Mothers' Boys

by Margaret Forster

  All through the first trying month Eric James had trumpeted, ‘I met them at the airport, I was right there when the li’le lad landed on British soil.’ It was as though he’d attended a coronation at least. The rest of the family had come to meet Leo, but none of them managed it without Eric James accompanying them. He took it upon himself to organise all the visits, ringing each member of the Armstrong Armstrongs up and telling them when they could go to Sheila’s, calling for him on the way, ‘Because the lad’s used to me, I’d best be with yer.’

  Sheila hadn’t the energy to defy him, just let it happen. Leo was awake most of the night, and so was she, sitting reading him stories, cuddling him, giving him soothing drinks, being there with him as her only concern. Alan swore she hadn’t slept a full night in their bed since her return. Not that he complained – he understood Leo’s need of his grandmother. In fact, it was all exactly as he had predicted: Sheila became a mother all over again, gave herself to it wholly, nothing and no one else mattered. Slowly, she brought Leo round to accepting his new circumstances, saw that he received such love and devotion that he could be in no doubt that he was safe and secure. And Eric James helped. He was part of the routine, regular as clockwork, part of Sheila’s own regime of concentrated attention. Alan was kind but distant all the same – he could not help standing back, being unsure, whereas Eric James had such zest for the job of making Leo love him too. Not that he ever used that word, or thought of what he was doing as bidding for, as well as giving, love. Leo was simply a source of endless fascination to him.

  Until he was seven. Four years of complete harmony between the old man and the boy and then the first cracks began to appear. Faint, hairline cracks in the beautiful relationship, nothing to worry about. But Sheila saw them and worried. The first time she heard her father say, ‘Yer don’t do what I do, yer do what I say . . . now then,’ she groaned. Leo was clever. He was curious. He wanted explanations for everything, reasons, justifications. To be told not to do something his beloved grandfather was doing simply because the old man said so and without any rationale being given annoyed him. Logic was something Eric James never bothered with, but it held great attraction for Leo from an early age. Then there was his rejection of some of the more babyish games Eric James had invented. This caused offence. ‘You please yerself then,’ his grandfather would say and shuffle off in a huff, his disappointment only too evident. Worst of all was the clash of what could only be called ‘standards’. ‘If he hits yer, you hit him harder, knock him to the ground, kick his teeth in, that’ll learn him,’ Eric James advised when Leo got into his first fight. Leo stared at him. ‘I don’t want to fight,’ he said. ‘It’s not what you want, lad, it’s what yer’ve got to do or yer’ll end up a pansy.’

  ‘What’s a pansy?’

  ‘Yer’ll know soon enough.’

  There it was again, reasons, explanations, never given. But Leo did fight. When he came home with a split lip, blood all over his lower face, but not crying, Eric James was delighted. ‘What’s the other fella like then, eh?’ And when Leo reported his assailant had indeed had his teeth kicked in and was still writhing on the ground, bawling, his grandfather was elated. ‘Good lad, good lad!’ he chortled. What he failed to observe was Leo’s unhappiness with his own victory and his disapproval of his grandfather’s joy. It didn’t feel right, nor did it feel right to follow Eric James in his constant small methods of cheating – jumping queues, getting into cinemas free by a side-door, silly, unimportant things, but they added up. Eric James was no shining example of grandfatherly rectitude and the more clearly he realised this, the more hesitant Leo became in partnering him as he had once done. By the time he was thirteen, Eric James was becoming an embarrassment. Leo was big by then. He’d turned, against all expectation, into an Armstrong Armstrong after all (nobody mentioned any Jackson side). He was tall, broad-shouldered and already powerfully built.

  ‘Be a boxer,’ Eric James urged. ‘Darkies mek good boxers.’

  ‘I’m not a darkie,’ Leo said, ‘and don’t use that word.’

  ‘I’ll use what word I bloody well like,’ roared his grandfather. ‘Don’t you be ordering me about, lad.’

  ‘I wasn’t, I was just saying . . .’

  ‘Niver mind just, niver mind that, remember yer manners, show some respect to yer elders.’

  ‘I will if they show respect to me,’ said Leo, and in the background Sheila had smiled and secretly urged him on. But when Leo was upset later, and said how he hated his grandfather calling him a darkie, she’d defended him, to her own surprise.

  ‘He’s an old, old man, Leo,’ she said soothingly, ‘it doesn’t mean anything, really. You’ve got to remember he’s lived a narrow life, he doesn’t think . . .’

  ‘Well, he should.’

  ‘I know he should, but he’s set in his ways, it’s too late to change him now, don’t hold it against him, it’s only ignorance.’

  ‘Only ignorance?’ Leo queried, morose and sour, suddenly.

  It wasn’t easy for him from then on. She watched him retreat into himself, bit by bit, lose all the former openness which had been so attractive. He’d always been quiet, but never sullen, quiet in an attentive, alert way, whereas now he was sunk in some kind of gloom she couldn’t penetrate. She didn’t believe he knew himself why his personality seemed to have suffered some sea-change. Her sister Carole said they were all the same, all boys went like this, but Sheila wondered how she could know when she had only daughters herself. The physical change alone was so violent and alarming – at sixteen Leo was over six feet and weighed thirteen stone. His shoes were size twelve, no sweater had arms long enough. And he wasn’t beautiful any more. Everything about his features seemed to coarsen and his eyes, once huge in the small face, seemed to narrow and shrink as the rest of him grew bigger. He filled their small rooms, knocked his head on doorways, was clumsy where he had been strikingly graceful. She found it all so difficult to take, and so, she sensed, did he.

  But they were still close, still friends. He was a good boy, helpful, thoughtful. Carole was always commenting on it – ‘Catch any of my lot doing my shopping,’ or, ‘Clean my windows? You must be joking.’ He looked after her, did Leo, without drawing attention to what he did or seeking reward or praise. They talked too. Often they had serious conversations, not that she could keep up with him, he knew too much, he was too clever. But he listened to her, gave weight to her uninformed opinions, never told her she was stupid, as Carole’s children had done. He loved her, she knew he did, though he’d long since outgrown the stage when he could openly tell her so, when he’d flung his arms round her neck and clung to her and kissed her and said, ‘I love, love, love you, mam.’ Maybe she should never have begun correcting him, making him realise she was his grandmother. It made him upset, it was as though she was betraying him in some way and at the same time reminding him his mother was dead. He couldn’t remember a thing about her, about Pat, absolutely nothing at all, nor about the accident. His earliest memory was of her, holding out her hand in that hospital room. That, and the plane and being given a teddy-bear by the stewardess. His life had started with her.

  He did once say, ‘What would have happened to me, if you hadn’t gone for me?’ He’d been about eight or nine when he asked that. She ought to have been prepared for this inevitable question, had an appropriate answer ready, but she wasn’t and hadn’t. She was startled into truth and said she didn’t know. Then she’d added how kind everyone there had been and that she was sure he would have been well looked after. ‘But who would have been my mam?’ he’d said, quite panicky. She’d sat down with him, glad he could still be cuddled, just, and told him there were questions in everyone’s life which could not be answered and it was no good torturing himself looking for them. She had come for him and that was all that mattered. At least she was ready for the next alarm – ‘Could anyone come from Africa and take me back there?’ It was such a relief to be able to be emphatic and say this was quite im
possible, he belonged only to her and Alan. It was Alan, whatever his views, who had seen everything was done properly. She even showed him the adoption papers, and he was satisfied. But gradually, in adolescence, Africa loomed larger in a different way. He wanted to know about his father. He liked being told he was a doctor. But about John Jackson’s family she could tell him nothing. She’d never known much, and though all Pat’s letters had been preserved and she passed them on to Leo on his sixteenth birthday, they held surprisingly little concrete information, few facts. Most of them were full of lyrical descriptions of the landscape and the animals and sunsets. ‘She loved Africa,’ Leo said, quite puzzled, and Sheila had agreed. Pat did love Africa. So Leo began to think he should go there and see for himself, and her great dread grew that once he was eighteen he’d up and go and leave her for ever, just like Pat.

  Now, she supposed, he would never get the chance. He wouldn’t be granted a visa, probably, not with his record. ‘Send him back to Africa,’ Eric James at one time had said, with such cruelty. ‘That’s where he belongs, in the jungle, carrying on like that, just an animal.’ Her hatred for her father had been so overpowering she had almost fainted with the pressure of it, the sheer burning pressure inside her. For once his mighty age, his physical frailty, had not protected him from her contempt. ‘I think you should go back, to you own home, if that’s all you have to say,’ she’d said.

  ‘Well, yer can’t deny it, bloody disgrace, acting like that, like an animal . . .’

  ‘You know nothing about it.’

  ‘I know he damned well did it, I know that, and so does the rest of this town.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘No wonder, neither do I, and neither does he, not a word to say for hisself.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Nobody really knows what went on, Leo hasn’t said.’

  ‘He didn’t deny he was there and he had a knife and he bloody used it, he didn’t deny it and he couldn’t, not with them finding the knife and his prints and the blood matching and all the . . .’

  ‘Dad! For pity’s sake! I can’t stand it, stop it!’

  He’d stopped. Shuffled off. Later, she’d realised it was his own pain speaking, the only way he could release his grief. They’d never spoken of it again. She and Alan never spoke of it, not after the first awful night. They agreed it did no good. And that was what terrified her most about Mrs Kennedy wanting to come . . . she might want to speak about it, the actual crime, go over it. Maybe she even knew more. That policeman, the Detective Sergeant, he’d hinted at something more and her heart had raced. He was always hinting. Smug. Actually tapped his nose with his finger and said he got feelings, call it sixth sense. He dared to tell her he had one about Leo, about why he’d done it. He insinuated it was something unpleasant, this reason. She refused to ask him. He could keep his suspicions, whatever they were, to himself. Nor would she volunteer any hypothesis of her own. She stuck to what she had always said: Leo was a good boy, always had been. She was his grandmother who had been like a mother and she knew. It was impossible for her to have brought this boy up for thirteen years and not to have known him through and through. Yes, she had to accept the evidence of Leo’s guilt, but she didn’t have to accept this meant he was rotten and evil. For one night, for forty minutes, yes, it was indisputable, but not before, not ever, and that must mean something. ‘Mothers,’ the policeman had said, smirking, ‘they’re all the same when it’s their little lamb.’

  But Leo didn’t seem to want her loyalty and faith in him. He was like a zombie, he couldn’t talk to her any more. If Mrs Kennedy was coming looking for explanations she would get none. She could talk about Leo’s upbringing, about Leo’s character and so forth, but there was nothing at all she could tell her about the attack. If she started on it, Sheila had made up her mind . . . she would show Mrs Kennedy the door. Clearly, the woman was going to come. There’d been no reply to her second letter, retracting the previous invitation, and meanwhile Mrs Kennedy’s own reply, saying she’d come on Wednesday, had arrived. She must just accept that she’d made a mistake in agreeing and get it over with as quickly as possible. She was nearly seventy years of age, she ought to be able to deal with it, behave with some dignity. She took the trouble to have her hair done on the Monday and though she wasn’t so foolish as to buy anything new to wear, she had her best dress dry-cleaned. She didn’t want to look pathetic and shabby. Mrs Kennedy had seen her in court all sombre in grey. Her best dress was a bright blue and she was glad, she didn’t want to look down-trodden, she wanted to show life went on and, although sorry and ashamed and miserable, that she was trying.

  And she baked two cakes to offer Mrs Kennedy a slice, a Dundee cake, her special, and gingerbread. She made sure both were produced on Sunday for tea so that a good bit of both cakes had been eaten and they wouldn’t look obvious. She wasn’t going to use her best china from the cabinet, nor was she going to sit in the living room. Too stiff, too far apart. The kitchen was small but friendlier. They could sit at the table, under the window, with the sun coming in and the geraniums visible in the window-box. She would say, ‘Would you rather go in the living-room, or is the kitchen all right?’ and she was sure Mrs Kennedy would choose the kitchen, with the question so cunningly put. Any woman would. Then it would be easy making the tea. She didn’t have any real coffee or a coffee-machine and didn’t want to offer instant, even if everyone else did. This was a tea household and tea it would be, unless Mrs Kennedy was very forthright in declining it. Then, the instant coffee would be produced. None of these things mattered, Sheila knew that, neither to her nor to her guest. They were irrelevant – tea, cake, best dress, hair – irrelevant, but not unimportant. They set the stage. It was all unnatural and the right props helped . . .

  By the time two o’clock on Wednesday came, Sheila was quite calm.

  Chapter Six

  SHE WAS AT the end of Mrs Armstrong’s street by one-twenty p.m. A street of small, terraced houses opening straight on to the pavement. Rows of them, all absolutely straight, running off a shopping thoroughfare. There was a railway bridge nearby and the trains could be clearly heard shooting over it. She’d passed two factories, enormous red-brick edifices with high, small windows. There were no trees anywhere, no gardens, and yet these narrow streets were not entirely bleak. She noticed all the doors were brightly painted and most had brass knockers. The windows sparkled and some had window-boxes on the whitened sills. There was no litter at all, not a speck of dirt anywhere. It was as though someone regularly washed and polished the grey stone of the pavements and the very tarmac of the road. Harriet drove along it a little way then turned into another street and parked. She couldn’t sit in the car for a whole forty minutes, so she got out and began to walk with as much sense of purpose as she could muster along this street. Unfortunately, it was a dead end and she was obliged to turn round and retreat. The wind was whipping her hair and though she did not care about such things she didn’t want to arrive at Mrs Armstrong’s house looking bedraggled, so she was obliged to get into her car once more. She brushed her hair, staring at herself in the small mirror fixed to the flap which hung down in front of the passenger seat. In it, she saw reflected a woman coming out of a house and stopping to look at the strange car curiously. Of course, in this kind of street any stranger or strange object would be noticed.

  It was silly to have arrived so very early, but she had been afraid of not being able to find the street and of being late and therefore flustered. She’d allowed twice as much time as she could realistically expect the journey to take and was still glad of it. She wanted to be calm and her composure was always threatened by anxiety over punctuality. She was calm now. Calm, but nervous. She hadn’t the faintest idea what she was going to say and the onus would be on her. Mrs Armstrong had, after all, tried to cancel this meeting, she’d thought better of it. She might be angry at being tricked, or what she could, with every justification,
regard as being tricked. Or she might not be there at all, not having received any acknowledgement of her last note. I must, Harriet thought, be prepared for anything, and I must, above all else, betray no emotion. This meeting was not about emotion. Even if she did not know what it was about, it was not about that.

  With another twenty minutes to go, she took but the folder of press cuttings. These repelled Sam, and Joe did not even know about them. She didn’t know why she had clipped and kept reports, first of the attack, then of the capture of the unnamed Leo Jackson, then of the court case. She’d done it furtively. All the cuttings were from the Daily Telegraph, their own daily paper, and from the local paper. There were no photographs alongside any of the pieces, because both boys were too young to be named. Really, these cuttings, she now saw, did not amount to much. They were quite pathetic. Front-page news in the local paper, but only in a side column, and a mere paragraph on page three of the Telegraph. The facts were stated and that was about all. Except there was a description of Leo Jackson’s upbringing. His grandfather was quoted as saying none of it made sense to him and his grandmother – ‘known as his mother’ – as reflecting he had always been a good boy. It was astonishing how little attention there had been.