Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (30 page)

My mother wrote notes. Notes to remind herself to do things: put the rubbish out, feed the cat. Notes of things she had to buy, people she had to telephone, TV programmes she wanted to watch, things she must find. Often, at the top of her day’s ‘To Do’ list was ‘Must find “Must Find” list’. While talking on the telephone, Mum would take notes to remind herself exactly what had been said, then refer back to them when telling me about the call. Every time she went out she would leave me a note saying exactly where she was going and what time she would be back, just in case I might call in and wonder where she was.

I put the books down on her kitchen table and searched around for my note. On the shelf by the telephone, there was a memo pad in the shape of a house. It had ‘Your Jobs Today’ written at the top; down the left margin were numbers one to ten – each one a rung on a teddy bear’s ladder. The teddy was on the roof of the house holding a hammer. It was exactly the kind of tasteless tat that my mother felt compelled to buy, then regretted as soon as she got home. I knew that this note was just one of Mum’s lists and not written directly for me, but I read it anyway. It would surely contain some interesting titbit she intended to tell me.

  1. Tel bill

  2. Ring Shirley – return purple top

  3. Bathroom floor tiles! Ring Dennis

  4. Tell G scented candles, £2 for 50

  5. Cashpoint

  6. Tesco: bread, milk, eggs, gravy, apples, spread

  7. Bins! Bins! Bins!

  8. Tell G have ov cancer. Prob term

  9. Bins!

10. Chemist: Moisturizer, deodorant, prescription

That would be item eight. Despite the abbreviation, I knew what it meant immediately. I wasn’t expecting it. I certainly had never thought about ovarian cancer in relation to my mother and there had been no recent conversations I could recall that might have brought it to the front of my mind. Yet straight away it read to me as a complete sentence: ‘Tell Grace I have ovarian cancer and it’s probably terminal.’

Amanda Nicolson sat in front of me and bawled her eyes out. She was a thick-set, sensible fourteen-year-old and the last child in St Anne’s, the private girls’ school where I taught, whom I would have expected to get pregnant. By the state of her, I imagined it was a sentiment that would be shared by her parents, if and when she told them.

‘I’m sorry, miss, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, miss...’

The students always apologized for getting upset. It was the most heartbreaking aspect of being the school’s counsellor, a voluntary position I held in addition to being the deputy head. Most of the other teachers shuddered at the idea of being a sounding board for the girls’ problems, but I enjoyed it. Perhaps because I didn’t have children of my own the reponsibility of it didn’t faze me. It might have been naive of me to take on the position of adviser and confidante to four hundred hormonal teenagers, but I believed someone had to listen to them. I remembered what it felt like to be a teenager myself – confused, pained, isolated, passionate, excitable – and it seemed a shame to me that so many adults generally, and teachers specifically, seemed to have little or no empathy with them.

I talked Amanda through all of her options but she was so distressed she barely took it in. The father was a seventeen-year-old Italian student who had been boarding with her family the previous summer – they had only done ‘it’ once.

‘My dad’s gonna kill me, he’s gonna k, k—’ and she collapsed again.

I knew Dr Nicolson would not kill Amanda. He would be disappointed and concerned. He would make an appointment at a private clinic where his serene manicured wife would take their precious daughter for an abortion. She would be kept home from school for a week, pampered by their housekeeper, then sent back and told to forget all about it. Amanda’s education would not be interrupted by a baby, and the respectable, middle-class lives of her parents could not incorporate an unexpected grandchild. It was out of the question. Amanda was too young to make a choice so her parents would make it for her. Along with choosing her university, her career and, if at all possible, her husband. The course of Amanda’s life was too important to be left to chance. It was not the pregnancy itself that was the tragedy, but the unexpectedness of it; the loss of control.

In the end, I just leaned forward and put my arms around her. She curled her chubby legs up gratefully on the sofa and put her head on my lap like an infant. I patted and stroked her head and indulged myself by wondering if her perfect mother would do the same when she found out. I knew it wasn’t my place to wonder – I was just there to provide temporary relief and solace – but I said a silent prayer that she would be all right. The exchange left me heavy with emotion.

A little of Amanda’s pain followed me into the car as I drove over to my mother’s house to deliver her some cookery books she had asked me to order off the internet for her.

*

Although I inherited my moderately left-wing politics and my liberal attitudes from my mother, it seemed that on a day-to-day basis she was the person who most completely challenged my personal belief system – my private ideas about the correct way to do things. If I had to describe myself I would have reluctantly used the label ‘new-age liberal’, although of course by our very nature we liberals object to putting people in boxes. (Except for ‘fascists’ and ‘racists’ and ‘conservatives’ and ‘religious right-wingers’ and, in fact, everyone who isn’t as ‘open-minded’ and ‘inclusive’ as us.) And yet my mother seemed capable of eliciting behaviour from me that was the opposite of liberal. Uptight, irritable and critical just about covers it. Much of it came from just the fact of who she was. I knew that I loved her more than I ever loved anyone and yet she was always the brunt of my careless criticism. We were very different and the only thing that irritated me more than the differences between us were the similarities. I could be kind and comforting towards another person’s pregnant teenage daughter, and yet I was rarely as kind to my own mother. A mother gives her child love: endlessly, unconditionally, on demand, constantly, from birth to grave. That’s what they do. The more they give you, the deeper they dig a pit which you expect them to fill. The bad news for both of you is the pit is bottomless. The
really
bad news is, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier.

I could never be certain if it was my own insecurity or my mother’s failing that she never felt like quite enough for me. I knew in my heart that she was a great mother, and yet I always carried around a little resentment towards her.

One of the things that broke my heart about my mother, and also irritated the hell out of me, was her lack of confidence. Mum never grew out of wanting to be slimmer, more fashionable, different from how she was; neither did she mature into one of those refined older women who settle into muted shades of cashmere that complement their beige, grey-peppered bobs. Mum was never happy with the subdued haircuts the hairdressers kept giving her.

‘They’ve made me look like a sixty-year-old suburban shop manager.’

‘You are a sixty-year-old suburban shop manager,’ I would say.

‘I don’t care,’ she’d snap, ‘I want to look “way out” and interesting. I want to look like Judi Dench!’

Mum was always experimenting – trying to find her ‘look’. She went through fads and phases. Loud African-print kaftans, then pashminas, then candy-coloured velour tracksuits with chunky training shoes that added an extra two inches to her five-foot-nothing frame. I towered over her, and I often sensed her irritation that I didn’t use the advantage of my height and slim build to more glamorous effect. As my mother never grew out of wanting to look ‘trendy’, I never grew out of being irritated by her lack of self-confidence. ‘Be who you are, Mum,’ I used to say when she asked me what I thought of a new handbag or haircut. Once she said, ‘I don’t
know
who I am, Grace.’ I assumed she was being flippant; it sounded like a line from a magazine. Despite how much I loved her – or rather because of it – I was compelled to constantly point out to Mum where she was going wrong. I wanted her to be the exception to every rule I knew about human behaviour. Publicly I said she was a great mother but secretly the child in me always believed that there was a better, more enlightened mother living inside her. Some part of me thought that all it would take was a nod from me and this all-knowing person would emerge from the flawed, vulnerable, unhappy mess that in my darkest moments I believed she was. It never occurred to me that perhaps that
was
her truth: she did not know who she was. She was unsure, floundering. She said she was content, that she had achieved all she had ever wanted in her life, but I didn’t believe her and that made
me
insecure. She was my mirror. I wanted her to be as good as she could be, so it would reflect well on me. My mother did not compete with me, but sometimes I thought it was only a lack of confidence that was stopping her.

I knew that my mother loved me, but always, even as a small child, I felt there was something missing. A mother’s love for her only child is supposed to be absolute. Somehow, my mum’s love never felt complete.

*

She had called and asked me to order the books weeks beforehand. She had telephoned at midnight, after sharing a couple of bottles of wine with Shirley, a divorcee who had become her new best friend, since her husband had run off with his secretary six months before. I was astonished that men in our modern age still had secretaries who would run off with them, but then Shirley was a walking cliché. She was, to put it politely, ‘dysfunctional’. Neither her son nor her daughter spoke to her any more; she was a chain smoker who rarely made it past lunchtime before cracking open the Chablis. Doubtless as distraction from the sadness of her own life, she had cast herself in the role of my mother’s keeper and was instructing Mum in subjects as diverse as diets, hairstyles, animal print and mother–daughter relations. It seemed she had added cookery to the list. The phone call could
not
wait until morning: ‘Shirley says the recipe for Thai chicken is superb, and that I simply
must
try it as soon as possible. So please order the book immediately, and sooner if possible. Thank you!’

My mother’s assertive tone was for Shirley’s benefit. It annoyed me that Mum, at the age of sixty-two, was being so easily led by this grotesque woman; also annoying was the fact that I knew she would forget she ever wanted the books and would blame me for adding to the already substantial pile of unused ‘stuff’ in her kitchen.

Mum seemed to be in a constant state of low-level self-flagellation; enough to keep her permanently irritated with herself, but not enough to motivate change. She regretted eating that big dinner, but then she’d have dessert and regret that too. She regretted buying that wool coat that didn’t fit her, but it was expensive so she would wear it anyway, then she would buy another one and regret the waste of money. Those orange curtains she had bought in a sale were absolutely vile, she didn’t know what had come over her, but they were up now and she would look at them every day thinking, Why, why,
why
did I buy them? ‘I’ll take them down, Mum, I’ll exchange the coat, I’ll take this fifty-pence tasteless notepad and throw it right in the bin.’ Then she would say, ‘No!’ It was as if she needed all these minor regrets. The wrong purchases, the half-written letters, the lapsed gym membership. Between them they formed a security blanket for her, a weight to stop her moving too fast. Without it, she might have had to get a computer and order her own books on the internet, or fulfil that ambition to be a stone lighter. The novelty notepad was a symptom of all that. As I picked it up I wished, not for the first time, that I wasn’t one of those co-dependent people who look inside other people and see their pain.

After I had been whacked with the initial bombshell, I turned the page over. It was an automatic action, like swearing at a paving stone after you’ve tripped over your own feet. I wasn’t expecting to find anything. Or perhaps part of me was hoping the next page would read ‘Only joking! April fool!’

It didn’t. It was written in the hurried shorthand scrawl my mother used when recording a phone call.

19th Feb

Dr Feltz – Royal Free Hosp.

Biopsy – Stage IV, MMMT rare sarcona (sarco
m
a?)

MMR – tumour 10cm, probably spread – maybe liver?

Operation – scheduled next 2 wks

Sponge bag – M&S new range + FIND PURPLE SLIPPERS! Grace?

I jumped at the sight of my name. I understood the other information. I had a basic knowledge of cancer – I knew it was sarco
m
a, for instance, and that Stage IV was almost certainly terminal. The information registered but it was so dreadful that my mind did not want to let it in. It opened the door and looked at it, but then closed it quickly again. So the terrifying truth of my mother’s cancer remained in the form of a handwritten list on a novelty notepad she had left lying around. I figured if my mother was going to distract herself with purple slippers then I was entitled to sidestep pain with a bit of well-deserved anger.

I believed that there were no such things as accidents. So I found myself in my mother’s kitchen freaking out
not
because she had Stage IV ovarian cancer,
not
because this meant that she was almost certainly going to die sooner rather than later, but because she hadn’t told me in the ‘correct’ way. In the three seconds (or ten minutes) that passed with me standing there holding the revelatory note in my hand, I was aware that I separated in two. Part one buckled against the fireplace, then leaned stock still against the cold bricks in a state of shock. The other, fluid, emotional part of me seemed to float out of my body, then bounce up and down in a state of hysterical fury.

She
had
intended me to find out in this way, I just knew it. She lacked the courage to tell me properly, so she had done it in this throwaway manner to try to make it more manageable, the stupid misguided woman. I mean,
number eight
? Number
eight
on a ‘To Do’ list is to tell her daughter she is dying? Squashed in between two reminders to put the bins out? Was this a metaphor of some kind – her subconscious saying, ‘I am a rubbish mother’? She put telling me below her grocery shopping, below telling me about scented candles on special offer at the pound shop! This was completely wrong, me finding out like this. Part of me was puzzled; why didn’t my mother tell me sooner, bring me along with her to the hospital, the doctor – whatever? Why didn’t she involve me, lean on me? The hysteric in me was raising her hands up, going, ‘This is so,
so
typical of my mother.’ I had no siblings to discuss it with; there was nobody else to break this gently to me; no father to share the pain of losing her with. Just me – on my own. The silly woman should have acquired enough wisdom by now to find a better way of telling me, rather than leaving a note on her kitchen table with all the gory facts detailed on the back.