The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (25 page)

‘John owns a house in the Medina,’ she says. ‘But he has also bought somewhere up in the Atlas mountains and we’ll spend part of the year there, when it gets too hot for Marrakesh. He
likes to paint there. He also has a house in Santa Fe. He’s American, you know, he’s quite well known in the States.’ Tom and I look at each other because we didn’t. She stops stirring for a moment and stares wistfully out of the kitchen window at the frost-bleached landscape. Everything is a different shade of pale. A herd of huddled sheep stare back at us from the field that marks the end of the garden. Occasionally they start bleating as though gossiping about what they are witnessing. Nothing like an audience to curb the worst family excesses, I think to myself, glad the sheep are enjoying their own Christmas special.

I struggle to assess whether this sudden flurry of disclosure makes the situation better or worse. It is difficult to read Tom’s expression. He is standing on a step opposite the cooker, studiously ignoring the détente between our mothers. Instead he has followed Mark’s advice and is organising my mother’s herbs into alphabetical order.

‘Do you think I should put the black pepper under B or P?’ he asks Petra.

‘I think you’ll find that it’s better to put it under P, followed by dried peppers and then white pepper,’ she says. This kind of exchange represents some deep communion between them.

I think sometimes that it is this diehard belief in domestic routine that has helped Petra to cope with the death of Tom’s father. Standards were never allowed to slip, even in the awful early days when he left her stranded following a massive and fatal heart attack. I remember a couple of weeks after he died, Petra asked us to go to the house they had lived in together for the previous forty years, to help clear out old clothes belonging to him. The gesture seemed a little premature. But from the moment of that terrible phone call in the early hours of Sunday
morning, Petra had been unnervingly dignified in her approach to the loss of her husband. There was no hysteria. No self-pity. No emotional outbursts.

‘She won’t cry in front of us,’ said Tom. ‘It’s not her style. She will save it all for when she is alone.’

So when I came down into the kitchen one morning during a bout of insomnia, to find her weeping silent tears, as she ironed underwear belonging to Tom’s father that she had obviously washed the previous evening after we went to bed, I was almost relieved. Her shoulders heaved and great pools of tears fell on to pairs of white pants and string vests. How come her washing never went grey, I wondered? How could she cry so noiselessly and gracefully? I considered my own emotional meltdowns, a salty mixture of water, snot and spit that left me looking bulbous and red. I needed a man’s handkerchief to mop those up. Petra, on the other hand, dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a small lace affair with embroidered roses.

In the corner were three large black bin liners, one neatly filled with striped shirts that her husband had worn for work. He was a man who considered himself daring for sporting brightly coloured socks with his sober suits and ties. Accountants are meant to be bland, he always said. No one wants an eccentric accountant. There were jackets from an era when smart-casual involved precarious decisions over whether other guests would opt for a blazer with big brass buttons, the more relaxed sports jacket, or even put on a lounge suit. A pair of large black Wellington boots lay felled on the floor.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked her, gripping her elbow until she put down the steaming iron.

‘It’s not easy, Lucy,’ she said, sniffing delicately.

‘Why are you ironing these clothes?’ I asked gently.

‘I couldn’t possibly send them to the charity shop with creases,’ she said, looking at me with a shocked expression on her face. ‘If I did that, the whole thing would unravel.’

Petra continued to wash sheets once a week through that dark period. Her underwear was always ironed. And the freezer remained filled with home-baked food, albeit in small, sad tinfoil portions for one person instead of two. They were rarely eaten.

I hold on to this image to engender feelings of sympathy towards her that were seriously compromised when I opened my Christmas present late last night. She had bought both my mother and me a copy of
What Not to Wear
by Trinny and Susannah, handing them over with great excitement. ‘I thought I should give these to you now, in case they come in handy over the festive period,’ she said. My mother looked at the book blankly. Apart from the news, she hasn’t watched much television since the early 1980s. Trinny and Susannah have not registered on her radar.

My mother strides over from the fridge. She has clearly not yet examined the book, because her Christmas look consists of a curious ensemble involving a skirt with a broken hem that hangs down at the back, and a petticoat visible both from the neckline of her unbuttoned shirt and the uneven hemline. Her shirt, a striped number that I remember her wearing when I still lived at home, is done up wrong. Everything is lopsided.

More carthorse than thoroughbred, I think to myself, comparing her unfavourably with Petra. My mother has even applied make-up. But she is out of practice and probably using products bought more than a decade ago. The foundation is
thick and unctuous and nestles in the wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes, so that if she laughs a small stream oozes out. Her lips are painted in a strong orange colour, her cheeks berry-red with rouge.

My mother’s insouciant attitude to her personal appearance used to be an endearing eccentricity. Now she just looks dishevelled and old. I feel a sudden need to protect her from unforgiving eyes. This is a sentiment new to me and, for the first time, I realise that the balance in our relationship is shifting and that I will be called upon to take more and more responsibility. I start to feel breathless with the weight of what lies ahead.

My feelings towards my mother are fairly straightforward because she is generally uncomplicated. There is no emotional blackmail. No passive aggressive behaviour. No criticism of my parenting techniques, beyond the inevitable disbelief that her daughter chose to disengage from her career. Her belief system has barely evolved since I was a child, and over the years her strong opinions have become comforting in their predictability. Most belong to a different era. Her feminism is cast from the Betty Friedan mould. Her Labour party allegiance more Neil Kinnock than Tony Blair. I know that she hoped that I would grow up with my compass set along the same lines, but nothing has ever seemed certain to me. I still find it too easy to see the other person’s point of view. To believe anything too much seems almost reckless. Her fear that having children might shackle her to the kitchen and jeopardise her hard-won freedoms meant that she spent much of our childhood running away from us. As though everything would be fine as long as she kept moving. She feared giving in to maternal urges, in case they might prove irresistible. She was often physically around,
it was just that her mind was engaged elsewhere, mostly in some book or other. My brother blames his inability to form long-term relationships on this emotional distance.

‘You’re behaving like someone in therapy, blaming your parents for your own inadequacies, instead of taking responsibility for your own destiny,’ I told him during our most recent argument about this, shortly after he had finished his last two-year relationship.

‘If I’m behaving like someone in therapy, that might be because I
am
in therapy,’ he said, because psychologists have to learn to take it as well as give it. ‘You just haven’t reached the level of consciousness required to realise that our childhood was blighted.’

‘All parents are flawed,’ I told him. ‘There is no such thing as a perfect parent. What parents should aim for is being good enough.’

‘You’ve been reading Winnicott,’ he said accusingly.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘That is Winnicott’s theory,’ he said. ‘The good-enough mother . . . starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure.’

‘Well, good on Winnicott then,’ I said. ‘It’s people like you who have undermined mothers. You have created a chain of command with experts at the top and parents at the bottom. That’s why those poor women got locked away in prison, falsely accused of killing their babies, on the basis of flawed evidence from a scientist they had never met. It’s the Guantanamo approach to mothers, you’re guilty unless you can prove your innocence.’

Now, I’m not denying that my mother has flaws. But there was nothing, even as a teenager, that I couldn’t have discussed with her if I had chosen. She was unjudgemental and practical. Unlike Tom’s family, where I struggled to decipher conversations and interpret looks like someone on their first French exchange, finally realising after several years that things that were said were often the opposite of what was meant, there was little hidden in ours. There were long, rowdy discussions late into the night and half-drunk bottles of wine that were cleaned up the following morning. Most arguments were inconclusive, and there was a lot of verbal incontinence, mostly on my mother’s part, because my father had a more evidence-based, less instinctive approach to debate, but at least everything was up for discussion. There was nothing repressed. My brother is less forgiving of our childhood but I think that is because I understand what women are up against.

‘Perhaps you would like to try?’ I suddenly hear Petra say in a frosty tone. She is handing the wooden spoon to my mother, waving it in front of her face like a sword. The icing on the spoon is set as hard as the expression on Petra’s face. She does up the top button of her cardigan. The battle lines are drawn.

My mother, never one to turn down a challenge, struggles to get the white mass to shift, using her not inconsiderable strength. It moves slightly, and in this subtle movement she finds vindication, but it is one great bowl-shaped mass, with the consistency and form of a Viking helmet. If the willpower of my mother cannot shift the icing, then nothing short of an ice pick will.

‘I’m going to slice it in half and put the bottom bit on top of the cake,’ my mother says defiantly, pointing towards the knife
drawer. I open it. I want her to win this battle, because the odds are stacked against her. The knife drawer is stiff and cumbersome to open and when I finally manage to pull it out, there are many things inside but no sharp knife.

‘We haven’t had one of those since the early eighties,’ my father says unhelpfully, looking at me, then down at the paper again, blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding at his kitchen table. Petra leans over my shoulder and peers in the drawer. I can see her dissecting the contents. Old bills, stray playing cards, corks, plastic lids, an obituary cut out from the
Guardian
, rusty icing nozzles in various sizes, bits of string in different colours, grains of rice, porridge oats and other unidentifiable debris that has found its way in over the years. Outside, the sheep bleat loudly as if discussing this display. They sense the build-up of dramatic tension.

‘Would you like me to sort this out?’ Petra asks eagerly. Without waiting for an answer, she takes out the drawer and immediately starts the process. ‘How are the children going to get the reindeer and Father Christmas to stand up on the icing? It’s set hard as concrete, no one will be able to bite through it,’ she says, efficiently lining up objects into intelligible categories. ‘Why don’t you let me start from scratch?’

‘Because this is the way that I have always done it,’ says my mother fiercely.

I doubt whether she has ever made icing before, and it is bewildering to me why she engages in this pretence. It is simply not her area of expertise and both women would be happier if Petra was left to take over everything relating to Christmas food.

‘Shall I get on with the roast potatoes?’ asks Petra, who, at the moment, has the diplomatic upper hand. ‘I think you’ll find
that if you sprinkle them with semolina rather than flour before you put them in the oven, they will have a crunchier edge.’

She is moving towards the fruit bowl and I know even before she reaches her destination that she will be unable to contain herself from throwing away the mouldy apple that I spot on the top.

My mother goes into the larder that leads off the back of the kitchen and I follow close behind.

‘B is for bastards,’ she seethes, and I shut the door to have one of those hold-it-together conversations.

‘This is a difficult time for them,’ I explain. ‘The more anxious they are, the more they tidy up. Just try and enjoy it. Don’t take it personally. Petra prides herself on her domestic capabilities, they are integral to her sense of self. You have many other things in your life, so be generous.’

‘It’s a difficult time for me, having both of them here at once,’ she says, sitting down on a stool and accidentally setting off a mousetrap with the tip of her shoe. ‘I thought the decision to move to Morocco might have loosened her up. I can’t believe that she can be engaged in something so impetuous and still be obsessing about the consistency of icing at the same time.’

‘She draws comfort from the repetition of these rituals, just as you do from delivering that introductory lecture on D. H. Lawrence to first-year students every year and seeing the expression on their faces when you say “cunt”,’ I say. ‘I think it is because she is moving to Morocco that you want her to get worked up over the icing. So that she conforms to your expectations. I think that you are resentful of this late blush of freedom in Petra’s life, so you are trying to force her back into her corner. Anyway, she’s got a point about the icing.’

‘Why would I be jealous?’ she says. I am surprised at her use of adjective, because I hadn’t actually considered that my mother might be envious of Petra’s existence.

‘Because for the first time since you have known her, she is doing something more exciting than you,’ I say. ‘You’re not used to her taking centre stage.’