Another Mother's Son (8 page)

Oliver has grown taller since October; he is also broader across the shoulders. He bears the invisible marks of a person who has got away and whose return will be temporary. He is a little more lordly than previously and a shade more polite. I remember a similar atmosphere of otherness around Ewan on his first vacation from university. The effect was stronger because he was the eldest and a pioneer. The burner was lit and the balloon lifting. Well, that's Ewan on his way, I thought.

Coming up to Pease Pottage, Oliver asks me to stop at the service station so that he can buy coffee. I dislike negotiating the interchange at Pease Pottage and feel sorry for anyone who lives there and has to grapple with it on a daily basis. From the A23 northbound, it is necessary to leave at J11, where the road becomes a motorway, turn right at the roundabout and immediately right again. I manage to do this in the correct order without being sucked onto the M23 or into the slipstream of a jumbo jet taking off at Gatwick airport. Aeroplanes fly low over the road there, stark and blackly three-dimensional against the sky – one-trick predators. I shall make thirty-six of these journeys. I totted them up. This is the fourth. I have now covered the permutations: down with Oliver, back alone, down alone, back with Oliver. Each is subtly different and the one I like least is back alone.

For God's sake, Lorna, Randal said when I rang to let him know Oliver's dates. You don't need to ferry him about. I said, I don't ferry him about. I'm not that sort of mother. News to me, Randal said. Let him go on the train. Or by bus. Even better. The whole of humanity is at Victoria Coach Station. Let him learn. I did it for Ewan, I said. I can't not do it for Oliver. Exactly, he said. Look where it got him. Think.

Oliver returns with a lidded beaker and immediately the smell of coffee pervades the car. We set off again. After a few gulps, Oliver comes partly to life. He tells a funny story about a lab assistant and a flask of benzene and mentions the names of new friends. Following the burst of communication, he falls silent again. I tell him that Ross has a girlfriend, Jude.

‘Ewan?'

‘He's the same,' I say.

I AM TRYING
on a short, mainly green, tartan skirt in front of the bedroom mirror when my phone rings. The cupboard doors are open and garments strewn on the bed. My legs are bare and I am wearing old socks. I am practised enough to see beyond the immediate aesthetic disaster and make a judgement. Hideous. These sessions that might or might not fill a carrier bag for the charity shop prove what I do not quite believe, that we are a succession of selves rather than a single identity. I am not the woman who bought that skirt.

‘I'm about five minutes away.' There is a whooshing sound of traffic in the background. It is Randal.

‘Make it ten.' I gaze at myself in the mirror.

‘Whatever are you up to, Lorna?'

‘Nothing. I just need the extra minutes.'

There is a slight pause. ‘Oh, OK then. I'll take the scenic route.'

Although the days and the times of Randal's visits vary, his appearances at Dairyman's Road are as much reiterations as my callings-in on my father at the Winchmore Hill flat. The randomness, over a given period, feels almost the same as a fixed routine. Randal presses his face to the glass of the front door – something he has always done. After dark his silhouette is light against black and in the afternoon, the reverse.

I call up to Ewan to tell him that his dad is on his way and send Ross a text. I take off the skirt and add it to the pile of clothes on the bed.

I put my jeans back on and attack my hair with a brush. It is now long enough to pull back into a stubby knot. I snap a band around the clump and fasten the loose ends with clips. Seconds later the doorbell rings.

‘Hi, Lorna. Happy New Year.' Randal kisses me casually on the cheek; one side only. The chinstrap beard that was in evidence when he delivered the Christmas presents has gone.

I return the greeting and tell him that Ross is out with Jude and that I do not know when they will be home.

‘Ewan?'

‘In his room.'

‘How is he?'

‘Same.'

‘I'll go on up then. See you shortly.'

Randal goes up the stairs two at a time and stumbles, as he generally does, at the point where the matting is loose. I hear him hammer on Ewan's door.

He is up there for about twenty minutes.

‘Hmm,' he says when he reappears. He is a scientist and has his own thing going. He pretends to be less enmeshed in parental emotion. In any case, he no longer lives at Dairyman's Road.

He looks around the kitchen as if viewing it for the first time. The greasy cooker hood, a half-eaten banana on the table, Ewan's never-to-be-thrown-away painting of an auroch.

‘What are you looking at?' I say.

‘Sorry. Just making shapes.' He doesn't immediately comment on Ewan. Sometimes he doesn't.

‘So, the girlfriend's still on the scene. Splendid. How old did you say she was?'

‘Seventeen. Same as Ross.'

‘You like her?'

‘She's lovely. She's half Dutch, did I tell you that? Her parents are doctors. They've lived in different places. Leeds, Utrecht, London. Jude's well-travelled.'

‘Where does she sleep?'

When he realises I am not going to reply Randal walks over to the back door and peers through the glass at the unmatching pieces of garden furniture, the barbecue fire pit without a grill rack, the collection of old bikes. The tree is the main feature. It stands tall and straight with its domed crown high above the suburban rooftops; the bark cracked into jigsaw-puzzle shapes of light and shade. An earlier owner gave up the struggle to grow anything and paved over the entire plot. It is an expanse of moss-encrusted grey, partly hidden by fallen sycamore leaves. We had a long-term plan to break up the paving and redesign the space in a more pleasing way but years went by and we did nothing. I shall probably continue to do nothing.

OLIVER AND ROSS
faced their father's departure to North Hertfordshire in utter silence. The house that up to that point had been a single entity became a series of doors, floors, ceilings and stairs. They kept to their rooms in a more studied way and with greater secrecy, as if they were ghosts of past inhabitants, former lodgers who turned keys in the locks, undid their collar studs and loosened their braces. We were, in a sense, back to what we had once been. Mother with children at home. Two of them – and then three when Ewan returned from Warwick for the Christmas vacation. Although I went to work every day, I was the old retainer. There was a bleak simplicity to our life and, when the evenings and weekends came, no sign of father. I worried for us all in our state of isolation. The thought that the atmosphere might have been different with daughters – or with another set of sons – brought no comfort. These were my sons and I could not change them.

My inclination to relax the rules was immediately thwarted. I had to put back the middle leaf that I had removed from the dining-room table and drag the sofa to its original position, facing the bay window. I was told not to play Shostakovich loudly, or Janis Joplin at all, and my suggestion that we might buy a pet was greeted with derision. It was as if they needed to experience our predicament in a pure state, unsoftened by adjustments. Home ritual that had previously hummed along in the background like an innocuous but essential item of domestic machinery exposed itself as the dark rhythm we dance to.

Here he is again, though, solid and faintly menacing in his new tight cord trousers.

‘Let's go and sit in the other room,' I say.

We walk down the passage and into the living room. I carry the tea. Whereas in our married days I would have flopped down next to Randal on the sofa, now I take the armchair. He places his phone beside him.

‘Unusual tea. What is it?' Randal sniffs at the mug.

‘Holy basil with jasmine. “Take a sip of ancient Wisdom”.'

‘It's weird. Smells of turps.' Randal takes a gulp. ‘He was on the phone when I went up.'

‘On the phone?'

‘Yes, walking about and talking. I admit he was under the duvet when I came in December but the boiler had packed up, hadn't it? I really don't think you were right, Lorna.'

I take a deep breath. ‘Let's forget it, can we?'

‘To be honest, it was one of the weirdest things I've ever heard anyone say.'

‘It. Was. A. Joke.'

I have never learned not to expose mental speculation to Randal. He wants to establish facts when there are none and like a militant atheist, as long as there is a single believer left in the world he cannot leave the thing alone.

He rubs the lower half of his face and then picks up his phone and checks it for messages. One reason I find my father's company restful is that he fiddles only with unresponsive objects, his reading glasses or a biro, and although he might polish the glasses with his handkerchief, or make a note to himself with the biro, these items give him no feedback. I do not say that he gives me his full attention. He has never been flooded with fascination for me – I would be appalled if he changed in this respect – but no other presence intervenes. When we are together it is just him and me and a few everyday distractions.

Over the course of minutes in which I watch Randal and wait, I bottle up anger. Bottling up need not take years. It is equally effective in the short term.

‘Are you losing interest, Randal?' I say in an offhand kind of way.

‘Interest in what?' as he composes a reply.

‘Ewan. There is still a problem. It hasn't been solved.'

He lays the phone down. ‘Don't be ridiculous, Lorna.'

‘I wondered whether he had become like a …' I pretend to search for a word. ‘Calendar?'

Randal looks at me in bafflement. He has, I think, genuinely forgotten that in the self-justifying list of my failings that he used to explain his departure with Charmian he likened me to a calendar, a reminder of the passing of time. When he spoke the words, his face contorted with excuses, I imagined something more Pirelli. It was only as he continued with more mundane accusations that the women in swimwear faded and I saw instead my husband of twenty-odd years troubled by numbers – groups of thirty or thirty-one days – that ate away at his life. I had become too closely associated with the process: back to the wall, spiral bound. If only he had compared me to an hourglass.

The gate clicks.

‘Here they are. Good.' Randal brightens.

I glance out of the front window. ‘It's a boy putting a flyer though the door. Yes, there's the letterbox. Pizza delivery? What were we saying?'

‘
Non lo so
. How's William?'

‘He's doing well. I'll tell him you asked after him. I'm seeing him soon.'

‘He'll be lost without Helena.'

‘He manages.'

‘Let me give you a lift to Winchmore Hill.'

‘No. I like to walk. Thank you.'

At four o'clock Randal leaves.

I return to the living room and sit on the sofa. Through half-closed eyes I take stock of the scene in front of me – bay window, fireplace, mirror, books, pictures, armchair; its loose cover furrowed by recent occupation. I turn them into a kind of mosaic of colours and shadows in which no single object conveys a particular meaning – and wish I could do the same with my thoughts. I was once proud of my thinking. I graded and preferred: purple or black, Mum or Dad, Christmas or summer, slow change or revolution.

I WENT TO
the Luptons' house years ago. It is in one of the roads of tall Victorian terraced houses to the east of Green Lanes, the winding thoroughfare that runs from Mason's Corner at Winchmore Hill down to Newington Green and was once a drovers' route. The terraces fall away down the slope of the land, their gables a diminishing series of pinnacles. Ross, aged twelve, spent a weekend afternoon with Harry and Gervase. The Luptons kept a gong in the hall and at supper-time the family appeared in response to Deborah's rhythmical banging. Deborah's mother-in-law who lives in their basement staggered upstairs within a few minutes. She panted somewhat from the effort and from the long-term effect of smoking a thin cigar before dinner, a habit that Deborah forbade; indeed, she had made the renunciation a condition of Jean's moving into the house.

The Lupton set-up made quite an impression on me. I waited among cases of musical instruments, cricket equipment, a rubber dinghy, a coil of marine rope, a wheelchair, a hoist and a solid, square-shaped object with a pink padded top that I took to be a commode. A modest chandelier hung from the ceiling and the walls were covered with nautical charts. Deborah talked as she banged the gong, warning me of Jean who duly appeared, puffing and heaving herself up by the banister rail, in many respects a normal woman, though Deborah had made out that she was some kind of living corpse. When Jean had recovered her breath she chatted pleasantly with me. I could see that she was in no immediate need of the aids, apart from perhaps the wheelchair for longer outings, and wondered whether they were placed there as symbols of decrepitude to deter her from her smoking habit – rather like the vanitas in old art, the skull or the fallen petal. I detected a whiff of tobacco as she talked. Harry, Gervase and Ross tumbled down the stairs soon afterwards. ‘It's you,' Ross said – a rare acknowledgement – and I caught a look of relief pass across his round face.

Deborah's plan to get a group of parents together in the run-up to Christmas failed. One by one, people cancelled and in the end only the Luptons and Simon Petridis, Evie's father, held onto the date. Emails passed to and fro as we tried to reschedule. Deborah said that it was like trying to herd cats. Work-related dinners, committee meetings, choir rehearsals, fiftieth birthday parties. They gave detailed explanations. I have less in the diary than the others though I have started seeing Richard Watson again in an on/off way and a Saturday morning meet-up with Dirk and Frances has been arranged. Oliver's term dates are pencilled in. The New Year at 10 Dairyman's Road is much like the old.