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  Mothertime

  A Novel

  Gillian White

  For Yvette. For everything.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  One

  THEY TOOK MOTHER PRISONER at half past two on Christmas Day morning.

  By then they had no option. It was an act of kindness—or defence, at any rate. It was a sad and wisely made decision, the sort most normally taken by civil servants in the way that they have, safe behind reinforced glass.

  Midwinter.

  Midnight.

  Bleak and frosty but with no wind moaning.

  ‘And another thing, Heavenly Father, sometimes I wake up so frightened about what’s going to happen to me in the day. Why did You make us the only species able to understand about torture…’

  Through the comfortable square of curtain, through the draped security of strangers we can see Vanessa Townsend finishing her conversation with God. She has just put down The Silence of the Lambs. A winter mist hangs round the old-fashioned street light outside her window, held in silence by the stillness of night. The wide-awake girl has the cloudy smell of Johnson’s Powder, she is blameless in white, waiting for Mother to come home, forcing herself to stay alert so that as soon as the house goes finally quiet and Mother drags herself upstairs to bed, she can creep around with the pillowcases she keeps hidden in the back of her wardrobe and then she can turn off her light. And her head. Her dressing gown is laid out on the edge of her bed, ready. Within the walls of the house nothing seems about to happen, the silence is complete.

  They hadn’t had any sort of Christmas last year and she cannot, will not, she has sworn on her Holy Bible that she will never allow that to happen again. Vanessa is responsible and there is nobody else. It is all up to her and she is sure she’s remembered everything… exactly how it used to be. The freezer is full and there is a Marks & Spencer Christmas cake in the pantry. She’s remembered the crackers, even a packet of indoor fireworks.

  Dominic—‘the man of the house’ Camilla and the twins, Sacha and Amber—well, they’re asleep, put to bed with strict instructions not to dare to wake up until seven o’clock at the earliest. That’s not surprising. They are all worn out. They lugged the decoration trunk down from the attic and spent the evening decorating the hall, the drawing room, and the sweet-smelling tree that they’d all gone to fetch from Mr Gribble’s after tea. It took ages to finish the job properly because the house is a tall one, Georgian and elegant, with high-ceilinged rooms and three flights of stairs. The two illuminated Tiffany pineapples which stand sentinel on their wrought-iron stalks beside the grandish, navy front door are part of Mother’s protest against what she calls ‘the mediocrity of this blighted world of Boots, Barratts and the Bradford & Bingley’ So the house is entirely decorated to Mother’s taste now—candy-striped like a chocolate box, lined with padded curtains and bows, jade vases of jelly-bean green are spotlighted in the alcoves and the carpets are so thick you can move unnoticed anywhere.

  They have laid Mother’s presents under the tree… there is one with a ribbon, it looks expensive, it must be from Daddy. They have opened the pile of Christmas cards which Mother ignored, or tore from their envelopes with careless indifference, and they have covered the mantelpiece, the bookshelves, and fixed lengths of cotton along the wall to take them all, to display them properly.

  There are a hundred and forty-seven cards. So someone, somewhere must have liked Mother once. She always says she is popular.

  Once, during the evening, while Dominic was balanced on the stepladder leaning over the tree with the fairy, they were interrupted by Ilse’s return.

  ‘My, my!’ Her blue eyes bulged. In her gold leggings and padded, silky blue anorak, she looked like a Christmas-card person… one that would come from a Woolies’ mixed pack with a robin on one shoulder. She lifted two dainty gloved hands as though she might start to tap-dance. ‘Vat vill Mrs Townsend say ven she zees?’

  The children froze and stared. The twins’ round spectacles glinted, stonier than the hardest of eyes. Huge tartan bows clutched at the sides of their small heads, shooting out hanks of hair stiff as horns. Their lips moved back, false smiles revealed gappy front teeth. They can afford to ignore Ilse: they know they can get her the sack tomorrow if they feel that way inclined, and Ilse knows it, too. Mother would be shocked if she realised how often Ilse went out—she should have been babysitting tonight—or about the times she brings men back to her bedroom high up in the gingerbread eaves of the house. Ilse has her own tiny balcony but she need not be coy on it like Juliet, she has her own back staircase, too.

  ‘They forecast that it might snow tomorrow.’ Ilse inspected the tree. There was one present on the floor for her. Vanessa had signed the label from all of them, Mother included, but Ilse showed not the slightest interest.

  ‘It never snows here, not at Christmas.’ Camilla put the Swedish girl straight.

  ‘You know you should be in bed by now. Especially ze leetle ones.’ Her lips were swollen, chapped-looking; her collar up to hide what Dominic calls her vampire bites. But she didn’t bother to say any more. Sighing prettily she turned and left, and they heard her in the kitchen liquidising some ice for her drink before she took it upstairs. She’d be washing her hair, getting her clothes ready for tomorrow. She’ll be off Christmas Day and Boxing Day, too, staying with her new friends in Wimbledon.

  Anyway, time has moved on—it’s midnight, then one, one-thirty—and now Vanessa is neatly arranged in her place in her bed, settled there, flounced in white like a porcelain child and her legs are straight under the covers with a bump as neat as a sleeping policeman. Oh yes, all the pillowcase presents are wrapped and labelled, chosen with love over the last few months with money Vanessa scrounged under false pretences from Mother, money kept back from outings and school trips, money she’d saved from shopping errands, change she’d hung on to. It was surprising how much cash she had collected; she added it to the large amounts Daddy gave her. It is also surprising how easy life has become since Mother has fallen in love with Bart, a relationship which has lasted much longer than any other her eldest daughter can remember, since Daddy left.

  Camilla, aged ten, says that Bart is a man of little substance.

  Mother is coming. Vanessa’s eyes darken. It feels as if she has been waiting for Mother for years.

  From her first-floor bedroom in the mellow house, dimly lit by the bedside light and overlooking the front porch on to Camberley Road, Vanessa hears the whispering engine of Bart’s new BMW as it pulls to a halt with opulent lethargy, its fat tyres sucking the gutters; she watches the headlights dip and fade like a reveller’s eyes drunk
enly drooping. The street is lined with parked cars, neat humps of blackness all the way down, because most people round here stay at home on this special night. Most people want to be near their children. Everywhere else is just as it should be, Christmas-Eve-silent, in that hushed, firelit, waiting mood of the night before Christmas. Not even the trees in the park across the road are sighing tonight and the mist round the lamppost is fixed like a wreath. When she was little she’d thought there were wolves in the park. They lurk on the pathways between the bracken and thorn, they slink in the woodlands of oaks and birches, they howl in the faraway pine trees that stand so lonely against the sky.

  Mother is coming.

  Vanessa tenses; her wide brow furrows as she waits to discover if Bart is going to come in, or if he’ll drive off as he sometimes does, back to his wife in Potters Bar who doesn’t know he is going out with Mother but thinks he is with friends at his health club in the City. Please come in, Bart, please come in! Vanessa knows that because of the wife, Mother will be alone all Christmas Day. ‘Nobody wants me,’ she’ll sob over the loud and constant TV—Mother loves game shows—with her long red nails bending back on her glass, with her whole self wrapped around her glass and mascara blotching her tear-bruised face. ‘Even you kids, you’re only here ’cos your father won’t have you… him and his snotty bitch wife.’

  The health club will be closed. Everywhere is going to be closed, even Ali’s store on the corner, but with a bit of luck Bart will find a phone and call Mother who will talk to him curled tensely over the bedroom extension, the terrible mess of untended clothes littered like overblown petals on the carpet around her. If he fails to do that then Christmas Day will be spoilt, far worse than usual. The best they can hope for is that Mother will sleep until the phone call comes… that might make her brighter… that might get her out of her drab dressing-gown.

  As time goes by Mother will mutter, ‘Ring, damn you,’ into the bulging silence that stretches behind the wild television screams.

  The nuns at school smile softly and say that Christmas is a time of innocence. Vanessa goes to the Convent of the Sacred Heart because Daddy is a Catholic and pays the fees. Camilla will follow her there next year if she passes the difficult entrance exam. Vanessa played Mary in the nativity although she was one of the youngest, ‘because there’s a purity about your face that is rare… a certain sweet serenity, dear, especially when you look up like that,’ Sister Agnes told her, lifting her chin with a freezing cold finger as she inspected her profile.

  Vanessa treasures Sister Agnes’ words. She has written them in the front of her diary.

  Mother moans that Vanessa is a plain child who might, with luck, blossom one day, but she doubts it. ‘You, most of all, take after your father and there’s only so much anyone can do.’ Vanessa cannot see what Mother means. She looks nothing like Daddy, she wishes that she did. They say that Mother is beautiful but her children know that underneath the crust of cream there is no beauty there at all. Not even her hair is real; beneath that selection of wigs that sit on the wigstands in her stuffy, scented room, hot like a jungle, what grows naturally on Mother’s head is mousey and spikey, cut short and rarely exposed. Mother goes round the house in a scarf like a wartime woman, leaving behind her own, special devastation, the crammed ashtrays and half-empty glasses. Any colour in Mother’s face is labelled Clinique, put there with brushes made out of sable and badger hair. Mother might once have appeared on the front of all those old magazines she sighs over, those she keeps in her walnut cabinet, but Mother is no longer glossy or beautiful. Mother is angry and ugly with little red veins behind her knees. This is because she’s had so many children… and that is because Daddy is a Catholic.

  They will have to be careful not to disturb her tomorrow.

  Mother was on an old advert they put on TV for a laugh last week, pushing a vacuum cleaner in a tight skirt and fishnet stockings. Vanessa smiles between two hooked thumbs as she remembers. Caroline Heaten, as Mother was then, stared at them out of the telly—a stranger with spidery eyelashes and hair stiffly high on her head like an upturned china potty. Bouffant. ‘Hush! Shush… everyone look!’ Excited, Mother leaned forward and her face went so thin, her chin went so pointed she looked like a witch. Luckily Bart had not arrived, she was spared the humiliation of that, because they were taking the piss out of the advert; it was so old-fashioned, filmed so long ago that the audience hooted with laughter and when Mother realised what they were doing, lying there on the sofa stroking her arm, she went white and her mouth clamped round her cigarette, wrinkling up like a string purse. Vanessa had felt a sharp stab of sadness then. For a moment she felt sorry for Mother, more sorry than she had ever been; she thought the glitter in her eyes might be tears, but when Camilla failed to stifle a giggle Mother uncoiled, she shot forward and slapped her hard across the face. The ten-year-old gasped. Mother wore no expression at all.

  Mother whines about once being famous. Daddy still is.

  Mother turns the TV off whenever she sees that Daddy is on it, but Dominic takes the video up to his room and meticulously records every Update, even the repeats. The children sit round and watch with a vengeance when Mother goes out, even though they don’t understand much of that dry political stuff.

  But this is not how it ought to be for the birth of the baby Jesus.

  The only thing you can do is to try to make it right.

  Mother is coming.

  Vanessa hopes fervently that Bart will come in so that Mother’s reactions to the Christmas preparations will be eased by his company. She makes an effort to be calmer when Bart is about; she distributes the cold, fluttering kisses she keeps on the ends of her fingers and sometimes pats the odd passing head. But Vanessa hears the curse and the harsh burst of laughter before the car door clicks, before the tap of the high-heel boots as they round the long silver bonnet and approach the pavement. A hollower sound, now, as the boots trip towards the house, towards the cold white pimpled pineapples—Mother always takes those long strides, like a model or a cat—and the window whirrs down, she hears a muffled remark from Bart and then, slurred, from her mother, ‘You’ve said it all, Bart. There’s really no need to make it worse. That’s it, you arsehole, I know where I stand now and that’s just fine so fuck off you jerk.’ Her vicious voice pierces like the end of a needle; the sound of her splits the soft silent fabric of night. ‘Just bloody well fuck off.’

  Shut up shut up shut up! Vanessa’s frantic whispers bubble out of her mouth so fast they take all the moisture with them. She licks her lips with just the very tip of her tongue.

  In a minute the house will tremble a little as Mother slams the door.

  The listening child lifts her head slightly, the expression on her small, drawn face turning solemn and nervous. The bedside clock, with the slither of tinsel she’s not been able to resist, says a quarter to two. She slips across the room and fetches the comb from a dressing table which is altar-like, draped in white muslin and decorated with a single, slender, unlit candle. A fleeting glance at the mirror shows unblinking eyes wide and black, there is hurt in them, too, like she’s seen in Daddy’s, a touch of violet. She makes herself comfortable in bed once more, pushes back the sleeves of her white nightgown—there’d been all sorts of colours to choose from in the shop but she’d chosen white for purity—and starts to comb her straight brown hair, a slow, calming rhythm, obsessive in its intensity. By now the car has driven away and, after a long pause, she hears the fumble of the key in the lock below her; the key drops on to the porch steps with a stony ping and Mother stumbles—and over all that comes an odd, gurgling sound from Mother’s throat.

  Nothing happy ever happens when Mother is home.

  Oh God help me. Oh God show me what to do. The Christmas she has planned with such care will be turned into a sickly fraud by the riot and disorder of Mother abandoned again.

  The twelve-year-old child grips her hands tightly together, she gazes thoughtfully down to her lap as the fluoresc
ent, pink comb is bent almost back on itself before it snaps in half as if she’s been playing too hard with hope, overloving it, fondling it so furiously that it died like that newt she’d once found which was cold-blooded and did not need her love. Did she do that?

  It is much better to love than be loved, Mother says, less responsibility.

  Silent night, Holy night. Vanessa knows she is crying because she can taste the salt. She doesn’t want to cry, to smudge, to be formless and undefended.

  Two

  THE CRASH ON THE stairs brings Camilla rushing to Vanessa’s room. Barefooted, her ringlets springing about her face, she looks astonished all over, like Goldilocks disturbed by the bears.

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘Mother’s back.’

  ‘I know. I heard the door bang. She’s trying to get upstairs. She’ll see what we’ve done in a minute.’

  ‘Has Bart come with her?’ The hope comes shrill with the question. It whistles with the question.

  ‘No. I think she’s fallen out with Bart.’

  Camilla nods, understanding at once. Her pointed face falls, the slant eyes open wide as they ever do, stretched with worry and difficult questions. If Camilla poses, and puts on her special pouting face, she looks exactly like Mother, dressed to kill in the old magazines, and the colour of her hair is the nearest to gold you can ever get.

  ‘What will she do?’

  ‘I dunno. Depends on how bad she is.’

  ‘What will happen to the tree if we’re not there to defend it? Will she spoil it?’

  Sick with dread, Vanessa cannot answer that. She knows what she has to say, she might as well say it. ‘We’d better go down. Perhaps if we let her open her presents…’

  ‘It would be better if we were all there. Especially Dominic.’ Mother likes Dominic.

  ‘But we don’t want the twins to be frightened.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Vanessa. Sacha and Amber don’t get frightened, not any more. Not like you.’