by Annie Murray
‘Oh dear,’ Joanne said.
Karen waved her sympathy away, but Joanne could see that her sister, still living at home, was carrying far more of this than she was. But it was bringing out the best in Karen, showing her softer, less business-like side. She was even dressed more casually today, in a pair of loose, cerise cotton trousers and a black T-shirt. Joanne, as usual, was in jeans, a vest top and flip-flops, though she had rolled the jeans up.
‘She’s such a nice lady – she just asked one or two questions and it all came pouring out . . . Anyway, she said, “Look, Karen, it sounds to me as if your mother really needs help. Have you thought of asking her if she’d like some counselling?” ’
‘Counselling? What: talking to someone? A stranger?’
Karen nodded, putting teabags in the pot. Everything Karen did was with neat, economical movements. Joanne’s wonky Victoria sponge was on a plate nearby, jam oozing over one edge. Thank goodness Dave had wanted to come too, and she hadn’t had to manage Amy and a cake tin on two different buses.
‘She keeps having odd moods – crying. I’ve gone up a couple of times when I’ve got in from work, and she’s been in bed in floods of tears. But she’ll never say what’s wrong. I just don’t know what to do, and of course Dad’s hopeless. I’ve asked him whether it’s something about her past, but he doesn’t seem to have a clue. I said to him, “Didn’t you notice anything, Dad?” And he just said he thought that was just the way she was. How can you live with someone all this time and not know anything about them? It just seems incredible.’
She banged the kettle down angrily after pouring in the water.
‘I mean, I know you don’t necessarily go on talking about everything after – what? – they married in nineteen-sixty, right? So that’s twenty-four years of marriage. Twenty-four! But you’d think they’d have talked about something sometime, wouldn’t you? He barely seems to know who she is.’
Joanne felt she had more than an inkling of how your wife or husband could become a total stranger. How they could start to behave in odd and frightening ways. The phone calls had continued all week. But she didn’t say anything and pushed the thought away. She did know a lot about Dave’s past, though. She had shared most of it.
‘We’d better go out,’ Joanne said. ‘I’ll bring the tray.’
‘What about it: the counselling?’
‘I can’t for the life of me see her doing that – can you, seriously?’
Karen sighed, looking deflated. ‘No. Not really. I just thought it might do her good.’
‘It probably would,’ Joanne said, picking up the tea tray. ‘I s’pose we could ask her. But I don’t think she’s very keen on things that would do her good.’
Outside they found Margaret sitting on a folding chair, beside her pots of geraniums, which looked as if they were gasping for water. The patio was still bathed in sunlight and Margaret was wearing a pale-green shirt-waister dress that she’d had for years, which was a bit tight on her and made her look washed out. Joanne recognized it with a pang. Why didn’t Mom go and buy herself something new and nice?
Dave was with Fred, halfway down the garden, bent over the lawnmower. Amy had toddled over to watch.
‘Ah, look at Amy!’ Karen said. ‘She always has to know what’s going on, doesn’t she? What’re they doing?’
‘There’s summat wrong with it,’ Margaret said. ‘Fred’s been complaining all week that he couldn’t get it started. I said to him: you want to get Dave over to look at it.’ Margaret turned her wonky-eyed stare to the table. ‘Cake looks nice, Jo.’
Joanne felt surprisingly flattered by this rare compliment. There were shortbread fingers as well. Mom liked those: she thought they were posh. She pulled open the other folding chairs and set them down with a metallic clatter.
‘You’d think Dad’d know about things like that,’ Karen said, pouring tea.
‘He only drives the buses,’ Margaret said. ‘He doesn’t stick his head in the engine.’
‘Dad, Dave – tea!’ Karen called. ‘Amy, love, d’you want a piece of cake?’
‘Nice cake, bab,’ Fred said as they sat round.
‘Ta, Dad.’ Not much baking went on in that house. Joanne looked at her dad’s skinny frame, his saggy, melancholy face, and wondered about him. I don’t know much about him, either, she thought. She did know that his background had been very poor. Lots of people had grown up in the back-to-backs. Slums, they were called by others. The cheapjack, cramped houses one room deep, backing onto another the same behind, had been built to cram in as many workers as possible close to the factories. Most of them had gone now, cleared after the war. The inhabitants had been scattered to tower blocks or far-flung estates. It wasn’t unusual. But Dad’s father had been killed in the war, and his Mom had never got over it and died not long after. The little she had heard about it had given Joanne the impression of a cold, underfed upbringing, flavoured with grief.
‘He was a poor thing really,’ Mom had said once. They didn’t talk about anything from the past much, either of them. They just got on with it, as they would say. But Joanne felt tender towards her father. He was clueless in so many ways, but he’d always been kindly and gentle with them. Mom did her best too, but she was the one who had a temper.
‘Business going all right, Dave?’ Fred asked, as he always did. He was tucking into the cake.
‘Yeah, not bad, thanks,’ Dave said, as he always did. He was more relaxed here. He knew his parents-in-law liked him and always had. They’d been a bit in awe of him when he was young, with his good looks and his football. But he’d never been slow to help them.
‘Nice cake, eh, Amy?’ Margaret said. Amy was leaning against Joanne’s knee completely absorbed in sponge and jam. There was a dust of icing sugar over her lips. They all laughed and Amy looked round, then giggled at all this attention.
‘More tea anyone?’ Karen said.
But the men were keen to get back to the lawn-mower. Amy toddled after them.
‘She’s growing up fast,’ Margaret said. She gave Joanne a direct look. ‘’Bout time you gave her a brother or sister, isn’t it?’
Joanne prickled inwardly with annoyance. She knew Mom was right, in a way, but something in her resisted. It was the way things felt so inevitable. You have one baby and so, as night follows day, you have another.
‘I might,’ she said.
‘You don’t want her growing up an only child, do you?’ Margaret said. ‘That wouldn’t be much fun for her.’
‘I don’t s’pose it’d be the end of the world,’ Joanne retorted. ‘She’s got lots of little friends . . .’
‘Anyway,’ Karen slipped in, ‘you did, didn’t you, Mom?’ There had been talk of her half-sister Elsie, but otherwise Mom’s childhood had come across as solitary. ‘Didn’t do you any harm, did it?’
‘I wasn’t an only child, was I?’ Margaret said as if it was obvious. ‘I mean, I had Tommy – well, at least, until . . .’ She stopped, looking down.
Joanne and Karen looked at each other. Mom was looking tense and angry now, as if she hadn’t meant to speak.
‘Who’s Tommy, Mom?’ Karen asked, carefully.
‘My brother.’ She blurted it, angrily. ‘My older brother, if you must know. Two years older.’
The girls exchanged looks again, at a loss. They’d never even heard of Tommy before, let alone met him. Mom’s mood was becoming suddenly dangerous.
‘You’ve never told us about Tommy,’ Joanne said. She could feel such strong emotions coming off her mother that it made her nervous. But it all seemed so silly not to be able to ask. ‘Where is he – I mean, is he still alive?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ Margaret said. ‘He never wanted to come back, so he didn’t. The last I saw of him . . .’ She stopped as if a memory had assaulted her. The girls saw her thinking, collecting herself. ‘He was evacuated with me. He went to a farm, and he liked it there, so he never came back when the war was over. He wanted to be a f
armhand. So he stayed.’
This was hard to take in.
‘So you mean . . .’ Karen stumbled into speech. ‘We have an Uncle Tommy – somewhere? Well, where?’
‘Worcester way. Back then, anyway. He could be in Timbuktu by now, I don’t know. He certainly never bothered to tell me where he was going.’
There was something in the way she was talking that made Joanne realize her mother was struggling on the verge of tears. She thought they’d better stop talking about Tommy, at least for the moment.
‘Where did you go to, Mom, when they evacuated you?’ she asked gently.
Her mother took a while to answer, but after a moment she looked up and Joanne could see a change in her, the usual flatness coming back over her as she took control.
‘I was near Worcester as well – I told you. We were sent away together. It’s a nice part, over there. I was sent to one lady, and then on to another place with two sisters.’ She spoke impersonally, as if talking about someone else now.
‘Well, when?’ Karen asked.
‘Oh, well, they evacuated a lot of children right at the start. We went at the beginning of September 1939, Tommy and me. And I came back in 1944 – March.’
‘But you must have been ever so little!’ Karen exclaimed.
Margaret nodded. There was an odd feeling coming off her, as if she was both glad to speak and resentful about being asked anything.
‘I was five.’
‘But why did they send you – couldn’t your mother have gone with you? Our . . . Our grandmother?’ As Karen spoke, Joanne saw the realization break over her that they knew nothing about that grandmother, either. They didn’t seem to know anything.
‘No, my mother was ill. Died soon after, by all accounts.’ This was said with no emotion. ‘I never saw her again.’
A hundred questions ran through Joanne’s mind, but she could see that her mother was on the point of shutting down.
‘So, what was it like?’ she asked, desperate to keep her talking.
‘Oh,’ Margaret said dismissively. ‘It was all right, you know – most of the time.’
Inside, washing up together, the two of them were silent for a time. Then Joanne said, ‘I feel sort of ashamed – that we don’t know anything. That we’ve never asked.’
Karen swished water round in the teapot. She seemed angry.
‘I don’t feel ashamed. I feel quite put out actually, Jo. I mean, if we ever asked about our nanna and granddad, we were just told they were all dead – and that was that. I mean, what’s the big secret? I think we have a right to know things like that.’
Joanne dried up a cup, slowly rotating it. ‘Well, maybe we will now, in the end. It’s funny, isn’t it – it’s as if this Valium thing has opened the lid on everything.’
‘Well, she opens it for a second, then slams it shut again.’ Karen banged the pot down on the side. ‘You never know where you are with her.’
Margaret sat on outside as the others tinkered with the lawnmower, glad for the girls to do the washing-up. She sat so still that from a distance she seemed to have fallen into a doze. However, her mind was anything but quiet. Things were rushing to the surface.
That hadn’t been the last time she had seen Tommy, that visit he made to the house in Buckley, as a tanned farm boy who had found a new life.
Not long before she left her father’s house, left him to it with that vicious harridan Peggy Loach, she had seen Tommy again. It was a Sunday afternoon, sometime in the summer of 1946. She remembered it being very warm – the doors open all round the yard.
Her father and Peggy were upstairs in bed, sleeping it off, and she went out to fetch a bowl of water from the tap. A few bits of washing were hanging on the lines outside in the sun and, as she stood waiting for the bowl to fill, she glanced across the yard.
Between the drying clothes she caught sight of someone standing just at the end of the entry: a tall, strong lad with an unmistakable face. He was staring intently along the yard towards their house. She dropped the bowl with a clatter, water splashing her feet. He looked across and, seeming afraid, turned away.
‘Tommy!’ The tap was still running, but she tore after him, saw him leaving the entry. She ran into the street, just as he started to run as well. ‘Tommy – stop! Stop!’
Her desperate shriek forced him to stop and turn round, slowly, as if he could hardly bear to look. He was so big now, a fourteen-year-old man, towering above her in a white shirt and waistcoat of rough black serge, trousers, boots.
‘Tommy?’
He stared down at her. She saw the same frank look, the cheeky turn to his lips. His face was a weathered, healthy colour. They just stood there, gazing at each other, trying to take in what was in front of them.
‘Are you coming home?’ She could hardly bring out the words, her throat was so full and aching.
Tommy shook his head and started to step away. ‘No, Sis – no. I can’t. This ain’t home. Not any more. No, never. But I just had to come and . . . Is Mom . . . ?’
‘She’s gone. She passed away soon after we left. You know she has.’
Tommy swallowed. ‘Yes. I knew it really. I just had to come and see – just the once. But I’m off now. I can’t stay, Maggie . . .’
He hurried away. There was nothing she could do. She knew he couldn’t stay, could see that he had belonged to another life for a long time now.
She stood in the street, watching him through the tears, which came then, until he turned the corner and was gone.
Thirty-One
Harpreet had slipped into the house that warm afternoon, home from visiting a friend. The hall was full of delicious cooking smells. She stopped and listened.
Voices were coming from the kitchen, her mother and big sister chatting together, over the sizzle of onions and spices. Harpreet’s round face broke into a smile. Stepping towards the portrait of Guru Nanak, she said, ‘Thank you, Guru-ji – that’s so much better.’
Later, upstairs, she flung her arms round Sooky.
‘Hey, Mom’s talking to you again, isn’t she? I’m so-o-o happy!’
It was only a few days after the visit from Kanvar, the ‘Young Prince’.
‘Yeah,’ Sooky said, giving her a squeeze. ‘Me too.’
Harpreet’s face creased with anxiety for a moment. ‘They have told the Sohals you’re not going to marry him, haven’t they?’
‘Yes, Dad told them.’
Harpreet sank down on the bed with exaggerated relief. ‘Phew! Fate worse than death! Does this mean things’ll go back to normal now? Are they okay with it?’
‘I don’t know about normal,’ Sooky said, laughing. ‘What’s normal round here anyway? But it’s much better. I think they’ve realized that marrying me off to just anyone might not be the answer now.’
She had cooked dinner with Mom, this time not in the brittle silence that had persisted for the past months. Only now that things were beginning to heal could she look back and take in just how much pain and loneliness her mother’s silent distancing of herself from Sooky had caused.
Harpreet was staring indignantly at her. ‘I should think not!’
‘Hey . . .’ Sooky pulled Harpreet down on the bed beside her. ‘Look, it’s not really just Mom and Dad’s fault. They’ve had to put up with a lot over this as well – you know, people bitching, the gossip.’
‘But that’s just it!’ Harpreet exploded. ‘They get all these horrible things said about them – and you. And you get the blame for all of it when it was all Jaz’s fault! It’s not fair, it’s just ridiculous. I don’t get why you’ve just accepted all that, said you’d had an affair with someone else to get a divorce, when you know you hadn’t done anything . . .’ Harpreet was almost in tears.
Sooky sighed, stroking her sister’s hand. ‘I know it’s not fair. It’s absolutely not fair. At the time I just wanted to get out of it so badly that I was prepared to take the blame. I feel like a coward now: I should have stood up to Jaz, told
someone about his . . . problems. What really gets me is wondering who else Jaz might start on.’ She looked at Harpreet. ‘We’re bound to hear if he gets married again – and I’ll warn her. I honestly will. I don’t know what else I can do now.’
‘But what about you: you’re the one who looks bad! And people remember all this stuff forever and ever.’
Sooky stared ahead of her. ‘It’s the whole family honour thing – izzat . . . Daughters keeping up the tradition. Mom and Dad are just caught up in that; we all are.’
Harpreet fumed beside her. ‘I don’t want to be. I’ll run away. I don’t ever want to get married!’
Sooky squeezed her hand. ‘But then what? You lose your family – you’re all on your own. Oh, I don’t know. It’s all stupid and unfair, and some of it needs to change. But the thing is, I still wish things had been different . . .’ Her eyes filled. ‘That I could have made Mom and Dad proud, the way they wanted me to.’
‘Oh, Sooks.’ Harpreet put her arms round Sooky again and they sat hugging for a minute, both tearful.
‘The main thing is,’ Sooky said over Harpreet’s shoulder, ‘that at least Mom’s talking to me.’
Until all this happened she had never experienced that simple longing for her mother’s presence. She wanted everyday things: for them to cook together, do the chores, look after Priya and chat, the way they had done before. This felt like a sacred part of life. Now she had lost it and regained it, she knew how precious it was.
At first communication was stiff, like an unused wheel cranking into action. Both Meena and Sooky had been polite, but wary of each other. They had to take time to relate to each other on a new footing.
The schools broke up and the weather was hot. Pav spent a lot of the time out with his friends, mostly quiet, studious boys who gave no cause for worry. Harpreet had just finished her GCSEs and was relaxing and socializing too.
Roopinder, who was now six months pregnant, insisted that she needed to rest and seemed to find it hard to tolerate the company of the children she had already. She seemed quite down in herself, sleeping a lot and snapping at everyone. So for much of the time Meena and Sooky were looking after Amardeep and Jasmeet as well as Priya, sometimes with Harpreet there to help.
