CHAPTER 9
The driver offered to walk me to the door of Rose Cottage, but I wanted the transition to myself. I’d brought my cane. Its tip swished through the longish grass until it scraped on hard path for me to follow. I rapped on the front door.
I tried to age the young woman that I carried in my mind: the woman from the Brussels photographs, the woman who wrote about children with fear and disgust. I tried to age her, but I didn’t know what had happened between now and then. So a young woman opened the door to me, wearing the green dress she’d worn to dinner in the Atomium restaurant in Brussels. She spoke with an old voice, but I saw the girl in the green dress. I suddenly remembered her perfume. I don’t know if she still wore it, or if it was another of those sudden memories that had been jumping out in front of me since Nick changed everything.
“What do you want?” said the old-woman voice.
My voice answered, also old. Amazingly old. In my mind I was young too: in my twenties, out of college, not yet married. We looked alike to me. We both looked like the young woman at the Brussels Expo. Then we spoke, and the vision splintered apart. “Why did you have me?” I asked.
This wasn’t the plan. The plan had been to persuade, to defend; to prove who I was and accuse who she was. Then to ask at last: Why did you leave me? But the question asked itself, and it was more important than the one I’d intended.
She didn’t answer, not quickly. She was examining me. Of course she would be; I’d skipped ahead. Then she retreated, leaving the door open. I followed her into a low-ceilinged room; I could feel the pressure of it, and the air smelled like the windows were closed. A fire made scratching noises in the corner. A jungle of furniture grew wild in the dry heat.
Her voice came from near the fire. She was faced away from me, poking it, I think. There were rustling sounds there, like a family of mice had settled into the flames. “Calling you Gretchen wasn’t my idea. A nurse named you. I didn’t have a name ready, so she called you after her dead sister. Her sister had died in a fire.” I’m sure the fire was consuming crumpled newspaper and hunks of wood. I’m sure of it, but I saw mice there. And a little girl. In a purple dress at Christmas.
“I despise waffling,” she said. “I’d come to hate Susan Maud. I hated what in me was like her. Equivocating. I wrote a scene; it was vicious. I had her raped in it. Never mind that there wasn’t even sex in any of the other books. I let it rip in this one. I held her down. I made her grow up. I was sick of her.
“It was unpublishable, of course. Unfinishable too. There wasn’t anything I wanted left to do with her after that.
“When I found out what was inside me,” and here I thought she figuratively meant her viciousness toward Susan Maud, but it became clear that she literally meant me, “I said, all right. I’m not going to pretend. I’m not going to apologise. So I stuck my belly out and everyone knew. I forced myself the way I’d forced Susan Maud: no more chance to go along and get along.”
I rocked.
“You can sit down,” she said abruptly. She waited, then spat: “It’s right behind you.” I stepped back gingerly, until my leg bumped the seat. I sat. She still stood. Her talking came from over me, still near the fire. Still far away.
“What did you come here for?” She sounded exasperated. I was suddenly a teenager, railing against a college rejection letter, or appealing punishment for breaking curfew. She was my mother. She was suddenly my mother. I cried.
Clink-clink, metal on brick. The fireplace poker. Impatience. I had to get myself together.
“She’s dead. She died,” I said, almost saying “my mother,” but I’d been training myself out of that. I’d been straining them apart in my mind: one slipping through the sieve holes, the other caught. Two mothers.
“I don’t know what you want me to do about it.” She still stood, cornered. My chair was between her and the door.
“I wanted to meet you,” I said. “I remember you.” I wanted her to remember me. Something precious and wriggly; something that looked like her. “You kept me,” I added. “For three years…” Instead of feeling abandoned, I felt chosen. Three years! Almost a thousand days. She could have given me up from the hospital bed.
“I didn’t write for three years,” she said. “Not anything complete. Pieces. I wrote Gloria, if that means anything to you.” The only mother her books had ever had. The children who were sticky, who terrified the protagonist. I was the sticky one. I climbed. I clawed. I consumed. I was the monster: small, agile, full of tricks.
The fire sighed. Wind in the chimney. My face and hands were hot; the backs of my legs were cold. I looked at the fire, which was a jagged-edged blob to me.
Another memory shot up in me like a rocket. The dog. The one she carried on the island trip. What had happened to the dog?
I must have asked out loud. She said, “It ran away.”
It did. I remembered it now. I was only two, but I remembered. She put it down in the garden and opened the gate. It ran away.
“No one could take away the money,” she said. “It was mine. It bypassed my parents. I threw it at you. I buried you in it. I hired that girl. She carried you around. She carried you. But you just kept reaching. Your arms were… so horribly long.” She shivered. “The girl wanted you. It was easy. Keeping you was hard.”
I shot up out of the chair. “What about boarding school? You didn’t need to… to sever. Why didn’t you just stretch?” Would weekends have been so horrible? Holidays?
“You!” she bellowed, from a deep, echoey space in her chest. “You’ve never had a child, have you.” It was an accusation, not a question. She panted. She snorted.
Men have wanted to put one in me, but I’ve said no. I’ve never wanted one. I didn’t know what she meant. What is there in having a child that makes boarding school not far enough? She must have really loved me, to have required such a vicious severance between us. You wouldn’t use an axe to slice bread.
“Did she steal me away?” This was my last fantasy. That I’d been wanted by both of them, only one had been more clever and more determined.
“I left open the garden gate,” she said, with a high, trickly laugh. That was the dog. Did she think the dog was here?
I shouted back, “I’m not the dog! I’m the baby!”
Suddenly we were old. Brussels was suddenly fifty years ago, Brussels was suddenly another country. I was here, in a cramped, too-warm cottage, in England, sturdy England.
“It was a long time ago.” She exhaled.
“I was born in the summer, wasn’t I?” I said. A Leo.
“It was hot,” she agreed.
“She changed my birthday. December. She celebrated my birthday in December. Was that when she took me?”
I laced my fingers, squeezing rings against knuckles.
“I’ll tell you how it was,” she said at last.
“She was friends with Gin,” she explained. “They double-dated. Gin thought she was all right, a nice girl. Bland, but Gin would like that. She liked being the one to sparkle.
“She was jealous of me. Of both of us, me and Gin, but of me especially, because of the baby.” She meant me. I was the baby. “She fussed over me, and brought me cold drinks that horrible, hot August. She offered to be the nanny. That was fine with me. She liked going fun places; she didn’t have the money herself. She liked being a better mother than I was. She liked that a lot. We were the pretty ones, Gin and I, and I was the brilliant one. And she was the… good one. None of us minded that. We all got to be the best at something.
“There was only one time it got out of hand. In Brussels. She chided me. The stairs multiplied, and you didn’t want to walk. You wanted to be carried. You’d been eating chocolate, and expected to be picked up. I said no. She wanted to lift you, but then what? Go all the way back to the hotel for a change of dress? I said no. She wiped your hands on her slip. She pulled it out from under her skirt and wiped your dirty hands with it, streaking the white linen muddy. It was disgusting. I was embarrassed. I told her I’d said no. She kept going. She even spat on her hand to swab at the most stubborn marks. Then she lifted you and passed in front of me, preceding us up the stairs. You waved your damp palms around as they dried to tackiness.”