I try to suggest, ‘Darling, all that you’re confronting them with is you.’
Her eyes flick to the jumper, ‘Do you need another jumper?’
‘No, I don’t need …’ but this is ridiculous, I stop, switch back on my track, ‘Surely there are other ways …’
She looks into the teapot, announces grandly, ‘I’m not discussing tactics with you.’
‘Can’t you work on them from the inside or something?’
She is pouring my cup. ‘Oh, very valiant, Mother.’
I splash milk into hers, muttering, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that this was about being valiant?
‘Look,’ she pushes mine towards me, ‘you’re having a go at the wrong person. Go and have a go at Mr Gray.’
So I try to explain, ‘I’m not having-a-go, Sylvie …’
She returns to her elbows, but lightly, and looks directly into my eyes. ‘Let me guess: this is for my own good.’
‘Well, yes …’
‘Listen,’ she gives up, starts on her own cup, ‘that school pushed me to this.’
I smile, but brittle, ‘Funny how the only push that that school gives everyone else is to college or university.’ I have strayed into another well-worn dispute.
On cue, without even looking up, she counters, ‘I’ve told you, I’m not going to college-or-university.’
Quickly back to the point: ‘Can’t you just apologize to Mr Gray?’ I know that people say that I am too easy on Sylvie: but I say that I want an easy life. And, anyway, what is the point of being hard?
She tells me, ‘No.’
‘Just for having said “fuck”?’ I would never, usually, say the word; but there is no point in euphemism, she tends not to respect euphemism.
But not even a smile, or a peep of a smile, from her. ‘No. I meant every word.’
I implore, ‘Sylvie …’
And suddenly she flares, ‘It would make no difference, he hates me.’
I soothe, ‘He doesn’t hate you, darling; no one hates you.’ I reach for the tin of biscuits, a Christmas present from Auntie Sarah, and ponder the lid: Circumstances may cause us to vary the assortment from that illustrated.
She remains fierce, ‘He does hate me.’
Sometimes I suspect that she wants to think that people hate her. I cast around and come up with, ‘He has a very difficult job to do – which he can’t do if you’re occupying his office.’ I try to tweek a smile from her with my own: ‘Hmm?’ See?
But she is blind to this, she is off: ‘Why is everyone on at me, all the time? Why did you have to mention university again, just now?’
‘I didn’t:
‘You did.’
‘When?’
‘Just now.’
And suddenly I remember. ‘Oh, yes. I’m sorry.’
She yelps, ‘You’re not sorry.’
Which, of course, is true. I simply said that I was sorry, without thinking. Now I can think no further than, ‘Look, we have to decide what to do about Mr Gray, but for now I’m rather tired, so I’m going to have a bath.’
When I reach the door, she pipes, ‘I mean, why should I go to university?’
I can see that a fresh pile of junk mail has landed in the hallway. ‘Well, why not?’
Behind me, she is reasoning, ‘I mean, I could go, easily’
‘Well then.’
Darkly, she says, ‘That’s not a reason.’
‘Oh, Sylvie …’ I give up on my bath, momentarily, to explain, ‘I simply want you to be happy.’
This seems to cause her to have trouble with a mouthful of tea, and to slam her cup on to the table. ‘And the way to be happy is to read more books?’
‘It’ll be different from school.’ Is this true? And how do I know? ‘And, anyway, is work fun?’
She scowls, mutters, ‘You seem to think so.’
‘Yes, well, but we’re very different.’ She cannot possibly argue with this.
But she looks at me, and I do not know what the look says, yes or no. Then she tries, ‘You didn’t go away to college: so, were you happy?’ There is more than a hint of a challenge in this. But then, everything comes as a challenge, from her. I think that the question is genuine, that she wants an answer.
And I would like to answer, but how?
‘I think so.’
Because looking back, scanning speedily, all that comes to mind is facts; well, no, not facts, but friends, family, jobs, homes, holidays, even clothes. People and places and objects, rather than states of mind and emotions. From a distance, all states of mind and emotions seem like one another: perhaps there are only so many, and I am old enough to have had them all.
‘My problem, as you know, was that I married badly.’
She concedes with a sort of swoon of her eyebrows: unfortunately, she knows how badly, from her lifetime of access visits.
‘Anyway,’ I try to finish convincingly, ‘life was different, in those days: we expected less.’
And instantly I doubt the truth of this: certainly I expected less; but there were some girls, like Caroline Jacobs and Beth Stanford in my class, and those women who have become Sylvie’s teachers, who aimed further.
Sylvie says, ‘Perhaps you expected more, if you expected a life in the home to be enough.’
I have never thought of it that way. But this is how it is with Sylvie: some people tell me that she thinks too much of herself, by which they mean that she thinks too little of them, but at least she thinks.
She seems to want to say no more, so I fill the silence: ‘I was never very bookish, I liked a laugh.’ And I bracket an aside with a nervous laugh: ‘Still do, of course.’
She is drawing lines with a fingertip in the condensation on the milk bottle.
I continue, ‘I was never the type for university.’ And for no particular reason, I laugh again. But she tuts, loudly. I do not know why, perhaps she has a point of view on this, one of those points of view of hers, one of the many: perhaps she thinks that we are all the type for university, that university is not for a certain type. A contradiction in terms, surely, because university is for those who are special. And I was never special. Which was fine by me. ‘I would never have wanted to wear one of those black things on my head, black has always tended to bring out my bags.’
She fails to laugh in return. In fact, she looks so baffled that I have to examine the pack of toothpaste on top of the mound of shopping: Children should use a pea-sized amount and be supervised.
How was my childhood? Thinking back, my childhood seems to have been about my brother. He is all that I remember of my childhood, perhaps because he was bigger than me. When I was small, I did everything that he said. And when he grew up and spent less time with me, I did very little. I had friends, of course; still have them, still have many of them. He went away to college. Geography. And now he is a teacher, which is how I know that Mr Gray’s job is so difficult. I never considered that education was for me, but was this because I was a girl, or younger, or just me? How do I know? Why should I care, now? My mother worked in a nursery school and my father was a proofreader, they believed in education, never said or implied that education was not for me. I think that they would have been happy for me to continue. Happier, I am sure, than they were for me to marry Bernie. Bernie was my mistake, my only mistake.
Suddenly, she speaks: ‘I might have a baby.’ And now she looks up, into my eyes, as if there was a question somewhere in these words.
I hurry to reassure her, ‘You have all the time in the world for babies,’ and explain, ‘I suppose that what I want is for you to have all the options, to keep your options open.’
But in the same wide-eyed, wondering way, she says, ‘To have a baby seems quite a nice option.’
And, ridiculously, I repeat, as if it is a refrain from a lullaby, ‘All the time in the world.’
But she continues, ‘Compared,’ and she has turned fierce, ‘compared to a life of being graded’
I laugh this off: �
�You wait, because when you have a baby, your health visitor is only too happy to do the honours, believe me.’
But which, from her look, she fails to do. Then she recovers her composure and tells me, urges, ‘I want to be a real person’
‘Oh, you’re most definitely that.’
Then she repeats, ‘I might have a baby.’
Suddenly, I see that this is not necessarily a theoretical discussion.
She continues, ‘I mean, I could.’
Instinct sits me down, makes me voice the question: ‘Are you pregnant?’
‘No!’ But now her fierce features flatten into calmness. ‘All I’m saying is that I could have a baby, if I choose.’
‘Choose? Why do I feel that she is threatening me? My gaze catches on her hand, on the tabletop: the bones of her little hand, tinder and marbles tied in muslin.
‘I’m sixteen,’ she is petulant.
I counter, ‘Barely. Do you know how to be careful?’ Inexplicably, I am angry with her. This is not how I am supposed to feel, how I planned to feel; this is quite simply not me. Anger achieves nothing. And now, suddenly, I am so much more worse: ‘You probably don’t believe in contraception, do you? Something to do with animals, with tests, or something.’
She says, ‘That’s ridiculous.’
Or I think that this is what she said, but I am too busy saying, ‘And as for abortion.’
‘Ah, well, yes,’ she says, now you’re talking.
Which stops me in my tracks.
She leans forward, presses down onto her forearms; her upper ribs ripple like piano keys. ‘I’m not altogether happy with the thought of abortion.’
Not altogether happy? with the thought of?
‘Well, don’t think, then; it’s not something that you think about, it’s something that you need to do, and let’s hope that you –’
‘– I mean, not these days,’ she has stopped listening to me.
So I stress, ‘Women died.’
But her eyes find mine and she says, ‘And nowadays babies die.’ This is not said fervently, but faintly, more like a question. And now she tries, ‘Look, I’m not saying …’ and tries again, ‘but these days women aren’t dependent …’ She stops suddenly, shrugs: do you see?
I do not know, I do not know. As usual, she has run rings around me. I squeeze shut my eyes, press my fingertips on to my temples. Slowly, I decide, ‘I should have a word with Dunc.’ Her boyfriend.
She squeaks, ‘Leave Dunc out of this! He has nothing to do with this.’
‘Oh, so if you decide to have your baby, then you’re going to go for self-insemination, are you?’
Thin-lipped, she merely manages, ‘God, you’re disgusting.’ But then she accelerates into, ‘You don’t own me, you’re like some medieval …’ before she flusters, fails, falls into silence.
I am curious. ‘Medieval what?’
‘Medieval father.’ All the insult came with father.
‘I have something to tell you.’ There: done.
For years, I have had something to tell her. For her whole life. Now she has forced my hand.
‘Yes?’ Now she is curious, but she remains arch.
I am so relieved to have broached the subject that I have forgotten that I have not actually told her. I ease myself in: ‘Something about your father.’
Her eyes slide away. ‘Oh, him.’
This is a help, because I can say, ‘No, not him; I mean, he’s not your father.’ There: said. I exhale, but unfortunately feel full of air, blown.
Her eyes slide back to mine. She wonders, ‘My father’s not my father,’ without conviction. She is eyeing me with suspicion, she suspects that I am senile.
‘Biologically speaking,’ I confirm, ‘someone else is your father.’
‘Who?’ she asks, levelly.
Which takes me by surprise. ‘Who?’
‘Yes, who?’
‘You want to know who?’ And not how it happened, or whether anyone knows?
‘Yes, I want to know who.’ Her face has become a tough little shell, a husk; her eyes, two marks; her mouth, a mere fracture. ‘What did you think that I’d want to know?’ And, quietly, she urges, ‘Who.’
How do I answer? Because the name will mean nothing to her. ‘Well, you don’t know him.’
‘Well, who is he, then?’ But I can see that this – you don’t know him – did mean something to her: she had been thinking of the men who were around when she was a child, who were our friends – her Uncles Vic and John and Len and the others – she had been thinking of them as possible candidates.
Horrified, I cannot stop myself, ‘You thought Uncle Vic or Uncle John – ?’
Suddenly she is screaming, ‘Well, I don’t know what to think, do I? Because you’re not telling me.’ Her hands are moving in the air, she is throwing off fury like a Catherine wheel. ‘What do you mean, I don’t know him? Did you know him? It’s a simple enough question, surely. Or was it the milkman or someone?’
I collect myself, stand up, back off. ‘Now you’re trivializing this.’
She fails to let up, and, indeed, seems to rise in her chair, to follow me: ‘Me? You found it so trivial that you managed to overlook it for sixteen years’
‘Quite the contrary,’ which, if she had stopped to think, if she had tried to be fair, she would have realized.
Now she slows down, but only for sarcasm: ‘I mean, why tell me now? In fact, why don’t we pretend that the last few minutes never happened, and slip back into blissful ignorance?’
Glancing at the bottle of tonic in my jumble of shopping, my gaze skids over the small print on the label: Open away from people and fragile objects. I push on: ‘I’m telling you for a reason.’
She puffs, ‘Oh, a reason: other than the reason that I have a right to know my own father, you mean?’
‘He had a gene.’
This freezes her. Then, ‘What?’ slaps the stony silence.
I know that she does not mean anything like, What is a gene? She is a clever girl, she knows about genes, knows what this means.
‘If you’re going to have children, you should know about the gene.’
Without moving a muscle, not even of her mouth, she is hurrying me: ‘Which gene?’
I will have to say the words, One of his children: words which I have never said aloud.
‘One of his children had cystic fibrosis.’ Then I rush to reassure her, ‘One of his three children.’ Only one.
She echoes, ‘Cystic fibrosis,’ cluelessly.
‘Chest, mainly. Infections.’
Her eyes open up to me in a way that I have not seen for years: suddenly, once again, I am the source of all wisdom. ‘Bad?’
And I have so often wondered: did she survive, did his little girl survive? Anya. His children – Lucy, Ed, Anya – who are no longer children; who, by now, will be, should be, adults, nearly as old as we were when Sylvie was conceived.
‘Yes, quite bad,’ really quite bad; but I can push us on into the future: ‘but the prospects are much better nowadays.’
But my reassurance fails to reach her, I can see no trace of it in her eyes. ‘Do people die?’
And I have to concede defeat. ‘Eventually, usually, yes.’
She is homing in. ‘How eventually?’
I do not know, I have to become more vague, ‘Twenties? Thirties?’ Before falling back on, ‘But the outlook is improving.’
Suddenly she moves, to hook her hair behind an ear, ready for business. ‘And you don’t think that I have this disease?’
So, she has listened; she understands that this is not about her but about her children. ‘You don’t have; we would know.’
‘Not even slightly? Are you sure?’
I almost laugh, because this is absurd: ‘You think that I haven’t spent your whole life watching for the slightest sign?’ Quietly triumphant, I tell her, ‘You’ve never even had a cough, you must be the only child in the world who has never had a cough.’ My miracle child.
But she is somewhere else, on another track: ‘And you still had me? You know I could have this cystic fibrosis, but you still had me, you took a chance?’
I can tell that she is not trying to make a point, to hark back to our earlier dispute; she is merely thinking aloud. But, of course, in those days, I would have had no choice: she has failed to realize this, and I swallow my shock at her naïvety. Would a choice have made any difference? How do I know, how can I know, now? ‘It’s chest infections, darling, not …’ but I stop myself from trying to compile a catalogue of birth defects. ‘Anyway, I didn’t know: I knew that his little girl had this disease, but I didn’t know that it was hereditary, not for years, not until I read something, once.’
Once? How many times, in the end? I remember the moment when I first saw the words: Sylvie was framed in the doorway, on the patio in her pyjamas in the early summer dusk, playing with a doll. In front of me, on the coffee table, I had a cup of milky coffee, a Nice biscuit bridging the saucer. Flopped in my lap, a women’s magazine, the True Life Story patched with photos of a mother and her two daughters, three women in sequence, the whole family displayed like dismantled Russian dolls. On the patio, Sylvie’s voice bubbled low in the thick air, in the dregs of the day; she was telling off her doll: Naughty … naughty … She was relishing this word, bowed over the doll, intimate, and full of admiration. Slowly, my moment extended to the biscuit, which was not quite as crisp as it should have been, and deliciously so: fractionally slow to yield to my front teeth; instantly sticky in my mouth. Then I started on the story: Doreen Jenkins’ daughter Samantha has cystic fibrosis, a disease which runs in families … My head jerked up, punched back into the leatherette of the sofa. Runs in families. There, in front of me, cross-legged on the dim crazy paving, was my family: Sylvie, as clean and constant as a night-light.
I knew that there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing. But, sitting there, I held my breath and listened, tried to track her breaths: I lay in wait for any shudder of phlegm, for any cold silver tinkle down in her tubes. I cringed in anticipation of the cough which she would shoot up into the falling darkness. The cough which would give her away. But nothing. As usual. Nothing but the relentless turning of air through those tough lungs. Then, suddenly she had scampered to her feet, her dry soles struck on the stones. I looked away from her eyes, looked down, back to the story. And if I had not read on, I would never have known. Because I knew nothing of genes, of how they can lie hidden; how a bad gene nestles with normal genes, only to be teased out, later, by an accomplice, to make a mark on another generation. I read on, and learned that Doreen Jenkins’ other daughter did not have the disease, but could not be sure that her own children would be born healthy. Odd, now, to think that if Doreen Jenkins had not had the daughter who was dying, then I would not have realized the danger in my own.
Tenterhooks Page 18
