So . . . my mum.
I think only children are a really bad idea. I mean, I know that for some people it’s okay. Some people CAN only have one child, and one is better than none. But I don’t think it was a great thing for me. For one thing, most women, if they are only going to have one child, would want that child to be a daughter. Not my mum—
she wanted me to be a boy. She always said so. She’d had brothers.
Her brothers were younger, and she had had a hand in raising them.
She said boys were nicer than girls. More straightforward and simple. Less devious. You knew where you were with boys, she said.
Often. From when I was young. I once, as a teenager, suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t have said it to me, so often, when I was younger. She was clearly mystified that it should have bothered me. Another stranger to the self-help section of the bookshop, clearly, my mum. Didn’t quite catch that groundbreaking work on bolstering your daughter’s self-esteem. I never quite knew why I was an only child. I would never have asked. Not that I recall ever seeing a single gesture of affection between my parents. What kept them together—if anything actually did, bar habit and necessity—
was conducted behind closed doors. There wasn’t a lot of cuddling for me, either. They never hit me or were cruel. It was just that home was a sort of dry place. What it gave me most strongly was a determination that my home, when I had one, would be the exact opposite. My dad used to look at me like I was a stranger, over the top of his newspaper. He clearly could not understand how a child with spirit and an easy laugh and that perpetual smile—the one that made people think I was simple—could have resulted from a
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union between him and my mother. They were both lean and spare, too, and I was curvy from the start. I was pink where they were grayish. My curly auburn hair apparently sprang from nowhere, too, although my dad was largely bald by the time I was born. They were both older than all my friends’ parents. In years, and in outlook.
They’d both lost their intendeds in the war. Mum’s childhood sweetheart was an auxiliary watch keeper in the Royal Navy and had been killed when the Germans sank the HMS
Hood
in the Denmark Strait in 1941. Dad’s fiancée was dead already by then—
killed in September 1940, in the early days of the Blitz. Her family had evacuated to relatives in Hove when war broke out the previous September, but, like many others, had come back when the threatened bombings hadn’t materialized. Twenty people died, including her entire family, during a nighttime raid. I only found out about them—Arthur and Margaret, they were called—by snooping and questioning. Dad didn’t have a picture of Margaret, but there was one of my mum and Arthur taken just before he left, proud and formal in his uniform. I found it once, in the back of a book; it had a tear in it, and bent corners. But she’d kept it.
If it sounds romantic, the two of them finding each other after all that heartache, I’m not sure it was. Maybe Arthur and Margaret had really been the loves of their lives, and anything else that they fell into afterward was destined to disappoint. I don’t even really believe that. I’m not sure either of them had a great capacity for love, that was all. It’s funny—mine feels bottomless.
I never saw them kiss, and I never saw either of them naked.
We had a lot of closed doors in our house. It sometimes felt like the three of us were living separate lives in the same space. We didn’t talk about things. Not really. I remember my mum trying to talk to me about sex, the night before I married Donald. It was obvious she found it excruciating. It was also, by the way, com-154 e l i z a b e t h
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pletely unnecessary. I may not have “done it” but I bet I knew more about it than she did! She said it was messy. She said I would need towels.
(Do you remember when I told you, Lisa and Jennifer? I had all my props. A book, a box of Tampax, a pack of condoms. A carefully rehearsed speech. It was all going very well until Lisa asked me if I had to stand on my head for daddy to get his willy in, and Jennifer ran screaming from the room. Probably not a much better job than Mum did, but I think I caught you both before you knew enough to think I was an idiot! At least I better have done. . . .) Anyway, I think Mum must have been the original lie-back-and-think-of-England girl. With towels. Maybe I’ve been doing it all wrong all these years, but I still haven’t done anything that needed towels to clear it up. . . .
I like to think that maybe she made me a better mother. By showing me how I didn’t want to do it. It’s a cliché, I know. I never closed a door in our house. (Okay, except the bedroom . . . but that’s a bit different.) I never wanted you to stop talking to me. I wanted us to laugh and play and have fun. And we did, didn’t we, girls? We did. I hope you remember it like I do. The sun is putting me to sleep. It’s lovely here. Simple pleasures have become so much more significant. Having this illness makes everything in the world look and feel different. I don’t think Mark will be back for another hour or so . . . so I’m going to act like an old lady, and take a nap . . . sad, hey?!
Love you, girls.
Mum
Lisa
Lisa tried to avoid coming face-to-face with Karen, but this week it couldn’t be helped. Andy was working late on something that needed finishing, and she was home, so it was she who opened the door to Cee
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Cee and her mother. Cee Cee, her Hello Kitty rucksack strapped on her back, and dolls in each hand, ran down the hall toward the television, throwing a vague greeting toward Lisa over her shoulder. Karen was following with a wheelie suitcase, its handle too short for her in her three-inch heels. Not many women looked good in pinstripe suits, but Karen did. This one had a pencil skirt. She wore it with a crisp white blouse, unbuttoned possibly one button too far. But hey—she had great tits: Lisa had seen them, hadn’t she, in the photographs? She was still tanned, from her child-free New Year shag fest with Steve in the Turks and Ca-icos. She’d had highlights, Lisa noticed. Her hair looked freshly washed and bouncy: it always did.
The laughing good-time girl Andy had described from their summer romance a million years ago had more than grown up. She’d grown kind of mean.
But today she was smiling. That meant she wanted something. She only tried to pretend that she and Lisa were friends when Cee Cee was around and she was playing Disney Channel single mum, or when she wanted to change visitation. Today she lunged in for the air kiss. She must want something big.
“Lisa, how are you?”
“Great, Karen. You? Still sporting the January tan, I see?!”
Karen laughed, tossing her big hair back, and showing her throat, so that more bronzed flesh was on display. “I’m great. The island was
amazing
. You have to get there.”
“I’ll put it on the list.”
“Do. The most amazing food. And really, really nice people.”
Ho hum.
Then she saw it. It was hard to miss. In case it wasn’t obvious, Karen ran her left hand through her hair, smoothing her cuticles quite unnecessarily. They’d never dare to be rough. The rings glinted in the wintery sunshine. Lisa would have much preferred to ignore it, but Karen wasn’t about to let that happen.
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“Oh,” she began, as though answering a question that hadn’t actually been posed.
“Yes. Steve proposed. We got married. Over there.”
Bloody hell. Was there something in the water? Out loud, she managed a spluttering “Congratulations. That’s great news. Wow. That was fast.”
“Not really.” Obviously not the right thing to say. “I mean, we’ve known—for ages—that it would happen. Couldn’t decide how to do it.
I mean, it’s a bit silly, isn’t it—having a big thing, when it’s the second time? I mean, it wouldn’t be, for you, of course, since it would be the first time for you. Only the second time for Andy . . .” Got that, Karen.
Yes—you had him first. Thanks. “Still, we wanted it to be special. It was Steve’s idea—doing it out there—he’s so romantic.”
“Well, yes. Sounds wonderful.”
“You’ll tell Andy for me?” Coward.
“Sure. He’ll be chuffed for you.”
“The only thing is Cee Cee. She was upset with me, when we got back and told her.” There’s a shocker, Lisa thought. You buggered off and got married without telling your six-year-old daughter that was what you had planned, and she had the audacity to be pissed off with you. Kids!
“She wanted to be a bridesmaid.”
Of course she did, you silly cow. She’s
six.
It’s the nearest thing to being a bride she can aspire to for, like, the next fifteen to twenty years, and aren’t we all just
obsessed
with being one of those. They must send us subliminal messages in utero.
What Lisa managed out loud was a less judgmental “Aah,” her hands pushed into the pockets of her jeans.
It was cold out here on the doorstep, but she really couldn’t bear to ask Karen in. She might expect to stay for a cup of tea. Lisa wished she’d get to her point.
“Still, I daresay it’ll be your turn soon. You and Andy,” she added, as though it needed qualifying. “So hopefully she’ll get her chance. . . .”
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Was that her point? Were she and Andy supposed to get married so that Karen could make up to Cee Cee for not having her as a bridesmaid?
“I mean, you’ll be doing it here, won’t you? Not Andy’s style, whisk-ing a girl away.”
Now Lisa quite wanted to slap her.
“But I know how serious he is about you. He’s told me.”
Or throttle her.
“And Cee Cee just adores you. . . .”
Turns out, Lisa didn’t need to tell Andy. Cee Cee told him. Over breakfast the next morning, between dips of her toast soldiers into her boiled eggs.
“Mummy and Steve got married. On the Turkeys and Cocoas. So he’s my new daddy. When you get married with Lisa, she’ll be my new mummy, and my old mummy says
that’s
when I’ll get to wear a bridesmaid’s dress and I want a pink one.”
Lisa, pretending to get something from the fridge, so she wouldn’t have to meet Andy’s gaze, rolled her eyes at the cranberry juice. There was a bloody conspiracy.
Jennifer
Jennifer took a chance on Kathleen being home alone. She was out of the office—she’d told her colleagues she was doing reconnaissance at a new boutique hotel in the country, but she hadn’t been anywhere near the place. She’d needed space. Once she got into the car, and out of the city, she just drove. Driving up here hadn’t been a conscious decision; she’d just realized that she was heading toward her parents-in-law. Her need to talk was threatening to consume her.
Brian played bowls and drank beer afterward at the bowls club. It was where most of his mates were these days. He’d worked at a warehouse, a few miles away, for many years, starting on the floor and working his way up to manager—with forty or fifty lads reporting to him. He’d 158 e l i z a b e t h
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retired a few years back, the recipient of a decent pension and the ubiquitous gold watch.
She parked her car on the street and walked up the path to the front door. Kathleen opened it before she had the chance to knock.
“Hello, dear. I saw you through the window. This is a nice surprise.”
Kathleen hugged her and pulled her into the house.
“I was almost passing!” She felt foolish. What would Kathleen think—her showing up in the middle of the day when she should have been at work? “I thought I might scrounge a cuppa, if you weren’t doing anything. I can go . . . if you’re busy. . . .”
“How lovely. What would I be doing, love, that meant I couldn’t see you?” She said it as though she never did anything and accepted her daughter-in-law’s arrival as though she might have been expecting it.
“Come on in. I was just going to take a break myself. I’ve been ironing.
Never stops, does it?”
The board was set up in the living room, and
Murder She Wrote
was on the television. There was a pile of bed linen in the basket, and several of Brian’s shirts neatly finished, on hangers hung on the French doors. The house was immaculate. Christmas, with its itinerant chaos, must be a struggle for Kathleen, by nature as neat as a pin. That much, at least, Stephen had inherited from her. She remembered, very early on in their courtship, watching him fold boxers into four when they came out of the tumble dryer. The sad thing was, she almost laughed, that had only added to his attraction, as far as she was concerned. Photographs crowded nearly every surface in here—grandchildren in school uniform, their hairstyles and teeth marking the passing of the years.
“I’ll just put the kettle on, and I’ll get rid of this mess.” She reached for the remote control and turned Angela Lansbury off.
“Don’t worry. No need. You’ll only have to get it out again. Leave it, please. Let’s sit in the kitchen.” Kathleen held her arms up in surrender, and they walked through to the back of the house. “Brian not about?”
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She winked. “You’re safe. You know Brian. He’s down at the bowls club—he won’t be back until he wants his tea. About six usually. God knows they can’t be playing—it’s freezing cold out there today.”
In the kitchen, she busied herself making tea. Jennifer noticed a soli-tary plate and knife waiting to be washed up by the sink. Her mother-in-law had lunched alone as well.
“Is he gone all day?”
“Sometimes. I’m glad to have him out from under my feet, to be honest. Truth is, I never really got used to him being retired and being around all day.”
“It must be different.”
“I hadn’t realized what a misery guts he was, dear.”
Jennifer laughed.
“I mean, when he was working, he’d come home and be like that, but you told yourself he was tired, work might have been stressful. I mean, it wasn’t all that high-powered a job, not like you lot have all got, but it had its problems, believe me. So I made excuses for him being so grumpy.