Every Day Is Mother's Day (5 page)

“I let your blasted mother put on me,” Sylvia said. “I’d know better now.” From upstairs came the sound of the lavatory flushing.

“Unfortunately it isn’t given to any of us to have our opportunities over again. Or what would you do if you could? Perhaps since you are now so dissatisfied with your life, you ought to have looked the other way when you saw Colin on the tram.”

“I can assure you,” Sylvia said, “that I didn’t meet Colin on any tram.”

“It would be nothing to be ashamed of if you had.”

“I assure you.”

“She couldn’t have,” said Colin, coming in. “It’s not possible.”

“I understood you met on a tram. I’m not saying anything against it.”

“Couldn’t have been on a tram,” Colin said. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t have been on a tram, either Sylvia or myself, but I happen to recall that the trams had stopped running some years previously. It was on the railway station that we met.”

“I knew public transport was involved somewhere,” Florence said.

“And what have you got against it?”

Florence smiled faintly. “Nothing.”

“Only I was going to say, your father made his living out of it, didn’t he, people falling off buses.”

“Yes, my love,” Colin said. “We are all staunch supporters of
public transport in this house. Perhaps that’s why you caught my eye. You so clearly approved of it too.”

“You were a while,” Sylvia observed, “in the toilet.”

“Allow me a few moments’ privacy,” Colin said. “Confine your interest to the children’s bowel movements, not mine.”

“The topic of romance on trams has worn thin,” Florence said. “I see that we must have something else. Sylvia sees it too.”

Defiantly, Colin took out a cigarette and lit it. Love is blind, Florence thought: for a year or two.

“Unhygienic habit,” Sylvia said. “I gave it up when I was pregnant with Suzanne. I read it in a magazine. Smoking and Pregnancy.”

“Sylvia takes magazines devoted to housewifery,” Florence said. “Does she have recipes making use of frozen chicken which are both tasty and economical?”

“I know what you eat,” Sylvia said. “Bread and jam.”

“In its place,” Florence murmured.

“Tea,” said Colin.

“I know. And tomato sandwiches. I don’t think Colin had ever had a proper meal in his life until we got married.” She got up. “We’ll be off, Florence.” She went out through the kitchen to the back door. “Come on, you lot, we’re off.”

An argument ensued. Florence could hear the protests of the children overridden by Sylvia’s firm flat voice. It made her nervous. If they wanted to stay, it probably meant that they were engaged in some form of covert vandalism. “The roses,” she said nervously.

“Roses,” Colin put his head in his hands. “You ought to get some cabbages in. The cost of living being what it is.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. They were Father’s roses.”

“Grub them up,” Colin said. “That’s it. Grub them up.” He groaned quietly, then stood up, stretching himself. He was a man on poor terms with his clothes—his shirt always coming out of his waistband, his trousers shooting up around his calves as he sat; it was difficult not to see this as a symptom of a more
general failure of control. He had once been remarkably good-looking, but now his looks had faded, as if his features were doubtful of their application in his current circumstances. His habitual expression was one of anxious astonishment, like that of a man who has been stopped in the street by a policeman and finds he has forgotten his name. “Where’s my pullover?” he said, looking about. He hauled it over his head and smoothed his thinning fair hair.

“You’re ageing, Colin,” Florence said in a low voice.

“Ah well. At my back I always hear time’s wingèd chariot etc. It’s been ten years you know, me and Sylvia. I should have thought the amusement would have palled. You hurt her, you know. She cries. She isn’t entirely the jolly factory lass you take her to be.”

“Come on, Colin.” Sylvia was standing in the doorway holding the hands of her two younger children. “Thank you very much, Florence. Say thank you to your Auntie for the nice tea.”

Freeing their hands, pushing past Florence, the children whooped out to the car. Sylvia followed them.

“I wanted your opinion,” Florence said. “About Mrs. Axon and her daughter.”

“I have no opinion,” Colin said. “Mrs. Axon has lived around the corner for as long as I can remember without having done anything to warrant my having an opinion on her.” His shirt had come out again; he was stuffing it back, hauling at his belt. “You know, Florence, Sylvia’s quite right. You’ve got to make a life of your own.”

Outside, Sylvia wound the car window down. “Colin, are you coming?”

“Anon, good Sylvia, anon. You see, the problem is, you were geared up to years of self-sacrifice, looking after Mother. Now all that’s aborted…well, you know what I mean. Eh, old girl? Pop over next Sunday.” A peck on the cheek. She stood in the porch watching Sylvia wind the window up again.
There was something incongruously patrician about Sylvia’s averted profile, her mouth was set, her chin sagging. Colin hunched himself into the driver’s seat.

“It’s a flaming bloodsport,” Sylvia said.

“Sorry, love.” On a sudden whim Colin transferred his hand from the knob of the gearstick to her knee. He patted it. “You mustn’t let her get you down. She’s lonely, you know.”

Sylvia sniffed. “Come on, let’s get home.”

Colin steered along Buckingham Avenue with his usual caution. The little saloon forced him to drive with his arms stiffly extended, as if he were fending off the week ahead.

“You were getting at me,” she said.

“Well, just a bit.”

“Florence sets you off.”

“I said I’m sorry. Can we have a bit of peace? I said,” he raised his voice for the children in the back, “can we have a bit of peace?”

The most difficult thing was not knowing: how many months. Evelyn took down the calendar and pored over it. You could not be positive that the missing Thursdays were implicated. That would be a jump altogether too far ahead.

“Do you want to go to the doctor?” she said. “It would cost.”

Muriel said that it was free now.

“Free? Nothing’s free. What sort of stupid talk is that?”

She didn’t know what was going on in the world, Muriel said craftily. Craftily, because it was Muriel’s scheme to have her inadequacy prick her, so that she would buy a television set. Evelyn wouldn’t have one in the house, not while she was alive; and after her death she expected to exercise some sway. After all, they hadn’t missed the radio when it had broken down, and they didn’t feel the lack of newspapers. Soon after the last war Muriel had been sent with the month’s money to the
newsagent’s. It had been wrapped up in a piece of paper, and she had lost it. Evelyn couldn’t see her way to finding the money twice over. So the shop had stopped delivering. Evelyn had never read them anyway. All the news was the same, and all bogus. The papers took no cognizance of the other world, except when they found some cheap talk of poltergeists or table-turning to fill the pages up.

“And where do you go?” she demanded of Muriel. “Where do you go, that you know so much?”

Muriel didn’t answer that question. Either Evelyn knew where she had been, and was mocking her, or she did not; in which case, her powers were on the wane, the long battle was drawing to an end. They tell you what’s free at the Class, Muriel said. They tell you what you can get for nothing.

It was strongly in Evelyn’s mind now that it must be someone from the class who was the father of Muriel’s child. But it was no use bothering Muriel about it, no use trying to get anything out of her. It did cross her mind that something malign in the house might be responsible for the girl’s condition; but she had to admit that in her extensive experience she had not heard of such a thing. There were unnatural unions, but did they come to fruition? Muriel looked as if she would come to fruition, quite soon. No, surely her first thought was right. The lax Welfare had turned their backs. Some half-wit had prevailed on a quarter-wit. Only one thing she would have liked to find out; was he in some way deformed?

“Isabel,” Colin said. “Isabel.”

“Don’t slobber, Colin.”

“You are unkind.”

“Oh?”

“You are vastly too good, Isabel. You make it plain.”

“Yes.” Isabel wound down the window of the car. A dank semi-rural darkness entered. She lit a cigarette.

“Colin, why do you always lock the doors?”

Heaving and sighing.

“The car doors, Colin, why do you insist on locking your passengers in? Oh, come on, Colin. A bit of coherent conversation.”

“The A6 murder,” Colin said.

“What?”

“This. Murder. Similar. Circumstances. Night, a field, or a tract of, I don’t remember, some open ground, I suppose, by the side of the road. Hanratty. Before your time.”

“Oh, Colin.” She put out a narrow cold hand to find his face. “Colin, you are a worrier.”

“Personally, I think the conviction was unjust,” Colin said.
“I’m against capital punishment. The truth is, Isabel, now forgive me, it’s rather maudlin I know, but the truth is Isabel, I’m against death. Death in any form.”

She sighed, in the damp darkness of the passenger seat.

“Sylvia,” he said. “Sylvia is forbidding me eggs. My arteries. She read these things. Aagh.” He let out a long breath, releasing his tie further with one hand. He heaved across to her, wet and sweating. “Do you know, sometimes I feel very much like suicide. But I had a good idea the other week. I thought I would buy myself a record of the Marches of Sousa. And if I felt really tempted to suicide, I would play it. You wouldn’t kill yourself after that—after you’d marched about a bit. It would be too ridiculous. Isabel, Isabel.” He pressed his face into her neck. It was a source of constant amazement to him that she did not pull away; not every time.

This is October. Isabel is just a name on a letter, received by someone else.

This is Colin off to his evening class. Sylvia is clattering the dishes together in the sink, slamming them with dangerous force onto the stainless-steel draining board. It is clear that she thinks Creative Writing a waste of time. Early evening bouts of violence echo from the lounge; the air hangs heavy and blue with gunsmoke, the children squat before the TV set, their mouths ajar.

“You see nothing of them,” Sylvia says. (This conversation has been held before.)

Colin reverses himself and strides back into the room, swerving to avoid cracking his shins on the coffee table. Blocking the TV he treads the carpet before his offspring like a Lippizan stallion; but not very like.

“They,” he reports, “see nothing of me.”

“What?”

“I wafted in there and stood in front of the television. They
didn’t address me by name. They saw me merely as an obstruction to their view.”

“Waft?” Sylvia says. “You couldn’t waft. Never in a million years could you waft.”

“They’re in a state of advanced hypnosis. Deep Trance. Tell me,” he says, “why couldn’t I have gifted children? It would have been an interest for me. Why can’t they all be little Mozarts?”

“We haven’t got a piano,” Sylvia says.

“I’m away.” Going out, Colin stuffs his notebook into his pocket.

In the hall mirror he glimpses his own face, weakly handsome, frowning, abstracted. He loosens the knot of his tie. Despite what Florence said about him aging, he looks years younger than his wife. He tries the effect of a boyish lopsided grin. It reminds him of something; his father’s hemiplegia perhaps. He erases it from his face and departs, banging the door behind him.

There were some eighteen people in the classroom, rather more female than male, rather more old than young. Teacher was rubbing the leftover algebra off the board, a plump lady in a cardigan, and chalking up the words
WRITING FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT
. Excuse me, said Colin, stumbling through the desks and finding himself a seat to overflow. He looked around for Zelda Fitzgerald. She wasn’t there.

“Perhaps if we all introduced ourselves,” Mrs. Wells said. “Perhaps if we all say a few words about the sort of writing we want to do. How we see ourselves.”

How we see ourselves, Colin thought in querulous alarm, how we see ourselves? I am a history teacher, a teacher of the benighted past to the benighted present, ill-recompensed for what I suffer and despairing of promotion. My feet are size eight and a half, and I belong to the generation of Angry
Young Men, though I was never angry until it was too late, oh, very late, and even now I am only mildly irritated. I am not a vegetarian and contribute to no charities, on principle; I loathe beetroot, and the sexual revolution has passed me by. My taste in clothes is conservative but I get holes in my pockets and my small change falls through; I do not speak to my wife about this because she is an excellent mother and I am intimidated by her, also appalled by the paltry nature of this complaint or what might be construed by her as a complaint. The sort of writing I want to do is the sort that will force me to become a tax-exile.

He looked across the room and saw a woman, directly opposite him in the semi-circle into which they had lumbered the desks. He wondered why he had not looked up before. Habit, he told himself. Habit ends here.

“My name is Isabel Field,” she said. “No, I have never tried to sell any work. I am not interested in writing commercially, I am interested in increasing my clarity of expression. I am a social worker.”

You are twenty-four or twenty-five, Colin thought, self-contained, reserved, sardonic. What struck him was that she had not hesitated; when she closed her mouth you knew she was not going to open it again until a fresh topic was raised. Her voice was accentless, or almost so. She had the fractured face of a Modigliani, clever yet obtuse; the long darting almond eyes and long supple neck. Her neat competent legs crossed when she sat down, crossed at the ankle and tucked under her chair. Her hands were long and lean, strong and beautiful, like the hands of the Lady with an Ermine.

The lady next to her said she was Mrs. Higginbottom, would they please call her Sheila, and that she wanted to write for women’s magazines. Now that is a difficult market, said Mrs. Wells with extreme vigour, a very difficult market indeed. The
Reader’s Digest
, a man said, those anecdotes, you know, page-fillers, Humour in Uniform, I could do a lot of those, because a lot of funny things happened to me while I was in the
army. Mrs. Wells seemed enthused. He was a man whose ears stuck out. Colin looked back at Isabel Field. He felt suddenly like a refugee, the past a memory of blazing ruins; the future, the long grey road and transit camp of the displaced heart.

Unanchored, Evelyn’s mind moves backwards and forwards over the years. In the 1950s Muriel inhabited her body as though it were a machine. She had a powerful urge to bite, to tear with her teeth. For this reason, she kept her mouth covered with her hand, and swallowed her food without chewing. Reasoning that her teeth were seldom used, Evelyn did not try to take her to the dentist.

The first years were spent in cleaning Muriel, in reconciling herself to her existence. Evelyn wanted to be alone in the house; the house filled up, more than she had dreaded. After some time, Muriel began to appear sufficiently normal to be sent to school, but Evelyn was well aware that she was concealing her true nature. She spoke now more like other people, though she was still both clipped and sententious. At first she had said, “Mother, Mother,” and Evelyn thought it was “Murder” she had called out in the dark.

1950: a neighbour buys Muriel a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas, and she works it without fumbling on the parlour floor, blank side up. 1960: Muriel flings back at her statements once heard, a song from the radio, taunting her with the empty echo of her own speech. At the same time, the spare room becomes tenanted; the same mockery greets her on the stairs. Muriel has a passion for giving objects the wrong name, even when she knows the right one; it is a technique of bafflement she is practising. She glances only surreptitiously around her, moving her eyes, never her head; she can see, for self-preservation she must see, but she is not sure that she is supposed to look. Once she watched in wonder Evelyn’s ritual with the milk-money. Now
she has learned that coins pay for desires. She wonders about the changing face of the clock. Is it related to the lines on her mother’s face, her increasing deafness and feebleness, the accumulation of dust upon their lives? Is it possible that every year is not the same, not just the same? Hurry, hurry, Evelyn always says: or you will not be on time…Yesterday, she says, today, tomorrow. Without causality there is no time, and there is no causality in Muriel’s head. Evelyn’s speech is just a noise, like the clatter of dustbin lids or the crack of bone, the incessant drip of the guttering. Events have no order, no structure, no purpose. Things happen because they must, because they can. Each moment belongs in infinity, each infinity cherishes its neighbour like turtle-doves on a bough. Muriel’s heart is a mathematical place, a singularity from which, in time, everything will issue.

Mrs. Wells had a flute-like voice; it would have been suitable for opening Parliament, and it seemed a pity that she would never get the opportunity.

“Rejection after rejection,” she was saying, “until finally—” and she would go on to read her class the story of the wealth and acclaim that had come to some struggling author overnight. But they were not much encouraged, for it was always some American of whom they had never heard, with a wildly improbable name. Colin had long ago ceased listening. Classrooms do not smell like classrooms any more, he thought, where is the scent of dried ink and bullying, where is my childhood?

“I also write fairy stories,” said the man whose ears stuck out. Mrs. Wells stared at him glassily, at a loss.

And Autumn does not smell like Autumn, Colin thought; where is the woodsmoke and the russet apples packed in barrels, and what are russet apples anyway, a breed or only a
colour? Where are the swallows twittering on the wires? What will the swallows do when we all communicate by telepathy? I have only seen one, this year, and it did not make a summer.

I will never be a writer, he thought, I will never learn it, just as last year I did not learn Russian, I will never do it, my mind runs to clichés like abandoned plots to seed.

“You have to give people what they recognise and understand,” Mrs. Wells was saying sweetly.

Autumn is only the wet lamplight on the black wet road, soup out of Sylvia’s packets, a splutter and a cough from the car engine at eight in the morning; kids whining and defaulting dragged by their scruffs from September through to Advent, transistor blah-blah, only two thousand shopping days to Christmas, blah-blah, God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

“Mushrooms,” said Mrs. Moffat with pride. “I have sent an article to
The Edible World
on the cultivation of mushrooms.”

My vegetable love will grow, thought Colin, vaster than Empires and more slow.

“Do read it to us,” Mrs. Wells shrilled. “Could you, would you, read it to us, and we might help you with helpful hints. But first we must have our little assignment, shall we? ‘An Interesting Experience.’ Mr. Sidney?”

Colin grinned. “I’m sorry, I haven’t done my homework.”

“Oh, now, that’s a pity, Mr. Sidney.”

Her tone was light; if there was genuine grief, she kept it out of her voice. It is commendable, he thought, her restraint. A bare branch tapped and tapped against the window, dice in the evening’s pot.

“I couldn’t think of anything to write about.”

Mrs. Wells was shocked into reproach. “But Mr. Sidney, there’s
always
something to write about. That’s the
whole point
.”

“I didn’t think any of my experiences were interesting.”

“But there’s a book in each of us, Mr. Sidney.”

“Is there?” said Colin, engaged by this. “I wonder if people
would like to tell us what book there is in them? I should like mine to be
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
or
The Brothers Karamazov
, but more likely it is something like
Famous Five Join the Circus
.”

“I should like mine to be
Mansfield Park
,” said Isabel, without a smile.

“Now, Mr. Sidney,” Mrs. Wells said, “you know I meant a book of our own, of our very own. We may think that we lead very ordinary lives, but believe me, it’s this very ordinariness that is the stuff of great books of all time. Look at
Jane Eyre
.”

“I wouldn’t call that ordinary,” Colin said. “Having this madwoman up in the attic, biting people.”

“Stabbing,” Isabel said.

“Stabbing, biting…though come to think of it, it happens all the time in the classes I teach.”

“Well, there you are then,” Mrs. Wells said. “Miss Field, have you got an interesting experience?”

Colin turned in his chair, all attention. The Duke of Norfolk, he thought; not altogether inconsequentially, because it was the name of the pub to which he hoped to take Isabel Field.

The lounge of the public house was heaving with wet raincoats, smelling of damp fake-furs and warming plastic. Electric coals twinkled merrily; above the bar, coloured Christmas lights winked around the calendar, and a notice informed the public that spirits are served in measures of one-sixth of a gill. Colin read it avidly, and the notice which said he didn’t have to be mad to work here but it helped. It was half-past nine, filling up. Colin manoeuvred for a corner table, and read the beermat as he pulled out Isabel’s chair, thinking, nobody pulls out chairs in a pub, what do you think it is, the bloody Dorchester? He was very anxious about the impression he was making.

“It’s the nearest,” he said apologetically, “and it’s quite nice really, you never get any rowdy people.”

“No horse-brasses. Good.”

“Plastic beams are my bête noire. What will you have to drink?”

She hesitated. “Gin.”

“Righto.”

Colin began to push his way to the bar. Singularly failing, as always, to catch the barmaid’s eye, he took time to look back at Isabel. Her eyes were cast down; perhaps she also read beermats. Her fingers were interlaced on the table in front of her in a formal pose, as if she were about to deliver a public statement. Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, Colin thought. This terrible habit of inappropriate quotation. How do you know she has a grief, perhaps she is just waiting for her drink, perhaps she doesn’t like to stare around her. Absolutely the worst you can do, he thought, is to fail. Isolated in his gaze, she gave the effect of a study, monochrome, perhaps the unnoticed frame on the back wall of an exhibition, or one of those grainy smudged photographs of Russian streets, a woman looking indistinctly for a moment into the lens of a strange culture. Her clothes were always beige or charcoal or grey, or a peculiarly soft dead green which he had never seen on anyone else. But then he had never looked.