by Patrick Gale
She had no great desire for motherhood and was living with a man who convinced her that the family was a patriarchal evil at the root of most of the modern world’s ills, from poverty to depression, and she used multiple contraceptive methods, on the belt and braces principle. By the time Laura startled the household with her arrival, Mummy was a professor at Imperial College and a then fairly elderly thirty-five and Dad was a lecturer at South Bank Poly. They were a radical couple so set in their domestic ways it always surprised people to learn they weren’t married.
Laura had an odd childhood. It wasn’t an unhappy one – she had intellectual, adult attention and books and excellent health – but she was never assertive enough to be any good at making friends her own age. Friendships, if they came, were thrust upon her, not chosen. A brother or sister would have helped but Dad had a vasectomy after she was born – which was explained to her, with diagrams – so most of her hours outside school were spent alone or in the company of adults, usually clever ones with limited social skills. Hence, perhaps, her ready acceptance of tribal life at Summerglades.
She had never forgotten her bouts of sick terror when she went up to Oxford. Aggressively shy, she studied hard because anything else involved socializing. Weeks had passed before she realized nobody would notice in so big an organization if she had no friends, and nobody would care. And she lowered her guard, which was how Amber and Tris came to annex her.
It transpired that relations with her mother’s family weren’t entirely severed after all. Or possibly they merely slipped down below the level of male radar, to an occasional exchange of postcards or Christmas letters between mother and daughter. Laura was never introduced to her uncles or grandparents and, prompted by her father, tended to think of them, if she thought of them at all, as the Enemy. When her grandfather died, Mummy only broke the news after taking herself off to Itchen Abbas for the funeral. Laura and Dad surprised her at the kitchen table in her best dark suit and court shoes, with pink eyes, the order of service and her father’s old watch. After that she took to slipping down to Hampshire for lunch roughly once a month, something Dad hated but was powerless to stop. Mummy at least respected the way things stood and didn’t press very hard for Laura to join her. Laura was in her late teens, studying like fury for Oxbridge and reliably bolshie.
‘She’d love to see you, you know,’ was all Mummy said. ‘Aren’t you curious? She’s your only surviving grandparent, after all.’
‘She’s never wanted to see me before,’ was all Laura said. ‘Why should I suddenly want to see her?’ and the subject was closed.
She was thirty and living in Paris when Dad died, just months into a reluctant redundancy. Mummy was more or less retired by then, no longer supervising any PhD students, a resentful sort of consultant on a couple of research projects, nothing more. Within the year she had sold the house in Ripplevale Grove and moved to Winchester and this house, dumping or selling virtually every article of furniture in the old place and furnishing her new one with things inherited from the unmarried antique dealer brother, who had died. Any gaps were then filled with leavings of her mother’s when her mother elected to sell the family house in Itchen Abbas and move to a tiny flat in a gracious sheltered housing development in Kingsworthy.
These pictures and furniture, elegant, discreet, what Mummy bluntly called good, were all Laura would ever know of the family she had refused to meet. It was all beautiful in its very English way, but when Mummy died, Laura decided, she would probably keep the book garages but sell every stick of the rest.
She started awake, glanced at her clock and saw she had barely nodded off but she forced herself upright just the same. It was a condition of living with her mother that she was tired all the time, forever nodding off in armchairs or at her desk, as though the sleepiness of old age were contagious. There were thirty-five years between them – compared to Mummy she should be an amazon – and yet it was Mummy, increasingly, who seemed the livelier one, the one keenest to be up and doing. ‘Perhaps I’m sickening,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps I’m clinically depressed?’
As if affirming the point, came the clunk of her mother flopping down on the stair-lift seat followed by the descending buzz of its motor.
Laura crossed to the bathroom and gave her teeth a quick brush to rid her mouth of staleness. Her mother was without vanity so the bathroom mirror was pleasantly small, soap-splashed and badly lit. It was easy to avoid meeting one’s eye as one brushed, rinsed and spat.
GLASS OF WATER
Something in his drug-company sandwich had brought on a thirst. Ben downed a glass of water at his sink then filled it and carried it back to his desk and drank the rest of it there. Like the other rooms where he worked, this one was bald of personal touches – no photographs, no possessions, nothing he couldn’t carry out again in his bag or pockets – he had taken such a tumble in status in order to work here that he simply worked wherever the nurses put him.
Whichever half of the day wasn’t devoted to the GUM clinic was given over to the separate HIV one. Fifteen years ago the two would have shared premises and appointment hours but this had never really been appropriate. Of course, new patients were often identified as a result of an HIV test conducted as part of a standard STD screening or treatment but HIV positive patients, whether they were still asymptomatic or had become ill were, thank God, usually long-term ones these days, requiring at least regular blood tests and check-ups to monitor their T cell levels and whatever drugs cocktail they were on, whereas a patient with syphilis might come to the GUM clinic just once in a lifetime.
Most of the HIV patients were sufficiently relaxed not to use pseudonyms. They were being seen regularly and doctors and staff in the department had won their confidence, but there were always exceptions: the man terrified he would lose his life insurance if word somehow got out, the woman Ben had seen only that afternoon, who he suspected was still keeping her HIV status from her husband and children.
So it was no surprise to glance down to his next appointment and find a Mrs Jones listed. Usually the patient’s notes were enough to jog his memory or at least give him enough information not to cause offence through ignorance. But this Mrs Jones had no notes, only a pristine folder, on which a paperclipped slip declared her a new pt, with a blank sheet of A4 inside it. Ben finished his water then buzzed the nurses’ station.
‘Hi, Sherry. Mrs Jones who’s due in next. Is she a transfer?’
‘Hang on, Ben.’ Sherry could be heard conferring with a colleague. ‘Yup,’ she said. ‘No notes. She’s a fresh referral, just moved to the area.’
‘Ah. Okay.’
He stepped outside and walked along the short corridor to the waiting area. This doubled as the reception area for the adjacent HIV ward so was always fairly busy with visitors calling in or waiting to take discharged patients home. He dodged a toddler who was stomping in pursuit of a jingling rubber ball and scanned the faces. ‘Mrs Jones?’
It was her. Of course it was. She stood, suppressing a smile and shook his offered hand.
How could he ever have thought she was funny-looking? With her honey-brown limbs and long neck she was lovely to him now, and the shy way she ducked her head slightly as she met his eye so that her hair shaded her face made him want to kiss her on the spot. ‘This way, please,’ he told her and led the way around the corner and along the corridor back to his room. He never spoke to patients until they were safely inside, to protect their confidentiality, but this was impossible with her. He had to say something. Words were bubbling up and he struggled to make them appropriate as colleagues and nurses were everywhere.
‘We’ve no notes for you yet,’ he stammered.
‘No,’ she said, her voice similarly wavery. ‘I’ve moved here unexpectedly. From Paris.’
‘Paris? That explains it. In here please.’
He had barely closed the door than she was kissing him. By some delicious miracle the door had a lock.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mu
rmured, coming up for air. ‘So sorry.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s me. It’s all me. Such a coward. I’m. Oh. I’m…’ And they had to kiss more. It was intolerable not to.
‘How long have we…?’ she began
‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Absolute max. We really shouldn’t.’
But with a couple of quick, efficient gestures she had undone her dress and stepped out of it. She had on dark green French lingerie he remembered from an earlier date. It was impossibly predictable and corny of him but he found it deeply exciting. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Hang on,’ he said and dropped the blinds. They were high up but window cleaners had a way of appearing unannounced.
She was clambering onto the examination couch. Her bare feet squeaked on its vinyl upholstery.
‘This is so bad,’ he whispered.
‘I know.’ She smiled and put up a hand to stop him undoing his tie. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘No time. Keep everything on.’
It was all over in five minutes or less. She was on fire and he barely had to touch her. A cleaner had unknowingly released the brake on the couch wheels and their rocking moved it some distance. As he tidied himself up she slipped back into her dress and shoes and sat demurely in the chair she’d have taken as a patient, and repaired her hair with a comb. He sat before her and took one of her hands between his and kissed its fingertips.
‘Oh God,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Paris, eh?’
‘Yup.’
‘You’d better…’
‘Go. Yes. I know.’
‘But can I see you?’
‘Yes. Oh yes. Don’t be silly. No more nonsense.’
‘No. I’ll…We’ll…’
She reclaimed her hand, briefly cupped his jaw in it and stood. ‘Of course we will. Everything.’
‘Everything’s going to be fine, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
She kissed his brow then let herself out. He twisted the blind control and the sunlight fell back in harsh bands. Then he refilled his water glass and drained it. Before he washed his hands in lurid pink Hibiscrub, he raised his fingers to his mouth and nose and breathed and, hot water steaming the mirror before him, let out a kind of sob then cleared his throat and pretended to cough.
TEA
‘You slept too,’ her mother said.
‘I didn’t mean to.’
Mummy reached up and gently patted the back of Laura’s head. ‘Hair standing up a bit,’ she said.
These moments of solicitude or tenderness between them were becoming more common but were still so unusual, so out of character, that Laura did not know how to deal with them. ‘Shall we have tea in the garden?’ she said. ‘I bought a lemon drizzle cake at the WI.’
‘Oh good.’
Having never seen the point of sweets or baking, having raised little Laura on a scrupulously healthy and frugal diet, Mummy had developed a childishly sweet tooth in her old age. Laura had to buy her several chocolate bars in the weekly shop which Mummy evidently ate in secret, as they were never shared. Occasionally Laura would find squares lost down the sides of chairs or backs of pillows and, if unobserved, would eat them swiftly and without compunction. She suspected she was putting on weight.
Mummy had already laboriously set tea things on a tray. Laura put the kettle on to boil then hurried out ahead of her to bank up her wooden garden seat with the pile of cushions stacked by the door for just this purpose.
‘I was looking for something in my tights drawer when I found a box of stuff. Junk really. Photographs and so on. It’s by the breadbin. Keep what you want and we can chuck the rest.’ As was her wont, Mummy carried on talking as she walked slowly into the garden and out of range. ‘And talking of chucking, we should clear half the things out of that drawer. I’m never going to wear tights again, just hideous knee-highs, so one might as well…’ She said something about making tree ties then her words became indistinct.
‘Can’t hear you,’ Laura said, too quietly to be heard herself, and she lifted the lid of the box – an old Terry’s 1767 one – and began to pick through the contents. There were holiday photographs that had all been left out of the albums for some reason. Laura with her father, smiling, bearded and now crazily young-looking, in front of Christchurch Priory, and with her mother at Wimborne Minster. Laura’s parents photographed lopsidedly by Laura, beaming on either side of a seaside donkey in a straw hat. Laura on her own, aged about six, in a Ladybird jersey and trousers with little elasticated straps under the feet, looking tense and isolated in an expanse of anonymous grass. Then there were several buttons and toggles to longlost garments and a conference badge announcing Professor Harriet Jellicoe. There was a picture of her and Dad looking glum beside the Arsénal canal and several holiday postcards from illegible friends, inexplicably retained.
As the kettle whistled, she tossed the lot in the rubbish bin and made their tea and set slices of cake on plates. Then she retrieved the box from among the kitchen scraps to take out the small photographs of her father looking young and of her smaller self, of solemn Lara, which she tucked into her pocket before carrying the tray out to the garden.
The sun had been shining all day so their little oasis was rich with the scents of sunbaked lavender and sweet pea. Bees were becoming noisily drunk in two great potted stands of candidum lilies in pots that framed the sitting area. Mummy was ever more reliant on pot gardening to create her effects since it involved less stooping and merely required Laura to move the pots about. A rotating quartet of pots in the same place had already seen dwarf daffodils and anemone blanda give way to delft blue hyacinths and green and white parrot tulips. Autumn would bring acidanthera and nerines, whose strong shade of pink always gave concern. Winter ushered in a quieter, longer display from winter pansies and a variegated ivy or two.
Mummy sat in dappled shade with her mottled, still skinny legs on what had been a gardener’s kneeler but now served as a footstool. With her pretty frock and hair recently brushed and sitting in a kind of bower, she might have been an advertisement for a retirement bond or geriatric emergency support. Mrs Lewis can rest assured. Can you? Only she was Professor Jellicoe and was reading a gruesomely illustrated book called Plagues of Venus she was reviewing for the TLS, which made the image a little less cosy.
Laura poured their tea and passed cake, which Mummy ate at once, shedding yellow crumbs across her open book.
‘Did you find the box?’
‘Rubbish mainly.’
‘Thought so.’
Laura handed her the photograph of herself on the expanse of grass. ‘Where was this?’
Mummy stared at it. ‘God knows,’ she said. ‘Could have been anywhere. If you find the album with you at that age you could probably match the clothes and work it out that way.’ She looked at the picture again. ‘You were such a serious little girl.’
‘I had pretty serious parents.’
Mummy handed the picture back without comment, brushed the crumbs off her book and continued to read. ‘Is there any more cake?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ Laura said and fetched it. She knew it was irritating asking questions of someone trying to read but she didn’t care. She had fetched the cake, she had earned the right. ‘Did you regret it, ever: your relationship with Dad?’
Mummy carried on reading as she answered, an old trick, like broaching tricky subjects when driving. ‘Of course not. He saved me. My father was of that generation that would only give up a daughter to another man, whatever they thought of him, not to a career.’ She laid the book on her lap thoughtfully. ‘I feel guilty sometimes, of course. Your father would have been happier with a more womanly woman.’
‘No!’
‘He wanted far more children. Maybe to make up for his lack of family. For all his disapproving talk about patriarchy, deep down he’d have liked a tribe but I wasn’t one of nature’s mothers. Not really.’ She caught Laura with her cool, patrician gaze. ‘Was I?�
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‘I had no points of comparison,’ Laura said and looked away to watch a thrush that was hunting through a flowerbed. It pounced on a snail and threw it hard against the wall.
‘Do you want to go to Evensong later? I mean, would you mind?’ Mummy asked.
‘Not at all. I’ll drive us down at five.’
‘You’ve got hardly any work done today. I’m sorry. Tomorrow can be more peaceful.’
‘That’s all right. No. It was simply that I was lying on my bed just now looking at the furniture and I realized that, apart from the book garages, which were always yours in any case, you didn’t keep anything from Ripplevale Grove.’
‘All that awful pine!’
‘But you lived with it for decades.’
‘I had to. We were poor and it was cheap. After a while I stopped seeing it. But after he died, and I was retired, I started seeing it again and without him it wasn’t very bearable. Or London. Lara, it was only tables and chairs.’
‘Laura.’
‘Laura. I think of him often. Every day. Don’t you?’
‘Probably.’
‘What’s happened to that nice man who came by? The one like the sexy BBC man with the gap in his teeth. I liked him.’
‘So did I. Oh. You know. It’s complicated when you’re grown up. More tea?’
Mummy shook her head, glanced at her father’s watch and returned to the plagues of Venus.
So. Ben had at last been mentioned, made a topic of conversation. Laura continued to think of him as she set their tea things back on the tray, carried them back to the house, put away the cake and loaded the dishwasher. Her thoughts began to overwhelm her.
She hurried up to her room, closed the door, kicked off her shoes and lay on her bed, just for a moment. She rolled onto her front, pressing her fists into her groin. She felt his weight above her, his voice at her ear and cried out into the depths of her pillow.