Partly to shut Ginny up she blurted out, ‘I’ve written to his mother, but don’t tell Sam. Promise?’
‘Whose mother?’
‘His – well, his grandmother.’
Ginny stared at her. It was satisfying to see her first puzzled and then appalled. ‘You don’t mean . . .’
‘She wrote to me first, about being sorry.’
‘Sorry? I thought you hated pity.’
‘I do. This wasn’t that kind of sorry. She wanted to tell me how sorry and ashamed she was. So I wrote back. I’m going to see her, I hope.’
‘Oh, Harriet. Oh, Harriet, I’m sure it isn’t a good idea, really, I’m sure it’s dangerous.’
‘How could it be? Where’s the danger?’
‘It will only upset you. I mean, what good could it do? Think about it.’
‘I’ve thought about nothing else ever since her letter came. I think she was so brave.’
‘For writing to you?’
‘Yes. Imagine, imagine if it had been your grandson, son really, that’s what she thought of him as. Imagine how you’d feel.’
‘I certainly wouldn’t write to the victim’s mother, and especially not months after my son, grandson, whatever, had been tried and convicted and sentenced, that’s the bit that’s fishy, so long after.’
‘But don’t you see, that shows she’s doing what I do.’
‘What?’
‘Thinking about it, all the time, making herself ill with it, not able to understand it or forget it, feeling desperate . . .’
‘I don’t think it shows any of that at all. You’re getting carried away. If you see her it will start everything up again.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Ginny . . . it can’t start everything up again, nothing’s died down. That’s the point, seeing her just might resolve something.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’
Ginny looked at her sister, scrutinised her intently. Too thin. She’d lost at least a stone, probably more. Her face was thin too, drawn. She didn’t look pretty any more. Her looks had always depended on animation and now there was none. It was pitiful to see her so lethargic. People wondered if she was ill. People in this small town, who’d known her and Harriet all their lives, stopped Ginny in the street and asked if her sister was all right. It was even rumoured that she had had a nervous breakdown, which Ginny firmly denied. Harriet hadn’t had a breakdown but was surely having one all the time, a breakdown made all the worse because she wouldn’t admit to it. What was a breakdown, anyway? Ginny had always wondered until the last year had shown her. It wasn’t a collapse, a sort of sustained faint. It was what Harriet was enduring, a permanent sense of great pressure, an inability to relax for one single moment, it was living in a state of crisis all the time. Joe was attacking her, using her, every day, and she let it happen. She’d been in this very kitchen and heard Joe swear at his mother viciously, heard him heap contempt on her for her supposed stupidity. That, Ginny suspected, was only the half of it. ‘He needs a good slap,’ Ginny had once said, furious with Joe at the sight of her sister’s distress after one scene when he’d yelled at her. Harriet had just looked at her, and afterwards her unthinking remark had created a barrier between them. For her to have said Joe should be slapped was quite unforgivable.
Ginny supposed it was. She was sorry she’d said it, as though Joe were a three-year-old who’d deliberately broken another child’s toy. But she found, on reflection, that she wasn’t sorry at the thought behind what she’d said. She agreed with Sam. Harriet was too soft, too indulgent, towards Joe. She’d made herself into his whipping boy. Everything Joe said and did was excused because of what he had suffered – Harriet had made him into a special case for life and it was wrong. Joe traded on it. He knew his mother’s heart bled for him and he appeared not to want to protect her. She was so cheerful with him too, never let him guess, so far as Ginny could tell, how wretched he was making her. Sometimes she thought how effective it might be if Harriet did let go, if she really did collapse so that Joe could take his turn and be the strong one. She’d discussed it with Sam, poor Sam, shoved out by both of them, and he’d shrugged and said Harriet would say she was the rock Joe clung on to and if she sank then he’d have no hope. It had made Sam irritable to report this and Ginny even more irritable to hear it. Both of them had agreed that Harriet was very wilful.
This crazy scheme of visiting the attacker’s mother, or whoever she was, was the perfect example of such wilfulness. How like Harriet, acting before she thought something through to its likely conclusion.
‘You haven’t really thought about this, Harriet,’ Ginny began again.
‘I have. Carefully.’
‘What about Sam? What about Joe? Have you thought about what they’ll say?’
‘I told you, they won’t know.’
‘How can you be sure they won’t find out? The woman might phone – who knows – she might turn out to be a nuisance, they could become involved.’
‘They won’t, it won’t be like that.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘What?’ Harriet laughed, turned round. Ginny looked so grave, so serious. ‘You certainly will not.’
‘I think I should, you don’t know what you’re going into, you’d be safer . . .’
‘Ginny, it isn’t pistols at dawn, for God’s sake, grow up, it’s just a meeting between two women . . .’
‘One of whose son almost murdered the other’s.’
‘Ginny!’
‘Sorry, but that’s how it has to be put to make you see this isn’t normal, Harriet, it’s very abnormal. You have to be careful, you know nothing about this woman . . .’
‘I do actually. So do you. I heard plenty, in court. She’s an elderly, decent, responsible woman. Her daughter was killed in Africa and she went all that way to bring her grandson back and look after him, all that way, a woman who’d hardly ever left her home town never mind her country. On her own, she went on her own, she flew for the first time. She was the best mother anyone could have been to that boy.’
‘We don’t know that . . . but anyway, what is all this passion for her, Harriet? I don’t understand it. It’s as though . . .’ Ginny stopped. She couldn’t think what she meant. She thought that maybe she’d been going to say it was as though her sister was in love with this stranger, this Mrs Armstrong. She was glad she’d pulled herself up because that wasn’t really it. It was more that Harriet seemed to want to latch on to this woman in some way that seemed suspicious. After all, why would anyone want anything to do with the mother, or grandmother, of the boy who’d nearly killed their son? She noted Harriet didn’t say, ‘As though what?’ when she stopped half-way through that sentence. She didn’t ask her to explain. That could only be because she herself knew Ginny was right, there was something odd going on even if it couldn’t be articulated. ‘Anyway,’ Ginny said, lamely, ‘I think I should go with you.’
‘No. I don’t want company. I want to meet her on my own, on my own terms.’
‘She might have someone with her.’
‘I doubt it, I don’t think so.’
‘At least tell me when you’re going.’
Harriet laughed. ‘So you can send out a search party if I don’t come back?’
They both looked at each other. These trigger words. Ginny’s husband Michael had organised the search party that found Joe. It was upsetting how Sam had resented the fact. Sam hadn’t thought any search party necessary. ‘Good heavens,’ he’d said, annoyed, ‘it’s only eleven o’clock. He’ll be staying at a friend’s, he’s just forgotten to phone.’ Even after all the likely friends had been contacted Sam had thought a search party melodramatic. He didn’t like Michael. He thought he was bossy and he hated all the keep-fit stuff Michael went in for. But Harriet had been so worried and Michael happened to come to the house to collect Ginny, and she hadn’t been able to resist his eagerness to go and look for Joe. That was all it was, until midnight, just M
ichael being over-helpful and going off to look for Joe. It didn’t turn into a search party until an hour later, and Sam was right, there had been something repellant about Michael’s zeal, about the almost gloating way he’d said he’d organised a search party. Sam, worried himself by then, only refusing to admit it, hiding behind bad temper, raging at Joe’s lack of consideration, had still declined to be part of it. He said it made more sense to ring the police, which he did, but before the police had even arrived Michael had found Joe and rung for an ambulance and administered vital first aid. He must have been, said Sam later, in his glory.
Watching Harriet’s face after she’d joked about a search party, Ginny felt unbearably depressed. Her sister surely could not go through the rest of her life being thrown off balance by the association of simple words. She saw her face change, shut down, and the memory begin unrolling, and instead of compassion she felt exasperation. This had gone on too long, she had to snap out of it. She knew perfectly well what an offensive thought that was but it was true. Joe wasn’t dead. Every day there were cases in the newspapers where teenagers, children, had been attacked and had died. There must be something Harriet hadn’t told her that made the attack on Joe worse than it seemed, something she gathered Joe might not have told anyone except his mother, but she knew it wasn’t anything to do with sex. That had been Ginny’s first thought when Harriet had hinted at something too appalling to speak of, but when she’d tried to ask if it was sexual assault, Harriet had said no, very firmly. In Ginny’s opinion this extra horror couldn’t therefore be so bad, but she had been wise enough not to say so – Harriet too obviously thought it very bad.
So, however much Joe had suffered, and she didn’t deny he had, she’d seen his injuries, seen how broken in spirit he was, he wasn’t dead, or maimed, nor had he been sexually assaulted. As her mother would have said, and as Harriet had herself at one point tearfully agreed, there was a great deal to be thankful for. But she’d forgotten that. She didn’t, these days, seem thankful for anything. She’d let Joe drag her down so low she was unable to get up again. Ginny wondered if she dared say, ‘It isn’t so terrible, Harriet.’ Harriet was determined to think it was terrible and could see no hope of Joe’s real recovery. Once, she’d said to Harriet that it would take time for Joe to come to terms with what had been done to him and Harriet had gone quite mad, screaming how much she loathed that meaningless phrase ‘coming to terms’, she hated it, everyone used it without thinking, it was jargon, it was slick, and even to dignify it with a meaning, which it didn’t deserve, it was still stupid, there were no terms to be arrived at . . . On and on she had ranted, and Ginny had been alarmed. She’d never used the words again and every time she read them she remembered Harriet’s objections and had begun to think them valid.
She tried, now, to think clearly and simply. If Harriet couldn’t joke about search parties without being overwhelmed by memories, all of them bad, then what it meant was that she couldn’t consign those memories to the dustbin of her mind. She couldn’t say, ‘It happened, it is over, now we go forward.’ And what was stopping her from doing that? Ginny decided to tell her, there and then.
‘You’re thinking of Michael’s search party that found Joe, aren’t you,’ she said, quite loudly, not at all in the usual soft, sympathetic tone she reserved for Harriet now.
‘Don’t talk about it,’ Harriet said, going back to her fussing over food.
‘Yes, I will talk about it,’ Ginny said. ‘I’m tired of it. You don’t know what you’re doing to yourself, all this punishment. It’s got to stop some time, and it won’t until you admit it all happened and it is over. It is, really.’
Harriet leaned over the sink, gave up scraping carrots so furiously. ‘You’ve seen Joe, Ginny,’ she said, voice thick with tears. ‘How can you of all people say it’s over? It isn’t. Nobody understands. It really isn’t, it never will be, he’ll never be the same, never.’
Ginny went over to her and turned her round and put her arms round her. ‘God, you’re skin and bone,’ she complained, then, ‘Look, Harriet, I’m not clever, I know I annoy you and say clumsy things, but I’m not saying Joe can ever be the same, all I’m saying is what’s wrong with being different, a different Joe but just as good, just as happy as he was? And, darling, he wasn’t ever easy, was he, between you and me? He always had problems, didn’t he? No, no, don’t hate me, I just meant you’ve been dealing with Joe since the day he was born, trying to understand how difficult he is. This didn’t make him difficult. You always said he was complicated, hard to make happy, but now you’re blaming it all on the attack, you’ve stopped believing he can absorb what happened and pick himself up and in spite of it sort himself out, and he always would have had to do that . . . oh, I’m talking rubbish, I’m sorry, big mouth, it runs away with me, but it’s you I worry about, Harriet. You, not just Joe, not even mainly Joe.’
Harriet cried. Ginny held her, feeling like their mother. Large, well-padded, just like her mother, and Harriet fragile, enviably slim all her life, and now stick-thin, brittle, not pleasant to embrace. She wondered, fleetingly, holding her sister as she was doing, what her love-life was like after all this. It wasn’t something they ever talked about, but she sensed Harriet’s hostility towards Sam and knew it must cause problems. Sam had a dour look to him, he wasn’t like himself at all, but Harriet all too clearly had little time for him. She had time only for Joe. It was fortunate Louis was not at home or he would surely have resented his mother’s total concentration on Joe. He’d always been over-indulged, but then he was the youngest and got away with it. The youngest and meant to be a girl, she always thought, though Harriet fiercely denied this, said she had hoped it would not be a girl, positively prayed for a second son, dreaded a daughter.
She’d been ill, having Joe. No trouble with Louis, an easy pregnancy, easy birth. But with Joe she’d threatened to miscarry all the way through, until the sixth month, and even after that there had been problems. She’d had to have a caesarean, which distressed her – she worried it made a difference to the bond with the baby, though everyone had assured her this was not so at all, or not necessarily so. Then Joe didn’t look like Louis, who had been a big, healthy, beautiful baby. Joe, joked Sam, was the runt of the litter, a five-pound weakling with a wobbly neck. Harriet had fretted over him from the very beginning and even when, by the time he was two, he was nearly as strong and lively as Louis had been, she had never quite relaxed. He was like her, she thought, and she didn’t want him to be, she wanted him to be like his brother, who was like his father and their father’s family, all Kennedys with their easy-going natures, lovers of sports, outdoor types, direct and straightforward in temperament. Joe, as Ginny had observed, was never any of those things. Sandwiched as he was between her two girls, she’d seen a lot of Joe as a child and she knew what he was like. To her shame, it had even slightly pleased her that at last Harriet knew what it was like to have a child who was introspective, a mass of strange fears, a child who was always hard to please and seemed frighteningly mature in all kinds of unexpected ways – just like her elder daughter Natasha. She’d got so sick of Harriet boasting that she never had a broken night with Louis, never had a real tantrum from him, never had a qualm about his going to school, whereas she, Ginny, had found Natasha’s first five years a test of endurance. Then Joe came along and changed all that.
‘I’m getting as bad as you,’ Ginny said, after she’d stood comforting Harriet for several minutes, after her sister had stopped weeping and was fumbling around with the wretched carrots again. ‘I spend half my time wallowing in memories, not here at all, wondering how things happened. Oh, not Joe,’ she went on, hurriedly, as Harriet made a small gesture of protest. ‘Natasha, I was suddenly thinking about Natasha. Remember how she used to cry? All the time, for everything, cry, cry, cry, it drove me wild. Do you remember? I thought it was me, how I moaned I must be a rotten mother, I must be doing something wrong. Then she just stopped. I don’t even know when. A
nd now she’s the most cheerful, confident girl imaginable. It’s amazing how they change.’
‘Oh Ginny,’ Harriet said, smiling, ‘for God’s sake, you’re so obvious, spare me, please.’
‘But I didn’t mean anything. I was just rambling on, honestly . . .’
So they both ended up laughing, and things felt a little better.
‘I’d better go,’ Ginny said. ‘Laura will be home.’
‘How’s she getting on?’
‘Fine. They said there’s no change. It isn’t even as bad as they first thought and it might not get any worse, they can control it.’
‘Good.’
Ginny hesitated, and then, door already open, said, ‘Well, at least tell me when you have been to see her. Promise?’
‘Promise,’ Harriet said. But she knew she wouldn’t.
Ginny was under the impression that tears were a good thing. Harriet was sure she’d just gone off humming to herself, convinced that ‘a good cry’ had helped. But it didn’t. Crying was exhausting and at the end of such bouts of weeping she was no better off, nothing whatsoever had been achieved. ‘It’s letting steam off,’ Ginny always told her, at her most confidential, as though imparting some great truth newly discovered by her. ‘It lets the pressure on your nerves relax, go on, cry.’ What rubbish! All it did was give her a headache and red eyes. Eyes so red-rimmed and bloodshot she’d have to think of an explanation when Joe came in. She never let him see her cry, never. She didn’t want him to think he was the cause, and so add to all the other burdens he carried. Even while visiting him in the hospital she’d been completely dry-eyed. It was Sam who’d cried, when he first saw Joe, and she’d despised him for it . . . it was no time for them to cry. Joe didn’t want or need their tears, she was sure of it. He wanted them composed and capable. He himself was the only one who had any right to cry and he never did, except once.
Mothers' Boys Page 8
