Astonishing Splashes of Colour (30 page)

“Did you find Martin?”

“Yes,” says James. “But he doesn’t want to come back for the time being. He’s decided to retire to his truck.”

I would like a truck, I think. Somewhere to go when things get difficult.

Suzy is handing out the cups. James and I both take one and avoid looking at her directly. We seem to have come a long way since the pregnancy issue, but as far as I’m concerned, all the resurrected mothers in the world don’t cancel out a dead baby.

Jake and Suzy sit down at the table. “Have a cup of tea,” Suzy says to Margaret.

Margaret looks at her suspiciously. I can see her thinking, “Who are you? Are you Kitty, or someone’s wife?” I wish she’d say it out loud.

“Why turn up now, after all this time?” says Paul angrily. “Wouldn’t it have been better to have left us with the fictional version?”

If you don’t know the truth, but you think you do, it’s not so bad. Your truth will do. We believed she was dead. Was it fair of her to come back? Who does it benefit? Her or us?

Margaret reaches over and takes an egg sandwich from a nearby plate. She eats it greedily, as if she’s ravenously hungry, and won’t catch anyone’s eye. “I didn’t realize you thought I was dead. I thought you’d all rejected me,” she says, and her voice is harsh and high-pitched again.

But she was an adult and we were children. We didn’t know how to think.

“Adrian invited me,” says Margaret. “They were my parents, after all. Why shouldn’t I come to my parents’ funeral?”

“But you let them believe you were dead,” says Paul.

“No, I didn’t,” she says. “I often talked to them on the telephone.”

I stare at her. This can’t be true. Granny or Grandpa would have told me. They looked after me for years of holidays. Grandpa would have slipped it in with the locks. “Can’t lock your mother out, can we?” he’d have said, chuckling away. Granny would have told me as she fed me with homemade scones. “I’d better put some away in case your mother turns up.”

“So you would have come to the funeral anyway?” says Adrian.

She hesitates. “Maybe,” she says defiantly, but we know the answer is no.

She’s lying. She must be. Granny and Grandpa couldn’t have kept this from me for all these years. They were too transparent for secrets. My mind is racing, listening to her, but thinking about Granny and Grandpa. Did they drop me hints that I didn’t notice? Didn’t I listen to them properly?

Margaret puts her cup and saucer on the mantelpiece and sits down in an oddly calculated way. She places her feet exactly together and straightens her back. Maybe she’s been taught relaxation. Take a breath, relax your shoulders, stop your hands from moving unnecessarily. It’s something that she’d never have learned if she’d stayed with us. It’s difficult to learn calmness when you have six children. The veins on her hands are raised, the skin pink and mottled.

“I’m a different person now,” she says. “I live with my husband in Norfolk. By the sea. In a caravan.”

“Husband?” says Adrian into a shocked silence.

We think we’re grown-up, but we’re only pretending. I’m three years old again, with a cold gap deep inside me, an unfilled hole. My brothers are boys, the gap inside them only partially filled. They’re trying to grab everything desperately, pour it in, press down the lid.

“Bigamist!” yells my father, leaping out of his chair. “We’re not divorced.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” shouts Margaret, equally loudly. “People just think we’re married. He looks after me.”

“Living in sin!” says my father, and he’s so pleased with himself that he sits down again and folds his arms triumphantly. Philippa, Angela, Lucia, Helen, etc., are congregated round him, over his shoulder, but he doesn’t see them.

“Did you bring him with you?” says Jake.

She looks at him sharply. “Of course not. Why should I? You don’t know him. Who are you?”

I can see Jake struggling with himself. He can’t decide whether he should identify himself and thus legitimize her inquiry, or remain anonymous. His observations will be freer if she doesn’t know who he is.

“Jake,” says Adrian.

Margaret nods. I think she’s forgotten him but she adds, “Do you still play the violin?” she says.

“Did you even think of us?” says Paul.

“Of course I did,” she says and looks directly at him. “Every day, every hour, every minute.”

I don’t believe this.

“Then why didn’t you come back for us?” says Paul. “You don’t seem to have made much effort.”

“No effort?” Her voice rises hysterically. “You think I made no effort? I wrote and wrote and wrote to you all. Nobody replied. It
was as if you’d wiped me out of your life. I came back and stood on the corner of the street when you came home from school, waiting to talk to you.” She pauses. “But you didn’t recognize me. You walked past me, talking to your friends. It was as if I didn’t exist.”

“We wouldn’t have been looking,” says Jake. “We thought you were dead.”

Could she be imagining this? Why didn’t she rush up to us with open arms? I try to picture myself not talking to Henry at sixteen. I wonder if she has a cold dark space inside her which stopped her loving us enough.

If a mother has this emptiness inside her, can she pass it on to her children? So it spreads onwards and outwards. An inherited disease. The mother thinks she knows everything. She knows nothing.

“I came back and watched you at the school gates. I saw other children being met. You didn’t seem to mind. You had friends, you talked to each other. You didn’t look as if you missed me.”

I was three years old. I didn’t know how to miss someone.

“Why didn’t you speak to us?” says Jake.

“I don’t know,” she says in a voice that is suddenly bleak. “The longer I waited, the harder it became. Now I can’t really understand it myself. I thought you didn’t need me—and in the end I gave up.”

“But you were wrong,” I say.

“No, she’s right, quite right,” says my father, sounding pleased. “We didn’t need you. We managed perfectly well on our own.”

“We should have been asked,” says Adrian angrily. “You made our choices for us. We weren’t given the option.”

But we would have spent the last thirty years wondering if she was going to turn up. Watching. Waiting.

“No,” says Margaret. “You should have been given the option.”

“You could have told us where she was,” says Adrian to Dad. “An address would have been helpful.”

“I didn’t have an address,” he says.

“Yes you did. It was on every letter I sent.”

“I threw them away unopened.” He realizes that he has confessed to something he has only just denied, so he picks up a mini-Battenberg and stuffs it into his mouth in one piece.

“Where did you go?” says Paul.

“Lots of places. In and out of hospital. I found jobs here and there for a while. Waitressing, shop work, cleaning.”

So my mother was a cleaner. The mother who was clever and went to university, but never qualified because of my father. The meeting on the beach, the wedding, six children. A golden age to my father. Dark ages to my mother.

“A burden to society,” says my father. He eats a handful of crisps, loudly.

“I paid my way when I was well enough,” says Margaret. “I worked in a maternity hospital for a bit. They let me look after the babies.”

It is difficult to reconcile a woman who helps others give birth with a woman who has abandoned her own children. We were all babies once—her babies. We were all delivered by her from her own womb. How many unknown babies must you look after to compensate for your own lost babies? Is there a specific number? Two unknown babies equal one lost baby? Three, four, ten? Do you get there if you keep it up long enough? Does the guilt subside more quickly once you’ve passed the hundred mark?