Sorry Isn’t Good Enough, page 26
Eventually I write to Knut to see how he’s doing, and say I may be coming out to Norway for academic purposes. He writes back a cheery letter, and hidden in the friendly news is one line telling me he is engaged to a Swedish endocrinologist now, and she is expecting his baby.
There, I have allowed myself to get hurt anyway. I cry myself to sleep for three nights in a row. I find an old jumper of his and wear it round the flat, arms swinging below my wrists (he had long arms). One night I stuff two pillows into it and hug his large, chunky-knit torso, hurt by the fact that his arms don’t hug me back, but merely flop about limply. After a week or two I admit to myself that it would have been hopeless anyhow. I wouldn’t take to short dark days and long sunny nights; my parents – who have to steel themselves for a journey by train – would never fly over to see us and they would miss Matt; and despite my initial envy of the Swedish endocrinologist, who I imagine in a shiplap house leaning her head on Knut’s firm woolly chest, I know she will soon feel held down, pinned in place by the dazzling paperweight of motherhood. I try not to tell myself that at least she will have someone to share it with.
I do make friends: I get to know some of the women at the school gates. Five of us go on little excursions to parks and farms and on day trips to the seaside. They all have husbands or partners, but we all have each other. We exchange funny anecdotes and recipes and intimacies. We roar with laughter and sympathise with hugs. Whatever our different backgrounds and qualifications, we sit on a beach, looking out at our children, and know that we are all held in a quiet orbit around them, wherever they are, whatever they are doing.
It’s so easy to love Matt. And the more I love him, the more it hurts that Mum has found it so difficult to show me affection. What has helped me to push that thought aside is the pleasure I feel in seeing her with him. She is a wonderful grandmother, although she still isn’t quite finished with me.
My flat is sparsely furnished but neat – apart from Matt’s scattered toys – and I am house-proud. Before their visits I vacuum thoroughly, scrub the countertops and put Matt’s toys away in toy boxes. But she will flick the pad of her index finger over my windowsills, examine the thinnest grey film of dust left on her skin and give an exasperated shrug. When I put the kettle on for a tea or a coffee, she’ll pick up the chosen mugs and wash them, as if they aren’t already clean.
‘Mum,’ I protest, on more than one occasion, ‘my mugs and cups are clean. I’ve washed them.’
‘Oh yes, they’re your idea of clean.’
‘Kath,’ my father says, helplessly; and she’ll clean them anyway, scrubbing as hard as she can with washing-up liquid and a sponge scourer she will have brought with her. She won’t use my washing-up brush, but dunks it in bleach and insists on leaving it there overnight. Whenever she comes, she leaves me a set of clean scourers. When I put a meal in front of her, she frowns at it as if she is about to summon a waiter to say she’s got the wrong order. Once she brought me a new duster. It’s a bizarre bunch of acrylic strands on a stick, and looks a bit like a mauve party wig. I have used it a few times, under her supervision, to remove cobwebs from the corners of the rooms. I really don’t give a toss. Spiders have to live somewhere. They’re welcome to my corners. But it makes Mum happy – or triumphant. Either is okay.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Item: Faux-velvet cat collar, red. Chuck.
Not long after Matt starts school, our old cat dies. Trevor is fifteen, and has to be put down after a squirrel bite became infected. We have no garden with the flat, but the neighbour downstairs lets us use his. So I dig a deep grave for him under a blossom tree, and make a headstone on which Matt paints his name. He solemnly sprinkles rose petals on top of the furry corpse, and we play ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ on the cassette player, because it’s the only cat song Matt can think of, and he likes it.
Back in the flat, we put his collar and name tag on the mantelpiece, and have a takeaway. A wake, snuggled on the sofa with pizza.
‘Would you like another kitten soon?’
Matt squishes his mouth to one side. ‘Perhaps.’ He munches on his pizza and swallows hard, his face full of concentration. ‘But I’d rather have a brother or sister.’
‘A brother or sister?’
‘Yes. Is that okay? Can I have one?’
‘Well … that’s a little more complicated.’
‘You just need a man’s seed, don’t you?’ (I had told him as early as possible about the facts of life.)
‘I suppose so. But the thing is, I don’t really know any men who would give me their seed.’
He reaches for another piece of pizza. ‘What about Grandad?’
‘That wouldn’t be a good idea.’ On so many levels. (I haven’t done genetics with him.) ‘It has to be someone outside the family – for it to work.’
He sighs heavily. ‘Well, we’ll find a man.’
‘Do you want a daddy, then?’
He looks thoughtfully at his pizza crust. ‘No. Just you and me and a brother or sister – and a kitten maybe.’
I must look daunted, because he adds helpfully: ‘I don’t mind if it’s a boy or a girl. We can have whatever you like.’
We cannot possibly guess at what a joy and a punishment she will be.
Matt doesn’t give up. It’s the one thing he wants that I can’t give him. I’ve even considered sleeping with a random, pleasant man a few times and not telling him he’s going to be the father of my child, but that seems too underhand to contemplate. There is an obvious candidate: a man I work with called Chris, who seems intermittently besotted with me – perhaps only when he can’t find anyone else. He’s a good egg, by and large. But when I try to picture a combination of my genes and his in the shape of a child, I find myself pulling faces and frowning so hard that my eyebrows ache. (I’m a great believer in subliminal messages.) Anyway, I imagine how I would feel, in that man’s shoes, years later, stumbling upon a son or daughter I never knew I had – and might even have very much wanted.
One day when Matthew’s five, and I’m picking him up from school, I bump into Simon. Although actually, it is Simon who bumps into me. He has been trying to find me at my flat because a friend of a friend said I was moving to Abergavenny. This is true. I have been offered a job at the hospital there, and I’ll be properly using my psychology degrees for the first time. He joshes around with Matthew on the way home from school – who is amused to know that this is his father – and he takes us both out for a burger. Later, back at my flat, after Matthew’s gone to sleep, Simon explains his decision that I should not go to Abergavenny. It isn’t fair of me to take his son away from him.
I should probably have laughed, but the more he talks, the more maudlin he becomes, until I almost believe he believes he cares. He has just been dumped by his latest girlfriend, and he seems to be looking for meaning in his life. We go to bed and make love. Well, we do it. We repeat the mistake the following week. The next month I move to Abergavenny with Matthew, newly pregnant.
I have a growing sense of unease with the next pregnancy. What if it’s a girl? Will I be able to love her in the same way as I have loved Matthew? Although I know in my bones that I will, I am plagued with nightmares about unwittingly making her feel unloved. What if, with the best will in the world, I find myself parroting my mother’s Sorry isn’t good enough or Crying is manipulative? or Look what you’ve done now? or worse, Don’t be so filthy? I’ll have to make a determined effort not to be like my mother, while all the time respecting the way she loves Matthew. But most of all I’m afraid, if I have a girl, that Mum will treat her the way she has treated me.
Mum falls in love with her from the very first moment. I name her Katherine after her, but she’ll be called Katie. Katie can do no wrong. My mother calls her ‘sweetheart’ and ‘love’ and ‘little sausage’. She will never be a poppet-user, but Katie doesn’t lack adoration from either of my parents. Gone is the prickliness around a little girl; coldness and jealousy and rivalry are totally absent. I begin to wonder if I imagined it all in my own childhood.
What we know, as psychologists, is still fairly limited, but there are accepted patterns. Small children are such tender little animals that they will attach themselves to the nearest available object that can provide comfort, relief or warmth; even if the object in question is hostile, if the solace is imaginary. If that’s all there is, then it will have to do. The tragedy with a cold, emotionally absent mother is that it provides the child’s blueprint for all later close relationships. Many is the young woman (or man) who unconsciously seeks out and attaches herself to the unloving, careless friend or lover. Yes. Friend. Or lover. Or both.
I have to get it right with Katie. And it seems I do. It is easy. And Mum and Dad and Matthew love her too. What can possibly go wrong?
Chapter Fifty-Nine
My Girl
Although my greatest fear has been that I will somehow, unaccountably, not be able to love Katie in the way I love Matthew, it disappears the moment I hold her; but there is still a nagging anxiety that I won’t know how to love her well as she grows up. I consult my list again: I love you; I see you; I am here for you; I will keep you safe; I delight in you. I become so worried that I mention it to a work colleague, a child psychologist of some standing.
‘The crucial thing is that you know how you don’t want to mother. That’s as important as having the path all mapped out in detail. It’s your path to choose, but you know which one you are definitely not taking.’
It all makes a lot of sense. And there is no husband to spoil Katie or vie for her loyalty. But still, sometimes, when I’m exhausted and she whines for attention, a little voice pulls at my sleeve and says ‘I would never have got away with that’, and the drive to ignore my daughter will battle with the desire to pick her up and hold her close. Sometimes I resent her ever so slightly for reducing my time with Matthew. This is my quiet time reading to Matthew; how can she want feeding now? This is when I play with Matthew; why is she squawking? How can I possibly give him all the attention he needs with another child to consider? What if this hardness in me grows? I see it like an indoor plant, spilling over the mantelpiece and sending out its leathery leaves on winding stems to every part of our house, putting down suckers, growing thick and woody until it is impossible to cut back.
But Matthew is my ally. He never seems to be jealous of Katie, and – perhaps mindful of his desperation to have a sibling – he is always very attentive to her. As soon as she can sit up on the carpet, he gets down with her and helps her build towers, makes her stuffed animals talk, or shows her how to stroke our new cat who, as soon as she can talk, she will name Gavin Baguette. She has the most infectious giggle, and I can’t help cuddling her. She loves cuddles, and I buy her a bear to hold at night. She calls him Peter, when she can talk, and she loves him with the same fervour I loved Trevor. I often hear her chuntering away to him after the light’s out. I make him little outfits and we make up stories about him together. She is an inventive storyteller. Peter can do almost anything, and she draws alarmingly funny pictures of his adventures with a dolphin that Mum made for her. The love I feel for Katie and Matt is boundless. I know it’s going to be okay. It will all be okay.
And it is the oddest thing, and perhaps the most wonderful of all: how my mother dotes on her grandchildren. On both of them equally. It’s as if her affection – like the crockery she has been saving for ‘best’ in the cupboard – is unlocked at last for her grandchildren. Now it’s allowed to be manhandled, chipped, cracked and covered in cake and jam for the sheer joy of using it.
She still draws her finger across my mantelpiece for dust, rewashes my coffee mugs and inspects my cutlery for smears, but I have never seen her show the slightest slither of disgust or contempt or anger towards Katie. I do try to keep an eye on them when they’re together, hovering for any sign of repulsion or mention of germs, but it seems that her granddaughter doesn’t trigger the same strange fury that her daughter did. She makes her pretty outfits and toy animals with endearing faces (the furry dolphin is a special favourite); she makes her a cot out of pinewood, and builds her a doll’s house with roses stencilled around the door; she loves to brush her hair, and as soon as she can stand on a chair, she has Katie’s hands in a bowl of flour and butter, ‘helping’ her to make cakes. Dad is the one who reads to her and tells her stories. But he never mentions Jesus or God or David or Goliath. He is content to read from the picture books we have, and to make appropriate animal noises, which makes her squeal with joy. He will bounce her on his knees and throw her down between them until she’s hot with laughter, her fat peal of giggles ringing out through every room in the house. On these occasions, Mum will laugh too. There isn’t a trace of a sneer, no thought of winding round little fingers.
They come to visit one weekend in June, and I pick them up from Abergavenny station. We all go on a picnic, squashed into my Mini with Katie in her car seat in the front. (Dad still doesn’t drive, and Mum still does what she’s told, too exhausted to dig up old arguments.) We drive through the luscious country lanes, which are swollen with leafy trees and wild flowers. We pull up on a grassy patch of land across a cattle grid onto an open common, where sheep and wild horses are grazing. I say ‘wild’, but they’re probably simply roaming free, like the sheep.
We lay out our rug and all the picnic things. The hedgerows are a frenzy of birdsong. Katie, at nineteen months old, toddles around the picnic rug, stopping to listen to the magical sounds, then starting up again, trying to locate them, a look of wonder on her sweet face. I feel so relaxed. I know Mum will be watching out for the children, and it gives me a rare moment of total peace. I lie back in the grass and savour it. There are no cars on the quiet country road. There is a stream nearby, and the sound of it is like the Dingle, burbling happily under the mating dragonflies.
When we’ve finished our food, we wander over to see the animals. The sheep are indifferent, nibbling away earnestly, and only bolting off if we come too close. The horses are more interested, especially as Mum has brought the remains of a loaf of bread to feed them. There are two foals, and about three or four horses. Katie is overwhelmed by the foals. ‘Baby horsey!’ she says, pointing her small, soft finger. ‘Baby!’
Mum explains that we have to be careful, because mummy horses don’t want anyone touching their babies. We can feed the mummies, but not the babies. ‘Like this.’ She holds out her hand flat for the horse to eat from. Katie is delighted when it peels back its hairy lip and snaffles up the bread. She reaches out her hand and Mum shows her how to softly stroke the side of its face. Katie offers her hand with bread on it, nervously pulling away when the horse breathes its hot breath on her palm. She tries again, and looks about at us all with a big grin when she’s successful. ‘I feeded horsey! I feeded it!’
She had started speaking at thirteen months. Not counting ‘Mama’, her first words were ‘Matt’ and ‘cat’, both applied to the correct individuals. By fifteen months, she could knock out a few expressions, like ‘Oh, God!’ and ‘Shit!’, for which I must take full responsibility. ‘I feeded horsey’ is a wonder. A proper sentence. Use of a past tense. What stories she will tell and write one day. We are all enthralled.
And I am happy. I am happy they love her so utterly, and happy they come to visit often. Mum will always bring a pointed gift for me, like a bottle of bleach or antibacterial spray. At this stage, my house is still clean and tidy, by anyone else’s standards, but she’ll tell me I need to clean my telephone or my photograph frames, and the next time she comes she’ll make a show of doing it for me. My housekeeping skills may have been hammered, but my sluttishness is never mentioned. Nor do they ever say they are proud of me. But I know they’re pleased with the grandchildren I have provided, despite the disgusting life of sin that has engendered them. I feel this is now considered to be merely the error of my ways, which no doubt God will forgive, if I ever find it in myself to repent. I never do find that need, despite what happens next.
We return to that picnic spot each summer, when the weather is fine enough. More often than not, the horses aren’t there. They seem to appear about the same time every year, in June, for a few weeks, which makes Mum suggest they probably belong to travellers. And it’s in June, when Katie is four and Matt ten, that we see them again for the last time.
Once more, Mum takes Katie’s hand and walks her over to them with Matt. She gives the children half an apple each to feed to them, which they hold out in the flat palms of their hands.
‘It tickles,’ says Katie, delighted as ever, and then makes up a story about the horses, which she tells us throughout the picnic. They have names like Mrs Conker, David Longjohn and Richard Chomper, and they gallop throughout the country, putting things right, rescuing people and having adventures. There are all sorts of romances, births and marriages – in that order, although Mum doesn’t flinch – and the odd death, from which the horse in question is revived and lives to have another escapade. Plot twists abound, endings never come. She chunters away with her mouth half-full as we munch on our sandwiches. Mum doesn’t tell her not to talk with her mouth full. The sun is hot, but quite a strong wind blows up and we start to put things away.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Dad asks Matt.
