Mothers & Daughters (45 page)

‘I asked Dr Page if she'd got religion – trying to find my bearings. He said not as far as he was aware, but he thought she might have developed a better sense of perspective. Maybe if I understood her more . . .'

‘What's to understand?' He waved his bottle. ‘Understand yourself, Carol. Put yourself first, for once in your life.'

‘Thank you, Marjorie Proops.'

This time it was he who laughed. ‘I reckon we could both do with seeing a trick-cyclist. Family therapy. What do you say?'

‘Bog off. I do owe you a sort of thank you, though.'

‘How's that?'

‘Well, you never once said to me, “I told you so”, did you?'

‘Over what?'

‘Letting Ian come round and see Matty. And you had every right.'

He scratched his neck. ‘You were trying your best – do you think I'd have done any better? You're the one who knows how people work. I look at our Jaz and I haven't a bloody clue.'

Phil had been edging his chair back across the room till he was by the computer. He wiggled the mouse and, after a few seconds, I heard music.

‘Hey, what do you reckon to that?'

‘What is it?'

‘Shh. Listen.'

A jaunty guitar riff, punctuated by claps, then Marc Bolan's reedy voice: ‘Ride a White Swan'.

‘Good God, this takes me back,' I said. ‘What year was it? Were we still at school?'

‘I think so.'

‘Yes, we must have been, because I remember Eileen and me going into town after last lesson to buy the single, and being embarrassed because we were in our uniforms. She'd pulled her shirt open and had her tie wrapped round her wrist, I don't know what we must have looked like. And we went to that little record shop in St Andrew's Square, do you remember it? I bet it's long gone now.'

Phil took another swig, wiped his mouth, and said, ‘This mess we're in, do you think there's any good to come out?'

‘With Jaz and Ian?'

‘You and me.'

I put my can down on the carpet. ‘Oh, Phil. I'm too tired to argue.'

‘'Cause it wasn't all bad, was it?'

‘No, but the bad bits spoiled the rest.'

‘What I'm saying is, though, you don't have to make that the last word. You don't
have
to let the past rule your entire future. We're not the same people we were, even this time last year, are we? Are we?'

I found myself feeling with my left thumb for the tiny dent that still marked my ring finger.

‘You think,' he went on, ‘what a team we made when we went to fetch Matty back. I'd never have managed without you. I don't think you'd have managed without me. We did it together.'

He stood up, and my heart began to beat faster. Keep away, I thought. But I stayed where I was.

‘All I'm asking, Carol, is that you give it some consideration.'

‘I have considered it. The answer's no.'

With extreme care he lowered himself down next to me, a man keen not to make any sudden moves. Nevertheless, his hip was against mine, and I felt the contact acutely. ‘I'm just trying to be honest with you. I thought it would help if you knew where you stand. No messing, I'm telling you: I'll do anything at all—'

He took my hand. Still I didn't pull away.

‘See, the man I was then isn't who I am now, any more than you're that girl in her teens or twenties. You're not, though, are you? And it's madness to let that hang over us when we could make a fresh start. The time's right. Jaz is home, she's back with Ian – kind of – you've got Matty. Everything's how you want it. But you're more than a “grandma” and a “mum” anyway. You have a life of your own.'

I do have a life
, I wanted to say.
Don't unbalance it again
. And another part of my brain was saying,
Why did you come round here, Carol? What were you expecting?

‘Are you really saying you want to shut the door on this?' He leaned in and kissed my hair. ‘And this?' He put his lips to my forehead. ‘And this?' He kissed the side of my mouth. By now I'd closed my eyes to shut him out, but that only made the sensations more intense. His fingertips crept round to caress the back of my neck, circling the top vertebrae, smoothing along the collarbone. A groan stifled in my throat. When someone's that familiar with your body, they know exactly what works.

Stop, oh, stop
, I said, but no words came out.

‘I tell you, we're different people now,' he said again, breathing into my hair.

You're wrong, I thought. I am that girl in her teens, her twenties, her thirties. I'm fooling with a scarf on the motorway bridge, waiting outside the Odeon, being snogged against a
tree, walking up the aisle, crying in your arms, passing you your baby daughter, cracking your photo over the newel post. I'm a blank-faced future me, watching.

He pulled away, and the unexpected action made me open my eyes. His brow was creased with hope.

‘Oh, please, Carol,' he said.

At last, the power was all mine.

CHAPTER 35

Photograph: unnumbered – loose inside an old Bunny-Bons toffee tin, Sunnybank

Location: Blackpool

Taken by: Phil

Subject: Eileen leans against an iron railing with the sea at her back. Her hair is blowing about, her fun-fur coat flattened down one side by the strong breeze, and her grin is as wide as the Golden Mile. This weekend she has the Key of the Door; all her life stretches in front of her, starting with this coming Saturday night
.

Newly-married Carol should be standing next to her, in her long leather coat, only she's been cut off the photo. You can just make out the crook of her elbow, and the fluttering end of a belt
.

It was my last chaotic area. This afternoon I was determined to have one big push, clear the shed, and then at last that small aspect of my life would be under control. As usual I was equipped with my three sets of bin bags – Keep, Throw and Charity Shop – and this time my mood was ruthless. Space had to be forged, my house reclaimed from the past. A new era beckoned.

I dragged the first box towards me and flipped it open.

There's a displacement activity, if ever there was one
, went Eileen.

You'll be telling me to take a cold shower next, I said to her.

When you live alone and don't date, your body learns to accept the situation, and deals with it accordingly. The dying days of my marriage had run my libido down for me; nothing damps your sex drive like living in simmering resentment month in, month out. Then, after the divorce came Jaz's illness, plus the stress of losing both Eileen and, after a fashion, my dad. By the time I felt anything approaching normal, my hormones had shut down. Sex seemed an activity I'd grown out of, the idea of me stripping naked in front of a man ludicrous, remote and petrifying.

Now, though—

Are you really saying you want to shut the door on this?
I heard Phil say again. And my own response,
I'm not taking Penny's leftovers
.

‘Not worthy of you, Carol,' he'd said. ‘Pen left because she couldn't compete. We both know it's always been you. That's why I couldn't leave you, why you had to kick me out. I didn't want to go – I've missed you like hell. It's been crap.'

This kiss should have been David's
had come into my head and I thought, If I spoke that out loud, it would really hurt you. ‘Tell me again why Penny left,' I'd said.

Something clattering onto the floor made me jump. In moving the box I'd disturbed a pile of refuse sacks, and they'd been gradually sagging against one of the shelves, shoving the contents towards the edge in the manner of one of those coin waterfall arcade games. A tin of Back to Black lay rocking on the concrete with its cap off.

I looked down at the box I was supposed to be sorting. It was full of crumpled newspaper, which I knew meant crockery:
Dad's. There was no need to go through it because I remembered the kind of thing he kept in his kitchen cupboards towards the end – mis-matched pieces from the Sixties and Seventies, ugly and utilitarian. He'd made me take the best when Mum died, said he was frightened of breaking them. Of course I should have slung this lot as soon as he moved out, but I couldn't bear to. Getting rid meant he was never coming back.

But he wasn't coming back. He was where he was, ambling across some great twilit plain towards a dark horizon. With one hand I opened the door, and with the other I pulled the box right out of the shed onto the flags. Perhaps a charity shop could use old plates and mugs, or a homeless shelter. Jaz might know of somewhere.

The next bag was his clothes. When I cleared out Dad's wardrobe, it seemed to me he must have kept every garment he'd ever worn in his life. The care home's always sweltering, so we only took a handful of outfits, light summer wear, and bought him new where necessary. But here were his old overalls, stained with creosote, and his gardening boots, and his rough tweed jacket. He used to sit in that jacket rolling cigarettes, I could see him now. Once he caught me on the lawn with a square of blotting paper, trying to construct a tube out of bits of grass and clover. Not long after that, he quit smoking.

The box behind, when I tore it open, was solid with books: Alistair MacLean, George MacDonald Fraser, Dennis Wheatley, the old familiar covers. I wasn't getting rid of these, for all the spines had softened and the pages swelled. Dad loved his paperbacks. I felt guilty for leaving them out here in the damp for so long.
The Ka of Gifford Hillary
I lifted out, and it flopped open unresistingly. ‘They make paper out of rags,' I remembered him saying. The edges of the pages were furry, like felt.

Underneath the top layers I found, not action novels, but a more eclectic mix of sizes, conditions, bindings and genres. Strange books I didn't recognise. Perhaps Phil had packed these away.
The Grapes of Wrath
, I uncovered;
Brave New World
,
Sons and Lovers
,
Middlemarch
. They had me frowning because, to tell the truth, I couldn't recall anyone reading the classics at Pincroft. But these had been read, you could tell by their state.
A Room of One's Own
was positively tatty, dog-eared, the picture of the woman on the front creased right down the middle. Delving deeper, I found Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
, A. S. Byatt's
The Virgin in the Garden
, Fay Weldon's
Down Among the Women
. There was something severe and grand about these titles, despite their dated fonts and colour-ways, as if they knew I hadn't read them and held me to account for it. One had been covered with brown paper in place of a jacket; when I opened it to find out what it was – Margaret Drabble's
The Millstone
– I saw, not my father's, but my mother's name inked possessively on the flyleaf. I put it down and picked up an ex-library copy of
The Selfish Gene
, only to find she'd gone further, marking sections with pencil underlinings and crabbed, illegible notes. Frieda White versus Richard Dawkins.

I hadn't known her as a reader. When had I last seen her absorbed in a book? All I could conjure at that precise moment was my mother up a stepladder shouting for curtain clips; holding her forearm under the cold tap where she'd caught herself with the iron; hacking viciously at the lilac which hung over our front path. Or sunk against the hospice pillow, her drip swaying on its tall stand. They might almost have been memories of someone else's mother, or a character from a drama on TV. At the very bottom of the pile was a battered paperback edition of
The Second Sex
, which I put gingerly to one side, as if it were a grenade.

To my relief, the next box turned out to be not Dad's, but Jaz's: schoolbooks and ringbinders and coursework folders. I flicked one open and my heart gave a twinge at the rounded, childish handwriting, at the doodles in the margin of cartoon bombs and eyes and wasp-waisted women. ‘What would Jaz say if she could see us now?' I'd asked Phil as he tried to kiss my neck.

‘Stop thinking about her,' he'd said. ‘You always think about her first. Think about yourself.'

I managed to dispatch two more boxes (old books and ornaments, tea towels and bedding) and three bags of clothes before Phil intruded again. This time it was a memory of very early sex, a clumsy attempt to use a condom that wouldn't roll down because it was on inside out. I honestly thought I'd die of embarrassment, but he made me laugh, and it was OK. It was always OK in those first years (and, God, we were young when we started out). He was still the only man I'd ever slept with. That counted for something, whether I liked it or not.

What would David say about that? If we were in a room, kissing, and I broke away and said, ‘You should know, I've only ever been with my husband.'

I needed to keep telling myself, though. He wasn't mine: Phil was.

Take all the time you need
, Phil had said.
I'm going nowhere
.

I hadn't slept with Phil, but I knew I was going to, sooner or later.

By the time I'd stopped for lunch and washed up and put away, I knew I only had another four hours before dark. The shed floor was now clear and I was about three-quarters of the way through the mezzanine section; this despite the voices in my head keeping up a hysterical and disjointed commentary
throughout. I replayed Eileen's advice about how I should treat Phil's affair like a battle, and on no account let this other woman take him off me. ‘You've come too far, you belong together,' she used to say. So un-Eileen-like, in many ways. Then it was Moira, talking about her ex and how she blamed herself for the break-up because she got obsessed with wanting a baby. And Faith from the gym, confiding to a general audience that her husband complained she put the children first, which is what Phil always said I did. I still couldn't see how that was wrong, so perhaps I had been a bad wife. Perhaps I did bring it on myself.