But he doesn’t want to go home yet. He doesn’t want to go back to the hostel. He checks in his pockets for change. He wonders if Ruby and Bart would be genuinely pleased to see him if he went there.
Twenty-one
DUSK FALLS. DUSK IS a haze of cries and whispers. Even in the basement with its sterile, melancholy landscape, there is a sense of dusk falling.
‘We’re walking in the air…’ sob the tubular bells.
Moving on soft, considerate feet, it is the contained quietness of the creeping children that makes them so sinister.
‘You’ve woken up again then, Mother.’
‘I haven’t been awake at all. I have only just come round.’
‘No, you’re wrong, you spoke to us two days ago.’
Mother’s impatient fingers tangle with her fraught fuzz of hair. ‘Then I can’t remember.’ She shrugs twitchily. ‘Vanessa, I’m sorry, I can hardly remember a thing.’
After a long, embarrassed hesitation Vanessa says, ‘You said some bad things to us two days ago. You said some very cruel things to us then, to me in particular. You threatened me with all sorts of awful punishments.’
What can she answer to that? For a start she can’t remember—and is that any wonder? She was suffering from violent withdrawal and she didn’t have a clue where she was or what was happening to her. Caroline’s caustic cynicism is her first line of defence, one at which she has become an expert. But it’s hopeless, like lead suits are hopeless against radiation but yes, she probably would have said hurtful things.
Caroline’s face is on one side of the plastic window, Vanessa’s on the other, and each of them feels they are talking to themselves through a round, metal-framed mirror because this conversation is so inane for such a solemn occasion. Her four younger children stand behind Vanessa in a perfect straight line, awaiting their turns.
‘How are you feeling now, Mother?’ Real concern is absent from the question although Caroline detects a kind of relief on her daughter’s ashen face.
While straightening the strap of her slip Caroline attempts a little laugh and immediately regrets that she tried it. ‘I could murder a drink.’ Vanessa’s face disappears for a second and Caroline imagines the expression she is wearing, how her slim eyebrows will be disapprovingly arched in her high, white forehead, how her nose will be crinkling up with distaste.
Vanessa comes back. ‘You have water,’ she says very gravely.
Caroline, humiliated and helpless, cannot argue.
‘And don’t worry, we are going out to buy you some appropriate clothes tomorrow morning.’
Caroline, suddenly aware of her semi-nakedness, modestly crosses her arms although her daughter can see only her face, not her body. Trying to be playful but meaning business she answers, ‘Appropriate clothes? There are clothes in my wardrobe, Vanessa, and unless you can turn down the heat in here all I’m going to need is a bathing costume.’ And then she dares to ask, ‘What’s going on, Vanessa? Why am I here? What are you planning to do? Don’t you think you had better let me out now? This is all very childish, after all.’ But she’s frightened.
‘It is childish because we are children, Mother.’ Spoken without the faintest trace of irony.
What the hell can she possibly answer to that? If she could only speak to Camilla she might be able to influence her… Camilla has always been steadier than Vanessa, gentler, more understanding. Not so obsessed with religion and Robin, with right and wrong.
‘I know you are upset. What happened was dreadful… and with Christmas and everything. I can understand why you did this, don’t think I can’t understand, darling. But what you didn’t know was that I had made plans this year, special plans. Everything went wrong, but…’
An impatient sigh briefly mists up the glass. ‘Everything always goes wrong, that’s the whole point.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘We brought you down here on Christmas Eve. Well, it was early on Christmas Day morning. You passed out. You were drunk again. You were disgusting.’
‘You brought me down here?’ Caroline’s hot, clammy flesh crawls.
‘We wanted to have a good time. We couldn’t do that, not with you as you were. I’d survive, but Dom and Sacha and Amber, how would they feel with their Christmas all spoilt again?’
Mother painfully clears her throat. ‘How are they? Can I see them?’
‘Later.’ Vanessa sounds defensive. Perhaps the others are not so firmly behind her after all. Perhaps, if she’s given a chance, Caroline can persuade them to change their mind.
‘How long are you planning to keep me here?’
‘Until you change.’
‘Change?’
‘Until you turn back into a mother again.’
Caroline feels tears threaten. She fights them hard. She does not want them to blind her eyes with their watery brightness. She wants to keep control so that Vanessa realises she is not in possession of this situation, she is not in command. ‘But I am your mother, Vanessa. This is all getting rather silly. Already it’s got way out of hand, hasn’t it, darling? Be honest.’
‘We have control, Mother. Everything is decided. You can’t threaten us any longer.’
There is a long, difficult pause during which they study each other in the imaginary two-way mirror. After what feels like years of avoidance, for once they take on each other’s eyes. Mother’s turn suddenly wary; there’s a danger that she might crumble away utterly. She says, ‘They’ll miss me at work.’
‘We have sorted all that out, Mother. We’re not stupid.’
‘And Robin? I suppose you have smoothed that little hiccup out, too.’
‘Daddy thinks you have gone to Broadlands.’
‘You told him that? And he believed you?’
‘Why wouldn’t he believe us? It’s exactly the sort of thing you might do.’
This is worse, far worse than Caroline has imagined to be remotely possible. Vanessa is so cold… as if she hates her. As if all the resentments over the years—the tiny resentments of children, like refusing a lollipop or a television programme, or making Vanessa put on her cardigan… all those furious little glances she remembers receiving and dismissing are summed up in this freezing cold stare.
‘Vanessa, listen to me, darling. You can’t force people to change. You can’t take people prisoner at whim and turn them into what you want them to be! For God’s sake child, you’re not thick… you’re not a toddler. You must realise…’
‘If we can’t make you change we are keeping you here. If you won’t change we don’t want you back.’
‘But it’s not so simple!’ For Christ’s sake! Just because you’ve managed to keep your secret for a few days—and God knows that’s incredible enough—don’t imagine you can incarcerate me here for weeks on end without anyone finding out. You must be out of your mind…’
‘Don’t say that about me!’
‘I’m just trying to make you see that this naïve idea of yours cannot succeed. Camilla! Camilla, are you there?’
‘Camilla does not want to speak to you just now.’
‘No, because Camilla knows better…’
‘Mother, can’t you see that you are saying everything wrong? I am the one you must talk to.’
‘I know, I know! But what the hell am I expected to say, given these extraordinary circumstances? I’m not going to beg you, Vanessa. You know that whatever happens I am never going to do that.’
‘We’re going to buy you some suitable clothes and some shampoo. I remember, and in the photographs, you have pretty hair.’
Strangely embarrassed, taken aback, Caroline brings her hand to her hair, and on the way up she passes her cheek. With a shock she remembers slapping Camilla when everything was so black. It was the only time she has raised a hand to her children, and something in Vanessa’s expression not inches away from her gaze must have reminded her of that. Vanessa saw the slap and has not forgiven and her memories are probably as clear as
crystal. Vanessa had no idea, when they played that ancient Electrolux ad. as Christmas drew nearer, how the horror had flooded back, how those great rollers of grief had pounded down and drowned her—and why should Vanessa know? Why should the children have to know? Isn’t life bad enough that the past has to be endured as well? There she was, Caroline Heaten, so full of hope, pushing the gadget along the carpet, all dolled up and stiff with mascara and promises. Camilla smirked and laughed. She covered her mouth with one pretty hand and she laughed… Camilla, with that sort of future so easily within her grasp—money no object, media connections, talent and beauty. Camilla laughed. It was unendurable. And so something snapped inside and Caroline slapped her. Immediately afterwards she had felt sick, but by then it was far too late.
And there’s more, oh God so much more. There was, ‘What have you done to my room, Mother?’
She recalls the horror on Dominic’s face when he saw his new wallpaper.
‘Don’t you like it?’ She’d been genuinely astonished.
‘I hate it! I wanted it kept exactly as it was!’
‘But how can you hate it? I chose the colours you like best. I spent hours choosing. I even went back to change my first choice because I know how you loathe fussy things.’
‘You have spoilt my room and the whole house. I’m surprised you haven’t taken my toys and my books and changed them, too. You should have put them on the fire and burnt them with the rest of Daddy’s stuff.’
At the time Caroline groaned. Why on earth would she do that?
Couldn’t they see? She was trying to make it a new house, a fresh start, free from the memories of those unhappy times. She could only curl up on her hurt, take another sip of her gin and say, ‘Well, Dominic, I’m sure you will get used to it if you try.’ And then, stabbed to the heart by the row of miserable faces, ‘You will all get used to it if you try. This isn’t easy for any of us. Can’t you understand?’
‘Why don’t you talk to us, Mother?’ That was Camilla, the child of the tender rosiness. ‘Why can’t we share this together?’
But what the hell do you say to children? How can you tell them you’re contemplating taking your own life because you just can’t cope with the scalding anguish any longer… for them… for anyone. All they wanted was Robin to come back. Well, what the hell did they think she wanted?
They worshipped Robin. They still do. They were cold and offhand with Caroline. They believed she had driven him away, and that’s certainly how it must have appeared. Robin looked like—he still looks like—a man who can slouch round the course of life with a long, loose easy stride and never make a mistake. While she, with that demon of need inside her which she could not control… all that storming, raging, accusing him of caring nothing for her.
He’d insisted she be the perfect mother, and to start with, feeling safe with him, she’d trusted him and tried.
During the bad times she had to get out of the house or die. Sick with fright, she had to surround herself with friends who talked loudly about themselves and spent exciting evenings in brightly lit places. She went among them like a blindfolded woman playing a frantic game, bumping into costly stereos, tumbling into mountains of pillows, caught in the arms of one man, then another who sucked on her nipples, men whose faces she could not quite see. And home in the morning with silver tracks inside her knickers, wetting black leather car seats.
Where did her children fit into this? How did Vanessa fit in, with her black and white views, no shades of grey allowed to show through? Guilt, guilt, guilt. And how could she help them to understand?
Caroline makes a great effort to sound normal, to sound brighter. ‘Hey, why don’t we all try and relax here. If this wasn’t quite so crazily funny it would be obscene. Well, if I’m not going to be allowed a drink, how about some cigarettes? I’ve run out.’
‘I would rather you tried not to smoke. You haven’t smoked for two days. You haven’t had a drink for three days, either, and it made you very ill. Soon, you won’t even want a drink or a cigarette. We’ll have cured you.’
‘But Vanessa, hell, my hands are shaking.’
‘Don’t worry, Mother, we’ll look after you because we love you.’ And this is said with such vehemence that Caroline recoils with a gasp.
‘So what am I supposed to do while you decide whether or not to let me out? Am I going to be provided with something to read? A television set? Some knitting, perhaps?’
‘You wouldn’t get a picture down here. And yes, of course we’ll let you have books. A pack of cards so that you can play Patience. Wool, too, if you want it.’
For Christ’s sake she was joking. On a bubble of frightened anger she fumes, ‘I could make Mrs Guerney hear me if I banged on the pipes. I could scream and someone would hear me.’
She doesn’t like Vanessa’s tone, quick and high with distraught emotions. ‘The sauna heating is quite high at the moment. Before we leave we’ve decided to turn it down. But if any of us hear any noise from down here, the slightest sound during the day or night, Dominic’s going to come down and turn it up. And don’t think we’ll all be going to school every day. Someone’ll stay home to listen. Soon you’ll be happy, Mother. Soon you won’t want to make a noise. You won’t need anybody’s help but ours. Mother, we are going to make you much happier than you were. And don’t worry that we’ll ever leave you. We’ll come and see you regularly at the same time every day. Otherwise you will not be disturbed.’
‘But you wouldn’t really hurt me?’
Fiercely uneasy, for there is madness in this. Could it be that Vanessa, Caroline’s most serious, high-minded child, is unbalanced? Not just troubled, but possessed? Is it something to do with her age, and all that eerie religion?
‘Vanessa,’ Caroline starts carefully with a new tremble in her voice. The scant clothes she wears feel heavy and damp. The atmosphere inside the sauna is sticky-thick. ‘Can you tell me what you think is going to happen in the end?’
‘I think that in the end you might not want to come out. We might, in the end, have to coax you.’
Only half-listening, for this is all quite beyond her, Caroline, with her eyes clenched tightly shut, hangs on to the door for support. ‘Right. Okay. If you’re determined to stick to this peculiar attitude. So just for curiosity, what sort of timescale are you talking about?’
‘Weeks, months, years, we can’t really say yet, can we?’ Vanessa’s insolence is almost discreet. So close to panic she can almost taste it, like silver fillings touching foil, Caroline can’t stand up for much longer. She wants to go and sit down on her bench. A feeling of terrible loss and regret tells her it’s too late to try and touch Vanessa now. Surely her daughter knows that she, so fragilely balanced, is incapable of existing alone for a day or an hour? Vanessa turns round as if to consult the others and her face seems to turn on the air, separate, unsupported, naked. My God, oh God help me, she is being perfectly serious! Caroline knows this with a sickening certainty because Vanessa can’t act as Camilla can act, as she herself can act. She’d wanted so much for Camilla, so much she had lost for herself.
‘Daddy, I want to be an actress.’
Severe and cold. ‘Over my dead body.’
Caroline was lucky. She was beautiful and talented. With a passion like a fire she got a place at LAMDA but she needed a grant. No matter how hard she begged, Daddy would not pay the fees. How hopeless it all seemed then. So she lived in a grimy bedsit and worked her way up, modelling for a pittance, then was taken on by an advertising agency and given small parts in three of those early television adverts, and she thought she’d made it. You had to be tough. There wasn’t much dignity. So many of her friends lived like that then, lonely, no money, scant hope, grabbing and seizing, clinging and clutching, waiting for their chance in a world where men chose, assembled, worked out the scheme and set the pace. She swore that if she ever had children of her own, she would make anything possible. No matter what they wanted to do she would put all her power an
d influence behind them. At DOTS, where she found the job that saved her, she watches so many unlikely kids pushed by ambitious parents, encouraged, supported. But every so often one comes along, that special child comes along, and Caroline wants to puff them off the flat of her hand like a thistledown, wishing with her eyes squeezed tight and whispering, ‘Go! Fly! Make it to the stars. Make it… Make it, for me!’
The big time beckoned when William Moore, a stiff old man in a swivel chair, asked her to do an audition for a part in a television play which was topical and daring. ‘You’ll get it, you’re perfect for it. He likes you,’ the bespectacled secretary said. She was pregnant then, only just pregnant with Vanessa, two years married to Robin who was rising, a budding star in his own right, already working for the BBC. A kinder version of Daddy, he wanted to take care of her. Caroline was in love. Her romantic ideas about love didn’t fit into this new experience with its subtle sickening excitements, its sensations of hunger and thirst. The thing crept into her body, interfered with her breathing and poured a delicious and dreadful fever into her blood. Caroline’s ambition turned soft just when it ought to have turned hard as stone, and she never found that strange, dauntless self-confidence again—she never, ever found it again.
‘How can you possibly risk your child for the sake of your own selfish ambition,’ carped Isobel. ‘Haven’t you got enough?’
Risk? What risk? So Caroline, when offered the part, accepted it gladly.
Robin stayed silent.
She can’t bear to think about that any more.
If only her mind was clearer, if only she could think. There must be something she can say or do to persuade them to let her out of here. What promises can she make… what do they want to hear?
Owlishly, stupidly, she stares through the glass while her unclear mind continues its racing. ‘And what if I tell you that I’ve learned my lesson, that this action of yours has shocked me so much that things are bound to be different, that after these three days nothing can possibly stay as it was.’
Mothertime Page 18
