Mothers' Boys

by Margaret Forster

  But then the attack and Joe’s fate were run-of-the-mill. Detective Sergeant Graham had tactlessly pointed this out in a mistaken attempt to be comforting. Run-of-the-mill. Random violence was run-of-the-mill, quite ordinary, nothing to get excited about. Run-of-the-mill or par for the course, Graham as usual wasn’t fussy about his cliches. He had been trying, Sam maintained, to reassure them that because what had happened to Joe was not unique, then his recovery was not impossible. ‘People get over it,’ Graham had said, ‘they think they won’t but they do. And he’s young, the young heal quicker.’ How it had enraged her. He knew nothing about Joe and yet could confidently assert he’d heal quickly and eventually forget. He hadn’t the faintest inkling of what all this had done to Joe. Once, he had even said, sanctimoniously, ‘It’s you I’m worried about, Mrs Kennedy, you’re taking it hard.’ He’d shaken his head sadly and attempted to engage her in one of his soulful, meaningful stares. She’d turned away, rejected his ghastly sympathy. He’d boasted to her about how he lectured – lectured – to police audiences on ‘How to Treat Victims of Random Violence’ and she’d almost vomited on the spot at the very idea of such a thing – it was disgusting.

  She wondered if Graham had visited the Armstrongs. Probably. And how would he have behaved with them? Would it have made any difference that they were the grandparents of the aggressor? Maybe not, maybe the self-importance, the evident relish of his role, would have been the same. It was something, she supposed, she could discuss with Mrs Armstrong, but she didn’t think she would. Ten minutes to go. There was no harm in being just a little early. She started the car and reversed and turned back into the right road. The Armstrongs’ house was nearly at the end. There was plenty of room to park. She pulled up at the very end of the road. She walked quite briskly to the front door, which opened before she could ring the bell.

  ‘Come in,’ Mrs Armstrong said, standing well back, with the door opened to its fullest extent, as though she wanted to convince Harriet there were no lions waiting to pounce.

  ‘Thank you.’ Harriet stepped inside and waited. Mrs Armstrong made little clucking noises as she went ahead. ‘I thought in the kitchen, it’s quite cosy, but if you’d rather . . .’

  ‘Oh, in the kitchen,’ Harriet said, and saw Mrs Armstrong’s approving little smile.

  The kitchen was small. Cosy means cramped, Harriet thought. Hardly room for the table between the cooker and fridge and cupboards. The table had a cloth on it, an embroidered cloth, she was sure Mrs Armstrong had made it herself, and a white jug of some pink flowers, she didn’t know what. Mrs Armstrong went straight to the kettle and put it on. It boiled at once, showing it had already been boiled in anticipation. Harriet wondered if she should say she didn’t like tea and rejected the idea – this was one occasion when she would have to force it down. Except for the faint hiss of the water as it was poured into the yellow china teapot there was silence. The fridge sprang into life, whirring croakily.

  ‘You sit down,’ Mrs Armstrong said, ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  Harriet sat, facing out of the window. Thank God she could at least recognise geraniums. ‘Cheerful, your geraniums,’ she said, as Mrs Armstrong set the teapot down and got cups out of a small wooden cupboard.

  ‘My husband is fond of geraniums. Anything bright he likes. Milk?’

  Harriet said no. Mrs Armstrong’s dress was a very bright blue. She was a big woman. Funny, when in court she hadn’t seemed so. Her hair was white, cut short, too short, a rather masculine haircut which didn’t suit her. She should have had a bun, Harriet decided, and a middle parting. Her features were quite fine, but the brutal haircut made them look coarser. She was suddenly aware that she’d been sitting there for a long time without speaking, not even to say thank you for the tea she hadn’t wanted.

  ‘Mrs Armstrong . . .’ she began, but was instantly interrupted.

  ‘Sheila. I know I’m old, but I’m not old-fashioned.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sheila then, I just thought you might prefer me to be formal since I’ve barged my way in . . .’

  ‘No, I let you come, even if I changed my mind, I knew you’d still come and I let you. I could have stopped you.’

  ‘Yes. You’re very kind.’

  ‘We could all do with a bit of kindness.’ Sheila saw how Harriet’s hand trembled as she replaced her cup. Replaced it without even taking the smallest sip. Maybe it was too hot. Tea without milk, tea newly poured and not cooled by milk, would be. She surely knew that. Now she was clasping her hands together under the table and clearing her throat. Sheila knew that noise. It was the same noise she had once made herself when she’d been trying to stop herself crying in the days she could cry. Crying would do no good: If this woman had come to sit and cry it would be hopeless, a waste of time. She couldn’t help her. ‘Have some cake,’ she urged, ‘it’s home-made.’ She expected it to be rejected, but a slice of Dundee cake was accepted quite eagerly and actually eaten. ‘I don’t bake so much now, with only Alan and me to eat the stuff. And my Dad, he enjoys a bit of cake when he comes.’

  ‘Does he live near?’

  ‘Too near, I sometimes think.’ They both smiled. ‘He’s nearly ninety,’ she went on, ‘and a cantankerous old chap, he’s difficult, always has been. Are your parents alive?’

  ‘No. They both died five years ago, quite young, one after the other, both of cancer.’

  ‘Young?’

  ‘My mother was sixty-six, my father sixty-eight. Not young really, I suppose.’

  ‘No.’

  Harriet closed her eyes. Leo Jackson’s mother, she remembered, had only been in her twenties when she was killed. How crass she had been to comment on her own parents’ supposed youth. She looked hurriedly at Sheila, whose face was impassive, and decided not to apologise, it would make matters worse. She must get on, she hadn’t come here to talk about her dead parents. Ten minutes had gone already – she could see her hour ticking away on the kitchen clock in front of her. This wouldn’t do. ‘It was good of you to write,’ she said, trying to look Sheila straight in the eye.

  ‘I should have done it before. I thought about it enough, but I wasn’t sure . . . it seemed . . . I thought it might make things worse, coming from me.’

  ‘No. It made things a bit better. Because they haven’t been, lately. They’ve been very bad again.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s like that. When my Pat was killed – well, it was terrible, I don’t want to talk about it even now, but a year later it seemed worse. I never could understand why. People seemed to think I was over it, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t even started.

  ‘Started?’

  ‘To get over it, like they expected. I didn’t even want to get over it. That’s all people want, they want to know you’re getting over it, eh?’

  ‘Yes. They do.’

  ‘But your boy isn’t dead.’

  ‘No. I’ve a lot to be thankful for. That’s one of the problems. People tell me all the time I’ve a lot to be thankful for. They didn’t kill him.’

  Sheila got up abruptly. ‘More tea?’ she asked, loudly.

  The clock in the next door livingroom chimed the halfhour. Good. Half-time. No score. She wouldn’t let it run to extra time, that was one thing, couldn’t afford to, not with Alan and her father due back.

  ‘No, no more tea, thank you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? Oh, you don’t want to worry about that . . .’

  ‘No, I mean mentioning killing. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to mention what happened in any way,’

  ‘It’s only natural, you couldn’t be blamed if you did.’

  ‘But I didn’t, I don’t want to. It’s pointless. It’s nothing to do with you, with us, all that.’

  ‘I’d like to be as sure.’

  ‘Did I sound sure?’

  ‘Well, you said it. It can’t be true, though, is how I feel. It would be a relief, but I can’t think it’s true, for me. For you, yes, but not for me.’

  ‘Why?’
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  ‘Bound to have something to do with upbringing, bound to. He couldn’t just turn into a monster. We went wrong somewhere.’

  ‘And I did.’

  ‘Oh, now!’

  ‘I did. I must have done. I’ve blamed myself over and over. There must have been something about Joe, and then, how he reacted . . .’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to talk about it.’ Harriet managed to gulp some of the now cold tea. Her dislike of the taste braced her. ‘My husband doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said.

  ‘Neither does mine.’

  ‘He’d be angry.’

  ‘So would mine. He’d say I was daft, writing in the first place, he wouldn’t like it at all.’

  ‘The thing is, Sam thinks I’m wallowing in it all, I mean he thinks everything would be all right if I’d just go along with pretending it was.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Forty-five. Sam’s forty-six.’

  ‘Old enough to know about men. They’re all the same. Can’t face up to anything even when it’s staring them in the face. When our Pat was killed, Alan never spoke of it, of what was going on in his head. He cried, mind. He cried a lot, and I suppose that isn’t typical.’

  ‘Sam doesn’t cry, or only once, seeing Joe in hospital. . .’ Harriet saw Sheila’s expression and stopped. It was impossible. Everything, with Sheila, came back to her grief over her daughter’s death and everything with herself to Joe’s suffering. How could they talk to each other without plunging into this overriding pain?

  ‘I can’t cry,’ Sheila said, though her face looked so ready for weeping. ‘It’s odd. Everyone else cries except me. People think it’s funny, they think I’m hard, or those that don’t know me, like that policeman. He thought I was hard-bitten, definitely.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Graham?’

  ‘I can’t remember his name. Lean chap, like a whippet, hair brushed straight back.’

  ‘Graham. I hated him.’

  ‘Only doing his job, as they say. Thrilled with himself, he was, took a pleasure in it. He had the place turned upside down. I scrubbed it from top to bottom afterwards. I shampooed the carpets, all of them, not that feet leave marks on carpets, I just felt they did. I felt like moving, selling the house and moving.’ Sheila stiffened at. the memory she was invoking. Her back went very straight and she lifted her chin in the air so that to Harriet she looked suddenly threatening. She never knew how the police had got on to Leo, though Alan said it would have been easy enough – how many black kids were there in this small city? If a gang with a black kid had been seen in Joe Kennedy’s area, if a gang had been recognised, in that pub where they’d called in, as being from the city, then the police wouldn’t have had to do much detection to think of Leo. All the trouble in their city started in its one nightclub and Leo, on his own admission, had been there. Easy, as Alan said. But she’d been so confident when she opened the door, and saw two policemen there on Sunday morning. Yes, she’d said, quite unworried, yes, Leo Jackson lived here and yes he was at home, if still asleep, and yes they could see him, she would call him – but they had brushed past her and gone thundering up the stairs . . .

  She brought herself back with difficulty to the present and looked at Harriet with embarrassment. It was so quiet. They were both so quiet, sitting there. The smallest clink of a teaspoon on a saucer was shockingly loud, the faintest movement of a hand seemed to screech in the still air. ‘I felt like moving,’ she repeated, and then again, ‘I felt like selling the house and moving.’ She saw recognition in the other woman’s eyes. She knew this woman, why there had been this pause, why Sheila had completely withdrawn for a few minutes and now she was helping her pretend nothing had happened, that there had been no gap in their stilted conversation.

  ‘Yes, Sam suggested that,’ Harriet said. ‘He thought I’d like it, but I didn’t. Where could we move to that was so peaceful and nice?’

  ‘I used to go where you live for my holidays, well, a couple of holidays. Lovely it is, you’re right. Lovelier than this, but we’ve lived here since we were married, all these years. We couldn’t move.’

  ‘I don’t think it does any good anyway. It’s just running away. It might work on a superficial level but not a deeper one, where it matters.’

  There was another long pause. This time Sheila was alert. She couldn’t think what to say and she could see that Harriet was equally at a loss. She studied her, quite openly, quite boldly. Rude. Her stare, for that was what it undeniably was, could be called rude. There was a sense of defiance in it, she knew. She was defying this woman to blame her and yet it was blame she wanted to face. She could see no blame, not a speck. She saw barely contained. distress. Harriet quivered, visibly quivered, her eyelids fluttering rapidly all the time, her lips trembling, as though they were stuttering though no sound came from them, and even her hair seemed to give off movement. The tension was unbearable. It is my house, Sheila thought, and I must stop this, I must think of something very ordinary to say.

  ‘You work, don’t you?’ she finally said.

  ‘Yes, I have a small business. I design and print fabrics.’

  ‘That must help.’

  ‘It does, if I can concentrate. I couldn’t, at first, and then I pulled myself together, but now it’s slipping again, the concentration, I mean. I seem to spend half my time wandering in the past. It’s silly . . .’

  ‘It’s natural. I do it, I’ve always done it.’

  ‘No, but it isn’t natural, not how I’m doing it now. I can’t explain, I use it like a drug and it has the same kind of effect, it makes me stupid. My sister says it’s not natural.’

  ‘Are you close?’

  ‘Quite. More now. She’s very straightforward, very practical. I was always the dreamer. She lives near, we see a lot of each other. She’s been very good, really. She’s got her own troubles, one of her girls, she’s got two daughters, the younger one has diabetes . . .’

  ‘That’s nasty.’

  ‘Yes. So Ginny, Virginia, that’s my sister, she tends to get exasperated with me – you know – everyone has troubles and they just have to adapt. I admire her, she’s wonderful. I have terrible daydreams. I’m ashamed of them, in them I think which would I rather, Joe has diabetes or gets attacked, as though you could compare them, it’s terrible.’

  ‘If I could have Pat back, I’d swop anything. I’d even trade lives, other people’s for hers.’

  They both stared at each other again for a long time. Harriet’s eyes were full of tears now, Sheila’s clear and unblinking. Each took in the other’s intensity. Sheila reached out her hand and touched Harriet’s, her hand cold, Harriet’s warm. The lightest of touches, hardly a touch at all, and hastily withdrawn. The clock next door struck three. Both of them started. Harriet sprang up, Sheila got to her feet more slowly, wondering how a whole hour could have passed.

  ‘I must go,’ Harriet said, suddenly embarrassed. ‘Joe will be home, it’s quite a long drive and I like to be home when he gets in, even if it annoys him. Thank you for letting me come.’

  ‘I wish I thought it had done you some good, dear.’

  ‘Oh, it has. Just talking.’

  ‘At least it hasn’t done harm, I hope.’

  ‘No, no, certainly not. Maybe one day you’d like to visit me? We could have a walk, by the lake, if you like it, you said you did, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do like it. Maybe one day.’

  They were at the door. Sheila felt she’d never see Harriet Kennedy again and was sorry. Twenty-five years between them, but it didn’t seem like that. She was even sorrier for her now than she had been before. In court, Harriet had seemed aloof and confident, a class apart, and class had been in the air all the time. Now it wasn’t. Different accents, different clothes, different generation, but the sum of these differences didn’t add up to the gulf it should. Sheila felt the stronger. She didn’t feel so old and beaten any more. This younger woman was in worse shape
and she felt compassionate. Not one angry or resentful word had passed Harriet’s lips, not a mention of any hatred for Leo, no feeling of utter revulsion towards him and all who were connected to him. She realised how relieved she was not to have had to talk about Leo, not to have been called to account. Everyone else, family, friends, neighbours, police, probation officers, strangers – all had wanted to call her to account, to explain, to find reasons. That was what she had dreaded this meeting would be about and she had been ready to take her punishment.

  She watched Harriet drive away, giving a little wave and a smile, and when she went back inside the house seemed dreary. She went upstairs and took off her blue dress and put on a skirt and blouse. Harriet had worn some sort of big shirt over leggings. Unusual clothes, not really suitable for a woman in her forties, except that these days being in your forties meant nothing . . . Her thoughts drifting in a banal, aimless way, Sheila eyed the bed longingly. She wanted to lie down upon it and give herself up to pointless, comforting, meanderings about clothes and hair and looks and fashions and memories of what her mother had worn and she had worn and Pat, Pat in her arty phase, coming back in all that junk from India, cheesecloth was it, light stuff you could see through, floaty stuff . . . she’d had precious few clothes when she was killed. Nothing colourful. A few pairs of shorts and trousers, some shirts, a couple of plain dresses, ordinary. Nothing worth keeping, nothing to get sentimental about, nothing of any significance to save for Leo. But then he was a boy, he wouldn’t have wanted anything, it would have been embarrassing. She’d taken the photographs and the pearl necklace they’d given Pat on her twenty-first, the one she’d never liked and clearly thought a waste of money, money she could have used to travel. And a ring, a silver ring. They said it had been on her finger. She’d tried it on but couldn’t even get it on her little finger. So small and thin Pat had been . . .