Mothertime

by Gillian White

  ‘There is no doubt in my mind but that he was following me. He was, how do you put it… a fanatical—a striker or a protester, tall and lean and lanky with black straggly hair dangling down over one eye and the other, the eye I could see, was staring madly out of his head.’ The excitable Isle hurried on, exaggerating madly because the uglier he was the more sympathetic Mrs Guerney was likely to be. ‘He watched me enter the house. He stood perfectly still and he watched. He stared hard at the house as if he was counting the windows. Believe me, I make no mistake.’

  ‘Ugh!’ exclaimed Mrs Guerney in a voice choked with outrage, who dips into scandal with the glee of a glutton delving into a box of chocolates. ‘Nobody is safe. These beasts are everywhere, undeterred by seasonal goodwill, or the weather. They should pick these perverts up in a van like they do stray dogs; they should take them off and castrate them. Even on your own lounge couch there’s no getting away from it, you see it in every wild-life programme you watch… sea lions, coyotes, wildebeests, preying and coupling. They’re exactly the same when it comes to that.’

  ‘You’d do it yourself, wouldn’t you, Mrs Guerney?’ Amber has heard these awesome threats before.

  ‘I would do it with my own bare hands and a sharp vegetable knife.’

  ‘Or a cheese-grater. Let’s go and see if we can find him. We could track his footprints in the snow.’

  ‘Let poor Ilse get her coat off and unpack her bag first, Amber. And it is not a good idea for anyone to go searching in the park. If anything is to be done it is for the police to do it. That’s what we pay our taxes for.’ But everyone knows that Mrs Guerney does not pay taxes—that’s why Mother pays her cash, weekly—and she’s on income support. Mother says it is one of the ways, apart from her hats and her penchant for picnics, in which Mrs Guerney mimics the Queen, and if you look at Mrs Guerney sideways on there is a definite likeness, except that Mrs Guerney’s hair has been allowed to go grey and there is not the merest suggestion of a curl in it. Mrs Guerney is such an excellent cleaner that on one occasion Mr Morrisey next door came round to ask Mother if she could spare her for just one morning a week at his house. Mother refused. She said, ‘I certainly don’t want all our private goings-on broadcast to the entire neighbourhood. It’s bad enough that she also works at Safeways.’

  ‘He didn’t do anything, did he, Ilse? He didn’t show you anything… or maybe you didn’t notice,’ Mrs Guerney asked in a low and terrible voice, deflated when Ilse shook her head.

  ‘What would he show her?’

  ‘Take Sacha and Amber upstairs, please, Camilla, while I get down to the root of this.’

  Camilla burst out laughing, Dominic blushed and sneered, but Vanessa bit her lip and looked away. Vanessa was on Mrs Guerney’s side when she snapped cryptically, ‘Well I’m glad you can see a funny side, Camilla, because I can’t. I find it absolutely revolting myself.’

  Ilse looks bored and resigned when she comes downstairs in her powder-blue shell suit prepared for a long day’s work.

  Mrs Guerney looks up, annoyed, from her place at the grate and accosts her. ‘You look washed out, Ilse. Are you ill? Have you had any sleep at all over the last two nights?’

  ‘I ’ave been badly upset by the experience of the man, Mrs Guerney.’ She picks up a magazine and listlessly heads for the sofa.

  ‘There’ll be some ironing to do when that washing’s dry and Mrs Townsend’s room could do with a good clear-out while she’s away. You’re in charge here now, Ilse…’ But Ilse’s eyes are already glued to the antics of Mario on the television screen. Her mouth falls stupidly open as she watches Dominic’s expert performance from his nest of buttons and wires on the floor. If Dominic will let her, then Ilse will do little else but play Nintendo until the next time she has to eat or sleep or until she can sneak out for a couple of hours on some pretence. Ilse will do anything to wangle a few hours on her own with Paulo.

  A rush of spidery worry crosses Mrs Guerney’s face as she eases up from her kneeling position and expertly pushes a piece of newspaper over her bucketful of ashes. ‘I think I’ll phone Mr Townsend before I go, just to make sure…’

  ‘There is no need for you to do that, Mrs Guerney. We are perfectly all right.’ Ilse quickly defends her position, nervous of unnecessary interference. She prefers to be left on her own. ‘If we need anything I know where he is and the children are very responsible.’

  ‘I am concerned about that man, now that he knows where you live. If he should decide to ring this bell…’

  ‘Mrs Guerney, I would never open the door without seeing who was there first. I can look after myself. I was only so nervous because I was out and he came with such sudden surprise.’

  ‘If you see him again you must telephone the police, Ilse, you understand that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  But Mrs Guerney’s decided that Ilse was probably behaving cheaply. She prefers the pregnant Welsh girls; she used to bore Mother to death with her nagging: ‘Ilse is immature and irresponsible and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if she’s not here when she ought to be, but having a high time down at the Plume of Feathers with those Greeks.’

  ‘The children would say something,’ said Mother, trying not to listen, trying to move to another room where Mrs Guerney wouldn’t follow her.

  But Mrs Guerney was not so easily diverted. ‘Not necessarily. They’re not so stupid. The children can wrap Ilse round their little fingers. She’s such a drip that they’re probably far happier if she’s out rather than drooping around indoors waiting for the next opportunity to escape. I know children, and I’m just warning you, Mrs Townsend, that’s all. At least the Welsh girls had nowhere to go and were too large to want to be off flaunting themselves all over London getting up to God knows what.’

  ‘They were too depressing to have around, sobbing and sighing all over the place. And you know how easily I get pulled down. Ilse’s here now and Ilse will have to do.’

  So Mrs Guerney would relent, but she never bothered to hide her disapproval of poor lovelorn Ilse. Now, quite understandably, she is reluctant to leave the household in Ilse’s charge. She hovers, she spends too much time arranging her hat and packing her bag and all the while Vanessa watches and considers. Mrs Guerney would be horrified if she knew what they’d done with Mother; Mrs Guerney would be on Mother’s side; Mrs Guerney would not sympathise with their reasons, she would refuse to understand.

  What should she do? Oh God, what should she do? Where are the tears that might save her? Finally, at dear last, Mrs Guerney’s cliff-like bosoms disappear behind the zip of her army surplus flying jacket. ‘I wonder if there was a man at all, or if it was a figment of that girl’s wild imagination. Or, of course, she could have been using it as an excuse for her lateness.’ Vanessa is willing to agree with anything. If Mrs Guerney is going she wants her to go immediately, not hang around here in the hall where Mother’s cries will be heard if she rouses herself from her torpor at this fatal moment.

  But Vanessa half-dreads and half-hopes for some sound. She wants to be found out; the strain of this terrible crisis is proving too much for a twelve-year-old child to bear. She longs to go down to see what is happening but at the same time the thought of creeping back to that gym, the thought of what they might find there is repellent and terrible.

  If Mother would only make a sound then Vanessa would know that Mother was still alive.

  Nineteen

  HER FIRST, REAL AWARENESS comes along with the scratching at the window. At first Caroline thinks she is in bed and that birds are scuffling in the ivy outside her window… the light is so bright it could be a warm, spring morning. Where, for God’s sake, did she go last night? Her eyes are stuck together, her lips are parched and her whole head is rumbling hotly like the inside of a tumble dryer. Where the hell has she been and what has she done to make herself feel so rotten?

  My God, she is down on some strange floor, hardly dressed. She moves every limb and muscle with care, easing her he
ad from her cramped arms, wincing as the blood rushes back and she feels the pain shoot sharply through every vein in her body. Her bleary, bloodshot eyes automatically search for some kind of reviving drink. They rest despairingly on the wooden bucket of water. The habitual curse is there; natural to her as a heartbeat it comes without thought: ‘Fuck this.’

  Is she alone? She clears her throat in case she might be required to speak but the result is similar to ripping a plaster off a raw and open wound. She drags her body heavily behind her as she makes for the bucket of water. Moaning for moisture, she thinks of a lizard moving across the dunes under a scorchingly red Sahara sun. Her tongue flicks like a lizard’s tongue and her hands are withered and dry, claws for nails, no eyelids… God help me.

  The searing heat which she first imagines to be emanating from her own wretched body is surely coming from the coals in the corner… if she narrows her smarting eyes she can watch the atmosphere shimmer above them, mirage-like on the air. What the hell? She rises on her hands—an exhausted sort of press-up, the movement is all she can make—and she dips her entire head in the bucket, shivering at the stale, lukewarm thickness of the water. It’s like dipping your head in a bucketful of silk… dipping into nothing mixed with the smell of wood chips. And then, as she gasps harshly for the next breath, she lets herself slump back against the bench behind her, catches the bucket in both her hands and lifts it over her head.

  ‘Will somebody turn this bloody light off, for Christ’s sake?’

  She smooths the stuck hair from her face, and then carefully, in case it might hurt her, she brings her knees to her chest and folds them in her wet arms. Slightly safer now, she dares to edge her eyes to take in the high sauna window and the rest of her bewildering surroundings. Have they put her in some weird high-security rehabilitation unit? Did she do something unlawful last night—and where was she last night… Are there guards out there disguised as nurses in starched white, waiting for her to find some bell and ring it? But isn’t there a faint familiarity about this place that she really ought to recognise? Damn the booze… damn it, damn it, she has to sort this out before someone comes in and the battle begins…

  Or has she been taken hostage by terrorists?

  Caroline Townsend fights sheer panic as she rises up stiffly; every muscle in her body screams out as she moves towards the door, terrified. And pushes. And gasps. And pushes again, cursing her pain and her weakness. And takes her frightened eyes to the window, screws them up to see through, licks her parched lips as she digests the stark basement room which is Robin’s gym, as empty and cold as Robin is, as calculated and uniform as Robin is, as unsympathetic to her and all that she stands for as Robin is, with a love as rusty as a tin-can alley. ‘There’ll be nothing left of me soon,’ she used to say pitifully, in the bad times, alone again, staring into her mirror, ‘but my eyes and my laugh.’

  Her attention is seized by a movement at the window over there in the far wall… scratchings against the pane, only just noticeable, as if someone is attempting to scrape away the white paint with the edge of a coin in order to make a hole to see through. So that was the noise that woke her from a sleep that was more like a death… no dreams.

  Caroline is at home. Safe. At home. In her own house. This is not a hospital and there are no waiting syringes.

  What day is this? There must be people upstairs who might hear her if she calls. But she knows she can’t call with the kind of throat this heat has given her. No, all she can do is bang the empty bucket up and down against the pipes and hope there is someone responsible upstairs who will come, at once, to rescue her before she loses her mind.

  She bangs. Every deep dong of the bucket assaults her brain, and her arm is achingly weak. She keeps on banging with a desperate regularity, her eyes closed against every sound. Caroline cannot bear to be shut in closed spaces. She imagines she cannot swallow or breathe. She listens… she has to know who is coming to get her. She has to fight, she daren’t lie down in case she’s not ready when they come with their strong arms and their punishments. It is a childhood thing; she really should have conquered it by now.

  How could anybody hate her enough to lock her away in here like this?

  And then she remembers that Robin is gone. Robin would have stopped them… Robin is the one she can count on to keep her safe whatever happens, but Robin has gone to live with Suzie now and there’s absolutely nothing Caroline can do about it. Oh, falling in love with Robin was easy and wonderful. She remembers the delicious languor of the first time, her body under the thin sheet, the sheen on the pretty porcelain cups, the heady scents drifting through the green blinds; the day swam past and they drifted along it from morning to evening in a burning dream whose fever increased as the sun went down. And when the crimson and gold had faded, when the moon rose, then… they attained madness.

  He’s gone. It was atrocious enough when she realised he’d left her, but when she discovered he was in love with somebody else she thought she would lose her mind. They all say there’s nothing worth doing but to work on oneself, work ceaselessly, work defiantly, laboriously, go against every habit, every craving, every fear, every hope and every pleasure… to what end? For the purpose of breaking through the pain. But all that is beyond her. She can’t seem to do it—can’t even understand it. And there’s no reward at the end, or if there is it’s too awful to contemplate. Childish things, that’s what she wants. She wants to believe childish things told in such a way that she can believe they are true. Because, without Robin, life is so dark… because everything is lost and gone into darkness. And Caroline is only a crumpled flower pinned to the shoulders of many lovers.

  Robin, fuck him, the prig, the cold-blooded fish, the intellectual with no time for hilarity, warmth or carelessness.

  Caroline bangs stoically on, feeble bangs becoming progressively weaker. One for Mummy, one for Daddy, one for Robin, one for Caroline… dear God, and all in this crippling, mind-blinding heat!

  Nobody’s going to come. She can bang as hard as she likes for as long as she likes. Nobody’s going to answer and it’s no good crying. She has to try and pretend she is not locked in. She has to use her imagination and pretend that she hasn’t been abandoned here, maybe forever. She has to try and work out what has happened. If only her head would clear, so that she could remember…

  She should not have poured away all that water. Is there any way she can turn this heating down? Listless, more thirsty than she has ever been in her life, and with lips that taste more briny than any ocean, she folds her fur coat and lays it on the bench to make a thicker cushion to take her aching body. There are blankets, too. Someone must have worried that she might catch cold! Hah. Her laugh is brittle; she wishes she could take it back. That little laugh tore its way out of her throat and she is sure there was blood behind it. While she’s stuck in here, laughing is out of the question: she cannot use laughter in her efforts to pretend. And anyway, there is nothing remotely funny about any of this. Why does she always have to make painful things funny? Or soak them in gin as if they are diamonds that need cleaning.

  What time is it, for God’s sake? Shouldn’t the children be home from school? When she looks at her watch Caroline remembers and catches her throat… it is Christmas! Vanessa, Camilla, Dom and the twins must be at home now, probably upstairs and wondering where she is, and the presents she’s hidden might be wasted—the presents that would have to try and make up for last year’s neglect when just to hear the word Christmas rent her, just to pass a shop where a carol was playing made her cry.

  She’d remembered the presents this year but not the decorations. She’d been angry when she got home… angry with Bart for being such a prat, angry to find that Vanessa had outwitted her again, Vanessa, solid and awkward as a kitchen chair, making her guilty again, somehow managing to make her fall short again. Vanessa seemed to be screaming, ‘Why can’t you do things quietly, live quietly and die quietly. Why does there have to be all the laughing and crying?�
� And Caroline would have loved to scream back, ‘I am not your monster, Vanessa! I used to stare at the soft sky with my mouth open, stupidly, like you, as if I was a stupid woman. But I was not too stupid to enjoy it, to love it, to sink into it. I have watched our lovely world, too. I have even found myself on my knees for all the enchantment of it…’

  They were proud of their efforts. They’d stood around, watching her, innocent in their dressing gowns. Beautiful, every one. Caroline remembers with difficulty, frowning, taken to some other world as she tries to bring back just how it was. She had teetered on the edge of some terrifying cliff then, and how many times in her life has she been to the edge of that cliff, staring down into the massively frightening awareness that there are things to live for, after all—that, with a mighty effort of will on her part, she might actually be able to reclaim the shattered shreds of her life and sew them together, give herself another chance. With Bart’s cruel words still ringing in her ears, when she’d walked into that drawing room and so suddenly caught sight of the Christmas tree it felt as if someone was mocking her, trying to unravel her determination to create a Christmas this year. Drunk, she’d been rearranging the clumsily draped tinsel but it must have looked frightening to them, frightening and quite, quite different. When she heard the children come into the room behind her, she looked round and saw their fear… fear over what she might do, what her reaction might be. Fear as if they were waiting to see which way the monster would pounce and the monster was her, vulgar and foul.

  She stared at dear, skinny Vanessa, so alien, preposterously fastidious, docilely miserable with her monstrous deep wide eyes. Her full face was candid, downright and honest, but her profile was impertinent and her mouth was… sensual. For all that she is so painfully thin Caroline’s daughter’s a warm little animal. She carries enchantment. Something in her hums. She saw her then as a drummer boy, very small and rather ragged, marching to the battle of life with her head up, whirling her brave little drumsticks. Caroline stared at her child and teetered. She desperately wanted to laugh, to hug them all to her, to breathe in the drowsy, talcumy smell of her children and laugh, to tell them to go upstairs and see what was waiting in her cupboard, to go and find the pantomime tickets, to look in the back of the pantry cupboard. She wanted to tell them the hell was over, that she was going to stop drinking. She dearly wanted to do that…