Mothers & Daughters (43 page)

‘And you used to have this joke about the coasters I made for you,' Jaz was telling Dad, ‘the little felt ones with the cross stitch round the edge. You'd pick one up and you'd go—Oh, Mum, look!
Look
!'

Panic shot through me as Jaz bent forward. What could she see on my father's face? A heart-attack? A stroke?

She drew back from him and turned to me, her face triumphant. ‘He's rocking himself to the song, Mum. He can hear it. He knows it.'

‘Don't fence me in
,' crooned Bing.

‘Dad?' I said, touching his fingers lightly. His eyes were still vacant, but there was no doubt about it, he was marking time to the music.

‘Isn't it fantastic?' Jaz said. ‘Has he ever done this before?'

‘No,' I said.

We sat entranced by the tiny movement of his shoulders, as though we were witnessing some incredible feat of gymnastics.

Meanwhile Bing spoke of wide skies and blissful solitude, of a life at ease and without boundaries or grief.

The song played out its jaunty amble, and I let myself imagine, for those two minutes, my dad's spirit roaming free across any landscape he cared to call up. Inside his silence, he must still be moored by a thread of memory; not floating, lost and nowhere. Even if he wasn't with us, he was himself, somewhere.

A weight lifted in me for the first time in ages.

‘I have my uses, don't I? I'm not just a thorn in your side,' said Jaz over the closing chords. She passed me a tissue from Dad's locker, and I dabbed at my eyes.

‘Rewind it, oh please, rewind it.'

‘See,' she said, bending once more to the iPod, ‘how something good can happen even after you've given up hoping?'

It wasn't till hours afterwards that I saw the irony of what she'd said. And I don't think Jaz got it at all.

CHAPTER 33

Photograph 352, Album Three

Location: Carol's dining room

Taken by: Carol

Subject: Eileen's birthday. A triple celebration because the biopsy seems clear, she's been promoted at work, and today she's twenty-one for the nineteenth time. Jaz brings in plates and cutlery, sets them down, and Eileen catches her hand playfully. ‘Why do you bite your nails?' she asks
.

Jaz raises her eyebrows. ‘Why don't you get your roots retouched
?'

‘Touché,' laughs Eileen
.

At the far end of the table, Carol's stomach turns over with jealousy
.

‘You're so good with her. I bet she wishes you were her mother,' she says that evening, when Jaz is in bed and both women have had a fair bit to drink
.

‘Don't be daft,' says Eileen. ‘I'm more like a substitute granny. I just hover on the edges. I'd be a useless mother. I'd be a useless wife
.'

‘You would not,' protests Carol. She'd like to know why Eileen thinks this, and also why there have been so very few
boyfriends over the years. After all, she dated at school. This is a bright, sparky, good-humoured woman with a decent figure and all her own teeth. ‘Not the marrying kind, your Eileen,' Carol's mother once remarked. Meaning what? Now, under this friendly gauze of drunkenness, might be the time to probe. But in leaning forward to pursue her point, Carol knocks her glass off the chair arm. By the time they've mopped up and re-poured, the moment's gone. Some instinct tells her not to return to it
.

It was only when I came to trawl through my hard drive to make up a special album, a thank you to Jaz, that I realised how many photographs I'd actually taken of Matty. Already there were hundreds.

Of my own first twenty-three months of life there existed just two snaps. One was a studio portrait of me as a baby, which my mother only had done because a friend was getting one of her little girl and wanted the company. The other shows me as a toddler in a knitted pixie cap with ear flaps, and an A-line coat. I'm holding onto my father's hand and we're outside church watching a neighbour's wedding. Heaven knows who took the photograph, or how we came by a copy.

It's difficult not to feel hard done by when I flip between that early album and the most recent. My childhood versus Matty's. There
are
snaps from the Fifties and Sixties, but they're pretty much all holiday vistas, rarely troubled by human figures. Very occasionally the minute form of my mother appears at the bottom of a sweeping landscape or a historical monument. Later on I pop up in a couple of beach shots, once underneath an archway in Ludlow Castle, and in the entrance to the Blue John Cavern. But the ordinary, everyday activities – the sort of thing I snap Matty doing, and treasure – never merited recording.

I just don't think there was the same level of interest in children then. Eileen and I used to play in the quarry, and round the lonely deep pond in the middle of Copper's Field, and clamber over farm equipment and throw branches at pylons. What freedom, you might say, how lucky we were. I know for a fact, though, that a lot of my personal liberty stemmed from my mother's indifference. Stop ironing and play a game? Switch off the vac and go for a walk? Don't be soft. She'd no more have got down on her knees to be a growly lion than she would have performed a striptease down the nave of St Stephen's. The nearest she and I ever came to spending quality time was when I became old enough to learn baking, sewing and cleaning (and there's not much entertainment to be had out of a wad of Duraglit, I can tell you).

What was it about those decades that made mums and dads so blasé? My mother thought I was mad to rush to Jaz as soon as she cried. Couldn't understand why I was cutting trailing ribbons off her baby clothes, shifting bottles of bleach out the way, screwing the bookcase to the wall. ‘You wonder how any of us managed to make it through infancy,' she used to scoff.
Your bloody good luck
, I'd think.

I let myself be frightened; stoked it, revelled in it. My reasoning was, if I remembered to be consciously grateful for Jaz from the moment she was born, then some Higher Power might recognise my appreciation and keep her safe.

I realise now you can't make bargains like that. Fate laughs in the face of such tactics.

I asked David to meet me by Pettymere Lake. I couldn't face seeing him in private, where heaven knows what might get said – or in a public place like a restaurant, with other people listening in. The wide bowl of the Moss was the only space I felt I could cope with.

We were both early, but I'd got there first and was able to watch him walk from the car park, round through the bare trees and across the bridge to the bench where I was sitting. I'd rehearsed a hundred lines and still I didn't know what to say. As he came towards me, his hands in the pockets of his big overcoat and a scarf at his neck, my mind went as blank as the sky. I was all October cloud and chill.

When he reached the bench, he didn't kiss me or say any kind of greeting. He sat down next me, his eyes on the lake.

‘Shall I begin?' he said after a few moments.

Pointless to pretend I didn't know what he meant. I nodded.

In cool, straightforward terms, David spelled out what I'd been about to say: that I couldn't contemplate a relationship with him because I was scared of my daughter.

‘It sounds so cowardly when you put it like that,' I said.

He made no comment.

‘Let me try and explain,' I said. ‘It's not just that I
love
Matty – obviously I do. It goes right beyond that. When I'm with him, it's almost as though I'm – I'm taken out of myself. I don't mean he makes me young. He makes me
no
age, and I can act how I want, I don't have to watch the implications of every damn thing I say. I see the world through his eyes and it's new and magical, and we're discovering it together. I go into the garden and Matty's pointing out, oh, spider webs, as though they're the most brilliant creation ever, and it lifts me right up. It's a kind of energy he gives off. Or happiness. I'm recharged. When he was away it was . . . well, you know what it was like. I was lost. A really important part of me was missing. So I daren't contemplate being without him again, I really daren't. I don't know what I'd do.'

‘I can't possibly compete with that,' he said.

‘You're Matty's grandad. Don't you feel the same way?'

‘I don't think I do, no. Not to the same degree. I love my grandson, too, of course, but not so – ferociously.'

What had Phil said?
He's not your child. You're obsessed
. Why could neither of them understand?

I tried a different tack.

‘OK, look at it this way, David. Are you prepared to risk all the ground we've won?'

‘It wouldn't come to that.' He spread his palms in a dismissive gesture. ‘I know what you're trying to do here: bargain with the future. Sacrifice one happiness against another. But it doesn't work like that. You can have both.'

‘I wish I could be so confident.'

‘Try it, Carol.'

Dead leaves lay clumped round our feet, rotting into blackness; bare branches scraped against each other.

‘You know,' he went on, ‘some people would say you've hung me out to dry.'

‘That's not fair!'

‘Tell me, what is fair about this business?'

On the other side of the lake an elderly couple walked a dog, a retriever or a golden labrador, which ran back and forth excitedly along the water's margin. As I watched, the woman stopped and spoke to her companion, and in response he held out his arm to her while she leaned against him and shook a stone from her shoe. It was one of those small, tender, everyday gestures that you take for granted when you're in a relationship, but which viewed from the outside can strike you through your breastbone with longing.

‘I feel terrible enough as it is,' I said. ‘I
do
understand what you did for me over the summer, of course I do. Do you honestly think I've forgotten the phone calls and chats and meals? The fact you drove me all the way down to see Tomasz and back again, found out all that information on legal rights, offered me
money? I will
never
forget those things. How you talked Ian round. Jaz and I couldn't have managed without you. I count my blessings every day that you were there to help us through. Whatever else, please don't think I'm not intensely grateful.'

‘It's not gratitude I'm after.'

‘This is hurting me, too.'

‘And I'm supposed to be pleased by that?'

At every turn he blocked me. The lines I'd prepared, I didn't dare deliver. I sat there with the cold slats of the bench digging into my back, feeling like the meanest woman born. My only consolation was my own, deserved, pain.

I said: ‘You know, I spent two dozen years married to a man who never listened. Unless you've lived in a relationship like that, you have no idea how lonely it is. Every serious conversation I ever started, he'd derail with his jokes and daft asides, till eventually I stopped bothering; I used to get more sense out of Jaz. And that was in the days when we were getting on, never mind what came later. Then I started talking, really talking, to you, and I found I could tell you things I'd not told anyone since Eileen died.'

‘But isn't that exactly—'

‘Wait,' I said. ‘Let me finish. It's worked the other way, too. I've got so much out of listening to you. Some of the things you've said have gone right through me, and changed me. You've made me feel more confident in myself, I've been better at making decisions. Essentially, you've become the best friend I've had in years. Although I know it's more than friendship.' I blushed. ‘And I never thought, after Phil—'

Say it
, went Eileen.
You owe him
. But I couldn't get the words out.

‘You're making me sound awfully altruistic. Do you think I've got nothing back from this relationship, Carol?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Oh, for God's sake. Why do you imagine Jacky left me? Can you really not guess?' I shifted my gaze away from him, embarrassed. ‘It was because I “wouldn't commit”. Her words. She was right. I admired her, we got on well, but for me it went no further. She wanted more and she got fed up of waiting. So she went. Like the others. Do you see?'

‘Not really.'

‘I thought, when Jeanette died, that was it. That I'd been incredibly lucky to have met her and to have had that time with her, and the flipside of that was that I'd never experience anything like it again. Every woman I've dated since then has confirmed that belief. Until you.'

‘I don't see why I'm so special. Compared with someone like Susannah.' I meant her long, poetic face, that sleek hair, the expensive coat.

‘There you go again. I'll tell you what the difference was: she didn't have your warmth, Carol. I look at you and I see a woman who's natural and instinctive and straightforward and true, and, when you're not tying yourself up in knots over Jaz, damn good company. You don't hold back, or scheme or calculate. There's nothing
artful
about you. You have this tremendous warmth, it just pours out of you—'

‘Holds me hostage,' I said.

‘Yes, but it
needn't
.'

I laughed bitterly. ‘You're the one who believes people are born as they are. Well, I wish I wasn't. I wish I could turn my emotions off. I wish I was cool and calculating and all the rest of it, because it would be a damn sight less distressing, that's for sure.'

At last he lifted his arm and put it round my shoulders, and the simple pressure was so comforting I wanted to cry.

Laverne's voice came through the muddle of noise in my head:
Imagine the hassle of dating again. I'd hate to start over,
wouldn't you? The stress of someone moving into your house. Or you moving into theirs. Interfering with your systems, always around you. Seeing you in all states. The s-e-x
. It was true, it would have been hard to begin all that business after so long on my own. I would have been prepared to face those fears for David, though.