Unbecoming

by Jenny Downham

  Caroline says, ‘Steve thought I was too old to have a second baby. Anyone over thirty-five is technically an “older mother”, did you know?’ She laughs, a soft sound. ‘I was way beyond that when I had Katie and Chris came along nearly three years later, totally unplanned. I was so proud to be fertile in my mid-forties. It was like it closed the age gap between me and Steve, made us the same.’ She leans her head against the back of the chair. ‘It sounds ridiculous now.’

  ‘No,’ Mary says, ‘it doesn’t. It sounds perfectly understandable.’

  ‘We had all the tests and they came back clear, but he had a seizure thirty minutes after he was born, and he kept having them for weeks. No one could tell us why. He had feeding and weight problems, he cried for hours on end. He was so different from Katie, absent somehow. And I could tell Steve blamed me. He’s never said anything, but I feel it. He kept asking me stuff about those boys who died, your mother’s sons, you know?’

  Mary nods. Of course she knows.

  ‘I told the doctors about that, but they didn’t think it was significant. Anyway, Steve had been so hands-on with Katie, and it was like he couldn’t bear to be Chris’s father. He started staying at work later and later, and even when he was home he always seemed to be creeping towards the door.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mary says. ‘I had no idea.’

  Caroline tops both glasses up. ‘We appear to be getting drunk together.’

  The fox barks again, further away now, a few gardens along. Cold air shivers its way into the kitchen.

  Caroline picks up her wine glass and knocks half of it back. ‘I was very depressed, very lonely and I blamed Chris. I wanted to shake him into making sense. It was like there was something wrong with his wiring and if only I could find a way to make him work, to rejig him, we could all go back to normal. I didn’t ever hurt him, of course I didn’t, but I got close a couple of times and it scared me so much. I felt such a bloody failure.’ She closes her eyes briefly, as if she can hardly bear the thought. Mary feels her own eyes smart with tears. Caroline swigs the rest of her wine down. ‘So, one morning, when Steve was at the park with the kids, I wrote a note and left it on the bedside table. It was like a dream, watching myself get in a cab and go to the airport. I kept thinking I was going to turn round and come home, but I didn’t. I phoned Steve when I landed, so he wouldn’t think I’d been murdered and he went absolutely nuts. He called me selfish, stupid, pathetic – all sorts. I figured the only way to survive was not to speak to him for a while, so I just sent postcards.’ Caroline looks at Mary, amazed. ‘I went to Spain and left my family behind. How did that happen?’

  ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I mean it. I’ve been here for weeks now, we’ve established routines and the children know me. You can take more time for yourself. Let me keep looking after them.’

  Caroline shakes her head, bats Mary’s hand away. ‘There’s something else.’ Her voice sounds strained, as if it’s going to hurt to say these words out loud. ‘Something else for Steve to hate me for.’

  And Mary knows then. She recognizes the weary guilt. ‘You met someone?’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’ Caroline rubs her hands over her eyes as if trying to erase the memory. ‘I’m such an idiot.’

  ‘Are you still seeing him?’

  ‘No, of course not! It was a few nights, that’s all.’ Caroline smiles – a tiny shadow of a smile. ‘He was only twenty-five. He was the waiter at the hotel.’ She slaps her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘Juan, the waiter!’

  Mary laughs. She can’t help it. It’s such a wonderful cliché and she loves how life does that sometimes.

  Caroline begins to chuckle too. ‘I sound like I’m describing a very bad film, don’t I?’

  She gets up for another bottle of wine. They really are going to get drunk. Mary wonders if that’s a good idea. There’s a line they might tip over and where they are now – quietly laughing together – well, this is how special it gets. She doesn’t want it to change.

  Caroline sits down, opens the wine and slops some into both glasses. ‘I felt more alive than I have for years. But every single morning when Juan left for work, I realized I hadn’t thought about my husband or kids all night.’ Her smile dies at the corners. She takes a slug of wine, slaps the glass back down. ‘What does that say about me?’

  Here we go, Mary thinks.

  ‘Does it make me the same as you?’

  How can she tell her daughter that disappearing for weeks is perhaps the most honest thing she’s ever done? Foolish perhaps, definitely selfish, but certainly the most eloquent. For once in her life, Caroline has said, I can’t manage, and it’s such a relief.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mary says, ‘it makes you someone who needed a little time for themselves.’

  ‘Is that what you needed when you dumped me with Pat? Nine years for yourself?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Caroline sighs and turns away. ‘It must be strange to be you, to never think about other people, to always put yourself first.’

  ‘I always wanted to be your mother, Caroline. I want to be a grandmother too.’

  ‘I’ve often thought,’ Caroline goes on, ‘that you got pregnant on purpose. You knew your dad would throw you out, knew Pat would offer to look after me, knew you’d finally get the freedom you wanted. Sometimes I think you sacrificed me so you could have the life you dreamed of.’

  ‘That’s not how it was.’

  ‘Wasn’t it? Are you sure?’

  ‘Let’s not do this,’ Mary says. ‘Let’s not rake over the past. Why don’t we think about what’s going to happen tomorrow when Steve gets home? How are you going to tell him?’

  ‘Are you mad? I’m not going to tell him.’ Caroline stabs a finger at Mary. ‘You better not breathe a word. I swear, if you do, I’ll never speak to you again. He’ll divorce me. I probably won’t even get custody.’

  ‘Steve loves you, Caroline. He’s not going to use the children to hurt you.’

  ‘You know him best, do you?’

  ‘I’m just suggesting you trust him, otherwise all that fear and resentment is going to sit there festering.’

  ‘Please stop. I really don’t need any of this hippy shit right now.’

  ‘You’ll end up blaming Steve for not understanding you, when you don’t even talk to each other.’

  Caroline gives her a long look. ‘So, your advice is that I tell Steve I had a seedy fling with a waiter and ask him to forgive me, because if I don’t, it’ll eat us up like cancer?’

  Mary shrugs. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And if it breaks his heart, should I swap him for another model? That’s what you told Pat, isn’t it? Leave Lionel, divorce him, be happy. Well, look where that got her – walking into the sea with her pockets full of stones. So much for your good advice, eh?’

  That hurts. Mary takes a breath.

  ‘I’m nothing like you,’ Caroline says, jabbing a finger across the table. ‘You’re the most selfish woman in the universe. You dump me, bugger off for years and then come back and steal me away. By the time I get home again, my mother’s suicidal and my grandfather’s a broken man. I gave up everything to look after him – your father. That should have been your job.’

  ‘Not my job,’ Mary says, ‘and not your job either. No one asked you to do it and you didn’t listen when I told you not to.’ She pulls her shawl from the back of the chair. She’ll go out for a cigarette. She needs to calm down. ‘It’s no one’s fault Pat died, and yet you stayed there because you felt guilty. Chris’s disability isn’t your fault. Stop punishing yourself for everything.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Caroline says quietly. ‘Please shut up and go away.’

  ‘Steve might understand about Spain. He might like to get to know your fire.’

  ‘Fire? I don’t want to be someone who dumps their kids to run off to Spain to shag a waiter. I don’t want
to be someone who throws my guilt at my husband to make myself feel better. Stop going on about fire.’

  Katie appears in the doorway shivering in her pyjamas. She’s half asleep, disorientated. She looks from her mother to Mary. From Mary back to her mother. ‘What fire?’

  Time slows down.

  Caroline holds out her hand. ‘Baby, what are you doing down here?’

  ‘I heard noises.’

  ‘That was us. Were we loud? I’m sorry.’

  ‘I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Come here and have a cuddle. Shall I take you up to bed?’

  Katie sticks her thumb in her mouth. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I’ve come home.’

  Mary sees the girl frown, like perhaps she’s still asleep and doesn’t trust this dream mother, this thin brown woman with braids in her hair who she hasn’t seen for weeks.

  Go to her, Mary wills.

  She can’t bear to see Caroline sitting at the table with her arm out to welcome a child who seems stuck in the doorway.

  ‘I didn’t like it,’ Katie says again.

  Caroline scrapes her chair back and stands up. She half stumbles to the door, sweeps Katie up and plants kisses on her hair. ‘Let’s go upstairs to bed, come on.’

  ‘You smell funny.’ Katie squirms to get down. ‘I don’t want to go to bed. I want sugar milk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hot milk with a little sugar,’ Mary says. ‘Sometimes she wakes in the night and it soothes her.’

  ‘I want to sit outside,’ Katie says, still wriggling to get down. ‘Can we do that? There might be wolves.’

  Mary shakes her head. ‘Not now, Katie. Mummy wants to take you to bed.’

  ‘Wolves?’ Caroline says.

  ‘Big ones,’ Katie says, holding her arms out wide. ‘We ride them.’

  ‘It’s just a story,’ Mary says. Which sounds ridiculous as soon as she says it, because of course Caroline knows there aren’t real wolves in her garden.

  Caroline stands in the doorway looking at Mary. She’s thinking terrible thoughts – Mary can see them roaring behind her eyes. She’s thinking her daughter is different. She’s thinking it’s Mary’s fault. She’s also thinking she’s given too much away, that Mary’s not to be trusted with children, husbands, secrets. But the worst, the very worst thought of all is – what if she is the same as Mary? What if abandoning children and loving the wrong men is in her blood? It cannot be. She has to make it go away.

  ‘You need to leave,’ Caroline says. ‘I’ll book you a taxi. There’ll still be plenty of trains.’

  She sounds ridiculously polite, as if cold practicality will keep the child from knowing her mother is raging. But look at the girl. She knows. She’s pushing away from Caroline, reaching her arms towards Mary.

  ‘Stop it,’ Caroline says, pulling her close. ‘You’re going to bed.’

  ‘I’m not. I don’t want to.’

  Mary takes a step forward. ‘Could I take her up?’

  As soon as the words fall out, Mary knows they’re preposterous. As if Caroline would ever leave the two of them alone together now. They’d be climbing out of windows, shinning down drainpipes, riding off on wolves …

  ‘You need to pack your things,’ Caroline says. She takes a step back, licking her lips as though something bitter is there.

  Mary looks at her feet. She nods. She’d hoped for a few minutes alone with Katie, to say sorry for leaving, to promise to love her always. But she isn’t going to get it. ‘A goodnight kiss then?’ she smiles at Katie. ‘How about one of those before you go to bed?’

  ‘Why are you getting a train?’ Katie’s voice is small and fearful. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I have to go home now, to my own house.’

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Can I visit you?’

  The question fills Mary with a dull pain. ‘Of course you can. Whenever you like.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Caroline breathes. ‘Don’t tell her that.’

  She expects them to give each other up, just like that. She wants Mary to pack her stuff and vanish. She wants Katie to be obedient and stop resisting every damn thing.

  Steve will have his part to play. If he wants his dutiful wife back, he needs to ask no tricky questions.

  And Caroline? Instead of thrashing it out with her husband, instead of saying, You know what? I can’t do this, I need your help, I need us to be closer, she’s going to pretend everything’s fine, that her absence was a never-to-be-repeated aberration. Nothing happened, nothing went wrong, nothing needs talking about. She’s going to lock all her feelings in a box.

  Mary feels as if she’s stepped away from herself, out of her body, and is observing, watching herself as she leans in to kiss the child, to stroke that beautiful hair one last time. ‘I love you,’ she says and she hears how desolate she sounds and she hates it about herself, hates that Katie hears it too, is looking at her uncertainly now.

  Caroline frowns, as if telling Mary not to display emotion in front of the girl when here she is, ripping them apart. ‘I’m going to take her up.’

  Mary watches as they go down the hallway. A mother and her daughter. At the turn of the stairs, Katie waves, her chubby hand a pale starfish in the dark.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Mary whispers. ‘Goodbye, my beautiful girl.’

  Forty

  There it was – the heart of all that Mary was missing. Two little girls – one her daughter and one her granddaughter – had both been taken from her. And, as her memory failed, she’d only been able to recall the pain of their absence, but none of the details.

  Katie drew a line under the story in the memory book. There were no pages left. The story of the photo was told, in so far as it was possible to recall it today.

  She was glad Mary seemed so relieved to have the facts at last. ‘That’s right,’ she’d said. ‘Every scrap of that is true. I remember it all now.’

  ‘I can’t believe I did it,’ Mum had said. ‘It feels like something I heard once or something I read about. How could I have done such a thing? How could I have pushed you out into the dark after you’d looked after my children for weeks?’ She’d looked around the room bemused, as if expecting answers from the furniture or the walls.

  Mary had reached out a hand and smoothed Mum’s hair. ‘You needed me to be the bad one. It’s all right. I don’t mind.’

  Mum had turned her head to look at her. ‘Mum,’ she’d whispered to Mary. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  No one died because Mum threw Mary out. Mary went to live with Jack. Dad came home. Chris got back into a routine. Katie started nursery. Letters were never written (both women agreed this was the case) because Mary didn’t want to interfere and Mum was trying to be the good one all over again.

  And Mary slipped from Katie’s memory, because eight weeks is no time in the life of a child and kids need help to hold onto memories. They need photos and videos and family stories told again and again – Remember when Mum left? Remember when Mary came to stay? No one was going to tell horror stories like that round the dinner table, so it became a secret – kept inside by Mum, studiously ignored by Dad, never really known of by Chris, let go of by Katie, and eventually forgotten by Mary.

  Katie shut the book and placed it on the coffee table. Hopefully, the pain of Mary’s blue blank would recede now she had the facts to hook it on. And when those facts slipped her mind, as they inevitably would, they existed in the book and Katie would tell her the story again.

  Although, perhaps she should start a new book and transpose Mary’s stuff across? Because when Mary went into a care home, she’d need her memories with her and the nursing staff were definitely not having access to the things Katie had written at the back!

  She smiled at that as she stood up and gave Mary a kiss on her fuzzy sleeping cheek. She peered round the kitchen door to wave goodbye to Mum (on the phone to social services), who frowned and looked surprised.

&nb
sp; ‘Where are you going?’ she mouthed.

  Katie pointed at the world beyond the window, then waggled her mobile to show she’d keep in touch and blew Mum a kiss.

  Mum looked ridiculously pleased to be given so much.

  Outside, Chris was still in goal.

  ‘You can go back if you like,’ Katie told him through the fence. ‘The worst is over.’

  ‘Can I stay out if I want?’

  ‘I guess.’

  One of the boys ran across and looked her up and down. ‘You know Chris?’

  ‘He’s my brother.’ She tried to make herself sound hard in case he was thinking of using Chris as a drugs mule, but the boy just grinned.

  ‘Thought so, you’ve got the same hair.’ He turned to Chris. ‘You going?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The boy nodded, as if that was good news and ran back to the game.

  ‘Go away now,’ Chris told Katie. ‘You’re embarrassing.’

  A story, Katie decided as she crossed the courtyard to the gate, is like a bolt of material or a woollen scarf, and you might pull out a thread and look at it boldly because there it is sitting in your palm. But there are countless threads tangled together and some belong to you and some belong to other people, and incoherence and inconsistency become part of the narrative.

  Mary had her version of the time she came to stay and Mum had hers. Dad would have something to add. If Katie interviewed the old neighbours, she’d get more. If Jack was alive – more still. Maybe she’d seek out the Spanish waiter and find out what he thought. All the threads bind and twist together. And every time you look it’s different, because stories change in the retelling.

  Even now, if Katie was challenged to repeat what she’d heard, she’d add bits, miss bits out, maybe ramp up her own role. She might accidentally sit on Mary’s lap when her four-year-old self came down the stairs, or make Mum miss her in ways it sounded as if she hadn’t. If she really wanted to embellish, she’d let Mary live next door with Jack, let Dad forgive Mum and not hold a grudge so deep he’d find himself attracted to another woman. Or maybe Mum could come back with the waiter (Katie secretly loved this part of the story, because it made Mum so much more human and gave Katie so much more room to trip up in her own life). Maybe they’d all live in a commune – waiter, Dad’s girlfriend, Dad’s baby, Jack and Mary – a happy sprawling family.