Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  The life I led inside my house also puzzled her. Much of my time was spent cooking and she observed this with something close to astonishment. Cooking for her had always been a burden, a necessary daily ritual with little pleasure in it. The family had to eat, the meals had to be cooked and it was such a nuisance thinking what to have (though what we had was dictated by what day of the week it was, so rigid were the culinary rules). But I had cookery books, mostly Elizabeth David’s, and I’d pore over them and experiment. I had a sunny, pretty kitchen too, a place it was pleasant to be in and not the ugly, cold, ill-equipped slot she’d wedged herself into most of her cooking life. She watched as I chopped vegetables she’d never heard of, still not obtainable in Carlisle then, and flung the wine and herbs around – she saw me enjoying myself, whereas to her all food preparation had been not just a chore but a constant anxiety. I’d cheerfully break six eggs into a bowl and watch her gasp, memories of dried egg filling her head. ‘This must cost a fortune,’ she’d say, slightly accusingly, slightly disapproving of money being spent on food in this way. There was no adequate answer to that. Compared with what she’d had to spend on food then, I did spend a fortune.

  We began to drink wine with our meals after we came back from the Algarve and my mother was not pleased. The too-often-heard words ‘God, I could do with a drink’, alarmed her even though she saw we bore no ill-effects. We didn’t stagger about as though we’d just come out of the Horse and Farrier in Raffles. Knowing her horror of drink, all drink, and pubs, it was wicked of us to trick her into going into one without her being aware of it. No pubs in Carlisle had gardens then and certainly no outrageous objects such as attractive benches and tables and umbrellas, so when we walked across the Heath and went into the garden of the Spaniards by the back way she was charmed. She was quite happy to sit with her glass of tonic water and watch the children have their orange juice and us our white wine. There were no drunken louts to spoil her enjoyment (not when we were there anyway) and a whole new complexion was put on going to a pub. If pubs had gardens like this, if she could sit under a rose trellis, if everything was civilized and orderly, then she was prepared to relax. My father, who had long since ‘come round’, and also came to stay, hated the Spaniards and other pubs like it. Women and children shouldn’t be in pubs. Pubs shouldn’t be made into play-pens, it ruined them. They were places for men only, for serious drinking.

  The part of my life my mother liked best was the part similar to her own as a young wife. I met my children out of school, always. I took them there, or Hunter did, and I met them and it was such a relief to her to light on this similarity when everything else about how I lived seemed so different. She’d always taken and met me until she was rejected – every day I’d come out of school, up to the age of eight, absolutely secure in the knowledge my mother would be there, holding out a raincoat if it was wet, standing patiently however cold it was. I loved the sight of her. I’d fly into her arms and hug her. And now I did the same as she had done and she came with me and watched my own children recognize and rush to me. It was what mothers were for and in spite of my fancy ways in other respects I was bowing to breeding and convention. It was the same when I spent the afternoon on the Heath before the children were at school. She liked me to take them to feed the ducks or play in the sandpit. She approved of these routines and yet the evidence that I was being at these times the kind of mother she had been didn’t create any real harmony between us.

  Often, she was bored, if approving, the boredom that came from being bored with herself. Once, as we were sitting on a bench at the swings watching the children play, I said I’d just go over to the slide and say hello to a friend I’d seen putting her child on it. ‘What?’ my mother said, quite sharply for her, ‘and leave me sitting here like a pot slop?’ I laughed – it was such an odd expression, I didn’t even know what a pot slop was – and sat down again saying fine, it didn’t matter, I’d talk to my friend later. After a while my mother said she was sorry, she didn’t know what had got into her and that of course I should speak to my friend. So I did, and brought her over, and introduced her to my mother, who was charming and smiled and chatted and gave every appearance of being totally happy and comfortable. But it was a mirage, the apparent case, the mother-and-daughter closeness, the united front. We weren’t united. We were miles and miles apart in thought and feeling while caring deeply for each other. We needed the children to bind us together. As long as they were demanding our attention real communication was avoided. Once they were in bed my mother didn’t know what to do. We ate, we chatted, but she remained expectant somehow and as usual I didn’t know either precisely what her expectations were, or how to satisfy them. I wanted to read and knew she would resent this. The best solution, though obviously it wasn’t one that could happen every night, was to take her to the theatre or to see a film. She adored the musical Oliver! and came home transformed by the excitement of her pleasure, and when we saw the film A Man for All Seasons she was so absorbed she didn’t even notice that the man next to us had had a heart attack, in spite of the commotion this caused. But the evenings at home were flat. I wondered what she’d done with her own mother in that tiny house in Raffles. How had they spent their evenings together? She was over the age her mother had been when she died and I was younger than she had been at that period when her mother lived with her, but I wondered if she and Margaret Ann had been happily intimate together and that was what she had expected and not got from her own daughter. Somehow, I doubted it.

  But there were no discussions about this, philosophical or otherwise. We talked children, children, children and, if not children, health. I’d never thought of my mother as unhealthy, except for her eye trouble, but suddenly during these weeks when she stayed with us I realized she was not fit. She was only five foot four but she weighed eleven stone. I was five foot eight but weighed nine stone. She had become plump, more than plump, fat, and it made her breathless carrying that weight. She’d never taken any real exercise in her life but was under the impression that the housework she did plus going to and from the shops and church amounted to all the exercise she needed. Good heavens, who had spare energy for exercise, it was ridiculous. She’d never played any kind of game, not even as a young unmarried woman, though in the twenties there was such a vogue for tennis and cycling and exercise classes with music. Games were a luxury and not one she envied. I hate games myself, all games, just a waste of good reading time, but on the other hand I’d always gone fell-walking and swimming and at one time was a cycling fanatic. I saw that compared with my mother I was extremely fit and always had been. Now she was aggrieved and bewildered by her own weight gain and kept saying she didn’t understand it, that she didn’t eat much. But it was easy to understand. She wasn’t expending anything like the energy she had once done now she was in her easy-to-look-after bungalow and yet she was eating the same amount of food and the same kind – cakes, scones, biscuits, puddings and still potatoes with main meals. She had the money now to indulge her taste for pastries and cream and Cumberland rum butter and all the fattening things. She didn’t like fruit, except for grapes, and wasn’t keen on salads or any vegetable except cauliflower. Her tea was always sugared and so was her cocoa, heavily. Any suggestion she should diet made her miserable. The only gesture towards dieting she made was to give up the boxes of Terry’s All Gold chocolates she loved. The weight built up and so did her blood pressure and that finally forced her to go to see her GP.

  Her doctor was fat himself and quite jovial about her weight. He told her to cut down on sweet things but didn’t give her any specific advice about diet in general. She came away with the feeling nothing could be done about her weight and angry at the doctor’s joke about joining a keep fit class. She was mortified at the very thought – at her age, the very idea.

  Her first stroke was no real surprise.

  XVIII

  The bad years began in the early seventies and lasted a decade. First there were more eye oper
ations, this time for cataracts, then the strokes, each more serious than the last, leaving my mother with her left arm useless and her left leg weak, then a bowel obstruction followed by shingles and finally heart failure. Ten years of acute illness, of having all real independence taken away, of deep depression, of a wish to have done with it and die.

  My father was brilliant. He looked after my mother with total devotion, watching over her in every way. He learned at the age of seventy-two to shop and cook and clean. But though she was grateful my mother still wanted her daughters; there was no substitute for us. She had looked after her mother and her mother-in-law, she’d given them a daughter’s tender care, the kind no man could give however devoted. But everything had changed. Families were no longer near to each other. Her daughters lived too far away to pop in daily with tasty things to eat, with clean washing, with little feminine services to perform. In a crisis, of course, and there were plenty of those, we always went, my sister or I, often both of us. We would relieve each other, never even suggesting our brother should take his turn – this was women’s work, he was not expected to respond in the same way. He was a man and had a man’s work to do. Pauline was a teacher and a wife and a mother of two boys. But that was different, oh heavens yes, and I was only a writer and that couldn’t be called work, could it? There was no need to ask if I could have time off. I could just take it.

  It was true. I could, and did: family first. But I had just had another baby, Flora, when my mother’s illnesses began in 1972, and though I put her in a carry-cot, only a few weeks old, and leapt on a train when the need arose, it added to the strain. How many times was I going to have to do this? Very many. Nine more years to go. In the middle of them, Jean died, just like that, a heart attack, her mother’s sort of heart attack at her mother’s sort of age. My own mother was distraught, not just with grief but envy – she was the eldest, she should have gone first. And Nan was in an appalling state of distress too, but that was more because of the shock of realizing her own generation was mortal – if Jean could die so could she and it terrified her. My mother couldn’t go to her sister’s funeral, she was too ill, so I went in loco parentis rather than as the devoted niece. At the funeral I speculated about Jean’s life. How much more fulfilled had she been than her mother Margaret Ann? Her only work had been in Carr’s offices and, once married, she had been a full-time wife and mother. But what I didn’t know, because I’d never been close to Jean, was whether those roles had left her as unsatisfied as my mother. Well, she’d missed the bad years, that was one thing. No long, slow decline for Jean, a fact much commented on at the funeral.

  Nan found it too terrible to think about and yet the could think about nothing else. And her own life was now so sad. True, she had a splendid mansion in its own grounds, the sort she had always wanted, and there was a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce in the garage, even if she couldn’t drive, and she had a mink coat and beautiful jewels and all the new clothes she wanted. She had all the champagne and smoked salmon she’d craved, all the worldly goods she’d vowed to acquire – her mother would never have believed it – the fine china, the antique furniture, the lush carpets. She lived with Jack in style. But style meant nothing because of what had happened to her only son Michael. Michael had multiple sclerosis. He was entirely bedridden, able to move only his arms and speaking with difficulty. He’d been taken to every specialist available and it was no good, he was incurable, and poor Nan grieved inconsolably. Jean’s sudden and untimely death made her see her own as imminent, and then what would happen to Michael?

  Sitting with her the day after Jean’s funeral, I was more affected by Nan than I had expected. She was still, in her mid sixties, a beautiful woman, looking at least ten years younger, what with her good and carefully looked after skin and her strong bone structure and the clever make-up and elegant clothes and discreetly tinted hair. A woman of a certain era, true, but highly attractive all the same, the dated style having its own appeal. Only the lovely mouth told of her tears and unhappiness and disappointment. It was twisted into a bitter pout; it pulled the shape of her whole face down and gave it a wretched look. The large blue eyes still sparkled but with tears of rage at the way life had turned out. And she was angry that day, angry with me. She wanted to know why I hadn’t been to see her for a whole year. ‘After all I did for you,’ she said. I tried to explain – a new baby… my mother’s illness… my work… three children to look after… the house. Excuses, she saw them as excuses, and trumped up at that. She was contemptuous, told me I could have come if I’d wanted to, said I’d let her down badly, I hadn’t behaved like a niece upon whom so much time and money had been lavished in her youth. ‘What happened?’ she asked as I left, shaking her head, refusing to accept my awkwardly offered embrace. I was speechless.

  It was only later, on the way home, that I thought of asking Nan about herself at my age. Whom had she visited? Whose generosity had she repaid? Which beds-of-illness had she attended? And her load had been light, with one child at boarding-school, no work, a woman to clean for her. She was no more the caring, compassionate daughter or niece than I was. Nor did she have the slightest appreciation of how hectic my life was, not an inkling. But most of all I resented this assumption of hers that in families everything must be paid for. Hadn’t she enjoyed having me to stay, hadn’t I been useful as a companion for Michael? Of course she had, of course I had been. But she had imagined this would bind me to her in a way it never should have been expected to, not once it was revealed how different we were in spite of first appearances, how we had nothing in common, neither standards nor tastes, once I was a person in my own right.

  But I knew that kind of reaction of mine was foolish. Nan’s resentment was more against fate than against me. Her life had only on the surface turned out how she wanted it to. A life of ease, a life with none of the hardship her mother had known, and from which she had wanted to escape, but a life with far less contentment in it and no acceptance at all of its random cruelties. She had only Michael and he was a tragedy. He had had no time to marry and have children before MS struck and she had been denied the grandchildren she wanted. She saw my mother at the apex of an ever-growing family – and family, it had been impressed upon her from the earliest age, was what a woman’s life was about. For Nan, nieces were the only hope, nieces, and, if they failed (as we did), nephews: Jean’s two unmarried sons who both lived near her and were her only family. She was in a panic of reproach that day and I was there to be accused. It would have been useless to tell Nan to blame herself for the emptiness of her days. It was no good pointing out to her that she could find interest and pleasure in educating herself as plenty of her generation were doing (her old friend Peggy Farish, for example, who went on all kinds of courses, who travelled on her own and in general made up for the deficiencies of the Board Schools). She didn’t want to be educated, she didn’t want to develop interests. She wanted people, she wanted family around her.

  My mother had been no more willing to broaden her cultural horizons. Once, before the eye trouble and strokes, at that time when she was so restless and aware that her days were becoming empty, I suggested she should attend some Adult Education class – she was clever, after all; she’d have no problems whatever she chose to study. But she chose nothing. I showed her a leaflet, listing what was available in Carlisle, and she ran her eye over it and shook her head. Why not French classes? No, it was too late to learn. There was no point in learning French. Music appreciation, then? No. She had a wireless if she wanted to listen to music and she really only liked hymns and needed no help appreciating those. What about history, local history? Surely she’d admit she had always been interested in history. Yes, she was, but she couldn’t be bothered. What she wanted was to return to the doing of those good works which had made her feel so useful and needed. If she couldn’t help people but had to be helped instead, what was the point in being alive? Her life had been about giving, mainly to her family, and without this giving she was bere
ft.

  My mother thought any kind of voluntary work was not something I’d deign to do. In her opinion I was above it, whereas women like her were made for it. This annoyed me. I hated the demarcation line she drew in her mind – she on one side, I on the other. After her first stroke she was in bed a couple of weeks and couldn’t do her turn at the Infirmary, taking round the tea trolley for Out-patients. She was agitated and the agitation was all because she didn’t like to ask me to do it for her and so avoid letting down her partner on the rota. I said of course I’d go in her place and why ever had she imagined I wouldn’t? ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you don’t do that sort of thing. I thought…’ But what she thought could not then be dragged out of her.

  Off I went to the Infirmary, desperate to prove I could be an adequate tea-trolley lady and so be worthy of my mother. I walked there, trying to think myself into my mother’s shoes. Shoes, yes. She’d wear her plain black court shoes, the ones with the lower heel, good for walking in her opinion, useless in mine. I couldn’t do anything about my plimsolls but at least they were pristine white. She would dress with care, as usual. She’d wear something she considered suitable for a hospital, probably her blue flowered dress with the white collar. I didn’t have such a dress but I was soberly attired in a plain grey cotton skirt and a white shirt. She’d leave plenty of time to walk there – rushing made her red and dizzy – and she’d take the shortest route down Stanhope Road and into Granville Road, and there she’d be, opposite the Infirmary. Couldn’t be simpler. It would take her about half an hour and she’d be pleased at the exercise and fresh air. It took me ten minutes. I reported to the desk and met my partner who looked rather like my mother and was very pleased to see me because she was worried about being able to manage on her own.