by Imogen Clark
‘Pop your seatbelt on,’ she says and it’s as if I too have regressed to my childhood.
I obey her, fumbling at first with the buckle and then clicking the belt into position around me. She drives slowly, with respect for our surroundings, but she doesn’t slow down further as we pass the rest of our party and I’m grateful for that. I lower my head as we drive on but I see them all standing there. They make a sombre little group.
The house is cold and dark when we get back. The sky has clouded over and is now threatening rain. Even though it’s not yet lunchtime, it feels like night can’t be far away. Mrs P flicks on lights and trips the central-heating switch and the boiler rumbles into action.
‘Let’s get you sat down. I’ll make us a nice cup of tea.’
She leads me into the lounge. I am completely numb, happy just to be steered about. I perch on the edge of the sofa as if I might leap up again at any minute. Dad’s chair stands opposite me, empty. A wave of anger passes through me. How could he have done this to me, to us? What kind of sick mind could possibly think it was an appropriate lie to tell? He carried it for all those years and never once relented. Even if he might have thought it was justified when I was small, surely he could have told me the truth when I grew up? I suppose he was scared. Scared of what I might say or do. Scared that I might react just as Michael had done and run from him. When he started to get ill perhaps he worried that he could no longer trust himself to keep the facts straight in his head? Then, one day, he would just have forgotten. It would have become, to him, as if it had never happened. I might never have known. It’s obvious that Michael had decided never to tell me. I would have gone through my entire life not knowing. How dare they do that to me? I feel my jaw tighten and my fists bunch with the fury that I have nowhere else to put.
And now, the not-dead mother has turned up. Judging by his reaction, I’m pretty certain that Michael didn’t know she was going to be there, but then I’m no longer sure what I can be certain of. Everything that was once secure in my world has fallen away.
Mrs P comes in and presses a hot cup of tea into my hand.
‘I’ve put plenty of sugar into it,’ she says. ‘For the shock. The others will be back in a moment, I’m sure. Is there anything I can do before they arrive?’
I shake my head.
‘Well, maybe I’ll go and see if I can sort things out in the kitchen,’ she says and then disappears to do what she does best. Part of me wishes that she would stay with me. I don’t want to talk. Right now, I have no words for what I’m feeling but I crave the sense of calm that she always brings me. The contrast between what I feel for her and what I feel for the woman who has just appeared at Dad’s funeral couldn’t be more marked. It strikes me that Mrs P, an agency nurse paid to live in my house and look after my father, has become so much more of a mother to me than I have ever known. Over the last few months she has been quietly compassionate, gentle and supportive, knowing instinctively what I needed and what should be said or not said. Her reassuring presence in my life is the closest thing I can remember to having an actual mother. And now, just as I finally understand that, she is going to leave me with a woman for whom I feel precisely nothing. It is the saddest thought.
I hear the front door open and close, whispering voices in the hall, before the lounge door swings and Michael comes in.
‘Cara? Are you okay?’
He kneels at my feet and lifts my chin so that he can look into my face. His eyes are rimmed red.
‘I’ve brought Mum back here,’ he says, his voice almost a whisper. ‘I think we need to talk.’
Before I have time to reply, the woman appears at the door. She is standing a little taller than she was before, her shoulders a little less rounded.
‘Please give me chance to explain everything,’ she says. ‘Then I’ll leave if you want me to.’
I look at Michael. He nods at me, eyebrows raised in expectation.
I hear Marianne in the hallway.
‘Come on, girls. Let’s go with Beth into the kitchen and see if we can find a drink.’
‘Can we show Beth our den?’ says Zara.
‘I love dens,’ I hear Beth say and then the voices are lost.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The woman, my mother, sits down in the chair that was Dad’s. Part of me flinches at her audacity: the man was cremated less than an hour ago. But then I suppose that she doesn’t know it’s his chair. I let it pass. Michael stays where he is, next to me. We look like an interview panel, which I suppose is appropriate in a way.
The woman bites at her knuckle and my heart starts to soften a little. This must be really hard for her too, not that that excuses anything. Still . . .
Then she clears her throat, a small sound like a child’s cough.
‘The first thing I need you to understand,’ she says, looking me straight in the eye, ‘is how deeply, deeply sorry I am for what happened.’
My heart hardens again. Sorry? She’s sorry. She, my mother, abandons me for thirty years and now she says she’s sorry. And sorry not for what she did but for what happened. I dig my fingernails into my palms, feeling the distracting, comforting pain as they sink into my flesh, but somehow I manage to keep my mouth shut.
‘I love you,’ she says. ‘I have never stopped loving you. I did what I did because I genuinely thought it would cause the least amount of pain for you.’
I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
‘Have you any idea . . .’ I begin but Michael shakes his head.
‘Shhhh, Cara,’ he says. ‘Let her tell her side.’
I sit back, my arms folded tightly across my chest.
‘I did leave that night. It was Tilly’s idea. It was supposed to be a gesture to show Joseph that I wasn’t going to let him walk all over me anymore. I thought that he could stew overnight and then, when he’d calmed down, I’d go back in the morning and collect you and we could all leave together. I thought Tilly would help me find somewhere for us to live and then we’d work out visiting rights and what have you for your father. That was my idea. I’m not sure now that that was what Tilly had in mind . . .’
She looks down, her cheeks pink. From what I now understand of Tilly, it must have been blindingly obvious that we didn’t feature in her plans. How could our mother not have seen that? But then, maybe, when times are desperate, people take leaps of faith without really considering how far they are going to have to jump to get to safety.
‘But then everything went wrong,’ she continues. ‘Your father changed the locks that night and then he wouldn’t let me in or answer the phone. I was hammering on the door for hours. I could hear you crying inside but he wouldn’t open it. I tried calling to you through the letterbox but he just turned the radio up so loud that you couldn’t hear me. The neighbours all came out to watch but no one came forward to help. I sat there all day, just shouting for you.’
Her breath is coming in gulps now but there are no tears. I listen but I can’t imagine what she is describing, can hardly believe that she’s talking about something that involved me. I look at Michael. There are tears trickling down his cheeks and I realise that he might remember this, or be allowing himself to remember it for the first time.
‘Then the police got involved,’ she says. ‘Joseph called them and they came and took me to the cells for causing a disturbance. They didn’t charge me but, by the time I got back to the house, your father had seen a solicitor and got the emergency injunction with the restriction order. You know about those?’
Michael nods.
‘So then, on top of everything else, I had the threat of prison hanging over me if I came anywhere near you. Tilly said I would be no good to you if I was locked up. I agreed but it was so hard to keep away. Tilly really hated your father. She filled my head with hatred too, although it wasn’t very hard. He had stolen my precious babies from me and there was nothing I could do to stop him.’
She pauses for a moment, collecting herself. I fee
l myself warming to her, part of me longing to forgive her for what she did. But part of me is still too angry. Then she begins to speak again.
‘That’s when Tilly suggested that we go on a trip, just a short one, until things calmed down. So we went to Europe, travelled around for a while. We ended up staying longer than I’d hoped,’ she adds quietly.
I snort. I’ve seen the postcards. They were gone for years. I’m about to challenge her but Michael flicks my foot with his and I hold my comments back. My mother takes a deep breath and continues.
‘You have to understand,’ she says, in a voice so quiet that I can barely hear her, ‘when you’ve spent your whole life being told that you’re rubbish, that you’ll never amount to anything, then you start to believe it. I tried so hard for him but nothing I did was ever good enough. If I cooked his favourite food, it was boring. If I experimented with something new, he’d complain that he didn’t like it. If he came home from work and I hadn’t managed to tidy up, he made me feel like I was a sloppy housewife who spent all day lounging around spending his money. Not that I had any money to spend. He gave me housekeeping for food but that was all. If I needed anything for you, shoes or new clothes, then I had to ask. I had next to nothing for myself because he didn’t seem to realise that I needed it. I didn’t even have money for . . . for personal things.’
Her cheeks burn as she says this. I think about the implications of what she’s describing. I can’t imagine being so dependent on someone that they could humiliate me by just withholding cash. I feel myself soften, just a little.
‘He used to joke that I was taking advantage of him and, after a while, I started to believe it. He never wanted any of my friends round. I had plenty of friends when we first got married, but if they came to visit when he was at home, he’d be rude to them and make them feel uncomfortable. So, eventually, they made excuses and stopped coming.’
Her words chime with what Ursula told me about Dad: the control, the passive aggression that seems to have been his modus operandi. I think about what Beth said just last night as well, what her mum had thought about our home life, and then my mother’s story starts to slot into the bigger picture. I try to put myself in her shoes but I still can’t get beyond the fact that she left us with him.
‘He kept going on at me, every day,’ my mother continues. ‘Drip-feeding me with how useless I was. My self-confidence had been all but destroyed by my father. It didn’t take much for Joe to knock me down lower still. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it half the time, but the spark at the heart of me was getting dimmer and dimmer. I was so frightened that it would go out altogether.’
She looks up at us, imploring us to understand. I think I can, maybe a little. Ursula told me stories of their life at home, of how their father treated them. I know that my mother was damaged long before she ever met Dad.
‘I’m not making excuses,’ she continues. ‘That’s just how it was. When someone tells you over and over again that you are pointless and no good, that’s how you begin to see yourself. When he was cross, he’d tell me that I was a terrible mother, and gradually I began to feel that he was right. I knew I was hopeless, that I was no good for you. For either of you.’
Her bottom lip begins to quiver, showing emotion for the first time since she started to speak.
‘That’s when I met Tilly,’ she says, and her tone changes. She almost smiles. ‘Well, we’d met before I was married. She was a friend of a friend but we bumped into each other at the post office. I couldn’t believe that someone like her would remember someone like me but she knew me straightaway. She dragged me for a drink. I was so nervous about being late back. But Tilly wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was like that, Tilly. When she wanted something, she just made it happen. She just blew into my life like a hurricane. She had this fantastic job and loads of money. She made things seem exciting again. Of course, Joseph couldn’t bear her – I suppose he could see how dangerous she was – but she didn’t care. She wasn’t scared of him like my other friends were. I loved that she could stand up to him. She made me feel brave. After all that time, I started to feel like I had choices.’
The door opens and Esmé comes running in, with Marianne right behind her. Esmé has a picture in her hand. It’s of her family standing in front of a house that could be this one, with its high gable roof. Standing slightly apart from the four of them is a single figure in a long, white dress, which I assume is me.
‘Auntie Cara,’ she says. ‘I drew you a picture.’ She holds it out towards me. The pain that slices through me as I see myself standing alone snatches my breath away. There, in this child’s drawing, is a clear depiction of who I am and all that I have lost.
‘Esmé,’ Marianne is saying. ‘Come out please. Daddy and Auntie Cara . . .’
Marianne looks up and, seeing my stricken face asks, ‘Is everything okay, Cara?’
I can’t move but Michael nods and so Marianne takes an objecting Esmé by the hand and pulls her from the room.
‘So,’ I say, trying to reclaim the anger I’d felt a moment before. Anger somehow seems easier to deal with than pain. ‘You abandoned us so that you could go and “find yourself” with Tilly.’ My fingers flick air commas round my words.
I know from what Ursula told me that this is neither true nor fair. The woman, my mother, doesn’t leap to defend herself and shame washes over me. I want to rage at what has been done to me but right now my heart is full of an incredibly deep sadness at all that the three of us have lost.
‘That’s not fair, Cara,’ says Michael, but he doesn’t need to stand up for her. I can see in her face how much what happened has cost her.
‘I had no idea of what would happen,’ she says. ‘I thought I was taking a stand, showing your father that I had a mind of my own and could do things that he wasn’t expecting. Yes, I was unhappy, and I really thought I loved Tilly, but I never dreamed that packing that suitcase would lead to me being pushed out of your lives completely. Leaving you that night was the biggest mistake of my life.’
And then she weeps: hard, silent tears that pour down her cheeks. She makes no move to wipe them. They just fall away.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Annie, 2018
What makes the perfect mother?
This is something that I’ve thought about a lot over the years. I’m certain all mothers do, as they try to process the crushing guilt they feel for the mistakes they believe they have made.
Is the perfect mother the one who stays with her children night and day, putting their needs before her own, sacrificing the life that she once had in order to focus all her attention on them?
What about the woman who juggles everything to try to forge a balance between work and home, providing a role model for her daughters while at the same time preserving a little of what she was before they were born?
Should the perfect mother let her children make mistakes or sweep in to protect them against every false step? Does she twist the truth to make the world seem more palatable or be brutally honest from the outset? Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny . . . are these all legends that enrich childhood or lies that destroy trust?
You see, there are so many ways of parenting a child. Who can say which is the right path to take?
Every mother has to work this out for herself. She must decide what she thinks is best for her children at any given moment.
Yet this decision cannot help but be coloured by so many other factors: her own childhood, her financial position, her partner’s views, her mental fortitude. And what she does may not be what she would choose to do in an ideal world; life is all about compromise, after all.
However, the one thing that drives each mother on is a visceral need to do her best for her offspring. She may make mistakes, have regrets, wish for another spin on the merry-go-round, but each mother truly believes that the decisions she makes about her children are the best that she is capable of making at the time that she makes them.
So condemn me if you choose, criticise my decisions, compare how you would have played my hand if it had been yours. But remember, before you rush to judgement, that all mothers are ultimately driven by the same engine, despite their differing makes and models. We are all just doing what we think is best for our children.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Cara, 2018
Marianne has made some food. Of course she has. That’s what Marianne does in a crisis. She nurtures.
I’m not hungry but I follow the others to the kitchen where I see no sign of the ham sandwiches that I had planned. Instead, there’s a huge bowl of some kind of kedgeree and another of pasta drenched in a rich tomato sauce.
‘I just used what I could find, Cara,’ she says to me with an expression somewhere between concern and pride. ‘I hope that’s okay.’
‘That’s great, Marianne,’ I mumble. ‘Thanks.’
So we sit to eat like the family we have never been, with Beth and Mrs P hovering awkwardly at the edges. Mrs P suggests that they should leave us to it, but I am adamant that they must both stay. I need them with me. I’m not interested in touching family reunions, not yet.
