Death of a Perfect Mother Read online

  Brian swallowed. ‘Gone for a leak, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, you are common. Why can’t you say “Gone to the toilet”?’ Lill thought for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose it being your birthday doesn’t stop you having to go for a leak. I must be off. Tell him I’m doing hamburgers.’

  ‘Ok, Mum, I’ll tell him.’

  And Lill trolled through the Saloon Bar, gave a goodnight to practically everyone there, and pushed the door out into the street. Someone at the bar looked at his watch and said: ‘Good old Lill. You could set your watch by her.’

  Too right, thought Brian, draining his glass. Good old Lill.

  The Saloon Bar settled down to be what in Lill’s absence it always was: a dull little bar in a dull little town. They’ll miss Lill when she’s gone, thought Brian.

  • • •

  That night after hamburger (under-) and egg (overcooked) Gordon and Brian undressed in their room and conversed in a whisper—unnecessarily, since nothing they said could have been heard over Fred’s snores and Lill’s noisy undressing in the next bedroom.

  ‘I left at nine-twenty-seven,’ hissed Gordon, ‘and I was in position this end of Snoggers Alley at nine-thirty exactly. Actually I nipped into old mother Mitchell’s garden in case she saw me, but in fact I’ll stand under the telegraph post, where the lane widens out. Lill came by at nine-thirty-four, so I could have left a minute or two later, but I don’t want to hurry—people might notice. And the four minutes’ rest means I’ll be in tip-top condition. Two minutes to do it, and I can be back in the Rose and Crown by nine-thirty-nine. Twelve minutes away in all. Plenty of people spend longer than that in the bog.’

  ‘Old Fred in the mornings, for a start,’ said Brian. They both giggled childishly, from nerves.

  ‘Anyway, it won’t matter if I’m a minute or two over time,’ said Gordon. ‘No one will notice I’m gone.’

  Brian’s face fell. ‘Don’t bank on it,’ he said. ‘Lill noticed, for a start.’

  ‘What?’ Gordon’s voice suddenly assumed its normal baritone, and they both jumped nervously. But they needn’t have bothered. Lill was in the bathroom, simultaneously cleaning her teeth and gargling her signature tune, and Fred was snoring away in the sleep of the just and stupid.

  ‘What did she say?’ hissed Gordon.

  ‘She noticed you weren’t there. When she went out. She asked where you were.’

  ‘Oh Christ. Drawing the attention of everyone in the bar to the fact that I wasn’t there.’ Brian nodded. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t say you were up in Snoggers timing an attempt to murder her this time next week . . .’ They both sat on their beds, hunched forward in thought. ‘What could I say? I said you’d gone to the bog.’

  Gordon thought and thought, but came up with no very comforting solution. ‘That’s the trouble with Lill,’ he said. ‘You think she’s absolutely predictable, then she springs a nasty surprise on you. We’re going to have to think about this. If we’re not careful we’re going to be shopped, by Lill herself.’

  CHAPTER 3

  GINGERING THINGS UP

  Sunday was a somnolent day at the Hodsdens’. It always was. Lill didn’t like it, but she recognized there was nothing she could do against the collective lethargies of the other four. Saturday night was always Fred’s big night of the week: darts at the Yachtsman’s took it out of him, and Sundays he crept blearily about the house, all passions spent and considerably in overdraft. Brian and Gordon, as a rule, followed suit, if Gordon had nothing sporting on: they sprawled in armchairs reading the papers, they played cards or they watched television. ‘It’s natural,’ Lill would explain to people, ‘they work and play hard the rest of the week in their different ways—Gordon the physical, Brian more the—’ she shied away from the word mental —‘more the psychological!’ Debbie just took herself off, quite inconspicuously. As usual, thought Lill bitterly, though she would certainly have gone on at her ceaselessly if she for once had been around.

  So Sunday they slept, ate well of Gordon’s birthday dinner of beef, Yorkshire pudding and three veg, followed by tinned peaches, then reread the Sunday Mirror and the Express and watched Bruce Forsyth on the enormous colour television that Lill said (and Fred believed her) she had picked up for practically nothing from a family going to live abroad. The chocolates, which they opened after tea, turned out to be all soft centres, which Gordon did not like. Still, Lill did, and the evening was punctuated by the sound of Lill’s pudgy hand reaching down into the box and scuffling around in the paper that crackled like money.

  ‘Come on, Gordon,’ she would say, ‘tuck in. They cost the earth.’

  ‘I’ve had enough for the moment, Mum.’

  ‘ “He has a proud stomach, that boy”,’ murmured Brian.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with his stomach,’ protested Lill. ‘He’s got a lovely body. Not an ounce of surplus anywhere.’ And she leered at her eldest and reached down again into the chocolate box.

  But the consequence was that Monday morning Lill felt in need of some sort of reviver, a tonic, something to put pep back into the system and get zing coursing through her veins. Which meant, though she was largely unconscious of this herself, that she was in need of a good stand-up row. All her best rows occurred on Mondays, as all the family but herself realized—it was a day that might well have been observed by family, neighbours and circle of acquaintance as a day of lamentation, fasting, and general breast-beating.

  At breakfast Lill was in high good humour, and, quite unaware that she was working up to a row or two, she planned them. She scrambled some eggs to a leathery consistency and then found she’d forgotten the salt. She toasted the thin sliced loaf into wavy North Sea shapes and slapped them in a pile down on the kitchen table.

  ‘Eat it while it’s warm,’ she said.

  ‘Here, Mum,’ said Gordon, poking a spoon sceptically at the marmalade dish, ‘what’s this?’

  ‘Mother’s special,’ replied Lill cheerily. ‘Had a lot of jam jars with just a bit left in them, and I put ’em all together. I think I’ll patent the idea. Call it plumberry marmalade or something.’

  Gordon groaned.

  ‘Tasty!’ said Fred, chewing meditatively.

  When Brian and Debbie had run off at the last minute to catch the bus to school, and when Gordon and Fred had cycled off in opposite directions to work (Christ, thought Lill to herself, we must be the only family in the whole bloody town without a car. Just my luck), Lill washed up and made the beds—all but Debbie’s, because a girl of that age ought to make her own—and while she did it she meditated ways of giving a lift to the day, gingering things up in her vicinity, giving life a spot of zip. So round about half past ten, when she knew she’d be having coffee, she stuffed a fag in her mouth and went in next door to see her mother.

  ‘Do you want a cup?’ her mother asked, having that moment sat down with hers at the kitchen table.

  ‘Just to be friendly,’ said Lill. ‘Make it milky.’ Her mother, without a word, got up and put a saucepan of milk on the gas-ring.

  About the only thing Lill had inherited from her mother had been her regularity—that was how she knew she’d be settling down to a quiet cup at half past ten. In other ways they were as different as camembert and gorgonzola. Old Mrs Casey, widow long since of a plumber in a small way, was short, fat and formidable more from her grim silence than her tongue. Wherever she went she was a Presence, steel-eyed, incorruptible, disapproving. She had her Standards, unspoken, unwritten, unanswerable, and she was openly contemptuous of anyone who wittingly or unwittingly sinned against them. She cut no figure in Todmarsh at large, but she attended Methodist Chapel morning and evening, rain or shine, of a Sunday. In fact, the image of nonconformity she presented was of so rigid and regrettable a kind that one trendy minister had offered to bring the service to her if she would only stay home. She had stared him out of countenance, and finally said: ‘I’m not gone that soft yet.’ In all her life she had had o
nly one failure, and made only one mistake. The failure was Lill, the mistake was consenting to come and live next door to her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Lill, starting straight in.

  ‘Oh yes . . . ?’ Grimly, very grimly.

  ‘About Debbie moving in here with you . . .’

  Mrs Casey removed the milk from the ring and poured it with rock-steady hand into the cup which had been a wedding present back in the days when a tea-service was a possession for life.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned there’s never been any question of it,’ she said. ‘The question doesn’t arise. And don’t drop cigarette ash in your cup, for goodness sake. Milk costs the earth these days.’

  But such diversionary tactics had less than no chance of success. Why had Lill put a cigarette in other than to annoy her mother, who hated above all to see her with it hanging loosely from her mouth?

  ‘That’s where you’re so daft, Mum,’ said Lill, deftly aiming ash in the direction of the stove. ‘You’re not as young as you were. You need someone here all the time, to see you’re all right.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mrs Casey, settling down into her chair again and taking up her coffee cup, ‘you needn’t pretend it’s concern for me that’s behind it.’

  ‘Well, there’s Gordon and Bri too, of course. They need a bedroom to themselves each. Stands to reason at their age. Debbie’s would just suit Bri down to the ground. Give him room for all them books of his.’

  ‘Not to mention the fact that you’d be pleased to get Debbie out of your hair. Well, I’ve told you before, it’s not on. I’m too old to go looking after a girl of her age. My notions are not her notions, and it’s silly to pretend she’d put up with it. After the sort of life she’s had in your house. I’m seventy-five. That’s no time of life to start bringing up a teenager.’

  ‘It’s because you’re so bloody old you need somebody here,’ said Lill, sucking in her coffee noisily. ‘Someone around all the time to see that you’re still living and breathing.’

  This appeal to the perennial fear of the old cut no ice with Mrs Casey. ‘It’s not me has to be afraid of dying. I’m ready. And it’s not as though I’m alone, with all you lot living next door. The boys are very good. They pop in.’

  Lill’s voice took on a harsh edge: ‘I’m not having my boys running in and out here every five minutes to see if you’re stretched out. They’ve got better things to do. You’ve gotter have your fun while you’re young.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Casey cunningly, ‘if you want the boys to have a room of their own, then Gordon could move in here with me.’

  ‘ ’Ere, you’re not having my Gordon! What a cheek! That’s disgusting, an old woman like you!’

  ‘He’s older,’ continued Mrs Casey, paying no attention, ‘so there wouldn’t be the same problems. He could go his own way. And it’s always easier with a boy, as you know.’

  The conversation had taken a turn that Lill Hodsden had not at all anticipated, and she tried to change tack. ‘The boys are staying together, and that’s flat. You only suggested it because you knew they wouldn’t—’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t have it, more like.’

  ‘You’re just a selfish old woman. You haven’t changed a bit all the years I’ve known you. Think about nothing but yourself. All my childhood you kept me down, stopped me having my bit of fun—’

  Mrs Casey sniffed expressively. ‘I tried to stop you leading a life of sin and depravity—’

  ‘No need to chuck the ruddy Bible at me. Nobody gives a damn about that sort of thing these days. You were jealous, that was all, under all that religious talk. Jealous. That’s why you forced me to marry Fred—’

  ‘Forced you! Ha!’ Mrs Casey let out a bitter, reminiscent laugh. ‘You’d have married Jack the Ripper only to get away from home. When you went off and married Fred I was just pleased it was no worse.’

  ‘How would you know how worse it was? You know nothing about it. You never understood me. You’ve made trouble in the family all the time you’ve been here. You’ve never fitted in—I should never have let you come here.’

  ‘Went down on your bended knees,’ amended Mrs Casey, who never let swervings from the literal truth pass uncorrected. ‘So you’d have a home help and someone to dump the kids on to when it suited you.’

  ‘And a fat lot of dumping I’ve been able to do on you!’ said Lill bitterly.

  Mrs Casey smiled a hard, complacent smile. ‘Not much, I grant you. I wasn’t having any of that. Why should I? I’m not so green as I’m cabbage-looking. You met your match wi’ me, Lill. You and I’ll never get on, because you’re not as smart as you think you are, and I’m a deal smarter!’

  Stung perhaps by the truth of it, Lill clattered her coffee cup back on the saucer and stood up. But before she could frame a sufficiently annihilating parting shot, her mother said:

  ‘Perhaps that’s the trouble with Debbie, too, eh? She’s a mite smarter than you already.’

  Lill banged out the back door, barged past the milkman, who had been idly listening, and bounced through the back garden home. Mrs Casey went about her morning dusting and sweeping with a sprightliness she hadn’t felt in her when she got up.

  • • •

  It had given a bit of excitement, thought Lill, but still, it wasn’t much of a row. Which meant, of course, that its outcome was not at all the one she had been banking on. It certainly hadn’t given the day the central focus she had unconsciously planned for it. Every day, for Lill, had to have some kind of focal point she could remember as she lay in bed—some moment when she stood in the spotlight in one or other kind of triumph. Through the rest of the morning, and over dinner with Fred and Gordon—shepherd’s pie and tinned pears and cream, rushed and scamped as always—she wondered how to give it that focus. When she had washed up she seemed to make a quick decision: she emptied the contents of the sugar bowl back into the packet, and she cantered up the road to little Mrs Watson.

  ‘Coo-ee,’ she shouted at the door, which stood open: ‘anyone at home?’

  Mrs Watson flinched, being just around the door trying to get her stove to light. But then, she flinched automatically at Lill. Todmarsh was a small town, though, and open warfares were best avoided, so she hid her dislike and irritation behind a brave social face and said: ‘Hello, Mrs Hodsden.’

  ‘Oh hello,’ said Lill, steaming in and assuming a dreadfully refined manner, like a parody of one of the more uppitty Archers. ‘I didn’t see you round there. Could you help me? I clean forgot sugar down the shops today. Could you lend me a spot, save me going down before tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ann Watson. She refrained from wondering why Lill had not gone borrowing at any of the nine or ten houses that separated them in Windsor Avenue. She merely took the bowl and went to the kitchen cupboard, her thick, long hair shielding her face from Lill’s hungry gaze. But when she brought it back and handed it over she could not avoid looking at her and paying the social price of a polite smile. She received in return a smile of combined sympathy and good cheer that oozed over her and dripped down, as if she’d been crowned with a plate of cold porridge.

  ‘I was pleased to see you out on Saturday night,’ said Lill, her voice throbbing with personal concern. ‘I thought to myself: “She’s coming round,” I thought.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Ann Watson, sheet ice in her voice.

  ‘Getting over it,’ pursued Lill, blithely unconscious. ‘Coming back to life, and getting about a bit again. Because it doesn’t do, you know.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’ said Ann unwisely, still frozen hard.

  ‘Giving yourself up to grief,’ said Lill luxuriantly.

  But for once Lill had hit the nail on the head. Ann Watson had been married less than two years when her husband had been shot in the back while on patrol in Northern Ireland. He had died the next day and become two lines in the national newspapers. The War Office had flown her to his funeral. Her life, it seemed to he
r, was like a snapped twig, and she was living the broken end now. It is not fashionable to talk of being grief-stricken, any more than it is fashionable to talk of happy marriages, but Ann Watson had been grief-stricken because her marriage had been happy. And she didn’t fool herself that happy marriages happen twice. Even now, more than two years later, all the social gestures seemed difficult and meaningless—even the social gesture of looking after her little girl. She constructed a daily round, and followed it like a somnambulant nun. At moments of stress she had visions of her husband falling in the street, and the pointlessness of it, the futility, enraged her to breaking point. Hardest to bear was the feeling that people she met could not face her pain, tried to butter it over with clichés. Time was not, she had found, the great healer.

  ‘I’ve been back teaching part-time for eighteen months,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t exactly look as if I’d given myself up to grief.’ As she said it she kicked herself: why should she justify herself to this woman? Someone she didn’t even like?

  ‘Oh, that’s not what I meant,’ said Lill, happily unconscious of opposition or offence. ‘I meant going out and enjoying yourself, getting a kick out of life again. That’s what I want to see.’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ said Ann, back to the stove and feeling pressed into a corner by her ignorant goodwill.

  ‘ ’Course it’s our business. We’ve all been concerned about you, everyone along the road. It’s just that old Lill’s the only one to speak out honest about it. It’s not nice to see someone moping for so long. I know my Gordon’s been very concerned.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s kindly meant,’ said Ann, aware that Lill was pushing her into the stalest of conversational clichés, and fearful that she would soon be reduced to the purest fishwife abuse. ‘I just wish you all wouldn’t bother.’

  ‘He’s a very kind-hearted chap, my Gordon. He feels things, know what I mean? ’Course, he was in the army like your hubby—five years he was in. Did his bit in Northern Ireland too, like they all have to. I expect him and your chap are very alike, really.’