by Mavis Cheek
Like a depressed knight I cut my way through the thorns, told her I was on my way, and drove towards the house I grew up in. Though I was sure my mother would question whether I had actually grown up at all.
The gate squeaked as it always did to tell my mother that I had arrived. Usually she opened the door in a kind of triumph before I’d had time to ring the bell – but not this time. I pressed the little white button and the familiar chimes rang out. Deep breath. Door opened. Mother stood there straight-backed in a dark green twinset, reading glasses in her hand, floral apron around her still slender waist, the very picture of domesticated grandmother at ease. She did not smile. I, on the other hand, was grinning like a hopeful in a beauty contest, and couldn’t stop. She indicated that I should go past her into the hallway. Which is what I did. And we then went, oh mercy, into the front room.
‘Springwatch over then?’
‘Only just.’
‘Was it good? Nesting boxes and blue tits and things? Deer? Rabbits?’
‘Did you bring the mostarda?’
Fuck.
‘No.’ And, of course, I was about to say that it had been confiscated at the airport when I remembered rotten old truth. ‘I forgot. I’m so sorry.’
Advantage, Mother.
‘I’ll get the coffee,’ she said. ‘It’s just made.’
While she was out of the room I looked at all the familiarities. Damask curtains in a non-colour, the cherry-wood china cabinet whose contents I had so longed to play with as a little girl – the key was in it now, though in the days of childhood it had been well hidden. A livid, patterned rug on the floor in front of the fireplace with its non-existent open fire. She now had a strange brass-framed panel that had a series of white flickering flames that gave out no heat whatsoever. Much cleaner, apparently. I did not, when I first saw it, say that it was also much colder.
What else? Well, there was what my mother called a serviceable suite – beige dralon, lumpish and comfortable and too large for the room. Perfectly pristine, everything. And colourless. It was no wonder our house was painted in all kinds of colours, even the wooden furniture. After living in this non-provocative Narnia, colour was all. How reactionary we children always are. How we think when we do things like paint two walls Bloomsbury Green that we are breaking new ground – when in fact we are just throwing our familial-psychological stuff away. And Robert, I thought, suddenly feeling a bit teary, Robert had never once objected in all these years to bright walls, painted floors, singing graphics and rainbow blinds. Tassie had, of course. She would go the other way. I looked around. One day, I thought, when she has a home of her own, it will look more or less like this. Oh, more modern, but cool, definitely cool. Even there, with the decor, I’d thought I was being true to myself and you know what? I was being anti-parent really. Johnno didn’t seem to notice, fortunately. He just never pulled his curtains and painted two of his walls black. Any floor covering had long since been hidden under a mound of unmentionable matter. He would have painted the whole room black but the paint ran out. Strange how it never occurred to him to go and buy another tin.
The photographs in this nerveless room were poignant, too. All lined up on the top of the oak sideboard. All perfectly symmetrical and dusted. Laurence and me on the swing in the garden, Dad behind, both of us children looking out with ten- and twelve-year-old eyes eager for the world; my mother holding Tassie in her arms after the christening (a small rise of irritation here; I had wanted to wait until Tassie could make up her own mind but my mother wouldn’t hear of it and so we conformed – Robert the (atheistic) peacemaker); and then that picture of Robert and me on our wedding day looking so happy and young and as touching in its way as the picture of Laurence and me on the swing. Photographs often lie, of course – you could go through Henry VIII’s photo albums, no doubt, and see nothing but happy family snaps – but this picture of the two of us did not lie. We were happy that day, and – despite the usual ups and downs and occasional marching out of the house by either party – we had continued to be so. As marriages go it was a good one. Probably I was helped to see this by having a best friend who was having an affair. It concentrated the mind. Robert would do, Robert would do very nicely, and I believed he felt much the same about me. Oh, we had our fiery moments and we had our cooler times – but we smouldered along together and occasionally burst into flame and that was just fine. This latest bit of behaviour, though, for some reason, had gone deeper than anything before. I felt unsupported. Dismissed. Was it our age? Was it my age? Was it that he had been feeling a bit bored and wanted a ruck? Was it that he felt insecure in some way and I had made it worse? No way of knowing until he came home …
I sat down and twiddled my fingers. I remembered the feel of that alien naked skin in Venice, the heat of the room, the scent of the lilies of the valley – and it made this seem even colder and cooler. I asked myself if I regretted not giving in. I thought I probably did, really, as I thought it would mean very little and would be something to bring out from a secret place of memories occasionally, as the hip joints grew stiffer … Ah, my dear, once upon a time … I smiled at the thought and then jumped at the rattle of the cups as my mother reappeared. She put the tray down on the low table and settled herself on the sofa opposite.
‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ she said, and leaned back against her dull old sofa and looked at me over the rim of her cup. I’d never liked that thin, floral china and I really disliked it now. Also, the biscuits were all-butter Osbornes, plain as you like, the selling point of which always made me want to say, Butter? Butter? Where?
‘Well, I just wanted to apologise for being so pious with you the other day. That stuff about truth. And to thank you for trying to help. That’s all. I suppose it was all done without thinking things through.’
‘Well, that’s you all over,’ she said.
But I just sipped my coffee. I was not here to be provoked. In this, the decor of the room was helpful.
‘And I’m going to make it up to Robert when he comes home.’
‘If he comes home,’ she said darkly. I realised that my mother, my only mother, was enjoying this. Or, at least, not minding it very much.
All I wanted was to try to do something that felt right. To be able to say that I don’t ask of others something that I can’t give myself.’
‘You do that all the time,’ said my mother.
‘What?’
‘Ask of others things that you don’t do yourself.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do.’
‘What?’
‘We all do it, Nina. It’s called being human. Don’t do what I do, do what I say. You’re a dab hand at it.’
She’d gone slightly pink. Pink with emotion. ‘You’ve been my daughter for nearly half a century…’ I flinched. That was below the belt. What a way of describing a mature woman like me. But still I did not rise. She waited, maybe for me to object. I set my mouth. ‘For a good many years at any rate, and you’ve never stopped doing it. You’re always so bound up in being superhuman and showing everyone else up – I don’t know how Robert bears it. Buddhism? Remember that? And the Japanese garden of tranquillity – when Tassie ate so many pebbles she rattled on the way to hospital? I mean, you’ve never rested, you’ve never just lived quietly and kept your thoughts to yourself like most of us do. Even your so-called work with that – Brian man – is heedless of others’ feelings. Remember when you made Laurence bury that blackbird?’
This was getting ridiculous.
‘No I haven’t a clue –’
‘Oh, cast your mind back. Poor Lollie – a sensitive boy – and you made him do the whole funeral rites. You said we all had to confront death sometime. You put the dead thing in his hands. I couldn’t get him to come out of his cupboard for a week.’
‘Well –’
‘He was nine, Nina.’
‘I really don’t remember.’
‘And your dad said that boys had to toughen up if
they were going to be as tough as girls. He always took your side.’
‘Not always – I remember when –’
‘We always baled you out when you got hold of some tomfool idea and it looks like you’ll be going on doing it. You’ve got everything most women would give their eye teeth for – but no. Not you. Let’s just tinker with this bit of the perfectly smooth-running engine, shall we, and see what happens?’
‘That’s not what I do. It’s about principle, it’s about being true to your self – in this case it is simply and solely about Truth, without which the world would be –’
But the pink of my mother’s indignant cheeks had deepened. There are high horses and there are even higher horses, and my mother had climbed onto the highest she could find.
‘Oh, the world, the world. And what about your family? What about their world? My world? And Robert has put up with so much over the years. You’ve even got Tassie on the point of coming home because she’s worried about you. And Johnno would come home if Tassie could locate him. When you should be the one worrying about them. And here am I – blast – no – bugger it – still worrying about you. Forty-odd years of people telling me how intelligent you are, how lively. Lively? They don’t know the half. Always a bee in your bonnet and someone else picks up the pieces. Years and years of it. And Robert is still there, and he’s still loyal, and he’s still alive … And your father’s been dead for all these years and you just snap your fingers as if nothing matters beyond you. And what have you been doing now? You’ve been having a lovely time in Venice with a queer.’
And there I was thinking I was an interesting and honourable person. I was genuinely shocked. Instead I found that, to my homophobic mother at least, I was just a flagrant abuser of a live husband. And a nuisance. Had Robert felt like that, too? And was that why this had happened – the proverbial straw? He’d had enough? I just stared at my mother’s pinker cheeks and hard, bright eyes.
Now, I should exonerate her a little here, lest the admirable political correctness brigade take up the baton. She feels she can be so indelicate about Brando’s sexuality and her terminology where he is concerned because of the following instance. When I first introduced them at a party at our house, not long after we were married, Brando put his arm around my waist and gave it a squeeze with his hand, that made me squeak. My mother looked from his hand to his face and then to me with a mixture of shock and anxiousness. Brando stepped in with his usual forthright-ness, bowed and said, ‘Oh, Mrs Carpenter, please don’t worry about your daughter’s virtue on my account for I am a rampant pansy.’ Which finished her off completely where he was concerned, forever. So she took it as her future right to continue the pattern. If it doesn’t exonerate her, it at least explains her behaviour. She’d been given permission.
Back to the pink cheeks and the assertion that my lovely husband had perhaps had enough of me and my ways. I partly believed it. And so, as of old, I hung my head and mumbled an apology. Never mind Robert. What I suddenly realised, to my shame, was that she missed my father, she still loved my father, and that far from being an old lady who was happy with her china cups, she was a widow who would never, quite, be happy again. Here I was turning my back on my husband when she’d lost hers forever. I could mumble an apology with impunity. I was sorry she was so hurt and angry, I was sorry that I had overlooked how much she still missed my father and it didn’t matter that the reason for her anger had absolutely nothing to do with me and truth. But at least the feeling sorry was genuine. I realised that I had scarcely given a thought to my mother’s being a blood-pumping woman with desires. ‘I am so sorry,’ I said again. And I really was. So far, so far I had not broken my bond. I smiled, a little wanly I think, and then it was over.
The box of necessary apologies was closed. She accepted it briskly, got up, brisk and straight, and went to the sideboard. Out came a bottle of whisky – I didn’t even know she had a bottle of whisky – and she poured some into her cup of coffee. ‘Being truthful, Nina, is not all it’s cracked up to be,’ she said. After your father died I wished, a thousand times, that I had been less truthful with him. And I think you’ll feel the same way if you don’t do something about Robert very soon.’ She took a slug of her coffee. ‘No – not all it’s cracked up to be at all.’
‘I’m beginning to realise that.’ I reached for the bottle. For in those few minutes my mother had said more to me than in a lifetime.
‘No,’ said my mother, removing the bottle. ‘Do get a grip, Nina. You’re driving.’
Sixteen
Sing small:1 to cease from boasting.
Albert Hyamson’s Dictionary of English Phrases, 1922
IN THE CAR and wearing my shift of penance I checked my phone. Several missed messages from Brando (of course) but nothing from Robert. Just as well. If I had spoken to him at that moment I would have cried my heart and lungs out and probably begged him to come home. I drove home slowly, particularly slowly past the doctor’s surgery. I had that deep down sick feeling that no medicine can cure. It is called shame. Beyond the windscreen people were coming and going, off for a night out, off for a night in, doing ordinary things, telling lies cheerfully and with impunity, living. And I had set myself above it all. As if. ‘Facing the enforced journey,’ said Bede, ‘no man can be more prudent than he has good call to be.’ The father of English history always had a word for it. The shame deepened. Nina Porter as Joan of Arc? I don’t think so. Literature was supposed to give you lessons in life. One of the things I liked most about Paradise Lost was that it allowed me a heart-warming sense of Schadenfreude. Satan’s tumble from overweening hubris was a reminder of how it could be. One which, thirty years later, I seemed to have forgotten. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour … England hath need of thee … He was a sick man but he kept on writing what he knew to be right. He was a great man and England did indeed have need of him, but I thought rather miserably that it could probably very well do without me. Of course I couldn’t change the way of the world. Not without turning my world and other people’s worlds upside down. Truth is cruel. Truth is unkind. Truth is – only pure and good when it is tempered by judgement. The judgement of Milton and his likes, not mine, oh humble weed.
Self-mortification is dangerously close to self-indulgence. You can get quite smug about recognising how dreadful you are and I think I probably did on that journey home. I had certainly never driven more courteously nor been more radiantly aware of the world and the life that was going on all around me. Ordinary, simple folk, getting on with things, glad for the good, sad for the bad – and not to be judged by the likes of mere me. In fact, so courteously did I drive that once or twice the driver behind me hooted with impatience. Don’t keep stopping at crossings or waiting for hovering pedestrians and the like, lady, some of us have a life to live … After the third or fourth bit of road rudeness some of the humility and mortification fell away. Remembering my mother’s amazing and never-before-experienced use of the swearing B-word, I began to feel that itch again – and then I did something I’d never done before either. At the fifth display of bad behaviour, I gave a bus driver who tooted me at a zebra crossing the finger. Yes. And as I turned out of the traffic and into our road I thought that was probably one of the more truthful things I had perpetrated in the last few days. And I felt all the better for it. My mother had nearly won, just not quite, and there was a bit of angora stitched into the hair shirt I wore.
*
The phone call with Tassie was not helped by my getting the time difference wrong. And waking her from what was clearly a deep and happy slumber. The psychological point at which secret police make their house calls for maximum effect. Her first words were ‘Has somebody died?’ She sounded so slurry that I asked her, with maternal light-heartedness, if she was a bit drunk. This was not met by daughterly light-heartedness. Her repeatable words were spoken coldly, and sternly. ‘Have you spoken to Dad yet?’ To which I thought, but did not say, Mind your own business.
Now marriages are not enhanced by having children. Let us get this straight. If we are speaking the truth, then children change marriages, change its participants, bring love, bring a glimpse of heaven in the slightest little gesture, bring that all-important link with the future of the planet, bring deep joy at the reproducing of one’s genes – but they do not bring enhancement to marriage. Marriage, at its best, is between two people in love who can’t get enough of each other both in and out of bed and who find a trip to the supermarket together thrilling. In short, in marriage, which is strictly a two-hander, the only time you find that you are not getting enough of each other is because you are asleep – asleep – by the way – for as long as you need. Indeed, children are wired to come between the partners in a marriage, or at least to make themselves the most important items in existence. They are wired to survive and that is how they do it. It is their smile that twists the heart of the parent, their cries that torture the nerves of the parent, their intensity of living in the present (my nappy – now; my rusks and milk now; my naptime now, etc.). Hitherto, before said child appeared, each of the partners viewed the other as possessing everything they needed in their emotional lives to live well. After children arrive this is cast aside as the new infant – with lungs and requirements of an unremitting nature – divides and rules. They are not sent to enhance but to use marriage for their own ends. To grow up as best as they possibly can. Let us be quite clear on that. And what I was dealing with here was not Tassie’s interests in parental strife – to which I would grant validity so far as she was concerned but deny her the right to impose herself – but a schism that had occurred in my marriage and which belonged to me and my marital partner. My marriage. Our marriage. His and mine. And our lovely, beloved, bossy daughter could just butt out.