by Kate Long
NAN: It has a bit of brass round th’ handle. Like a brass collar.
KAREN: Honestly, Mum, I don’t.
NAN: You do. Like a big serving spoon, a shell-shaped bowl.
KAREN: Hmm . . . I think I dimly remember it.
NAN: I used to serve peas up wi’ it, and mash. It’s in t’drawer.
KAREN: Which drawer?
NAN: Under t’big cupboard. In t’kitchen.
KAREN: Is it? Perhaps it’s dropped down the back. I’ll have a look tonight. So, what – did she pinch the ladle or was she given it?
NAN: Given it, I think. Mind, that weren’t all she got, neither.
KAREN: How do you mean?
NAN: Well, we never knew who Harold’s dad was, but we think it was her employer. After she left, he sent her money, regular. She never went short.
KAREN: Oh, I see.
NAN: But nobody ever said it outright . . . That might have been why Harold was such a monkey, because he didn’t have a father around to knock him into shape.
KAREN: You mean the way he messed your mum about, and having other women?
NAN: Aye. We met one of ’em once, at t’bus stop. My mother just went, ‘Get on this bus, quick,’ even though it were t’wrong one, she were in that much of a state. He broke her heart, did Harold Fenton. And then one day he were run over outside t’Corn Exchange in Manchester, and that were that.
KAREN: Awful.
NAN: Aye.
KAREN: But he was good with you?
NAN: Oh aye. When he was around. He brought us brandy snaps and bags of currants, sometimes toys he’d made. He thought the sun shone out of our Billy.
(Long pause.)
KAREN: Tell me more about Grandma Fenton.
NAN: Oh, well, she were a nice woman, a bit of a folk healer. You know, if you couldn’t afford t’doctor, you’d go to her. She had this pantry full of jars and bottles, knitbone and Friar’s Balsam, goose grease, brimstone and treacle. Laudanum.
KAREN: Laudanum? That’s poison!
NAN: Aye. They took it in cough mixture. I don’t think as she killed anyone. I remember one time a neighbour come running in with a big hornet sting on t’top of his head – he were bald, like – and she put a vinegar poultice on for him. Only, it were vinegar out o’ t’beetroot jar, and he went round all day wi’ a bright purple crown. We were two-double laughing.
KAREN: But you said she was frightened of electricity?
NAN: She didn’t understand it. She’d allus had gas-lamps, you see. Just after she moved in wi’ us, we caught her standing on th’ eiderdown, trying to blow out t’light bulb. She used to say, ‘I see you’ve one of them lights in a bottle.’ (Pause.) Now I look back, I think she had trouble keeping up wi’ life after she lost her son. It was like, she couldn’t be bothered wi’ it. Do you know what I mean?
CHAPTER 6
On a day in June
‘Tell me, who do I have to see to withdraw from the course?’
I plonked myself down across from Martin and pushed my bag out of the way under his antique desk.
He closed the book he’d been reading. ‘One of those weeks, is it, Charlotte?’
‘This time I’m not joking. I’ve had enough. I want to leave.’
That made him sit up.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let me pour you a coffee and then you can tell me all about it.’
I waited while he took the jug off its stand, filled two cups, turned down the Baroque music he’d had playing in the background. Telemann again. Nowadays it was one of my favourites. I knew if I lived to be a hundred, Telemann’s Allegros would always transport me back to Martin’s office.
‘All righty,’ he said, placing a cup of evil-smelling Java in front of me. Then he settled back to listen.
So I told him about Will calling my mother ‘Mummy’. ‘It was horrible,’ I said, ‘like someone slicing my chest right open. I couldn’t believe it. To call her his mother. Her! What does that make me? I knew it wouldn’t work, me being away so much! It’s all gone wrong the way I said it would, and nobody listened.’
Martin considered.
‘Are you certain that’s what you heard? You might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. What you heard might have been him calling for you. In effect, “I want my mummy.”’
I shook my head. ‘Yeah, I bet Mum would have tried to argue that if she’d got the chance. But Dad blew it for her. He went, “Oh aye, Charlie, he’s done it a couple of times now. We’ve tried telling him.”’
‘Ah.’
‘And then Mum came on the phone and spun me this line about language development and how it was natural for toddlers to confuse names, and how once he’d called a man in a shop “Granddad” just because the guy had a moustache. She went, “Anyway, you used to mix up parrots and pirates. You could never remember which one sat on the other one’s shoulder.” As if that had anything to do with it. She said to me, “It’s just words, it doesn’t mean anything.”’
Martin frowned, tapping his forefingers together while he marshalled his thoughts.
‘Well, if it’s any consolation, Charlotte, my four-year-old godson calls his parents Xander and Rowan; no one’s ever used the handles “Mummy” or “Daddy” in that house, but he has no doubt who they are and what they mean to him. So while I can certainly appreciate why you’re upset, I agree with your mother on this one. Terminology’s not that important. Will’s feelings for you won’t have changed.’
‘You honestly think? God, I was so angry I could barely speak.’ In fact, I’d put the phone down on her in the end. It was easier than trying to explain the riot of misery charging through my veins.
‘Are you still angry?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know! It’s so complicated. I mean, I wanted her to look after him properly, to love him, it would have been awful if she hadn’t. So of course he sees her as a mum-type figure. In practical terms that’s what she is, most days. It’s not like she set out to steal him from me or anything.’
‘And some women in her position might be tempted to do that.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘So you’re not blaming her.’
‘No. Although I’m jealous of the time she gets to spend with him. I can’t help myself.’
‘Have you told her that?’
‘There’s no point. It wouldn’t change anything, plus I know I’m being irrational. This is the most practical set-up, we agreed. Meanwhile she gets to tuck him in at nights, give him his baths, set his daily rules and routine. The result is, I feel like I haven’t forged that crucial bond with my own child. Or maybe I did and I’ve let it come apart. It’s my fault. I meant to be the best parent, and I’ve turned out to be rubbish. And do you know why?’
Martin waited, knowing I was about to answer my own question.
‘Because I think part of me’s holding back from him. He might only be two and a half but he already senses that. It’s not just the being away from home – although that’s obviously a major deal – it’s that inside, I’m sort of at war. I love him, I love him utterly. Utterly. There’s no question of that. I’d die for him. But I can’t help resenting the way I have to arrange my life now. It’s exhausting. I’m forever in the wrong place. There’s never a moment’s mental peace, I can’t be the person I want to be because half my mind’s always somewhere else. And I don’t want that kind of relationship with Will. I want him to grow up knowing his mum loves him, full stop, without other stuff leaking in.’ I leaned forward and rested my elbows miserably on the desk. ‘The most awful part is, I suddenly GET my mother. I can see it now. I understand why she was so resentful of me. Which makes me the same as her. I wanted so much to be better.’
The music had slowed to an Adagio. Martin took a pen and began to doodle little cages on his notepad.
‘She wasn’t such a bad mother, was she?’
I hesitated. ‘Well – she constantly used to blame me for cutting short her opportunities. I mean openly, say it straight o
ut in front of me. “Oh, Charlotte, what I could have been, what I sacrificed for you.” How’s that supposed to make a kid feel? Then, as I was growing up, it was all the pressure to achieve the targets she missed. Compensating for her so-called failure. She isn’t a failure at all, actually, she teaches children to read. I’d say that’s a pretty worthwhile job.’
‘She encouraged you to do well.’
‘That’s true. But it didn’t feel like encouragement. It wasn’t how your middle-class parents do it, you know – “You go for it, Charlotte, we believe in you, yay.” It was more like continual jabbing with a sharpened stick. And I don’t know whether the success she was after was for me or for her. And when I got pregnant, God. She went spare. Threw stuff, broke ornaments, threatened me and Nan. She was like a woman possessed. Then of course afterwards there was this complete weird turn-about. She’d been away on a break having some meltdown on her own by the seaside, and by the time she came back I was in labour. Suddenly she’s full of maternal remorse, can’t do enough for me. Cries her eyes out at the birth. Instantly dotes on Will, when months before she was cursing him.’
‘Babies have been known to trigger Damascene conversions. I think it’s to do with witnessing a new life. It makes people take stock.’
‘Or something happened while she was away, some mental crisis got resolved. Who knows. What matters is, the resolution didn’t last. Since my grandma died – well, I’d say we’re currently at a pretty low point.’
I noticed that Martin’s cages were forming into stacking patterns, and that some of them looked to have branches or hands sticking out of them. To be honest, they looked a bit sinister. I was about to make some comment on them when he pushed the pad away and stood up. I glanced at the clock: it was coming up to noon. Had my time run out? Was I about to be dismissed? This was a busy man with lectures and tutorials to give, departmental meetings to attend.
But he didn’t go for his briefcase or tap his watch. Instead he wandered over to the sash window and wiped his jacket cuff across the glass. He said, ‘Have you been to the Railway Museum lately, Charlotte?’
Strange question, I thought.
‘No. Not since Freshers’ Week.’ Walshy had visited at the start of term, but only to make mischief. He’d had this idea of planting a rude figure in one of the model-train layouts – a tiny plastic flasher he’d carved out of a Dungeons and Dragons druid – but when the day of installation came it turned out he’d made him the wrong gauge. What he’d actually created was a flashing giant. A shame, really, because he’d spent hours with a heated craft knife, carving and tweaking his miniature pervert.
‘Well, if you’re around that way, it’s worth having a look at one of their engines,’ said Martin. ‘I don’t mean the trains, I mean the actual engine mechanism. They have one in a glass case so you can study the component parts.’
‘Yeah?’ I still didn’t get where this was leading.
‘If you watch an engine in motion, you’ll see that for some sections to rise, others have to fall. There’s a harmony even to a simple piston. You have to have the up and down movement, the cyclic, the forward and backward, for energy to be produced. So if you’ll allow me the analogy, this is dynamically how a relationship works. How could it be entirely positive, entirely on one note? It would be unproductive. It would stall. And that applies across the board, to you, to your mother, to me, everyone. We all experience our low points and our high, times we’re close and times the momentum of living carries us further apart. That’s normal.’
‘Is it?’
‘What I’m saying is, things will come round again. You just have to keep the lines of communication open. Really, try and talk to your mother, bring her nearer. Explain to her about this “Mummy” business, that it’s made you feel vulnerable. Stress that you’re not blaming her. Ask for reassurance.’
I thought of the days after Will was born, how it seemed as though we’d finally reached a new understanding. How even the way we spoke was different, mum to mum. And in some ways they were dark times: I’d struggled like mad to cope with a newborn, and she was busy beating herself up at having to put Nan into a home. But we supported each other. We confided, we listened. I remember joking with her about her boss Leo Fairbrother always hanging round, and about Dad being his usual shifty-charming self. In that tough year Mum and I grew closer than we’d ever been. Was it possible to get back to that level of tolerance? Right now it seemed unlikely. Mum was just too far away, and weary. Sometimes it felt as though she was living at the bottom of a deep, deep well and the rest of us were shouting down to her.
‘I could try, I suppose. I still think I need to pack in the course, though, Martin. The bottom line is, you just can’t be a decent parent at a distance.’
He turned back from the window and his expression was grave. ‘Can’t you?’ Our eyes fell at the same moment on the photo of his daughter. ‘Well, if that’s the case, then a great swathe of us are doomed.’
Meet me at 12.30, Eric had texted me.
Straight away I’d got myself into a dither: was this a sort of date, or what? How should I dress? For a school day I normally wore flat shoes and trousers because, as a classroom assistant, you’re half the time squatting on infant-sized chairs and half the time on your feet. All us adults have backache at the end of the day. My hair I tended to keep clipped back out of the way of glue, sand, snot, headlice, etc, and I never wore much make-up because who was there to appreciate it? This morning, however, I’d got up early and washed my hair and tonged it, and put on a bit of lippy. I’d chosen a long skirt and a summer blouse and shoes with a bit of a wedge. I knew that by mid-morning the lipstick would most likely have slid off – those big windows heat the classrooms like a greenhouse – and there was every chance I’d have caught my skirt on a chair leg and ripped it. But it felt nice to make an effort for once, and anyway, nothing ventured.
When the dinner bell rang I gathered up my stencils and went to wash poster paint off my fingers. Some horrible child had put dirty fingermarks on my white sleeve, which was a blow, but I turned the cuff up and that more or less hid the damage. I reapplied my make-up and smoothed my hair with wetted fingers. Sylv shouted after me as I sneaked across the foyer.
‘Ooh, you look nice, Karen. Going somewhere special?’
‘Smear test,’ I called back. That shut her up. This was one bit of gossip she wasn’t having off me, not yet. Not till I’d an idea myself of what I was walking into.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. God, if I could have climbed into a hole and shovelled earth over myself, I would have done. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest you couldn’t be a good father unless you lived in. Like, when I told you before about my dad’s set-up and how it worked fine for us, I wasn’t lying. Obviously you’re a fantastic parent. I know you are.’
But he only smiled. ‘I think you’ve just defeated your own argument, Charlotte.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Because I’m sure you’re terrific. I’ve said before—’
‘It’s OK. There’s no need to apologise. Just think it through logically. Regular, consistent and committed contact is what counts, not some specific number of hours. Yes, the type of parenting you and I have to manage is perhaps more difficult, it’s certainly more complicated logistically than what happens in a traditional nuclear family, but it’s not poor or inadequate. Not by default, anyway. We’re simply parents who do our best in not-always-ideal circumstances, and there are millions of us in that camp.’
I didn’t know how to respond, but he didn’t wait for either validation or argument.
‘Now, to go back to the degree for a moment. Have you considered how helpful it’s going to be to Will if you abandon the course at this stage?’
The kind expression in his eyes pierced right through me. ‘Martin, I’m not going to lie to you. I really, really want the degree, you know I do. I’ve worked so hard for it. I love the course, I chose it because it was one of the best, set my heart on it before I ever got pr
egnant. I’ve been revising like mad for these exams. But the bottom line is, you don’t need a degree to get a job.’
‘I’m not talking about jobs. I’m talking about a sense of fulfilment, completion. Completing who you are. If you break off your studies now, you’re always going to feel that loss. Will might come to feel it too. You said how bitterly your mother regretted not finishing her education, and the effect that had on your growing up.’
‘I would never make Will a scapegoat like that!’
Martin left a pause before he carried on: You might not intend to.
‘Let’s look at this pragmatically. You’re already two-thirds of the way through the degree. You’ve got your dissertation sketched out, haven’t you? Ready to tackle in the autumn. We were going to draw up a reading list so you could cover some background research over the holidays. Would you really bin all that effort at this late stage? It’s your decision. You have five weeks till we break up: why not stick it out till the end of term, then decide during the summer? Talk it over with your boyfriend. He’s supportive, isn’t he?’
‘Let’s not go there,’ I said.
‘All right, leaving that aside, it really is a situation you need to think through in a considered space, not something you should leap at. Of course you can terminate the course whenever you want to – you’re an adult, you’re here of your own free will. But personally speaking, Charlotte, I’d be very sorry indeed if you left.’
He strolled back across the room, ignoring his chair and instead leaning against the side of the desk so he could refill our cups.
I felt slightly shaky with gratitude. Daniel used to joke sometimes that I had a crush on Martin. I wondered if he was right.
‘OK,’ I said at last. ‘I need to think about this some more. But thank you for taking the time to listen to me.’
‘My pleasure.’
Then, with barely a pause, he went on to the subject of this extended reading list he was compiling for me, how he’d grouped the texts not by simple chronology but by stylistic development, so I’d appreciate how each author drew on previous writers for inspiration. ‘Nothing comes from nothing,’ he said. ‘Everything begins before itself. There’d be no Romantics without the Augustans.’
