The Mother-in-Law

by Sally Hepworth

  ‘Not with the girls,’ she said. ‘Just the two of us.’

  I thought it was going to be about Kathy’s health—perhaps she’d found a lump or had a bad test result. That’s what ‘news’ is about when people are our age. But, as it turned out, it was nothing to do with Kathy at all.

  ‘I was away in Daylesford for the weekend,’ she said. ‘And I saw something. I really shouldn’t be saying anything because I’m not a hundred per cent certain but . . .’

  She was quick to point out that it may have been a misunderstanding, but she would’ve bet her life that it was Patrick coming out of a restaurant with a woman. A woman she could’ve sworn wasn’t Nettie. His arm was around her. It didn’t look platonic.

  I decided not to get involved. After all, Kathy wasn’t sure about what she’d seen and it was none of my business. But then, at Christmas, Nettie started talking about IVF again and I panicked. I didn’t mean to upset anyone or insult Lucy. All I wanted was to make Nettie think twice before trying to have a baby with a man who may not be faithful.

  Instead I acted hastily and alienated them all.

  The quiet since Christmas has been surprisingly loud. As someone who knows a lot of women who have very little to do (Jan, Liz and Kathy), I’ve always been a little smug about my full life—my charity, my chores, drinks with the girls, the children, the grandchildren. When people talk about the elderly being lonely, I always think: That won’t be me. I am surrounded by people. People like me wish for loneliness. But it’s been two weeks since Christmas and I’m starting to feel, well, lonely.

  ‘I noticed Ollie and Eamon were here today,’ I say to Tom.

  Tom lowers his newspaper, revealing a guilty face.

  ‘How much did you give them?’

  I’d just driven Faizah home from the hospital with her baby when I returned home to find Eamon’s ridiculous sports car in the driveway. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were doing here.

  ‘It’s an investment,’ Tom says. ‘In their business.’

  I take Tom’s sock-clad toes and bend them back toward his knee, stretching out the calf muscle. He groans.

  ‘Are you upset with me?’ he says.

  ‘No, I’m not upset, I’m tired.’

  The fact is, sometimes being a mother is impossible. From the time your children are little, you’re thinking not only about whether you should let them have chocolate for breakfast ‘juuuuust this once’, you’re also wondering if it will rot their teeth, set them up for a lifetime of bad habits and contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic. When they’re adults, it’s worse. I worry about Nettie not being able to get pregnant, I also worry that she might have a baby with a man who is unfaithful. I worry about Ollie’s business going under. I worry about my children expecting their parents to provide for them when they are adults.

  Tom puts the newspaper down. ‘What would you say if I said I’d given money to Nettie too? For IVF.’

  I sigh. ‘I’d say I’m not surprised.’

  ‘But you don’t endorse it?’

  I close my eyes. ‘No. I don’t.’

  I feel Tom’s hand on my leg. ‘Come on, Di. Think about what your life would have been like if your parents had supported your desire to have your baby rather than sent you away.’

  I shake my head. ‘It’s different.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ he says. ‘It’s all about support. Whether you want to give it or not.’

  I open my eyes. ‘Actually, it’s about whether to give money or not. And that’s not the same thing.’

  On the fourteenth day, Nettie extends the olive branch. I find her on a bar stool in the kitchen when I return from running errands. She’s dressed in tailored pants and a white shirt, but she’s taken off her slingbacks and is leaning over the counter on her elbows. It reminds me of when she was a teenager, lolling all over the bench after school, scavenging for something to eat.

  ‘Nettie.’

  She glances over her shoulder, then spins on her stool so she is facing me. She’s lost weight. Her eyes look more prominent in her face. And her hair has a dull look, like it hasn’t been washed in a while. ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘This is a surprise.’

  I continue into the kitchen and Nettie swivels her stool, following me. ‘I wanted to check we were okay.’

  I set my handbag on the kitchen counter and climb onto the stool next to hers. ‘I hope we are.’

  ‘I hope so too.’

  I nod. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about Christmas. I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know how much you want a baby, darling.’

  Her eyes fill up with tears. ‘It feels like we’ve been trying forever. And I’m nearly forty, Mum. Our time is running out, at least mine is. Patrick has all the time in the world. It’s not fair.’

  I put a hand on her back and pat gently. ‘How is everything with Patrick?’ I ask casually.

  She sniffs. ‘Fine.’

  I wonder, yet again, if I should tell her what I know about Patrick. Or, at least, what I’ve heard about Patrick. I can tell her to do her own investigations and see if there is any truth to it. I can just be the messenger, and stand true to the fact that it’s none of my business. I can tell her that whatever she decides to do about it is fine by me. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s the fact that I know if I tell Nettie what I’ve heard . . . I’ll lose her. She is proud, my daughter. I’ve already lost a lot of her—to adulthood, to Patrick. I want to hold on to the little bit I have left.

  ‘Have you ever had a miscarriage, Mum?’ she asks me.

  ‘No,’ I admit. ‘I never have. But I understand that it must be—’

  Nettie presses her hands into her face and lets out a sob. ‘No you don’t understand. You have no idea what it’s like to have a baby inside you, to pray and beg and bargain that one day you will get to hold it and love it and raise it and be its mother.’

  It’s funny what the younger generation assumes we don’t know. They assume we can’t possibly understand the agony of heartbreak, or the pressure of buying a house. We can’t understand infertility or depression or the fight for equality. If we have experienced any of these things, they are milder, softer versions, played out in sepia, not experiences that can compare to theirs. You have no idea what I know, I want to tell her. Instead I open my arms and let her lie against my shoulder and cry.

  30

  DIANA

  The past . . .

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ Ghezala asks me. She’s nursing her baby girl while her serious little boy Aarash wanders around my house, looking at everything with wonderment but touching nothing. Ghezala pops by from time to time now, with kahwa or biscuits or cakes, and I enjoy her visits immensely.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I say.

  ‘Why do you help pregnant women? I see that you do not need to work.’

  Usually when someone asks me this I tell them I do it to keep myself busy, or that I like to give something back to the community. But Ghezala and I have been through too much for me to give her the standard response. The funny thing is, sometimes I find myself telling her things that I don’t tell anyone . . . my friends, Nettie, even Tom.

  ‘Because I was young and pregnant once, with no money and no one to help me. I was twenty years old, unmarried. My parents sent me away.’

  ‘I am sorry.’ Ghezala sits forward and places her hand over my own. ‘Where did they send you?’

  I shake my head. ‘Oh, it wasn’t that far away, even if it did feel like another planet. I went to a home for unmarried pregnant girls, where you went to live until your baby was born.’

  Ghezala keeps her hand on mine. Understanding comes to her eyes. ‘And what happened to your baby after it was born?’

  I’m not sure why, but I decide to tell her the truth.

  1970 . . .

  When I turned up on my father’s cousin’s doorstep after escaping from Orchard House, she wasn’t overjoyed to see me. I still remember Meredith giving me the once-over from the doo
rway. Her gaze lingered for a long time on my belly.

  ‘So,’ she said finally, ‘you’ve been exiled too.’

  I almost didn’t recognise her. In a previous life, whenever I’d seen Meredith, her shoulder-length hair was teased and full, her clothes freshly pressed. Now her hair was cut stylelessly short and her clothes were rumpled, shapeless and practical.

  ‘Well,’ she said after a world-weary sigh. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

  As it turned out, Meredith didn’t just look different, she was different. As I watched her whizz about the tiny house—making me a fried egg on toast, getting out towels and sheets—I wondered if she was the same woman. The Meredith I knew was easily overwhelmed by guests when she lived at her magnificent home in Hawthorn, and I recall Mother saying she often had to take to her bed to recover from even a small afternoon tea at her house. In contrast, now she seemed more than capable. She made me up a bed in what amounted to a shed in the backyard of her rental. The main house wasn’t much more than a shed itself: four rooms—a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room.

  ‘You can stay until you’ve had the baby and you’re back on your feet,’ she said. ‘After that, you’ll have to be on your way, I’m afraid. I can’t afford to feed two more mouths.’

  I spent the next two weeks doing what I could to earn my keep—scrubbing Meredith’s floors, fetching groceries from the store, doing the laundry. I made my way through a large pile of Meredith’s clothes that needed mending, sewing on buttons or fixing hems. I organised her pantry, I mowed the lawn. If Meredith noticed any of it, she never commented. But at least it kept me busy and kept my mind off what was coming.

  I still had no idea what to expect in terms of the birth, although the moans I’d heard in the hallways of Orchard House from girls in early labour did nothing to reassure me. In another life, a life in which I was married and had friends who were married, I could have asked my friends about it. A lot of the friends who had been away would be returning from Europe around now, perhaps wondering where I was. I imagined getting in touch with them, but I didn’t need anyone to tell me that wouldn’t end well. Even Cynthia, my dearest friend, would not have been able to find a place for me in her life under these circumstances. We came from a tight-knit Catholic neighbourhood. It was problematic to give up your baby and return to your old life, but to return to it with your baby wasn’t an option.

  I’d written to Mother after arriving at Meredith’s to tell her the decision I had made, and where I was living. For days after sending it I’d been on guard, half-expecting her to turn up on Meredith’s doorstep and physically drag me back to Orchard House, but she’d never even written back, let alone showed up. I knew what the silence meant. I remember seeing the letters from Meredith in the garbage at home, unopened. ‘There’s no point keeping up correspondence with someone who isn’t in our lives any more,’ she’d say crisply if anyone referred to the unopened envelopes.

  Now I, clearly, was no longer in her life.

  Two weeks after arriving at Meredith’s, I woke to the feeling of something popping deep inside. It was a cold night, and moonlight streamed in the crack of the shed door, illuminating my single bed. Between my legs the mattress was wet. I gripped the cold wall to help me push myself upright. More water came when I stood; and when I walked, more still. I stuffed my feet into slippers and pulled my robe around me and made my way to the toilet that abutted the house. There was no pain yet, and I didn’t see the point in waking Meredith if it was a false alarm.

  I dropped my knickers and sat down. There was blood, a little of it, and a lot of clear odourless liquid. As I stared at it, my abdomen pulled tight and firm. This was it.

  To my extraordinary surprise, I wasn’t scared.

  When I returned to Meredith’s house ten days later, there was a second-hand bassinette set up in the shed. Next to it, neatly folded on my single bed, was a pile of cloth nappies, two knitted jackets, knitted pants and a woollen hat. It wasn’t the scene I’d always pictured when I imagined bringing my first baby home, and yet it brought a tear to my eye. When you had nothing, I’d begun to realise, you appreciated everything.

  ‘It’s the bare minimum,’ Meredith said, ‘which will have to do.’

  Meredith didn’t engage much with Ollie in the first few weeks, which surprised me as she was obviously taken with him. I often caught her peeking into his bassinette and smiling (and it was rare that Meredith smiled).

  ‘You can hold him,’ I said to her once, but she immediately shook her head.

  ‘It’s not my job to hold him.’

  Meredith was quite particular about my jobs. Looking after Ollie was one of them, obviously, but there were others too. When the tyre on her car went flat, it was me using the jack. When the light bulbs needed changing, or errands needed running, I did it. I cleaned the house, took care of the laundry. I did the grocery shopping, carrying Ollie down to the shopping centre in my arms because we didn’t have money for a pram.

  Meredith never thanked me for anything I did, not once, but there was something about the way she asked me to do things. I started to look forward to the requests. (‘You can fix that leaky sink, you’re good at figuring things out.’ ‘Come on up to the roof and see if you can’t do anything about the broken tile.’ ‘Find the cheapest place you can to repair these shoes, I know you won’t let anyone rip us off.’) I came to realise she was right—I was good at figuring things out, I could repair most things, and I didn’t let people rip us off. A couple of months into our living arrangements, I found she hardly had to tell me what to do at all.

  One morning when Ollie was about two months old, I fell asleep in the armchair when I should have been going to the shopping centre. The store closed at noon on a Saturday and I’d told Meredith I’d make roast chicken for dinner. But Ollie had been awake for hours during the night and I decided I could catch a few minutes sleep while he napped on my chest.

  When I woke, it was with a start, just before noon.

  I’d leaped out of my seat, transferring Ollie to my other shoulder, searching around for my purse. That’s when I’d noticed Meredith sitting at the kitchen table. She gestured to the raw chicken in front of her.

  ‘You looked like you could use the sleep,’ she said.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, Meredith and I chatted a little. I asked her what it was like to lose her husband and her affluent lifestyle.

  ‘It was the worst time of my life,’ she said. ‘My friends wouldn’t speak to me, my parents disowned me. Bill married Cindy within the year and moved her into our home while I was working in a factory six days a week.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I told her.

  ‘You haven’t even got me started on the fact that I am only paid two-thirds of a man’s wage for the very same job. And do you know why? Because they assume a wife has a husband at home to take care of her!’ She laughed—a rare, wonderful treat. ‘But there are silver linings. I had so much to lose back then. Now everything I have belongs to me. That’s worth more than you’d think.’

  I was beginning to understand what she meant.

  When Ollie was three months old, Meredith told me to get a job.

  ‘But what job could I do with a baby?’ I asked.

  ‘If there’s anyone who can figure it out, it’s you, Diana.’

  ‘Maybe I could work at night,’ I said, after tossing and turning for three nights, trying to come up with something. I had become attached Meredith’s comments about my ingenuity and I was determined not to let her down. ‘Or the weekends?’

  ‘But . . . what will you do with Ollie?’ she asked, looking perplexed.

  ‘Oh,’ I started, feeling foolish, ‘I thought . . . you would help me.’

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘helping is the worst thing I could do for you.’

  After I finish telling Ghezala my story, nothing is off the table. I tell her how I wrote to Mother to tell her she had a grandson and still she didn’t reply. I tell her how I sen
t her pictures of Ollie every year. How one day I caught the train to my childhood home and saw my father’s old car parked in the driveway, and Mother in the garden pulling weeds. I tell her how Mother looked right at me then lowered her straw hat so it covered her face and went back to weeding. I tell her how that was the last time I saw Mother before she died, four years later. That, after her funeral, I never saw my father again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ghezala says.

  ‘It is what it is. I moved forward with my life and started a new family. I have Tom and the children now.’

  ‘But your children are unhappy with you?’

  I sigh. ‘Because of money. It’s always about money.’

  ‘Your children want your money?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And you don’t want to give it?’

  I smile. There’s something so delightfully simple about the way Ghezala speaks. There’s no ambiguity, no judgment. It frees me to speak equally simply.

  ‘Being poor and having to survive without my parents was the single most defining thing I’ve ever done. It showed me what I am capable of. As a mother, I think this is the most important gift you can give to your children. Unlike money, it can’t be taken away or lost.’

  ‘It sounds like you have your answer,’ Ghezala says.

  ‘But it’s more complicated than that. Nettie wants to have a baby and she’s having trouble getting pregnant. IVF is very expensive and she wants us to help her with the cost. The clock is ticking too, as she’s forty now. And that’s not even the whole picture. I have reason to believe that her husband is unfaithful.’

  Ghezala’s brown eyes widen. ‘Does she know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. The funny thing is . . . I’m not sure she’ll want to know. This baby thing has sent her quite mad. She’s got her eye on the prize—a baby—and she’s unable to see anything else.’

  ‘So . . . instead of talking to her about it, you’re . . . ensuring she won’t get pregnant, by withholding money?’