreed. I apologised for laughing, said that I’d just been so taken aback, and then I invited her to tell me what she thought had been going on. Paige was being mocked, she claimed. Haroun called her fat. He led a whispering campaign among the children. They hissed ‘fatty’ at her, all the time. Mrs York wasn’t having it. Paige was tall, she was big-boned, she was well covered but she was not fat. She knew where this kind of thing led: Paige would become anorexic. She herself had suffered from this kind of taunt and she knew how it hurt and she wasn’t having her daughter go through this kind of thing.
I was tempted to list for Mrs York the jibes I’d heard Paige hurl at Haroun, but I didn’t. Instead I said that small children – I reminded her they were all five, or not quite five, in my class – were constantly saying mean things to each other. If I heard them, I stopped them, of course, but to a certain extent name-calling was part of the school experience and children learned how to deal with it. I wondered, tentatively, if maybe the bed-wetting was due to some other cause, if there might be something else troubling Paige … But that got Mrs York started on her own problems, her marital troubles which I’d no wish to listen to but which successfully got her off the topic of Haroun’s ‘cruelty’. I ended up promising to keep a very close eye on Haroun and making sure he did not torment Paige.
After she left, I sat thinking of the only time I ever asked to see one of my children’s teachers to complain about something. It wasn’t about bullying, though I know Miranda was bullied at one stage and I almost asked for a meeting then. It was because Molly had been put in a different class from her twin and was crying about it at night. I’d been informed, of course, that this was going to happen, and I’d been given the reasons and had even agreed with them. Both girls would benefit from this kind of separation. And Miranda did, there was no question about it. But Molly didn’t. She was upset, she wanted her twin at her side. Don was adamant that we should not
interfere – the school knew best. But did it? Did they? It worried me. I didn’t want to be one of those parents who complained, though I was not actually going to complain (so I told myself), but neither did I want Molly to go on being so miserable.
So I secretly went to see her teacher. It was an education, being on the other side. I realised that if I was not actually afraid of Molly’s teacher I was certainly apprehensive and also embarrassed. The teacher, whose name I forget, was young, not even thirty, I remember calculating, but she was brisk and confident, as though she’d been teaching for many years. I was about thirty-five myself then, so not much older, but she made me feel younger than she was. I said my piece, about Molly being wretched, parted from her twin, and the teacher said, without any preamble or apology, ‘She’s very bossy. The other children don’t like her.’ I was furious. It seemed to me her response had nothing to do with what I’d come about and I resented both her description of Molly and the statement that followed. But I clearly recall not wanting to offend the teacher and make things worse for Molly. So I tried to suggest that it was not bossiness that Molly was displaying but the symptoms of missing her twin. As for the other children not liking her, I asked – politely, I thought – how the teacher could tell, and how she thought Molly might be helped to overcome their dislike. I thought I was being tactful, but the teacher brushed aside my tact. Molly, she said, had to learn that she could not dominate. That was her problem and being a twin had made it worse because she was so used to dominating Miranda.
That’s the trouble with teachers – they have your child in their class for five minutes and hey presto, they know everything about her, much, much more than her own mother does. It was a warning to me, when I returned to teaching, and I tried always to remember it. Molly did not dominate Miranda. This was a fallacious theory. Molly helped her twin, who asked for that help, and she looked after her. Without Miranda there to need her, it was Molly who was at a loss. She was looking for a substitute, someone else who needed her strength, and she hadn’t found anyone. I didn’t say any of this to that teacher. I said I hoped she’d agree that Molly, if bossy, was a lively, active child, eager to do things, so could she perhaps give her little jobs in the classroom, give her some responsibility. She said she’d try, but I could tell that nothing was going to change her mind.
Still, maybe she took on board some of what I said. She did make Molly window monitor and gave her another series of simple jobs. At any rate, Molly settled down and stopped being so miserable. I wished, all the same, that I hadn’t gone to see her teacher. Don was right.
*
What can I give Molly for her birthday? Thinking about it, I realise that I haven’t given her a real present since Miranda died. Her birthday has been too painful to celebrate. Last year she was in Africa and I only sent her a book of poems.
*
It has happened before and it will happen again and it never gets easier to deal with: I meet someone who truly does not know what happened to Miranda. This time it was a woman I’d been at teacher training college with, though I never knew her well, and I couldn’t, when she came up to me in the National Portrait Gallery, remember her name. But I did recognise her, even after twenty-five years. ‘Louise?’ she said, ‘Louise Findlay, isn’t it?’ I said, yes, warily, and then realised who it was, and tried to cover up the fact that I’d forgotten her name. She helped me out. ‘Kitty,’ she said, ‘Kitty Clarke. I know all about you. Pat used to write to me and sent me snaps sometimes of your family. Guess what, I’ve got twin girls too. I haven’t heard from Pat for ages now, two or three years, I think. How is she? Maybe she’s lost my address. I emigrated, you know, to New Zealand. We’re only over here because Andrew’s mother’s very ill …’
On and on she went as I stood there, trapped. She suggested that we went down to the café, and I found myself going along with her. She chattered away, telling me all about her twins, both at university, one sporty and one not, one with a serious boyfriend and one without. Then, inevitably, apologising for talking so much, she asked about my twins, and the moment came. I dropped my head. I couldn’t just pretend, I couldn’t just walk away. Kitty is a perfectly nice woman. I used to like her, even if she always did talk too much. She wasn’t like that Florence woman on holiday. Kitty sat across from me, smiling, eager to listen, friendly, and I really didn’t need to feel defensive. What on earth was I defending myself against? I didn’t know. Against a response I didn’t want, I suppose – too much emotional reaction. Or too little. I can’t bear, even now, people being too sympathetic or too appalled. And I can’t bear them wanting to get away, either, because they are embarrassed by the tragedy and don’t know how to cope with it. But I have to get over this dread, and so I chose to do it with Kitty. I said simply that one of my twins had drowned in a sailing accident. I made myself watch Kitty’s face closely as I spoke. I saw the horror there, and then the empathy – yes, that was what it was, a melting of her face, a softening, then a tightening of her brow as she imagined herself in my position. For once, she didn’t launch into another verbal stream but instead reached out and touched my clasped hands very lightly and said, ‘Oh, Lou,’ quietly. She didn’t ask for details, thank God. She was silent, stunned, and I found myself saying, almost in a hearty fashion, ‘Well, it was nearly three years ago,’ and I added for good measure that cliché I particularly dislike, ‘Life goes on.’
Kitty did ask a few questions after she’d recovered and before we parted, but none of them were about Miranda’s death. She asked how Molly was coping and I told her about Africa but didn’t volunteer any other insights. Then she asked about my husband, and that was another test. I failed it. I couldn’t find the energy to describe how I felt about Don, especially at the moment. Kitty had never met him and she’d never known us as a married couple and it seemed irrelevant to start confessing that we were separated. So I just said he’d had a hard time coping but that he was much better now. ‘And you, Lou?’ she said. I felt it was time to go and suddenly remembered an appointment, which didn’t fool Kitty for a moment. There was a hurried exchange of addresses and so on, and then we parted, promising to stay in touch.
I watched her walk away from the gallery towards Trafalgar Square and thought how she’d be feeling lucky, with both her twins alive and well. It’s one of the benefits we bereaved bestow on other people – we make them feel lucky.
*
Back to fretting about what to buy Molly for her birthday. A camera, maybe, a digital camera. She’s got a camera but it isn’t digital and she does like taking photographs. Or a video camera, but she’s always said she preferred still photographs. So, a digital camera. It will mean a trip to the kind of shop where I always feel at a complete loss, a target for those salesmen, who sense straight away that you’re ignorant about such things. I will ask Finn to go with me. He’ll know all about such cameras.
*
Don has bought Molly a digital camera already. Well, of course. His thinking would follow the same pattern as my own, so it is hardly surprising that we arrived at the same conclusion. ‘Can’t it be from both of you?’ Finn said, and I said no far too quickly, it could not. ‘There’s no need for all this, you know, Mum,’ he said. I didn’t like the way he said it, and asked him what he meant. ‘It’s like you’re rivals,’ he said, ‘you and Dad, fighting over everything, even nice things like a present for Molly.’ I said we did not fight, we had never fought, and there was no rivalry between us over Molly’s present or anything else. ‘Oh, there is,’ he said, with that annoyingly superior smile he’s developed lately.
It will have to be either clothes or else some kind of special bag. She loves her old bag but she did say there were some holes in the corners and that the straps are wearing thin. I can try to find an exact copy in soft, good-quality leather. At least looking for something like that will take me to the kind of shops where I am comfortable and where Don would never be likely to go, if he plans to buy her anything else.
10<
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CHAOS AT SCHOOL today. The new rules on security have come into operation and parents are now forbidden to come into the building to deliver their children to classroom doors. Only nursery children are allowed to be accompanied, but not the others. Parents have to leave their children in the playground and some of them were upset by this. They all like the idea of security being strict, so that no madman or bomber can enter, but they don’t like the atmosphere this creates.
I don’t like it myself. Meeting parents twice a day at my classroom door is a good way of getting to know them, and it helps to deal with any problems – it feels quite natural just to have a few words, and slip in bits of information without setting up meetings. So much can be easily put right in that way. As for security, haven’t we gone far enough in that direction, with the school gates locked almost all the time and an intercom fitted? There hasn’t been free and easy entry for several years now. The parents gather outside at 3.30 as though outside a prison.
It isn’t far from the playground to the reception classroom, only along one corridor and then round the corner, but the way some of the children entered this morning you’d have thought they’d walked miles. Their parents are used to moving them along briskly, holding their hands and sometimes half-dragging them, desperate to deliver them to me so they can get off to work or back home. This morning, left to make their own way for the first time, some of my class ran but others trailed and looked lost and exhausted when they arrived. I sent Jeremy to check on the stragglers and he found Lola sobbing in the corner where the corridor turns. She says she didn’t know which way to go. No good pointing out that she’d been coming to school for nearly nine months now and that in any case all she had to do was follow the others.
What, I wonder, will this do to the children? We have to give explanations for these security measures and I’ve heard some mothers, Paige’s for example, talking about ‘bad men’ and what they might do if they got into the school. It’s going to make the children nervous, and some of them are nervous enough anyway.
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