Mothers' Boys

by Margaret Forster

  When Joe came in from school she was using the age-old trick of peeling onions to explain her red eyes. ‘These onions,’ she gasped, ‘the juice is spurting into my eyes.’

  ‘Wear goggles,’ Joe said, quite amiably.

  ‘Good idea, but I’ve nearly finished.’

  He sat down at the kitchen table, slumped. She shot furtive glances at him. Pale, as usual. That frown, so heavy, so permanent now.

  ‘There’s a skiing trip,’ he said, ‘next January.’

  ‘Oh.’ She didn’t ask if he was interested, that would be fatal.

  ‘It’s to Austria, not that crap French place.’

  ‘Sounds an improvement.’

  ‘Louis went there, remember? In his fourth year, before they changed it to the crap place.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Oh yes”. Why don’t you just say what you want to say? Ask it for Christ’s sake, ask me if I want to go, that’s what you want to know, isn’t it? It’s so false how you talk to me, all this fucking politeness and handling me, be careful, Joe might bite.’

  ‘Well then, do you want to go?’

  ‘Obviously!’ he yelled. ‘Jesus! Why the hell would I mention it if I didn’t?’

  ‘It might just have been idle chat . . .’

  ‘Idle chat? I don’t do idle chat, idle chat!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? Why? Why are you sorry? I’ve been rude and you’re sorry. What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sorry I annoyed you. I . . .’

  ‘Why can’t you annoy me? What’s so special about me that I can’t be annoyed? Eh?’

  ‘I just meant I seem to say the wrong thing all the time . . .’

  ‘Then shut up.’

  He slammed out of the kitchen and up to his room. Another slam. The tears came again, horrifying her. He couldn’t help it, she knew he couldn’t, that was how all his misery came out, in that kind of ugly way. He didn’t behave like that with anyone else, only with her. Even when he was foul to Sam it wasn’t in that way. She just had to take it, show him she could bear anything and not flinch. She was the one person who loved him so much, so much, that no matter how she was treated by him, that love would endure. Sam, of course, when she’d tried to explain this, had said it was high-minded nonsense. He said Joe needed boundaries set beyond which he could not go. If they didn’t exist, he’d go on riding rough-shod and it would do him no good. But she knew Sam was wrong. What Joe needed was what she, and she alone, gave: unconditional understanding and devotion, exactly what she would have given if she had been Leo Jackson’s mother, though even to imagine that made her panic. Would she? Would she truly? If Joe, not Leo Jackson, had stabbed a boy? Had kicked and beaten him? Had watched while he was made to do that other thing?

  The truth was that she didn’t know. The truth was, that was the real reason she wanted to meet Mrs Armstrong, to see if her mother’s love stretched that far, could encompass such a nightmare. And if it did, she wanted to feed off it. Ginny was right, it wasn’t healthy, it was suspicious, it was abnormal. The very excitement she felt at the prospect of this meeting with his mother, his grandmother, was indeed sick. But was Mrs Armstrong’s gesture equally sick? Did it spring from the same sources? She didn’t know. The fact that Mrs Armstrong had so swiftly followed her first letter, saying she would be happy to meet, with another, cancelling the arrangement, showed her own confusion and doubt. But Harriet was going to ignore the cancellation. She’d replied before she got it, saying she’d arrive, as suggested, at two p.m. on Wednesday next. In the cancellation letter Mrs Armstrong had put, ‘Please let me know you have received this and understand.’ She was ignoring that. She wasn’t letting Mrs Armstrong know anything of the sort. She was going to pretend she never got that letter and if in the interval before next Wednesday another arrived she’d ignore that too, however mean it would be to do so. She’d already set the trip up. Sam had been told. She didn’t know why she’d bothered to make up a convincing story because he wasn’t the least bit interested. He just said, ‘That’ll be a nice day out,’ and that was all. She’d told Joe too, and he’d said, predictably, ‘Why are you telling me? So you might not be here at four p.m. next Wednesday . . . for God’s sake, Mum.’ She was going, even if Mrs Armstrong closed the door in her face. As well she might.

  Chapter Five

  SHEILA’S FATHER, ERIC James Armstrong, retired butcher, liked both of his Christian names to be used. He was very attached to the James and would reply ‘Eric James’ if his name was called out in a clinic, for example, ‘Eric James Armstrong is correct,’ and glare. He lived on his own in a small terraced house only a few streets away from both of his daughters. People were always telling him he was a lucky man, surrounded by his family in this day and age, and he’d growl, ‘I’m no bother to any of them, that’s one thing.’ It was true. He was no bother. A worry, a scourge, an irritation but, on the surface, no bother. At the age of eighty-nine he fended for himself without any help, kept his little house as clean and tidy as his wife (dead twenty years) had always done, washed his own clothes, even the bedding, in the bath, in spite of both daughters begging him to be sensible and let them do his sheets and towels in one of their automatic washing machines. He walked half a mile a day to get his shopping and, secretly, to place the bets he would never admit to – his only official bets were on the Derby and the Grand National. He was always smart, shoes burnished, trilby at an angle or cap pulled firmly down, and the stick he’d started to carry at seventy often used as a weapon in a bus to correct some unruly child.

  He insisted on boarding buses even though he was regularly offered lifts. He had his bus pass and he liked to use it. ‘I’m independent,’ he was fond of declaring loudly, and using buses was part of the independence. Getting on and off was a performance of his, agonising to watch – he had such difficulty hauling himself up the two steep steps and then balancing while he showed his pass. Sometimes the drivers would say, ‘It’s all right, Grandad,’ as he fumbled for his pass and he’d frown at them and say they were not doing their job if they didn’t inspect his pass and he’d report them. The whole bus would heave a sigh of relief when at last he was settled and begin to tense when they knew Mr Armstrong’s stop was coming up. Help was not allowed. Everyone would have to watch while he stumbled and staggered to the dreaded step, and many of those who knew him best would be obliged to close their eyes while he negotiated them once more.

  But they all admired him now, even those who once had disliked him as intensely as they had liked his wife Jane. It was an area of the town which had remained surprisingly stable over several decades – people really had been born and lived all their lives in this district and, in spite of the town itself growing and changing since the war, whole generations of families still lived in the same rented houses their great-grandparents had first inhabited. It was what Pat, Sheila’s daughter, had found so awful and stifling, but it was what her grandfather loved. He was proud of the stability of the area. ‘No need to move,’ he would declare, ‘there’s everything anyone could want right here, mek no mistake. “East, West, Home’s Best” I alus say.’ He hadn’t been east or west, or even north or south, but he was quite confident. Anyone moving was a fool as well as a traitor. ‘They’ll be back,’ he’d growl, ‘tail between their legs,’ and when they were not, when they wrote saying how much they loved wherever they’d gone, he didn’t believe them. They were liars all.

  His daughters, Sheila and Carole, indulged him these days. Both had been dominated and bullied by their father, but they stood up to him, met threats with disdain, anger with their own anger. The worst thing Eric James could say of either of them was known to be, ‘By God, you’re nowt like yer mother, nowt!’ and if either of them dared to yell back, ‘Good, who wants to be?’ they’d get beaten with a strap. It was practically a hanging offence not to want to be like the saintly Jane and, of course, really they did want to be like her, they adored her, they just knew that the
y couldn’t match up. The truth was, they were like Eric James – tough, brave, independent, needing nobody’s protection. Not that he admired them for it. Everything was wrong about them. Their mother was small and delicate with fluffy, mousy hair and beautiful skin, whereas they were both big-boned, big-Armstrong-boned, and tall, with their father’s alarming dark eyebrows which they spent many painful hours in their adolescence plucking. They were Armstrong women, like Eric James’s mother, the mother he never talked about and usually claimed not to be able to remember, but the few photographs which had survived told the whole story. Armstrong women, fierce, challenging, handsome but needing a strong hand, especially Sheila.

  She recalled actually fighting with her father when she was small, six or seven, hitting his thighs with her fists and being picked up by him and held kicking and screaming, but pinioned by his great hands so that she was like a marionette. She’d shrieked she hated him and once she’d spat in his face, and first he’d laughed and then he’d shaken her and called her a little cat and then he’d slapped her, though only across the legs, and pushed her out of the door where she’d collapsed, sobbing for her mother, who finally was allowed to come and bring her inside and put Vaseline on the red marks. ‘You shouldn’t goad him,’ her mother would say, tired and defeated, and Sheila would hiccup that it was his fault and say again that she hated him. ‘You don’t,’ her mother would say, firmly. ‘You’re as alike as two peas in a pod, that’s the trouble.’ By the age of twenty Sheila had been bound to acknowledge that her mother was right. It was dreadful to think, but she was like her father and there was nothing she could do about it except try to make herself less like him. Whenever she caught herself losing her temper in an irrational Eric James way, or sneering as he sneered, without cause, she would pull herself up and deliberately change tack. The older she got, the more she found she could do it, and by the time she married she was of the opinion that she had actually succeeded in changing her own nature.

  Alan had been part of the process. Her father was beside himself when she announced she was going to marry Alan Armstrong. At first, before she brought him home, Eric James had been charmed by the coincidence of the surname, common though it was in their part of the world. ‘Must be good stuff if he’s an Armstrong,’ he smirked, and enquired about Alan’s parentage, clearly hoping there would be a connection. There wasn’t. Alan was from a different kind of Armstrong family. No big bones, for a start. All of them were on the short side, and bones were so well covered they were not much in evidence. Sheila was actually an inch taller than Alan, another cross against him. Her father wouldn’t credit she’d got involved with what he called a midget. ‘Why’d yer go for a bloody midget?’ he’d roared. ‘It beats me, I can tell you, a lass marrying a chap shorter.’ She hadn’t liked Alan’s lack of height herself, in fact, but when her father made it sound like a deformity she’d defended him passionately, even to absurd lengths. ‘I hate big men,’ she’d declared, to her six-foot-two father, ‘big hefty men – ugh, who wants them.’ Eric James had laughed. ‘Oh aye?’ he’d said, and turned away, disbelief written all over him. She was five-foot-nine, Alan five-foot-eight, not a midget at all, but at her wedding, walking down the aisle one way on her father’s arm and the other on Alan’s, she’d known which looked best.

  She loved Alan for everything in him that was not like her father – his quiet nature, his patience, his good humour, his constant kindness. She didn’t mind what even her mother called his ‘softness’, implying his lack of power, of drive and ambition. It was true, Alan had little drive. She would even admit he was lazy. Not lazy enough to lose his not very demanding job, but just lazy enough not to make much progress. He had a little money when they married from his mother’s side of the family, and Sheila believed this small inheritance was part of Alan’s trouble. They bought a house outright with it when they married and it wasn’t until much later that any worry about money at all had ever had to enter Alan’s head. He’d been cautious, put the rest of his inheritance in a building society, and the interest had enabled them to live as his actual salary would not have done. No car, not for a long time, but no need for Sheila to work. In this kind of secure, cosy life her transformation had been complete, the shadow of her likeness to her father banished for ever, she hoped.

  Until Pat was killed. Then, she felt Eric James stirring in her – his determination, his stubbornness, his courage. For the first time in her life she had despised Alan, his helplessness, his conviction that nothing could or should be done. Her father had been in the house when they’d heard. Having his dinner, as he did every Sunday – dinner at Sheila’s, tea at Carole’s. Alan had answered the telephone while she and her father had gone on eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding – ‘not bad, but not as good as yer mam’s’ – and he hadn’t stopped wolfing it down all the time Alan was stuttering out the terrible news. He’d gone on eating till he’d finished the whole plateful. Then, as Sheila sat transfixed, he’d got his khaki handkerchief out and passed it over his brow and said, ‘Oh hell,’ followed by, ‘Damn, damn,’ and a shaking of his head. An eternity she’d sat there, aware he was watching her furtively. She knew why. He was waiting to see if she’d break down, he was terrified she would cry, then what would he do? He, who had never offered a crumb of comfort to anyone, only said, ‘It can’t be helped,’ and, ‘There’s nowt can be done,’ intent that his own fatalistic attitude should prevail and act as a brake on all emotion. So she hadn’t cried, but not because of him, whatever he thought.

  He’d shuffled off home. Without touching her. Without any embrace. He’d said he’d be there if he was needed and made his way home where he then proceeded to telephone the entire family, not just Carole, but cousins, aunts, the lot, to tell them. He told Carole she’d best get round to Sheila’s at once – so she could offer what he could not, presumably. He thought he’d done well. ‘Did Carole come?’ he’d asked, later that evening, ringing before bed. ‘Yes.’ ‘Thought so,’ he said, triumphantly, ‘good lass.’ She hadn’t bothered arguing. But later there had been plenty of arguments. Over Pat’s body, for one. He thought it should be brought back and buried where her grandmother, his wife Jane, was buried. It was proper, he said. She told him what it would cost and he didn’t blanch. He still thought it proper and said he’d pay out of what he’d saved for his own funeral. He shook his head in disgust when they told him the two bodies had been buried already out there. Only over the matter of Leo had he been any help. ‘Lad’s family,’ he’d said, ‘can’t get round that, blood’s blood, there’s no choice. Lad’s lost his mam, nowt worse, nowt worse.’ He’d visibly toughened and stiffened while Alan pleaded that to bring a mixed-race three-year-old-boy back here would be cruel. ‘Cruel?’ Eric James said. ‘Cruel to leave him, yer mean, without his mam. He needs our Sheila, no getting away from it.’ When Alan said it was Sheila he was concerned about, she was nearly sixty, it would be hard taking on a three-year-old – Eric James had interrupted, banging his stick and saying, ‘Nearly sixty? She’s an Armstrong Armstrong, they don’t give up at sixty. She could tek on any number of three-year-olds and never blink an eye, what the devil are yer talking about, eh?’

  He hadn’t been able to wait to see Leo, whatever his loud former opinions of the colour of the child’s father. All that was forgotten. Leo was Pat’s lad and that was that. Right had to be done by him. And, of course, he loved children, at least until they were seven. He was even good with them – all his grandchildren had adored him. His own daughters might have no memories of any tenderness, of games played and attention devoted, but his granddaughters did. He’d have gone with Sheila to claim Leo, breaking his own proud record of never having left his own country, if only he’d been younger. He said so frequently, glaring at Alan. ‘Good job she’s got backbone,’ he’d said, pointedly. ‘Very good job.’ All the way through the planning of Sheila’s daunting journey he’d praised her for ‘sticking to it’ and, though bewildered by all the strange place names and the
timetables he couldn’t understand, he’d pushed her on as hard as Alan tried to pull her back.

  When she returned, her father was there, at Manchester airport, with Alan, to greet her and Leo. It was the greatest gesture he could make, to drive with Alan all that way at his great age to a city he was afraid of. Nothing Alan could say would persuade him that this ordeal was not called for – he’d be better off at home, instead of subjecting himself to unnecessary effort. But no, he wanted to be there, to give the little lad a real welcome, to let him see what was what, as he mysteriously expressed it. And so, when she and Leo came through the customs hall and out into the arrival lounge, walking unsteadily, her legs cramped from being so long in the plane, and Leo tired, the first face she saw was that of Eric James, peering over the barrier, looking fierce. He didn’t smile when he saw her – smiling was not his forte, and indeed when he did smile his lips never looked comfortable and slid as quickly as was decent into their normal grim line – but instead raised his stick. He was the last person she wanted to see. She wanted comforting Alan, quiet Alan, or Carole, who’d be so good at taking charge.

  Having her father there made everything twice as difficult. He walked so slowly with his stick and was forever pausing to shout indignantly, at some fool he accused of trying to trip him up. ‘Git away with yer!’ he’d bark, but his voice was lost in the general hubbub. Leo didn’t even notice him. He was being carried by Sheila, his face buried in her shoulder, half asleep. She sat in the back of the car with Leo’s head now in her lap and the rest of his small frame curled on the seat, covered with a rug. Her father sat in the front, instructing both her and Alan. ‘That’s it, let the lad sleep, best thing, don’t waken him,’ to her, and, ‘Tek yer time, tek yer time, no hurry,’ to Alan. Every now and again he’d turn round, with immense difficulty, cursing his seat-belt and half strangling himself with it, and look at Leo. ‘Small,’ he muttered, ‘like Pat, nowt of our Armstrongs in him.’ She didn’t reply, kept her own eyes shut, but it didn’t put him off asking questions. ‘How’s he been, the lad?’ She managed to say, ‘Fine,’ which brought forth a stream of ‘Good lad’s’. Later, it was, ‘Hot, was it, eh? I’ll bet.’ She nodded. ‘Lad’ll notice the difference, bound to.’ His desperation to talk, to bring himself close to Leo, was so marked that even in the midst of her overwhelming weariness she felt sorry for him. Awful, she reflected sleepily, to want to communicate concern and affection and be unable to, all that unused pent-up feeling inside him which he wouldn’t acknowledge as emotion.