Mothers' Boys

by Margaret Forster

  ‘No, it isn’t a relief. It’s a burden. I’m a burden for him.’

  ‘Harriet, what the hell are you on about?’

  She stopped. She didn’t know what she was on about, but rambling on to Sam she felt she’d stumbled on a truth others had been trying to get her to see: she was a burden to Joe. Her pain for him was a burden, her agonised concern a stone round his neck. He couldn’t get free of his memories, he couldn’t get free of her. So she said yes to Sam, she said she’d go away with him, for the weekend of their wedding anniversary. They ought to celebrate and a party was out of the question. She couldn’t cope with that kind of celebration, it was too much when there was so little joy in her. Nor did she want to go far. Scotland, that was far enough. Maybe Edinburgh. Their anniversary was in August, they’d go during the Festival and have a weekend of plays and events, of liveliness. Joe could go to Ginny’s. But when she told him, Joe refused. He said he would stay at home, he wouldn’t hear of going to Ginny’s or anywhere else. She wondered if Louis would be back and flew to the calendar where she’d made him write down his dates. August 16. Their anniversary was the 15th. Sam wanted to go on the 14th, return on the 18th.

  Could she leave Joe for two nights, alone in the house? Nothing had happened in the house. It was a test.

  *

  ‘We’ll go out for the day,’ Alan said, ‘that’ll buck you up.’

  Sheila smiled wearily; it was so ridiculous. It was how Alan thought: simply. She was quiet and listless, unlike herself, so a day out and Bob’s your uncle, she’d buck up. ‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘we’ll have a day out.’

  It was marvellous the way his expression changed. ‘Sunday,’ he said, ‘we’ll go to the Lakes on Sunday. Keswick, have a sail on Derwent, eh?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not Keswick, it’ll be crowded on a Sunday, this time of year. Ullswater, how about Ullswater? Or Crummock?’

  ‘I’d like a sail,’ Alan said, ‘and you can’t sail on Crummock. Ullswater, then, we’ll drive to Pooley Bridge and catch the boat.’

  ‘What about Dad?’ she said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘If it’s a Sunday, you know he has his dinner on a Sunday . . .’

  ‘Well, for once he can’t. Let Carole and Peter have him.’

  ‘Carole and Peter are away.’

  ‘Then let him stick, he’s spoiled.’

  ‘I wouldn’t enjoy it. Can’t we take him? He’d love it.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. Take him . . .’

  But they did. Alan was soft. She didn’t have to blackmail him, didn’t have to say she wouldn’t go if Eric James couldn’t come too. She just kept quiet, quieter than ever, and looked at Alan sorrowfully. She could have laughed . . . poor Alan. It was sad for him. He wanted to be just with her, that was what he had always wanted, even with Pat and certainly with Leo. The least selfish man in the world, quite unable to make sure he got what he wanted. So she invited Eric James and he infuriated her, typically.

  ‘Ullswater?’ he said, and, instead of showing the enthusiasm she’d been sure of, ‘All right, if yer say so,’ was the nearest to delight he could come. ‘What time will us set off?’

  She said she supposed about ten or eleven in the morning, to make a day of it. ‘Why? Does it matter?’

  ‘Course it matters, when us set off, course it does. Ten or eleven, eh? Which?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Well yer should. Ten or eleven?’

  ‘Ten, then.’

  ‘That’s awkward.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll not be back until after ten. If I go. It’d mean not going.’

  She was furious with him and said nothing. Very well, if ten was too early, if it conflicted with this urgent appointment he apparently had, then she wasn’t going to change it. He could stay behind, stew in his own juice. Alan would be glad. But Alan spoiled his chance. Coming in at that moment, he hailed his father-in-law with, ‘Looking forward to Sunday then? Has Sheila told you?’

  ‘Ay. What time is us setting off?’

  ‘Oh, about eleven, not before. That suit you?’

  ‘Grand,’ said Eric James, with indecent satisfaction, smirking, avoiding Sheila’s eye. ‘Give me time to git back from the cemetery. I’ll be ready, niver fear.’

  He could go to the cemetery any time, there was nothing sacred about going before ten on a Sunday. But he always went then, to pay his respects on the Lord’s Day, as he put it, he who was the least religious of men. The only time he was ever in a church was for a wedding or a funeral. But once his wife died he became a cemetery visitor on a Sunday as though he were a God-fearing believer. Got dressed up in his best suit and trilby and shuffled off, even now, on the long walk to Jane’s grave where he would remove his hat and cross himself. It was so silly. He used to take Leo and bewilder him. ‘It’s what you do on a Sunday at yer great-grandmother’s grave,’ was all Eric James would say when plagued with questions as to the meaning of this ritual. ‘It’s right and proper, just do as yer told,’ was the only addition to this. Asked by Leo if he believed in God, then, Eric James said it was none of his business, but when Leo, at the age of twelve, just at the limit of revering his great-grandfather, said he certainly didn’t, he was told to wash his mouth out and never say that again.

  On the anniversary of her mother’s death, Sheila always went with him to the grave. She ordered what was called a ‘memorial posy’, price £8.50, mixed flowers. Eric James loved her doing this, and putting a notice in the local paper: ‘Jane Armstrong, died March i, 1972, beloved wife of Eric James Armstrong and much-loved mother of Sheila and Carole. Sorely missed.’ He kept the cutting. Every year he’d produce it and the whole thing would have to be gone through again. She made a day of it for him. They’d take the posy and walk up the centre path of the cemetery, always the same route. When he was young, Leo came too, allowed to carry the flowers, actually liking to carry them. Sheila hated it. All the way to her mother’s grave she’d be thinking of Pat’s, out there under the scorching sun, dusty and forgotten, the wooden cross perhaps disintegrated, eaten by ants, no stone angel to mark the spot, nobody putting flowers there, ever. She could hardly bear it. But her father thought her anguished face was due to grief for her mother and it pleased him. He’d even mutter, ‘Now then,’ and, ‘Good lass,’ on the way back, and he’d order Leo to keep quiet, his grandma was upset. Leo didn’t need to be told. To him, eventually, she told the truth. After she had done so, he never went again.

  They picked Eric James up at eleven. He was standing at the door, coat on, testing it was shut properly by pressing himself against it. He went in the front of the car, naturally, and she was in the back. Hardly was he in the car before he asked, ‘What’s us doing about dinner?’

  ‘We’re having it this evening, when we get back,’ Sheila said, anticipating the horror he then expressed. ‘And I’ve got a picnic for lunch.’

  ‘Well, that’s summat,’ he said. ‘What if it rains?’

  ‘We’ll eat it in the car.’

  But it didn’t rain. The sun shone brilliantly and the first glimpse of Ullswater dazzled. Eric James became quite perky and animated, asking her all the time if she remembered this day and that day, all the outings from her childhood.. She always did. He’d brought them on the bus, a long journey, first to Penrith, then to Pooley Bridge. They were exhausted by the time they got there. The boat was the big treat, all the way to Glenridding and back. Leo had done it too, more comfortably, by car, only an hour or less to the landing stage. He’d loved it. Like Pat. She vividly remembered Pat, aged eight, her face upturned, smiling, excited, saying, ‘I’m going to go on a big boat when I’m grown up, I’m going to sail the seven seas.’ She’d laughed. It was from a story, of course. Pat didn’t even know which were the seven seas. Leo was the same. He hadn’t wanted to get off the boat. They’d had a terrible struggle the first time. He wanted to go to Africa on it.

  The boat wasn’t too crowded. Th
ey found seats easily, good ones, on the prow. Eric James sat as straight-backed as he could, staring around him, pointing out birds and other boats, in his element. ‘Grand,’ he said frequently, and, ‘Champion.’ Alan wandered off, to get a beer, she suspected. They were left happily feeling the sun and the breeze on their faces, Sheila’s eyes closed. ‘Makes yer think,’ Eric James suddenly said. She said nothing. There was no need. He didn’t want encouragement as others did, scorned the normal give-and-take of conversation. ‘Aye, it makes yer think. First Pat, then him. And it only seems five minutes ago. Five minutes.’ This was true Eric James enigmatic style. She knew nevertheless exactly what he was struggling to say. Let him struggle. ‘You never know,’ he went on, ‘how anything will turn out. Who’d have thought it? Sitting here, holding my hand, nice as yer please. Makes yer wonder.’ She had no patience with this, getting his drift, and opening her eyes turned round to look for Alan. Then he did surprise her. ‘It was none of your doing, any road,’ he said. ‘Get that idea out of yer head, now then.’

  ‘What idea?’ She had to ask, unable to resist it.

  ‘Never yer mind. That’s all. Get it out of your head.’

  ‘If I knew what it was, maybe I could.’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘No need to spoil the day. I’ve said enough. Let it rest.’

  She let it rest and it didn’t spoil the day. It was a good day, all of it. As good as those others had been. They got off at Glenridding and found a place to have their picnic. Eric James walked well. Sometimes, if he wanted to be awkward, if he disapproved of where they wanted him to walk to, he’d claim he couldn’t walk at all. But he was willing and able and sat on a boulder covered with Alan’s jacket. Leo had loved picnics, just the eating in the open, and Eric James reminisced about all those he’d taken him on, sometimes just in the park with a packet of crisps, some chocolate biscuits and a can of coke, but a picnic all the same. Sheila suddenly realised, listening to him, that he spoke of Leo as though he were dead. Leo belonged, like Pat, to his memories, his happy memories, and that was all. She thought of where Leo was, what he was doing, while they sat here by the lake. Then she tried to think of Leo in the future. On a picnic. With them. All happy. A family. Leo maybe with wife, with children, Leo driving the car, his car, to Pooley Bridge. Leo in charge. Leo, having lived down the whole thing, with it all atoned for. But how could he atone for it? He hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to, he’d expressed no regret or remorse. That was the worst of it. Nothing. Did he even know what he’d done to Joe Kennedy? Did he? Did anyone? He was intelligent, imaginative, he must. Maybe he would apologise, seek Joe out, as she had sought Harriet. Then everything would change, he would have a future.

  He would drive to Pooley Bridge, with his wife, his children, with her. They would get the boat, have a picnic . . .

  She couldn’t see it. She just couldn’t. Daren’t.

  *

  The last school exam was on 23 June, Joe’s seventeenth birthday on the 25th. Harriet hardly dared mention the word ‘celebration’, and yet she so badly wanted to. Last year, Joe wouldn’t even acknowledge it was his birthday. Birthdays were suddenly terrible. Forever after, his birthday would be smeared by the events just before it. And as for the exams, he didn’t want to talk about them. They were not important, he said, though she knew they were, knew the predictions for his A Levels depended on them.

  She never knew how he’d taken his GCSEs, which he’d been due to take that very June. Instead he took them when everyone did their retakes. All the rest of that agonising year, dragging himself to school, refusing any suggestion that he should defer them a whole year, and yet killing himself in the effort to concentrate. He’d lain on the floor sobbing over maths – he couldn’t do it, he was just stupid, he was going to fail . . . She’d gone to the school, secretly, and they’d just stared at her, both teachers of maths, assured her Joe was so good he couldn’t fail to get a ‘B’ grade at least. And he got an ‘A’, an ‘A’ in everything except Art; ‘A’ grades in eight subjects, ‘B’ in one. Oh, the euphoria she had felt! The triumph! All those ‘A’s in the circumstances. A triumph of mind over . . . she wasn’t sure over what, but something tremendous. But there was no joy in Joe. None at all. It seemed to make things worse. ‘What does it matter? he said, sadly. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing,’ and she flashed back, ‘When I said that, when you thought you were going to fail the lot, you said it did.’ He’d been quiet. ‘I just don’t feel particularly glad,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  So no celebration. This year would be no different, except for the significance of driving. At seventeen he could get a provisional licence. They had it all ready for him, plus twelve lessons booked with an instructor. That was his present. She knew he would be pleased – to drive a car was one of the few remaining ambitions he would admit to having. It wasn’t just the normal adolescent wish either. She knew why he wanted to drive so badly: to feel safe. If he had been driving that night, if he hadn’t had to walk home alone from the cinema, if . . . it was foolish thinking, but not to him.

  He’d taken to wearing boots, great big clumsy things. He wore them summer and winter alike, black lumps of lead at the end of his long, thin legs. He wouldn’t be parted from them, abandoned his trainers and the moccasin-style shoes he’d once been so fond of And he was quite open about the reason: in his boots, he felt more confident. He liked to hear himself walking, hear his feet echoing on the pavement. He said they helped him behave in a different way, a more powerful way. He said he felt he could kick in them. She’d had to turn away at that statement. So pathetic, pitiful. He would never kick. The boots were more likely to slow him down and be a handicap.

  He wouldn’t be able to wear those boots for driving, she was sure. They’d be awkward when he was learning, even if plenty of men wore them. She was hoping to persuade him back into trainers, a new pair, another present. It was to give her pleasure, not him, but what was wrong with that? New trainers, new socks, new Joe. New-looking Joe, anyway. She did so care about how he looked and knew it was wrong. She had her favourite shirts for him, favourite sweaters, as once she had had for Louis. After the attack, she’d kept the clothes he had been wearing. Detective Sergeant Graham had assumed she wouldn’t want them. ‘We’ll have them burned when forensic are finished with them, don’t you worry,’ he’d said. They’d been in separate plastic bags, the garments. A blue short-sleeved button-down collared shirt, hopelessly ripped down the back and stained with blood; a pair of light blue jeans, intact but with darker, deeper patches of blood all down one leg; a black bomber jacket, canvas, unmarked; a pair of white Adidas trainers, untouched; a pair of white cotton socks, one perfect, one discoloured; and his underpants, blue, cotton . . . She’d fiercely demanded them all back, without telling Joe. She’d washed and repaired everything and hidden them. Furtively. In her wardrobe, on a shelf, at the back. Joe had naturally never asked about his clothes, only about his key and his bus pass.

  Neither was returned. The bus pass didn’t matter, it was soon out of date, and he had another, but the key bothered him. In the first weeks he asked about it all the time. Graham said it would be returned – the usual line, about forensic finishing with it – but it never came back and what would forensic do with a key, anyway? Joe was sure the police had lost it and worked himself into a rage over their carelessness. They had the lock changed, hoping this would calm Joe down but it didn’t, he said they’d missed the point. Even a year later he was always muttering about the silly key. He’d tried to use it as a weapon. It had been in his pocket and his hand had gone to it when they jumped him and he’d attempted one desperate lunge with it, absolutely to no avail, only ridicule.

  When he was small, they had always had parties for the boys, a joint one, since Louis’ birthday was on 21 June. They celebrated the longest day or midsummer’s day alternate years and the boys had six guests each. Sam organised the parties – cricket parties, crazy
golf parties, canoeing parties, always some outdoor activity. Right up to Louis’ sixteenth, and after that they’d stopped. Louis had his own parties and Joe didn’t want one without him. But they’d still had celebrations, special meals, treats, his birthday had still been marked somehow. Until his sixteenth, just after. What a sickeningly sombre day that had been . . . Happy Birthday, Joe . . . a farce. Detective Sergeant Graham had given him a present. A video game. None of them knew what it was like because Joe wouldn’t even unwrap it. Even she had been moved to thank Detective Sergeant Graham for his kindness, and Sam had been fulsome. ‘I’m too soft,’ Graham had said, pleased, ‘I can’t resist spoiling the lad a bit after all he’s been through.’

  She had argued with Joe – ‘It was kind of him, you can’t deny that, Joe.’ Joe had said he didn’t want kindness, it made him feel sick. Most things, then, made him feel sick – kindness, compassion, tenderness, consideration and especially sympathy. The only people he really liked were those who were curt, uninterested, sharp and critical. Then he cried. He liked them, but they made him cry. The kind made him rage. To have a chance with Joe you needed to be a stranger who had come back to their little town after a prolonged absence, after everyone had forgotten the attack and didn’t bother mentioning what had happened to young Joe Kennedy – then, Joe was prepared to give people a chance, then he might neither cry nor rage if asked about himself. He even enjoyed missing out this vital stage in his recent life. She’d heard him. She’d heard him say to a neighbour, newly back from Australia, when asked what he’d been doing with himself the last year, what had been happening. ‘Oh nothing much, exams mostly, and working at the boat yard, boring really.’ He’d smiled, been amused at the ease of the glossing over, and afterwards he had warned her not to dare enlighten these people.

  It was why Sam was in a sense right and Joe needed to get away, to start a new life where no one knew anything about him. Staying here might give him security, among those who loved and protected him, but it was a false security and also a hollow one: he hadn’t been protected. Sam would’ve sent him off to Canada, to his brother in Toronto, that very first summer, as soon as he was physically recovered, but she’d said he wasn’t up to it, he was too fragile altogether, he’d never cope with the journey and his cousins and having to pretend he was fine. Anyway, he hadn’t wanted to go. ‘How can I?’ he’d asked, appalled, and that was that. He thought he carried a mark as visible as Cain’s upon him.