Something I'm Not (13 page)

Dylan turns round, suspending the bridge of ‘What Would We Do Without You?' His hands linger on the keyboard. He sees my eyes glistening with tears, and gives a small nod. Then he turns back and continues playing. Clearly he thinks I'm engaged with the music.

Instead, I'm staring at the photos propped up on the piano: our wedding, Eloise at the twins' christening, Dylan's ordination. Matt waterskiing, our honeymoon on safari, eating noodles in Cambodia. Serena with one-hour-old twins, Jenny in a large hat, me in a veil, me and Dylan in mortar boards. Me smiling.

By nightfall, everyone is upstairs, singing round the piano – even Matt, despite the fact that he hasn't performed publicly since
HMS Pinafore
at prep school; in a dress. Eleanor turns the pages, while her sisters whirl to the music, pretending to be sycamore keys in the wind, their pale hair floating behind them, before falling asleep on the sofa.

‘Auditions are on Tuesday,' Dylan reminds us all, to a chorus of groans. I retreat downstairs to put together a tray of cheese and biscuits. Harry is teasing Dylan that he's snaffled the lead part for himself.

‘I need to talk to you, yaar.' Nicole has followed me down, in pedicured barefoot silence.

‘So you
are
dumping Dominic.'

‘Nooo,' says Nicole slowly. ‘At least, I haven't thought everything through yet.'

‘What “everything”?' I say, tapping a digestive as I pick it up, to shed loose crumbs.

Nicole finds my wrist and grips it. ‘I'm pregnant.'

Chapter Eighteen

I
SPEED UP
on the road south out of London; the car might as well be fuelled with delirium. I check my rear-view mirror constantly.

Every so often, I realise that I'm holding my breath. My mind flounders in its own birthing pool, bobbing in the water to avoid the word – my greatest fear. A word with angry blue veins across its taut, hard belly. Pregnant. So Nicole is pregnant. The expensive toy whose body now contains Fabergé fertilised eggs. First two cells, then four, then however many. Billions of cells, endlessly, endlessly multiplying. Unless. Unless?

Last night, that other word got stuck in my throat. But apparently there is to be no disposal, no end to this chain of reproduction. Indeed the opposite would appear to hold sway, since Nicole now speaks as though her world has turned pink and glittery overnight. This was my cue to enthuse, to congratulate.
But I'm sorry
, Nicole kept saying. She assumed I disapproved. And it's true: I've turned into my mother. I've inherited her disapproval, like haemophilia.

I press my foot down further on the accelerator.

As distances to Mother's village begin appearing on road signs, I know I've made a dreadful mistake. It's not in my nature to be reckless, and rushing after a sleepless night to face her without proper planning is as reckless an act as I can envisage. As reckless as coming off the pill. I spot signs for Midhurst, and swerve across three lanes.

Midhurst is one large teashop. I enter one, with its smell of mothballs. Little nonagenarians, shrunken with osteoporosis and wearing their hats indoors, stare at me as I sit down. My tea comes quickly; the toasted teacakes glisten with forbidden butter. Maybe my anxiety has been triggered by nothing more pathological than an empty stomach.

Soon, the tearoom is packed with mothers piloting pushchairs. A beautiful redhead asks to borrow a chair from my table. Her breasts are enormous, their skin creamy yet freckled, squeezed into a little green top whose scoop-neck trumpets rather than hides their ripeness. I am ensnared by the banter of these women, their confidence, their sensuality, even though they all have their backs to me. Lucky Nicole. I am the child skipping on her own in the playground, while all the others play ‘All In Together Girls'.

And I try to imagine what it might be like to find out that one is already three months pregnant. To have the decision largely taken out of one's hands. As if that could ever happen! And yet this Masonic Lodge of the Tearoom is fiercely debating that very thing; a local teenager who gave birth in the school toilets, apparently unaware she was pregnant.

Nicole, it seems, has always known. In the beginning, she tried to deny what, with her sudden cravings for my muffins and attacks of giddiness in the London Eye, she'd suspected all along. But it was only at the twins' birthday party, when just the smell of wine had made her want to retch, that she decided to pay attention. And even then it had taken her a couple of weeks to pluck up the courage to go to Boots and buy the testing kit.

As I pull the door to the teashop behind me, my face feels slapped by the brisk autumn wind in the high street. Slowly I walk to my car. Matt will be on the golf course by now, his mobile switched off. I hoped this morning that he'd cancel his game, to be by my side, but he didn't. We had a row, or rather I chucked a few toys out of my pram while Matt checked the contents of his golf bag. I've been married to a psych for long enough to know that boundaries are not made to be broken, especially sporting ones. I hate the way he does what he does for a living and yet can't magic my heartache away.

*

A sea breeze tacks across the salt marshes and stings my cheeks. I squeeze my hands into the pockets of my jeans, and wish I'd brought a jumper. I'd forgotten how much the temperature drops away from London. Looking up, I catch sight in the distance of Mother's maroon bungalow, a converted Victorian railway carriage. I stumble on some loose earth on the footpath.

I reach the place where the path forks. It peels away to the left towards the mudflats and shingle beds of the southern spit; the start of the internationally famous, protected-status ornithological trail. I hesitate. Is something moving over by the carriage? Someone stepping outside to empty tea leaves? Someone hurrying back inside? But with the grass swaying in the breeze, the glare of the sun on the wetlands (the tide is coming in) and the cries of birds, I can't be sure. Ignoring the weather-worn sign forbidding entry which Mother fought lengthy battles with the council to erect (
for my privacy) (So don't live alongside a tourist attraction, Mother
), I walk towards the carriage. My heart is knocking against my ribcage.

The bungalow appears to be empty. Its windows are closed. Dead plants in a window box stutter in the wind. Weeds surround the brackets that secure the carriage to its foundations. The carriages were brought to the village after the First World War to combat a housing shortage, positioned in the woodlands just beyond the reserve boundary. In May 1944, fifty 6,000-ton sections of the Mulberry Harbour to be used in Operation Overlord were secretly stored here prior to the invasion. The carriage Mother now owns was moved closer to the lagoon mouth to house the small unit of soldiers guarding these temporary naval migrants. Which is also why its nearest neighbour stands such a distance away in the copse.

When others of her generation are moving closer to grandchildren, or contemplating sheltered accommodation, my mother selects somewhere remote. She has a history of anaemia. Sickle cell traits have been mooted. I've lost track of the number of times childhood treats, trips to the zoo or the cinema, were held hostage to Mother's attacks of palpitations. And it's my fear that one night I'll receive a call from the police who, having been alerted by twitchers, have broken down the carriage door to discover a decomposing body – mother's final triumph, an everlasting accusation of neglect from someone who keeps the world at bay.

As I approach the carriage from the path, gulls screech their siren warnings. I knock and wait for the door to be opened. White clouds scud in front of the sun, and I shiver. Do I want my mother to be home, or not? It occurs to me that she might be on holiday, although holidays are for people with an appetite for pleasure. Perhaps she's out enjoying the hospitality of the many friends whose arrival so often coincides with my phone calls. I knock again, and cup my hands around my ears to blot out the sound of the wind and the birds.

After a few minutes, I circle the carriage, placing each footstep on the shingle so as to make as little noise as possible. I'm hoping to catch my mother out, to glimpse her through a window, hiding in some fashion, and to expose her in some way. But I see nothing meriting reproach, and as the wind tosses my hair across my face, I feel foolish and dishevelled.

I walk back to the fork and, on a whim, take the path towards the visitors' centre. From here, I slide gingerly down the grass bank to the hide from where years ago my school class would watch birds feeding on the mudflats.

Inside, I find a family of twitchers dressed in blue cagoules. They are watching, they whisper, three rare curlew sandpipers. The son, who looks to be about ten or eleven, is making careful notes in a pocketbook. Father is in charge of the binoculars. He passes them to me, and shows me where to look. I see them immediately, the russet flush on their bellies, their eyes rimmed with white. Along the flood embankment I can make out the old school building, now derelict. The mother passes me some black coffee. We all sit, our silence punctuated by the distant cries of birds. My ears still burn from the cold, and my nose runs from the coffee steam, but it's good to be out of the wind. When I've finished, I hand back the cup before creeping out of the hide, my final smile thanking them for their easy company.

As I approach the car, I see the parking ticket tucked under the wiper. I scan the hedgerows for a notice. So, provincial wardens are as officious as their urban cousins. Matt will certainly see the funny side. But as I reach out for the ticket I recognise mother's tiny handwriting. My heart thumping, I read the message, its edges frayed where Mother (an evacuee, hard-wired to economise) has folded and torn some random mailshot into four, to use as scrap.

I bang on the carriage door repeatedly. ‘I know you're in there'. The wind snatches my words away. It occurs to me that Mother is not in the carriage at all, but is watching from the copse behind. I turn, fully expecting to see her sitting on a fence, gloating. But all I see is a vast expanse of windswept wasteland leading to a Brothers Grimm woodland. I shout through the letterbox. The pull-down window of the carriage door was replaced with a wooden panel for security reasons when the carriages were first erected. In despair, and in some sense still convinced that Mother is not at home, I start swearing.

‘I should make you come inside and wash your mouth out with soap.'

My spine locks. The voice seems to belong to the wind. And yet it's unmistakably Mother's timbre, uttering chillingly familiar sentiments. I push open the letterbox.

‘Mother?' I pause, straining to hear sounds inside. ‘Where are you?'

‘That sounds more civilised.' The voice comes from just beyond the door – in the shadows.

‘Why won't you open the door?'

‘And have to listen to you screaming at me in my small home?'

‘But I'm only screaming out here because – oh, for goodness sake.' I sink my chin towards my chest and try to calm down, to not rise to the bait. I must not ask again to be let in. It would hand Mother an easy victory.

‘This note you left on my car. What does it mean?'

‘It means what it says. What was it you studied at university? English? Dear me, does Matt do all your reading for you now, as well? And I did try
so
hard to make it simple.'

How quickly it always comes to this
, I think.
This bitterness, from a woman who never finished school
.

‘It's certainly very concise.'

‘Well, there's no point in wasting good ink.'

The cloud cover thickens and steals away the sun.

‘Anyway, thank you for coming,' I hear her say, as if to trade.

‘Aren't you even interested in finding out why I'm here?'

‘I told you in my note. I got your postcard. Now, I have a very busy afternoon—'

‘Do you really think I'd drive all this way just to find out whether you got it?'

‘Why else would you be here? It couldn't possibly be to spend time with your poor old Mum. You never were a daughter who visits, or brought friends to eat round my table.'

‘You never cook!'

‘I gave up when you refused my cheese tart.'

‘I can't eat dairy. You know that.'

‘What kind of child refuses milk?'

I shut my eyes at the familiarity, the futility, of this particular dispute. A crow hops on the pebbles around me, emitting its Dalek war cry.

‘My card told you we needed to talk. I'm here to talk to you.'

‘And we have spoken. Now, I need to get on.'

I shiver on the shingle. It's as though Mother has stolen all the warmth in the world; not because she wants it particularly, but to prevent others from having the pleasure.

I'm about to go, when for no reason at all I recall Serena telling me at Tim's funeral that Esme has become stroppy at mealtimes, hurling her bowl on the floor and refusing to eat. Serena feigns disinterest, but she's concerned and annoyed. She reasons that she doesn't have time to indulge the child. Esme will eat what everyone else eats, and what doesn't get eaten will be left in the bowl until it is.

And so I shout, without pausing for breath, that Dad is dead; that there was a funeral and that Mother was banned. And then I sprint back to the fork in the path before she has a chance to hurl this information back in my face.

From the fork I run to the car without looking back, get inside and drive away. My legs are shaking so much it is impossible to use the clutch, and so I drive for several miles in first gear, the engine roaring with the effort. I feel, not that I am lost, but that I am numb, my emotions swallowed by the orange orb of the sun I see in my rear-view mirror, as it slinks behind the glorious swell of the Downs. Only once I cross the county border some thirty miles away do I pull over and weep hot tears.