Mothers & Daughters (23 page)

‘Of course not,' I said.

‘It would pretty much be incest. Plus he's such an upper-class twit.'

‘He isn't really. Not that.'

‘See, you're doing it again. Stop sticking up for him, will you? He's a nob, and his son's a bastard. Just because he's got money, he thinks he's better than us.'

‘I don't think that's true, Jaz.' But even as I said it, I was thinking, Why am I bothering to defend him?

‘The way he speaks, that thing he does with his eyebrows. So smug. Do you remember how he had to have the last word at the wedding?'

‘Only because your dad forgot to toast you at the end of his speech.' (And say how beautiful you looked, or express any kind of confidence in the match.) ‘He was too busy telling jokes. Someone had to step in and deliver the line.'

‘What about afterwards, when he said Dad ought to have been working the clubs?'

‘Yes, all right. That was probably below the belt.'

Our doorbell rang as Herod backed away up the stage, ranting.

‘Not that any of it matters now.' I got to my feet. Through the window I could see Josh standing under the porch, and I was glad because it was weeks since I'd had a proper chance to talk to him, what with his work experience and then the school breaking up for the holidays. He was clutching a plastic bag in his hand: Laverne's Easter exchange, that would be. You get into these customs and then it's hard to know when to draw a line under them. I'd always bought a chocolate egg for Josh when he was little, so she started buying one for Matty, and here today was her six-foot son, still the recipient of a Thornton's bunny for which he would be made to write a thank you card.
Oh, for God's sake, knock it on the head
, I imagined Phil saying.

I opened the front door, all smiles. Josh was flushed and breathing hard, as though he'd been running.

‘Hello!' I said gaily. ‘Enjoying the break? How was work experience? I've got something for you, if you give me a minute.'

‘Here,' he said, and thrust out his fist with the bag in it.

‘Oh, for me? Well, for Matty. That's lovely, tell your mother thanks. And I've got, hang on a sec, I thought I left yours—'

‘Jesus! Take it, will you?' he snapped. And before I could react, he'd hurled the bag past me, into the hall, where it knocked into a bowl of grape hyacinths I'd put on the telephone table ready to take to Dad.

‘Oh,' I squeaked in shock.

The bowl had been shunted to the edge but not tipped off. One of the stems looked to be snapped.

When I turned back to the door, Josh was already striding away. Instinct told me not to call after him. Instead I watched him go, my hands on my cheeks, my heart thumping. In my
head I heard myself telling Laverne how I thought he wasn't happy at school, remembered that worried crease between her eyebrows, and I knew, I knew exactly what I'd done. ‘Oh, Josh,' I said under my breath. ‘Oh hell.'

Back in the lounge the TV was still going, but Herod had been replaced by Roly Mo. ‘We turned over,' she said. ‘Who was it?'

‘Josh.' I was almost too shaken to speak the name.

Jaz pulled a face. ‘Doughboy? I don't know why he doesn't just move in here. Anyway,' she went on, ‘what I was saying was, if you did start seeing David, it would make things impossible for me. With Matty, for one. I wouldn't want to be leaving Matty in a house where David might turn up. Do you understand what I'm saying, Mum?'

I sat down on the sofa next to them, and it felt as though I'd crawled onto an island in the middle of a stormy sea. Every day as a grandmother seemed to bring new anxieties, new traps for me to fall into. Even choosing Matty's egg had been a trial – Jaz might complain it was too big, not ethical, contained E numbers, should have been something else entirely, e.g. an educational toy. Three nights before, and unable to sleep, I'd texted Phil to check again he'd keep his mouth shut about Ian. Even when he'd replied (
No wy dnt wrry
) I couldn't damp down my small-hours terror.

I looked across at Jaz, her hair still spiky from the rain, the yoke of my purple blouse marked with damp smears. She was nodding her head to Roly Mo's song, humming, terrifying in her unconcern.

The rain dried up, and in the end it was such a beautiful evening we took the baby monitor out onto the patio and opened a bottle of wine there.

‘What time do you want wakening tomorrow?' I asked her.

‘We have to be at Nat's for half-nine, so, eightish.'

‘I'll get Matty ready for you.'

We were gearing up to have one of those amazing pink and blue sunsets. I pulled my garden chair closer to hers, and we sat and watched the clouds slowly change colour. For a long time neither of us spoke. A robin was singing from the cypress tree, and the breeze brought us faint snatches of Laverne's piano music. The scent of grass and lilac and flowering currant mingled in a green tang.

I pointed with the toe of my shoe. ‘All along the edge of that bed are the tulips Matty helped plant last autumn.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Well, I held him while he dropped a few bulbs in the right place. They should be coming into flower any day now, I must remember to show him.'

‘I'd take that cane off him first.'

‘It's locked in the shed.'

‘Very wise.'

The lights on the monitor stayed still, and we drank our wine.

‘Do you remember that time you put in all those bulbs for me, when I'd broken my arm?' I said. ‘You were such a help. I taught you how to load the washer and use the grill, all sorts. You kept us ticking over. I'd never have managed otherwise.'

Jaz leaned back and crossed her ankles. ‘You do know, Mum, you're always on about when I was little?'

‘Am I?'

‘Yup. You bloody live down Memory Lane, you do, it's your permanent address. I wish you wouldn't, sometimes.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I sometimes feel you only liked me when I was younger.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' I said.

She smoothed the hair from out of her eyes. It was hard to tell how serious she was being. ‘You're not telling me you've always felt exactly the same way about me all the way through my life?'

For a moment, I was thrown.

‘Of course it changes,' I said, after a few seconds' thought. ‘But it's the same, as well. Like a tree going through different seasons; it's always a tree.'

‘So I'm a tree, now?'

‘No, not you. Us.'

‘If you say so.'

A bee dithered through the forget-me-nots at the edge of the pond like a fat woman rooting through jumble.

I said: ‘You know that time you were at Leeds?'

‘Do you mean during, or after?'

‘After, I suppose. When you were poorly.' I paused to let her protest, but she didn't, so I carried on. ‘The way you are now, upset – it's not like it was then, is it? You wouldn't let things get so bad again without telling me?'

‘No.'

‘Because then, you were away from home, on your own. You didn't have the support.'

‘I know, that's why I came back. It did help. Eventually.'

I let that last word finish resonating before I spoke again.

‘What happened at Leeds, Jaz? You never really told me.'

‘I drank too much, I blew my grant on clothes and music. Like students do.'

‘Drugs?'

‘Never.'

‘Honestly?'

‘Oh, well, yeah, a bit, at school.'

‘I
knew
it.' That drifting-away look she'd worn all the way through Year Twelve, the skulking about and moods.

‘Truly, Mum, nothing since the Sixth Form, and only half a dozen roll-ups even then. No big deal. I wouldn't be telling you now if it was. This is, like, ten years ago. What were
you
doing ten years ago?'

Still putting up with my marriage, just. I took her point.

The sky turned pinker, and I poured us more wine.

‘I got involved with someone off my course and he let me down, that was all,' she said in a rush. ‘And I totally wasn't expecting it, and he told people our private stuff, which was shit, and . . . I just didn't deal with it very well.'

‘Oh, love,' I said. ‘I wish you'd told me at the time. I thought it must be something—' Something worse, I was thinking, though I didn't dare say it. A broken heart? After all the hooha, that was it? But at the same time I was overwhelmed with relief that it turned out to be such an ordinary kind of tragedy, and that she'd confided at last.

‘Funny,' she went on, ‘I thought it was such a big deal back then, the end of the world, yeah? And now, against everything that's happened lately, it's a blip. I don't know why I got myself into such a state about it. I should have learned my lesson.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘That it's obviously me. Obviously I'm destined to fuck up when it comes to men, and that was the warning shot. Or maybe it's not my fault, maybe they're all like that, and it's simply a matter of
when
they cheat on you. They're all bastards, aren't they?'

She sounded so hopeless I couldn't bear it.

‘Not all, love. Look at your grandad. Nearly fifty years he was with your grandma.'

‘Maybe fidelity's gone out of fashion, then,' she snapped.

I put my glass down and reached across the gap for her hand.

‘Listen. Think about this: whatever happens with Ian,
you've got Matty out of it. Same as I had you, when my marriage ended.'

Jaz gave a wan smile. ‘A great consolation, was I?'

‘Yes,' I said, squeezing her fingers earnestly. ‘You were.'

Reeds bent in the breeze, stirring the water's surface. The memory of Josh's outburst came on me like a pain and I swivelled my mind away.

‘I just, I get so frightened, Mum.'

‘I know.'

‘Sometimes I wish I was little again.'

I wish that too, I thought. We all knew where we were in those days.

‘Once upon a time,' I said. ‘There was a pig called Grunt.'

‘God, no, spare us the Grunt stories.'

‘Poor Grunt.'

‘Poor Grunt nothing. I've got a story for you: once upon a time there was a woman who got bloody everything wrong in her life.'

‘Oh, Jaz, you haven't. You've got so much ahead of you.'

‘I was talking about you,' she said, laughing. I can't tell you what a good sound it was.

‘You, young lady, are sailing very close to the wind,' I said.

‘So ground me,' she said.

‘You're not too big to put over my knee,' I said.

When the business with Ian was sorted out, whichever way it went, I could start again with her. Without Phil to distract me, I could be the kind of mother I always meant to be. A me of the future waved down from the monorail at Chester Zoo, my face flanked by Matty and Jaz.

My second chance, it was going to be. This time, I'd make good.

CHAPTER 19

Photograph: web print-out, tucked inside a copy of
La Symphonie Pastorale
from a box in the loft, Sunnybank

Location: the Adler-Tate lecture theatre, Modern Languages Department, Leeds University

Taken by: Dr López Covas

Subject: Dr Nick Page posing for his Staff Profile entry. His smile is broad and chipper, though, in truth, this appointment isn't working out quite as he imagined. There are changes he's keen to make, but it's too soon and anyway, he's not senior enough. Still, early days. The second term's bound to be easier
.

On the plus side, he's already identified a particularly bright first-year student who looks as though she might prove interesting. Jasmine Morgan, her name is. Dark and troubled, bright and brittle. Those are the kind of students he likes
.

Nothing draws him more than a knotty problem, a contradiction
.

I had Radio 3 on while I took out the old bedding plants and put in new. Radio 2 was airing an outraged phone-in, and on 4 it was the news, an endless pageant of human suffering,
incompetence and doom. I found some piano music that suited the bright day, and I was just about to see off a cockchafer grub with my trowel when the announcer said, ‘
La Berceuse
, from Fauré's
Dolly Suite
'. Then the opening notes started and it was like an electric shock down my spine: instantly I was by the fire at Pincroft again, shunting around some lead farm animals that had been my dad's. Mum was ironing, there was a wooden maiden draped with pillowcases and underslips, and in the corner, the big radiogram playing the theme tune to
Listen With Mother
. And as I crouched by that planter, trowel-edge poised, I swear I could still smell the hot cloth steaming, and the beeswax polish my mother always used. It was a scene of perfect security and calm.

The loss bloomed inside me, taking my breath for a moment, so that I had to get up and walk about for a while.
Mum may not always have been a ray of sunshine, but there's comfort to be had in normality
, I imagined telling Dad. Except that he wasn't there any more either. I knew that, really.

A noise from next door brought me out of it. Whatever would Laverne say if she came out and found me like this? How would I explain myself? Ridiculous to be upset at fifty-two because you're no longer a child. But there I was.

When I got back to the cockchafer, he'd spied his chance and burrowed away. I dabbed my eyes on the hem of my blouse, and carried on planting.

Lying awake that night, I tried to envisage how Jaz might sum up her childhood. I'd worked so hard to make her days sunny, surely her memories would be positive ones.

If she was here with me now, I'd tell her how vital it is to keep hold of those moments from the past, because they make up who you are. ‘That's why Grandad's so lost,' I'd say. ‘That's why I take all these photos. You have to hang onto the good
times to see you through the bad. Happy memories make a happy person.'