Hester’s parenting techniques. But I know from experience that my parents don’t want to hear about that. My parents are always more enthusiastic about the idealised notion of the grandchildren than they are thenoisy, messy reality. That much is clear when we all congregate here or at Hester’s house at Christmas.
I sometimes suspect that, as far as my mother is concerned, the real purpose of family is to ensure she always has something to talk about if she bumps into Mrs Tucker at Tesco.
As is customary, she only half-listens to what I am saying about Toby and Rufus. My mother has never been a very engaged listener. Other people’s speech is useful mainly as a prompt. So when I mention Toby’s passion for Playmobil, she launches on an anecdote about a den Hester and I once built together using the clothes horse and all the clean towels in the airing cupboard – a story I’ve heard countless times before (although I now have no memory of the actual incident). I wonder how much of a connection my mother makes between the child I once was and the adult I now am. Usually she talks of my childhood as if it’s something that really happened only to her, as if I were only distantly involved.
We have crème caramel in stemmed glass dishes for dessert, and then I help to clear away. The evening stretches ahead of us: acres of it, as flat and featureless as the fields around the house. None of us can decently go to bed for hours.
We fill the time with coffee and mint chocolate thins in little slippery envelopes, and my mother lays the table for breakfast, and then we watch several finalists competing for a part in a London stage musical, and after that there’s a film, an action movie set in ancient Rome. My mother fidgets uneasily during the fight sequences and the sex scenes. In the second commercial break, she collects the cups and chocolate wrappers and says, ‘Well, Frances, I hope you have everything you need. Sleep well, dear.’ Then it’s just my father and me, sitting side by side in the darkened room, eyes fixed on the screen like astronauts preparing for countdown.
From time to time, I can hear the dog barking. It’s a lessangry sound now, as if she has started to adjust to her new status, as if she is now merely disconsolate.
We don’t watch the end of the movie, but switch over for the ten o’clock news.
Later, as I move around my room, picking the plastic film off the soap (as tiny and pearly-pink as prawn dim sum), brushing my teeth at the rinky-dink basin and running the flannel over my face, I hear my father escorting Margot through the house and ushering her, with a strange sort of chivalry, out of the front door (‘Come on, old girl, time for some fresh air’). I poke back the curtain an inch with a finger and watch the pair of them beginning a circuit of the village green, moving slowly between the benison of the lamp-posts, a stout elderly man and a stouter elderly dog, out in the wind and the dark.
Fifteen minutes later there’s the slight reverberation as the front door clicks. Lying in bed with the novel propped open on my chest and a notebook and pen ready on the bedside table, I hear Margot’s nails skittering down the corridor and my father’s muttered good night as he shuts her in the sunroom and then comes upstairs, wheezing faintly on every step.
The buzz of the bathroom extractor fan, the toilet flush, the fan switching off. Finally there’s silence.
This is the house where I grew up, and it means nothing to me, just as I mean nothing to it. There’s no sense when I’m here of being safe or understood. If anything, this is the place where I feel most alone, most unlike everyone else.
I learned to talk and walk here; I sat at the dining-room table painstakingly crayoning letters on sugar paper; I sowed mustard and cress upon thick wet layers of kitchen roll; I came down on Christmas mornings and received dolls and roller skates and bikes and, as time went on, book tokens
I sometimes suspect that, as far as my mother is concerned, the real purpose of family is to ensure she always has something to talk about if she bumps into Mrs Tucker at Tesco.
As is customary, she only half-listens to what I am saying about Toby and Rufus. My mother has never been a very engaged listener. Other people’s speech is useful mainly as a prompt. So when I mention Toby’s passion for Playmobil, she launches on an anecdote about a den Hester and I once built together using the clothes horse and all the clean towels in the airing cupboard – a story I’ve heard countless times before (although I now have no memory of the actual incident). I wonder how much of a connection my mother makes between the child I once was and the adult I now am. Usually she talks of my childhood as if it’s something that really happened only to her, as if I were only distantly involved.
We have crème caramel in stemmed glass dishes for dessert, and then I help to clear away. The evening stretches ahead of us: acres of it, as flat and featureless as the fields around the house. None of us can decently go to bed for hours.
We fill the time with coffee and mint chocolate thins in little slippery envelopes, and my mother lays the table for breakfast, and then we watch several finalists competing for a part in a London stage musical, and after that there’s a film, an action movie set in ancient Rome. My mother fidgets uneasily during the fight sequences and the sex scenes. In the second commercial break, she collects the cups and chocolate wrappers and says, ‘Well, Frances, I hope you have everything you need. Sleep well, dear.’ Then it’s just my father and me, sitting side by side in the darkened room, eyes fixed on the screen like astronauts preparing for countdown.
From time to time, I can hear the dog barking. It’s a lessangry sound now, as if she has started to adjust to her new status, as if she is now merely disconsolate.
We don’t watch the end of the movie, but switch over for the ten o’clock news.
Later, as I move around my room, picking the plastic film off the soap (as tiny and pearly-pink as prawn dim sum), brushing my teeth at the rinky-dink basin and running the flannel over my face, I hear my father escorting Margot through the house and ushering her, with a strange sort of chivalry, out of the front door (‘Come on, old girl, time for some fresh air’). I poke back the curtain an inch with a finger and watch the pair of them beginning a circuit of the village green, moving slowly between the benison of the lamp-posts, a stout elderly man and a stouter elderly dog, out in the wind and the dark.
Fifteen minutes later there’s the slight reverberation as the front door clicks. Lying in bed with the novel propped open on my chest and a notebook and pen ready on the bedside table, I hear Margot’s nails skittering down the corridor and my father’s muttered good night as he shuts her in the sunroom and then comes upstairs, wheezing faintly on every step.
The buzz of the bathroom extractor fan, the toilet flush, the fan switching off. Finally there’s silence.
This is the house where I grew up, and it means nothing to me, just as I mean nothing to it. There’s no sense when I’m here of being safe or understood. If anything, this is the place where I feel most alone, most unlike everyone else.
I learned to talk and walk here; I sat at the dining-room table painstakingly crayoning letters on sugar paper; I sowed mustard and cress upon thick wet layers of kitchen roll; I came down on Christmas mornings and received dolls and roller skates and bikes and, as time went on, book tokens
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