by Beth Morrey
I nodded. Sylvie was a modern-day Atalanta, the virgin huntress, and she didn’t need any apples slowing her down.
“So tell me about your Melanie. Who is she marrying? Some terribly dashing academic?”
“Sort of.” Picking up the envelope again, I took out the invitation and turned it around in my hands. Mel had scrawled, Bring whoever you like, rather carelessly on the back of the card. “I don’t really enjoy going to these things on my own.”
Sylvie set her cup down. “Why don’t you ask Angie to go with you? She’s excellent value at a party. No chance of you being a wallflower with her around.”
I sat up, struck by the idea. “Otis could come too, we could make a day of it. Cambridge in the spring is rather nice.”
“That’s a lovely idea,” said Sylvie approvingly. “Do.” She got to her feet. “Well, I must get going. I’ve had such a good day, what a treat. Thank you.”
As I followed her to the front door to wave her off, Bobby immediately shot between us, panting excitedly as if we hadn’t just got back from her walk. She was a relentless opportunist.
“Calm down, we’re not going anywhere, you lunatic.”
I wondered what we should do with her on the wedding day. I’d have asked Sylvie to take her, but the dog had a deep-rooted and almost cartoonish loathing of cats. Whenever we saw one in the street her hackles would rise and she would emit a kind of strangled growl as if the feline’s very presence tore at her insides. It was a strange mixture of aggression and fear, for if the cat ever hissed back, she would cower against me, still growling but also shivering. She really was a ridiculous animal. Anyway, it meant that Sylvie’s house was a no-go area for her, since her cat, Aphra, very much ruled the roost.
After Sylvie had gone I went back into the kitchen and opened the envelope again, rereading the cursive script.
Melanie and Octavia invite you to attend the occasion of their marriage
On Saturday, 14 May 2016
At Newnham College, Cambridge
That they were doing it at my alma mater seemed an imposition somehow, although Octavia was a fellow there. But they could have chosen Girton, where Mel studied, or Clare, where she taught now. Or just a registry office and a restaurant. I hadn’t been back to Newnham in decades, not since an alumni dinner in the early ’90s, where I hadn’t seen a soul I knew, and all anyone asked me about was my husband, the famous Dr. Carmichael, whose blistering new biography of Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli everyone seemed to have read.
I used to deliver the occasional lecture, when I was working at the University Library before we moved to London. Nothing like Leo’s grand orations of course—students flocking from miles around to hang on his every word. But my talk on the Sinope Gospels was quite well received. Then I “devoted” myself to being a housewife, quelling the brain-buzz with scrubbing. By the time I’d finished, everyone had moved on, Leo most of all, off to his conferences and book events, while I waited at home with supper in the oven and my apron on.
No wonder I drank to forget, to forget I had forgotten, was forgotten. No wonder Mel, who revered her fond and absent father, was more critical of her fractious and ever-present mother, who all too often had a glass in her hand. Alistair, with a boy’s blitheness, was oblivious to it, but as I poured myself a gin and tonic at “magic hour” (another thing to thank Alicia Stewart for), I would feel the heat of Mel’s accusing gaze. She disliked weakness, since she had none—as sure of herself and her opinions as my mother. She never mentioned her sexuality—unless you counted a rather unnecessary speech at her thirtieth birthday party; poor Leo certainly did. I’d known, of course, particularly after we saw her in that Calamity Jane production, but preferred not to discuss it.
Mel and Octavia had lived together in wholly unrepentant sin for years now, and there was no reason they should suddenly decide to get married. What was she, fifty-six, fifty-seven? Still . . . children loved weddings. We took Ali and Mel to Leo’s friend Tristan’s nuptials when they were small, and we all danced together, Ali wearing my hat and sticking his tongue out as he jigged away to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” I remembered the four of us holding hands and careering round the dance floor, widening our little circle and then rushing toward one another. That’s what the oikos should be—expanding, contracting, but always connected. Sometimes it took a wedding to make you see that.
It might be fun. It might make things better. I thought of the words I’d exchanged with Mel here in my kitchen. “Some things are better left unsaid,” I murmured to Bobby, and she put her head on my knee.
When Angela dropped Otis off the next morning so she could grab an hour to meet a deadline, I plucked up my courage and showed her the invitation. She read the card and then looked up at me quizzically. “Octavia?”
“Yes,” I replied, refusing to indulge her. “They’ve been together for years.”
“An Oxbridge wedding, fancy that!” she exclaimed. “Obviously I’d be delighted, give me a chance to gawp at all the bluestockings. Can Otis come? It’ll broaden his tiny mind.”
“Of course,” I said, tucking the card back in its envelope. “I thought we’d get the train up, no need to stay the night as it’s so quick.” I didn’t want any extra expense, as there was already the wedding present to consider. But here Sylvie stepped up, or rather down from the attic the following week with an old black and white photograph, which she put on the kitchen table in front of me. I saw myself, aged twenty-two, with a baby Melanie in my arms, my mother with her arms round us both, in front of the house on Jesus Green. I was smiling down at Mel, and Lena was smiling down at me. It was the only photo I’d ever seen of the three of us, and I’d had no idea it existed, couldn’t recall the moment it was taken. For a moment I couldn’t speak.
“I thought you could frame it for her,” said Sylvie gently. I nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat, and thinking again how grateful I was that she was doing this, acting as a kind of intermediary between me and the emotionally charged contents of those rooms above my head. I hadn’t been up there since that first night, preferring to let Sylvie get on with it and deal with the results when she was finished. But I resolved to give her the Murano vase when she was done. Some things were worth letting go.
Chapter 17
What’s her name?”
My mother bent over the bassinet, dark hair falling down, blocking my view of the baby. Our tiny cottage on Jesus Green was dark, even in the harsh winter sunshine, and despite the fire in the grate there was a chill in the air. I’d seen an advert for gas central heating the other day, but in 1959 that felt like an unimaginable luxury, even with a new baby to keep warm.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. We haven’t fixed on anything.” Then, sullenly, “Leo says he wants to call her Venetia.”
Lena was tickling the baby’s cheek with one finger, but at this looked up, amused. My mother was often amused by my husband. “After the novel Disraeli wrote?”
I scowled. “He’s joking, of course. He hasn’t come up with anything sensible.”
“Well, don’t you have any ideas?”
I looked away and realized I was blinking back tears. Where did they come from? My nipples tweaked and fractured, leaking milk onto my blouse, already stained with my baby’s posseting. Her eyes flicked and fixed on me; immediately, the screaming started, incessant and maddeningly rhythmic. Chuckling, my mother burrowed into the bassinet and gathered her up, enfolding and nuzzling with an ease entirely alien to me. The screaming continued, all the same.
“I think she’s hungry.” Lena held her out and I took her awkwardly, craning round to sink onto the chair near the fireplace. Its back was hard and unyielding, but we had no sofa.
Cocking her head toward the space where it should be, Lena said, “Would you like something from the London house?” But I didn’t answer, because I was manhandling this squalling infan
t into position, desperately squeezing an aching breast into her gaping black hole of a mouth in the hope that she would latch on. And when she did, spurting milk and tears with the pain of the release. It was like nothing I’d felt before, hideous pricks around my areolas, a tiny shark feasting with its thousand pincer teeth. She kept guzzling, the milk kept coming and so did my tears, sliding silently down my cheeks as my mother watched us both speculatively. I wanted to wipe them away, but my hands were tied. So much liquid oozing from every orifice, all that lost blood draining out, desiccating me, until all that was left was a husk.
“Did I ever tell you,” Lena said, settling herself on the floor at my feet, “about the woman who taught me to breastfeed?”
Sniffling, I wrenched one hand free to wipe my nose. “Taught?” I had visions of a schoolmarm pointing to a blackboard.
“Why, yes. It was a week or so after you were born, and I was having a terrible time, and you were losing weight, and I felt perfectly wretched, but then I had a visit from a midwife.”
“My midwife just tells me off,” I mumbled, wincing. “Says I should get out more.”
“Oh, so did mine,” returned my mother merrily. “But this was a different midwife. One I hadn’t seen before. She was French. She was wonderful.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but no sound came out; my throat was parched. Seeing my distress, my mother leaped up and returned with a glass of water. She held it to my lips and I gulped gratefully. When I finished our eyes met briefly, and she squeezed my shoulder before returning to her place at the foot of the chair.
“Where was I? Oh yes, my wonderful French midwife. Well, she saw what a state I was in, the room in darkness, me in a mess of sheets and sweat, and you wasting away in your crib. And do you know what she did? She poured me a glass of wine! It was eleven o’clock in the morning!” She threw back her head as she laughed, and I laughed too, although I’d forgotten how, and it came out as a wheeze, like a barking seal.
“Anyway, the wine was very relaxing, and while I drank it she opened the curtains and arranged some flowers in a vase in the window, and when the room was bright again she came and sat on the bed with me and took my hand, and this is what she said.”
My mother took my hand and looked hard at me, serious and spirited. “‘You are an excellent mother and you are doing a fine job, and when I show you how to feed your baby, you will have learned a precious skill that is not always as instinctive as people think.’”
I licked my cracked lips. “And did she show you?”
My mother smiled. “She did. I never forgot it, and it would be my great honor to show you. May I?”
I nodded, and she moved up until she was nestled next to us both, her rippling hair tickling my cheeks where the tears tracked.
“Now, tuck your little finger in her mouth to get her off, then we’ll do it properly.”
And gently, with infinite tenderness, she showed me how to get my baby to suckle; how to roll her head up at the exact angle; how to get her mouth to cup from below. How to insist on the right attachment every time, because if you don’t get it right from the beginning, it will always be off. The lesson to end all lessons.
Then, all of a sudden, I got it, and she fastened onto me, and for the first time ever it didn’t hurt; that terrible splintering pain didn’t come, and I was crying again, but with the relief of it, the blessed absence. My mother was patting and encouraging, and I saw that the warrior in her was tempered with the nurse and felt as grateful for it as my throat was for the water. We sat on that hard chair together, rocking and patting, and finally, when the baby fell off me, replete, I turned to my mother and breathed, “What was her name?”
A tiny frown appeared. “Whose name?”
I was impatient, had to know. “The French midwife.”
Her brow cleared. “Oh! She was called Mélanie.”
I looked down at the sleeping baby. “Melanie,” I said tentatively. She gave a little snore.
“Melanie Carmichael,” said my mother thoughtfully.
I pondered. “I suppose she’ll have to have Emmeline as a middle name?”
“Melanie Emmeline Jameson-Carmichael?” suggested Lena the suffragist.
I laughed, remembering how. “I’m not sure Leo would approve. Unless it was Melanie Emmeline Venetia.”
My mother stood and held out her hands to me, to us both. “Come on. I agree with your midwife. You need to get out more. Let’s go and get Melanie some fresh air.”
And together we went out into the front garden of our little cottage on Jesus Green, to show my daughter the sun.
Chapter 18
Saturday dawned bright and clear, a perfect day for a wedding, and I felt quite chirpy as I dressed in what I hoped was a suitable outfit. Mel was often determinedly low-key and might scorn me if I turned up in frills and finery, so I settled for a navy crêpe dress (something blue for the bluestockings), pinning one of my mother’s brooches—another of Sylvie’s finds—on the collar. Gazing in my dressing table mirror, I saw Bobby reflected behind me, head to one side. “How do I look?”
She came over to me and put her paw on my knee, leaving dog hairs on the crêpe.
“Right, you can have a good brush.”
Putting the photo, framed and wrapped, in my bag, I clipped a newly groomed Bobby on her lead and set off to Angela’s flat to pick her up.
The dog had been an issue. We couldn’t leave her behind, because we would be back late and Angela said she shouldn’t be left on her own for more than four hours. I’d stuck religiously to this rule, until the other day when I’d had to dash back from my John Lewis shopping trip to buy Mel’s picture frame. I’d been distracted by the children’s toys and couldn’t resist buying a little Batman Lego flashlight for Arthur, and then another for Otis. I arrived back after four P.M. to find that Bobby, in her desperation, had widdled on the floor in the kitchen. She looked so guilty that it was hard to be angry and besides, it had been my own fault for getting back so late. Rather than clean it up immediately, I went to her “treat tin”—just a Tupperware full of kibble next to the Aga—and gave her a handful. She wolfed them like she hadn’t been fed in months. Afterward she licked my hand, and I tried not to worry about the germs.
In the end I called Mel. As she told Octavia to turn the television down, I could hear Octavia’s “Really?” and felt a stab of guilt. The brief, stilted phone conversations we’d had since our row had been instigated by my daughter.
“I have a dog now,” I said to Melanie after we’d dispensed with the how-are-yous.
“Righto,” said Melanie. “Good for you.”
“I can’t leave her behind on Saturday,” I began, but Mel interrupted me.
“Bring her along,” she said briskly. “More the merrier.”
“But they don’t allow dogs at the college, do they? Not unless they’re guide dogs, and well, I don’t think we’d get away with that.”
“Don’t worry,” replied Mel. “Octavia will get a special dispensation from the principal. At least she’s a girl.”
As usual, I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “Thank you.”
“What’s her name?” asked Mel. “For the place cards.”
“Bob,” I said, forgetting my amendment.
“That’s not a girl’s name.”
“It’s from Blackadder.” I winced, waiting for the inevitable quote. Mel had spent her thirties reciting snippets of the scripts, though I didn’t remember a single line apart from her saying, “Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more,” whenever anything didn’t go her way.
“It’s a funny name for a girl but it’s a perfectly normal name for a strapping young dog,” she said immediately.
“You know I’ve never watched it,” I said tetchily.
“Then why did you name your dog after a character in it?”
“It�
�s not my dog, I’m just looking after her for someone and . . . it’s a long story.”
“Well, bring her along and you can tell me about it on Saturday. And you’ve got two other guests, haven’t you, of the human variety?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I sent you their names—that’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s nice; you’ve got friends coming. I’ve been worried . . .”
“See you on Saturday, then,” I said hurriedly and hung up, unable to bear her sympathy, which would inevitably turn into some sort of censure.
So here we were: the old biddy, the single mother, the superhero and the adopted mongrel, on our way to see my daughter marry her girlfriend. I suppose we made an odd spectacle as we got off the bus at Finsbury Park station. Otis was dressed as Iron Man, Angela had insisted on tying a white velvet bow “for the suffragettes” round Bobby’s neck, and she herself was dressed in an extraordinary black sequined jumpsuit, which I didn’t think entirely suitable for the event. She was shivering like a whippet, for one thing.
On the train, Angela opened her capacious bag and, Mary Poppins fashion, produced a series of enormous toys, including a plastic car park, to entertain Otis, who ignored them all in favor of two toilet-roll tubes he’d stuck together to make a set of binoculars. He spent the journey looking out of the window as we rattled our way out of London toward the Fens. Occasionally he would comment on the scenery—“Sheep!” “Cows!” “Yellow carpet!”—while Angela rolled her eyes and muttered, “You can take the boy out of London . . .” as she played with his Etch A Sketch.
Bobby curled up in the aisle and then jumped up, mightily offended, whenever any fellow passengers tried to get past her, as I resigned myself to the idea that the day was going to be varying degrees of stressful and mortifying. At least it was a relatively short journey, and I enjoyed the views, lulled by the rhythmic clunk of the carriage.
We arrived in Cambridge in good time and queued for a taxi to take us to the college. Alas, we had to wait for a driver who was happy to have Bobby in the car. Several shook their heads and beckoned the next in the queue. Time was getting tight, Angela was covered in goosebumps since Cambridge is always a degree or two colder than London, and Otis was beginning to get bored, hanging off his mother’s arm and moaning that he’d left his “nocklars” on the train. I started to wish we’d left Bobby behind; I could have put newspaper down on the kitchen floor.
