All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  Jean said, ‘Nigel’s very affectionate! I hope you don’t mind!’

  Granny and Grandpa Green looked at Nigel as if he was an escaped zoo animal, and turned around and fled.

  Nigel took a bottle of Prosecco and three glass flutes out amongst the bay trees, said ‘Bottoms up’ and nearly fell off his chair laughing.

  We clinked and sipped.

  ‘Jean,’ I began. ‘Were there any letters?’

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘I’ll have a good look,’ she said. ‘The decorators have been in so perhaps …’

  ‘It’s quite urgent,’ I said.

  And because Jean was such a nice person, she didn’t ask in what way the letters might be urgent. No, she simply opened every cupboard and drawer of the house, coming back, not with a bundle, but with one thin pale blue one.

  One thin one with Bridget’s writing on.

  A fizz of anticipation.

  ‘I’ve sent you three letters that you haven’t answered,’ she wrote flatly. ‘I assume you’re very caught up with Michael.’

  Caught up?

  Like in a net?

  Was she right?

  Also, how dare the decorators throw away my letters?

  Blame the decorators.

  So much easier than blaming myself.

  Bridget said that she, Bessie and Bella were now living in a kibbutz, which was currently converting to the renewing kibbutz model, which she wrote about at length, and which I skimmed because it really wasn’t interesting.

  Wasn’t interesting?

  A bubble of pain rose up from my belly because Bridget surely would always be interesting to me, and if her life wasn’t interesting to me, maybe my life wasn’t interesting to her, so we were officially losing each other, may even have lost each other already, and that was a true tragedy. Because she was the person I loved most in the world and we were supposed to share everything our whole lives.

  ‘Barny’s back in England,’ wrote Bridget. ‘He’s reading Archaeology at Durham.’

  I’m ashamed to say that the power of Barnaby’s name overshadowed my anxiety about Bridget, and I’m also ashamed to see the shallow inadequacy of my letter back to her, a letter I absolutely don’t remember writing – oh the danger of the self-justifying memory – but which she kept and is in front of me, right now. It’s clear I was rushing it off to make sure the message got to Barnaby.

  Dear Bridget

  I never got your letters – so sorry.

  My mother is very ill (again) so had to move out quickly.

  May not have sent my temporary address?

  (May not? Such a lie. Weirdly, I don’t say that I’ve been living with the Orsons, and I don’t say anything about Michael, probably to leave the coast clear for Barnaby. Consciously or sub-consciously.)

  Thanks for all the news.

  Kibbutz living – amazing! Completely amazing!

  (Is that honestly all I could manage? It was so obvious I hadn’t read it properly.)

  Head currently in A levels.

  (Where were my verbs?)

  Tell Barnaby to give me a call if he ever comes south. Or could meet halfway? Makes so much sense he’s studying Archaeology!! Remember Charmouth beach?! The locket?!

  (Far too many exclamation marks and surely not those double?!s.)

  So many happy memories!

  Hugs from London xx

  It was the sort of letter, thinking about it, that Christine Orson might have written.

  Fast and exclamatory, with a cold trophy busyness about it – must dash, no time for full sentences.

  But I was in the land of love again, and perhaps Jean’s unshowy kindness and Nigel’s hugs would warm me up.

  Chapter 58

  The next day, Michael appeared wearing a linen jacket, looking handsome and agitated.

  I felt guilty about how much I wanted to see Barnaby.

  We stood a foot apart from each other, both of us with our hands in our pockets.

  ‘Evs,’ said Michael, taking his hands out of his pockets, but not knowing what to do with them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I did know, I knew he’d have tried to stop me.

  ‘You mean the world to me,’ he said. ‘And obviously so does my mother.’

  ‘Has she decided I might not be such a good proposition after all?’ I said.

  ‘She’s just worried for both of us,’ he said. ‘Any mother would be.’

  ‘Your mother has been very good to me,’ I said, in a strange voice I didn’t recognise.

  I started crying.

  Partly to make Michael feel sorry for me, instead of cross with me.

  If I’m honest.

  I watched as Michael took a little packet out of his pocket, pulled off its sticky strip and neatly unfolded a tissue, one section at a time.

  ‘She thinks the world of you,’ he said, handing me the unfolded tissue. I knew she didn’t.

  I knew how hard it is to love people who don’t love us.

  Nigel appeared with Prosecco, and we went out to the patio, where Jean joined us.

  ‘Bottoms up,’ said Nigel, and the four of us clinked glasses.

  ‘I wish I had a girlfriend,’ said Nigel. ‘But I’m never allowed out on my own.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Michael.

  ‘I always get drunk!’ said Nigel. ‘I love getting drunk. But sometimes I can’t find my way home.’

  Jean asked Nigel to leave the two of us in peace, and they went inside.

  Michael sat on the sunlounger and pulled me towards him.

  ‘Why don’t you go to King’s instead of Edinburgh?’ he said. ‘It’s just around the corner. And I’m going to be in London. And we need to be together.’

  ‘I told you it’s my second choice,’ I said.

  ‘But Edinburgh’s so far away,’ he said, kissing my neck – he had a bit of a thing for my neck. ‘It won’t be good for our relationship.’

  I had an urge to swat his kisses like flies.

  ‘If it’s meant to be, it will work,’ I said, thinking that, although people said this a lot, it really was a load of crap.

  Chapter 59

  Back in Chelsea, wonderfully, I started sleeping again, and, even better, I went on sleeping as my A levels began and my mother came home.

  ‘I got better for you!’ she said, like when she came to collect me from Bridget’s seven years earlier. ‘I did it!’

  I stared at her, and she looked like a stranger.

  Nigel led us both to the patio, and my mother said, ‘Jeanie!’

  She really did.

  Jean reached out her two hands and held my mother’s two hands. I stared at them, thinking that I’d never held her hands like that, and had never wanted to.

  My mother got up the next morning and got dressed, and we all four ate breakfast together, smiling at each other. The smiles carried on through the exams and the celebration parties and then I was leaving school, and off to Mirabello Bay, shuddering with anxiety at the thought of being Orsoned again.

  The sun shone and the Orsons’ cook made delicious dinners, and we drank champagne and went for rides in their speedboat, but Billy kept escaping alone in his kayak.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said to me, ‘I think I might get in this kayak and keep going and never come back.’

  ‘Please don’t do that,’ I said. ‘I’d really miss you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘We never see each other.’

  ‘We see each other all the time.’

  ‘Because you’re Michael’s girlfriend,’ he said. ‘You never see me.’

  ‘The thing is …’ I stammered. ‘I’m just not sure how …’

  ‘I know,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve tried to see it from your point of view, climb inside your skin. You know, like in To Kill a Mockingbird. You don’t need to explain.’

  I hugged him, and it felt like I was hugging nothing.

 
As he got in his kayak, I knew that I hadn’t tried to climb inside his skin and walk around in it, like Harper Lee said.

  And nor had I tried to climb into Bridget’s.

  I watched Billy floating across the bay, and I felt fear, like smoke rising on the horizon.

  Chapter 60

  When we got back to England, I was desperate to be alone.

  Michael phoned to say that Billy had disappeared, and could I come over?

  I didn’t want to.

  But I went.

  I didn’t stay the night.

  Michael was cross.

  Billy didn’t come back.

  A week passed.

  I came and went.

  I could only think of Billy.

  But Michael wanted to talk about our relationship.

  How it would work if I went to Edinburgh.

  When Billy finally walked through the door of Fairmont House, we were all eating supper.

  We stopped.

  ‘Ah, the prodigal son!’ said Mr Orson.

  Christine said, ‘How dare you do this to me?’

  Billy said nothing.

  Christine told him he was a total waste of space and would never amount to anything in the world, not unless he turned himself around.

  Billy swivelled in a circle on one leg, 360 degrees.

  Which wasn’t wise, and he probably regretted it later.

  It might have been funny if I hadn’t felt so afraid.

  Christine didn’t offer him any supper.

  I found it hard to eat.

  Billy went to his bedroom.

  Michael and I went for a walk.

  When we got back, I whispered secretly through Billy’s door.

  But he didn’t answer.

  Michael said, ‘How dare Billy put my mother through this!’

  I said I was going back to Chelsea for a few days.

  When the results came out in August, I’d got all As, which meant I’d got into Edinburgh.

  ‘Edinburgh?’ said my mother. ‘You mean in Scotland?’

  She took to her bed, pulled the drapey curtains and refused to move.

  Michael appeared at the door, looking shocked.

  ‘Something awful has happened,’ he said.

  I grabbed his hand.

  ‘Billy got C, D, D,’ he said. ‘Mum’s distraught.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘A levels aren’t everything. Look at Richard Branson.’

  ‘Anyway?’ he said, looking at me.

  ‘Anyway what?’ I said to Michael.

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘Who cares?’ I said.

  ‘Did you get all As?’ he said.

  I looked away.

  ‘You did, didn’t you?’ said Michael.

  ‘Please don’t say anything to Billy,’ I said.

  ‘Please stay in London with me,’ he said, and he put his arms around me, and they reminded me of those kissing gates, where you get trapped for a moment, before being let out.

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ I said to his handsome fragile face. ‘I’m going to Edinburgh.’

  Let me out, I thought, but he still had his arms around me.

  Michael looked utterly defeated by Edinburgh, but not as defeated as he would look the next day, when the gardener found Billy at the back of the garage, hanging from a rope underneath the stuffed stag’s head, which his mother wouldn’t have in the house.

  I sat staring through the window at the golden-rain tree, hearing Michael’s gaspy sobs at the other end of the phone, and Jean came in, went out, came in, went out.

  Yellow petals blew in the breeze.

  I tasted Maltesers in my mouth.

  I saw Billy strutting like Freddy Mercury with the tree branch between his legs.

  On the other end of the phone, Michael was crying, and Michael never cried, and the golden-rain tree was crying, its petals falling slowly to the pavement, and Billy was dead, Billy who wanted to kayak over the horizon to see if it was any better over there, beyond the expectations.

  It couldn’t possibly be true.

  I should never have gone out with Michael.

  I should have been Billy’s friend.

  Wake me up before you go-go.

  I could still remember the dance moves.

  But he didn’t wake me up before he went.

  I should have told Michael what Billy had said to me in Mirabello Bay.

  I shouldn’t have stayed at Fairmont House when Billy had to board.

  I put down the phone.

  I stared out of the window.

  Jean came in.

  ‘I don’t think your mother can survive you going to Edinburgh,’ she said.

  Will everyone leave me alone and let me go to Edinburgh, I thought.

  I am going to Edinburgh.

  Nothing will stop me going to Edinburgh.

  Billy has died and I can’t go to Edinburgh.

  The tears fountained up from my gut.

  I CAN’T GO!

  I CAN’T GO!

  I’ll have to stay.

  Here.

  I’ll have to stay.

  With Michael.

  Nobody leaves a grieving brother.

  And anyway, it was partly my fault, and maybe I could have stopped him if only I’d tried.

  I exploded into a strange paroxysm of grief, as if everything I’d ever been sad about in my whole life was bursting through my eyes, out of my veins, through my skin.

  Nigel crept into my father’s old study.

  ‘Evzy,’ he said. ‘I hid some Prosecco. Here you are.’

  We passed the bottle back and forward, glugging it in great gulps, and Nigel held me in his chubby arms, as I sobbed and sobbed and couldn’t stop, and he said, ‘I felt really really sad once.’

  ‘When was that, Nigel?’ I sobbed.

  ‘When Mum didn’t let me learn to play the trumpet,’ he said.

  ‘I got over it in the end,’ he said. ‘Not learning the trumpet.’

  Then Michael rang.

  He said, ‘Please please don’t go to Edinburgh now, Evs.’

  So that was how it was that I ended up going to King’s College, London, living at home in Chelsea because my mother (via Grandpa Green who ran her finances) couldn’t see the point of paying rent when we were drowning in empty bedrooms.

  Bridget remembers writing to ask me how my A levels had gone.

  I imagine I didn’t answer because I was lost in my own tragedy, but she had no way of knowing that.

  People don’t know things unless you tell them.

  This is an important point to remember.

  Chapter 61

  The first thing the Orsons did when Billy died was buy beautiful new black clothes.

  Black with a splash of colour.

  That’s what Christine Orson kept saying on the phone, staring at the garage through the kitchen window, as if Billy might come walking out of it.

  ‘Black with a splash of colour.’

  Like a parrot.

  I was broken by Billy’s death.

  Grief exposed my heart, like when a building has its outside wall blown off, and I was vulnerable and unprotected.

  I couldn’t bear to be talked to, consoled, touched.

  I couldn’t bear to have sex.

  Although Michael needed to, that’s what he said, that’s how he would be comforted.

  I had no idea what I was supposed to do, and nobody to ask.

  So I gritted my teeth and imagined myself out of my body.

  ‘What are you wearing for the funeral?’ Michael’s mother kept saying. ‘The dress code is black with a splash of colour.’

  I felt like screaming.

  Who cared – just bring Billy back, bring him back.

  I had horrible thoughts, wishing other Orsons had died, and not Billy.

  Then I hated myself.

  A black parrot with a splash of colour, there came Christine Orson, with red lipstick, and rainbow wings, the huge silk scarf flying behind h
er, down the empty aisle, the slim little coffin having been dispensed with at the crematorium, the six of us holding our breath, clutching at the shiny wooden chair in front of us, as Billy went, he left us, sliding away on his back, in the oak box, holding his nose, that’s what I imagined, like when he went down the slide into the swimming pool.

  Billy was gone, and burning up, but there we were, two hours later, mascara re-applied, the Awesome Orsons, plus girlfriends, walking down the stone-tiled aisle, holding our pain inside our stupid, pointless shiny new clothes.

  Looking at Christine’s face made my heart hurt.

  Because I knew she knew that she’d told him he was a waste of space and would never amount to anything in the world. And now the space that was Billy – every centimetre of him – had been burnt to cinders and the only thing he could amount to was ash.

  I looked at Mr Orson’s gold tie heading off to the right of his fat belly, and I looked at the way he was clenching his jaw to hold in his tears.

  To be a man.

  What the hell is a man if he can’t cry for his son?

  Being a man was so much of the problem here.

  Mr Orson, jaw clenching, clenching, held his wife’s arm, and Johnny held Antonina’s, and Michael held mine.

  Our presence was a tide of silence.

  The church was so full that people had to stand at the back, black with a splash of colour, like spillages of pain.

  Billy’s friends from his boarding school were there, with their parents and the teachers and the headmaster – rows of unknown faces, black suits, pink ties, red scarves, emerald earrings.

  The parents of Archie, who committed suicide in the first term, were there. Giles and Heather Morton. They were wearing badges with a photograph of Archie’s face on their lapels.

  Most of my year from Lewis College were there, and my year’s parents, smart people in smart clothes, frozen with shock, people who hadn’t necessarily loved Billy.

  The whole church was crying, not only for Billy, or the Orsons, but for themselves, for the fact that soon, next week, the week after, their kids would leave for gap years and freshers’ weeks, and sometimes people drowned in university rivers or in coach crashes down mountains or in night clubs taking drugs. None of us knew what was coming, and we cried for that.