A Mother's Love (35 page)

Now she sat limp and huddled, her eyes sore from crying, her head reeling from all the things she had said, half of them untrue, the other half silly supposition.

She had never seen such a look on his face as when he backed away. He’d said not a word in his defence to her wild accusations of betrayal – that he had probably been unfaithful to her for years; had probably even sought the services of prostitutes for his carnal obsession; that this was probably one of the reasons why he hadn’t touched her for years.

It suited her to slide around the real truth of their rift: cringing from her wifely duties, she had no one but herself to blame if he had sought affection somewhere else. Yet in righteous fury she had screamed at him to get out, never come back, that she hated him, never wanted to see him again. As she collapsed weeping on her bed, exhausted by her own tirade, he had turned and left without a word.

She heard him running down the stairs. She had an urge to run after him, tell him that she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to hurt him, that she did trust him. But her body wouldn’t obey her. By the time it did and she’d sat up, the front door had slammed and he was gone.

Of course he would come back, she was sure of that. She sat on the edge of her bed, trying to think clearly. It wasn’t easy with her head so muzzy. When he returned in a while, she would fall at his feet and beg forgiveness. She would tell him she trusted him, would trust him for ever more; that she understood how Sara, with her slimy underhanded ways, had tried to tempt him, but that she knew him to be a finer man than to be tempted by a slut of a girl she was ashamed to call her daughter. She would tell him how much she needed him and that she would try to change. She would confess that she’d been thoroughly stupid to listen to a child, and yes, she would be a proper wife to him. She thought all this and slowly relaxed, her tears drying as she waited for him to return. He was probably walking off his anger, and rightly so. And he’d have forgiven her by the time he retraced his steps homeward. But in the meantime she felt so ill.

The half hour of genteel physical training suitable for young ladies within the high school’s walled playing field had brought a healthy glow to Sara’s cheeks. It accentuated her dark hair, now braided, and her clear blue eyes. A head taller than most of the other girls, she looked almost too old for school despite her school pinafore.

She stood breathing deeply from the healthy exercise, smiling her enjoyment of it as the school’s headmistress appeared from the main building. The grave expression on Miss Haverfield’s heavy features as she drew near banished Sara’s smile and caused it to be replaced with a frown of consternation. What had she done wrong to bring the woman out here?

‘Sara,’ began Miss Haverfield, not unkindly. ‘Please come with me.’

Sara followed bleakly. ‘What have I done, Miss Haverfield?’

‘Nothing, child. You have done nothing. Please follow me.’

Their footsteps echoing across the hall and along the corridors, Sara three paces behind, they proceeded to the headmistress’s study at the front of the building. Miss Haverfield held the door open for her, and Sara went in. The hushed air inside the room was in sharp contrast to the echoing corridors.

Standing by the desk Sara recognised the short figure and round face of the Reverend Crombie, vicar of their local church. He too looked sombre, and had obviously been waiting for her. He came forward.

‘My dear child …’ Advancing, he seemed to be much closer to her than she was to him in some unaccountable way. ‘My dear child, how can I begin to tell you?’ Sara stood looking at him in bewilderment. ‘My child, I have some terrible news to impart …’

He stopped to glance at the headmistress. ‘May she sit down?’

‘By all means.’ Miss Haverfield brought one of the several heavy, straight-backed, green leather-seated chairs that stood around the eau-de-Nil papered walls. Dutifully, Sara sat, already feeling dread pumping with sickening beats through her chest.

‘What is it? Is it my mother?’ She’d always felt something might happen to Mother. She didn’t know why, only that Mother seemed vulnerable enough for something awful to happen to her one day.

Mr Crombie shook his head. ‘It isn’t your mother. You must try to be brave, my child.’

She knew then. In that brief second before the beloved name was uttered, she knew. The tidings coming faintly through a whirlpool-roaring of disbelief, her soul tore itself loose inside her – like something ripped out of her to leave a salty internal bleeding of tears through which details of the accident became jumbled together.

In a plea for what Mr Crombie was saying not to be true, her eyes met his. The man was smiling at her. A smile of sympathy. A smile meant to soothe but which was a travesty. A small round face filled with teeth. She couldn’t take her eyes from those teeth, felt that when at any time in her future she thought of this moment she would recall only teeth, a white-fenced barrier between herself and reality – or unreality – as the details were unfolded for her.

Walking fast, not thinking where he was going, Harriet’s accusations ringing in his ears, Matthew had turned into Mare Street. He had not heard the warning cry of the motorist.

This, Sara in part, deduced later.

What she did learn as the news was gently broken to her was that he had stepped off a kerb without looking, and had been bounced off the oncoming vehicle into the path of a brewer’s dray. The great iron-shod hooves of one of the terrified Clydesdales had struck him, and the wheels of the heavy wagon, fully laden with barrels and unable to pull up sharply enough, had delivered the coup de grace. The Reverend was so sorry.

Sara came home to a house that held people but still felt empty. Many times over the years the house had known Matthew’s absence, but part of him had always been there, awaiting his return. Now that presence was gone. All her mother’s crying would not fill it; a hundred people clustered within its walls would not fill it; all the sunlight in the world pouring in at its windows would never again bring the feeling of his being there somewhere, even though Sara clung desperately to the impression that at any moment he might walk in at the door.

Jamie had been told. Sent home to mourn his father, he stood about looking suitably lugubrious. Never having been close to his father, he watched his mother’s grief-swollen face with a kind of passive resignation, longing only for all this to be over so that he could return to school.

Sara, sent home within hours of being told, found her mother inconsolable. She tried to do what she could to comfort, but her efforts went unacknowledged, and she even found herself pushed fiercely away. Trying to tell herself that it stemmed purely from grief, she knew that wasn’t true: it had always been this way. And so she shrank into herself to nurse her own lonely grief.

She hadn’t yet been able to cry. Tears might have diminished the pain inside her, building up so much that it must eventually burst through. But it didn’t; it just kept on accumulating, being reabsorbed, only to accumulate again. It was as though her own eyes were barriers to the tears that should be shed, until all she could do was screw herself up bodily to relieve the pressure. How then could she ever take away any of her mother’s sense of loss when her own was so profound that it was squeezing the life out of her?

She couldn’t speak of Matthew. Not yet. How could it have happened so suddenly, so cruelly? If he had to depart this life, it should have been gently, with her there to comfort him. This violent ending – this wonderful light gone out with no chance of farewell – it was beyond endurance.

Sitting beside her mother on the sofa in the dim, curtain-drawn parlour, any word of comfort became a farce, inadequate, trite.

‘I know what you are feeling.’

‘No you don’t!’ The reply was harsh. ‘I loved him so much.’

In her heart Sara heard the echo:
So did I – more than you will ever know.

The small woman beside her had stiffened as though divining her thoughts, condemning her for them, cringing from that cautious half-embrace she had attempted to offer. Sara wasn’t surprised. She had never cuddled her mother in her life, and was deprived of that privilege even now.

Instead she looked about the dimmed parlour, fixing on the large, heavily framed wedding photo hanging from the picture rail. Beneath its covering of black cloth she knew every detail of it: sepia, a studio photograph, Matthew seated, her mother standing beside and slightly behind him, one hand on his shoulder, small oval face serious, behind them an arbour of flowers. Another small oval-framed photo sat on the mantelpiece: Matthew on holiday, smiling, happy. That too was concealed, black-draped. Did he still smile beneath that piece of black cloth?

Sara turned her eyes away and saw Jamie sitting by the window, having resisted his mother’s pleas to come and sit beside her. With him sat Aunt Clara, every now and again parting the drawn curtains to peep out on to the street below for sign of her Fred and Annie and Robert.

They had gone to sort out funeral arrangements on behalf of the helpless widow. They would be bringing Grandma and Great Aunt Sarah back with them, the house again full of people yet still as empty as ever.

She was thinking this when Harriet’s frantic voice startled all three, making Aunt Clara gasp, the curtains falling back from her hand.

‘You!’ came the cry. ‘You didn’t
love
him. You just wanted …’

A gush of tears engulfed the rest as Harriet’s convulsive sobbing filled the room, only to be disrupted by yet another hysterical outburst.

‘It was an accident … an accident, I tell you!’

‘I know,’ Sara endeavoured and this time her mother didn’t shrink from the arm she put around the small, quivering shoulders.

‘It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t mean it to happen that way.’

Clara came hurrying to her other side. ‘Of course you didn’t.’

The sobbing had become a convulsion of hiccupping. ‘I only tried to keep him away from me … But he fell … Right to the bottom. I didn’t mean to push him. But he kept on and on. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I had to! I had to!’

Jamie was looking frightened. Clara had half risen, startled.

‘What’s she talking about?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I don’t know,’ Sara said, but it was dawning on her that this was about an entirely different person. Her mother’s mind had gone back into the past, and she was confusing the death of one husband with another.

As gently as she could, she tried to help ease the mind back to the present.

‘It’s Matthew, Mum.’ How raw the name sounded on her lips, her heart an aching weight against her ribs to have him here alive again. How it hurt to utter that beloved name. ‘Matthew.’

Her mother had leaned away from her, staring at her with vacant eyes – no, not vacant, querying, confused, as though not properly recognising her.

‘Matthew?’ The convulsions stopped temporarily. ‘No – he’d have protected me if he’d been here … He’d have stopped him. He didn’t care I was eight months gone. Only wanted his pleasure. I tried to push him away but he fell all the way down from top to bottom. He didn’t get up. I knew he was dead. I killed him. I didn’t mean to. I only meant to push him away to make him leave me alone …’

She broke off abruptly. Her grey eyes, from staring only into the past, became in a moment aware of the present; and, seeing her daughter, grew full of hatred. As Sara made to touch her again, she flinched away like a startled animal.

‘No! You’re trying to drag me down there with him. I won’t let you. You’re nothing to me. You’re nothing!’

‘Mum.’ Sara interrupted the babble. ‘I’m Sara. I’m your daughter.’

‘No you’re not! You’re his. You’re just like him. Not mine.’

Fear clutched momentarily at Sara. ‘But you are my mother?’ Her plea was like a child trying to make something come true that might not be. ‘You did give birth to me? You did, didn’t you?’

‘I wish I hadn’t.’ The words hissed. ‘Him – your vile father – put you inside me. Against my will. He didn’t care how he hurt me. Just went on pushing and pushing with his filthy need whenever he wanted me. He forced you inside me. And then wanted more. Couldn’t leave me alone, even when … No, you’re not my child. You’re his.’

Prompted to fresh sobbing by her memories, Harriet rocked herself while Sara stared at her, feeling some relief that she wasn’t what people called a love-child – an odd reference when, even born in wedlock, she had not come into existence out of love. She knew that now without a doubt.

The sense of relief did not stay long, replaced by a wave of bitter understanding of her mother’s unnatural revulsion of a daughter born out of pain and cruelty – her own father’s cruelty – herself the result of it. Rejection – that was what she had inherited, her mother blaming her for the sins of her father. Why must she be the one to be rejected?

Not only Mother, Matthew too. That night before his death yawned now in her memory like a cold, bleak cavern. He had come to her as usual, and as usual had talked about the journal. Recalling their differences in Brittany – Matthew stalking on ahead that afternoon to avoid her company for the rest of the vacation – she had been so unhappy. But for two of his visits after the holiday there had been no tension, nothing said or done to disturb the content and tranquillity of sitting together for an hour talking – just talking. She had been so relieved to know it was all healed.

But that last evening it had begun all over again – the trembling of his hands, the tremor in his voice, and then Matthew’s lips had touched hers for the first time ever, the sweet feel of them almost making her swoon. Then he was bearing her back on to the coverlet, and she was too overwhelmed to wonder what he was doing. Suddenly his weight against her had lessened and he had pushed himself away from her to stand with his hands clenched on either side of his cheeks. ‘God forgive me!’ She had heard his agonised cry.

His expression had been terrifying, looking down at her as one might regard a loathsome beetle or a filthy beggar. Beneath the fair moustache the lips that a moment before had been wonderful upon hers, had been twisted – with what? Hate? Repugnance? Again the pain and bitterness of being thrust away, of being shunned, unwanted, had torn through her heart.