Mother Can You Hear Me?

by Margaret Forster

  The whole affair was more pathetic and touching than Angela had envisaged. Protocol bothered everyone. None of the aunts, experienced though they must have been, seemed to know what to do. There was a good deal of irritable jostling when the funeral cars arrived. There were no visible signs of distress. Mother, alone at home, looking at the clock and following the funeral service in her prayer book, would be crying with all her heart, while in the crematorium every eye was dry. Angela looked round at all the faces and wondered if you could recognize internal sorrowing. When the time came, would all the Trewicks gather stoically round Mother’s coffin and appear composed? Would all the Bradburys gather round her own without a flicker of emotion? She could not believe it. There was death and death.

  The breakfast afterwards was embarrassing. Tea and biscuits, standing up in the front room, Sidney drunk and talking loudly of life going on. All Mother’s sisters looked at him with contempt. All of them knew he had put Sally in the family way at eighteen by making her as drunk as himself. He was a let down. With Sally dead, none of them had any intention of having anything to do with him again. Only Mother would write, a note painfully scrawled but full of sympathetic endearments. Mother’s forte was to feel sorry for absolutely everyone, especially the undeserving.

  When the time came to go—she had felt obliged to wait and catch the last train—Angela was taken to the station by Frances and her husband in their flash car. They both seemed stiff and constrained whereas normally they were jolly and when Angela attempted to chat to them they rebuffed her attempt. She presumed they were more upset than she had imagined. They were almost at the station when Frances turned round and, looking at Angela with a sorrowful expression, absurd on her chubby, wobbling face, but so like Mother’s martyred look, said, ‘Oh, Angela, whatever happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Angela said. She knew she was blushing and she felt that same unease that came over her whenever Mother turned accusing and soulful.

  ‘Why don’t you ever come near us now?’ Frances said. ‘All those years we doted on you and now you never come near. And you hardly visit your Mother, except when she’s ill—and you were such a loving little girl. We never thought you’d just drop us, never.’

  ‘I’ve got four children, Aunt Frances,’ Angela said, ‘and I teach part-time.’

  Frances turned her back and stared out of the front window.

  ‘You just don’t understand,’ Angela said, aware that her voice was trembling with what Frances would think was shame but was really rage. ‘Your life is so different—you can’t grasp what it’s like to be me.’

  ‘We treated you as a daughter,’ Frances said, ‘took you everywhere—gave you all the things your Mother couldn’t afford, and this is all the thanks we get.’

  The train ride home was frightful. Though she succeded in writing a long descriptive letter to Mother listing the floral tributes and the size of the congregation in the Chapel of Rest, Angela was pursued by Frances’ idiotic accusation until it drove her frantic. Everywhere she went miracles of tolerance and understanding were expected of her—the past, her past, seemed one huge debt, burdening her with commitments she had not sought. Mother needed her, her own family needed her, relatives as remote as Frances appeared to need her. They all drained her dry. They all wished her to put herself in their position—but who put themselves in her position? Who protected her? To whom did she turn and say she needed them? Not to Mother and Father, that was certain. It seemed a million years since she had even contemplated going to them for help or comfort. Not to her children—such a thought was almost laughable. Elsewhere in the world there might be mothers who wept with exhaustion or depression or misery, mothers around whose necks tiny arms wrapped themselves to console as best they could, but she was not one of them. To have cast herself on her children would have horrified her. Only her husband was any good as confidant and helper but even Ben was often useless because he thought she magnified the obligations she felt. She was the fulcrum upon which everything turned and no excuses for not performing her vital function would be accepted.

  She put the letter in an envelope and addressed and stamped it, ready to drop in the letter box at the station. None of her real thoughts were in that letter—she never inflicted doubts or worries upon Mother, who had to be cheered up. There was nothing Mother could do anyway. Nothing anyone could do. If her burdens grew too heavy she would have to collapse before anyone noticed. Women—mothers—did it all the time and were trampled on and despised for being feeble. But she was not feeble. She was strong. The devastation and ruin that would follow any collapse of hers would be truly terrible, and so there was no choice. One struggled on, hoping one day for relief. But one thing she would not do was pass the baton on. As the train howled its way through the dark night she kept her tired aching body straight and vowed to break the chain. Sadie should not feel what she felt. Sadie should be free as air, unfettered by shame or guilt or duty. Sadie should not have hanging over her that thick pall of maternal expectation. To that, she pledged herself.

  The house was dark and cold when she finally reached it, neither a light nor a voice to welcome her, even Ben soundly asleep. She knew it was foolish of her to expect anything else when it was after midnight but in her exhausted state the absence of any sign that she was cared about brought tears to her eyes. She was too tired to make so much as a cup of tea. In no time at all she would be in the middle of another morning hubbub with everyone acting as though she had just come back from a gay weekend in Paris instead of a dreary funeral in Norwich. She always seemed to be going away for reasons that had nothing to do with pleasure yet the family persisted in treating her journeys as self-indulgences. And tomorrow she had the third form at school—inattentive, cheeky, boisterous, the hardest of all the groups to interest and control. She would make them write a story called ‘The Funeral’.

  In the hall, she fell over Max’s football gear, dropped there when he came in at four o’clock and climbed over ever since, boots and shorts and shirt and socks and the ball itself in one big heap. In the bathroom she hung all the sodden towels on the hot rail, put the top back on the bottle of cochineal which Sadie used liberally to tint her hair and rescued the soap from the plughole. Only Mothers did things like that. If she were not there, none of them would do anything. Everything—all the debris of a large family—would, accumulate and block up the windows and doors before anyone either noticed or complained.

  Sadie took seven or eight years to betray the truth. Every night, Angela carefully laid out Sadie’s clothes for the next day without thinking she was doing anything unusual. Sadie simply got up and put them on. In an area where children wore any odd assortment of old clothes Sadie stood out, bandbox fresh, colours co-ordinated, socks startingly white, black shoes polished till they shone, hair brushed and brushed and neatly tied back. People made fun of Angela for dressing her daughter so immaculately but she didn’t care—she liked to do it. But then, as the boys were born and Sadie was left more to her own devices, it became obvious that she would not continue the tradition of Trewick cleanliness and smartness. She was quite happy to put on knickers that were dirty, socks that smelled, shirts with stains on the front. Angela shouted at her. Obediently, she would go and change without conceding that there had been anything wrong with her attire in the first place. As time went on, she stopped giving in. ‘I like dirty socks,’ she would say, and ‘They’ll only get dirty as soon as I get to the playground anyway.’ It was no good Angela trying to get her to see how much more attractive it was to be clean and tidy. She just didn’t see. She did not have within her any appreciation for freshness or elegance. Angela had to stop herself from saying the things Mother had said to her with such effect—‘I don’t like to see you scruffy, Angela’—and began instead to acknowledge Sadie’s right to dress how she wanted. ‘Sadie’s an apprentice slut,’ she would tell people cheerfully. And to Mother and Father who were appalled by their grand-daughter’s slovenliness she said, ‘I don�
�t see that it matters, frankly.’Unfortunately, it still mattered to her too much and it was very hard work concealing this from Sadie.

  ‘While I was away yesterday,’ Angela said at breakfast, knowing it was quite the wrong time for such a speech, ‘nobody did a thing. The dishwasher hasn’t even been emptied, the dirty dishes have all been left for me to do, the entire house is festooned with apple cores and clothes and god knows what and it’s become a dump in less than twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I’m off,’ Sadie said, mouth jammed full of toast.

  ‘You are not,’ yelled Angela, ‘I haven’t finished—sit down.’

  ‘I’ll be late for school.’

  ‘You won’t.’ Sadie didn’t sit, but she stayed, hand on hip, expression vacant, as provoking as possible.

  ‘I am not your servant,’ Angela said, ‘I work, I run this house, and I expect co-operation. You are all utterly spoiled and it’s got to stop.’

  ‘What put you in such a temper?’ Max said. Tim began to cry.

  ‘Coming back to a slum,’ Angela said, ‘coming home feeling shattered and having to start cleaning up.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Max said.

  ‘It isn’t okay. It’s all wrong.’

  ‘What do you want us to do then?’ Max said.

  ‘Help.’

  ‘All right, I’ll help, but don’t go on about it.’

  ‘I really will be late,’ said Sadie.

  ‘Oh, go on then. But I would have thought—’

  The kitchen emptied dramatically. She dried Tim’s tears and assured him she hadn’t meant him. She put him in the car and drove him to school, pausing to collect some clothes from the dry cleaner’s on the way. Her resentment at having to do such a small thing showed her how low she had become—she never resented doing anything for Ben, who worked so hard and for such long hours. Mother had never seemed to resent anything. She had just got on with it, seeing it as her lot in life to slave away after them all. Angela could not remember a single occasion upon which Mother had shouted at them all as she had just shouted at her children. Mother had cleared up after them and never appeared to mind. Somewhere, something had gone very wrong. Mother must possess some secret, Angela decided, to which she herself did not have access. Either that, or she was an unnatural mother. She didn’t know how she was going to find out which was true but as she drove on to her job with set face and tensed shoulders it seemed the most important question in the world to answer.

  Four

  ‘WHERE ARE YOU going for your holidays?’ Father said on the Monday evening telephone call.

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘We don’t either,’ Father said, with emphasis. ‘Your Mother’s moaning on about it. Mrs Collins set her off—going to Newquay for a week—oh, we never go anywhere, no holidays for us, your Mother says. She says she wishes someone would give her a holiday, stuck here indoors, year in, year out. Well I said get yourself to Angela’s. Here, here she is—you talk to her—she doesn’t seem to like anything I say, twisting her face up at me. You tell her what’s what.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Mother whispered, then cleared her throat. ‘I can’t go anywhere, not in my condition, he knows that. He can go and have a holiday—he’s the one that needs it. He can put me in a home and gallivant where he likes. I’m past caring.’

  In the background Father shouted, ‘I don’t need any holiday—it’s you that started on about it, lass, not me.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Mother said again, faintly.

  ‘I’d love you to come here for a holiday like you used to, Mother,’ Angela said, striving to insert warmth and conviction into her voice, ‘but I just don’t think you could stand a three-hundred-mile journey, do you?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ Mother said, ‘I can’t even get half a mile to church. I’m finished, past everything.’

  ‘You’re not—you’re getting better every day—but you’re not up to a long tiring journey. Listen, why don’t I come down for a week and let Father go to Valerie’s—you both need a break—it would be the perfect solution, give you both a sort of holiday at least.’

  ‘Your Father wouldn’t hear of it,’ Mother said, ‘he wouldn’t go off on his own, would you?’ There was a confused minute while the message was relayed and then a roar as Father emphatically refused. ‘There,’ Mother said, ‘I told you he wouldn’t go, didn’t I?’ Angela could not tell whether she spoke with satisfaction or not.

  It was easy to picture Mother hunched in her armchair in front of the fire, listening miserably to the plans of Mrs Collins and other neighbours with their weeks here and days there. An annual torture that made Mother increasingly bitter. Instead of summer sunshine making her feel happier, bringing as it did the prospect of a seat in the garden in place of a seat in one small room, it made her furious. Anyone would have thought, from the vehemence with which she spoke, that Mother had formerly had the most sumptuous and regular holidays and not the pedestrian week with one of her sisters in Exeter or Plymouth that had been the reality. But something would have to be done or the remarks would go on and on until October brought the end with ‘Well, there was no holiday for me, at any rate.

  ‘I think,’ Angela said that evening, ‘we will have to spend all the Easter holidays in St Erick after all.’ The protests drowned her explanation. When they were all quiet, she began to enlarge on Grandmother’s unhappiness but none of them would relent. Even Ben was steadfast in his objections. She exaggerated, he said. Her mother and father were perfectly happy really, and even if they weren’t why should she consider their needs more than her own family’s—why shouldn’t their hatred of holidays in St Erick weigh as much in her mind as her parents’ need to have them here? ‘They are old and feeble,’ Angela said, ‘we are all young and strong. We can afford to be magnanimous—is it really asking so much?’

  She went to bed haunted by the little scene in her mind, Mother and Father trapped in that pokey room, Mother wretched because she never went anywhere. She could not sleep for attempting to solve the insoluble. There was nothing she could do, short of moving next door to them, to effectively make them happy. Leaving St Erick had been the ultimate betrayal, which they had seen coming a long way off. In their opinion, all would have been well if it had not been for ‘that Grammar School’. It gave her big ideas, they said. ‘You used to be such a nice little girl before you went to that Grammar School,’ Mother used to say, sorrowfully. They said they didn’t know what had got into her, that they could see how it would all end. ‘You have children,’ Father said, ‘you look after them and work hard for them and then what do they do—they leave, the minute they’re any good to you. We never did, but you, you’ll be up and off, finished.’

  ‘That’s life,’ Angela would say, ‘children don’t stay at home when they grow up unless there’s something wrong with them.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with your Mother and I,’ Father would say, ‘we knew what duty was.’

  ‘You had no choice,’ Angela would say, knowing it was foolish to prolong such an argument. Whatever was said afterwards, Father always managed to finish with the same words, ‘Elephants stay together, they don’t leave the herd.’

  They all ought to be near, Tom and Harry and Valerie and her, visiting every day, as Mother and Father had visited their parents when they were alive, a happy extended family. Except Angela could remember no happiness, only obligation and the gratification which came from it. Every Sunday after morning Sunday School Father marched all four of them down to his parents’ house, down to the gloomy, solid terrace house by the river, and there they would troop in, into the dark hall smelling of damp and decay, into the back room where a big, blackened kettle hung on a hook over the hardly burning fire. Warned to be quiet and behave themselves one minute, they would be ordered to entertain their crippled grandmother the next. They would be pulled by the arm in turn to the bed in the corner where Grandma lay, propped up on pillows so that she could stare through the dusty net curtains in
to the yard that held nothing but a dustbin and was bound on all sides by high brick walls with pieces of broken glass on the top. Grandma was a fearful sight. Her crooked arthritic fingers made her hands into claws and her dreadfully pale emaciated face was always screwed up with pain. ‘Kiss your Grandma,’ Grandad would say, ‘a nice big kiss, mind,’ and then it was a battle between rival fears, between dreading the touch of the loathsome flaccid skin of Grandma’s cheek and dreading Grandad’s anger if his commandment was not enthusiastically obeyed. Angela remembered no pity for Grandma, nor any stirrings of compassion for Grandad, who was an ogre with a partiality for mental arithmetic. ‘Five nines,’ he would suddenly shout, pointing a poker at his victims, and the first to answer correctly got a penny. It was always Angela. Then Grandad would storm and shout at the boys because he wanted them to be cleverer. ‘Letting a lass beat you,’ he would roar and if Tom burst into tears of fright, as he quite often did, then Grandad would drive him with the poker to the back door and put him outside. Father never interfered. He would watch Grandad with an odd smile on his face and never lift a finger to protect poor Tom.

  Sometimes, as they wailed their way home, exhausted by the tension of it all, he would say ‘Now you know,’ a statement so obviously incomplete and enigmatic that Angela could never fathom it. ‘Why do we have to go there?’ she would ask.‘Why—when Grandad’s so horrible?’ ‘You be quiet about your Grandfather,’ Father would say. Mother was no better. ‘There are things I’ll never forgive your Grandfather for,’ she would say to Angela when plagued for enlightenment. ‘Things he made your Father suffer. You don’t know the half of it.’ And Angela, who badly wanted to know that half and every other little scrap there might be, was left unsatisfied and wondering. She went with Mother twice a week to make Grandma’s tea and watched Mother washing Grandma tenderly and making her bed expertly and heard Grandma say ‘Oh, you’re a blessing, Mary, a blessing. I couldn’t manage without you, dear.’ She saw Mother unpacking cakes and blancmanges, she heard her standing up to Grandad about the coldness of the room, she felt the whole atmosphere of the dreary house lighten and brighten when Mother was there. And there were others—elderly aunts and invalid cousins whom Mother fitted into her rounds, strange old people who lived in hidden rooms tucked away at the back of lanes and buildings, unknown to anyone else except Mother, Angela thought. Mother looked after them all and thought nothing of it and when, as she grew older, Angela complained about visiting them, Mother just said ‘Poor old things’ and she was silenced.