Months have passed since the Italian stamp debacle and here we are, me and the children, marking out the long weeks of holiday ‘at Granny’s’. The beach and her love of the children alleviate the resentment of having to visit this tired seaside town that has never been home to me.
My mother has moved to granny-friendly accommodation, and is surrounded by neighbours who are older and more decrepit. Although she is only sixty she talks of converting the bath to a shower, of the convenience of having her bedroom downstairs. Tension plays out over the fact I am holidaying at hers rather than she with us. She freely admits that she would prefer not cooking for us at all.
But irritation over the cooking is camouflage for something much more grave. The lie is still amongst us. We trip over it wherever we step.
Day three I find Mum seated in Dad’s ugly recliner, attempting nonchalance. Yanking on the handle she tips it back, so the footrest kicks up her striped socked feet. There is a hole, which she points out to the two-year-old.
‘Look, Granny’s got a hole in her sock.’ The toddler toddles over to inspect. The big toe wiggles. Mum reaches over and pulls out some white paper and a red felt-tip and says: ‘Go on and draw Granny a huge red hippopotamus?’ Then calls through to the five-year-old, crouched over a train set in the other room: ‘When you’ve got the track finished I’ll come through and see it.’
I wonder whether she was always this good at mothering, or if it is only mothering me that is so hard. I struggle so with it myself.
Both children now distracted, she pulls the striped polycotton back over her toe.
‘We must not tell the boys.’
She must mean my brothers, but it is far too late for that. I have told everyone.
‘I mean,’ she says, ‘if they ask, of course, you can tell them. But only if they ask.’
Which makes this another Catholic lie, where by not speaking the truth the hope is that it will just wither away, a technique she must have picked up from Dad. It is not an observation I make aloud. Partly because I have not admitted to the illicit emails or furtive checks of her address book for all the women Dad might have shagged.
She shuffles forward on the recliner and says calmly:
‘It’s not something they need to know.’
A catalogue of knowing, which she must already regret.
‘So you didn’t know yourself?’ I say. ‘You didn’t know until the Italian stamp?’
She looks at me blandly.
‘This is the first you knew?’ I repeat, meaning generally – that Dad had affairs.
‘Yes,’ she says, getting up to swoop the toddler and her hippopotamus scrawl away from the dog.
Her ‘yes’ is not a lie. It relates, I will later realise, only to the specific case of the German, Renata, rather than his promiscuity in general.
‘Look,’ she calls over her shoulder, ‘I’ve only got pasta. Shall we do that for tea?’
As she trails the dog and toddler through to the finished train track, I am struck by her ignorance – how could she have not known, I wonder, without giving my own idiocy any thought.
It is not a point I am able to make. Within hours of this dubious exchange, my mother is gratefully diverted by something much more important. Lunging for a ball the dog breaks (not fatally) his back. And it is in this final frazzled week that the email arrives. In the past, when she could get to them before me, my mother read my postcards. The Outlook email programme that I have left open on her desktop screen proves to be the contemporary equivalent. It is not that she must open the email to see it, but rather, like the postcard, it advertises its content, and she barrels out of her office as if she’s been struck.
It’s not even an email from a friend. It’s an email from another mother.
I have said diabolical things about mine before to friends and acquaintances. She was a source of much of my bleak comedy.
The first sentence of Caroline’s email reads: ‘Have you strangled your mother yet?’
‘It was a joke,’ I tell Mum, fear burning black within me. ‘Most daughters make jokes about their mothers.’
And they do, but our relationship is no joke. Too much is broken. However, I know I am on safe ground. Both of us remember, as we stand there in the hall, that she spent much of her twenties and thirties whining about her own mother too.
Perhaps it is this irony, or seeing the lie of our relationship laid bare, or just the sense of betrayal that the question provoked, but whatever it is Mum does not speak the rest of the afternoon and goes to bed early without a word.
As Caroline predicted, Mum will be strangled slowly. Within a year she is dead. It is as though this email kills her. That very night her diseased motor neurones begin the inexorable process of giving up her ghost.