by Meg Mason
Watching her empty it, he said, ‘By God, Celia, it’s not bloody medicine. At least look like you’re enjoying it.’
She was enjoying it. Ingrid and I were not. At home, at parties, our mother’s drinking had always been a source of amusement to us. It was becoming less so now that we were older, and she was older, and her drinking was no longer dependent on there being interesting people in the house or any people at all. And it had never been amusing at Belgravia, where my uncle and aunt drank in a way that did not produce a change in mood, and Ingrid and I learned that bottles could be recorked and put away and glasses left on the table unfinished. That day, which ended with Winsome on her hands and knees on the floor next to our mother’s chair, dabbing wine out of the carpet, it embarrassed us. Our mother embarrassed us.
Once we were all seated and Winsome started the platters going, requisite left around the table, Rowland, at the adults’ end, asked Patrick, at the children’s end, if he was of ethnic extraction.
Oliver said, ‘Dad, you can’t ask someone that.’
Rowland said, ‘Evidently you can, since I just did,’ and looked pointedly back at Patrick who obediently replied, saying his father was born in America but he is actually Scottish, and his mother was – his voice wavered at that point – his mother was British Indian.
In that case, my uncle said, it was peculiar that Patrick spoke with a smarter accent than his own sons if neither of his parents were English. Nicholas said oh my God under his breath and was asked to leave the room but didn’t. In his critical years, my mother told us once, both Winsome and Rowland lacked follow-through when it came to their eldest son, a position that surprised Ingrid and me because she did not discipline us at all.
With forced brightness, Winsome asked Patrick his parents’ names. He said his father was called Christopher Friel and, almost inaudibly, that his mother’s name was Nina. Rowland began peeling bits of skin off the slices of turkey my aunt had arranged on his plate, feeding them one by one to the whippet sitting at his feet, which he had acquired weeks earlier and named Wagner. Unfortunately, people only got the joke if he explained it, the German pronunciation vs. the spelling. Often he had to write it down and show them. Appearing at breakfast that morning, my mother said she would have preferred to listen to the entire Ring Cycle performed by a learner violinist than the dog’s whining all night in the crate.
To Rowland’s next question of what his father did, Patrick said he worked for a European bank but he couldn’t remember which one, sorry. My uncle took a large swallow of whatever was in his glass, then said, ‘Tell us then, what befell your mother?’
The platters had finished going around but nobody had started eating because of the conversation being had from opposite ends of the table. Working hard not to cry, Patrick explained that she had drowned in a hotel pool when he was seven. Rowland said bad luck and shook out his napkin, indicating that the interview was over. Immediately, Oliver and Nicholas picked up their cutlery and began eating like a starter’s pistol had just gone off, with their heads bowed, left arm circled around their plate as if defending it from theft while they shovelled food in with the fork in their right hand. Patrick ate the same way.
He was sent to boarding school a week after his mother’s funeral. That is what kind of father manages to forget to book his own son a flight home.
A few minutes later, during a lull in the adults’ conversation, Patrick stopped shovelling, raised his head and said, ‘My mother was a doctor.’ No one had asked him, then or earlier. He said it as if he’d forgotten, and just remembered.
I think, to prevent Rowland from reopening the topic or selecting a worse one, my father began to explain the Theseus Paradox to the whole table. It was, he said, a first century philosophical conundrum: if a wooden ship has every single plank replaced during the voyage across the ocean, is it technically the same vessel when it gets to the other side? Or put another way, he went on, because none of us understood what he was talking about, ‘Is Rowland’s current bar of soap the same one he purchased in 1980, or a different one entirely?’ My mother said, ‘The Imperial Leather Paradox,’ reaching across him for an open bottle.
*
At the end of lunch, Winsome invited us all to transition to the formal living room for ‘a little bit of opening’. And, for Ingrid and me, a little bit of finding out that the money we lived on did not come from our parents.
Both of us, then, were at a school that was private and selective and single sex. I got a scholarship because, an older girl told me on my first day, I came number two in the exam and the number one girl had died in the holidays.
The uniform list was five pages long and double-sided. My mother read it out at the table, laughing in a way that made me nervous. ‘Winter socks, crested. Summer socks, crested. Sports socks, crested. Bathing suit, crested. Swim cap, crested. Sanitary towels, crested.’ She tossed it on the sideboard and said, ‘Martha don’t look like that, I’m joking. I’m sure you can use non-regulation pads.’
Because she did not get a scholarship, our parents enrolled Ingrid at the high school near our house that was free and co-ed and offered female students two kinds of uniform, she told people, the normal one and the maternity one. But at the last minute our parents changed their minds and sent her to mine. My mother said she had sold a piece. Ingrid and I made a cake.
In the car, on our way to Belgravia that Christmas Eve, we had asked our mother why she didn’t like Winsome, because she had spent the previous few hours refusing to get ready, issuing her annual threat of not coming whenever my father tried to chivvy her along, only agreeing once there had been sufficient begging. She told us it was because Winsome was controlling and obsessed with appearances and, sister or not, she could not relate to someone whose twin passions were renovation and large group catering.
Even so, my mother always gave her extravagant presents – to everyone, but especially Winsome who would open hers just enough to see what was in it, then try to re-stick the tape, saying it was too much. Always, my mother would get up and leave the room aggrieved, and Ingrid would say something funny to make everything fine but instead, that year, she stayed where she was, threw up her hands and said, ‘Why, Winsome? Why are you never, ever grateful for things I buy you?’
My aunt looked deeply embarrassed, her eyes darting all over the room for anywhere to look. Rowland, who had just given her per tradition, a Marks & Spencers voucher in the amount of £20, said, ‘Because it’s our bloody money Celia.’
Ingrid and I were sharing the same armchair and found each other’s hands. Hers felt hot, gripping mine, as we watched our mother struggle to her feet, saying, ‘Oh well Rowland, win some, lose some I suppose.’ She laughed at her own joke all the way to the door.
As old as we were, it had never occurred to us that a blocked poet and a sculptor who was yet to achieve minorly important status would not earn anything and our crested swimsuits were, like everything else, paid for by my uncle and aunt. Once our mother was out of the room, Ingrid said to Winsome, ‘What is it? I’ll have it as long as it’s not a sculpture’ and everything was fine.
*
It was the rule at Belgravia that children opened presents in ascending age order. Jessamine first, Nicholas and I last. As Oliver’s turn approached, Winsome disappeared briefly and came back again with a present that, unnoticed by everyone except me, she put under the tree. A moment later, she retrieved it and said, ‘One for you, Patrick.’ He looked stunned. It was some kind of cartoon annual. Ingrid whispered ‘disappointing’ when she saw what it was but I did not think I had ever seen a boy smile as hard as Patrick was when he looked up from opening it to thank my aunt.
How there was a present with his name on it even though no one knew he was coming remained a mystery to him until years later; we were packing to move to Oxford. Patrick found the book on a shelf and asked me if I remembered it. He said, ‘It was one of the best presents I got as a kid. No idea how Winsome knew to get it for me.’
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‘It was from her emergency gift cupboard, Patrick.’
He looked vaguely deflated but said, ‘Still,’ and stood reading it until I took it out of his hands.
*
I only spoke to Patrick once that first year, on the walk through the streets to Hyde Park and all the way around Kensington Gardens, which we were always made to take in the afternoon so Rowland could watch the Queen’s Speech in relative peace. Relative because my mother would begin railing against the institution of the monarchy from the first sweeping aerial shot of Windsor Castle and continue for the duration of Her Majesty’s address, while my father read bits aloud from a book he had gifted himself for Christmas.
Ingrid and I were walking directly behind Patrick when, near the top of the Broad Walk, he stopped suddenly and lunged for a tennis ball Oliver had just thrown to him. My sister did not stop in time and was struck hard in the chest by his outstretched arm. She swore and told Patrick he’d massively hurt her boob. He looked stricken and said sorry. I told him not to worry, it was hard to not hit Ingrid in the boob. He apologised for that as well and ran ahead.
*
Patrick returned the following year, this time by arrangement with Winsome, because his father had just got remarried – to a Chinese-American litigator called Cynthia – and was on his honeymoon. I was seventeen. Patrick was fourteen. I said hello when he appeared in the kitchen with Oliver; he stood near the door, doing the same rolling thing with the hem of his jumper while my cousin looked for whatever he had come in to find.
At some point that day, we all went up to Jessamine’s room and sat on the unmade airbeds, except Nicholas, who went over to the window and took a cigarette out of his pocket, a roll-your-own that was loose and coming undone. Jessamine, who was nine, flapped her hands and started crying while he attempted to light it.
Ingrid said, ‘No one thinks you’re cool, Nicholas,’ and got Jessamine to come sit between us. ‘It looks like a tea bag wrapped in toilet paper.’
I offered to go and find him some sticky tape, then asked Jessamine if she wanted to see a trick. She nodded and let Ingrid wipe her face with the sleeve of her jumper. I had braces then and with everybody watching, I started moving my tongue around inside my cheek. A second later, I made my mouth into an O and one of my rubber bands shot out. It landed on the back of Patrick’s hand. He looked at it uncertainly for a moment, then carefully picked it off.
At home later, Ingrid came into my room so we could lay out all our presents on the floor to see who had got more and divide them into Like and Don’t Like piles, although we were getting too old for it. She told me she saw Patrick put the rubber band in his pocket when he thought no one was looking. ‘Because he loves you.’
I told her that was gross. ‘He’s a child.’
‘The age gap won’t matter by the time you get married.’
I pretended to throw up.
Ingrid said, ‘Patrick loves Martha,’ and took Hot Tracks ’93 off my Don’t Like pile and put it on my CD player.
That was the last Christmas before a little bomb went off in my brain. The end, hidden in the beginning. Patrick came back every year.
4
ON THE MORNING of my French A level I woke up with no feeling in my hands and arms. I was lying on my back and there were already tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, running down my temples into my hair. I got up and went to the bathroom, and saw in the mirror that I had a deep purple circle, like a bruise, around my mouth. I could not stop shaking.
In the exam, I couldn’t read the paper and sat staring at the first page until it was over, writing nothing. As soon as I got home, I went upstairs and got into the space under my desk and sat still like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying.
I stayed there for days, coming down for food and the bathroom, and eventually just the bathroom. I could not sleep at night or stay awake during the day. My skin crawled with things I couldn’t see. I acquired a terror for noise. Ingrid was constantly coming in and begging me to stop being weird. I told her to please, please, go away. Then I would hear her calling out from the hallway, ‘Mum, Martha’s under her desk again.’
My mother was sympathetic to begin with, bringing me glasses of water, trying to coax me to come downstairs in various ways. Then it started to annoy her and when Ingrid called out after that she would say, ‘Martha will come out when she wants to.’ She no longer came into my room, except once with the Hoover. She pretended not to notice me, but made a point of vacuuming around my feet. That is the only memory I have that involves my mother and any form of cleaning.
*
The Goldhawk Road parties were suspended at my father’s behest. He told my mother, just until I was on the up. She said, ‘Who needs fun I suppose,’ and subsequently cut her hair very short, and started dying it shades that do not appear in nature.
Supposedly, it was the stress of my illness that caused her to get fat. Ingrid says that if that is true, it is also my fault that she began wearing sack dresses; waistless, muslin or linen, invariably purple, layered over one another, so that their uneven hems fell around her ankles like corners of a tablecloth. She has not deviated from the style since, except for acquiring an additional layer for each additional stone. Now that she is essentially spherical, the impression is of many blankets thrown haphazardly over a birdcage.
Before I got ill, my mother’s nickname for me was Hum because as a child I used to sing, one meandering, tuneless, made-up song that I started as soon as I woke up and continued until someone asked me to stop. The memories I have of it are mostly from other people – that I once sang about my love of tinned peaches for all of a six-hour drive to Cornwall, that I could be so affected by a song about a dog without a mother or a lost felt-tip, I made myself cry, so hard on one occasion I threw up in the bath.
In the only memory that is mine, I am in the garden sitting on the unmown grass outside my mother’s shed, singing about the splinter in my foot and her voice comes from inside and she is singing, ‘Come in here Hum and I will get it out for you.’ She stopped calling me Hum when I got sick, and began calling me Our Resident Critic.
Ingrid says she has always had bitch-like tendencies but it was me who really brought them out.
*
Last year, I got glasses that I do not need because the optometrist fell off his rolling stool during the eye-test. He looked so mortified I started reading the letters wrongly on purpose. They are in the glovebox, still in the bag.
*
From the beginning, my father stayed up with me in the night, sitting on the floor, leaning against my bed. He offered to read me poetry and if I did not want him to, he talked about unrelated things in a very quiet voice, not requiring a response. He was never in his pyjamas, I think, because if he didn’t change out of his clothes, we could pretend it was still just the evening and we were doing a normal thing.
But I knew he was worried and because I was so ashamed of what I was doing and, after a month, I did not know how to stop doing it, I let him take me to a doctor. On the way there, I lay down on the back seat.
The doctor asked my father some questions while I sat in the chair next to him looking at the floor, eventually saying that based on the fatigue, the pallor, the low mood, it was so likely to be glandular fever there was no point in a blood test. Likewise, there was nothing he could give me for it – glandular fever could only run its course – but, he said, some girls liked the idea of taking something, in which case, an iron tablet. He clapped his thighs and got up. At the door, he tipped his head at me as he said, to my father, ‘Evidently someone has been kissing boys.’
On the way home my father stopped and bought me an ice cream, which I tried to eat but couldn’t so that he had to hold the melting cone out the window for the rest of the drive. At the front door, he paused and said, instead of going straight back to my room, I could always come and have a rest in his study. It is the first room off the street. He said, for a change of scene, t
he scene being the space underneath my desk although he did not say so. He told me he had things to do – there didn’t have to be any talking. I said yes because I knew he wanted me to and because I had just done the six steps up from the footpath and needed to sit down before taking the stairs up to my room.
I waited in the doorway while he cleared books and piles of paper off the brown sofa that had migrated inside again and was pushed against the wall under the front windows. Things slipped out of his arms because he was trying to do it so quickly, as though I might change my mind and leave if he took too long. Until then, I always thought I wasn’t meant to go in there, but waiting, I realised it was only because my mother said why would anyone want to if they didn’t have to? Out of all the rooms in the house, it was the one she hated most because, she said, it had an aura of unproductiveness.
Once he was finished, I went in and lay down on my side with my head on the sofa’s low armrest, facing his desk. My father went around to his chair and adjusted a sheet of paper already in the typewriter, then he rubbed his palms together. Previously, whenever I heard the sound of his typing from another part of the house or passed his closed door on my way out, I imagined him in torment because he always looked drained when he emerged to cook chops. But as soon as he started pecking the keys with his index fingers, my father’s face took on an expression of private bliss. Within a minute, he seemed to have forgotten I was there. I lay and watched him – stopping at the end of the line to read over whatever it was he’d just written, mouthing it silently to himself, usually smiling. Then, smacking the lever with his left hand so the carriage flew back to the margin, more palm rubbing, another line. The keys of his typewriter did not make a sharp crack so much as a dull thud. I was not agitated by the noise, only calmed to the point of drowsiness by the repetition of his process, and his presence – the feeling of being in a room with someone who did want to be alive.
