Slowly, Angela gathered up all the different documents and put them back in the bag. She would find a box somewhere in the house and put them inside it and label it and put it in the loft for posterity. She looked through them all once more to check that there were no photographs. Aunt Frances would have to ask Father about that. Photographs were the only things Father did not throw away—he liked them, saved every one however bad and even put them in albums, glue smeared all round the corners so that the pages frequently stuck together. It was unlikely that he would let Frances have the photograph she wanted—he would say he couldn’t spoil the album, dear me no. Often, he brought them out on rainy holiday afternoons and, amazingly, their charm never failed.
Angela tied the string and got up to go into the house. She would bring out some ice-cold drinks for everyone and a cake she had baked in the morning before the sun made the kitchen too hot. She liked to do things for her family, even things much more servile than bringing out refreshments into the garden—it made her feel motherly. As she picked up her jacket and walked up the path into the house, carrying Mother’s mementoes, she reflected upon how she had created a different image from Mother’s and yet how deep the roots were that went back to that other view of maternity. She had not quite broken free—she had not quite been able to reject so many of Mother’s standards. It was impossible to measure either the loss or the gain. Later, much later when Sadie was grown up and a mother herself, she might be able to see their whole relationship in a different perspective. Now, she was full of doubts still and all that cheered her was the smallest show of concern upon Sadie’s part towards her. Would the concern turn into guilt? In spite of her protestations, would Sadie suffer with an aged mother exactly as she herself had suffered? Was pain the inescapable price for that unstinting love mothers gave to their young children in such abundance?
‘Are you going to get some drinks?’ Sadie called after her.
‘Yes.’
‘About time.’
‘You should get your own,’ Angela said, but without resentment.
Also available in Vintage
Margaret Forster
DIARY OF AN ORDINARY WOMAN
‘Extraordinary’
Observer
Margaret Forster presents the ‘edited’ diary of a woman, born in 1901, whose life spans the twentieth century. On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and vividly records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles. From the bohemian London to Rome in the 1920s her story moves on to social work and the buildup to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London.
Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up, coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women’s lives from WWI to Greenham Common and beyond. A triumph of resolution and evocation, this is a beautifully observed story of an ordinary woman’s life – a fictional narrative where every word rings true.
‘A highly enjoyable read; well-informed, gripping . . . an overview of the period seen from the underside’
Sunday Telegraph
Also available in Vintage
Margaret Forster
THE SEDUCTION OF MRS PENDLEBURY
‘Beautifully written and a joy to read’
Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard
Rose Pendlebury has little in common with her Islington neighbours. Her street has been invaded by young, confident, upwardly-mobile people without, it seems, a care in the world. She keeps herself to herself, and only her husband Stan is aware of her bubbling anger, her terrible prickliness and her ability to take offence.
But when Alice and Tony move in next door with their enchanting toddler Amy, Mrs Pendlebury begins to come out of her shell, as gradually her new neighbours undermine her traditional, cautious privacy. Mrs Pendlebury may not be ripe for transformation, or even happiness, but she is not too old to change.
‘She charts real people and touches her harridan with genuine pathos . . . nothing of hers that I have read has satisfied like The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury’ Guardian
‘Margaret Forster’s heroine is quite unforgettable . . . Often splendidly funny . . . In an admirably unpretentious way Forster has written a painfully convincing tragic-comedy’
Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph
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Epub ISBN: 9781446443699
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Published by Vintage 2004
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Copyright © Margaret Forster, 1979
Margaret Forster has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 1979 by
Secker & Warburg
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099455585
Mother Can You Hear Me? Page 33
