Mothers & Daughters (31 page)

To my surprise, it was David.

‘I'm going out,' I said.

‘I know. That's why I'm here.'

It took me a moment before I understood. ‘You want to come with me?'

‘If you'll let me, I'd like to drive you down. It's a good three hours and I know your car's still crimped. I'd wait outside when we got there. I wouldn't interfere – that's very much not my agenda – or I'd come in with you, if that's what you wanted. Whatever suited you. I'd just like to be involved.'

I said, ‘Phil's taking me.'

‘I see.'

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘I should have mentioned it. But thanks ever so much for coming round.'

‘All right. But you will give me a ring when you get there? To let me know what's . . .' He trailed off, frowning. ‘Can you hear music? Or am I hallucinating?'

He was right, it was my mobile. By the time I'd hunted it down, the screen was displaying Missed Call, but I knew it was
Phil. I left David where he stood, took myself into the kitchen and rang straight back.

‘Ah, Carol,' said Phil. ‘I am still coming round, but I might be a bit late. Something's happened.'

‘Something?'

There was shouting in the background, a woman's voice.

‘Pen's here. She wants—
No, it isn't. Wait. Wait! There's no need
!' I heard him mutter an aside, then his voice became loud again. ‘I didn't know she was coming. She wants to pick up some stuff.'

‘Phil, I need to get down there.'

‘Yeah, I'll be with you, soon as I've got rid of her.'

‘Fine,' I said crisply.

‘Don't be like that.'

‘I'm not being like anything. Obviously there are still things you need to sort out. Don't bother coming over, I'm setting off now.'

And I clicked the phone closed.

I came back out into the hall where David was writing something on my telephone pad. ‘I was going to see myself out,' he said.

‘If it's three hours to Bristol,' I said to him, ‘we'd better get going, hadn't we?'

The first part of the drive was completed in silence. My head was all Phil, all anger and humiliation and disappointment and images of bloody Penny, bloody bloody Pen, jowly cow blundering into my life, buggering everything up again and again and again! God, I hated her.

Two feet away from David I sat and stewed in my own thick fog of loathing; when that began to disperse, I remembered where we were going, and then it was fear enveloped me instead. I sat clutching the seat belt, trying to work out how I'd
cope if we got there and there was no Matty, no Jaz, and why should she be there? This was a longer-than-long shot, I was only setting myself up for a fall. I tried not to imagine her opening the door to me, Matty behind her, peeping round her legs. I tried not to imagine my grandson tottering forward for a hug, me lifting him up and squeezing him to my chest, his hair against my cheek, his hot smooth skin brushing my lips as I kissed him and kissed him. And the more I strained to banish the pictures, the clearer they became till they were as sharp as real memories.

David was saying something. It was like someone speaking to you from the poolside when your head's underwater: ‘—if you get car sick. Wind the window down if you need it.'

‘I'm fine,' I snapped. I felt as though his interruption had foiled an actual reunion. When I glanced across, his expression was completely neutral. Was it just a front? Was he, secretly, as churned up as me? Why did he have to call me out of myself like that? Now I was wrong-footed, on top of everything else. The miles were rolling away under us and I wasn't prepared. ‘Sorry, I'm a bit tense.'

‘Or we can have the radio on if you want background noise.' He pushed a button on his dashboard, and something busy and classical came out of the speakers.

‘No, thanks.'

He switched the music off. We covered another silent mile.

‘Who are we going to see, exactly?'

‘Oh. Her ex, sort of. Although she's not been in touch with him since she was married, her friend told me.'

‘And what do we know about him?'

‘Only that Jaz dated him at university, and that it was quite serious. The break-up was what started her illness, I think.'

I wasn't going to tell David about the abortion. No one was hearing that.

I said, ‘I suppose Ian's in a state.'

‘He's pretty wound up, yes. Though still very aware that whatever Jaz is up to, he started the whole business. That's holding him down at the moment. I don't know how long for.'

‘Does he know about today?'

‘He's had to go into work.'

‘On a Saturday?'

‘Some kind of project crisis that won't wait. No point dragging him away from that, stressing him out over what might be a wild-goose chase. I'll tell him when I get home,' said David, as if there were nothing to debate about such a strategy. Imagine having offspring who respected your opinion like that, who assumed you knew what you were doing, who were prepared to put their life into your hands.

By the outskirts of Birmingham, the traffic had grown much heavier. We passed huge, thundering lorries with wheel arches as high as my head. The landscape on either side was hoardings and warehouses and factories and banks of transformers. Wires criss-crossed the skyline.

I said, ‘One thing I've realised, I don't know my son-in-law at all. Not even slightly.'

‘If it's any consolation, I think he took us all by surprise.'

Here came a truck with a yellow digger on the back, but I had no one to point it out to.

‘When you look back, though, can you see where the affair came from?'

David was silent for a long while. I thought he'd decided not to answer, or perhaps he'd shaken his head and I'd not seen. The traffic became mesmerising if you gazed at it for too long.

Suddenly he said, ‘What you have to understand about Ian is, he has absolutely no self-confidence.'

‘I can't believe that,' I said. ‘His background. His education.'

‘You're confusing confidence with being well turned-out, polite, nicely spoken. It's not the same thing, Carol. I've trained Ian over the years to come across as relatively easy with himself, but it's a veneer. I don't know how far even Jasmine appreciates that, for all the time they've spent together. She may not. He's become adept at disguise.'

I found myself staring at a row of grey and beige tower blocks, imagining myself transported there, my own face to the window, watching the distant cars.

‘Do you think it comes down to having a difficult childhood? Losing his mum?'

‘Oh, it started before that. Long before. When Ian was born, there were babies in cribs either side who lay like dolls and never made a murmur. Ian was fretful from the minute he came out; I could almost have told you then we'd have trouble at nursery, and starting school, and changing classes, and that every little setback would be a crisis. In a sense he didn't cope too badly with Jeanette dying, in that his life then was one drama after another, so that just became one more to deal with. I did my best, under the circumstances.

‘He calmed down as he got older, grew a thicker skin, learned the social graces. I'd say he enjoyed certainly the sixth form and university. Barring a couple of hiccups.

‘Then he married your daughter, a woman – let's be frank – in a completely different league from anyone else he's ever dated. Not that he'd had many girlfriends to begin with.'

‘Surely if he felt like that, he'd have hung onto Jaz all the more tightly?'

‘Why do some women who've had a violent upbringing go on to choose a violent partner? Or girls whose mothers had them too young fall pregnant themselves before they're able to cope with a baby? Why do people drink too much, or take harmful drugs, or get themselves repeatedly into debt? We all
come with a self-destruct button, Carol, it's just that some of us are better at resisting than others. My guess is that when this woman threw herself at him, flattery scrambled his brains. The boost to his confidence eclipsed everything else. Even, momentarily, his love for Jasmine and Matty.'

Excuse-lines from Phil echoed in the back of my mind:
You and Jaz make me feel the odd one out. Sometimes I think I'm invisible to you. It's like I come last in this house
.

‘I hope you're not suggesting Jaz is to blame?' I said. ‘It's not her fault she's beautiful. You know, he's had
nothing
but kindness off our family.'

‘It's not an excuse,' said David. ‘Just an attempt at explanation. Anyway, I could be wrong. He doesn't speak to me about it. By the way,' he nodded at the plaster across my knuckles, ‘what happened to your hand?'

‘Oh. Silly accident.'

‘Argument with a cheese-grater?'

‘Not exactly.'

To tell him, or not. He waited while I decided, and it was knowing I didn't have to say any more that made me want to.

‘God, it's so stupid. I punched a wall.'

‘And why did you do that?'

‘I don't know. I had this mad moment last night where suddenly I didn't know what to do with myself, I just needed to thump something. I hope that doesn't sound too disturbed.'

‘Can I suggest a cushion next time?'

In spite of everything, he made me smile. ‘It's not me. I don't do things like that. Unless I'm someone different from who I thought I was.'

‘That's always possible.'

We were out of the city now and into countryside. The pressure in the car was less somehow, even though every revolution of the wheels brought me closer to Jaz, or to her absence.

‘A month after Jeanette died,' said David, ‘I tried to dig up a tree root in the garden. That was idiotic of me, because really it needed experts in with proper equipment. But I wasn't bothered about that, I just wanted to attack something. I used a pick and a spade and I went at it non-stop for two hours, and by the end I'd taken all the skin off the palms of both hands. They were so bad I had to go up to the surgery to have them dressed. I couldn't drive for a week.'

‘Oh, God.'

‘Time moves on. This too shall pass. It will, Carol.'

Much later, as we were getting ready to come off the motorway, I realised there was something else I needed to get off my chest.

‘I feel as though I should say sorry.'

‘What for?'

‘Shouting at you. What I said about, you know.'
No wonder Ian's like he is
.

‘You feel you should, but you don't especially want to?'

I blushed. ‘That's about it, yes. It seemed important at the time. Now, compared with everything else that's happened – And it wasn't really my business anyway. And I should have let you have your say. Those are the bits I'm sorry for.'

‘A selective apology.' He rubbed his wrist strap, stretched his shoulders back in his seat. ‘Well, you were selectively right, if it's any consolation. Not about all of it; you don't know the details and I'm not prepared to share those because it would mean breaking a promise. Although, if anyone would have understood, it would have been you.'

‘I don't want to hear.'

But I was thinking about those stories you read in magazines: people with partners who were very badly disabled or ill, open marriages, marriages where one person simply didn't want sex and the other had been left stranded. Perhaps it was one of
these he was talking about. Perhaps not. Perhaps you could never ever justify that kind of deceit.

He said, ‘I hope you know me well enough by now to appreciate I'm not wholly devoid of morals. There were special circumstances. It wasn't a bad thing I was doing, at least I didn't think it was when it started, but I ended it because it didn't sit right with me. I got drawn in against my better judgement. The way it began, I thought I couldn't say no without hurting someone I thought a lot of . . . No, I've already said too much.'

‘Let's leave it there, then,' I said.

‘Let's,' he said.

At last I sat back and let my mind drift. Ian showing me the picture of the pram he'd marked in the catalogue. Ian opening their fridge and counting up the jars of cling peach pieces Jaz had stockpiled to satisfy her pregnancy cravings. Jaz lifting up her skirt and showing me the veins in her legs. Jaz unfolding the kick chart that the midwife had given her, the little blocks shaded with ink that meant the baby was alive. Meeting Ian at the entrance to the maternity ward, neither of us able to shape a coherent sentence. Laughing at Phil because he brought in a packet of make-up remover tissues instead of baby wipes. The way Ian leaned protectively over Jaz to shield her when she was breastfeeding. Her expression as the wedding car drove off. Ian sitting next to Dad's bed, reading him articles from the local paper. Ian reading to Matty at bedtime and putting on a high-pitched voice for a mouse. Matty standing up in his cot, pointing at a teddy he'd thrown onto the floor. Six-week-old Matty strapped into his baby carrier, asleep on Ian's back. Matty asleep on my sofa, while I sat by him and watched over him.

‘It's saying junction nineteen.' David nodded at the satnav screen. ‘So the next one.'

I pulled down the mirror to check my lipstick. Behind me on the back seat Jacky materialised, wedding hat and all. She became the Baroness, who became Penny.
You're nothing
,
any of you
, I told them, pushing the mirror back up and vanishing them with a flip.

When I looked out of the window, we were crossing the estuary, into Bristol.

CHAPTER 25

Photograph 468, Album Four

Location: the back garden, Sunnybank

Taken by: Carol

Subject: Jaz and Ian, the week before their wedding. Jaz is throwing her head back at something Ian's said, and he's smiling because he's pleased he's made her laugh, and oh, the look of love in his eyes
.