Mothers & Daughters (49 page)

So a trip to Tannerside was needed, for background. We hadn't been up there for nearly five years.

‘Will there be pages about Ian, too?' she'd asked.

‘That's up to you. Only, it's for Matty, remember. What do you think he'd want?'

She'd looked away, out of the window. Yes, I thought, one day he'll be grown up and standing there like a recording angel, listing all your deficiencies. Missing photos won't be the half of it.

The place I grew up in had gone from being an unpicturesque village, built off the back of cotton and coal, to one of the remoter suburbs of New Enterprise Bolton. Building developments had sprung up everywhere; the fields I'd played in had vanished under housing estates and bypasses and supermarkets. Streams we fished and poked about in had been culverted, trees we used to swing from chopped down, their roots blasted out. You couldn't blame Dad for becoming disorientated. When they erase key landmarks from your childhood, it becomes harder to trust your own memory.

Tannerside's original vicarage was now an old people's home, with a bungalow where the main lawn used to be. Jaz and I stood at the bottom of the drive, underneath leafless horse chestnut trees, reading the sign.

‘Is this where you want putting when you reach your dotage?'

‘You're to stick me on a cruise ship, you know that.'

‘Why do you want a photo of this place, then?'

‘It reminds me of your grandma,' I said. ‘They used to hold Mothers' Union meetings here, and let us kids loose in the garden. It was terrifically grand. For Tannerside.'

Between the upper and lower lawns there'd been wide stone steps, but we always chose to run down the grass bank
instead. Every visit began with a game of hide and seek. Round the back of the house, near the kitchen, I remembered a compost heap where Joseph Critchley found a nest of grass snakes and threw gravel at them till the vicar's wife made him stop. There were fruit canes at the back, too; one time Margaret Wardle ate so many raspberries she vomited red on the doorstep, and panicked because she thought it was part of her insides. We always got a high tea before we went home, with miniature sandwiches and fairy cakes, so it was almost like going to someone's birthday party. Uneaten food was parcelled up for us to take home. Eileen was never part of these afternoons because her family didn't go to church. For some reason my mother, normally a keen recruiter, would never approach hers. So to make up, I'd share any stale sponge left over and give Eileen a blow-by-blow account of what we'd all been up to in the vicarage grounds. I did try to include her that way. Perhaps, in retrospect, it might have been better if I'd kept the details of our revelry to myself.

St Stephen's Primary was now a private residence called ‘The Old Schoolhouse', had a black and gold name plaque on the gatepost. ‘Boys still got the slipper in those days,' I said to Jaz, bringing the gable end into focus through my viewfinder. ‘Girls just lost their playtime for being naughty. Though your dad once famously got both.'

‘What for?'

‘He carried one of the reception class up to the top of the oil tank and left him there.'

‘Why would he do that?'

‘Oh, he never needed a reason. It was me who went to get a teacher, but I've never told him that. Don't you say, either.'

‘Like it matters now.'

Greenhalgh's was still there, still with a queue coming out the door. Hot pasties glistened in the window.

‘You're not taking a picture of a bakery, Mum?' said Jaz.

‘We used to go there every Friday dinnertime to get the bread for the weekend. Never cake, though; your grandma made all our cakes herself. Drop scones, she was always very good at. I've still got her griddle. One day it'll be yours.'

‘Gee, thanks.'

We strolled on down to the wool shop, but it was a chiropodist's.

‘How much do you remember of your grandma?' I asked.

Jaz shrugged. ‘Nothing, really. She walked with a stick.'

‘When she got poorly, yes. Nothing else?'

‘Don't think so. She wasn't very nice to you, was she?'

‘She did what she was capable of.'

‘You've got a bit of an issue there, haven't you?'

‘I wouldn't say so.'

At the start of the next terrace was Eileen's old house, unchanged except for a satellite dish above the upstairs window. I'd meant to stop, take a snap, but as we drew near I changed my mind and kept my camera by my side. Bevelled glass doors, the smell of hairspray, plastic flowers and charity shop shoes with dirty insoles bring her mother back to me. ‘By the time I turn twenty-one, I want to be out of this village,' Eileen had told me. But it was me who'd left first, for Phil's job.

As we passed the low front wall I had a sudden memory of Jaz returning from a sleepover at Nat's and saying, ‘I'm glad I live here and not there.' I think she may even have hugged me, although I might be imagining that.

St Stephen's Church looked the same as ever from the outside, but when we went in I discovered the interior had been dramatically refurbished. There were now indoor toilets, and
a proper enclosed meeting area, and what looked like a crèche. The austere feeling I remembered from childhood had gone, banished by deep orange carpet in the entrance hall and proper heating. My mother would have hated it.

‘I knew you'd come here,' said Jaz, putting her bag down by the baize display board.

‘I wanted a shot of the village quilt,' I said. ‘If it's still on display. Come and help me find it.'

Two years it had taken the Mothers' Union to complete the quilt and they'd hung it in the Lady Chapel, with a spotlight of its own. It depicted historical landmarks of Tannerside, bordered by scenes from the Christian Year. In the top left-hand corner, the Nativity hovered above a set of pit winding gear; bottom left were harvest sheaves, veg, fish, and the original council offices with their bowed walls and cobbled front. St Stephen's itself had been given centre spot, along with Cappelthorne Hall where they started holding the church fete after the old vicarage was sold off.

‘The middle right side is Grandma's,' I said, pointing. My mother had used a mixture of embroidery and appliqué to render the Passiontide: a basin and towel, a bag of coins, a whip, a sword, a crown of thorns, some nails, a sponge, a blindfold and a sign saying
King of the Jews
.

‘How neat is that?' said Jaz.

‘Oh, she was a whizz with a needle, before her hands got bad. She taught me to sew when I was still in the Infants.'

‘You never taught me.'

‘I tried. Anyway, you can manage the basics, can't you? You can mend a seam, sew on a button.'

Jaz smirked. ‘Nat's got this thing with buttons.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I'm not sure I should say in a church.'

So we went outside into the freezing graveyard, and while
I hunted for ancient family headstones, she told me how Nat liked to secretly cull a button from every man she slept with. ‘She keeps them in a box,' said Jaz.

‘Good grief. How many are we talking about?' I was picturing something the size of a shoebox, filled to the brim.

Jaz sketched cigarette packet dimensions with her fingers. She was grinning.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I don't think that's very nice.'

‘I know, it's cheap. I wouldn't do it. Not that I'd have a lot of buttons in the first place.'

‘If it was me, it'd be the one button only. I'd need a single compartment of a pill box, that's all.'

She goggled at me. ‘God, honestly?'

‘Yes.'

‘Only my dad?'

‘Yes. Stop looking at me like that.'

‘No one else, before or after? Jeez. That's amazing.'

‘Not really.'

She followed me as I picked my way through stone memorials.

‘I suppose there's a lot of stuff like that I don't know about you,' she said.

‘I'm your mum. There's nothing else for you to know.'

I stood for a moment in front of my Great-aunty Florence's grave and thought about the drive to the crematorium after my mother's funeral, then all those po-faced elderly ladies standing round the chapel foyer.
You'll not remember me, Carol, but I lived next door to Flo Viner
. . . Phil stiff and awkward in his suit; Dad with his head bowed over the pew, one hand laid across the other. Moira had looked after Jaz that day. I'd been so glad to get back to her.

‘Do you think I should start going to church?' said Jaz.

I tried not to look taken aback. ‘If you want to.'

‘Why did you stop going?'

‘I was too busy.'

‘That's rubbish.'

‘All right: I lost heart, then. Things got in the way.'

‘But Nick says—' She saw my expression. ‘Obviously it's your choice.'

‘It is.'

‘Can we talk about it sometime?'

‘Yes, but not today,' I said, clicking the lens cap back into place. ‘Today we have other fish to fry.'

The rendering on Pincroft's top half had been re-painted pale yellow and the front lawn paved in that compressed concrete they have nowadays. I thought of my mother's continual war with grass and dandelions and lilac and privet, how she'd don a pair of pink rubber gloves and re-do the bedding from scratch every season, and wondered whether she'd have been pleased at the innovation. It's possible she might have approved.

‘Haven't you got photos of the house already?' asked Jaz.

‘Not of the front, looking from the road.'

‘Is it the same people Grandad sold it to? They were going to move the bathroom upstairs.'

In my head I was clearing piles of old newspaper from under the stairs while Dad, his shirt hanging loose from his trousers, paced anxiously up and down the hallway. The next instant I was sitting on the back step in my Ladybird nightie cutting the robin motifs off a box of starch.

‘It's a strange process, getting old,' I said.

‘Do you want to have a look inside? Shall I go knock on the door?'

‘No!'

‘Go on. I'll do it, you can wait here. What's there to lose?'

‘I don't want to see what they've changed, Jaz.'

The grey carpet with black, white and red drizzles would have gone for sure, and the kitchen cupboards with their rickety sliding doors, and the old Fifties bathroom suite. Probably everything I knew would have been stripped and junked.

‘It's not my house any more.'

‘Fair enough,' she said. ‘Can we get something to eat soon? I'm frozen and I'm starving.'

She let me take her arm and we retraced our steps towards the High Street. There was a café-cum-gift shop I'd noted, where, as well as having a snack, I could check out product lines and displays to report back to Moira. After lunch I intended taking Jaz along the canal, see if the woods were still there, and the stone dovecote, and we could loop back via the main road to where the car was parked, taking in Cappelthorne Brow where Dad once took me blackberrying when the works were on strike.

‘You look nice today,' she said, as we drew near the church again. ‘Your hair's so much better than it was when you used to try and do it yourself.'

‘Job's complimenter.'

‘The jacket's neat, too. I've not seen you in that colour before.'

‘It's funny,' I said, pausing before we crossed the road, ‘you might think you'd get to an age where you'd have sorted your style for good. You'd just know what suited you, and that would be it. But actually, the older you are, the more need there seems to be for reinvention and makeover. I can't decide whether that's a positive thing or not.'

‘I'm getting old,' said Jaz. ‘I'll be thirty in a couple of years.'

I made a mock-swipe at her, and she laughed.

Together we stood outside the gift-shop window, eyeing the pearlescent vases and floral pigs. Behind the front shelf our reflections hovered.

‘You know,' she said, ‘Nick's a friend, not a rival. He really rates you.'

‘That's lucky, then.'

‘It's been fun today, hasn't it? We could do it again, with Matty when he's a bit older.'

And I thought, This is my reward, this is my life as it is now. It's enough. I'm happy. I am.

CHAPTER 39

Photo 185, Album Two

Location: the lounge, Sunnybank

Taken by: Carol

Subject: It's Christmas 1983 and Frieda's stationed in an armchair, clasping a cerise paper hat to her bosom. How did she get here? she's thinking. Who are these people gathered around her? Perhaps this is how dementia begins. Not with a lack of recognition, exactly – that woman there's her daughter, that man there's her no-good son-in-law – but with a lack of explanation for your life. What has this scene got to do with who she is, and the things she wanted? She could surely have done more with these past four decades than shift dust from surface to surface, wring out the days over a Belfast sink
.

If she closes her eyes, she feels it: only the thinnest of filaments tethers her to this room and this family
.

Now Carol's talking, she's offering round a box of Eat Me dates, but it's as if she's stretching her hand out from a mile away. Bob's taken refuge in a nap. Even the jolly piano music to
All Creatures Great and Small
fails to provide its usual faint comfort. The only object that stirs Frieda
here is the little girl playing on the hearthrug. She can't say why
.

It was dark by the time we got back to Jaz's.

‘I hate these winter evenings,' she said as the car pulled up. ‘After I've put Matty to bed.'

‘I'm only ever a phone call away, you know.'

‘Yeah. I've got to learn to cope, though, haven't I?'

I couldn't answer her. Bloody rotten shame, I was thinking, when she'd had it all, their lovely first home just how she wanted it, and no mortgage or rent to pay so they weren't struggling like so many young couples; happy and loved and safe and optimistic. Sometimes these sudden and massive waves of anger against Ian still knocked me off-balance: the injustice, the waste. What must my daughter feel every time she unlocked the front door of this flat to be presented with grubby walls, worn carpet, other people's post?