September Starlings (11 page)

‘And Melinda? Is she still missing her mum?’ Robert’s wife died four years ago, because the remedy did not come in time. I have just survived the very problem that deprived a little girl of her mother.

He stands very still, studies me. ‘Ask her yourself. She likes you, needs someone like you.’

Here comes the old argument. ‘I’m not moving in with you, Robert.’

‘Because of how it would look? Because the neighbours wouldn’t like it?’

It’s hopeless. He’s so infantile, so determined and stubborn. ‘I don’t want to take Carol’s place. I couldn’t. And I am not suitable material anyway. Stepmotherhood is not for me, Robert. I’ve done my stint and I wasn’t terribly good at it.’

‘Rubbish.’

My temper is grumbling like an appendix that threatens to burst. ‘I’ve three kids. One’s an inch from prison, another’s breaking his heart because his boyfriend doesn’t love him any more, while my daughter’s wandering about England trying to find herself. They’re not exactly steady.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ His voice raises itself. ‘You didn’t tell Gerald to go out and mix with fraudsters, and Edward’s homosexuality is nothing to do with you. As for Jodie, she’ll give herself the boot up the arse that’s sadly needed. Jodie will come good.’

I sit and wait while he pours water on to the Nescafé. When he is seated, I try again. ‘Edward’s sexuality is not a problem. It’s the fact that he’s insecure, can’t settle. Edward doesn’t trust anyone to stay with him, and that’s because I didn’t give him enough love and attention. Gerald’s the same, uses money as a crutch. Jodie’s a law unto herself. She modelled herself on me, became selfish and self-indulgent. I do not want any more children in my life. And that is an end of it.’

He isn’t pleased. It began as a friendship, developed into mutual comfort and companionship after our losses, got out of hand when he fell in love with me. I’m older, wiser, don’t need the kind of stability that Robert seeks. His lower lip protrudes slightly, makes him into a displeased child. ‘I love you,’ he insists.

‘Then let me go.’

He drains the cup in one gulp, must have an asbestos palate. ‘Look after the cat,’ he says brusquely.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, you’re not. This is a great trip for you, turning down a man who’d do just about anything for you. And don’t start the age difference crap, it’s boring. Ten years is nothing, nothing at all. You like me, you enjoy my work, could have a good time helping with the animals. My kids adore you …’ His voice tails away and a hand pushes its way through the tousled mop of hair. ‘I don’t mind waiting. Ben won’t get well, we both know that. And he told you to take a lover if he ever became ill—’

‘He didn’t tell me to go and start another life.’

‘But you’d still be there for him. You’d still visit him and—’

Something snaps. ‘I will stay in his house until he dies, Robert. He’s my husband and my best friend. While Ben is in this world, I will be his and he’ll be mine. And that’s not romantic garbage, it’s elemental, a part of who he is, who I am.’ My yelling causes Handel to ruffle slightly, but the kitten slumbers on. Still, if she was born in a shed among a crowd of vicious cats, she’ll be used to noise.

He is furious, hates my shouting. ‘You don’t bloody know who he is.’

I should never have told him that. Pillow talk is dangerous, does not look good in the light of day. ‘I might have known that you would use that, Robert. Ben is one of the finest men I’ve ever met. You’ve no idea at all of what he did for me and my children. Please go home now.’

He is sorry, worried. A hand reaches across the table. ‘Laura.’

‘I’ll talk to you when you’ve calmed down a bit. But I’d advise you to get out of this house. Now.’

Life is so sad. In a bedroom, Robert and I are good partners. But on a day-to-day basis, the arrangement could never work. His son is precocious, his daughter needs affection. Robert and I would be fine, but I could never accept his children. Tom is wont to rhyme off lists of meaningless facts, and Melinda needs warmth, love, a reader of fairy tales.

He shouts from the hall, ‘I’ll be back. I’m not giving up, Laura.’

Neither am I. When I was a child, I didn’t really like children – except for my cousin Anne. As a mother of young children, I struggled against enormous odds just to keep food in the house, just to feed and clothe them. There was no time for love, no chance to escape the fear that kept me cowed and silent. Children were a part of the terror, a part of the nightmare.

And when we got away, it was too late. There were too many worries. There is no excuse for depriving children of love, because that is their birthright. But I had a reason, and the reason was that I didn’t understand what a mother’s love was, what it ought to be. My children are well and strong. They have good bones, good teeth, good health. But they never had a good mother, never had a pattern of security that they might copy, learn from. I’ve tried not to scream at my own mother for being such a burden, because I look at her and see myself in thirty years. She was my model, but who was hers? Were they really sweet, those parents of hers? Or did she, too, have to escape, has that made her bitter?

We go upstairs, Flakey and I. She lies in a shoe box, all tiny and warm, a nest of handkerchiefs beneath her. I place her liquid food on my desk, lie the dropper beside the jar.

And I carry on writing
Laura
.

It’s hard to remember in detail the very early days of your life. There are flashes, of course, mind-pictures of a particular garden, a porcelain sink in a kitchen, raincoats dripping, a mousetrap under the stairs. How I worried about those poor mice.

Smells are easier than pictures. Auntie Maisie used a light, powdery perfume, something on the lines of Je Reviens, but less cloying. Her house was always full of baking and sewing, rich, yeasty scents and that crisp aroma of new calico. Uncle Freddie smelled of coffee or of wet earth and potato skins, depending on what he’d been dealing with at the Co-op. My dad was liquorice and peppermint and Mother reeked of bad temper. Bad temper is something to do with cigarette smoke and a particular brand of eau-de-Cologne that seems to have disappeared from the market.

Sounds, too. Oh yes, the noises are there. The rag-and-bone man with his ‘aynee owld raa-aags’, the clatter of metal scoop against metal churn when the milkman filled our jugs, the gentle snort of his horse as it champed on the bit. Mill hooters, the clang of a tram on Chorley Old Road, the whirr of a trolley bus in town. ‘
Bowton Evernin’ Newers
’ sang the boy on the corner. Bolton was a noisy, smoky, comforting place.

There were other noises, not so welcome. ‘Laura, have you tidied your room?’ and ‘I should never have had you, you are a dreadful child.’ The crack of flesh on flesh when she struck me, the screams I kept inside my head because whenever I yelled, the violence got worse. My father singing to me, my poor dear father who never
understood her, never understood me. He was a great man and a weak human being.

No, I must try to remember the better things, like the noises from the house next door. ‘Pull up a chair, Laura. Now stand on it and give us a song.’ Uncle Freddie was the most terrible tease in the whole world. That knowledge had been passed on to us by his wife, Auntie Maisie.

‘What shall I sing?’

‘A pretty song. A pretty girl should always sing a pretty ditty.’

I was not a good singer, but they listened while I murdered ‘Alice Blue Gown’.

Then Anne would do ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ or ‘Run Rabbit Run’.

‘Treacle toffee, that’ll shut you up, Annie.’ Auntie Maisie’s face was round, glowing like the sun. ‘Here, Laura, you get some before Freddie pinches it. Keeps swallowing bits of his teeth, greedy old bugger.’

My mother never said things like ‘bugger’, so I would giggle and keep the secret. Secrets from my mother were rare and as sweet as the toffee. I would sit in the warm glow of Maisie Turnbull’s love, would soak up the happiness, try to keep it in my heart where it would warm me till morning. But it never did. Somewhere on the way from their door to ours, I always grew chilled and lonely.

There was bunting in the street when the war ended. Liza McNally, my supposed mother, wouldn’t let me go to the party in the avenue. I often dreamed of the whole thing being a mistake, hoped that someone in authority would come along and say, ‘Sorry, Mrs McNally, but Laura is not your child.’ She would have been pleased, too, had I not been hers, because she was always saying that I wasn’t good enough. I hoped, but the hope grew dim with the passing of time. The facts of life were a topic for the future, and I imagined that I might keep the same father and get a better mother. ‘You are not going outside to mix with those people,’ she announced through a cloud of
Craven A exhaust. I was not to be allowed to celebrate the end of a war.

My father spoke up for me, but she refused to be moved. John McNally believed that the rearing of infant children was a woman’s job, so she often had the last word when I was very young. Father said, ‘It’s not worth upsetting her, Laurie-child.’ He brought me sweets that night, barley sugars and Uncle Joes. He was a kind man, but he was powerless in her presence.

My mother closed our curtains on Victory Day. ‘It’s common,’ she said, pursing her reddened lips. ‘No child of mine is going to run about outside with sandwiches.’

‘But Mother—’

‘Don’t argue with me. I’ve had enough of your cheek just lately.’

I sat in the dark and imagined rescue, but no-one came. Cousin Anne did not arrive to knock on our door, to urge me to step outside, because Mother had severed relations with next door some weeks earlier, had cut me off from my kith and kin. Although cowed for much of the time, I was moved to speak up on this occasion. ‘You don’t want me to have anybody,’ I accused, my feet spread wide, arms folded to demonstrate my anger. That’s a thing I recall quite clearly, the way I copied her body language.

She clouted me across my left cheek. ‘You do not need Maisie and Freddie. Anne has a coarse mouth, something she’s inherited from that unbearable man. Laura McNally, you will be a lady if I have to drag you up screaming all by myself.’

My face was stinging. ‘I don’t want to be a lady. Cyril Mort’s got fireworks, saved up since before the war. His dad said they’d be lit once Hitler was in the muck where he belonged.’

She dragged me into the kitchen, waved a bar of red carbolic before my eyes. ‘Must I wash your mouth out, girl? You do not use such words in my house.’ Carbolic burns, sears the skin from your tongue. I knew that, because I’d received mouthwashes before for simple words
like ‘ta-ra’. Common words, she called them. Above all, I was to become an uncommon child.

It was sickening. I’d heard my dad asking the milkman for horse-muck to put on the roses. The word she objected to must have been ‘muck’, as it was the only unusual one to have slipped from my tongue.

‘You are not to look at me in that fashion,’ she screamed before smacking my head so hard that it crashed against the sink. Immediately, she panicked. Although Mother was a vicious woman, she made it her business to ensure that the marks of cruelty seldom showed. My head was grabbed, pushed over the sink, doused in cold water. ‘It’s your own fault,’ she mumbled, choking slightly because she had no hand free to take the cigarette from her mouth. ‘The way you look at me, the way you disobey …’ The towel was hard and rough. I kept my expression neutral as she rubbed me dry, but my dislike of her grew larger and heavier, even as I stood in that kitchen.

‘We shall go into the sitting room.’ Her voice shook; she had frightened herself with her actions, was terrified of being out of control, even for a second.

Liza McNally lived on her nerves and announced that fact regularly to me, to my father and to anyone else within earshot. The nerves were visible that afternoon, the day of the street party. She stood by the fireplace smoking, smoothing her perfect hair, picking at the buffed and painted nails. I can see her now if I close my eyes, pearl choker, round-necked navy frock with lace on the collar, dark shoes, nylon stockings donated by an American serviceman whose life had reputedly been saved by my father’s stomach balm. Even with my eyes open, I can see the seeds of bitterness in her expression, a clear acidity of temperament that would not abate with the passing of time. After contact with the sink, my head was already sore, and she did not improve matters when she pulled at my hair till I heard some of it snapping away at the scalp. ‘Selfish child,’ she muttered as she dragged me out of the kitchen.

Hatred is a strong word, perhaps too strong to express the feelings of a five-year-old child. But something boiled in my chest, got brewed up in the summer of 1945, has simmered ever since. I was perplexed, lonely, excluded. She watched me, fastened me to the chair with her eagle vision, willed me not to move. It was a long day, one of the longest in my whole life. The cruellest part was the party dress. She made me wear it, pretended that we were having our own ‘select’ gathering in the dining-room at the back of our house. The curtains were closed, of course, to keep out the noise of the ‘rabble’ outside. The ‘rabble’ consisted of hard-working middle-class people, factory managers, shopkeepers, self-employed businessmen. Whatever, they were not good enough for my mother. The party dress was washed and pressed just in case anyone outside should catch sight of me and pity my isolation. Saving pride and face was my mother’s way of life, even her
ration d’être
, but I had only just begun to learn that.

I fidgeted, of course. Sitting straight and still in a chair is difficult for an adult, impossible for a child. There was a pattern on the oilcloth at the edge of Mother’s Indian carpet, brown and beige squares with diamond shapes inside the beige bits. The toes of my patent shoes tapped out a message in the diamonds. ‘I am not her little girl, she is not my mother.’ It was silly, but it helped. Inside, I was defying her; inside, I had a secret.

‘Stop that stamping. You are so irritating. Go upstairs and stay away from the windows.’

I obeyed. Well, I obeyed by going upstairs, but I broke the second law, of course. A long table had appeared in the middle of the road as if by magic. It was made, I’m sure, from lots of ordinary dining tables swathed in sheets and coloured paper, but to my infant gaze, this was a miracle. There was dandelion and burdock, jelly, a huge cake with red, white and blue icing. I saw sandwiches and pies and jam tarts. And Anne saw me, glanced up and waved, looked sad without me.