‘WHERE ARE YOU going for your holidays?’ Father said on the Monday evening telephone call.
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘We don’t either,’ Father said, with emphasis. ‘Your Mother’s moaning on about it. Mrs Collins set her off—going to Newquay for a week—oh, we never go anywhere, no holidays for us, your Mother says. She says she wishes someone would give her a holiday, stuck here indoors, year in, year out. Well I said get yourself to Angela’s. Here, here she is—you talk to her—she doesn’t seem to like anything I say, twisting her face up at me. You tell her what’s what.’
‘Ignore him,’ Mother whispered, then cleared her throat. ‘I can’t go anywhere, not in my condition, he knows that. He can go and have a holiday—he’s the one that needs it. He can put me in a home and gallivant where he likes. I’m past caring.’
In the background Father shouted, ‘I don’t need any holiday—it’s you that started on about it, lass, not me.’
‘Ignore him,’ Mother said again, faintly.
‘I’d love you to come here for a holiday like you used to, Mother,’ Angela said, striving to insert warmth and conviction into her voice, ‘but I just don’t think you could stand a three-hundred-mile journey, do you?’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ Mother said, ‘I can’t even get half a mile to church. I’m finished, past everything.’
‘You’re not—you’re getting better every day—but you’re not up to a long tiring journey. Listen, why don’t I come down for a week and let Father go to Valerie’s—you both need a break—it would be the perfect solution, give you both a sort of holiday at least.’
‘Your Father wouldn’t hear of it,’ Mother said, ‘he wouldn’t go off on his own, would you?’ There was a confused minute while the message was relayed and then a roar as Father emphatically refused. ‘There,’ Mother said, ‘I told you he wouldn’t go, didn’t I?’ Angela could not tell whether she spoke with satisfaction or not.
It was easy to picture Mother hunched in her armchair in front of the fire, listening miserably to the plans of Mrs Collins and other neighbours with their weeks here and days there. An annual torture that made Mother increasingly bitter. Instead of summer sunshine making her feel happier, bringing as it did the prospect of a seat in the garden in place of a seat in one small room, it made her furious. Anyone would have thought, from the vehemence with which she spoke, that Mother had formerly had the most sumptuous and regular holidays and not the pedestrian week with one of her sisters in Exeter or Plymouth that had been the reality. But something would have to be done or the remarks would go on and on until October brought the end with ‘Well, there was no holiday for me, at any rate.
‘I think,’ Angela said that evening, ‘we will have to spend all the Easter holidays in St Erick after all.’ The protests drowned her explanation. When they were all quiet, she began to enlarge on Grandmother’s unhappiness but none of them would relent. Even Ben was steadfast in his objections. She exaggerated, he said. Her mother and father were perfectly happy really, and even if they weren’t why should she consider their needs more than her own family’s—why shouldn’t their hatred of holidays in St Erick weigh as much in her mind as her parents’ need to have them here? ‘They are old and feeble,’ Angela said, ‘we are all young and strong. We can afford to be magnanimous—is it really asking so much?’
She went to bed haunted by the little scene in her mind, Mother and Father trapped in that pokey room, Mother wretched because she never went anywhere. She could not sleep for attempting to solve the insoluble. There was nothing she could do, short of moving next door to them, to effectively make them happy. Leaving St Erick had been the ultimate betrayal, which they had seen coming a long way off. In their opinion, all would have been well if it had not been for ‘that Grammar School’. It gave her big ideas, they said. ‘You used to be such a nice little girl before you went to that Grammar School,’ Mother used to say, sorrowfully. They said they didn’t know what had got into her, that they could see how it would all end. ‘You have children,’ Father said, ‘you look after them and work hard for them and then what do they do—they leave, the minute they’re any good to you. We never did, but you, you’ll be up and off, finished.’
‘That’s life,’ Angela would say, ‘children don’t stay at home when they grow up unless there’s something wrong with them.’
‘There was nothing wrong with your Mother and I,’ Father would say, ‘we knew what duty was.’
‘You had no choice,’ Angela would say, knowing it was foolish to prolong such an argument. Whatever was said afterwards, Father always managed to finish with the same words, ‘Elephants stay together, they don’t leave the herd.’
They all ought to be near, Tom and Harry and Valerie and her, visiting every day, as Mother and Father had visited their parents when they were alive, a happy extended family. Except Angela could remember no happiness, only obligation and the gratification which came from it. Every Sunday after morning Sunday School Father marched all four of them down to his parents’ house, down to the gloomy, solid terrace house by the river, and there they would troop in, into the dark hall smelling of damp and decay, into the back room where a big, blackened kettle hung on a hook over the hardly burning fire. Warned to be quiet and behave themselves one minute, they would be ordered to entertain their crippled grandmother the next. They would be pulled by the arm in turn to the bed in the corner where Grandma lay, propped up on pillows so that she could stare through the dusty net curtains into the yard that held nothing but a dustbin and was bound on all sides by high brick walls with pieces of broken glass on the top. Grandma was a fearful sight. Her crooked arthritic fingers made her hands into claws and her dreadfully pale emaciated face was always screwed up with pain. ‘Kiss your Grandma,’ Grandad would say, ‘a nice big kiss, mind,’ and then it was a battle between rival fears, between dreading the touch of the loathsome flaccid skin of Grandma’s cheek and dreading Grandad’s anger if his commandment was not enthusiastically obeyed. Angela remembered no pity for Grandma, nor any stirrings of compassion for Grandad, who was an ogre with a partiality for mental arithmetic. ‘Five nines,’ he would suddenly shout, pointing a poker at his victims, and the first to answer correctly got a penny. It was always Angela. Then Grandad would storm and shout at the boys because he wanted them to be cleverer. ‘Letting a lass beat you,’ he would roar and if Tom burst into tears of fright, as he quite often did, then Grandad would drive him with the poker to the back door and put him outside. Father never interfered. He would watch Grandad with an odd smile on his face and never lift a finger to protect poor Tom.
Sometimes, as they wailed their way home, exhausted by the tension of it all, he would say ‘Now you know,’ a statement so obviously incomplete and enigmatic that Angela could never fathom it. ‘Why do we have to go there?’ she would ask.‘Why—when Grandad’s so horrible?’ ‘You be quiet about your Grandfather,’ Father would say. Mother was no better. ‘There are things I’ll never forgive your Grandfather for,’ she would say to Angela when plagued for enlightenment. ‘Things he made your Father suffer. You don’t know the half of it.’ And Angela, who badly wanted to know that half and every other little scrap there might be, was left unsatisfied and wondering. She went with Mother twice a week to make Grandma’s tea and watched Mother washing Grandma tenderly and making her bed expertly and heard Grandma say ‘Oh, you’re a blessing, Mary, a blessing. I couldn’t manage without you, dear.’ She saw Mother unpacking cakes and blancmanges, she heard her standing up to Grandad about the coldness of the room, she felt the whole atmosphere of the dreary house lighten and brighten when Mother was there. And there were others—elderly aunts and invalid cousins whom Mother fitted into her rounds, strange old people who lived in hidden rooms tucked away at the back of lanes and buildings, unknown to anyone else except Mother, Angela thought. Mother looked after them all and thought nothing of it and when, as she grew older, Angela complained about visiting them, Mother just said ‘Poor old things’ and she was silenced.
Three times a year they went to St Erick, she and the family, three times only, a week or less at Easter, Whit and during August. They crammed into her parents’ house and their goodwill evaporated in a matter of hours. From the moment she went through the front door Angela felt suffocated not only by the pungent smell of lavender polish too thickly used and rose pot-pourris too regularly renewed but by the memories of living there. Sometimes on train journeys looking out of the window at rows and rows of featureless houses Angela would think how awful it must be to live in them and then experience a physical thrill of shock as she remembered that once she had done. When Grandad died, outliving Grandma by a mere six months, there had been some talk of moving into their house but Mother had refused to consider it. It was, she said, a horrible place with big draughty rooms and difficult stairs and no garden. It was built in Queen Victoria’s time, she said, and looked it. Only Angela, aged twelve, had wanted to live there. She had wandered about the house while Mother ministered to Grandma in the one used room and it excited her. Upstairs, there were four huge bedrooms with wide bay windows, the sort of windows where you could make a seat and sit there reading a book like children did in the books themselves. They could each have a room instead of she and Valerie sharing, and Tom and Harry squashed into a box room that was like a slit. But Mother was adamant. They would sell the grandparents’ house and divide the money with Father’s brother and sisters. So they stayed in their council house—‘at least it has modern comforts,’ Mother said—and used their share of the money to decorate it from top to bottom in flowered wallpapers and cream paint. They bought a new dining room suite, though they did not have a dining room, and a greenhouse and put the rest away for a rainy day though by then it was hardly enough to buy a couple of good umbrellas. Father, who would have liked to have a car, was a little disgruntled after the whole business was over, but Mother was given a great deal of innocent pleasure.
The house was like thousands of others, literally so, one of a mass-produced lot that sprang up to deface the landscape before the war. Mother had chosen theirs herself and was proud of it. Her uncle was brother-in-law to the town planning officer and he told her to take her pick. Mother chose a two bedroom-with-boxroom and a washhouse attached. It was all they could afford at the time, she said. There was no bathroom and an outside lavatory but then bathrooms with lavatories upped the rent considerably. When, at school,’ Angela studied briefly the rudiments of architecture it made her laugh to think of their council house ever being designed. Designed? Windows, doors, building materials—who ever considered anything but cost where council houses were concerned? ‘We were so lucky,’ Mother said, and felt guilty about using her uncle’s influence. ‘We got the best two-bedroom one on the estate,’ she said. Nobody else’s soul was seared by living in that graceless shelter, except Angela’s, and she could take her fancy notions elsewhere.
She would have liked to buy Mother and Father their own house—something pretty and old—but they would have none of it. When marriage to Ben made her prosperous she offered them, with Ben’s full approval, a charming cottage high up on the hill behind the town, a hill with a view of the river far below and easy access to the countryside around. They said no. They thanked her and admired the cottage and refused. They had neighbours on the estate, they had always lived there, they didn’t fancy moving; not now, not if she didn’t mind. So Angela put in a bathroom for the council’s benefit and had a telephone installed and Mother and Father pronounced themselves well content. Only when Angela and her family came did the house suddenly seem too small, but to admit it would not have been considered. ‘Plenty of room,’ Father would say, even when confronted with absolute evidence that this was a lie. Angela and Ben slept in the spare double bed with Tim on a camp bed beside them. Sadie slept on another camp bed in the bathroom which had once been the box room. Max and Saul slept in Mother and Father’s old room. ‘Plenty of room,’ Father said, and, ‘Always room for your own family.’
Before Sadie was born, Ben brought home a strange and colourful toy clown that he had seen in a shop window. It was big and fat with long spindly legs and a lolling head. The stomach of this stuffed creature was yellow, the arms orange, the rest brown. Angela decorated the whole of the baby-to-be’s room round it. She painted all the walls a vivid sunshine yellow except for one, above the mantelpiece, which she covered in dark brown cork. Later, children’s drawings would be pinned upon it because of course her children would be given crayons as soon as they could hold them and she would know how to treasure their efforts. There was an orange rug on the shiny wooden floor and an orange blind on the window. The room was at the top of the house, on the top floor, overlooking the long, tree-filled garden. In the last stages of her pregnancy, Angela haunted it. She imagined the delight of the child who would have it. She sat at the window in a rocking chair and tears came into her eyes as she thought about it. Sadie turned out to be indifferent to her room. As soon as she was old enough, she neglected it. The cork remained brown and bare—no pictures were ever drawn for it, or if they were, Sadie immediately removed them and took them downstairs to pin in the kitchen. The many open shelves had untidy little clusters of things dumped upon them and never looked organized. The big work table was filthy with scraps of plasticine that had hardened and was allowed to collect dirt. ‘You say it’s my room,’ Sadie said when Angela called it a dump, ‘then you want it to be like your room was at my age.’ Angela was wise enough not to say she had never had her own room, that that was the point, the reason for her distress. She and Valerie had shared a bed in a room so small they had to turn sideways to get between the enormous wardrobe and the bed itself. There had been no beautiful spacious room in which she could take a pride, no private place to which she could retreat to read. But then Sadie never read and wasn’t private. It was clear from the beginning that Sadie was not a solitary creature destined to love a room high up and secluded. Eventually, she moved. They had the old coal cellar next to the kitchen made into a room, intending it as a study, and Sadie begged to have it. There was barely room for her bed and no room at all for clothes or belongings. Everything she owned was either crammed into a cabin trunk or draped round the walls on hangers and hooks. She maintained she liked its smallness and darkness. Angela never went into Sadie’s room unless she had to, and then claustrophobia overwhelmed her to such an extent that if the door had been accidentally shut, she would have screamed.
Ben humoured her but prophesied doom, a rare thing for him to do. The children were glad only that they did not have to stay at Grandad’s and be harangued for their sins. Angela merely counted the days of freedom left and worried incessantly. She knew the place, she knew the hotel, she was completely familiar with exactly what to expect in the way of weather and she had made her decision to go because it was an experiment worth trying. Neutral ground, she told herself repeatedly, might solve all their problems. They would be on display and Trewicks displayed rather well.
Already, Mother and Father had had three weeks of anticipation and whatever the outcome would have many more of enjoying their unexpected holiday in retrospect. It did not even have to be a success for them to do that. Angela could remember several shared holidays with Mother and Father—holiday homes rented on freezing beaches—which had been totally disastrous but were now gone over nostalgically. It was the going away together that mattered. They remembered that—the public exhibition of unity—and forget the arguments, forgot how rude and naughty their grandchildren had been, forgot their disapproval of how Angela and Ben brought them up. They remembered only what they wanted to remember and their version of it.
Perhaps the same would happen again. And this time, there was the hotel to consider. Mother and Father had never stayed in an hotel, not ever. Boarding houses had been the pinnacle of their achievement, and even then they had to go back thirty years or more to remember when last they had graced such an exclusive establishment. All through Angela’s childhood Mother had written off inquiring prices at selected boarding houses—stayed at and vouched for by better’ off folk—but they had always been too high. She never went to stay in a boarding house and was envious of those who did, until Aunt Frances told her they were only a kind of cheap hotel and not to be mentioned in the same breath as the real thing.
The things that might worry Mother and Father had been taken care of. Their bedroom would have a bathroom attached and all round would be Angela and her family forming a solid block of Trewicks. The hotel was at the seaside, near the small town of Port Point, Father’s favourite place in the whole world, not that he had ever ventured far into it. For something like fifty years he had gone every Sunday to Port Point to fish and walk along the cliff. Angela alone of the children had liked to go with him, but loving the sea rather than Port Point. ‘The King would have come here, you know,’ Father would say, ‘only there was no hotel big enough.’ ‘What king?’ Angela would ask, suspiciously, but Father didn’t know. The fact that the king—any king—almost came should have been enough for her. Father said the reason he almost came was for the air which he had rightly heard was purer in Port Point than anywhere else, but Angela thought he must have wanted to come for the quiet. Port Point was not pretty, but it was quiet. It had a green and several streets of dull terraced houses and a cobbled main road along which stretched the shops and hotels. It was high up and open and apart from a few copses of pines totally exposed to the Atlantic winds which swept across it all winter and half the summer. ‘Bracing,’ Father would say, ‘get that in your lungs and feel the difference.’
All one usually felt was exceedingly cold, to the point of numbness. A mile past Port Point there was a headland sticking out into the Atlantic. There stood a convalescent home and two hotels, both much admired by Mother and Father, who had never been in either. Sometimes, after Father had marched them along the cliff from Port Point, they would ogle the hotels, especially the bigger and more Edwardian of the two, and Father would say something about when his boat came in. The sea was a mere hundred yards away on one side and along the other was a narrow road leading onto the estuary. If the weather was good, it was the most perfect spot imaginable. If it was bad, there was no hope, not for Mother, not for the one person the holiday had been arranged for. The real killer would be a strong cold wind, the most likely thing of all on that particular part of the north Cornish coast—cold winds and drizzle, a combination so frequent it was sheer madness not to anticipate it.
Angela did anticipate it. Her anticipatory imagination was in excellent working order. The point was, Mother and Father would still get a change of surroundings with very little effort on their part. They would have the excitement of staying in an hotel. They would have all their meals made and the novelty of choosing from a menu and the stimulus of other people around. Father could tramp into Port Point every day. The children could run wild and not be noticed. It would be better than nothing—it would prevent that coma of depression into which she herself fell under the strain of trying to cope, of trying to make Mother and Father happy. It would throw a smokescreen between her and the Angela they wanted and in it she could hide.
She grew more and more silent as the day to drive down to St Erick approached. She had nightmares in which Ben was called away and she had to manage Mother and Father herself. It could not be done, not for a week, not with the children squarely on her back too. Ben was the ideal son-in-law. Often, Angela found herself apologizing for Mother and Father and the way in which inevitably they were made his concern as well as hers, but he bore no resentment. He said they took each other’s parents on—but he had none himself, a vital difference Angela harped upon. She envied him so passionately his orphan state that it frightened her. If Mother and Father had been Ben’s parents how tolerant she would have been, how kind and considerate, how anxious about their welfare, how easy she would have found it to be objective about their troubles. If her parents, like Ben’s parents, had been killed in a car crash when she was twenty how deeply she would have mourned them, how sincere would have been her tears. And how liberated she would have felt.
But Mother and Father were old and alive and eagerly awaiting her arrival in St Erick. Waiting for Angela to solve all their problems. She would whisk in and organize them and liven them up and they would not feel lonely and deserted and failures for a week at least. ‘You will help, won’t you Sadie?’ Angela pleaded. Sadie grunted. ‘You will talk to them and try to understand why they are as they are?’ ‘It’s so awful,’ Sadie said, ‘Grandad’s so stupid and Grandma just sits and we just have to sit too. It’s agony.’ ‘I know,’ Angela said, ‘but look at it from their point of view.’ ‘I do, but you go on so—I mean, what do you expect us to actually do?’ ‘Just be cheerful. And look for ways to please them. And make them feel wanted. That’s all. And don’t sulk or fight with Max—just try to be a little less selfish for once.’ ‘It’s all hypocrisy,’ Sadie said.
After Tim was born, Angela was ill. Sadie was nine, Max seven, Saul six and that was meant to be that, their family complete. But Angela’s doctor made her come off the pill ‘for a while anyway’ and she became pregnant in spite of the most careful precautions. She would not have it that Tim was a mistake—she had made no mistake. He was an accident and that was different. An abortion was available but to her own astonishment she found she could not bring herself to have it. There was a small corner in her heart that had not quite done with babies, and though it was irrational and silly, and though she had only just gone back to teaching and was enjoying it, she went ahead and had Tim. Mother and Father were shocked. Knowing they would be she did not tell them until she was six months pregnant and then when she broke the news she went to great lengths to point out that she wanted the baby and that they were not to think of it as a catastrophe. But they did. The baby was thought of by them as a disaster—‘as if you didn’t have enough already’—and there were so many unpleasant innuendoes in everything they said about her unexpected pregnancy that Angela felt like a criminal. They both prophesied doom and as it turned out they were nearly right. She was five days in labour and then had a Caesarean. Tim was a pitiful not-quite-five-pounds baby who had to stay in an incubator for a month. Mother and Father’s concern was deep and genuine—and burdensome—but the element of ‘we told you so’ hard to endure. Then as soon as she came home, Angela developed glandular fever. It took her four months to climb out of the appalling listlessness and exhaustion that sapped every ounce of her already depleted strength. She did not have to be told that she needed a holiday. Valerie came, a heroine, and looked after the children and Angela was taken off to the sun, too weak to resist. With her own feebleness so apparent, she had thought the children, especially Sadie, would understand why she had to go away, but they showed no signs of doing so. Sadie in particular was resentful. ‘The baby will cry for you,’ she said accusingly, ‘you know he will. He’ll cry and cry.’ When the plane took off for Greece, Sadie’s hostility haunted Angela—she saw her daughter’s cold, tight little face staring at her with what she imagined was hatred. The entire two weeks she was away she woke up at night sweating with terror as Sadie’s, shrill voice rang in her ears saying ‘But what about us? What about us?’ Suppose the plane crashed, suppose one of them was killed while she was away, suppose they were all wretchedly unhappy—it would be her fault for putting herself first. Mother had not gone off to the sun after an illness. Mother had carried on. She had always been there, putting them first. Though she grew tanned and put on weight and felt human again for the first time since Tim’s birth, guilt tinged every day. When she went home, to find everything in perfect order, it was Sadie’s smile that meant most. Ben said she was a little tyrant but Angela saw it differently. Sadie had been afraid. Sadie had estimated correctly her mother’s importance in her life and shuddered at the thought of what would happen if it was removed. Sadie was nowhere near ready to go her own way and until she was—until that blissful day—the truth of her deepest fear had to be acknowledged.
‘Couldn’t I stay here?’ Sadie said, the day before they were due to go.
‘No, you could not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because this is a family holiday.’
‘Well, I don’t like family holidays. I’m not a child any more—you’re always telling me I’m not—I don’t like any of the things we do on a family holiday. I hate walking. I hate touring round places.’
‘It will do you good.’
‘How can it do me good if I hate it? And what do you mean “do me good”?’
‘All the fresh air—’
‘—god!—’
‘—and just getting away from the dirt and noise of London and having time to really relax.’
‘But I like the dirt and noise—I like London—I don’t want time to relax—it’s boring down there with nothing to do and nowhere to go. You don’t even like having me with you, you know you don’t.’
‘We couldn’t leave you behind anyway, not alone in this huge house.’
‘Why not? I could have Joanna and Sue to stay.’
‘No. You’re not responsible enough. Take last week when we were all out—you didn’t even notice the downstairs sink was overflowing. If we hadn’t come back when we did there would have been a flood.’
‘Then can I stay with Sue?’
‘No. You’re always accepting other people’s hospitality and never returning it.’
‘Oh, Mum—you’re so ridiculous when you say things like that. Sleeping on somebody’s floor isn’t hospitality.’
‘And eating their food?’
‘I’d get my own food.’
‘You don’t do that here—you’re here every meal time with your tongue hanging out and if there isn’t a three-course meal you’re mortally offended.’
‘But why are you forcing me to go?’
‘Because—because I want you to—and I don’t think the alternatives are acceptable—and it would disappoint Grandma and Grandpa if you didn’t.’
Father had regularly forced them to do things as a family. He forced all of them to go for a family walk every Sunday evening. They hated it. They would spend the whole week trying to fabricate cast-iron excuses and when they failed they would all line up with scowls on their faces, hands thrust deep into pockets and feet ready to trail as they were marched out. Father didn’t seem to care what their attitude was—all that mattered was their presence. They would walk up to the woods, strung out in a line behind Father, who alone knew their destination. If their sulking spoiled his pleasure he never mentioned it. When they got back in the house he would say ‘That was grand now.’ Never once did he try to explain what he got from executing this exercise.
Irritation at being cast in the role of coercer made her bad tempered on the telephone with Valerie, who rang only to express admiration for what she was about to do.
‘Mother is so excited,’ Valerie said, ‘she can’t stop talking about it.’
‘Don’t,’ Angela said, ‘I can’t bear it. You know as well as I do the whole thing will be the most terrible anti-climax.’
‘Oh, it might not be—it might be lovely—the sun might shine, you never know.’
‘I do know.’
‘Anyway, I think it’s marvellous and I know Mother and Father do too. And you’ll have the children to help.’
‘Valerie, don’t talk rubbish. Children are never a help.’
‘Well, Mother just loves to be with them.’
‘She doesn’t. Within minutes they drive her crazy and then I have to spend all my time keeping them apart.’
‘At least it will be a rest.’
‘That’s very unlikely.’
‘Would you like me to come and help then?’
‘I would hate you to come and help. It would only make the situation worse.’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘Don’t be so touchy. You know what I mean, or you ought to. Anyway, it would be a waste—save yourself for another time when I can’t manage it. They can come to you later in the summer when Mother is stronger.’
‘They’re always welcome,’ Valerie said.
It took Angela’s breath away—Valerie saying something like that—about Mother and Father being welcome, about looking forward to having them—and coming out with similar platitudes and refusing to admit they were lies. Even after Mother and Father had been to stay with her she kept up the pretence. ‘They had a lovely time here,’ she would say. ‘Father was quite happy pottering around the town and Mother enjoyed the view.’ It drove Angela mad. Father had told her how he hated Manchester where Valerie lived. ‘It’s a filthy big town,’ he would say, ‘dirt and noise, disgusting. Don’t know what she wants to go and live there for—no peace, nothing.’ And the only comment Mother had ever passed about the view she was reputed to enjoy was that it made her dizzy, living in a flat so high up. There were vague mumblings from both of then—quickly stifled—about not getting enough to eat because Valerie didn’t eat enough herself to feed a sparrow, and about the terrible heat that stifled them in her sixth-floor flat, and of how they feared the lift. Nothing they said added up to having had the good time Valerie maintained they had had. The only explanation Angela could come up with was that either Valerie needed to keep up the myth because the truth was too distressing, or that she simply did not know what the truth was. In which case she was exceedingly lucky.
‘Sadie,’ Angela said, ‘sit in the back please.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘I’ll be sick if I sit in the back.’
‘So will I,’ Angela said firmly, ‘and I need to be in better shape than you today.’
‘There isn’t even room in the back.’
‘It’s your fat bum,’ said Max.
‘Fuck yourself,’ Sadie said.
‘Stop that language,’ Angela shouted. The whole street could hear them. ‘Just get in and shut up. There’s plenty of room.’
‘When will the first stop be?’ Tim said.
‘Oh god—we haven’t even started yet.’
‘I just want to know, that’s all.’
‘In two hours’ time.’
‘Two hours? But we usually stop in one—we usually—’
‘Oh shut up—I don’t know when we’re going to stop—when we need to, that’s when. If only you would all be a little more grown up.’
‘Listen who’s talking,’ Sadie said.
‘Look,’ Angela said, turning round to face her. ‘I am tired and fed up and I don’t like doing this any more than you do so it’s hardly surprising I’m bad tempered—’
‘Just don’t take it out on us.’
‘I’m not taking anything out on anyone—’
‘—I’m just asking for a little consideration, that’s all—a little understanding—some ordinary sympathy—’
‘Oh, god.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very, very much.’
Sadie burst out laughing, and tears of humiliation came into Angela’s eyes.
She had put herself into a ridiculous position, just as Father used to—throwing the hat out so ostentatiously that all her daughter wanted to do was be sick into it. She had whined and whimpered and begged for mercy in those sanctimonious tones that made nonsense of what she was asking for. Mother had never done that. Mother would be grey-faced with visible exhaustion yet never let out a single moan. She would be carrying all the worries of the world on her poor shoulders yet never try to unload them. It was Father who pointed out the obvious and made them all jump to help Mother and they hated him for the way in which he did it. ‘She’ll be dead before you notice,’ he would shout, and ‘you’ll appreciate her when she’s gone.’ It had thrown them into a panic, rushing to get things for Mother, forcing her to put her feet up, swearing they would be better children. And she had just sighed and said she could manage and that had cut them to shreds.
Sadie, however, had laughed, and rightly. Angela was compelled on the long journey down to St Erick to admit that her attitude was ludicrous. It was crass and stupid to roar in a bull-like way that you were tired—nobody could believe it. It was contemptible to say she did not want to go to St Erick and to boast that she was being dutiful. Nobody ever called forth compassion in that way. She knew Sadie despised her double standards and failed to see her motives were honourable. She had always hoped that by being open about all her joys and troubles she would achieve a depth of understanding with her children that Mother had never had with them, and that when they grew up that harmony would remain. But she had been mistaken. Exposing her own anguish only severed communication.
She sat half mesmerized by the traffic on the motorway wondering what would happen if she simply abandoned all her responsibilities. Suppose she were to stay in bed and let them all get on with it? Suppose she were never to telephone or write to Mother again? Suppose she were to do only those things she wanted to do and fret only about herself and wait for others to look after her for a change—what would happen? She did not want to be so important. She did not want to control anyone’s destiny. She wanted to fade quietly into the background and have no one at all relying upon her. But she could not do that. She was a Mother, and Mothers stood like rocks, immovable and solid, while all the rest eddied around them.
‘You’re shivering,’ Ben said.
‘I know. I think I must be getting a cold.’
‘That’s all we need.’
He had not meant to be unkind. He never was. But in her fragile state the remark was enough to start her crying again and she had to take refuge in a fit of pretend sneezing until she had finished. Mothers did not cry in front of children.
‘Filling the car with germs,’ Sadie murmured, and rolled down a window. A blast of cold air whipped across Angela’s neck and brought her out in goose pimples.