Another Mother's Son (7 page)

Jane Brims is a full ten years younger than William, possibly more; a striking woman with a serviceable layer of flesh – the equivalent of a couple of thermal vests – evenly distributed over her person, and this conserves her youth. Her unlined face is long and large; her eyes, brown as a dog's, remain soulful even when her mouth – the business end of her face – tightens in annoyance. She sits firmly on the sofa, in an upright posture, more interviewer than interviewee, without a shred of diffidence. The legs, more skittishly arranged, stretched out and crossed at the ankles, reveal the floral socks. Are we supposed to admire them?

She has been on a classical tour of Tunisia and visited the ancient Roman city of Dougga and the remains of the city of Carthage. There was an optional camel ride.

William starts to tell his piano-recital story from the never-to-be-repeated cultural cruise on the Danube. Jane sits tight-lipped through his plodding account and the second it comes to an end launches into a morning at the troglodyte cave dwellings of Matmata, beginning with the early start and breakfast on the minibus.

She speaks of white walls and blue-painted doors and progresses to Lars Homestead, the residence of Luke Skywalker, Aunt Beru Lars and Uncle Owen Lars. My father, who knows nothing of
Star Wars
, is taken aback by the mention of these Norwegian-sounding relatives and asks tetchily, ‘Which holiday are you on now?'

In the lulls, I focus on the views north-west, over suburban crescents and closes, towards the turreted buildings of Highlands, the former Northern Convalescent Fever Hospital, now converted into apartment blocks. The windows of William's apartment resemble unrolled Chinese scrolls. The balcony rail appears as a consistent dividing line in each and the vistas of lighted buildings and bare-branched trees occupy successive sections of the panorama, with their own clouds or cloud parts, pale against the sky. At the end of November, the sun has set by four-thirty.

She starts as she means to go on, I think, though quite why the phrase jumps into my mind, I don't know. I have no idea who Jane Brims is or why she is ensconced in William's living room, looking like part of the furniture. My father's reference to Jane passing by – where? The Heronry, Winchmore Hill? – seems inadequate and even disingenuous; a sleight of hand that I find disconcerting. I am not inclined to ask questions. Is she a Yates or a Finch? Suffolk or Middlesex? Probing will prolong the visit and validate the woman's presence. Jane Brims might question me in return – though she has shown no interest in me thus far – and then I would have to elaborate on my sons' ages and education, my work, where we live; the usual rigmarole. I prefer to sit gormlessly on the arm of my father's chair.

I have got into the habit, before I leave, of asking if there is anything William wants. This triggers anxious thoughts in him. It generally turns out that he has lost some household item – the kitchen scissors or the window key – or he wants me to read a letter from the managing agents of the flats.

William hesitates, then, ‘No, nothing to report. All's well,' he says.

One thing my mother did that I failed to appreciate while she was alive was to make it possible to communicate with my father. She was both interpreter and maître d'. She was the oil that allowed a frictionless flow. I wish I had a recording to remind me how it was done. Even without Jane Brims on the scene, talk with William can be stilted and a little bit sticky though we are full of goodwill towards one another. I have hopes that as we get used to the new situation we will find it easier. My mother, rather than an absence, will preside over us again or maybe we will just rub along without her.

THE GRILLES ARE
down over the entrance to St James's Park station. We all stream back the way the way we came, past the free-newspaper stand, past doorway sleepers and unoccupied rolls of bedding, past the
Big Issue
seller, in his Santa hat, and the two lumbering, human-sized furry animals who beseech with their paws and hold out buckets for cash. Spangly light from the shops is reflected in puddles.

‘Does this mean Victoria station's shut too?' a woman asks.

The pedestrian signal by The Albert turns from green to red and back to green but the crowd of office workers and shoppers underneath a canopy of bobbing umbrellas has to wait behind the outstretched arms of a policewoman until she gives permission to go. Buses labour, stopping and starting, the passengers masked by a blur of condensation. Wheels splash in slow motion.

‘How much longer?' someone calls out.

‘It's always the same,' the woman says, confidingly. ‘They favour the traffic. If we're on foot, we don't exist.'

My phone rings. I have trouble disentangling it from my coat pocket. Drips land on my face as the umbrella tips sideways. I press the phone to my ear. Through the sound of juddering engines, I hear the word ‘duck'. Doug? Dirk. Got it.

‘Oh, hello, Dirk,' I say. ‘There's a lot of background noise. I'm sorry.'

‘You are at the airport check-in?'

‘No. I've just left work. Hang on a sec. We're being allowed across the road.'

In the crush of pedestrians surging forward, I manage to hang onto the phone. The woman who spoke to me jams her open umbrella against mine. We are trapped in a moving, makeshift tent as the rain beats down on us.

‘I have been meaning to thank you for having Jude to stay,' Dirk says. ‘It has been frequent.'

‘Not at all. We love to see her.'

‘I hope she's no trouble.'

‘No, she's no trouble at all. It's a pleasure to have her in the house.' We reach the other side and I walk briskly into the external lobby of the House of Fraser, formerly the Army and Navy Stores. I contrive, one-handed, to put down the umbrella. The woman has vanished, though momentarily I thought she was with me for life.

‘Is the weekend of the twenty-seventh to twenty-eighth of January also possible? Rather distant, I know, but I should like to make these dates secure. Normally they stay where they like without intervention from us parents. This is correct for their age group, isn't it? They are moving out of our clutches towards independence. On this occasion I am more formal because Frances and I will be away. If you need to kick her out we will not be there.' Dirk laughs. ‘I'm only joking. Of course, we will keep our phones on.'

‘Yes, that should be fine, Dirk.' I step to one side to allow a customer to pass. He pushes open the glass door into the store and a waft of warm, cosmetic-scented air escapes. I glimpse beauty gifts the size of timpani.

‘We are going to Manchester. This is where we met. And the twenty-eighth of January is an anniversary, special to us. It will, I hope, be a worthwhile weekend. I think you have heard from Jude some of our difficulties. I won't bore you with them. They are, inevitably, quite boring if you yourself are not in the thick of them.'

I murmur something; nothing articulate, a sympathetic noise.

The doors open and again a cloying, synthetic floral smell meets the damp air. Two women come out, laden with shopping bags.

‘She has talked a bit about you.' Dirk Neerhoff pauses. ‘She gives me a flavour of your conversation.'

‘Well, it's always lovely to chat with her. She's great.'

‘She is quite a mimic!' Dirk Neerhoff gives a short, friendly laugh. ‘I do not have this gift. The expressions too. She does the expressions.'

I glance at my reflection in the glass doors of the store. And then across the road, at the light beaming through the decorative etched windows of The Albert: the yellow brick pub, built in the 1860s, that is sandwiched between undistinguished office towers.

‘Really?' I say.

‘I feel we have met. I hope this will be a reality in the near future. The four of us? For coffee?' Dirk says.

‘Good idea.'

‘We will find a date. Unless a plan is made nothing happens. If we don't speak again before Christmas, have a very happy—'

I wonder whether the changed pattern of Jude coming to Dairyman's Road rather than Ross going to the Bennet-Neerhoffs is connected with whatever is happening at home. Perhaps the atmosphere is terrible. Perhaps her parents row all the time. Or weep. My pleasure at the turn of events – Palmers Green one, Crews Hill nil – seems, in some far-fetched sense, to be at the other family's expense.

IT TAKES ME
two hours to get back to Palmers Green station. At the moment Deborah Lupton imposes herself, I am in a trance, ascending to street level in the mass of commuters returning from work. The stairwell is poorly lit; the steps intermittently padded by damp, discarded newspapers. Her voice penetrates my coat at the level of my thoracic spine and travels up to my ears. Through thuds of disordered footsteps, it reaches me. I am in a state of holding steady, semi-stoical and semi-absent like an animal, a horse or an ox, pulling a cart up a hill, urged on by an unseen driver. Trapped between bodies and a brick wall, the paint of which has flaked into map-like patterns of green and sand-coloured continents, I hold and shall continue to hold, as I do every day, until the press of moving, breathing people eases, and I am out in damp air, walking along Alderman's Hill, heading towards home and able to be human again. I keep my feet on the steps, all the while forced to feel the woman's breath on my neck and to hear the powerful broadcast that reaches me in gusts. ‘… as you know, he failed to attend the performance review. Absolutely typical. What we have come to expect … didn't even have the nous to give a pathetic excuse … guess is, he knows he's floundering and didn't want to face the …' It is only through willpower and a reminder to myself of the social contract that I resist an overwhelming urge to give Deborah Lupton a backwards kick that will send her toppling down onto the upward-climbing strangers who will not know what has hit them.

Once on the level, I continue to press forward. I turn right out of the station but she grabs my sleeve.

I whirl round. ‘Just stop it. Calm down. Your voice is so bloody loud, everyone can hear you.'

Her large, astonished face is close enough to be out of focus. The mouth twitches and opens. ‘Well, I don't think anyone is—'

‘They might be. You don't know that. We are not a million miles from school.' I blast words into the face and then take a step back.

Deborah is staring at me as though I were a family comedy that had flashed up a scene of indecent assault. ‘Point taken, Lorna.' She stands firm in her waterproof trousers. Her wellington boots are a foot or more apart.

‘Say what you've got to say.' I breathe in and I breathe out again and by the second breath I see my surroundings. We are in front of the pharmacy. The interior is lit but partly shielded from sight by notices. ‘Do You Know your Cholesterol Levels?' ‘Free Prescription Service'. A man smokes a cigarette in the doorway. The smell is oddly comforting. People walk past us. ‘I'm sorry, Deborah. I lost my temper. I just need to get home.'

She wrinkles her nose and raises her upper lip; something between a sniff and a wary smile. ‘All right, I won't mention his name but we know who we're talking about, don't we? I hope you're keeping notes, Lorna. I am. A, his setting and marking of coursework are haphazard. B, he aims at the lowest common denominator. C, he leaves lessons as soon as the hooter goes and never makes himself available to answer questions. D, he fails to enthuse. To sum up – an all-round lacklustre performance.'

She invites me round for a drink the following week to discuss an action plan. I agree to go though I loathe this kind of thing – middle-class people on their high horses.

‘I scanned for viruses after he sent that email. I advise you do the same.'

‘Which email are you talking about, Deborah? I haven't had anything.'

‘It was blank. No content. No subject. But he sent it. [email protected]. Ginny Lu had one too. I haven't yet checked with the others. Ginny says he may be
depressed
.'

‘Perhaps he is.'

I knock on Ross's door to report on the conversation with Dirk. All family information should be in the open.

‘What will you say to them?' Ross asks, referring to the coffee plan.

I say that I guess we will just chat.

‘Why? You don't know them,' he says.

‘I realise I don't but it's good to be friendly to people. These difficulties Dirk mentioned, have you any idea …?'

‘They'll get a shock when they see you,' Ross says.

‘Why?'

‘I don't know why. But they will.'

‘Tell Jude her dad called, will you,' I say.

‘Meaning what?'

‘Not meaning anything. It's polite to tell her.'

He slaps the side of his head. ‘Man, you are bigging this thing up? This is disproportionate.'

I think, since the conversation is not going especially well, that I should ask him if he is up to date with his coursework. My mother used to tell me that this was a bad tactic and that it is better to wait for a pleasant spell before tackling an unwelcome topic. First, when is this pleasant spell? And second, why spoil it? I prefer to soldier on – unless we are eating. I go in for any kind of appeasement at mealtimes.

CD REVIEW
FOLLOWS
the news on the car radio; different recordings of the same Schumann Trio meticulously compared, movement by movement. Scenery goes by, an irrelevant backdrop to the passages of music. I keep my eye on the road; on the stream of cars ahead and behind. Through the speakers, strings and piano rush forward in bursts of intensity against the pull of an opposing tide. It begins to drizzle so I switch the windscreen wipers on, then a squirt of detergent because the glass is greasy.

I am on my way to Brighton. Another year nearly over. Oliver with a new life, Ross with a new life, William widowed which is a kind of new life. The sump of the year. Memory and expectation defeated by shopping. A fir tree lies on the living-room floor under the bay window. I realised too late that it is not wedged into a block and will not stand upright. I have made online donations: £50 to Crisis, £50 to Shelter and £50 to
www.arrest-blair.com
and bought Jude a present. A scarf and a pair of sheepskin mittens. I wrapped them in shimmery paper and tied the ribbon in a big bow. The boys never spend Christmas at Randal's. They are conservative about arrangements and act as a pack to thwart changes. There is an element of loyalty to me in their refusal but this is, I believe, subsidiary to their obstinacy. The first Christmas without Randal, I failed to put decorations up in the hall and living room and, as soon as the boys noticed, they questioned me belligerently. Randal had left at the beginning of the month: 6 December, the anniversary of the establishment of the Irish Free State. I get things astonishingly wrong. I try to adapt to my sons' increasing years and put away childish things, sometimes with a pang and sometimes with a light heart, but I had to unearth the large red honeycomb paper bell, the paper chains made from gummed strips on a long-ago Sunday afternoon, the strings of silver stars, from the cardboard box marked ‘Brother' that had once contained a printer. I dusted them off, got the stepladder out from under the stairs and suspended the bell from the central light fitting, draped the paper chains from nails that my father had banged into the architrave for that purpose, twisted the strings of silver stars over the fireplace and around the banister rail. The boys stayed in their rooms while I performed the neglected rite and afterwards said not a word. I could tell from their faces that they harboured hurt feelings and thought, not for the first time, that the distance between making amends and getting something right from the outset is immeasurable and that it might well be better to brazen things out because brazening confers a feeling of strength whereas reparation debilitates.