Love and Fallout (39 page)

‘You must have made a mistake. It must have been someone else…'

But her voice remained calm, as if she wasn't aware of the storm crashing and destroying everything in range, turning everything to sticks.

It had happened in Cornwall, said Jean. With nothing to grip hold of I felt myself swirling and choking too, Rori rising and submerging, and then the image of her face as I'd seen it last, empty, one curl falling over her eye. I saw her walking alone into the water.
It's harder to drown than
you'd think
. My teeth began chattering, and then my legs and arms were jittering and shaking, as if I'd been pulled up spasming from a freezing sea.

‘It's the shock,' said Jean. Her arm went around me, solid and real. She held a flask to my lips, its fumes rising. ‘Brandy,' she said. Me and Rori, drinking brandy side by side, the pub alive around us. ‘Come on dear,' came Jean's voice. I opened my mouth to speak but the words didn't come out and instead I swallowed them with the brandy.
It's my fault.

34

Bourbons

‘You know what you can have in your coffee now?' I raise my eyebrows in expectation, waiting for Mum to tell me, and she does with obvious pleasure. ‘Amaretto syrup.'

We're discussing café society. ‘Remember when having coffee in town meant a cup of filter in British Home Stores?' This is something I've noted before but that's not important, the important thing is that Mum gets to chat happily on for a while, the burgeoning coffee shop scene of Stevenage having become something of a pet subject in recent years.

‘That one near the bus station is good, but they leave the gateaux in the fridge too long. Who wants chilly cake?' she says, twisting one of the pearl buttons on her dressing gown. ‘Mind you, the tables are always spotless.'

It's ten o'clock and we're settled on the sofa before bed. I've a morning workshop at a local comprehensive so I'm staying the night rather than catching the train all the way back to Heston. Home looks the same as it always does, cared for, polished, orderly. The conservatory they had built after their pools win is lovingly attended to, its orchids and glossy-leaved rubber plants, the liberty-print armchair where Mum sits in the afternoon with her crossword.

On the television a Mediterranean chef assembles an elaborate dessert, but neither of us is paying much attention and my gaze wanders towards the figurines.

‘Is she new?'

‘Couldn't resist,' says Mum, reaching for another Bourbon.

The ballerina stands in an arabesque beside her sisters: the milkmaid shouldering two heavy pails; the three shepherdesses with their crooks; the rosy-cheeked farm girl; the fine lady in her fancy hat and empire line frock coat; the Dutch girl in shiny clogs. All of them have been helping to keep Mum company since Dad died three years ago.

‘Are you going to tell me what's up then?' says Mum, and when I turn from the china she's studying me. I'd tried to keep up a convincing stream of conversation over dinner and washing-up, offering snippets of news about this and that, local happenings, neighbours. I also recounted the fundraising picnic in Heston Field: she particularly liked the description of Dom offering close-up magic tricks for a 50p donation. Thankfully, the day was a huge success – sunshine, steel band, cake stalls, bouncy castle for the kids – and with some last-minute effort we managed an impressive turn out. The local paper chipped up and took photos. Pete was in one of the pictures wearing a Save Heston Fields t-shirt underneath a striped apron. He'd been due to take his lower-sixth on a field trip to York that weekend, but mindful of our sessions with Valeria he'd arranged for a colleague to cover and offered to man the barbecue instead. The supply teacher has changed things.

Mum still has her attention on me. She seems alarmingly old tonight, the fine lines of her face easily traceable without foundation or rouge. Naturally I haven't mentioned the Pete situation. She loves Pete, has done from the first day he entered our living room, filling the space, his head inches from the ceiling. ‘Isn't he tall, Tessa?' she'd said afterwards. Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Jimmy Stuart, she'd always liked tall men. She and Dad stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and though he was solid, with a broad builder's back, she liked the notion of being swept upwards. And she liked Pete's family too,
professional people
she called them, a GP and a music teacher, a cousin somewhere who worked in the Foreign Office, all part of that upwards sweep.

She's still waiting for an explanation. ‘You're all out of sorts,' she says matter-of-factly. Impossible to imagine her on a two-seater sofa giving up her most intimate feelings.
Me and your Dad just got on with it
, she once said.

‘I'm fine.'

‘You're not fine, I'm your mother and I know.'

I flop my head back and laugh, exasperated. ‘Mum, I'm forty-eight.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

I never tell her anything that'll worry her, but I'll have to offer something, not the supply teacher, not the discontent that's been churning like a waterwheel since meeting Angela, not the scene in the Ipswich nightclub with Pippa smothered by blue powder, but something. I say we're having a few problems with the charity. She listens and asks questions until she's satisfied.

‘Just your job is it? No more run-ins with Maggie?'

She knows about the make-over show-down, but I assure her we've patched it up, and she sips her tea. ‘Well, I'm glad you're pals again,' and her voice becomes factual. ‘She can be a bit silly.'

‘But you love Maggie.' Mum's known her so long she's almost like another daughter. She likes her verve and her lipstick and her high heels, her breezy manner and her gutsy laugh.

‘Yes. But she's a bit silly,' Mum repeats. ‘Always has been. Remember all those get-ups she used to have on herself? And the hair!'

We recall a few of her more memorable experiments: the Medusa-style perm; the blonde asymmetric fringe; the bridesmaid's dress cut down and dyed crimson.

‘I used to think you'd have preferred her for a daughter,' I say, half to myself, regretting the hurt which passes over Mum's face. ‘Only, you know, I wasn't much good at fashion, was I?' A memory of the day I left for Greenham: Mum and Dad in the kitchen, me with my Doctor Martens and rucksack, Mum turning to Dad as if he might be able to do something.

‘Come on Tessa, as if that matters.'

‘Sorry,' I say, knowing she would have loved us to go through the Littlewoods catalogue together all the same.

‘Anyway, they didn't do a bad job on you, those TV people. I thought you came out a treat.' She takes me in. ‘Even so, I prefer your natural hair colour.'

She tells me again how she watched the programme with her friend Shirley. Recently she's begun to repeat herself. In my own cowardly way I find it easier to ignore the signs of her ageing rather than to see them close up, that way she can stay here forever in this house wearing her frilled dressing gowns and eating biscuits.

‘Shirley said they could teach her daughter-in-law a thing or two – have you ever met Dawn? She's one of those poor things with the thighs.' She draws her hands apart illustratively. ‘Wears these terrible tight jeans, like sausage skin.' While Mum is sidetracked by Shirley's daughter-in-law, I begin to imagine Angela at home watching the programme. I decorate her house with original art works and Eames chairs, then wonder if there should be a few children's toys or teenager's clothes scattered around. Perhaps it's a modern and functional place, the home of someone who devotes her life to work. Is there a portrait of the Madonna in a discreet alcove? I remember her at the Southbank, the small gold cross at her neck falling forwards as she laughed, a wave of sunlight brightening her blonde hair. Is she a contented Catholic now? Perhaps she's made enough sacrifices to earn that privilege.

‘A woman I used to know from Greenham Common got in touch recently.'

‘Did she? One of your chums?'

‘Not especially. She saw the show, we met up.'

‘That's nice. Did she fancy a make-over too?'

‘Not exactly,' I recall Angela's Italian shoulder bag. ‘She works in advertising these days.'

‘Is that right?' Mum nods approvingly. ‘You could have had a job like that if you'd wanted. Be better than trekking all over the countryside for no money wouldn't it?' She smiles to let me know she's joking, but only half joking. I don't comment because for the first time I've started to think the same thing, especially after our funding review collapsed.

It's been another long day; part of it spent giving a school's workshop in Peterborough. When I split the class into groups and gave out questions for discussion, a girl with brutally scraped back hair and a lot of eye make-up regarded me with dismissal and said that as long as the lights came on when she clicked the switch she didn't give a shit where the power came from. Her friend laughed. The teacher was chatting to her colleague at the back of the room, and too tired for a confrontation, I carried on. Everyone has bad days of course. But then, why not have a bad day and get paid for it?

Angela's company website, MPP (Mullen, Powell and Porter), a sleek affair of sliding graphics, has her photographed in black and white, back lit and self-assured: Angela Mullen, Creative Director and Partner. I pondered that photo for much longer than necessary, and her passage through life; the years in America, her career in academia, then the transfer into a new world of immaculate cream suits. Meanwhile I've been trying to push boulders up mountainsides for about 53 pence a week. That photo of Angela gave me a stricken feeling I couldn't quite explain. Over the years when I thought of the common, she was one of the people I held clearest, her round glasses, that pale face peering out of the parka into a book or away into an imagined future. Her phrase about protest requiring sacrifice stuck with me, but was that advice delivered by a different person? Has she had her therapy and reinvented her life as if none of it mattered? I can't tell and it's not the sort of question that can be easily asked, but it lodges in my chest.

‘How long did she stay there then, your friend?' Mum never says Greenham, she says
there
, or
your camp
, and on occasion
that place
.

‘Angela? She left before I did.' That reminds me, I didn't ask about Seneca, the peace camp in New York State where she was bound.

‘Smart girl.'

It bothers me that Mum's so intransigent after all this time. She catches my sigh.

‘Well,' she says, ‘bunking down in the mud for heaven's sake. I never understood it. You were a girl, weren't you, young for your age I suppose, but as to those middle-aged women. Married women, some of them.' She shakes her head.

‘Plenty of married women came, and plenty of men supported them. Those women were there because they had convictions, Mum.'

‘Maybe so, but they didn't have to give their convictions to you.' She shakes her head, as if at some private memory. ‘Convictions don't always do people good.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You weren't the same after you came back from that common. It was like you'd shrunk and grown all at the same time.' Her voice is serious. ‘They did something to you. They changed you. You came back different.'

I wonder who Mum's
they
are, and even as I wonder I know she's right, I did come back different. It's just that she's attributed the change to an army of radicalised women.

‘No one was brainwashing me, Mum. You could have come if you'd wanted. Seen it for yourself.' It strikes me that a visit from Mum would have been the last thing I'd have wanted back then.

‘I nearly did,' says Mum, ‘when you didn't come home for Christmas. Your dad stopped me, said we should leave you be.'

‘Did he?'

She seems vexed at the memory. ‘You weren't the sort to be living under a canvas sheet. You thought you were, but you weren't.'

She sighs thinking about it, that shadowy period of time, just them in the house, scanning the papers, waiting for me to ring from the Newbury phone box when I couldn't always get there. She would have been worrying about the worst, whatever her version of the worst was. Motherhood in the eighties: a world without texts.

‘So Dad was all right with me staying?'

She purses her lips. ‘We didn't see eye-to-eye about it.'

‘Really?' Hard to imagine Dad being insistent, he was so mild, and in truth it was usually Mum who had the last word.

‘In fact,' a fond note enters her voice, ‘he became your number one defender, got into a row with Bob Potts about it all.'

‘What, Dad and Bob Potts?' My mind skids about at the idea of Dad arguing with anyone, least of all Bob, long-time manager of the Old Volunteer, loud and ruddy, pink ham fists clenched around the ale pumps.

‘Some of them in there were having a few cracks about the women and your dad got his hackles up. He'd done his stuff by then, his research, he knew all the arguments. He kept a scrapbook.' Mum waves to indicate the side cabinet. ‘Probably in one of those drawers.'