Mother Can You Hear Me?

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Father said, ‘many a time.’

  ‘I always got off at this hill—’ Angela said.

  ‘How fascinating,’ Sadie murmured.

  ‘—it was the only one I couldn’t get up. And then at the top you get the first view of the sea and it’s downhill all the way. I used to see how far I could freewheel.’

  Sadie began to hum, quietly, but Father and Mother were pleased with her.

  They neared the turning for Port Point and there was a distinct lifting of spirits within the car. The children sat up straight and began pointing out things as they followed the narrow road that wound along the cliff. Even Sadie liked arriving at new places though within a very short time she might be cruelly condemning them. The rain seemed to slacken and the clouds to lift just a little and there was a suspicious brightness in the sky over to the west which might or might not turn out to be the sun. Against all reason and all Trewick training Angela began to feel optimistic.

  Before she moved to comprehensive school, Sadie revealed herself to have pride. Max would come home often claiming nobody liked him and nobody would play with him and that he had had to sit all playtime by himself But not Sadie. Angela thought at first that the contrast between Sadie and Max might be based on her daughter’s greater popularity—perhaps Sadie did not come home from school with tales of woe simply because she had none to tell. Because she had so many friends she was never lonely and sad. But one day Angela had to go to see Sadie’s headmistress and as she went across the playground, looking for Sadie among the gangs of shrieking girls, she saw her sitting by herself, quite alone, a dejected little figure at the end of a bench. It was hard to continue on her way but she knew instinctively that Sadie would not wish her to stop—especially not to stop and ask what was wrong. At teatime she said to Sadie, ‘Do you always have someone to play with at playtime?’ ‘No,’ Sadie said. ‘What do you do when you haven’t got anyone?’ Angela asked. ‘Oh,’ Sadie said, ‘I have things to do.’ The conversation was closed. Angela did not know whether to applaud or regret her daughter’s pride, but ever afterwards she noticed endless instances of it. At a loose end, Sadie would invariably apply herself to conquering the problem—and succeed. She never let anyone see that she was bored or unhappy. She did not retreat into any shell and set her face against the world. She seemed to always be on the watch, ready to snatch her opportunities, in a way Angela had never been. And it made Angela happy to notice the rejection of the Trewick tradition she was afraid to have passed on.

  The car had barely stopped in the gravelled forecourt of the hotel before Father was out, tugging in vain at the locked rear door. ‘I’ll get her out,’ he shouted, ‘hang on, Mother, I’ll have you out in a minute.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ Angela said, from inside.

  ‘She’s been sitting long enough.’

  Angela opened the door and in an instant he was grabbing Mother roughly by the arm, hauling her out like a bag of coal. He gave her contradictory instructions about what to do with her limbs—‘Pull that leg up—up—put your shoulders this way—this way—down with your head now,’ and she tried to obey without complaining. The only thing Angela could do was get out at the other side and ignore them. Interfering was useless—the whole pantomime of getting Mother into and out of cars simply had to be gone through in this way.

  They stood in the middle of the entrance hall, an uncertain group with little coherence. Saul and Tim broke away, darting off round the corner to see what they could find, and though the noise they made ought to have been stopped, Angela was relieved that someone was behaving naturally. Ben went off to find a manager or receptionist and she was left to stem a rising tide of panic that this hotel was not perhaps what she had thought it was. They ought to have gone to the Port Point Hotel itself instead of choosing Grun House because it looked architecturally more imposing and was even nearer the sea and had ground-floor bedrooms, so vital for Mother. They had never even been inside it—she had trusted the charm of the double-fronted sandstone building and the cheerfulness of the flower-filled windows. Now that she was through the front door she sensed an air of abandon for which she had not been prepared.

  ‘Sit down, Mother,’ she said, pointing to a dusty-looking armchair in the corner.

  ‘I’ve been sitting down the last hour,’ Mother said, holding her head up high. ‘Anyway, that chair doesn’t look any too clean, and I’ve got my good skirt on—I’ll walk about a bit.’

  ‘Not much now,’ Father said eyeing her critically, ‘nice and easy.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Mother said, shuffling backwards and forwards across the black and white tiled floor, a distance of five or six yards at a time. Father whistled. Sadie stood looking out of a window onto the garden. Max was absorbed in a comic, slumped in the chair Mother had spurned. Angela took Mother’s arm and together they went up to a large picture—a watercolour—of the sea. Mother strained to appreciate it. ‘Nice colour,’ she said. ‘Very,’ Angela said.

  The appearance of Ben and a smiling manager cheered them all until the horrifying news was broken that there were no ground-floor bedrooms.

  ‘Our ground floor is given over to sitting rooms and the dining room and so forth, the manager said. ‘We used to have a few ground-floor rooms—you’re quite right—but we converted them into a play room last year.’ He smiled with satisfaction, oblivious to the concern he was causing. He was the sort of man, Angela thought, who was oblivious to most things—his job was to serve the public, in whom he was not the slightest bit interested. Smiling was his limit.

  ‘I can’t climb stairs,’ Mother said and gave a little laugh that hurt Angela so much she flinched with imagined physical pain. ‘I’d better just go home. No place for me here.’ With surprising strength she began to pull Angela towards the door.

  ‘Hold on,’ Ben said. He was avoiding Angela’s eye. His manner, placating and easy, took some of the tension out of the air and the manager looked towards him hopefully. ‘Let’s just look at these stairs first—they might not be too bad. It’s all my fault—I told my secretary to book ground-floor rooms and I suppose when they said they had none I just told her to get what she could without thinking. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I won’t be able to manage, no good trying.’ Mother said, and such was her pitiful expression that Angela instantly forgave her. It was humiliating for Mother to have to stand there at the bottom of a flight of stairs while everyone stared at her and waited. Her left leg, broken in a bad fall five years before, had never mended properly and had left her unable to use it without difficulty. Stairs, steps, changing levels of any kind were obstacles she avoided. The doctor had said a stick would help but she would not have a stick. Father was equally adamant—would make an invalid of her’ he said, and the subject was closed.

  Ben put his arm round Mother’s waist and encouraged her with little jokes, quickly expressing surprise that the fiendish stairs were actually so shallow and so few in number and without any twists in them—simply ten straight stairs leading onto the first landing—and best of all carpeted so that she need not worry about slipping. Mother responded as she would not have done to either Father or Angela. She allowed Ben to help her and accepted his compliments and in no time at all the dreaded stairs had been surmounted with not the slightest trace of strain on her face. She stood at the top, only a little breathless, while Ben congratulated her. Angela felt faint with relief and as she made her own way up the stairs had to cling to the banister rail to hide her weakness.

  The rooms were disappointing. There was no denying it. But Angela was aware that the disappointment was hers rather than Mother’s. She found the rooms ugly but Mother noticed only the comfortable beds and thick fitted carpet and the spacious bathroom. She shuffled about fingering the counterpanes and towels—’good quality’—while Angela went over to the window and fought with the net curtains to see the view. It at least was satisfying—a clear vista of grass and sea, uninterrupted by any man-made thing. ‘
It’s a beautiful view,’ she said, ‘come and look.’ Mother came over to the window and stared and turned away. ‘Not much to see,’ she said, ‘not that I can see much anyway. I daresay it will be very nice on a good day.’ Outside, Angela could hear the boys running from room to room, jumping on beds and fighting over who should sleep where. She let the curtain drop. ‘Put it straight,’ Mother said, ‘it was hanging nice and straight before you meddled with it.’ ‘Why don’t you have a little rest after all your exertions?’ Angela said, alarmed by Mother’s sudden high colour.

  ‘Oh, I’m sick of little rests,’ Mother said, ‘I want shaking up instead of resting.’ She would not even sit down. ‘What are we going to do now?’ she said. ‘What are we going to do now we’re here?’ ‘I thought,’ said Angela, weakly, without conviction, ‘I thought it would be a lovely idea to go into Port Point before dinner and have a look round.’

  Father was nowhere to be seen. ‘When they had descended the stairs, three abreast, Mother half lifted down between Angela and Ben, he was nowhere to be found. No one had seen him since Mother had begun to climb the stairs. Angela sent the boys off in different directions to look for him while Mother exclaimed at his thoughtlessness. ‘Just like him to wander off when he’s needed,’ she said, ‘typical.’

  ‘Let’s wait outside,’ Angela said, ‘in the car—he might be outside,’ but at that minute Father came into the entrance hall with Saul and Max on either side like policemen and Tim pulling him along shouting ‘He went to see a man about a dog, he says.’ Mother’s disgust made her frightening. ‘I might have known,’ she said, and then again, separating each word very carefully, ‘I-might-have-known. At a time like this—to play that game.’ Father said nothing—no excuses. He looked a little grey and crumpled and Angela remembered how abruptly he had turned away when Ben led Mother towards the stairs. ‘Let’s go into Port Point,’ she said quickly. ‘Who wants to walk and who wants to drive?’ ‘I haven’t any choice,’ Mother said.

  Angela walked with Father and Max, leaving the others to get noisily into the car. Ben was best left with Mother anyway. With him, she was charming and dignified and tried harder to enjoy herself. He would squire her around gallantly in the old-fashioned way she liked and would involve her in little conspiracies that made her feel years younger. His manner towards her was both deferential and teasing, a combination she clearly relished. Ben was the sort of young man she felt she ought to have married—just a bit above her class, with money and brains and a certain gentleness about him that appealed to her. He looked how she liked young men to look—clean shaven, tall and straight-backed with blond hair that looked as though a nanny had brushed and combed it that very morning. She approved of his shyness, of his kindness, of his lack of ‘pushiness’. His job was something of a disappointment to her. All she understood of it was that it was ‘something to do with oil’ and that was a pity. Mother’s real cup of tea were professional people—doctors, lawyers, teachers—but she managed in Ben’s case to overlook this deviation from her ideal. There was the comfort, after all, of knowing that he had been educated at a minor public school, even if he now repudiated what it had stood for. He had beautiful manners and a lovely speaking voice and she envied Angela her luck.

  They walked at a terrific pace along the cliff. The noise of the waves bashing against the rocks and of the wind sweeping along from the open sea without interruption made all conversation impossible. Father, she knew, would have liked to give voice either to his conviction that the stairs were going to kill Mother or to his fears that the whole trip had been a mistake. Angela blessed the elements. She walked along with her eyes half closed, face upturned to meet the rain, enjoying the buffeting the wind was giving her. Father enjoyed it too. He looked strong and confident as he marched on, just a little ahead, his tweed overcoat buttoned to the neck and his cap pulled firmly down.

  Long before they reached the end of the cliff path, Angela was anticipating the weariness of trailing Mother round the shops. They were not the sort of shops one could spend much time in—a few small food shops, a few garish, cheap tourist shops—but to Mother, deprived of all shops, they were something. She missed going into shops and looking to see what they had. She missed the simple exchange of money for goods and the satisfaction that came from a primitive love of trading. She missed the small observations one made in shops, the feeling of belonging, the casual gossip overheard. And the Port Point shops, though few in number and disappointing in content, were the sort of shops Mother had used in her youth. They were tiny, room for no more than a dozen people at a time, with highly polished windows in which goods were displayed in rows. Mother could stand and look in the windows for hours, comparing and contrasting the appearance and price of all the items, and then she enjoyed being decisive once inside. Yet when Father joined her, glowing and beaming from another blow along the front, and asked her what she had been doing, she would say ‘nothing much’ and look sulky. He would turn to Angela and say, ‘Haven’t you taken her round the shops then?’ ‘You can’t call them shops,’ Mother would spit out, and Father would say, ‘Beg pardon, what would you call them then?’

  If only they could walk on forever, past Port Point, past the docks where once they had embarked for Tintagel and almost capsized in the fishing boat that took them, along the sand where in summer they ate paste sandwiches crouching behind the reedy grass. Their only holiday as a family ever had been at Port Point and oh the pride of it! Angela remembered boasting at school that she was going on her holidays to the seaside, thrilled that at last she was upsides with those who regularly did, no longer obliged to toss her head and announce she preferred going for ‘days’. The wretchedness of discovering the caravan was not a caravan as she thought of one—not a gypsy caravan pulled by a horse—but a hideous modern contraption was quickly overcome. The site, in those days, was deserted and if Romany romance was lacking the caravan was at least in a proper field and the field was ten yards from the beach. The sun shone the whole week—they were blessed, Mother said—and she ran on the sands and pretended she rode a horse called Chestnut.

  They turned off the sea front at the amusement arcade and made their way across the green to where they could see the car parked in front of the church. The rain had stopped and away from the sea the wind was much less fierce. Angela could see Sadie leaning against the wall, her arms folded across her chest, the sleeves of her pullover pulled down over her hands.

  ‘She looks frozen,’ Father said, eyeing her critically from a distance. ‘Hasn’t she got a coat?’

  ‘No,’ Angela said, ‘she doesn’t like coats.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Father said, ‘should have more sense—you always had coats, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, it’s her own fault,’ Angela said, ‘she’ll just have to learn.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything with her?’ Father said.

  ‘I don’t see the point.’ Angela wanted to finish the discussion quickly before they reached Sadie.

  ‘You’re her Mother, that’s the point,’ Father said.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I’m a policeman. Hello, Sadie.’

  ‘Where’s your Grandma?’ Father said.

  ‘Dad’s taken her round the shops.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with her?’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Father said, ‘hoighty-toighty, eh.’

  ‘The shops aren’t very exciting, Father,’ Angela said.

  ‘You thought they were at that age.’

  ‘At that age,’ Angela said, ‘I had never been out of St Erick. I thought anything was exciting.’

  By the time Sadie was ten she had been to America, South Africa and New Zealand, to every European country except Denmark and Norway, and to every region of the British Isles. Sometimes living in different countries for months at a time because of her father’s work, sometimes on holiday, she was familiar with aeroplanes and boats and trains and the airports and docks and stations that went with them. She
travelled well, taking in her stride hold-ups and cancellations, adapting quickly to different climates and customs and picking up where she had left off when she came home. It was as though she had been born experienced—her lifestyle simply appeared to confirm her innate sophistication. And yet, though she was immensely proud of her daughter’s versatility, Angela slowly began to realize that it was not matched by an equal confidence. Sadie only seemed confident. It did not matter how many times they had flown—she would not fly on her own. The truth was, she had no taste for independence and however wide her horizons had been she remained narrow in her ability to do things herself. Angela could not understand this—it did not make sense. She found it hard to accept that it was only when accompanied by her family that Sadie was blasé. With a shock, Angela realized, as Sadie reached adolescence, that unless she was buttressed by friends or parents Sadie was as timid as a girl who had never been out of a country village. Though she had travelled thousands of miles and exchanged continents several times she could not take a 5p bus ride to the local swimming baths without a companion. Directions confused her. She would say she couldn’t manage without any shame, and drove Angela to say things like ‘When I was your age I could go anywhere—I liked trying to get myself about.’ St Erick, of course, had been different from London, but still Angela was surprised. Sadie had no taste for adventure. She was only bold if someone was with her and her opportunities had seemed wasted. Unless, Angela found herself thinking, unless it is all my fault—unless I have wrapped her in cotton wool and never exposed her to chance, unless I have been too strong and capable and dulled any spirit she had, unless we have travelled too much and killed any natural wanderlust.

  Dinner at Grun House was at seven-thirty, one sitting only. Angela tried hard, from five o’clock onwards, to make an occasion of it. All four children were threatened with the most dire penalties if they did not dress in a manner which would please their grandparents—clean trousers, clean white shirts for the boys and a skirt and blouse for Sadie, who referred to both garments as outlandish. Ben put on a suit and Angela herself wore the least flamboyant of her peasant dresses. When they were all ready, they lined up outside Mother and Father’s door and knocked formally and were admitted with equal politeness. Mother had her best frock on, the birthday present from Angela, and earrings and necklace that Valerie had given her, and her feet, which in the last few years had become rather swollen, were somehow squashed into black patent leather court shoes. Her white hair, crimped and flattened by the hairdresser the week before, was brushed into life by Father, to the best of his ability. The scent of Devon Violets filled the room and clung even to Father, resplendent in a dark threepiece suit, white shirt with a stiff collar, and a regimental tie to which strictly speaking he was not entitled. He had run away at the age of fifteen to enlist in the army during the First World War and for one day, since he was a big heavy lad, he had belonged to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. The next day his father arrived, beat the living daylights out of him right there in front of the barracks, and dragged him home. The war ended on Father’s eighteenth birthday and to his eternal regret he was too old to be immediately needed for the next. But he wore the tie on very special occasions as a reminder of what might have been and no one who knew was ever unkind enough to challenge his right to it.