You Be Mother

by Meg Mason

  ‘Good Lord,’ Phil said a moment later, falling into a lazy backstroke. ‘There must be two other mothers somewhere in the world who’ve not had a single whiff of tragedy thanks to us. We’ve had more than our share, haven’t we? Anyhow, you won’t have a plunge, just in what you’re wearing, Abigail? Will I hold the dear boy while you do?’

  ‘Oh, no thank you,’ Abi said. ‘I should get him back really. He’ll be yelling in a minute.’ She stood up and felt the water running down off her shins.

  ‘Well then, I shall do a few desultory laps in that case,’ Phil said, moving off towards the other end. ‘No doubt we’ll meet again, if you’re now of the Point.’

  As Abi carried Jude home, smelling his soft, downy head, she promised she would make it all straight next time. Explain properly. There was going to be a next time – Phil had just said so.

  16.

  There’s no need to be vulgar

  Phil felt oddly energised by her little talk with the girl at the pool, even if the conversation had been tragic in substance. To have lost your entire family by such a young age! Phil could hardly fathom it – and it was not as though she was a stranger to tragedy herself. With her basket over her arm and Domenica yanking at the leash, Phil took her time to walk home, after swimming ten rather good lengths. She sighed, thinking of Frederick. Then again, more absent-mindedly, remembering James.

  The girl had introduced herself as Abi, although Phil did not enjoy the use of diminutives outside her immediate family and would certainly not have them foisted upon her. She would use Abigail.

  She was a recent émigré and her eagerness for company was plain from their first meeting. Phil had spoken to her briefly and then again the next day when the plaintive looks in her direction became impossible to ignore. Although cautious of becoming obliged – the pool was Phil’s own sanctuary and the last thing she wished to create for herself there was duty – when the chatter got up and going the girl turned out to be infinitely more interesting than one would expect from the look of her.

  She was such a slip of a thing, with a skittish way of moving, like some poor animal that’s been belted all its life, and bolts to the corner whenever anyone tries to give it a pat. But then, when it came, a husky smoker’s voice and a charmingly dirty laugh that followed nearly everything she said, even the particulars of a really ghastly life story. Really, it was no wonder those nails were bitten to the quick.

  And her hair, although a lovely, almost Titian colour, looked for all the world as though it had been nibbled round by a mouse in the night. But then the glorious milk-white skin, so unlike the leather handbag variety so often seen here, Phil thought, as she covered her décolletage with her damp Turkish towel and walked on.

  The jewel of a baby too. It was hard not to be smitten by something so new, and the cautious, tender way a new mother had was always lovely to watch. Abigail looked when she held him as though she’d been asked to mind the infant Messiah while Mary popped out to run errands.

  Still, it was hard not to feel rather low about the child’s prospects. Idly, Phil wondered if she ought to stand in the gap, as it were. A little motherly direction was clearly required and it was not, Phil noted with dismay, as though her own dance card was full at the present time.

  She gave Domenica a sharp tug on the leash and opened her side gate. At the back door, she braced herself before entering the tomb-like silence of the kitchen. Oppressive, that’s what it was, the silence was oppressive. It lay in wait and pounced the moment she walked in.

  A less disciplined woman, Phil thought, as she felt out the key from inside the planter and stuck it in the lock, a less disciplined woman would stop going out just to avoid the horror of coming back in and finding everything exactly as it had been left. Newspaper untouched, tea cold in the cup and a dripping tap like a bloody jungle drum.

  But anyway, there it was, she’d done it now. ‘There you go, Poll,’ she said out loud. ‘Mother’s had her outing, you’ll be pleased to know.’

  Since Frederick, Polly had developed a near obsession with how Phil was handling what she called ‘the grief process’. Was she getting out? Was she keeping busy? Seeing friends, eating properly and – most galling to Phil – keeping up a standard of personal care?

  Phil picked up a few bits of mail stacked by the phone, waiting to be dealt with in a stronger moment. All addressed to Frederick Woolnough QC and all now her problem even though, she realised with immense disappointment at the cliché of it, she had no idea how to go about it. Fred had taken care of all that side of things. Once or twice, when the children were small, he’d tried to get her interested. But sitting beside him and being made to stare at a lot of printed papers always gave rise to the most fearful bout of yawning. ‘Never try to teach your mother anything, girls,’ she heard Frederick saying in the teasing tone he had passed on to every one of his children.

  As Phil hovered, mail in hand, she could see them all there again, together, in the pleasant chaos of the family kitchen. Polly, scowling over some schoolwork, chin only just higher than the table. Brigitta bathed, pyjama’ed and sulking about some imagined slight. The boys still outside, battering the kitchen door with a ball.

  ‘If you do, my girls, she’ll go out of her way not to learn it,’ Frederick would say, bopping Phil on the behind with a rolled newspaper.

  Phil’s half-laugh became a sigh and then, looking down at his name on the envelopes, she realised it was too late. She was in for one now. She steadied herself against the kitchen bench and let it come – an enormous, juddering wave of agony that constricted the chest, swelled her tongue until she was gasping for air. It grabbed onto her, tossed her about, threatened to knock her to the floor. She held the edge of the benchtop with both hands and waited – it would move on as quickly as it had come. It was useless to fight against it, she knew. It had been the same with James.

  A minute later she released her grip, wrists aching from the pressure. So many years ago, a midwife in a starched white apron and neat cap had stood beside her as she delivered one of the boys, and with every harrowing contraction, she had patted Phil’s hand and said, ‘There’s another one you never have to have again.’ As Phil pressed her face into a tea towel, she hoped the same rule might apply to this brutal business. The grieving process. Except, of course, the desperate moments of grief never did stop after James, only became fewer and further between.

  After a lie down, a few chapters of a political memoir and a half-hearted attempt on Frederick’s sock drawer, Phil picked up the cordless and dialled Brigitta.

  She took forever picking up. Phil counted the rings and tried not to work out what time it would be in London. It was certainly on the early side, but if she was going to wake Brigitta she’d be truthfully able to claim she didn’t know exactly how early.

  Finally, Brigitta’s groggy voice came on the line.

  ‘Mum. Hello.’

  ‘Briggy dear. How did you know it was I?’

  ‘Because nobody would ever ring at this hour, unless the person happened to come of them.’

  ‘Darling, there’s no need to be vulgar,’ Phil said, regretting it immediately.

  It was vital to get these chats off on the right foot. A bad phone call to a child overseas had a way of lingering until the next one and sometimes that wasn’t for days. Generally, you could tell within seconds if it was going to go well or poorly. And although Brigitta seemed to share the same intuition, neither was game to hang up as soon as the conversation veered into tall grass. This one was yet to establish itself.

  ‘Also because your number comes up on the screen,’ Brigitta said.

  ‘Well, I was only wondering, how is my darling girl,’ Phil said, wishing she’d left out the only.

  ‘I’m fine. But truly Mummers, I’m so zonked. Couldn’t you wait until a bit later to call me? I didn’t get in until one.’

  Phil hated to think of Brigitta slaving away at that bistro, and had offered her an allowance that would let her conc
entrate on her acting – the entire point apparently of her being in London when Phil could so have done with her at home.

  The logic of continuing the evening job – and one that left her on the cusp of exhaustion – quite escaped Phil, who could hear, even now, the fatigue in her daughter’s lovely voice.

  Still, Phil arranged herself more comfortably on the window seat, propping a cushion behind her back, in the expectation of this becoming a nice lengthy talk. ‘Really, Briggy, couldn’t you take a little loan from your mother so you could put the waitressing business away? Then you could give the acting a good go if that’s what you truly want. I wonder anyway if twenty-seven isn’t a touch on the mature side for the service industries.’

  ‘Say what you think, Philly, why don’t you?’ Brigitta laughed. ‘Since I’m awake now, will I make a cup of tea and we can go over my life choices one by one?’

  ‘There’s no need to be facetious, darling.’ Phil felt the lurch again. ‘I only know Daddy never liked the idea of his only daughter doing something so backbreaking.’

  ‘His only daughter apart from Polly, you mean.’

  ‘Well. Quite. But we all know he rather numbered Polly as one of the boys. Certainly after James.’

  His name was Phil’s trump card. It had been for as long as Brigitta could remember. She was forced to change tack. ‘Mum, you can be so hopeless,’ she said. ‘I’m front of house for God’s sake. Taking people’s coats is hardly backbreaking. Honestly, I’m not as fragile as you all think.’

  ‘You know Polly would happily have you live with them. They’ve got room, and then at least you could give up the o-vel.’

  It was a joke between them from when Phil had visited Brigitta in London a year prior and been shocked by her astonishingly basic living arrangements. If she had to live in a hovel, Phil had declared after refusing a cup of tea owing to the look of the cupboard it came out of, at least they might pronounce the word in h-less French. At the time, Phil had given Brigitta another three months to last in such dismal surrounds, but her daughter continued to be uncharacteristically stoic in the face of its privations, and the unceasing grind of being a jobbing actress in London.

  When Brigitta first decided on drama school, Phil considered it a passing fad, like the ceramics jag that had come after an unfinished journalism degree, which itself began after two disastrous semesters of law. Yet two years after graduating with really quite good marks, Brigitta was still at it, no sign of fading interest. If pressed, Phil would not have been able to say what sort of career she considered her daughter best suited to. She had never given it concentrated thought. Perhaps, it came to her now as she adjusted the cushion again, something to do with interiors. Or a very smart shop. Phil heard Brigitta yawn, and then from somewhere in the background came a low, mannish cough.

  ‘Is there someone with you, darling?’

  ‘Mum, I need to hang up. I’m as fat as butter and I want to go running before rehearsal. I love you. I don’t want to live with my sister. I don’t need any money. Please go and find something to do or else I’ll tell on you to Polly. I love you, goodbye. I’ll ring you soon, I absolutely promise.’

  ‘All right. But please remember, we’ve got plays here as well, you know. It mightn’t be Shakespeare’s Globe but –’

  ‘Thank you, Mum. I need to be here. I’m doing well, you know. You should be proud of me.’ A moment of silence passed between them before Brigitta spoke again. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? You’re just missing Dad.’

  ‘Oh darling, please.’ Phil had no intention of weeping into the cordless, no matter how strong the impulse at that moment. ‘Let’s not be feeble. And I am proud of you, I’m just not one to be vocal about these things.’

  ‘Okay, Mummers. Loves, honestly. I’ll ring you later.’ Brigitta gave a kiss into the phone. It went dead against Phil’s ear and she remained for a time with it on her lap, thinking the call could have gone worse. Eventually, she forced herself up and to the kitchen, to prepare an early supper for which she had no appetite.

  In the end, the setting of a single place at the kitchen table unleashed the tears that had threatened since Brigitta’s well-meaning inquiry, and Phil took a dish of buttered Digestives up to bed.

  * * *

  Brigitta dropped the phone on the floor and, turning over, wrapped herself around Guy, the cougher. Pushing one leg between his, she closed her eyes and hoped she’d delivered her little soliloquy about not needing money with sufficient feeling. ‘Make me believe you,’ Guy was always saying. ‘I want to see your motivation.’ He was her director and he really was teaching her all sorts.

  17.

  Baby corn was very big in Gordon in the nineties

  Abi was asleep on the sofa with Jude passed out on her chest, milk-drunk, onesie flaps undone, missing one tiny sock. She woke to the sound of Stu at the front door, struggling to get his key in the lock. On the television, the menu of the DVD that had put her to sleep continued to loop and her water glass lay on its side in a patch of wet carpet. After another moment of effort, Stu got the door open and took two staggering steps into the room. ‘Hey babe. Looks like you two had a big night!’

  ‘What time is it?’ Abi whispered.

  ‘No idea. One-ish? I had a few beers while we cleaned up and I feel like the last one’s only hitting me now. Is there anything in the fridge?’

  Stu disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a bowl of stir-fry, which Abi had made the day before with two-minute noodles and a can of peas she turned up in the Reduced for a Quick Sale! barrel in the back corner of Supa FoodBarn. A layer of dust on the tin suggested that the barrel’s object had not been realised.

  She longed to go to bed properly, but Stu’s energy pulled her back to wakefulness.

  ‘Hey, have you ever noticed that every family has its own stir-fry taste?’ Stu said, mouth full. ‘You go to anyone’s house and their stir-fry is trademark to that family? I could pick Mum’s stir-fry out of a line up. Baby corn would give it away in a flash. Baby corn was very big in Gordon in the nineties.’

  Since Abi arrived, Stu had developed a habit of reminiscing about his childhood and asking for the details of hers. Already she had run out of stories to exchange for all his memories of Kellett family holidays, kelpie crosses with amazing natures and injuries that had required stitches.

  ‘Rae was not really a mega cook.’ Abi’s voice was still croaky with sleep. ‘Well, she didn’t cook ever once it was just me.’ Jude whimpered and she adjusted her hold.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, of course.’

  ‘Do you think we have our stir-fry taste?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Stu said. ‘Shame if this is it though. Still it’s good to get that sort of stuff locked in. The rest will fall into place now.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  He scraped his fork into the corners of the container. ‘So, what did you two get up to today?’

  For a moment Abi couldn’t think. She was not sure if she was imagining the note of accusation in his voice. Did he presume she did nothing, instead of the endless three-hour circle of critical activity, broken only occasionally by trips to the pool or walking the pram up to the junction for remaindered foodstuffs?

  ‘Well apart from all the normal stuff, we went to the pool in the morning and I ran into that nice lady again. Remember I told you about her? It’s weird, she’s really interesting even though she’s old. She’s got one of those yappy dogs, but it’s called Domenica Regina. Isn’t that the funniest dog name you’ve ever heard? We chatted for ages today, about all sorts.’

  ‘But she’s old? Like Mum’s age?’ Stu asked, fork aloft.

  ‘A bit older. Maybe seventy or something? No, probably not that old, I don’t know. She’s got grown-up kids but they all live overseas I think. The daughters definitely do, and there’s a son but I don’t know where he is. Anyway, her husband just died a month before Christmas, so I think she’s a bit hard up for company as well. Which suits me. I mean, no
t to be mean.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t you think it’s weird hanging out with some old lady you’re not related to? Especially when you’ve got my mum right here. She’s been trying to arrange a visit and she says you never answer your phone.’

  ‘She phoned once and anyway, I’m creating structure like she said. She keeps telling me to make friends but did you realise that every mum around here is forty-five? And rich.’

  Stu’s interest had passed and he got up, leaving his bowl on a sofa cushion where Abi knew she would find it in the morning.

  She got up and carried the sleeping baby to the window. She could hear Stu gargling loudly from the bathroom. As she peered through the darkness at the big house, the window seat lit up as a perfect rectangle of yellow. Abi could make out the precise shape of Phil in a nightie, holding a glass of something. As she watched, Domenica leapt onto the squab beside her and Phil scratched under the animal’s neck.

  ‘Abi! Earth to Abi? I just said I’m going to bed?’ Stu was at her elbow.

  ‘Okay,’ Abi said without turning. After a time, Phil got up and wandered out of view. The light went off, returning the window seat to darkness. Abi slid into bed beside Stu, already asleep, and savoured the knowledge that Phil was both friend and neighbour.

  18.

  A night off the Jude talk

  The week passed slowly. When Saturday came, Elaine arrived at the flat at 5.59 p.m. and some seconds and let herself in with a key that Abi had not realised she had.

  ‘Thanks for this, Mum,’ she heard Stu say. He’d showered and dressed and was looking after Jude on the sofa. He would be bouncing him too vigorously, Abi was sure, but she remained cross-legged on the mattress, with her dress off one shoulder and one breast squashed into a pump that sucked like a feeble dust-buster.

  After forty minutes, she had managed to extract somewhere between 7 and 8 ml of thin, bluish milk. There was no way to tell for sure because the measuring lines didn’t start until ten. Maybe she was meant to do it before she fed him? But then, wouldn’t he need it straight away? How did it work, going out and not taking your baby? First Year with Baby had been uncharacteristically opaque on the subject.