The Family Retreat, page 13
I can see her looking around for things for her conversation to land on. Like a bird on the beach, looking for scraps. But she is not hungry to entertain or amuse. She is desperate to distract. To divert. To find ways for us to look away. And I know this feeling well. This is what she always does in times of crisis. I place cups and milk onto the tray and I walk out of the back door. ‘I love these pictures. What fun!’ I hear her say, as she peers at the photo montage as I step outside. ‘Which one’s the owner?’
And as I walk across the grass, there is a familiarity about all this. The whole incident has been filed away. Like an important document hastily shoved in the shredder. And I do what I always do. I say nothing. I eat my biscuits with my jaw tight. Swallow down the tea. Pebbles in my throat. I am twelve years old again, sitting at the dinner table.
My father is talking to Penny, over her small fence. They are laughing as she points to something in the distance. Already I can see the incident has gone from his face. And I marvel at his inability to keep Sam in mind. How in the face of a better, alternative distraction, my son has been dropped like a stone.
*
And what about me? What do I do? In spite of my incomprehension at his ineptitude, I am speechless. I withdraw. My fury is turned on myself. I took my eye off the ball, is what I think. I relaxed for a moment and entrusted someone else, someone I thought I could depend on, with the welfare of my son, and how this wrong assumption could have been fatal. I blame myself entirely.
And as I sit there pouring out cups of tea for us all, I resolve never to rely on him again. His habitual distractedness is legendary. But never like this. Never in a way that has put others’ lives at risk. If anything, his tendency towards distraction is something of a family joke. Stories that we have woven into family mythology and linked to a kind of benign eccentricity. The absent-minded professor. The brilliant academic. How much he got away with; but how much, it occurs to me now, we let him get away with.
We drink our tea, and my hands are still shaking as I lift my cup. I have no energy for words. For polite chatter. When my mother updates me about Alicia’s brain tumour, I look away. ‘Just three weeks, they say.’ And as always, a reminder, that however awful things might be, there is always someone worse off. ‘What will happen?’ she asks. ‘From a medical point of view? Will it be painful – or will she just slip away?’
‘Slip away probably,’ I say, ‘if she’s given enough morphine.’
She asks some more questions and I simply cannot help myself. My default position, answering, engaging – even though I have no interest or inclination. What I do pull back from is finding placatory words to frame around what’s happened. I want the horror to remain, laid bare in front of them. It’s too soon to move away from it. Too raw. I want to remember. If anything, I want to move towards it, not away. To wave a banner like a protester on the street.
I have felt fear before. I think fleetingly of Keith. The flash of rage and tension in the room. But today’s fear was coated with the heaviness of loss. Of responsibility. Of guilt. I never want to taste it again, but I want to remember that dull metallic taste of death. I want to turn it over in my hands. Like a sharp object in my fingers. I want to feel the pain of those jagged edges. And I want to give it to my mother, and fold her fingers around the edges, so she can feel it too.
I don’t want to listen to talk about hedges and biscuits and brain tumours and menus for my father’s birthday. I want to remember the fragility of life. Its brittleness. The momentary quicksilver of a decision. But, as ever, I am unable to express my anger. Because I know it will simply bounce off them both, and roll off down the hillside.
The kids are happy to be back in the garden with the box of cars. Sam has taken his new net and bucket and spade inside and hidden them under the bed, and when he comes back out, he asks about the beach. ‘Can we go later – to the sandy one?’
I shudder at the thought. ‘Tomorrow,’ I say, ‘we’ll go tomorrow with Ollie and Lexie.’
After we have finished our tea, I stand up. ‘Nana and Grandad are going now,’ I announce to their surprise. I haven’t consulted my parents about their departure time. I know they aren’t due at the restaurant until 2 p.m. ‘There’s a lovely garden nearby,’ I say, ‘or you could have a drink at a pub on the way. The Royal Oak looks nice.’
My mother goes to speak, but decides against it, then stands up too.
She gathers up her coat and bag. ‘Right then, we’ll head off for the restaurant now,’ she says, like it’s her own idea.
My father is walking towards the car and stops to speak to Philip who is in a deckchair by their back door. ‘Hello again,’ he says cheerily, extending his hand, and they have a brief conversation I’m glad I cannot hear.
‘Shall we pop back with a takeaway? Fish and chips perhaps?’ she says. ‘There’s a good one in Swanage—’
‘No, thanks,’ I say, ‘we’re fine.’
‘We’ll practically be passing—’
I just want to be here, alone with the kids. I just want them to leave. But in the silence that follows, I can’t keep quiet. Feel compelled to give a reason. I am like the default setting on my own phone that I don’t know how to turn off.
‘Feel a bit shattered after the events of the morning. Just need to rest. Chill out a bit.’
And of course, my mother seizes on the hook I have inadvertently thrown out. ‘Won’t it be a help then? Getting fish and chips, so you won’t have to cook?’ She looks around. ‘And the kids love fish and chips, don’t they?’ raising her voice so they can hear.
I shake my head.
‘We’ve got some bits and pieces to finish up – we’re fine.’
‘Really? What? I didn’t see much in the fridge—’
‘Pancakes,’ I say, ‘we’re having pancakes.’
‘Oh? Where are the eggs?’ she says, looking around as if they might miraculously appear.
‘We get them from Joyce—’
‘But won’t it save you the trip? If we bring food? Just trying to help,’ she says, ‘make things easier—’
‘I’ve got to pop over to Joyce’s anyway,’ I lie.
Finally, with a disappointed twitch of her lips, it stops.
And then they are gone. I get crisps and snacks for us all. Juice for the kids and wine for me. The sun is on the grass. The path is a giddying array of traffic. ‘It’s a car park,’ Sam says when I look over. The heat is warm on my face. There’s the hum of bees on the lavender. I close my eyes. I sip at my glass of rosé. The kids are laughing, playing quietly for a moment. And I allow myself to relish the peace. And having brushed up against danger, I feel the preciousness of life. I feel it in my heart and want to hold on tight.
My mind drifts to Terri Garner and the conversation I had with Sarita about the risk for pregnant women. ‘A very dangerous time for both mother and child.’ And I think about how Terri had no children, but was already thinking like a mother. Of the sacrifices she had to make, knowing she couldn’t bring a baby into an unsafe house. ‘I can’t have a baby with Danny,’ was what she said the next time I spoke to her, as she asked for a termination and a referral to the clinic. Telling me she had to go at the weekend, while he was away. She already knew she wouldn’t be able to protect a child. She knew what she had to do.
As I look out across the fields, the clouds have now gone, and the sky is a bright brilliant blue. The sun is on the cornfields, lighting them up in a golden hue.
The phone rings. I look down. It’s Rob. I switch it to silent, turn it over, and close my eyes. I can’t speak to him at the moment. I am not ready to say what’s happened out loud. But mostly, I realise, I’m not ready to manage his emotion. I can’t listen and accommodate his response, the swirl of his panic and outrage, as he sits on his beach in Los Angeles. I know I can only tell him when I feel better, when my own emotions are safely beached.
TWELVE
Not long after we get to the beach, Helen’s phone rings. ‘My sister,’ she mouths to me, before moving away along the sand to answer the call. She always feels the need to tell me who it is, even though it’s always her sister. Occasionally James, but never anyone else. We have set up our blankets and towels on the dry sand and the kids are a little further down towards the water’s edge where the sand is damp, and apparently the perfect consistency for their construction of a complex set of moats they hope will be filled by the incoming tide.
I watch them, and feel my mind drift. My eyes casting over our bags. The jumble of my own, stuffed in haphazardly. And Helen’s. Neat. All Tupperwared up, with folded clothes and emergency essentials. As a family, I could see the Dunstables were neat. James and Helen, and the kids too, especially Ollie. In fact, in a flat sea of calm and order, it’s Lexie’s day-dreamy stares and her unwieldy hair that offer the only ripple of disarray. But since Rob has left, I feel grateful for Helen and her family. There’s something appealing about her shape. Her organised place in the world. Their definiteness as a family. And I start to like this. I start to feel spending time with them might make us all shape up, and morph into something more solid.
Helen is the sort of mother who has tissues, plasters and a change of dry clothes for both children always at the ready. She is prepared for all eventualities. The kind of mother who exposes my chaotic kind of mothering. A mother who I cannot imagine bent double and nauseous with panic as she searches for her lost child on a cliff. And if you looked at my previous organisational skills and abilities at work, she’s exactly the sort of mother I thought I’d be. Earlier, Sam was proudly showing off his new blue net. I said nothing. I did not want to talk about the drama. Nor did I want to see the horror of it reflected on her face. The flash of judgement she would have done her best to hide.
In spite of my ability to multi-task at work, unfathomably, I was unable, or unwilling, to translate this work efficiency into my domestic life. I was not the mother who puréed carrots into ice cubes when the babies were small. I did not batch cook trays of fish pie and chilli that I put in the freezer. I didn’t seem to manage to arrange online deliveries before the cupboards were empty. Nor did I schedule the washing and the ironing around the kids’ naps or start organising childcare in preparation for my return to work after maternity leave.
Instead, I found myself repeatedly surprised by the need for certain essentials, in the same quantity, every single day. I seemed in a perpetual state of shock at the repetition of it all, especially in those early years with two children only fourteen months apart (what was I thinking?). I lacked the drive for anticipatory behaviour. The truth was, I found the daily need to look ahead on the rail tracks of motherhood boring. The tedium of anticipating arrivals, in spite of the fact that the timetable didn’t change and each day was a repetition of the last. And perhaps it was precisely because it rarely altered that I seemed unable to succumb to it. Unable to hand myself over, simply to find the only person it ultimately rebounded on was me. To the outside observer, this might seem odd, given my liking for order and patterns.
I used to wonder if the forgetting and disorganisation was an act of rebellion against the tedium, providing small pinpricks of drama to fend off the monotony. The excitement of the late-night dash to the Turkish corner shop for milk or nappies or wipes. A spontaneous chat with the lovely Ali, arm on the counter, talking about everything and nothing. The creation of little pockets of choppy chaos in the otherwise predictable sea.
I loved the babies. I loved them instantly, with a fierceness I had not foreseen. It was a clean and pure kind of feeling that I’d never felt before. And if being a mother was just about loving your babies, it would be easy. But sometimes, it felt that loving your kids was just a small cork bobbing in the ocean of motherhood. There was the constant flotsam and jetsam of everything else. The feeding. The washing. The shopping. The cleaning. The tidying. Now I wonder, with a burn of shame, whether it was less about rebellion, and more about the thankless nature of the repetition. No thanks. No glory. No prizes. It felt like a tidal wave of domesticity. And it washed up on my shore.
Rob’s riotous bay was full of fun. Spontaneous and in the moment. The wild hysteria before bed. The choppy hilarity before a bath. Plunging his face underwater, balancing a boat on his head. The hysterical laughter as he pretended to be a character from a series they’d just watched on the telly. His funny voices. Their red laughing faces. Me laughing too – but all the while keeping an eye on the sloshing water on the bathroom floor. Surreptitiously mopping it up so I didn’t look like the killjoy that I was. The fun-police.
And while I was on maternity leave, we muddled along in our state of happy and haphazard chaos. But my return to work was less a car crash, more a motorway pile-up on the domestic front. Was it then I began to look ahead and anticipate?
And now, here in Dorset for this month, life feels easier. Obviously, the days are free of work, but that is no different from the last few months in London. But being away, there is simply so much less to have to do. Fewer clothes to wash. A smaller number of toys to clear up. Fewer people to see and arrangements to make. Less rushing about to classes and pickups, including the weekly stressful dash to yoga where I pay an exorbitant fee to force myself to lie down on a mat and breathe. Life has got smaller and more manageable. My head is less busy. Less full of the ‘to do’ list I never seem to get to the end of. It feels unbelievably light and freeing. Like the pressing of a giant pause button on my life. I can’t quite imagine how I will ever press ‘play’ again.
*
I watch the kids, as their heads bob in the sand. The faces of determination. The intense concentration. The way they negotiate their plans. Someone speaks, usually Ollie, and their heads jolt up. There are small snatches of conversation; plans, decisions, ideas. The pointing. The nods of agreement. Then more furious collective digging.
I am now used to the calls from Polly. The first few times, I felt a sense of irritation. Given the length of time Helen spent on the phone, I experienced a weird sense of feeling excluded. Of rejection. A sense of my own isolation, abandoned on the blanket. But now, I expect them. And I have come to welcome them. Polly calls at least once a day. Sometimes twice, and every time, I wave a hand. Of course, off you go. And I sink into the time alone. I look at the sea. The clouds. The changing colour of the water and the sun as it hits the waves. Sometimes my eyes focus on the shimmer of silver. Glittery gems that sparkle on the surface. I watch almost mesmerised. And perhaps one of the reasons I find it relaxing when Helen goes is that these rare moments are gifts. A time when my mind doesn’t drift, or race to cluster around the worries that preoccupied me in London. It simply hangs, as though suspended, and that day, when she returns after her phone call, I realise I am still there, the unopened book in my hand, sitting very still and staring out at the sea at the small shots of silver on the horizon.
Unusually that day, Helen’s not on the phone for that long. But when she comes to join me back on the blanket, she is obviously distressed. Her face is red. She looks tearful.
I hesitate before saying anything. I still often feel nervous with Helen, wary of saying the wrong thing. Of overstepping the mark.
‘Are you OK?’ I ask.
She shakes her head, chewing on her lip. She reaches for her water and takes a long drink. I can see she is trying to swallow away her distress. It sits like a lump in her throat. I know that feeling. The upsurge of sadness, the swallowing down. I look away as she battles to gain the composure that I know she wants to find. I dig into my bag for the flask of coffee and pour her out a cup and place it on the sand on front of her. She’s searching for tissues and then dabs at her face.
For a while, we sit in silence. It is not my way. Not how I would usually respond. But I have got used to Helen. How she likes to be left. How sometimes even an innocuous question can feel like an intrusion and she not only reels back, but something closes down on her face, like the snap of a shutter at a kiosk window. And I feel propelled back. Like I have been rude to ask. To say anything. Sometimes it’s a look, but it can land like a slap, and when it happens, it’s a reminder that for all the time we spend on the beach with the kids, we hardly know each other at all.
But that day, I bite my lip; it’s hard not to comment on her obvious shift of mood. Her sadness and her distress. I take a risk.
‘Do you want to talk about it? Is there anything I can do?’
My voice is gentle and, in spite of herself, she weeps into her tissue that is pressed against her face. Given how neat and shiny she usually presents, it’s a shock to see her raw emotion. Her red blotchy skin, like a tarnish on her sheen.
I wait. I pour more coffee, digging a little indentation in the sand to place the cup inside. As I move back to my place, I put my hand on her shoulder. Give a gentle squeeze.
‘It’s difficult,’ she says, after a while. There’s something about the way she says it, the hesitancy. The reluctance she has in even putting it into words. She looks up, twisting her fingers. ‘I’m sorry—’ and she starts to cry again.
We sit together in silence.
‘I’m here,’ I say, ‘if you want to talk . . . if there’s anything I can do?’
After some moments, she wipes her face. ‘I just feel so helpless. My sister’s in trouble,’ she says, ‘having such a hard time. I don’t know how to help her.’
Again, I feel that invisible barrier. Like an electric fence that if I touched, moved too close, I would get sent suddenly reeling backwards. The shock of electricity tingling at the end of my fingers.
