Some Girls' Mothers

by Anne Caldwell

  I drive back to London through the Dartford Tunnel. Lose the way. The dark closes in. Headlights flash and fade. I seem to be on the same spiralling slip road for ever.

  *

  I sit in the high hospital bed with a plastic bowl in my lap. Of course I want her to come through the door. Cathy. I want Cathy. My mother doesn’t know. I never find a way of telling her. She dies four years later. So what is she doing, in the half-light of my imagination, in this memory which does not include her, marching into the John Radcliffe in the middle of the night? Only Danny and Nick know that I’m here, and they’ve gone home. The ward is dark apart from a single point of illumination at the nurse’s station. The sister is on the phone.

  ‘We need some sandwiches, there’s a lot of failed suicides in tonight and they’re hungry.’

  My mother strides past her. I could jump out and yank the curtains across so she can’t find me. But I’m dazed and groggy, I want to throw up. She comes to a halt; stands beside the bed in the semi-darkness. I can’t look at her, but I know she’s wearing her brown silk evening dress that drapes and gathers at a low waist. A string of glass beads. A clutch bag under her arm. Perfume, face powder, white wine. She has interrupted dinner to race down the M40 through the west London suburbs, Buckinghamshire and into Oxfordshire at over seventy miles per hour, because her only daughter is in trouble.

  ‘Sorry. That you’ve had to leave wherever you were. I got myself into a bit of a state. Probably been drinking too much. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m going to be fine.’

  I don’t tell her that I want Cathy here. I want Cathy to know what I’ve done, to clamber onto the bed and hold me; I want to feel her leather jacket on the inside of my arms, her white shirt under my hands.

  Is she shocked to see me like this? I can’t tell. I’m too busy making myself as small as possible. Is she wondering what went wrong? Everything seemed to be going well. I had friends. A busy life. Lectures. Essays. Libraries. I’d mentioned theatre groups, women’s groups.

  Now she’s trying to say something. I anticipate it: she will change the subject, tell me about the talk she’s been to, that Doris has a new book out but she finds it unreadable, too much like hearing her speak. And Doris does go on. She will say it’s a pity they can’t paint these walls anything but a dismal pastel green. She will say there’s a new Richard III on at the National and she’ll get tickets for the next time I’m in town.

  I can hear her sigh. A forced breath through the nose. The air brushes my arm. I know. I know. I’ve been a stupid girl.

  The words come like an old recording, where the scratches and dust are in the foreground and the microphone has been badly placed. Have the pills affected my hearing? I hunch forward to listen better. Try and piece the syllables together. Her voice is gentler than I expected. It seems that she’s been away somewhere and now that she’s back there’s a great deal of catching up to do. Is she the person I think she is? Can I let her speak?

  The words trail off. I want to hold her hand, say, ‘Mum, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying but can you stay, sit down.’

  I open my eyes.

  She’s not there.

  Visit to the Psychotherapist

  Anne Caldwell

  Mum clutches her handbag and refuses to take off her beige raincoat. This is not a good start. She looks tiny as she perches on one of those chairs favoured by therapists – bent wood frame, a stripy canvas back and cushion reminiscent of a deck chair on the prom. Just as uncomfortable. The therapist is a little younger, a plump woman in her fifties dressed in a modern trouser suit, smart but friendly, with a large necklace of African wooden beads.

  Mum’s upbringing has not prepared her for anything like this. Christened Martha, she was a scholarship girl who went to Queen Mary’s School in Lytham St Annes. There was a photo of her around this age in the top drawer of her dressing table. She has two bright red plaits, a pleated skirt, a blazer slightly too big for her and a big, big smile. She looked like she was ready for anything. Mum graduated from her school with straight As in Biology, Zoology and Botany. I think she would have liked to have been a famous plant collector, or expert in animal behaviour; a female Gerald Durrell or David Attenborough. She should have gone on to university, but this was the middle of the de-mob years. She trained to be a primary school teacher instead. Her mottos in life were: ‘if you make your bed you’ve got to lie on it’, and that you should ‘just grin and bear it’. So Mum did. Feelings were kept very much under wraps. Or in her case, kept in a stock cupboard full of PVA and sugar paper.

  I have been coming to therapy for years, handing over cash each week and struggling to keep up my mortgage payments. I am longing for a cure, but have done so much therapy I know this language is out of date and a cure is not the goal. I must learn to ‘re-write my script’, come to terms with my past, and invent a new blueprint for living. Some days this feels very difficult indeed and I wish I had chosen to become a born-again Christian or Pagan. It might have been easier on the bank balance.

  ‘Now, shall we set a contract for this session?’

  The therapist checks her watch. We have exactly fifty minutes even though I pay for an hour. The ‘contract’ bit has worried my mother. She is beginning to think she might have to sign up for something, like an evening class in how to get on with your angry daughter, or something worse.

  ‘Right. Mrs Greenwood. Don’t look so terrified. I will explain. We need to set some boundaries in place for this therapy session, something you can both agree to focus on, reflect on at the end of our time together. Now how does that sound to you?’

  Martha looks totally baffled now, and is checking for emergency exits. She has not said a word since we sat down.

  ‘Mum – we just need to work out what we want to say to each other – okay?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, you brought me here.’

  ‘I know. But you must have a view on something. On what we talked about at home.’

  ‘You know what I think. I’m very sorry it all happened. It wasn’t easy bringing you three up. I feel like a failure now you’ve told me that all that was going on under my nose.’

  Mum clutches her bag tighter to her chest and is looking flushed about the throat. She has travelled into Manchester for my sake, from her small village on the edge of Cheshire and was lost for a good twenty minutes on the motorway network. She would prefer it if we could just go for a nice cup of tea somewhere and a bun.

  Something inside me springs open like an umbrella.

  ‘Here we go again! The focus is on you and your failings and I am meant to look after you. Well I won’t do it, do you hear me? I won’t!’

  I am on my feet now, marching to the window, and I can see the therapist is looking worried. This isn’t the way she likes her clients to behave.

  A police car wails outside on the busy main street that cuts through Chorlton. I look across at the church opposite. It has been turned into a pub called ‘Down Under’ and serves kangaroo steaks on Sundays. Next door, there is a physiotherapist doing sports injuries and a Bach Flower remedy specialist. I turn back towards Mum and the therapist. The wood-chip wallpaper above their heads is now looking a bit tired. The settee opposite is covered in an Indian blanket and has a tea stain in the middle.

  ‘Right ladies. Contract, contract. Let’s start again. Mrs Greenwood. Or may I call you Martha?’

  ‘Definitely not! I’m Mrs Greenwood…and I don’t see why me coming here is going to help matters. I don’t understand at all.’

  ‘I am sensing some defensiveness here…Mrs Greenwood, is that something you would like to explore?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, should we talk about the resistance you feel about being here with your daughter?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue what you are on about. Can’t we just get on with it?’

  ‘On with what? Do you want to tell me more about that transaction?’

  ‘Oh for goodness sake! What is
the point of raking up the past?’

  Right at this moment I’m inclined to agree with her.

  I sit down again, on the tea-stained sofa opposite my mum and imagine myself at home in my own space. The tiny red-brick terraced house in Fallowfield I have moved heaven and earth to try and keep now my boyfriend and I have parted company. It has lovely white walls, lots of bookcases and framed prints. I have just got beyond the poster and Blu-Tack stage. I have bought a casserole dish and a decent frying pan. I have six matching wine glasses for when people visit and an out-of-tune piano which I mean to take up playing at some point in the future.

  I wish I could just let go of the past. It’s like being followed by a stray dog that keeps yapping at my heels. I am scrunched forward on the edge of my seat and notice black biro down my linen trousers. What happened to me as a young girl was anything but civilised or something you can discuss with anyone.

  I re-focus on the room and remember what started this all in the first place. That very, very difficult conversation with my mother in her kitchen a few months ago. She had made braising steak. She knows I am a vegetarian. She thinks I need building up, even though I am in my late twenties. If I would only eat her stews like I used to I might get a bit of colour in my cheeks and give up all this nonsense about self development and being a poet and a feminist, I’d meet a nice man, get a good job and settle down.

  ‘So, what the hell are we all going to talk about now? The state of the economy?’

  My voice has gone up an octave and my neck is blotchy.

  ‘Hang on, hang on…shall we all just calm down a little bit?’ The therapist is also perched forward in her leather chair.

  ‘Anne – let’s backtrack a little bit. Can you just explain to me the purpose of you coming here together and what you would like to get out of the session?’

  ‘It was your idea to invite her as far as I can remember. I knew it would be like this. I’ve told you – we’re not a family who bloody talk to each other in any real sense. We never have done, and when we’ve tried, cans of worms multiply until you’ve got a supermarket full of them to deal with.’

  ‘There is no need to swear,’ Mum chips in.

  ‘There’s every bloody need to swear! If we’d at least had a bit more blue language in the family we might’ve uncovered what was really going on half the time!’

  ‘Would you like to respond to that, Mrs Greenwood? I can see that you’re looking quite agitated as your daughter expresses anger.’

  ‘I tried my best. It was hard. I made sure that we had holidays abroad and that the girls had as much opportunity as when their father was alive. That included the music lessons. If I’d known…Why didn’t you…? Oh I don’t know.’

  The therapist is smiling encouragingly at Mum and I can see that she thinks we’re really getting somewhere. I fiddle with my ring, look at the tea stain on the settee, then at my mum’s over-stuffed brown handbag with its weathered strap. From inside she could produce anything for a physical emergency – nail scissors, plasters, Savlon, tissues, mints, and a fiver if you were short.

  I go over to where Mum is sitting, take a deep breath, and stroke her hair. I wish I could tell her it was all a mistake coming here and rewind the clock. Maybe I should never have tried to tell her what happened to me back then. She looks tiny. Like a wren, crumpled up somehow. I know she’s done her best. She cooked for me and my sisters every evening after work (even if it was boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce and Vesta meals), and managed a roast dinner on a Sunday. She bought us clothes when we wanted them and put up with all our strops and moods and unreasonable demands to be picked up late at night from various boyfriends’ houses. It’s just there was no room to admit things were going terribly wrong. It would have been like reading out your diary in school assembly. As I listen to the sound of the traffic and the city charging past the sash windows, bits of what I had told her that January afternoon a few months ago drift back.

  I remember Mum’s kitchen table with its chequerboard Formica top and cruet set. Her leatherette stool warm against my legs. I described to her what this big man had done. The man in whom she’d placed her trust to get me through ‘O’-level music. An educated teacher with flannel trousers and pale cream shirts. A musician who could improvise brilliantly on the clarinet and understood the inner pacing of a piece of Bach. How he’d taken a genuine interest, helped me choose my options for school, listened when I told him I didn’t want to be a scientist or accountant but didn’t really know what to do next.

  How the stairs in the centre of his house were very dark and smelt of bulrushes. The candlewick bedspread that was worn in places. Its horrible shade of mustard.

  How he liked me to fold up my school uniform on a wickerwork bedroom chair and leave my elasticated belt on with its three-clasped buckle across my stomach.

  How I stared at the pattern of cracks on the ceiling and thought of the tributaries in the Amazon delta and a steamboat with twin engines that could take you down to the port near the sea.

  How I felt the coarseness of his beard scratch my cheek and the weight of him pushing the springs of his spare bed into the small of my back, his breath smelling of garlic.

  How the buckle on my belt left an imprint. Three red circles like a cattle brand on my pale white skin that stayed for days.

  My mum just stared into space. Looked across the kitchen table at me as if the sky had fallen in. Just like the children’s story she read to infants about Henny Penny. She opened her mouth. Then closed it. Began to load the dishwasher with dirty clothes. Then took them out and put them back in their red plastic basket. Outside, clouds were scudding across the sky and it was beginning to rain. I could hear the river at the end of her garden gushing underneath the road bridge.

  I was not sure she believed me and I sat there swinging my legs from side to side at the table, fiddling with the cut-glass salt and pepper pot.

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you say anything to me at the time?’ Mum said gingerly.

  ‘I don’t know. He said it was all our secret and it had to stay that way otherwise I would be in real trouble. I was scared stiff. You were always so busy with your school preparation every night, and taking Mary to Brownies, or Susan to flute lessons, or doing parents’ evenings or making food. I don’t remember you having a minute to talk, you know, really talk to us about anything.’

  ‘Oh, Anne. I would have tried. Really I would have tried. Why on earth… Under my nose as well! Oh I wish your father had been alive. He would’ve given him a good hiding…’

  She came over and rubbed my shoulder with her thumb and forefinger. A muscle in my leg was pulsing. Outside the rain was much heavier now, bouncing off the concrete drive, filling up the gutters.

  *

  That journey from music room, up the stairs, to the back bedroom and the ceiling-delta had brought us to this therapy session. Without warning, my mother begins to cry. For the next thirty minutes, I sit near her and watch a reservoir of sadness fill up the room. There is nothing I can say. I look on with astonishment. I’ve never seen Mum crying before. The therapist hands her a box of tissues from the bottom drawer of her office desk. She motions to me to loosen my mum’s coat, and, surprisingly, Mum does not make a fuss. When she’s finished the tissues, Mum rummages in her bag for an embroidered hanky and a packet of Murray mints. She can’t do up the clasp. The therapist is on home turf now. Brewing tea and handing out tissues is her stock-in-trade. She looks comfortable and busy in the face of all this catharsis.

  I’m perched on one of the uncomfortable armrests of Mum’s chair and she’s still weeping. I’m holding her hand and I notice it is marked with liver spots and a pattern of blue veins.

  ‘So much grief, Mrs Geenwood,’ soothes the therapist. I could sock her one at this point, but only manage a hard stare in her general direction.

  ‘There’s been a lot to cry about hasn’t there? Our time’s nearly up now. I would strongly advise you to book in for another session, and
to come without your daughter.’ Her voice has assumed a professional tone.

  Mum drops the mints and they scatter across the floor.

  ‘I really miss him, you know. We had such a lovely start. All those concerts and going out for meals. Then I’d such a good time when you were all babies. He was a quiet man with everyone else but could talk to me. All those visits to the cancer hospital. Night after night. When he died I was so angry. I thought: why me? Why has this happened to me? It wasn’t fair. There I was with three girls and the house to run and he goes and dies on me.’

  It takes me a while to work out Mum is talking about my father. She has never spoken so much about my dad in front of me. In fact, usually she never refers to him at all. I feel the umbrella in my stomach close up, and fold itself around a small press-stud.

  ‘Well…it wasn’t fair, Mum.’

  ‘No. Not fair. I used to like to cuddle up to him at night, warm myself on his back at the end of the day. You don’t get used to sleeping on your own, even after all this time. Even after twenty years…’

  ‘Martha…Mrs Greenwood. Anne. You’re both going to have to leave now. I’m sorry, I have another client.’

  The therapist is standing over us now. Her beads are swinging from side to side and she’s smoothing down her jacket with the palms of her hands.

  I feel like a pile of washing you would rather just ram in the drum of the machine and switch to ‘quick wash with fabric softener’.

  ‘Come on. We’ve got to leave…’ I get out my chequebook as Mum buttons up her coat and fastens her handbag. My hand is shaking whilst I sign my signature and the only biro I’ve found is orange fluorescent ink. Bloody typical.

  Mum looks like she’s not sure where she is at all.

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ I say to the therapist who is now holding the door open and checking her watch. ‘Sorry I lost my temper a bit earlier on.’