‘Why?’
‘I’m mad?’ Francesca cried. ‘You total hypocrite, Tess. I’m mad! That’d be funny if it wasn’t so totally patronizing. And wrong, by the way. Can’t you see we’re just playing at real life, here? With these—’ she gestured to the broken china—‘with these cake stands and stupid sofa cushions and—arghh.’ Her shoulders sank down and her arms fell heavily to her sides. ‘We’re grown women and we’re both hiding from where we belong.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’m not mad, Tess. I had a crappy job and it made me unhappy. But I know where I belong, and that’s back in London, with my friends, getting another job, living the life I had before.’ She stared up at her. ‘Someone rang me about a job last week. Doing pro-bono work, only taking on needy cases. There’s a load of competition, obviously. But I’m going for it.’
‘Oh,’ said Tess. ‘That’s—well, that’s great.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
‘Hey—’ Tess shook her head. ‘That’s not important. I just want you to—
Francesca interrupted her. ‘Tess, I know where I belong, and if I stay in Langford it’ll be like—like being wrapped up in cotton wool. I’ll be throwing my life away, doing some half-arsed job and waiting for Adam to come round at midnight and leave three hours later. I know where I need to be, that’s all. Can you say the same thing?’
Tess said, faltering, ‘Of course I can—’
But she remembered something Leonora Mortmain had said to her, their first night in Rome, a line that had been playing at the back of her head all through this long day. Her beaky face, beady eyes, watching her carefully as she spoke. A woman should live for herself, not in the shadow of others. She had been referring to herself, as much as to anyone else.
‘Really,’ said Francesca, picking up armfuls of clothes from beside the sofa and dumping them into the open suitcase. ‘Tell me, why haven’t you seen Peter since you got back?’
‘I—we haven’t been able to. And the funeral was today so—You know that.’
Francesca nodded. Tess looked around her, her eyes resting on the broken cake stand briefly before she realized she didn’t want to look as though she was bothered about it.
‘I’ll get you a new one,’ Francesca said. ‘I’ve said I will.’ Tess shook her head impatiently—it didn’t matter. ‘Oh—oh, Tess.’ Francesca sounded almost imploring. ‘You’ve got to see what I’m talking about.’
‘I don’t,’ Tess said, trying not to sound as upset as she felt. ‘I think you’re trying to make me feel bad so you can justify your own behaviour, but I don’t want to have an argument with you about it, Francesca, not if this is your last night.’ She laughed shortly, and shook her head. ‘Why are we even—this is crazy! Your last night. Don’t go!’
‘I have to,’ Francesca said loudly, too loudly. ‘God, Tess, don’t you see? Look at this, look at us!’ Her face was a rictus of rage; she relaxed, and a tear ran down her cheek. ‘We live in a town that’s still controlled by the family that ran it two hundred years ago! You teach things that happened two thousand years ago! You think you’re in love with some guy in Italy who’s about to move to the other side of the world, and you seriously think the two of you are going to be together!’ She winced, as if it was painful to say these things, but it didn’t stop her. ‘You talk to a picture of Jane Austen, because a picture on the wall is the closest you’ve got to having a friend here, apart from me and Adam. And you two aren’t friends, whatever you’ve got you’re not friends.’ Francesca paused, panting, and then she said, ‘And everyone here is over fifty, apart from us and Adam, and he’s the biggest hypocrite of them all, he’s in bed with all of them!’ She was sobbing now. ‘It’s like I woke up today, and now I see it I can’t stay here another day. I just can’t.’ She shuddered. ‘I need to get my own life, I want to walk on wet pavements again, I want to be annoyed when the tube’s cancelled, I want to fall in love with someone who loves me back, and I don’t ever want to see a fucking tea towel, ever again.’ She kicked the side of the sofa. ‘Tonight made up my mind for me.’
‘Is that why you—’ Tess gestured at the mess, not knowing what else to say.
‘This? This wasn’t just me. It was your precious Adam too.’ She smiled, almost pleased she could shock Tess like this. ‘I knew I was going after that ridiculous service, that awful wake at the pub. I knew I had to go. But he—he merely hastened the process.’
‘Adam—did this?’ Tess didn’t believe her.
‘Well, both of us,’ said Francesca shortly. ‘He was almost mad.’
‘You must have had quite a bad fight…’ Tess was bewildered. ‘How can you be like this with each other?’
‘Ha.’ She smiled again, a great big smile. ‘You think I’m mad, babe. You have no idea.’ She looked at Tess, her hand on her cheek, her face flushed, hair tumbling about her. ‘You should look in the mirror sometime. Or at that man you think you know so well. You’re welcome to him. To all of it. I don’t know what happened with his mother, or his horrible old grandmother, but whatever it was, it’s screwed him up for life.’
‘It’s kind of understandable,’ Tess said, trying to be loyal to Adam, and the memory of lovely Philippa, whom everyone missed every day. ‘I can’t blame him, you know.’
‘Nothing can be that bad,’ Francesca said. ‘I’m sick of it. I’m getting out of here, darling, it’s the only way. I can’t stay.’
‘What time’s your train, then?’ said Tess, not knowing what else to say.
‘It’s at eleven,’ said Francesca. ‘I’ll be home by lunch-time, and you can go to college in the afternoon, and by the evening you’ll have forgotten I was ever here.’
With an air of total finality, she dropped her dressing gown, the blue Chinese dressing gown, into the suitcase, and flipped the lid shut.
Spring 1977
The younger woman walked heavily across the lawn to the striped deckchair facing away from her. She could see a pair of feet, shod in pointed black pumps and crossed elegantly beneath the chair, and she cleared her throat tentatively.
‘Hello?’
No answer.
‘Um—hello?’ she said, slightly louder, trying not to wheeze. She wiped the sweat off her brow; she was nervous.
Silence.
‘Er…Mother?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’
A low, drawling voice came from the chair, but nothing moved.
‘If you take only one thing away from this meeting, please, it is that you are never to call me Mother again.’
Philippa shifted her weight from one leg to the other. It was hot, even in her cheesecloth kaftan, and she was very pregnant, and she wished she were sitting down, there, under the shade of the spreading magnolia tree at the edge of the lawn, in a deckchair like this one, sipping something cool. These days her feet seemed to have permanently swelled to twice their natural size. Everything ached: her feet, her back, her breasts, her neck; she felt sick all the time, and had headaches that never went away, always had done, and she couldn’t take anything now to stop them. She was always un comfortable, especially since she’d come to Langford. She had never wanted to find her mother, never felt the urge to make a neat story out of her life. Philippa was used to self-sufficiency. But now she was desperate. That was the only reason she was here.
How they found out where she was, she never knew. Since Tony left, went back to the States, Philippa had been increasingly alone, her already-small band of friends in Dublin dwindling by the day. She had always been a loner, preferred her own company to anything else. She was an only child, after all. From the moment she had been able to escape the kindly but suffocating ministrations of her adopted parents, she had escaped as far as she could; it was the sixties, and though she didn’t know it, she was far less alone than she would have thought in this desire to flee. She didn’t particularly care who her real parents were, nor did anyone ever ask. The baby-boomer generation was made up of so many different kinds of families, fractured by the Second W
orld War, and in those days, there was no real guarantee of ever finding out. Besides, she wanted to live her own life now. That was in the past; she wanted a future.
The next few years were like a dream come true. She had gone to Morocco for a year, travelling around with a girlfriend from university, had driven along the Silk Route in a minivan, ending up in India, living in Varanasi for a few months and selling beers to fellow dropouts. She had crossed the States with friends in another minivan, and somehow ended up teaching English in California, she didn’t know how. When Philippa crossed the Atlantic again, she knew she couldn’t go back to the safe, dull Home Counties of England she had learned to despise. She went to Dublin and stayed there, gaining her PhD, becoming a lecturer, living a gently bohemian life, drinking long into the evenings, arguing about poetry, discussing politics and art, taking off for strange places at a moment’s notice, having sex with whomever she pleased. Nothing that tied her down, nothing that made her feel like little Philippa Crabtree from Basingstoke, growing up in one of a row of identical houses, hair plaited like every other little girl in her street, shoes, satchel and dolls identical to everyone else’s.
She vowed that would never happen to her.
And then she fell pregnant.
She told everyone it was an accident, but that was not strictly true. She was in her mid-thirties now, and inside her was a deep longing for a baby. Tony—the sweet, kind, Irish lecturer in Early English with whom she had been having an affair these past few months—was appalled at the news, but man enough to hide it when she told him. The relief on his face when she explained she wanted to bring up the baby by herself was almost comical. Philippa remembered, again, why she preferred being alone.
But that was before she lost her job—employment law in the mid-seventies not being what it was later to become. Tony had happily fled to take up a teaching post in America. Many of her other friends had either lost their jobs or been drawn back to the UK, since this was during the height of the Troubles and even Dublin was affected by the mood. Everyone was on strike, inflation had never been highter: it felt as though the world which to her had seemed so full of golden possibilities was going to hell in a handcart. The Crabtrees, her adoptive parents, had scented the wind of change early and migrated to Australia several years previously—presumably hoping, Philippa wryly thought, to put as much distance between themselves and their disappointing daughter as possible.
Suddenly, free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky Philippa realized she was pregnant, broke, with rent due in three days, no savings, absolutely no plans, and almost totally alone. It was then, like a miracle, that she was contacted one day by a solicitor from a small town called Langford.
‘Miss Crabtree?’
She had almost not answered the phone; it was in the hallway, too far for her to walk when she was lying prone on the grubby corduroy sofa, silently weeping and patting her stomach.
‘Miss Crabtree, my name is Edward Tey. I am contacting you on behalf of a client of mine. We have been aware of your whereabouts for some time now. I wonder, could I interest you in a trip back to England? We have a proposal for you.’
And that was how Philippa found out who her mother was. Two days later, she was back in England for the first time in over a decade, walking across a typical English lawn at the height of summer, feeling like a fish out of water, wishing with all her heart she were back in Dublin. But it was too late for that now. It wasn’t just her any more. She wasn’t alone any more, nor would she ever be again.
So Philippa stood there awkwardly, pushing her thick hair away from her perspiring face and waiting for this woman to turn around, hoping more than anything else that she would let her sit down.
When she stood up and turned around, Philippa squinted. She was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, which kept most of her face in the shade, and huge sunglasses. Her large hands were folded together, and she wore a blue silk jersey tunic—obviously expensive, even Philippa could see that. She said nothing.
‘Hello,’ Philippa said, slowly. ‘It’s nice to—’
‘Here are the deeds to the house,’ Leonora Mortmain said, picking up an envelope of papers from the iron table beside her. A trickle of condensation ran down the jug of water next to it. Philippa watched its progress longingly. ‘It has been painted, only last year for the previous tenants. There is furniture in there, again from the old tenants. You will find an envelope in this pack. It has five hundred pounds in it. That is for clothing, et cetera, for the baby, and for the two of you for the first few months, until you are able to get another teaching post. Yes?’
Philippa squinted, as if she were a bit drunk, to try and make out some of her mother’s features. ‘It’s nice to meet you at last,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for—’
‘Please listen to me,’ said Leonora Mortmain, and her voice was awful, horrible to hear. ‘I have always monitored your movements, first through the Crabtrees, then through private means. We know you are desperate, that you have no options, and that you and that child, which will be born a bastard, are basically alone in the world. That is why I have said I will help you.’ She cleared her throat, a small, precise gesture. ‘Yes, you are my child, and the child of someone else too, and that is why I will help you. But we are not to be in each other’s lives. I do not want to hear from you again. I do not want anyone to know, most of all that child in there, where you came from. Do not tell him. Do not tell anyone that you are a Mortmain. You will have to change your surname, to be totally sure no one can make the connection. These are my only conditions. Is that understood?’
The baby inside Philippa—the reason she was there, rooted to the ground in this small town, forced to settle for something when it was really the last thing she wanted—suddenly kicked. She put her hand on her stomach, feeling the smooth, taut skin of her rounded belly underneath the cotton of her dress.
‘Don’t call my baby a bastard,’ she said softly. ‘I won’t take the house, thank you very much. I don’t want anything from you.’
There was a silence.
‘You have to take it,’ Leonora Mortmain said flatly. ‘You think you’re quite the bohemian, don’t you? Living a life of Reilly, no cares or responsibilities, but you’re not quite so selfish as to turn this down, are you? I know you really have nothing.’ She took her sunglasses off, folded them neatly and put them on the table. The baby kicked again, and the vice-like grip around Philippa’s head, from the sun and fatigue, tightened a little more as she looked into her mother’s dark eyes for the first time since she had been a new born.
‘Don’t you care?’ she said wonderingly, blinking back sharp tears. ‘Didn’t you care at all about me? Did you think of me, ever, when I was growing up?’
‘Not really,’ said Leonora Mortmain. Her eyes were impossible to read. She stared impassively at her daughter. ‘You were a mistake, you see.’
‘You can’t be this horrible,’ Philippa said. She reached forward, and took the envelope. ‘You just can’t. I’m going to let you know when the baby’s born, what it is, how he or she is. Don’t worry—’ as Leonora held up her hand to speak—‘I’ll make sure no one finds out, I won’t say a word. Thank you. Thank you for the house, and the money. It is kind of you, though apparently you don’t want me to think so.’
She desperately wanted to pee, to sit down, to cry. She had to go.
‘I have already explained,’ Leonora Mortmain said. ‘I don’t think I need to explain any further. I have a duty to you, in as much as I cannot let you become destitute. You are clearly the sort of person who needs control in her life. Perhaps that is what I can give you.’
Philippa could feel sweat pooling between her breasts. ‘Can you tell me who my father was?’ she asked quietly.
The older woman put her hand up to her eyes, as if she were shading them from the sun, and when she spoke her voice was wavery. ‘No. I cannot. I’ve said all I’m going to say to you. Take this envelope, please, and consider this entire matter closed.’<
br />
And Leonora Mortmain simply walked away, walked into the house, shutting the door behind her, leaving her daughter on the lawn in the midday sunshine, tears in her eyes. Philippa clutched the envelope. This was like a bad dream. This baby was a terrible mistake, she knew it now.
Perhaps she should give it away, get out of this town, start all over again.
Then she realized with cold, calm certainty that she stood on a precipice. That she would be in terrible danger of repeating what had happened to her. That would not happen to her baby, never, ever!
She was still crying a little as she walked through the silent house, down the corridor and out of the front door. No one said goodbye, but she felt as if there were eyes watch ing her the whole time. Philippa stood on the high street and looked around her, as if trying to remember where she was. It was a whole new world. There, opposite, was a pub called the Feathers. Philippa wiped her nose and walked in.
There was a man behind the bar, polishing some glasses and whistling. He looked up as she came in, giving her a curious glance, and then he smiled.
‘You all right, my dear?’
‘Um—not sure,’ said Philippa, stroking her stomach again as the kicking intensified. ‘I’ve just moved here, actually.’
She didn’t know why she said this.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ said the man behind the bar, ‘you look as if you could do with a nice sit-down and a cup of tea.’
‘That would be lovely,’ said Philippa. ‘But I need the loo first.’
‘Well, let me point you in the right direction and I’ll get you your tea.’ He leaned across the bar. ‘Welcome to the Feathers. I’m Mick. Nice to have a new face in Langford. You’re very welcome, my dear.’ And he grinned, kindly.
Philippa shook his hand and gave him a watery smile and, as she took in her new surroundings, blinking back tears, for the first time in a long while felt that she might not be entirely alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I Remember You Page 35
