So with my mind at rest I was able to be more of what a husband should be to Jean. I’m not saying that things were back to what they had been but they were better. As times passed I could see that she was missing Susan too, not that she ever admitted it. She never said that she thought she’d handled things badly but I could see that she was having second thoughts.
We didn’t hear from Susan again for a long time. At first, every time I saw Julie I asked if Susan had called her but the answer was always the same: no, she hadn’t. I stopped after a while because I didn’t want to put Julie in an awkward situation. Maybe Susan was ringing her but asking her to say nothing to us. I trusted Julie to tell us if there was anything that we needed to know.
Anyway, Julie had problems of her own. She’d been having a baby but lost it and the poor kid was in bits. My heart went out to her. Everyone, especially her mother, said that it was just one of those things and that there’d be other babies but that didn’t help. I kept my mouth shut. What did I know about that sort of thing? I just held her when she cried.
So we had that with Julie and then Helen and her husband split up. He was carrying on with another woman and for two pins I’d have gone and knocked his head off but Helen and her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Helen said that wasn’t the way things were done these days and I think Jean just didn’t want me arrested for assault. Wouldn’t have bothered me. I never liked the lad much anyway.
Things have turned out better for Julie and Chris though. They told us not long ago that they are having another baby and we’ve all got fingers crossed that everything will be all right this time. The doctors are keeping a close eye on her and she hasn’t got long to go now.
She was at the doctor’s when the second phone call from Susan came. Thank God they had one of those answer machines because at least Susan was able to leave a message. She’d said that Mary had started school and that she liked it. It wasn’t a lot to go on but it would have to do, for now.
I say ‘for now’ because, through everything, I knew that Susan would come home one day. We just had to wait until she was ready.
I’ve missed Susan something terrible in the years that she’s been gone and every night before I go to sleep I pray to God that Susan will come home tomorrow.
My prayers were answered. Susan turned up today.
SUSAN
I could feel the eyes of the curtain twitchers on us as Mary and I walked down the street towards the house that I’d left nearly six years earlier. Nothing had changed; it looked just the same as it always had. Tommy Brown’s car was still sitting on bricks in their front garden and Old Mrs Murton still dried her washing in hers. On the surface it was like I had never been away but the reality was that I was a different person now. My heart was beating against my rib cage and I squeezed Mary’s tiny hand hoping to get some strength from it.
I was terrified. What would be waiting for me when I knocked on the door? Would anything be waiting for me? Maybe they were out. Who was I kidding? It was Sunday and it was lunchtime; of course they would be in. But what would be waiting for me? Well I’d find out soon enough.
‘Where are we, Mummy?’ Mary asked.
‘This is your grandparents’ house,’ I told her as I lifted the latch on the gate. ‘This is where my mummy and daddy live,’ or at least I hoped that they still did. It had never occurred to me that they might have moved. Half a dozen steps later we were standing in front of the door and I watched my hand shake as I made a fist and knocked.
I waited for what felt like ages with my stomach doing somersaults and a sick feeling burning my throat but no one came. I lifted my hand to knock again and as I did I heard the sound of voices – well one voice – on the other side of the door. I’d heard Julie shout that she would get the door and I thanked God that she was there.
The door opened and for the first time in six years I was looking at a family member that wasn’t my daughter.
Julie’s mouth opened wide and moved but no words came out. She grabbed hold of the door jamb like she needed to hold herself up. I noticed the large bump on her stomach and I felt a little bolt of happiness shoot through me. Julie was having a baby.
I felt Mary tighten her grip on my hand. God only knows what she was thinking.
‘Hello, Julie,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’
Still her mouth was moving and still no words came out. I heard another voice from behind her ask if she was all right and a moment later I was looking at my mother. She looked older, which I know sounds stupid because obviously she was older, we all were, but she looked old.
‘You’d better come inside,’ Mum said. I looked down at Mary who was looking up at me with wide eyes.
‘Come on, sweetheart,’ I said as calmly as I could. I gave her hand a gentle squeeze. We walked through the door together and as we passed Mum in the hallway I noticed that she popped her head out of the door and cast a glance up and down the street.
She leaned into the door to close it and rested her head against it for a few seconds.
When she turned round we stood looking at each other. From somewhere behind me I could hear my dad talking to someone about football while in the hallway my mother and I just stood and looked at each other. Mum was moving her tongue over her lips, trying to moisten them and I knew how she felt because my mouth was as dry as a bone.
‘Hello,’ the voice came from my left-hand side and I looked down to see my daughter looking up at my mother. ‘I’m Mary.’
My mum looked down at her too and after a couple of deep breaths she found her voice. ‘Hello, Mary,’ she croaked. ‘I’m … your gran.’
‘Hello, Gran. I’m very pleased to meet you.’
Mum smiled as the two of them looked at each other and her face was softer than I had ever seen it before.
‘Why don’t we go and meet your Granddad,’ Julie said, holding her hand out to Mary who looked at me for guidance. I nodded my head. ‘I’m your Auntie Julie by the way,’ she said as they disappeared into the living room.
Mum and I still stood looking at each other.
‘You look well,’ Mum said.
‘Thanks. I am well.’ On the outside I was calm but inside was a different story. What is it they say about swans? That they look all serene on top of the water but underneath their feet are going like the clappers. Well I knew how they must feel.
‘Where have you been?’ Mum was also calm though I suspect that was just on the outside too.
I told her and she made a comment about how it was supposed to be nice there. I said something about it having good and bad in it, like all places do, and for a couple of minutes we exchanged words but didn’t really say anything at all. It was the most surreal conversation of my life. There’d been a hell of a commotion in the living room when Julie had taken Mary in and I’d fully expected Dad to appear in the hallway but he didn’t and so Mum and I just carried on looking at each other and speaking without saying anything.
After a few seconds of silence Mum said, ‘She looks like…’ and I thought she was going to finish the sentence with the word ‘Tim’ but thank God she didn’t. She said ‘…a lovely little girl,’ and I allowed myself to breathe.
‘She is.’ I looked towards the door that Mary had gone through and said, ‘She is an angel.’ I felt a defiance rising inside me and I turned to my mum and told her, ‘and she was worth everything.’
Mum couldn’t hold my gaze. She knew what I meant. My eyes didn’t move an inch. I could see that Mum’s chest was heaving and I wondered if she was all right. Should I call for help? I’d only meant to make a point, not give her a heart attack. One of my reasons for coming was so that I could reconnect while I still had time. I didn’t want that time to be less than five minutes.
But Mum recovered herself and lifted her head. Her voice was low, not much more than a whisper really. ‘I was trying to do what I thought was best for you.’
I considered that for a second or two and then told her, ‘and so was
I.’
Just then the door to the living room opened and my dad was there. Like Mum, he had aged a lot in the last six years and I knew that I was probably the cause of that. He opened his arms wide and wrapped them around me. We both cried.
After we’d all had a cup of tea, the cure for everything in my mum’s house, she said she had to put the finishing touches to the lunch. She asked if we were stopping for it and I said that our bus back home didn’t leave until five o’clock so that would be ‘lovely, thank you.’
Anyway, while Mum was off in the kitchen doing what she did best, which was the Sunday roast, I sat in the living room and chatted with my dad and Julie and Chris. I’d brought some toys in a bag to keep Mary entertained on the bus journey and she sat on the floor playing with them. Dad was talking to me but he could hardly keep his eyes off her. It was as though he could hardly believe she was there.
There were lots of questions. Where did we live? How had I been? Had I made new friends? Was Mary happy in school? Just one after the other with barely any time to answer one before the next one was asked. I had questions of my own too. How were they? How were Helen and Robert? When was Julie’s baby due?
Julie told me that she had a couple more weeks to go but twenty minutes later she was on her way to hospital after her waters broke and soaked the sofa. On her way out the door Julie looked at me and asked me to promise that I would stay. I said that I couldn’t but I did promise that I’d come back the following weekend. I wished her good luck and told her that it would be worth it.
Mum went back to the kitchen and I was alone with my dad, apart from Mary and she had her head in a book. As Dad and I sat together holding hands he kept repeating, ‘I can’t believe it,’ over and over again. He must have said it half a dozen times.
I could hardly believe it myself.
‘I always knew you’d come back,’ he said eventually.
Did he? I hadn’t known it; for a long time I thought I would never come back.
‘You were right,’ I said, my voice cracking.
Dad’s hand was over his mouth like he was trying to hold something inside but his eyes gave away the smile that was under his hand.
‘I have missed you so much, Susan.’
‘Oh, Dad,’ I got down on my knees and knelt on the floor in front of him. I rested my head on his thigh and he stroked my hair, ‘I’ve missed you too.’
Only then did Mary look up from her book. She looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Dad and I sat like that for a while and then, when the time was right, I sat back on the sofa.
‘How have you been,’ he asked, ‘really?’
‘We’ve been all right,’ I said, ‘mostly.’
He didn’t ask what I meant by that but he did say that he thought it couldn’t have been easy for me. He was right, it hadn’t been, but I glossed over the bad times and told him that I had been very lucky.
‘So, Julie’s having a baby,’ I said trying to move the conversation along and then I added, ‘now,’ and laughed.
‘Yes,’ he laughed too. ‘Please God, everything will be all right this time.’
This time? What did he mean this time? And that was when I found out that my sister had miscarried a baby five years earlier. ‘It happened not long after we heard that Mary had been born,’ he said and I wondered if Julie had resented me.
What else had I missed? Well, it turned out that I’d missed Robert’s affair, Helen’s divorce, Robert having a baby with someone else and Helen organising her second wedding to a man called Richard. So much had happened in the time that I had been away – hardly surprising really; a lot had happened to me too. That’s how it went. Life moved on and I had been out of their lives for a long time.
Mum called us to the table and, like the street outside, the kitchen looked just the way it always had. Mum told me to sit in my chair, the one that I had always sat in at tea time, and that was when I really felt at home again. Mary sat beside me in what had been – and probably still was – Julie’s seat.
I’ve told you before that no one makes mashed potatoes like my mum and they had never tasted better than they did that day. Mum and Dad couldn’t take their eyes off Mary who didn’t appear to notice as she tucked into her food.
After lunch I said that I would give Mum a hand with the washing up and I was amazed when she agreed that I could. The kitchen had always been Mum’s domain and she wasn’t in the habit of letting people help her. She hadn’t used to be anyway but something about her was different now.
‘Are you happy?’ she asked me as she handed me the first plate she’d washed.
‘Yes,’ I said.
We worked in silence for a while and as we did I realised that the way I worked in my own kitchen, at my own sink, was the way that my mum worked. I know that might sound daft but different people do simple things like washing dishes differently and I did them like my mum did. I truly was my mother’s daughter.
Mum put down the plate that she had been washing and turned to me. ‘Can you forgive me?’ she asked.
I have to say, that stunned me a bit. I had never heard her say those words to anyone before and I certainly hadn’t expected to hear them that day. She grabbed the tea towel I was holding, tossed it aside and took hold of my hands. We stood with our wet hands interlocked looking at each other. I could see tears in her eyes and I was sure that she could see them in mine.
‘I was wrong,’ she said finally. ‘I see that now and I am so sorry, but please believe me when I said that I was trying to do what I thought was best for you.’
‘You wanted me to give Mary away, Mam.’ I know it sounded like an accusation but I hadn’t meant it to. I could hear the crack in my voice.
She thought about that for a few seconds, her eyes on the sink like she was expecting the right words to float out of the water. ‘I was just thinking about you, Susan. You.’ She emphasised the word. ‘I was just trying to do what was best for my daughter.’
‘And so was I.’
We looked at each other, finally understanding that we were just two women who both wanted what was best for their children. After a minute or so Mum put her hands back in the sink and carried on where she had left off but without the vigour that she had started the job with. It was as though the apology had taken everything out of her.
After the dishes were finished we went back to the living room to find my dad sitting in his chair with a five-year-old fast asleep on his lap. I couldn’t help myself, I just started to cry.
‘Don’t cry, love,’ Dad said, patting the seat on the sofa that was closest to him. I sat down and rubbed my tears away with the heel of my hand.
‘I am so sorry,’ I sniffed, looking first at Dad and then at Mum, ‘for what I have put you both through.’
‘We’ve all got a lot to be sorry for,’ Dad said but he directed his words towards Mum. She avoided his eyes by looking at my daughter who was starting to stir from her sleep.
‘She is beautiful,’ Mum said with a softness in her voice that I had never heard before and when I looked at her there was something on her face that I had never seen before either. Was that a look of love? Yes. It was. She had a little smile on her lips and was all doe-eyed.
‘Yes she is,’ I said.
‘She’s got your eyes, Jean,’ Dad said.
‘Do you think?’ Mum said, not able to keep a hint of pride out of her voice.
Mary woke up fully just after that and Mum couldn’t wait for a cuddle. ‘Are you going to come and sit on Gran’s knee for a bit?’ she asked, and Mary duly obliged.
I was amazed by how easily she had taken to these people that she’d only just met but I put it down to something that humans did; you know, recognising their own. I don’t know the science but I’m sure there’s an explanation for it because Mary was usually wary of strangers.
Then with her usual, ‘say it like it is’ attitude Mary asked, ‘Are you and Mummy friends again?’ Her face was upturned and just an inch or two way from M
um’s chin.
Mum looked over Mary’s head to me and smiled. I smiled back and I think I nodded my head just ever so slightly. ‘Yes, Mary,’ she said kissing the top of her granddaughter’s head. ‘Your Mummy and me are friends again.’
In Mary’s head that was that: we were all friends again, end of story. Mum asked her questions about school and her friends and Mary answered the only way she knew how which was with absolute honesty. Molly was her best friend in her class but Jade was her best friend in the world. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and Jade’s mummy is my mummy’s best friend.’
‘I met her just after I left,’ I told them. ‘We’ve been through a lot together.’
They didn’t ask where I had gone to and I didn’t tell them. What would be the point? What mattered now was that I had come back, and I had brought my daughter with me. The time just flew and before I knew it, it was time to leave. We were going to have to rush to make it to the bus station on time.
As we were preparing to leave something happened that I had wanted all of my life. My mum hugged me. It took me by surprise, but not as much as when she whispered, ‘I love you, Susan,’ in my ear.
I hugged her back. ‘I love you too, Mum.’
We were both crying – in fact, we were all crying apart from Mary. She had a big smile on her face.
I didn’t have time to think about anything on our way to the bus station, apart from worrying that we’d miss the bus, but when we were safely sitting down and on our way I had time to reflect on the day. I had been shocked by the change in my parents, especially my mother. My dad had just aged, other than that he’d seemed just the same as he’d always been. But Mum? Well, Mum seemed like a completely different person. She’d asked me if I could forgive her – which is something I had never expected – but, more than that, she had said that she loved me. I’d waited all of my life to hear those words.
Ribbons in Her Hair Page 17
