Meadowland

by Alison Giles

  She’d heard about the break-in, Mother was saying, first from young Jane Simpson who’d called in to collect the charity collection envelopes she, Mother, now couldn’t of course distribute, and then again from the girl at the hairdresser’s when she’d rung to make an appointment. ‘For tomorrow morning,’ the recollection reminded her. ‘If you can get me down there.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ I assured her.

  And we did. Afterwards I drove her, splendidly coiffed, to a local beauty spot where we lunched, amid much solicitous concern from the manager and several waitresses as they assisted her to a table, at the lakeside restaurant there.

  It was, yet again, over Sunday lunch that Mother renewed her probing. It wasn’t until some time later that it occurred to me that, on each occasion, the prospect of my imminent departure might, in one way or another, have determined the timing.

  Her approach was subtle to start with. ‘It is so good of you to come down – I don’t know how I’d have managed without you.’

  I accepted her appreciation at face value.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, reaching for the salt, ‘I realise you’d rather be with … Andrew.’

  ‘No problem. He understands.’ What else was I supposed to say? I could hardly deny it.

  Her tone sharpened just a shade; her smile remained, though, deceptively disarming. ‘You should have invited him down for the day’

  ‘Mother, I’ve explained—’

  ‘You haven’t explained a thing.’ Her eyes totally negated, now, the smile she was holding firmly in place.

  I sliced into a roast potato. ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘And what can those be, pray?’ I didn’t need to look up to be aware of the accusing stare directed at me.

  When I didn’t answer, her patience snapped. ‘This is just what I went through with your father. I knew something was up. I waited and waited. At least when he eventually admitted it, I knew where I was. Anything is better than not knowing.’ It wasn’t until later that I recognised the irony of her remark.

  ‘But what I do, my relationships, don’t affect you in the same way.’ Plausible enough but – as I was only too well aware – on this occasion untrue. I pushed food around my plate.

  Mother calmed her voice. ‘Just give me one good reason, then, why you can’t be honest with me.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Dejected; helpless.

  ‘Then tell me.’

  She’d done it again. Pushed my back up against the wall.

  I squirmed. ‘You’d be hurt.’

  I forced myself to raise my eyes. She was staring at me, lips pursed in cynical disbelief.

  I took a deep breath. ‘OK, then; judge for yourself.’ I was on a rollercoaster. It was cresting the ride. I plunged. ‘Because he’s a friend of Flora’s.’

  It was a different sort of disbelief that her face registered. It transformed into bewilderment; then incomprehension.

  ‘Of Flora’s?’

  Maybe I should have got up, put an arm round her, attempted to comfort her, reassure her. But I was rooted to my chair.

  ‘How,’ she enquired in a tightly controlled voice that chilled me, ‘do you come to know Flora? I take it you have met her, then? This isn’t just some extraordinary coincidence?’

  I nodded. Miserably. Where was all that anger at her rôle in everything? Her coldness was like ice on a flame. It was my disloyalty – nothing else – that stared me in the face.

  I had to get away. Yet even as I experienced the urge, my practicality asserted itself. I reached for the plates. ‘I’ll clear these,’ I said.

  As I did so, and made coffee for her, the questions battered me: ‘When did you meet her; how did you meet her; so is that where you’ve been spending your time?’ I answered them, shortly, to the point. By the time she’d finished she had all the factual details.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’ve left a tray set out for your supper. Can you manage?’

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to.’

  Was that what she’d said to Father? Wasn’t that what she’d done? Managed. How had he felt? What did I feel?

  I went upstairs to collect my things. When I came down she was standing, propped on her crutches, at the foot of the stairs. ‘You do realise,’ she said, freezing me mid-flight, ‘that it’s because of you that your father deserted me.’

  The exaggeration of his actions hardly registered. ‘Because of me?’ I stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  What was she going to say? What sin had I committed? Had Father hated me after all? I reached out for the banister rail.

  ‘You tore me apart when you were born. Literally. You have no idea … Hardly surprising –’ she looked at me scornfully – ‘I couldn’t have any more children. But your father always wanted a son. I couldn’t give him that.’ She glared. ‘Things were never the same between us again. He never forgave me.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’m sure it’s not true. He’d never have held it against you. He wasn’t like that.’ I sank down on the stairs. ‘And even if it were, it’s not fair to blame me.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you –’ cold reason – ‘just telling you. What I don’t understand –’ and now her voice rose – ‘is how, after all I’ve gone through for you, you could do this to me.’

  ‘Do what? What is it I’ve done? Except want to love you both.’ Tears were streaming down my face.

  ‘Love us both!’ Her lip curled. ‘You never loved me. Loved your father, maybe. Smarmed up to him. And he encouraged it. Well, you were the only one – his baby.’ She swung herself round on her sticks, swaying.

  Automatically I leapt up, and down the last few stairs to steady her. She shook my arm away and lurched towards the sitting room, leaving me standing.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, surprised at the control in my voice, ‘it would be better if you asked Leah to come over next weekend.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I mustn’t keep you from Andrew.’ Her words floated over her shoulder as she negotiated the doorway.

  The heavy thud of rubber ferrules across the carpet preceded a pause and then the sigh of cushions as she sank down.

  I left, clicking the front door quietly behind me.

  I wanted to stop at the end of the Avenue, but forced myself instead to drive on for several streets before pulling the car in to the kerb. I rested my arms on the steering wheel and let my head fall forward on to them.

  What a mess. What a bloody awful mess.

  CHAPTER 19

  I’m not sure at what point I decided, rather than take the A3, to drive via Epsom.

  Aunt Leah took one look at my face when she opened the door, and pulled me inside.

  I skirted round suitcases in the hall.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘we’ve only just got back.’

  I wasn’t up to apologising for the intrusion.

  I followed her through and allowed her to steer me to an armchair. ‘Tea, Harold, please,’ she called; and I heard the sounds of movement from the direction of the kitchen.

  Leah crossed the room to close the patio doors. A sparrow, pecking at insects on the crazy paving beyond them, fluttered anxiously away at the disturbance. She returned and sat down opposite me, leaning forward. ‘I’ve just had your mother on the phone,’ she said, satisfied I’d had time to settle, ‘so I’ve an idea what this is all about.’

  I remembered odd occasions as a child when I’d run to Auntie Leah for sympathy. She’d always been far less reserved than my mother. ‘You’re the only person I can talk to,’ I said – though now it wasn’t just her manner but how much she already knew that made it possible.

  ‘It’s all to do with your father and this … other woman, isn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  Leah reached beneath a side table and handed over a box of tissues. ‘Looks like you could do with a good cry. Go ahead; you’ll feel much better.’

  Harold appeared with a tray. I raised a smudged face and gave him a watery smile. He patted my shoulder
and retreated, waved out of the room by Leah.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell her,’ I hiccoughed at last.

  ‘That you’ve been in touch with Flora?’ She countered my surprise: ‘It’s all right. Your mother’s just poured it out to me.’

  I smiled sheepishly. ‘I’m sorry. Now you’ve got me doing the same thing.’

  She passed me a cup of strong tea. ‘I must say, it might have been better if you hadn’t told her.’

  ‘I tried not to. But she kept on and on at me. About Andrew.’ I let it all come out – the main facts anyway.

  ‘Well, you can’t really expect her to like it, can you?’ Leah observed when I’d told the tale.

  ‘No, of course not. But it’s not fair of her to blame me. I mean for Father going off with Flora in the first place.’

  Leah frowned. ‘How do you mean …?’

  ‘She said my father wanted more children, a son; that he never forgave her … that’s why … But it’s hardly my fault she wasn’t able to.’ I rushed on. ‘Well, in a way it is of course if –’ I quoted her – ‘I tore her apart—’

  ‘Is that what she said: that she couldn’t have more children?’

  I nodded.

  Leah put out a hand and touched my knee. ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why she said it, but I can’t let you go on believing it. You weren’t an easy birth by all accounts. Though –’ her face creased in memory – ‘no worse than my first one.’

  ‘Your first one?’ I did a double take.

  ‘I had a stillborn little boy before Elspeth.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ Then, as the thought occurred to me: ‘Does Elspeth?’

  ‘Oh yes. Although we don’t dwell on it. We were so thankful when she arrived – after all the miscarriages as well.’

  ‘I see.’ I looked at my aunt with fresh eyes. ‘I’d no idea you’d been through all that.’

  She looked reflective. ‘We’d have liked at least one more. Girl or boy, it wouldn’t have mattered; but then when I lost another at three months, well, we decided to call it a day.’ Abruptly she straightened up. ‘But that’s our story, not hers.’

  ‘So it’s not true …’ I prompted.

  ‘Of course not.’ She sounded impatient; or cross; or both. ‘She didn’t have a particularly easy time when you were born, but –’ she hesitated – ‘well, there was no medical reason that I know of why she shouldn’t have had another half-dozen.’

  ‘So why –’ I could hear the hint of a wail in my voice – ‘is she saying there was?’

  Leah’s face expressed concern. Then she rose. ‘I’d better go and see what Harold’s up to; get him to take those cases upstairs. You stay there; pour yourself another cup of tea and relax.’

  I heard her chatting to him, the sounds of heavy objects being heaved up the stairs. I wandered over to the piano, an upright above which hung a selection of family photographs. Idly I lifted the lid, picked out a one-fingered tune: ‘Oranges and Lemons’. I’d had lessons once but had never mastered the left hand.

  Leah reappeared. She smiled. ‘Long time since that’s been played. We got it for Elspeth …’ She sat down. ‘How are you feeling now? Better?’

  ‘Yes thanks.’

  Harold poked his head round the door. ‘I’m just popping down to the garden centre.’

  Leah shook her head as the door banged. ‘Your uncle and his plants. I don’t know – even when he’s on holiday he’s thinking about them.’

  ‘How was your holiday?’

  She launched into the account I’d invited.

  ‘So what,’ I pleaded, returning – when that and various other small-talk subjects had been exhausted – to what was uppermost in my mind, ‘am I going to do about Mother?’

  ‘Let it be. She’s upset; you can’t be surprised.’ Leah patted my knee again. ‘Give it time. She’ll come round; after all, she doesn’t want to lose you.’

  I waited for Harold to return before saying my goodbyes. I reached across the armful of plant pots he was emptying out of the boot and pecked his cheek. Leah reassured me about Mother. ‘Don’t you worry about next weekend. I’ll see she’s all right.’

  It was still only early evening when I got back to the flat. I padded around, restless; not wanting to think about the day’s events. The phone, reclining white and silent on the inlaid occasional table I’d picked up in a local antique shop, seemed almost sepulchral – as though any jerk into life could only herald ghosts from the past. Only common-sense restraint prevented me lifting the receiver and laying it to one side.

  Determined to occupy myself at least physically, I remembered the crocheted blanket I’d rescued and promised myself I’d darn. So far I’d only made token attempts. Now seemed as good a time as any to tackle the task in earnest. It was fiddly; it might even distract my mind.

  So many colours. As I’d built it up all those years ago from a central violet square, the remnants of wool I’d scrounged had at first each completed at least one row of the expanding rounds. But as the blanket grew, the lengths available had forced a more haphazard patterning – until the border; for which, I recalled, I had sacrificed the opportunity to add the latest pop music tape to my collection, purchasing instead with my pocket money two huge balls. Bright turquoise. A cheerful colour.

  I set to with needle and patience. The concentration required did at least calm me. Mother had been hurt, I reminded myself. She was angry and she’d been lashing out. I secured an end and snipped. That was all there was to it. Forget it. I picked up a yellow strand and threaded it, stifling the ‘yes, buts’, the subsidiary questions; repeated my mantra: ‘she was hurt … forget it’. It worked – or seemed to.

  But the act of breaking off to investigate the fridge allowed wider-ranging thoughts to sneak back. Why was she so angry; angrier, as far as I could tell, than she had been with Father? And why blame me for something which – even if it were true – I could hardly be held responsible?

  I did my best to push the questions aside; made myself a sandwich – packet ham and coleslaw; munched an apple. Thoughts continued to intrude. Did she feel guilty for not giving Father more children? Why Father; why not herself too? Didn’t mothers want children? And, if Leah was right and she could have had more, why didn’t she?

  I threw the core, still with half the fruit on it, in the bin. What did she mean by ‘all she’d done’ for me? What about all I’d done for her – all that support I’d given her, all that loyalty? And, yes, I had shown her both. At the expense of Father. I hadn’t been allowed to love him. Not since Flora came on the scene anyway. Until then I had. Was she referring to those contented early years when she accused me of ‘smarming up’ to him; the way she’d said it … it was almost as though she were … well, jealous. Of me? Ridiculous!

  Once again I found myself pacing, aimlessly tidying books, plumping cushions, eventually staring out of the kitchen window into the darkness, eerie under a sky yellowed by the glow of street lamps. Turning abruptly, I knocked a bowl from the sill. Grateful that at least it hadn’t broken, I scrabbled on the floor, retrieving oddments for which it served as a receptacle. Among them I recognised Elspeth’s button. I’d forgotten about it. Some time I’d ring her. Andrew too. But not tonight.

  A headache, threatening all evening and gradually increasing from a nagging in my temples to an all-over throb, drove me to give in to an early night. I swallowed a paracetamol and tried to deaden the pain in the softness of the pillow. After a while the analgesic took effect and I fell asleep.

  My dreams were the usual muddle. At one point I discovered myself on a boat – Leo and Clare’s maybe? – bucking through heavy seas. At first there were others on board – who? – then suddenly they were gone and I was struggling with the helm, sails billowing out of control. Cliffs appeared on the port side; my earlier companions were strolling along them. I waved frantically but they ignored me. I was approaching rocks …

  I shook myself awake, went to the loo, and searche
d out a glass of orange before returning to bed. This time, Mother – or was it Flora? – was kneeling by a flower-bed, trowel in hand, attending to a small plant. I stood behind her, watching.

  I refused to allow my personal problems to accompany me to work. I dressed in my smartest outfit – the suit I’d worn, as it happened, to go and see Flora that first time – and spent time perfecting my make-up. I strode, rather than walked, into the office, and settled down with determination to be the efficient professional I was. Amazing what it did for my morale. Here at least I knew what I was doing.

  I managed to summon up a similar confidence when I spoke to Andrew in the evening. ‘Good news,’ I told him. ‘Leah’s agreed to play nurse next weekend.’

  ‘Great. How’s she doing, by the way?’ He meant Mother.

  ‘Fine,’ I said airily. I thought back to our lunch by the lake and regaled him with that. ‘Surrounded by fussing staff – she was in her element.’

  And how! I remembered, cynically now, the way she’d described her wedding – she the centre of attention, the princess. Yet so much for the happy-ever-after: her prince had let her down. But who ever spared a thought for him; except maybe the fairy godmother? Flora? The analogy skewed tradition. I brushed my ruminations aside – life, I was realising, didn’t fall into neat, convenient patterns.

  Later I picked up the blanket from the chair on which I’d abandoned it the previous evening and sewed in a few more ends.

  I debated for several days whether or not to ring Mother. In the end I decided to. The ringing tone seemed to go on for ever before she answered.

  ‘How are you?’ I tried to make my voice normal.

  ‘As well as can be expected.’ End of reply. Silence frosted down the line at me.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Leah. She says she’ll pop over on Saturday, and Sunday as well if necessary. Check if you need anything.’