THE twins were playing with the contents of my mother’s underwear drawer. Hannah had a pair of my mother’s underpants on her head, and William had wrapped a graying bra around his neck.
“Look at me, look at me!” he shouted, bouncing up and down.
I was sitting on the bed and watching my mother pack. Into the suitcase she dropped several very worthy books, a selection of legal journals, cotton shirts and skirts in pastel shades, trousers, a digital camera, still in its box, sunglasses still with a price tag attached, a new swimsuit, goggles, and an unopened bottle of sunblock. My mother has long white-gray hair and a dowdy gray wardrobe. She had never, as long as I remember, exposed her white skin to the sun.
“I thought this was supposed to be a spiritual retreat,” I said. “They have a pool?”
“They have a pool,” my mother answered firmly. “There’s no rule that says Buddhists can’t swim.”
“I’m sure they’re wonderful swimmers,” I agreed, and my mother gave me a look. The look was not unamused—she was aware that this was a very New Age expedition for a very middle-aged person—but neither did the look invite me to poke further fun.
She started to battle good-naturedly with Hannah. “I need them, darling. People still have to wear underpants in California,” she told her, “it’s the law.”
My mother was going to California to find herself. Or to lose her family, which probably amounted to the same thing. Her life has not been easy since she met my father more than forty years ago. He left her six years later, but somehow he’d left such a mess behind him—not to mention three daughters—that things didn’t get much easier.
The past couple of years have been particularly tough. She works full-time as a lawyer. On top of that, she had to nurse my sister Lorna through chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating condition that is what it sounds like, an almost perpetual state of physical exhaustion. In Lorna’s case, she was almost bed-bound for two years. Her recovery over recent months has been of the two steps forward, one step back variety. She is no good at pacing herself, she never has been. She rushes forward, and then she is brought up short by a wall of fatigue. But she rarely needs nursing now, and she has a part-time job, although she is frustrated by the limitations her body imposes on her.
My mother was seeing Lorna through all this, and then came Adam’s death, and the attack on me, and she ended up playing nurse to me and baby-sitter to my twins through the long months while I recovered. It was hardly surprising she needed a rest and perfectly natural that she should at long last decide to accept a standing invitation to her friend Nancy’s place in Santa Barbara. But she had an open ticket, and she wouldn’t say when she was coming back. She was practically going into exile.
The doorbell rang. My sisters, Lorna and Tanya, stood at the door, while Tanya’s husband, Patrick, was getting their three girls out of the car.
I kissed Lorna’s porcelain cheek. “You’re looking well,” I told her. She’d tied her red gold ringlets on top of her head so that they cascaded down, and she was wearing a brown suede jacket tailored in to her neat waist.
“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked, as though she had never had a day of illness in her life. She likes to pretend that there is nothing wrong and never has been, which drives my mother up the wall.
Tanya has a pretty blond look that is softer than Lorna’s dramatic beauty. She wears pinks to Lorna’s purples and big baggy sweaters in pastel colors that swamp a figure she thinks is too plump.
My mother was to fly in the middle of the week, so we were having Sunday lunch together. Even Finney had submitted to the family mealtime, so momentous was the occasion. He turned up just as we were about to eat, cutting it close as he always does on such occasions. He was looking weary. He’d been at work on a case until the early hours, and he grumbled that there had been precious little progress to show for it.
“We should go away, too,” he told me as he stepped inside. “Don’t you want a holiday?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, kissing him, not paying attention. Finney hadn’t taken a break in all the time I’d known him, but he liked to talk about holidays.
My mother had produced an unconventional lunch, a strange vegetable risotto with a vast but wilting salad and a thick, unidentifiable soup. We all looked at it warily, and Tanya’s eldest, Chloë, grimaced and rolled her eyes.
“I needed to use up the food in the house,” my mother explained. “I’ve been trying all week to wean myself off meat. I just can’t make myself like tofu.”
Lorna had brought a bottle of champagne, which she poured into tumblers, the only glasses my mother had.
“To welcome you back in one piece—just,” Lorna said, handing me one, “and launch Ma on her way to California.”
My mother gave her oldest daughter a look that said—confirming what I suspected—that she would not be going to California at all if it were not for the fact that Lorna had made her too angry to stay. Lorna is the one who has embraced the return of my father after more than thirty years of absence. Embracing my father means offending my mother. Gilbert, my father, scuttled out when I was four years old, his pockets filled with a substantial amount of money that did not belong to him. For more than thirty years, we thought he was dead. Or at least Tanya and I did. It emerged that Lorna had kept in touch with him secretly all that time. When he’d turned up again nearly two years earlier, as if from a crack in the wall, he’d churned up a third of a century of trouble.
My mother raised her glass, then replied to Lorna’s toast.
“How sweet of you, Lorna, to wish me so happily on my way to the far ends of the earth. Would that you had done so with your other parent.”
Lorna opened her mouth to respond but thought better of it. The rest of us raised our glasses with our mother and draink to her rapier slash of a toast. Finney fought to control an evil grin. There was silence as we shoveled the rice busily into our mouths.
It was my mother who eventually broke the silence, asking after my friend Jane, who is hugely pregnant. Jane, I said, was terrified of childbirth.
“Well, she’s a control freak,” Lorna commented. “Control freaks hate the unpredictability of childbirth.”
“Takes one to know one,” Patrick muttered.
For the rest of the afternoon, none of us mentioned Gilbert, my father. There are other taboos, too, of course. No one asks Lorna how Father Joe is, because she’s touchy about her relationship with the American priest I introduced her to. Although anyone who has seen them together knows that they are in love. No one asks Lorna how she’s feeling, because she likes to pretend she’s not sick anymore. No one asks Tanya or Patrick about work, because their jobs nursing at the hospital leave them exhausted, underpaid, and disillusioned. I had a sense, that afternoon, that sometimes my family’s hearth is as alien as any foreign country.
I left the children at my mother’s house for the evening while I took Finney out. He had to be dragged.
“Do we really have to go to the ballet?” He looked mournful.
“It’s modern dance, not ballet,” I told him. “It may even be contemporary dance. I’m not sure I know the difference. You’ll enjoy it.”
Half an hour later, seated in a small theater in Islington, I was still confused, but I thought the fact that the dancers were all but naked would at least cheer Finney. I’d seen the choreography reviewed as “witty,” although I wasn’t sure what the joke was. At the intermission, I elbowed Finney awake and came clean, pointing at Jacqui Darling’s name in the program.
“You see?” I said. “Mike Darling’s daughter.”
He squinted dozily down at the photographs in the program. “Which one is she?”
“This one.” She was a small, girlish woman with pale tea-colored skin, long dark hair in rows of tight plaits, and a body like flexible steel. You could see the rest of them working as though it were heavy labor, all this jumping and pounding and twisting. But she had a natural grace, and she was flirtatious, too.
Finney shook his head. “You made me sit through this because of her?”
Around us, the audience was filtering back to their seats. A woman squeezing past looked with disgust at Finney.
“I’m just curious,” I said in a low voice. “Justin told me she’s dancing with this company, and I’ve heard so much about her, so when I saw the advert . . . Her father was the last—”
“For God’s sake, just stay out of it.” He was irritated, and he spoke more loudly than was strictly necessary. “Will you just for once, for me, stay home and look after your kids, and . . .”
The lights dimmed, and the theater fell suddenly silent. His voice trailed off.
“And look after you?” I finished for him, whispering in his ear.
“I was going to say, And look after yourself,” he murmured back.
“Oh,” I mouthed in the dark.
I reached for his hand, and we sat there, our fingers entwined, and watched as the dancers trotted back onstage. I have never had a relationship with a man that lasted, from my father onward. I could see the attraction of waking up in the same bed as Finney every day and retiring to the same bed at night. But I wasn’t sure how these things were supposed to work. Did one live in the expectation of betrayal? Was every day a succession of compromise and concession? Finney once saved my life. When we talk about it, I pretend, of course, that I’d have survived without him, that he was simply incidental. But the fact is that without him I probably would be dead and my children orphans, which is a hefty debt, and one that I’m not sure how to repay. I know I can’t hand over my independence. Of course, I’m not sure that he requires it.
Within moments I felt the grip of Finney’s hand relax, and I knew he was asleep.