I didn’t remember that, none of it. Not chocolate, not sticky hands, not those stairs, nor that time being carried, waving my arms.
“She was smug at the top of those stairs. The hem of her dress had a brown stain, and her slip had gone askew and was showing out the bottom. You put your hands into her hair and ran the fingers through. I looked away. It was…” Her breath shuddered. This was Gloria. This was where Gloria came from.
“I told her to take you back to the hotel and change. She left with you, but I saw her later. She looked the same. She hadn’t changed. She hadn’t even put you down. She was still carrying you, and you had ice cream, and it was falling onto the front of her dress. A white linen dress embroidered with pink and yellow flowers. The ice cream was vanilla, but its white was thick and yellowish and showed on the fabric. It showed as much as if it had been blood. She bore it like stigmata, the sacrifice of motherhood. She even tickled you to make you shake. Drops of melted ice cream festooned her frizzy hair like dew on a spider’s web.
“She was claiming you, as if she’d swollen up around you and squeezed you out. I don’t know why she didn’t have a child if that’s what she wanted so badly. It’s not difficult to get a child. I know that. Anyone can have a child. Even my mother had children, and she despised my father. She fought him off. But there we were, Gin and I.”
I never saw her, the nanny, touch a man. Not my whole life. She never left me with a babysitter for a weekend away, or had a man over for dinner. She worked as a secretary at my school during the day. “What was her name?” I asked suddenly. It had only just occurred to me that I didn’t know.
“What do you mean?”
“She called herself Linda Paul. She pretended to be you. You let her be you. What was her real name?”
“I don’t know,” she said. That answer just popped out of her: no caginess, no shame, no reaching deep into the bag to see if it might be in one of the corners. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
“She said my father…” I’d never said that phrase before: my father. Compared to my mother, it hadn’t seemed important. “… was her-your-accountant. She had a picture of him, in white tie. At a party.”
“He certainly was not.” She snorted. “Our family accountant was a pig-bellied dirty old man.”
“Who was he, then?” I asked.
“A man in white tie at a party? Any one of thousands, I would imagine. It doesn’t matter, you know. They don’t matter.”
“I just want to know,” I explained carefully, wary of using up her willingness to speak, “in case it turns out to matter.”
She told me. There were two men, both married academics, and she’d had affairs with both of them around that time. I asked their specialities, and was unsurprised that one was an expert in literature. The other was a botanist. Of course the kind of genetic assumption I so quickly leapt to is faulty; the botanist would be the first to chide me that humans are not so predictably determined by their parents as are plants.
“I’m a member of the English Faculty at Cambridge. Magdalene.” I remembered handing my mother picked violets once. But I couldn’t remember which mother it had been.
“You don’t take after me, then,” she said. She snorted. I think she was laughing at me. Had she been bad at school? Had she disliked teachers?
“You must know her name,” I pressed.
“She wanted to be Linda Paul. She wanted it, so I let her have it. Fine with me.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would anyone want to be you?”
She laughed and laughed. “Thank God. I was getting sick of you. That pleading face. So avid.”
“Why was she so eager to replace her name?” I persisted.
“Why not? So was I. Being a child is such a horrible thing: powerless, stifled. She admired what I’d been able to do with money. Travel and such. She hadn’t, she wanted to. You can’t tell someone that what they want isn’t what they think it must be. You can’t tell them; you can only let them go ahead with it. They’ll find out soon enough. She wanted the name and the baby and the money. I let her have them all. We each thought we got the better deal.”
“What did she give you?”
A satisfied sigh. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Her book Half Moon contained a scene in which that word was repeated, just that way: an exultation. It was the comfort of the nothing that comes after something too loud, too close, too much. A good nothing, without a needy daughter and the uncomfortable role of socialite shaping her from the outside. She was water spilled at last out of an uncomfortable jar; that was in her book Noisy Birds. Water can’t resist its container’s shape; it’s free only if it leaves the jar entirely. She got out by inviting infill from… the nanny. “You must know her name,” I begged. “To give her the money… there must have been papers…”
“The money was in your name.” Of course it was. It was a trust. It had always been mine. “The trustee was Linda Paul. I gave her my National Insurance number. I didn’t want it. The books… I’d written them. I was done with them. I was sick of them.”
“But you became Susan-”
“We fled together, Susan Maud and I. Having the whole world to choose from, I named myself the character I’d created. I became my own, from start to finish. My own mother. My own child. I was completely my own at last.”
Is that what she’d wanted? Had that been her “pear”? Something worth sacrificing everything else for…
“You sent the photos to our house in Brighton. I have them.” She’d reused a box of her own. Someone had mailed something to her, here on Cantelupe Road, and she’d put a sticker over that address to mail the photos to me.
“That was years ago.”
She could have thrown them away. “Thank you for doing that.”
I hadn’t thought I’d thank her. I thought I’d bellow at her. I thought I’d push and cry and never forgive. But I hadn’t the energy. I was old. My mother wasn’t a girl, and neither was I. We were old and tired.
Her telephone had an old-fashioned bell, a jarring one. It shrieked four times. Then a click, a whir. “Leave a message.” Succinct.
“Hi, Susan, it’s me, Melisma. I’m… having a rather bad day, actually. A shitty day. Roger and I are done. Really done this time-he’s such a prick. I hate him. I’m sorry to be springing this on you, but, really, I need to get out of here. I’m taking all my stuff so he won’t have any reason to come by bringing me this or that, ‘Oh, Mel, you forgot your soap,’ or whatever stupid excuse he’d make. There are some things I’d like to leave but I won’t because he’ll think I want a reason to come back, which I don’t. I’ll just take everything and chuck what’s useless. Fucking men. I need to pack everything up here and then I’ll bring it over. I hope you don’t mind. ’Bye.”
“My stepdaughter,” she said heavily, before the machine had even clicked off. She got up and keys jangled. “You’ll have to leave now.”
Her stepdaughter. Another daughter. She was running to her now, to comfort her, to commiserate about her awful ex-boyfriend, to protect her, perhaps to put ice on bruises if he was a beast, and encouragement on her ego if he was merely horrid. This was a real daughter. Not one from inside her, but one for whom she’d instantly leap to action. She put her coat on. Shoes. Closet door, rustles, heel clicks, the bang of a purse hitting the wall as she bent over to… tie laces? Slip a finger between the back of her foot and tight shoe leather?