Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  I recite to myself my litany of patience: she is old, forgetful, doesn’t know what she’s saying.

  ‘When I die, Isobel, I want to be buried whole.’

  I mutter under my breath, ‘Is that with or without your tongue?’

  ‘M. B. Bloomfield here is eighty-eight.’

  ‘And every year of it lived!’ the Bloomfield booms, her great voice reverberating deeper than would seem possible in her sparrow’s chest.

  ‘She taught me French.’

  ‘She was the worst pupil I ever had. Stella Motte! With a name like Motte, fancy!’

  ‘Well, they hadn’t spoken French since the Norman conquest, M.B.’

  ‘Honked like a swan with its neck caught in a bottle.’ The old bag has enormous teeth. The eyes are shrewd and dark. ‘You were always silly, Stella. Silly, but charming. She never did her homework. Used to bring me cakes to cover up.’ She points her toe to show that, at eighty-eight, she still has an ankle.

  My mother starts reciting, ‘La plume de ma tante est sur le bureau de mon oncle. Où est le canif de Charles? Le canif de Charles est dans la poche de Robert. Charles pleure. Pauvre Charles.’

  ‘My, what a memory!’ the Bloomfield croaks.

  ‘Your fault, M.B. That blasted book … What was it called?’

  ‘Don’t look at me, Mum. I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You do. You had it yourself at school.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Well, try!’ she snaps and raps me on the wrist.

  ‘French without Tears,’ the Bloomfield drawls and I laugh, but my mother is cross with me.

  ‘It’ll happen to you one day, Isobel. You’ll be wanting to say something and you won’t be able to retrieve it.’ Under pressure, the words fly out of her reach. Like a child in a roomful of wayward balloons, she stamps her foot. Beyond these walls, old women to whom I owe no allegiance get along splendidly without me.

  The Bloomfield perches forward in her chair, her dark eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Have you ever had your portrait painted, Isobel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Such a pity. You have a classical face.’

  ‘I’ve had mine painted,’ my mother pipes up. ‘During the war. A young chap used to come to the canteen and draw me.’

  ‘Oh, sugar and spice! A waste of paint!’ the Bloomfield cries. ‘Chocolate box features, Stella. You’re a pair of pretty eyes in a dizzy head.’

  ‘Well, it’s true,’ says my mother, on her dignity.

  ‘I had my portrait painted,’ whinnies the Bloomfield. ‘By a real live man.’

  ‘Well, a dead man would be hard put to do it,’ says my mother.

  ‘I have a classical face,’ says the Bloomfield, ‘otherwise, Bunny, how would you have recognised me after all these years? Of course, I knew it was you at once. You said, “Well, if it isn’t M. B. Bloomfield! Bet you don’t know who I am?” I didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Bunny Motte,” I said. I’m sorry your poor old Henry died young and rich. I liked Henry. A most intelligent man, even if he was a communist. I knew him before you were married, did you know?’

  ‘No!’ my mother yells. ‘No, indeed I did not. He was always doing things behind my back!’

  ‘I’d hardly call it behind your back, dear. He was friendly with a neighbour I used to have before I was put in the old folks’ unit. Now, she’s someone you’d know, Isobel. She’s the lady who does the embroidery, Rose Hirsch. She’s getting on now, of course, although she doesn’t look it. Perfect skin.’

  ‘Oh, her,’ says my mother, archly. ‘She used to be on the desk at Lauringtons’. I suppose Henry would have known her from there. How long ago was it, M.B.?’

  ‘I think he was a frequent caller, even after his marriage with that other person.’

  I thrust another slice of cake at my mother, and she gobbles it down, distracted, sticking her arthritic knuckle through chumping lips.

  ‘I had a funny phone call from Eli yesterday,’ she says, by way of a diversion.

  ‘Who’s Eli?’

  ‘My grandson.’

  ‘Isobel’s son? Or Allegra’s?’

  I say, ‘My son. Allegra had a daughter.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Eli’s twenty-one,’ I continue. ‘Nin’ll soon be six. She’d be here, but she’s gone to swimming classes this morning and then she’s going out to a birthday lunch with a friend.’

  ‘Cold day for swimming,’ says M.B.

  ‘Heated pool,’ I say.

  ‘Good Heavens! In my day it was the river or the beach.’

  ‘He said your phone was looking lonely, Bel,’ says my mother, still talking about Eli. ‘So he rang me up. That’s him, M.B.’ My mother hands around a plastic frieze of Eli, aged eight, in a rat mask.

  ‘Very handsome,’ says M.B. ‘Father was a rat, I suppose?’

  ‘Too true,’ rejoins my mother. ‘Tell Isobel about those books you write.’

  ‘Ha! Novels! Four of them are out of print, and the fifth you can only buy in New Zealand.’

  ‘She uses a nom de plume,’ says my mother, pronouncing it with care. She rolls her eyes. ‘Julia Drake.’

  ‘Oh, hush, Bunny. I’m old-fashioned. It’s my business. I can see the name means nothing to your daughter, but it satisfies my artistic streak – that’s all it is, a streak, but it’s human endeavour. I feel I will have left my mark. Oh, blast, I’ve dropped my hearing aid now. Wretched thing …’ on her hands and knees, she strokes my mother’s carpet, ‘… they make them so small. Can you see it? I’ll never be able to get up. Your carpet smells, Stella. Have those dogs of yours been inside again?’

  Two of them are coralled out in the laundry and one is injured and asleep in my mother’s bed, its bitten head ‘suppurating’ on her pillow.

  Temporarily cut off from communication, M.B. cannot hear my mother’s diverting history of the dogs, how they were all strays, how she feeds them on fruitcake and vichyssoise, how their bowels are affected and the injured one has had its ear bitten off by the other male, cranky with eczema.

  ‘Have you got eczema?’ M.B. creaks to her feet with some help, slapping the ‘pill of a thing’ back into her ear. ‘I get it in summertime. I have to take off all my clothes and go round nude!’ She feels for the seat of her chair, bent almost double, her backbone like a lizard’s frill which skews her partially undone zipper to one side. ‘A young man rang my doorbell last time. Gave him quite a surprise. Ah, life isn’t so very unendurable; it has its compensations. What’s that tune you’re whistling, Stella? Makes me want to go. Stop it!’

  My mother composes her mouth in a prim, sarcastic smile. She hates being told to stop it. ‘My children were Truby King babies. Truby King mothers were instructed to whistle rather than hit. It was supposed to breed placid babies. But my two got around Truby King. They learnt to criticise in their cots. Allegra particularly. Twiddle your thumbs in a distant room and she’d yell out, “Stop it!”’

  ‘I don’t wonder, the way you twiddle yours, Stella. You’ll curdle the air.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it! All my life, stop it!’ My mother slaps the arm of her chair repeatedly. ‘Parkfuls of exhausted women with brutal babies!’

  M.B. thinks it is hilarious. ‘It’s a wonder they survived with you as a mother!’

  ‘One didn’t.’ Like the last wrench of a dripping tap that has stopped the drips entirely and the tap forever. ‘Ah well,’ shrilly, ‘time for more tea. Bad for the bowels. It’s all bad for the bowels. If Allegra had been a dietitian we’d never have got anything through to the other side of our faces, would we?’ And she gives me a vicious, hysterical tap on the head. ‘Ah, don’t, can’t, mayn’t, stop! I draw my breath at the same bank you do, M.B. Do you like what the plasterers did to my ceiling? Cost the earth, but there are still cracks in it.’

  So we are reduced to home improvements, how Nina used to criticise: ‘Such a waste of money, when you could be sending the girls to decent schools. It’s always th
e ones who haven’t any children. She’d send practical things, like a plastic picnic set for Christmas, when we never went on picnics.’

  M.B. loses her hearing aid again. This time it has landed in the cream of my mother’s cake; she plucks it out and licks it. ‘Poo! Tastes of wax!’

  M. B. Bloomfield shakes her iron-grey head. ‘You a mother! Bunny Bloody Motte! Whatever would Truby King think? Licking my hearing aid!’ She stares at the carpet, bemused, fluttering her long, gnarled hand. ‘No matter.’ She plants her feet on the floor and rises. ‘Time to go.’

  Julia Drake, authoress, all pride residing in her robust nose, bobs for a higher perch on her front doorstep, flings her key at the slot and is clouted on the claw by the beaten plaque that holds it. ‘Ouch! I hate old age!’ She stamps. She glares at me. ‘Don’t fidget. I won’t keep you long. What I want you to see is just through here …’ She leads the way into her box of a maisonette that makes no noise, casts blurry shadows and smells as impersonal as a new refrigerator. It makes no effort at all to greet her, but just contains, like the weary idea of a young architect with an old mother. She opens a little white door, with some difficulty, over the thick carpet.

  And there, over the neatly made bed with its white, tight coverlet, is the portrait she spoke of, in half profile, looking down.

  ‘He made me sit still for what seemed ages. Fed me whisky for my aching neck. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it was painted by Leslie Hallett. It’s lovely. Really adventurous.’ He has made her lay a hand by her chin and incline her head above it. Though the hand and face are ageing, the attitude is somehow young, so the portrait conveys the passage of life. ‘How long did it take him?’

  ‘An afternoon. Leslie was a very quick painter.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘I didn’t know him very well. He was Harry Laurington’s friend and I’d known Harry since childhood. It was painted down at Indented Head in Harry’s beach house. I seemed to be the only person with money in those days. I told Harry that if this young man Hallett, who was Harry’s “find’’, painted my portrait, I’d pay him.

  ‘You know, it’s fate that our paths should cross, Isobel. I first met your father on the day that was painted. Your father was very charming. At that time he was with Viva. You know, it’s always fascinated me why Viva married Harry, or to put it another way, why he married her. There was no doubt in my mind that, at that stage of his life anyway, Harry was homosexual. I was under the impression, a very strong impression, that he and Leslie were having an affair. Harry used to tell me about his affairs, you see.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At Harry’s Beach House

  THIS NEWS OF Harry Laurington galvanised me. I spent the rest of the afternoon with M. B. Bloomfield, and what I heard caused me to pay Harry a visit.

  ‘Thank God I can still handle a coffee cup,’ he said, as he half sat, half lay, propped up in his azalea niche. The nurse, Jean Higgs, set his coffee tray the way he liked it.

  I still felt I had to establish grounds for a visit. Although I liked Harry and I felt he liked me, we hadn’t yet become friends. I took my cup in my hands and wondered how to begin. Once Jean had left the room I said, ‘Harry, I want to ask you something very personal. I’ve met someone you know. She’s a friend or relative of my mother’s, so I more or less met her by chance. Her name’s Bloomfield, M. B. Bloomfield.’

  ‘Oh, Molly! She’s still alive then? Must be getting on now, she has a year or two on me. Our families knew each other and one of her brothers was in my house at school. Ted. I think I heard that Ted had died not so long ago?’

  ‘Yes, he’s dead,’ I said, ‘And so is her other brother …’

  ‘Sandy. Yes, I knew about Sandy.’ He pre-empted me a little too quickly to seem innocent of the question that lay behind the prompt. I was going to hinge my conversation on Sandy Bloomfield because M.B. had told me she was pretty certain there’d been an affair between him and Harry. Harry had chosen her as his confidante, probably in order to cover Sandy’s tracks. He had sworn to M.B. that he was in love with another young man, thinking no doubt such risqué information would divert M.B’s attention.

  M.B. believed that Sandy had managed to keep his homosexuality under wraps all through a long, prosperous society marriage, because his wife would hear nothing against him and was thus protected from knowing what she would rather not.

  I was about to devise a leading question to recover lost ground when Harry started ringing his bell for Jean and saying, ‘Poor Jean. She’d probably like a cup of coffee herself. I’ll ask her to join us.’

  I wondered whether he had just betrayed himself, but I was too slow to force the moment while Jean was away fetching herself a cup.

  Harry was faster. He said, ‘You know, Molly Bloomfield went to Europe in the thirties. Doing the grand tour. She went to England first, of course. She was one of those people who spoke of it as “home”, though I should think even her grandparents were born in Australia. Then she went to Germany – she prides herself on her German – and she sent back such glowing accounts of England and Germany that we rather thought we might be rid of her. And I say rid of her because, although she’s a forthright person, she’s very critical of everyone and everything and she’s inclined to pry. But you might understand Molly Bloomfield – funny that her name is almost the same as Joyce’s Molly Bloom – when I tell you that when she got to France she stayed with a family whose sons were in the Action française, and she was damned proud of it. She’s as anti-Semitic as they come. Doesn’t even believe in the Holocaust – or didn’t the last time I spoke to her, some years ago now. I didn’t keep up with her much because her attitude was hurtful to Laurent and Rose. She was a clever woman, but obtuse.’

  By this time, Jean was back in the room, and I could see just how adept Harry was at protecting himself with mental and social barriers. But the fact that I knew what he was doing did not escape him and he coloured a little bit as he drank. ‘Tell me, Isobel,’ he said, ‘are things looking up for you? I understand Reg has cornered the whole “Nice Girls” series for you.’

  I didn’t feel like answering him. I got up and strolled around the room, looking at the artworks on his walls but without being able to take them in. He was treating me in a shallow, evasive, manipulative way. Perhaps he was desperate, but what about me? Inside my chest I felt there was an iron stake.

  I thought but was not able to say, ‘It’s my relationship to Checkie that is worrying me.’

  ‘You’ve never been down to the beach house,’ Harry said. His tone was kind enough, but it was not balm to me. ‘Would you like to go, Isobel? There’s a chap down there painting at the moment, but the place is easily big enough for two. You could stay there for a while and get some serenity into your life. Reg says you haven’t been painting. I can understand that, but you must remember that gifts like yours are unique. Gifted people often don’t have easy lives because they are impelled to go where others won’t and think what others dare not think. Allegra used to protect you, didn’t she?’

  As I nodded my head the stake in my chest moved up and down dangerously. Then he said, very gently, ‘Come here, Isobel,’ and he held out his good arm for me to come to him. Maybe he was opening his heart to me; I stopped at his hand, as though to come just within the ambit of a gate, but he slipped his arm around me, inviting me to put my head on his chest. It was too much, the stake inside me churned and I wept bitterly. I knew that Harry’s arm around me was warm, but I was in a hard and terrible place of my own where his embrace was like trying to shift a boulder with a feather.

  I accepted Harry’s invitation to the beach house. Even if it was a red herring, I needed my father and it was the only place I could think of where he was. Reg drove me down.

  On the journey, I asked him, ‘Is Harry gay?’ and Reg said, ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I want to know.’

  ‘What do you want to know that for? It doesn’t matter.’


  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘What difference would knowing that make?’

  ‘Well, if he’s gay, how come he’s Checkie’s father?’

  ‘He might be bi.’

  ‘Stop avoiding the question, Reg.’

  ‘How would I know the answer? I don’t go around asking people whether they’re gay.’

  ‘You just don’t want to answer me, do you?’ The flat acres were passing us by. Indented Head seemed a million miles away, and I as far as ever from an answer to my question. Then, ‘Is he Checkie’s father?’ I demanded.

  ‘Well, I suppose so. He’s spent all that money and time on her, so I guess she’s his daughter.’ Then he laughed. ‘What? Are you afraid of being related to her or something?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘Checkie’s not bad.’

  ‘You’re outrageous, Reg. For God’s sake, tell me what I want to know!’

  ‘Allegra was your sister.’

  ‘Fuck! I’m asking you if my father was also Checkie’s father? For God’s sake, tell me!’

  But all he would say was, ‘There’s fatherhood and fatherhood. And then, there’s motherhood, and, believe me, motherhood is much more important. Women are weightier characters than men.’

  ‘You’re being cruel and unfair, Reg. I want a straight answer.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try to make sure you get it, but it isn’t mine to tell, Isobel.’

  I was not a David. I couldn’t keep up a barrage until someone weakened or took pity on me. The evasions of both Harry and Reg seemed to add up to an unpalatable truth, one that would partially explain the wrangle over the will. Even Wednesday had wondered, albeit speculatively, whether Checkie might not have a legal claim equal to Allegra’s and mine.

  I thought over Rose’s description of Allegra the First, Dadda’s mother, and her blonde hair in its Marcel wave. Latterly, Checkie had resorted to a hairdo similar to a Marcel wave; the frizzy hair she’d had as a child had given way to a smoother look. She’d come to the funeral but kept her distance. Someone said even she was weeping. Later, she’d sent me a card saying she was thinking of me. I didn’t want her to think of me and threw it away. The idea that I might be closely related to her made me feel sick.