Charlie was less content to be carried round the garden on Steph’s hip having the names of colours told him; he wriggled now to be put down on the grass, where he would sit for a moment, pointing, and then lunge forward trying to reach the flowers, desperate to get among them. He could bounce along quite fast, and needed constant watching. Steph fretted pleasurably about his increased independence and mobility. She was worn out, she said. What with Charlie being here all the time, she was being run ragged. And he would put anything in his mouth. One day Jean came out to the garden to find her entire wooden spoon collection in a circle around him on his mat and Charlie sitting with his arms stretched up towards her, two bright red circles on his cheeks. He was teething.
There followed some disturbed nights and days of frantic gnawing, bad temper and a burning temperature. It was Steph and Michael together who saw him through it. They took it in turns to rise as soon as they heard him cry and dose him with Baby Calpol. For four nights in a row they walked the hot little bundle up and down with a cold flannel against his face. Then there were two twin white stumps in the centre of his lower jaw. It seemed to bring Michael round. His smile, which had been tight, filled out again. He laughed. Sally, who rang Steph once a week or so, sounded sorry in a remote kind of way to have missed her baby’s first tooth. Steph promised to take a photograph. In the meantime Simon, Sally said, was no worse, but neither was he much better. She could not come home yet. Steph told her not to worry.
Not only the colours in the garden faded, but the skies changed too, and in the afternoons the light shining on the walls of the house was gold. Inside the house Jean noticed the scent of roses and from the windows, looking up from what she was doing, she liked to watch Michael and Steph in the garden with Charlie, whose good humour was quite restored. Now once again there would be singing, and shrieking and laughing, and Michael and Steph swinging Charlie up high between them, then quiet spells. That was when Jean liked to walk slowly outside to join them. Charlie would be either asleep, or amusing himself on a rug in the shade, Steph would be lying or strolling about nearby. Michael most often would be reading. A pretty picture they made, or perhaps they created something more like a line in a poem than a picture, because the faint reluctance Jean sometimes felt to walk in and become part of it was not a fear of sullying the thing visually. It was an appreciation of the scene’s completeness, and her utter contentment in standing there beholding it, that sometimes made her wonder if adding herself to it would be clumsy. For she was beginning to feel the slight separation that comes with being the first to realise something important, ahead of other people. The date was beginning to weigh on her mind, and, with her face as calm as ever, she now, as she went about her work, would be wondering about it, thinking what to do. She would not discuss it with the others, not yet; she liked to be thinking it over for herself as she watched them out in the garden, oblivious. She did not want to burden them with it yet. Then they would look round and see her, and call out, and she would go towards them, smiling. So they would lie about talking and playing until it was time to go in. They were impossibly happy.
I did say earlier that it is amazing to me the way this house seems to provide what we need. It amazes me further that it provides it just when it is needed. For it is only now, in August, that I have remembered about monkshood although I have been tending the flowers, picking them, learning about them from the gardening books, arranging them, all this time. And I have known for years that monkshood is a poisonous plant, but it was only when Steph was talking about Charlie, who is now crawling and putting all sorts in his mouth, that I wondered how safe he would be in the garden, and then, as if I had only just seen it for the first time, I became aware of the monkshood. Aconitum, to give it its proper name.
And I also see, but only now, that the things I have been remembering and writing down here about Mother- things which I have not thought about for years- are part of all this. Not just rambling digressions on my part, but stopping places on the way to where I am now. All this time I have been becoming the person I am. I have always been heading this way.
This is the point. On the day of that row with Mother, eighteen years ago, with the buddleia swinging in the wind outside, it wasn’t the news about the clock that did it. Mother and I had stopped screaming at each other. The row was over, really, and we had reverted to our usual calm hostility. But in the silence, when I was going about all the things I had to do to her- the washing, the wiping, the hair, the tablets, the breakfast, the cleaning up, the rubbing of her elbows and heels with meths to stop her getting bedsores, tidying the bed- we were both thinking up things to hurt the other with.
Who can say what might have happened if she had not got in first? But worse than the actual information she gave me was the offhand pleasure she took in it.
‘Oh, yes, moan moan. You can moan,’ she said. ‘Go on, I’m used to it. But if you didn’t have me you wouldn’t have anybody, would you? I’m all you’ve got. It’s not as if you’ve got any friends, is it?’
‘May I remind you,’ I said, ‘may I just remind you that in actual fact I do have a mother?’ I was plumping up her pillows, bashing them with my fist. ‘Not you. I don’t mean you. I’m talking about a mother, a real one. I at least have a blood relation.’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking past me, ‘you still think that, do you? Well, allow me to inform you that you are sadly mistaken.’
I was confused to begin with. But hadn’t she said, just after Father died, that my real mother had not died when I was four, she had given me up? Wasn’t that what Mother had said? (Wasn’t that what I had been holding on to, the hope that I would find her some day?) Mother said, still breezy, oh, yes, but she died later. She had not bothered to remember quite when.
I wanted to die myself then, for shame perhaps. For shame that some ordinary day, any dull old day when I got on and off buses, filed carbon copies, ate biscuits, bought stockings, God knows what banal things, was the day on which my real mother died. On that day I had been oblivious. I spoke no word, took no farewell, did not grieve. I did not know the day or even the year she died. Oh, well, Mother said, relishing it, it was maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. Then I thought, she’s lying, the whole thing is a lie. But no, she knew this because my real mother had kept in touch with the adoption bureau, keeping them up to date with her address, in case one day I ever wanted to contact her. Mother had never told me that, either. The bureau had been informed when she died and had passed the news on to Mother but, as she pointed out, what was the use in telling me? It wasn’t as if I knew her.
Until that precise moment I had considered the Mr Hapgood episode as the worst thing that had ever been done to me. In a way it was- as a deed actively done, I mean, or a set of deeds performed but then over and finished with- but now I suddenly saw that Mother’s treatment of me so outclassed Mr Hapgood’s in malice that it amazed me that I had not seen it before. For Mother, without actually doing very much, had been busy. Over the years, forty-one of them by that time, she had been so constantly and perniciously denying me her care and approval that my state of permanent want had become a strand, no, the very substance of my character. I suppose I had grown to think of it as an inability on her part, something she couldn’t help, but suddenly I saw that she had withheld things from me so conscientiously, in so meticulous and thorough a manner, that it must have been deliberate, worked at. It had not occurred to me before then that I had a right to be angry. But now I thought, what sort of person would do that?