From a Distance (4 page)

Hunched over the sponge and meringue concoction as she glued the Alaska together, Luisa’s back twinged. Oh to really be in New York, with the day stretching ahead and time to practise perfect deportment with a handsome personal trainer. Would Nick like this ice cream? Or rather, would Cathy? Not that she would taste it, of course, she was one of those dairy-free mothers, but she would have an opinion, and it needed to be a good one. It was through the support of Cathy and friends like her that Luisa had been introduced to the new restaurant in Blythe. The award-winning chef who ran it had taken three of her desserts. Luisa rolled her shoulders. He would like May Day, but she might give it a more Italian name for his menu.

It was a shame, it was just the sort of thing Gina, her mother, would love to do, but she had left last week for the summer. Off to stay with her sister near Turin. Every year she made the trip, but since Luisa’s father died, the weeks had started to stretch into months. This year she would be gone for three months. Almost as long as Ellie. Fancy having a mother and a daughter both on versions of a gap year. What did it say about Luisa herself, she wondered? Sad old stay-at-home or keeper of the hearth and pulse of the family heart? She’d like to believe the latter, but it was hard.

Closing the oven door, Luisa surreptitiously crossed herself, then sighed, wishing she hadn’t. Too many of her mother’s foibles were beginning to appear in her daily actions. Had they always been there, silently filling the pool of her subconscious, the part of her that she believed was hers alone, secretly saturating her until the first drips began to spill out again? Would these droplets form faster and faster until the habits and actions she noticed in her mother engulfed her? Would she become her mother at that point? And when was that moment? Her mother was seventy-five, she was fifty-one. The way things were stacked, it looked like it could be quite soon. Just as well Gina was away for a while.

Much as she loved her family, Luisa felt as if she had become invisible. The change had been subtle, but it was inevitable and irreversible. Every mother reigns supreme at the heart of her family while bringing up children, and every mother has to move over at some point. Luisa accepted the natural order of things, she just hadn’t reckoned on it coming so soon. Once Ellie had gone travelling, home life had been subverted. Luca and Mae moved up to fill space Ellie had occupied, and suddenly the family dynamic had changed and no one was little any more. They were at school, they had their own lives, their friends, and their own idea of what to eat and when. Her children seemed to take their lead from Tom, who whirled through the house, rushing to work or into his study to mark papers, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl as he passed, not sure if he would be back for supper, shouting ‘Don’t wait for me’ as he banged out of the door and into his car. And now her children, as she still thought of them, had begun to live as though all of them were housemates.

She asked Gina if she remembered this happening to her when she and Cosmo were teenagers, but her mother was implacable.

‘I don’t know what you mean talking about housemates. Your father, you and Cosmo, you all came home for dinner every night. Housemates? No, we were always a family. A family.’ She dusted her hands together, clapping away the strand of thought she didn’t like.

Suddenly Luisa’s children didn’t ask her for anything. The familiar cries of ‘Mum, where’s my—’ or ‘Mum can you help me—’ or ‘Mum, what’s for supper?’ vanished overnight to be replaced by a disconcerting silence. They helped themselves to what they wanted and retreated to their rooms with laptops and phones, music and, sporadically, skulking companions she sometimes didn’t recognise. None of them cleared up the yoghurt pots under the sofa, the orange peel on cushions, the glasses, odd trainers and endless socks, mugs or apple cores that appeared around every place they sat down, but none of them expected her to either. She had learned it was best to take the line of least resistance. It worked. After all, who wanted to be a slave to housework? The only thing was that it sometimes left her wondering what she was meant to do? Her purpose as a mother was no longer vital, so who or what was she now? Should she pack her bags like Gina and take off? She and Tom hadn’t ever visited her sister-in-law Bella, New Zealand always seemed so far, but now? Luisa’s thoughts faltered. She wouldn’t want to go all that way on her own and Tom was so busy. Maybe she should. She needed to be more independent. All those years as a wife and mother .
.
. Now the props had been removed, and she was facing the prospect of being herself. She wondered what she might find out about herself.

One thing was for sure, she wasn’t much of a timekeeper. Surely the time in India, on the third clock, was wrong? How could it be ten past anything, anywhere? Surely it was five hours ahead? Weren’t minutes the same the world over? Luisa felt a shimmer of panic. Had her clock just given India an extra half hour? Or taken it away? More or less time? Which was it? Anyway, it didn’t matter, the important thing was that it was roughly teatime. A cosy thought, teatime in India. Luisa felt silly even thinking about it. It was just she hadn’t quite got the hang of Ellie being so far out of reach.

Ellie. Warm and open, sometimes stroppy, but mainly even-tempered and a joy to be around. Her elder daughter, and part of her life for the last nineteen years. Almost twenty when one counted the halcyon long ago days of Luisa’s first pregnancy. Ellie had always been communicative, she would often call Luisa in her lunch break, waiting for the bus or a lift home from school, and if ever she stayed away, ended conversations and texts with ‘Luv u’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘XX 2 U Mumma’. Luisa had been quite unprepared for the shock of all this stopping when Ellie left for India. Scarcely a message a week, and when they did come they were short, and just texts or emails, not a single phone call. Luisa felt bereft. Silly, but bereft. It was all very well for Tom to say that the next generation had to be allowed to separate from their mothers, but Fran White called her mother from Mexico, and she’d been gone two months. Joanna Davies, a school mother Luisa had never much liked because she always had to know more than anyone else about everyone else, had the nerve to say Max had bumped into Ellie on a beach somewhere in Cochin. If you listened to Joanna Davies you’d think Ellie was suddenly best friends with Max, when Luisa could definitely remember her kids announcing he was a loser after he was caught cheating in his A levels. Only by asking Mae and Luca to let her see the Facebook posts Ellie had blocked her from, had she discovered anything at all. Distracted by the tantalising photos she could suddenly see, Luisa forgot to write a message. Then thought better of it. No point in annoying Ellie by letting her know she had seen things she was not meant to.

Mae pointed her towards a picture. ‘Look, she’s fine, Mum. You can see her here.’

Luisa put on her glasses to look more closely. ‘What are they doing? Who’s she with? It looks like they’re castaways. Ellie’s got something on her head. Is it a turban? Oh, don’t Mae, I’m looking. I need to see her.’

‘You don’t
need
to,’ Mae told her mother firmly. She’s blocked you because she doesn’t want you to see them. But never mind that. Look what she posted.’

Luisa began following the words on the screen with her finger, Mae batted her hand away. ‘Mum, you don’t have to touch it you know! Just relax.’

Luisa leaned closer to the screen. What was that thing on Ellie’s head? It wasn’t a scarf, or a hood.

‘Oh.’ Startled, the exclamation punched out of her throat. It was someone’s arm. Ellie was lying on a beach tucked close into someone’s armpit, her eyes raised to meet the armpit owner’s. He or she was not visible, but Luisa was sure it was ‘he’, as the armpit was clearly hairy. Too hairy for even the most defiantly feminist of Ellie’s friends, and way too muscly. Luisa clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t ask Mae who she thought the mystery armpit belonged to; she’d be struck off entirely, removed from Ellie’s contacts if she did anything that could be construed as interfering. So she read the post: ‘Going trekking for a few days off the beaten track to a tea plantation. Please guys, tell Mum to get off my case, she keeps hassling me.’ The smart of humiliation was sudden and painful as a nettle rash. Still, it was another lesson learned.

She began to wash up, squirting foaming liquid in a squiggle, pulling on gloves that clamped her hands like wax. Bubbles wafted over the sides of the sink and onto the draining board. The muffled crackling noise of the sink filling with foam was a conduit to long ago. When they were small, the girls loved to shadow her every move in the kitchen, miming domesticity, close to her side as if magnetically connected. Washing up was a protracted affair when a six- and a three-year-old took over, a chair dragged to stand on at the sink, sleeves rolled up as they delved for soapy plates and pans. Everything she did, they wanted to do too, mimicking her words and gestures, small mirrors to her mothering.

‘Right everyone, that’s enough nonsense. Have a glass of water. Just sips you know.’ Ellie would say firmly to her dolls, adding, with kindly wisdom, to her mother, ‘They just forget to calm down sometimes, like me and Mae.’

In a parallel, equally absorbing world, Mae diligently trundled a small wheelbarrow across the kitchen, stopping every few paces to add carefully chosen items to her load. A peppermill, a glove from the basket by the door, a turquoise tiara, a snake of apple peel and a pair of sunglasses. A photograph of her with her trophies, the sunglasses lopsided on her tiny nose, was propped on the mantelpiece, the edges curling inward with age. They were like little fairies then, but weren’t all small children wrapped in magic?

Luisa looked at the clocks again. The pudding would take another five minutes. There was no question, Ellie had been ready to go. On the day she left she had brought her bags down to the car an hour and a half before she needed to go. She sat on the doorstep in the watery spring sunshine with Luca making playlists, laughing as they added tracks featuring journeys.

‘That’s way too easy, there’re loads,’ said Luca. ‘Let’s make it with the word “road” in it. The more restrictions the better.’

Luisa turned on her iPod. Otis Redding poured into the room, ‘These Arms of Mine’. Tom called her taste ‘slit your wrists music’, but Luisa didn’t care. She sang along loudly, she knew all the words to all his songs, had done since her brother Cosmo had introduced her to ‘Dock of the Bay’ when she was thirteen, and singing stopped her checking her phone.

‘Burning to hold you’. It was close to sunset in Southern India now, but if this were New York she’d be off to work. In reality, she was at home in the kitchen with the dog, and two puddings he and she would have to eat.

Making ice cream. It was hardly a serious contribution to life on earth, but it was her skill, and she was in demand for it. Three local shops and one tearoom in Blythe stocked the ice creams she made, and if this thing with the restaurant took off, it could be time for a recipe book next. And definitely the van if it could be fixed. Luisa wasn’t sure her husband or children had registered her growing success.

‘The trouble with ice cream,’ she said to the dog as she manoeuvred the spectacular blue baked Alaska out of the oven, ‘is that it melts. Or gets eaten. It’s just not very interesting, really.’

Except that it was. Mercurial, ever-changing, as fairylike as any child, yet exacting as algebra or chemistry in its creation, Luisa knew the delight of ice-cream making as her forebears had done. She understood the romance. Catherine de Medici was said to have taken her Italian chefs with her when she went to France to marry the Duc d’Orleons. She was just fifteen and, not surprisingly, she wanted ice cream. Luisa told this to Mae and Ellie, hoping to draw them in, but their interest was lukewarm at best. It was her own love affair. She’d always enjoyed the order and the excitement of her science lessons at school, the test tubes lined up, the enigmatic array of powders and liquids, ethers and explosives. This was the edible version. Some, Tom agreed, were pure poetry. ‘This is summer on a plate. Nothing can beat it,’ Tom had said, with rare lyricism when Luisa made champagne ice cream with elderflowers to celebrate Mae’s birthday.

Tom. She had to remember he did appreciate her in his way. He could be thoughtful. He gave her the time-zone clocks after all. A week after Ellie left he put them up for her in the kitchen and called her in to look, ‘Here, Tod,’ he said. ‘You can keep up with her now,’ he ruffled her hair affectionately, tweaking nostalgia with the nickname he’d invented when they met.

Luisa loved the myth that had grown up around their meeting, she didn’t even really know if it was true or not any more, but Tom was certain of the facts as he remembered them. It was October, she had been wearing a pink fur coat. That was true enough, she’d got it at a jumble sale and wore it all the time. She was always cold, she had bad circulation like Ellie. On this occasion, the day she met Tom, the coat was a lifesaver, worn for her Saturday shift selling ice creams out of the window of a chilly van parked up by a pond a mile inland from the seashore at Yarmouth the weekend the clocks changed.

It wasn’t really her shift, or even her job any more, but Cosmo, her brother, sounded under pressure. ‘Lou, help me out here, half term’s the last bite of the cherry, the last blast, before winter kills the ice cream trade, y’know.’

Luisa had never liked working the vans, too many teenage summer days stuck in the cramped space with a generator pounding away next to her, when her friends were out on the beach, often tantalisingly within view. ‘What would you like? Cone or wafer, Flake or sprinkles? Single or double?’ Why did people take so long to choose? It was hardly a life-altering decision. A cold breeze flung a shifting veil of geese across the sky, harbingers of weather that would follow from the Russian Steppes, covering Norfolk in diamante frosts with air that bit your breath away. Cosmo had been let down by his mate Franco, who moonlighted from a scaffolding company, and sometimes simply didn’t show. She sighed and checked the time. An hour to go.