Every Day Is Mother's Day

by Hilary Mantel

  Florence walked in ahead of her.

  “I am going to give you a drink,” Evelyn said from the hall. “Sit down and stay where you are.”

  Florence looked around her. She had never been in the Axons’ house. Her mother, she knew, had sometimes visited. The most remarkable thing was the quality of furniture, each heavy and unpolished piece pushed up against the next, jostling for space on a mud-coloured carpet; surely, Florence thought, carpets are not woven in any such shade. The upholstery of the suite was greasy and worn, the wallpaper yellow with age. What a way to live, Florence thought; creating a slum, here in this neighbourhood. What was the need for it? She tried to place the smell. Cats? No. Well, perhaps she was too fastidious. Not everyone had the same tastes in decor. And there was nothing too frightful, just some pervading air—Florence bit her lip.

  Evelyn returned carrying a small tumbler of something pale. She stood opposite Florence, holding the glass. Florence noted with distaste that it was greasy.

  “Aren’t you joining me?”

  “No.”

  Florence reached out for the glass and swallowed it quickly, anxious to have it over with.

  “Merry Christmas,” Evelyn said. “At the same time, I must tell you that I regard you as an odious and interfering woman.”

  Florence spluttered. “I am sorry,” she said. “I can’t drink whisky. I didn’t realise that it was neat whisky.”

  “How unfortunate,” Evelyn said. “I went to a great deal of trouble to find it for you. It is some years since anyone wanted it.”

  Florence stood up. “I am sorry to have put you to so much inconvenience. Perhaps you will give Muriel my best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.”

  “Certainly,” Evelyn said. “This way.”

  “Yes, I know the way,” Florence said faintly. She gestured down at the plate containing the ten remaining pies, which she had placed on the arm of her chair.

  “Not really,” Evelyn said.

  Florence picked the plate up and walked out into the hall. “You seem to think I have intruded on your privacy. I sincerely apologise.”

  “One lives and learns,” Evelyn said blandly. “Muriel is putting on weight, you know.”

  “About that door. Obviously something is wrong with the frame. You ought to get a man in.”

  Evelyn sniggered. “Oh, we have that. We have had a man in.” She watched Florence down the path.

  Thoroughly unnerved, Florence walked into her own tidy kitchen and filled the kettle. She stared for a moment at the mince pies on their plate, then with an abrupt movement picked it up and slid them into the wastebin.

  CHAPTER 5

  Christmas morning.

  “Just shut the door on them,” Sylvia said. It was six A.M. She was huddled into her quilted dressing-gown. The children shrieked and howled from Suzanne’s bedroom. “I’ll go down and brew some tea,” Sylvia said. “There’s no point in going back to bed.” And on this as on almost every other day, a grey fatigue shook her; another baby, what for, when the three were too much for her, but if only she could think sensibly about this, think logically, if only she could run all the strands of her thinking together for just half an hour. She never seemed to have half an hour, that was the trouble. In the cold kitchen she bit into a corner of dry toast; all she could face, these last couple of weeks. The electric light was brilliant and hard, like an operating theatre; her laminate surfaces gleamed empty and scrubbed, ready for the severance of 1974 from 1975. Condensation ran down the windows. Already the fights had begun upstairs; she could hear Alistair working himself into one of his fits. When he was younger, he used to go blue with temper and stop breathing. She moved about the kitchen, aimlessly dazed with bowls and spoons and teapots. She pulled back the curtains onto the blue-black morning; a streetlight burned fuzzily on the opposite side of the road, the great artificial moon which shone each night onto her marital bed. Already in the neighbours’ houses lights were clicking on, the children rampaging downstairs shredding wrapping paper and mauling cats, shaking the ornaments from the Christmas trees. She put her hand against the radiator. It would soon be as warm as they could afford. She had always wanted a cosy house, low and cream, with plump flowered cushions; now she was as cosy as a fish under ice. Another year almost gone, the house no nearer paid for: the piling up of the interest on the debts.

  Colin stood by the small window on the landing at the top of the stairs, looking out, with a damp towel from the bathroom in his hand. Some people, unbelievable as it seemed, lived in such a way that they had their own towels. A door opened and Karen lurched towards him, her face streaked with tears and dirty—how could it be dirty?—already. Grasped in either hand she had by the wrist identical dolls, fatly flaxen, improbably frilled.

  “Come on now, pet,” he said, but she avoided him with a warning growl and swayed downstairs. Suzanne came out, glowering, her face heated.

  “Florence has brought me a rotten sewing machine,” she said. “I never get anything decent.”

  “What’s the matter with Karen?” Colin asked mildly.

  “She’s a crybaby. Stupid kids. I’m fed up pretending about Father Christmas. Daft stupid kids.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been enlightened,” Colin said. “Could you just manage to pretend, for your brother and sister? Just for this year, at least. It would spoil it for them, you see.”

  “Spoil it for you,” Suzanne said, acutely.

  “You’re eight years old,” Colin said, with ferocity; the accumulation of pinpricks. She stared at him and laughed, and went downstairs.

  Sylvia was doing an explanation when he arrived in the kitchen. She held out the two dolls and looked helplessly from one to the other.

  “Besides, I’ll make them new dresses,” she said. “Then they’ll be different.”

  “When? Today?”

  “Well, soon, lovey, but not just today, because your Aunty Florence is coming. Besides, isn’t it nice, what they are, you see, they’re identical twins.” Karen stopped crying, but her mouth drooped dangerously; Suzanne was openly sneering. “I’ll make them on the machine,” Sylvia promised. “Special little dresses.”

  “Just as long as I’m not expected to do it,” Suzanne said. “I’ll get filthy Alistair for his breakfast. Get his pigswill out.”

  “Come here,” Sylvia said to her husband. They backed off into the corner by the fridge. Her voice was dangerous. “Florence. I bloody told her. I bloody told her what I’d got for Karen but she won’t be told.”

  “I can’t help it. She didn’t do it on purpose, did she? Look, just leave it, just leave them to fight it out amongst themselves.”

  “A finely practical attitude,” Sylvia said. “Do you want the house wrecked? Alistair, if you don’t stop messing about in that sugar basin I’m going to come over there and slap you, Christmas or no Christmas.”

  Colin moved and took her by the arm. A corner of the vegetable rack caught him painfully on the shin.

  “This is what I stay for,” he said. “They’re your children, you wanted them. Can’t you manage better than this? Do you realise this is what I stay for?”

  “Stay?” Sylvia gaped. “And where are you planning to go? What are you talking about? Who else in the name of God would want you?” Her mouth quivered like Karen’s, in disbelief, and suddenly tears plopped out of her pale blue eyes and ran down onto her housecoat, Christmas or no Christmas, the first in years.

  At mid-morning, Colin slipped away. He went up to the bedroom, and from his briefcase drew out Isabel’s present. He had missed the opportunity to hand over her mittens. They would have to be a late gift; when would he be able to deliver them? Term started on January 12th, and then, perhaps, there would be excuses: Parent’s Evenings, visits to Frank O’Dwyer, extracurricular drama. Even sports, as the night grew lighter; but how to sustain it, through another winter?

  It was a flat parcel, in red paper; a record. He pulled the paper off. “Marches of Sousa.” In the field, maudl
in after physical pleasure, he had spoken of suicide and his plans for evading it. For the season, it was a bitter joke.

  Because it cannot be sustained, he thought. Last time they met, the strain was telling on her. These days she forgot things, lost her files, she jumped when she was spoken to. He saw her corroded spirit in her eyes, watched her twist her fingers together, frail, timid, flawed. She was not the woman she had been in September.

  He thought of Sylvia weeping in the kitchen, her face cruelly blotched. His marriage had not disappointed him; his grief was that it had turned out exactly as he had expected. The past can’t be changed, but you should be able to change the present. My present isn’t under my control, he thought, it doesn’t seem mine to dispose of.

  He slipped the record back into his briefcase; then, on second thought, retrieved it. He carried it downstairs and intruded it into the pile on the radiogram. Sylvia would never know.

  Until well into the morning Evelyn did not remember it was Christmas Day. She knew it was near, of course, because of the festive irruption of Florence, and because the signs she had seen in the shops a few days ago when she went to buy food. She had not made plans to mark the festival. They were not religious.

  Some time ago, two cards had fallen through the letterbox. At least, they were lying on the hall floor, as if they could have come through the letterbox. One was Florence Sidney’s, she knew by the writing. She sent one every year, as one of her impertinences. Gingerly, she held up the other one and peered at the address. It was to Muriel. From the father? Possibly. Who else did Muriel know? Evelyn did not succumb to curiosity. She carried the two envelopes into the lean-to and thrust them both into a pile of damp newspapers.

  Far back in her memory was a picture of another Christmas Day, at her family’s house in Shropshire. She stood at the window of the morning room, the long french window, an overgrown girl of thirteen. She was wearing the party dress that had been bought for her when she was ten. It was too short now, and her great bony knees and wrists seemed like the exposed parts of some terrifying machine. Outside the glass the wind whirled the sleet into eddies. Goose pimples prickled her bare arms, and she shuddered at the thought of the festivities. They were to be meagre this year. Father had died of influenza. Water had got on his lungs, they said. She listened at doors. Blaise had been careless; the policies were not in order. Matters were outstanding, they said. Matters matters matters. A woman from Craven Arms had come up to the front door; bold as brass she had said outright that she had two children by Blaise and had been promised all sorts. She demanded compensation. In other ways, too, Blaise had been careless.

  Mother was to be brought downstairs for Christmas dinner. Mother was an invalid and never left her room, but she would do so on this occasion because it was understood that this was the last winter in their own house. They were to be sold up, said voices in the air.

  Evelyn rubbed her arms, clamping them across her thin chest. The garden had gone to seed; snow drifting in the hollows and a single blackbird scavenged in the weeds, pecking without hope at the iron-hard ground.

  Remembering that Christmas, hands now slack in her lap, Evelyn felt no inclination to busy herself for Muriel’s sake. An accustomed weight lay around her heart. In February the house was sold. She left with one box-trunk for her Aunt Norah, in Liverpool. She cried as the taxi took her down the drive, not because her childhood had been happy, but because crying passed the time.

  Aunt Norah had a tall black house, a city house with many staircases. Half a mile away skinny children played in the streets. On certain days a smell drifted up from the docks, of rubber and salt and decaying fruit. At Aunt Norah’s she cried every night. She stood by her bedroom window looking down at the pavement far below, tempted by the wicked railings of the street frontage. When she opened the window, a preparatory step, the night howled about her ears. She closed it again quickly, hearing her quick breathing in the dark, and watching the faint crack of light that crept under her door from the passage. She felt as if she were suffocating. But she was not more unhappy than she had been before.

  Her mother, smelling of urine, was now confined to a nursing home. Evelyn visited her four times a year. Latterly, she screamed if she was touched. When she finally died, Evelyn was seventeen.

  Aunt Norah now gave her notice that she must make her own way. She had performed her duty to her sister and had, indeed, met the hospital bills for the past six months. There was no more money from any source, and every mouthful of bread Evelyn ate had been put there by the charity of her Aunt and her Uncle Reggie. Every mouthful of bread.

  Three weeks after this ultimatum came Clifford Axon. He was a senior shipping clerk who worked for Uncle Reggie. He had decided recently that his life would be better regulated if he had a wife to oversee his domestic arrangements and provide him with a few small comforts. Explaining this, he had proposed to as many as four young ladies, and they had all turned him down on the spot. His misfortune was the subject of general merriment in Uncle Reggie’s Chambers. Uncle Reggie bet Clifford five pounds that he knew a girl who would be willing to marry him at once, on first meeting.

  “Is she ugly?” Axon asked.

  “Ugly? You’d not say so. Plain, perhaps, but what would you?”

  He did not say, faintly peculiar, but poured himself a glass of whisky, a little pale fire on a foggy afternoon, a toast to the Gaiety Girl.

  Evelyn accepted. After the wedding, Axon, who did not care for the jibes of his colleagues, left the firm and went into an insurance office, and was moved away from Liverpool. Afterwards, Uncle Reggie was vaguely sorry. He suspected Axon of indulging in sexual deviations. But it was too late to do anything about that.

  When Evelyn thought of her childhood, it seemed to have taken place in another century.

  When the meal was over the children went upstairs, screaming and bawling, to play with their toys. The sound of their disputes punctured the air at intervals, like machine-gun fire.

  Sylvia yawned, and reached out for the congealing dishes with their remains of pudding. She began to scrape the leftovers into one dish.

  “Florence doesn’t think you ought to scrape the plates at the table,” she commented. “She carries them out two at a time. It’s hard on the feet.”

  “I’ll do it, if you like,” Florence said weakly. After the heavy meal, Sylvia’s activities were making her nauseous.

  “That’s all right,” Sylvia said. “You can sit still, if you’ll allow me to suit myself at my own table.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Florence protested.

  “No, but you looked plenty.” Sylvia reached across for a sprout which one of the children had rolled onto the table cloth, chopped it into a general mess, and stood up to carry the pile of dishes away.

  “I’ll help you,” Colin said. He made movements to show that in time, after preparation, he would push back his chair and rise to his feet. He felt gross and sated. He eyed the last inch of red wine. Self-indulgence was tripping through his blood-vessels, tiptoe on warning feet.

  “Get the presents,” Sylvia said. “We might as well have them in peace while the kiddies are out of the way.”

  She went into the kitchen, and Colin took the presents from the sideboard. Sylvia had refused to have a proper tree, on account of the pine needles, the sweeping up they entailed, the danger to children’s feet, and their habit of appearing imbedded in upholstery, to next September and beyond. Every year she set out her argument, passionless, step by step, and every year Colin refused to put the presents under her Tesco artefact with its stiff tinsel branches.

  “This tree,” he said to Florence. He shook his head. “I like a tree. A proper one.”

  “It’s not worth quarrelling over,” Florence said. “They only came in with Prince Albert.”

  “Nonsense,” Colin said. “It’s a pagan custom.”

  “I didn’t know you were a pagan,” Sylvia said, returning. “I thought you were an agnostic.” She sat down an
d wiped her hands on her paper napkin, and looked expectant. Impelled to goodwill, Colin placed two parcels before her, and doled out the same to Florence.

  “Well,” Colin said. “Another drink, anybody? Such largesse. I always think this is the nicest moment. I mean giving, of course, as well as receiving.”

  “It’s a pity you weren’t a vicar,” Sylvia said.

  “If I were a vicar, Sylvia, we should have even less money than we do, and certainly none to spare for presents.”

  “Really, do you have to go on like this?” Florence muttered. They composed their faces to amiability. From upstairs came Alistair’s long-drawn and hideous wail; his sisters were pinching him and calling him pig. There was a loud, almost shocking rending of paper, as Sylvia pulled out of its wrapping the bottle of scent Colin gave her every year.

  “A new one,” she said. “You’ve bought a new kind.” She opened the box, prised it out, unscrewed the cap, and began to dab the scent on her wrists.

  “Steady,” Colin said. “Don’t waste it all.”

  “This was imaginative of you, Colin,” Florence said.

  “I thought, oh, you know, try a change.” He looked modest.

  “I don’t think I was praising you,” Florence said. “I think I was being sarcastic, really. Have you actually bought her the same each year?”

  Sylvia held her wrist to her nose and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes. They snapped open, and a flicker of surprise crossed her face.

  “Well?” Colin demanded. He was eager to get on with his own parcels.

  Sylvia hesitated, and proffered her wrist.

  “Very nice,” Colin said. “Very nice indeed.”

  “Let it warm up on your skin, Sylvia,” Florence suggested. “That might make all the difference.”

  “I hope so,” Sylvia said.

  “It wasn’t cheap,” Colin said. “It wasn’t bloody cheap, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He thrust his chair back, glowering.