Every Day Is Mother's Day (12 page)

“Dad said it wasn’t.”

“Look, Suzanne,” Colin said, “anybody can make a mistake.”

“What mistake?” Sylvia said.

“He went into a phone box and phoned somebody. Just now, when we were out.”

Sylvia looked at him questioningly.

“I rang Frank O’Dwyer, it was just something I had on my mind, about plans for next term. I thought it might go out of my head if I didn’t do it right away.”

“Oh,” Sylvia said. She wasn’t greatly interested; to Colin it sounded extremely feeble, but it was the best he could do on the spur of the moment.

“Why did you say the phone was out of order?” Suzanne asked. “You told a fib.”

“Get off my back, Suzanne,” Colin said. “You’re getting very cheeky.” He picked up the newspaper.

“Did you get those Swiss rolls?” Sylvia asked him.

“Sorry. Forgot.”

“I asked you, Colin,” she said mildly.

“Then I’ll go back.” He put the paper down.

“He wants to phone again,” Suzanne said. “I’ll go with him, shall I, and see if he does?”

Oh God, he thought, is it worth it? This is only the Christmas holidays. It is only two weeks and a half. What will happen when the summer comes?

Evelyn had made herself a cup of tea. It had been an ordeal. When she had found that the front door was open after all, she had stood hesitating on the step. Once, she would not have been able to nerve herself to go in.

“I’m tired of your tricks,” she said out loud, and pushed the door open carefully. The hall was empty.

Muriel got up sleepily at the sound of the key turning in her prison door. She rubbed her eyes. Evelyn could see the dent in the cushion where her head had rested. She went over to the
window and pulled back the curtains, but night was coming down and she saw that there was no point in it.

“I was locked out,” she said to Muriel. “Didn’t you hear me knocking on the window?” She sighed and went into the kitchen.

Muriel followed her. Evelyn talked, to keep the silence away. Muriel had an elaborate air of not listening: humming to herself, twiddling her fingers in front of her eyes.

Now, that overcoat, Evelyn said. Nothing was made nowadays as well as it used to be, neither coats nor mothballs. Of course, she had put it carefully in the wardrobe, not knowing when it might be needed. After all, it had been practically new. At some time she must have transferred it to the old chest in the lean-to. And over the years she had forgotten it. Who would have thought it would have kept so nice? Seeing it hanging up had given her such a turn.

Evelyn’s tone was easy, conversational. She was anxious to make it clear that she did not hold the business against her daughter. In matters of this kind, Muriel was as innocent as the day is long.

Evelyn put a cup of tea down before Muriel. Muriel began to devote all her attention to it, gazing into its depths avidly.

How long now? Evelyn thought. She had made no preparations, as yet. Clearly, she would have to take responsibility. She would have to do it all. She tried to remember Muriel’s birth, whether there had been difficulties, whether it had been painful. It was all so long ago now.

In the days after their marriage, the house had been very tidy. She had polished and swept all day. Clifford came and went. He went out to business. He was a handsome, taciturn man, a fastidious eater, a vegetarian. He shaved twice a day. She did not really know him well, not well at all.

She had made an appointment with the doctor, an elderly and sallow man.

“Well, I suppose you know your condition,” he had said. “It is sufficiently evident.”

She had gathered her courage, clearing her throat softly. “How does this come about?” she asked.

The doctor had looked up at her. “My dear lady.” He chuckled without a semblance of humour. “My dear lady.”

She had told Clifford the same night. He was not pleased. But he said that no doubt the child could be trained to be not much inconvenience. After all, he had never imagined that he would be a dog-owner, but the Airedale was very well-behaved.

Unfortunately, soon after Muriel was born, the Airedale chewed up a rug and Clifford took it away to the vet’s. Muriel lay quietly in her cot. Clifford’s temper was short, but she gave no cause for complaint.

A brief sharp pain interrupted Evelyn’s thoughts; now she remembered. She had been left alone to scream, on a high white bed. The landscape of her pain had been her high, knotted, purple stomach. The parasite was straining to be away. A woman with a clamped mouth had stuck her head around the door, and asked her to please have some consideration.

And dangling from the doctor’s hands, upside down and blood-smeared, like someone horribly executed: Muriel Alexandra, a lovely daughter.

She looked at Muriel in pity, turning at once to exasperation.

“Now what is that you have there?”

She pulled the bit of card out of Muriel’s hand. It was tatty, crumpled, thumbed; a reminder from the Welfare. Dates and times. The Day Centre. Miss Field has called.

“How long have you had this?”

No answer.

Evelyn ripped it through once. I’ll burn it, she said. If you have any more, give them to me at once and I’ll burn them all.

Muriel raised her head and gave her a direct look, engaging
her eyes. It was something she did so seldom that Evelyn was shot through with alarm. She understood that she was being threatened.

“Why should they bother about you?” she said. “Why should they come looking for you? What are you worth, to anybody?”

Muriel subsided. She tapped her fingernail rhythmically against the side of her cup. Strange, Evelyn thought, but it was some time now since she had wondered how her daughter had come by the baby.

“You can drive nature out with a pitchfork,” she said, “but she gets back in.”

Muriel got up and opened the cutlery drawer, jerking it as she always did, as she always did to irritate her mother. She took out a fork and fingered it speculatively.

“Put it down,” Evelyn said. “You’ll prick yourself. Don’t go touching my things.”

Muriel threw down the fork with a clatter, and slammed shut the drawer. She seized the dishcloth and wrung it between her hands, dripping greasy water onto her feet. She flung it at the table and moved across the room, tapping the chairbacks with her knuckles and slapping the palm of her hand against the cupboard doors.

“Stop it, stop it.” Evelyn got up, pushing her chair back, convulsed with anger. “Everything in this house is mine.”

She doubled her fist and struck out at Muriel, pounding at her shoulders and arms and ribs. Muriel stood, stoic. The blows bounced back from her plump solid body. Evelyn whined and gasped. Weariness stopped her. She stood glaring at her daughter, her arms limp by her sides. Suddenly, Muriel smiled. The grin split her face and lit up her eyes. She was delighted, she said softly. Delighted to be here. Welcoming you all. A short programme of song and laughter. For your entertainment. Tonight.

Three days before Christmas, Colin said to Sylvia, “Frank O’Dwyer phoned up.”

“Oh yes?”

“I thought I might just run over there. There are a few things he wants to get straightened out, about next term.”

Sylvia gave him an odd look, he thought. “Can’t it wait till after Christmas?”

“Well, yes, but you know how it is. The holidays are over before you know where you are.” He paused, watching the effect of this; none discernible. Sylvia was peeling potatoes. “I think he might want a bit of company as well. Poor old Frank,” he added sentimentally.

Sylvia filleted out an eye with the sharp end of the peeler. “All right,” she said.

“Only you wouldn’t want to come. It would mean getting somebody in to babysit, and we’d only be talking shop.”

“I’ve a lot to do,” Sylvia said, and added warningly, “Christmas is no holiday for me, you know.”

The following night Colin sat with Isabel in a chilly country pub twelve miles out of town. It was one of the unregenerated kind, with stone floors and a picturesque but quite inadequate open fire. A limp paperchain or two hung over the bar as a nod to festivity, but the customers were quiet and the landlord surly. Isabel looked up and watched Colin as he walked across the room with her tepid gin and his own pint of flat warm beer. Frankly he wondered how he was going to be able to manage these expeditions; the money for drinks, and the extra petrol. He always had an overdraft by the end of January. Every year.

“No ice,” he said jerking his head back towards the bar.

“It’s all right here,” Isabel said. “It’s quiet.”

“I could hardly believe Sylvia didn’t know I was up to something.”

“Up to something? You make me sound like a practical joke.” She lit a cigarette. “Colin, I wanted to see you because I’ve got some decisions to make. I’m thinking of leaving my job.”

“Well…I didn’t think you were happy.”

“Happiness seems a bit ambitious. I’m not sure I can see my way to that.”

“You’re not thinking of going away, are you?”

She watched his face, for the dawn of any hope. How have I come to trust him so little, she wonders, how has all my life become so soured?

“I’ve been offered a post in a new set-up—a therapeutic community, we call it. Must I blush for my jargon? It’s only a few miles away. But they’d like me to live in.”

“And you don’t want to leave your father?”

“I don’t feel that I can.”

“It’s bad luck on you to have no brothers and sisters, and a father who’s so elderly. I suppose he can’t get about as he used to.”

Isabel opened her bag and took out her handkerchief. Inside the bag were her father’s spectacles. He could not manage without them. After some thought, she had hit on this method of confining him to the house. “This place,” she said, “it’s a new approach, small numbers, a good staffing ratio. It’s for children who are mentally ill.”

Colin noticed the blue circles under her eyes, the tightness around her mouth. “I should think that would be intensely depressing. What have children got to make them mentally ill? Are they born that way?”

“Are you asking me for information?” she said. “Or is it a debating point?”

“For information. You’d be surprised what I don’t know. Explain to me.”

“Some babies don’t eat, they don’t cry. Nobody knows why.”

“It can hardly be society. It must be their genes. Genes are not much in fashion, I think. It must be their mothers.”

“Some of the mothers don’t seem to make relationships with the children. They don’t treat them as people, just as objects. They let them lie for hours and don’t react when they cry. The children feel that nothing they do can influence the world. They can’t control it. And they give up trying.”

“Like me,” Colin said. “I can’t control the world. I’m like that. I have it.”

“It’s not a disease, it’s a state of being. The constant frustration of one’s efforts to adapt the world, and the resignation of the attempt.”

“It’s common.” He sighed. “Look at the Labour Party.”

“Oh, Colin, it isn’t a bit the same. The frustrations we meet every day are of a different order. Sometimes the mothers are quite normal, and then we can’t account for it. When they get a bit older the children just sit, or they lie, and they gaze into the distance, you know, or just play with their fingers. They seem not to want to live. They seem afraid of it. Afraid of everything.”

“Nobody can do anything about anything,” Colin said. “They are right, the rest of us are wrong. Deluded. Why should we victimise them? Poor little sods.”

“But it’s a practical problem. They have to be fed. Kept alive. The whole world seems to them completely destructive.” She paused. “Maybe it is. I see your point. They have the nuclear weapons inside their heads. The megadeath.”

“Why don’t they give up then? Just give up and die?”

“Some do.”

“And the others?”

“We presume that they once felt some security or goodness. At the breast. They are fighting to get back to it.”

“But you can’t get everything from the breast.”

“No. You can’t get very much at all.” She looked up at him. “Could we possibly, do you think, be more cheerful?”

“It
is
Christmas,” he said automatically. “Look, Isabel, I don’t think you should rush into a decision. On the one hand, would you be any more satisfied with that sort of work? On the other hand, perhaps your father should stand on his own feet. Plenty of people that age manage for themselves. He might live another twenty years, and then what? You’d be a prisoner.”

Isabel put her bag down at her feet, and edged it under the table.

“Don’t put it down there, love, you might forget it.”

“Women never forget their handbags. They’re womb symbols. You wouldn’t forget your womb, would you? I bet Sylvia never does.”

“You’ve not been well, you know. You look very run down. Put everything off for a month or two.”

“Well, I can’t seem to cope, that’s true enough. I do some stupid things. I lost a file. At least, I put it in the back of my car, and then it went into the garage, and when it came back the file wasn’t there.”

“Nobody would want it, would they?”

“It would be of no use or interest to anyone. That’s why it’s so annoying.”