My mother came to see me twice. She came by air and stayed with me in the cubby-hole on the way to the shower cubicle which passed for my bedroom. She insistently begged me to come home. She could see no reason for my feelings for the place. And no more could I, in my youthful ignorance, see why she was less than euphoric at the prospect of dossing in my cubby-hole for two weeks on end, in a flat above a bar, in a town where the natives never go to bed. She saw no reason why the food came as it did. She saw no reason at all, she said once over a plateful of squid, why the locals couldn’t eat ‘ordinary’ food like people in England. You couldn’t drink the coffee and you couldn’t toast the bread. It was stale by lunchtime and it had no insides. Only crusts.
Then she wrote to me suddenly from Hendon to say that she was getting married. Her letter was both extraordinary and revealing to me. She was planning to marry an assistant bank manager from Dorset, she said, and she hoped that I wouldn’t mind. I wondered by what right I ought to mind. She felt free to do so, she said, since I had grown up and left home and appeared not to need her any more. She had only once before considered marrying again but, as I might remember, I had taken against the gentleman and she had felt that she ought to put me first. I was stunned to discover that I had wielded this kind of power over her. I recalled that when I was twelve there had been a man who had called at the house a good bit, whom I had vocally disliked for the profound reasons that he had blown his nose over-politely at table, almost burying his head under the cloth, that he had worn bow ties, and that he had made a point of carving meat with a formidable show of expertise. That my mother had decided against remarrying on the basis of these youthful aversions filled me with horror. With what contained resentment had she thereafter washed my clothes and brought me my cocoa and custard creams in bed? And what kind of reciprocal sacrifices were, in consequence, required of me? Pish, I thought, as I went my way, stamping firmly on guilt.
I went to her wedding and played out, for an hour or two, my mother’s fantasy: her desire to see me as a reflection of the best of herself. I enacted a charade in a tasteless navy two-piece with yellow saddle-stitching and a yellow shirt which tied at the neck, feeling like a perfume lady in John Barnes. I bore the castrated smut which emanated from the best man’s speech. I gave her my love and hopped it, an extravagant and wheeling stranger, belonging nowhere. I was, in addition, about to lose my rights to the cubby-hole over the bar. My flat-mate’s boyfriend had designs upon it.