Cooee (2 page)

It is astonishing, in fact, that I care for him as I do: so much of love is a response, an answering involuntary warmth to the warmth projected. It mirrors that warmth: no, not just mirrors it, reflects and expands it. Dominic has never tried to attract me, never tried to radiate this warmth, this tenderness, kindliness, that ought to exist between us, not only on my side.

But without the most minimal offering of affection from Dominic, finding itself treated with this entire absence of tenderness, my love simply becomes more stubborn: it digs itself in like some spiky leather-leaved plant whose only object is survival. It feeds off itself, since there is nothing else to sustain it.

Sophie is a loving child. Sweet-natured and gentle. It's a problem, really: how will she ever defend herself in a hostile world? So far she has met kindness at every turn — but, as we all know, that won't last.

Sometimes I think Kate ought to try to toughen her up a bit — so she'll be a more competent person than her mother, apart from anything else. But she says she hasn't the heart, and I understand that. I say
Humph
, and cast my eyes upward, and drum my fingers, and tell Kate she's a fool; but I see what she means.

When the child comes to me (which she does, after school, Monday to Thursday, four o'clock prompt); when she slopes in the door with her wide, shy smile, her clear green eyes and her ready hug and kiss for Gandie, I melt, too. I look forward to seeing her, and I'm sorry when she leaves. Even when I love people dearly (and I am a loving person; I am not a cold person), I am usually at least a little relieved when they leave, when we part. Such a strain, sometimes, supporting relationships, maintaining conversations. Sophie's not a strain.

She's taken to asking me about days past, about when I was a young woman, about when her own mother was a child. I found this hard, at first. Kate was an unremarkable child by any standards, after all, and her childhood was undistinguished: I found it difficult to reach back through the tangle of memory, to pluck bright stories from the long-ago. But once I started, I found I could manage. For a twelve-year-old she is quite mature, I think. Kate would not at that age have been able to grasp some of the concepts her daughter easily handles. She startled me when she first began to ask questions.

‘Gandie, you used to be married to Grandpa Steve, didn't you?'

I can see her, lolling against the kitchen table, her slim, tanned legs inelegantly splayed, white socks rucked about her ankles. It disconcerts me, this question: it comes like a mild bomb out of the blue, all kinds of straying tracer bullets to follow in its wake. I've never spoken to Sophie about Steve — why would I? — but somehow I've always assumed she understood the relationship.

We both turn up regularly for the big occasions — birthdays, school concerts and the like. It was difficult at first: we would eye each other suspiciously across the room, speak together only stiffly, draw a sigh of relief when we could withdraw from each other. I did, anyway, and I assume it was the same for him. As these things do, it has become easier over time.

We even sometimes go to each other's houses for a family event, although I think that is stretching the tape: how friendly can divorced couples ever be, after all? How can we step smoothly to meet each other over the mess of the past, the mangled trust, the dead dreams?

We have surfed together on a surging sea of bile and bitterness, leaving in our single wake a foul detritus, a jetsam of anger and shame and guilt and betrayal. It is obscene, really obscene, to expect us to maintain civilities. Still, we do it, for Sophie's sake. At least, that's why I do it, and I assume it's the same for him. And for Liam, of course: we do it for him, too.

‘You don't mind me asking, Gandie?' says Sophie, taking a bite of her apple and regarding me with slight anxiety.

‘No, no,' I say, heartily, lying through my teeth. ‘Of course I don't mind, sweetheart.' I do, of course. I mind terribly. She's fond of Steve: I don't want anyone filling her head with a lot of rubbish about the divorce, about how I behaved. ‘Yes, we were married.'

‘And then you stopped being married,' observes Sophie, cheerfully.

‘Yes. Yes, we did.'

‘Why, Gandie?'

Ah, why?

‘Well, honeybunch,' I say. ‘It was all a long time ago, you know.'

‘How long?'

I pause to think. I make more of a meal of it than I need to, as I count over my fingers, to try to give myself a bit of a buffer, a few moments to think, to make sure I don't blurt out something wrong. Steve and I separated when Kate was fifteen. Three years older than Sophie is now. Kate had Sophie when she was twenty. What an easy sum it is.

‘Seventeen years,' I say, brightly. ‘Good heavens, Sophie, seventeen years! What a long time that is. More than your life.'

Sophie absorbs this.

‘But why?' she says. ‘Whose fault was it?'

‘Sophie, honey, people sometimes decide not to keep on living together. There's nothing wrong about it; it needn't be anyone's fault. Grandpa Steve and I just decided not to keep on living together. It was all perfectly friendly.'

I mouth these barefaced lies in a kindly voice, watching my granddaughter's face. I don't blame her for looking dissatisfied. Why do we try to protect our children in this hopeless way?

When they are little, we put them to bed with the hot, rank breath of the wolf, slavering down the front of Granny's nightgown; we torment them with stories of children whose parents desert them in thorny, hostile woods, of children whose parents force them into the world on murderous quests, of children who do battle with ogres, who are imprisoned alone forever in dank stone towers or pierced by glass shards or abused by vindictive stepmothers, children who go to bed in their flowerlike innocence and unexpectedly fall asleep for a hundred years, waking to find the world still cruel but differently so.

And we expect them to sleep soundly.
Don't let the bedbugs bite
, we say, tapping their downy plump cheeks lightly as we leave them to the dark solitude of the bedroom. And then, when they are only a little older, we cannot find it in ourselves to tell them the plain truth, to admit that a marriage went badly wrong, that people lied and shouted and hated.

‘And then you married Max,' she states, bending to pat the old dog Borrow, who has a penchant for apples and licks the sweet juice from her fingers.

I rearrange my features to try to produce an impression of offhandedness, of undisturbed good humour.

‘Yes,' I say. ‘I married Max.' Well, near enough.

‘Gandie, you look so cross.'

‘No, no, sweetheart.' I stretch my lips to show how unconcerned I am.

‘You sure you don't mind me asking you about it?'

‘Heavens, no. It's just — sweetheart, Sophie love — it's such a long time ago, and I don't know — I mean — why are you suddenly talking about these things?'

‘Mum told me about it,' says Sophie, apparently losing interest and showing me what genuine unconcern looks like as she mooches off to glance at the newspaper, which is lying on the kitchen bench.

I will give Kate hell the next time I see her, I think, the old fury my daughter can always generate stirring deep and cold and snakelike inside me.

But then I think, later, she is twelve, after all, my Sophie. She will be adolescent, soon: to all intents and purposes, is already. She is of an age to take an interest in these things.

I suddenly wonder whether her periods have begun. Surely Kate would have told me? But I have noticed her little breast-buds under her white school T-shirts. A sliver of fear pricks my heart. It is at this point that your children start to change, to regard you with alien and uncommunicative eyes. It is when puberty kicks in, when hormones perk up, when the blistering new juices of life start to sizzle.
Hello
, you say.
Hello? It's me here. It is I, your loving mother. I haven't changed
. But they have.

I dread the day this happens to my Sophie, the day when she ceases to run to me with the fierce pressure of her kisses and her sharp, squeezing hugs. I dread her being caught up in the pitiless impassive tides of womanhood, the impersonal coercive rhythms, the bleeding and the desire and the pain.

We ought to have some kind of ritual to welcome our daughters into their maturity, into the sisterhood. There ought to be a ceremony, a thumbed cross of blood on the forehead, the musty perfume of incense, prophecies from the crones. Picking up a box of tampons from the supermarket shelf doesn't rate.

Not that the sisterhood is up to much, though. On the whole, taken by and large, really one would sooner not be part of it.

The next time I was alone with Kate I mentioned Sophie's new interest in Max. I didn't shout; I wasn't heated. I was quite mild about it, and there was no need for her to look sideways at me in that infuriating kicked-puppy way she has.

‘Sophie talked to me about Max,' I say.

She glances at me, drops her eyes. ‘Yes?' she says, politely.

‘You've been talking to her about Max.'

‘She asked me.'

‘She wouldn't have asked if she hadn't had some encouragement.'

‘Sophie's quick to pick things up. She doesn't need encouragement.'

‘She must have had some.'

‘Mum,' says Kate, with a conspicuous effort at patience that irritates me. ‘Mum, Max will come back one day. What are we meant to say to Sophie? Here's Max: he used to be married to Gandie, but we've never talked about him; we've never told you about him. What will she think then? Max was a fact in our lives, Mum. Is a fact. I know you and I don't speak of him, but there he is, just the same. And a fact in Sophie's life, too. We can't hide him. We can't pretend he never existed.'

‘He won't come back.'

‘I think he will,' says Kate, still not looking at me. Why will she never look at me when we speak? She never meets my eyes.

‘Have her periods started?' I ask, abruptly.

Kate is startled. ‘Sophie?'

‘Who else?'

‘Not yet.'

‘She's twelve.'

‘I know how old my daughter is, Mum.'

‘Well, then. I only wondered.'

‘Any day, I'd say. She's growing up fast.'

‘I can see that,' I snap. Why does she always state the obvious in those dulcet explanatory tones? She drops her eyes again, ducks her head in that exasperating way she has.

‘Mum, she is growing up. What I mean is, she's started to be interested in different things.'

‘Do you mean sex?'

‘Not really sex, no. Well, not that she's let on to me. But weddings, and babies, and that sort of thing. She's asked me lots about when I was little. When was I born, what happened, what sorts of toys did I have. That sort of thing.'

It's true. It isn't long before Sophie nobbles me about Kate as a baby.

‘Mum was your first baby, wasn't she, Gandie?'

‘Yes, honey.'

‘Were you very excited?'

‘Well, of course.'

‘Did you have a nursery all ready for her?'

‘I certainly did,' I say, brightly.

‘And toys and things?'

‘Yep.'

‘Cuddly toys?'

‘You bet.'

‘Mum says her favourite toy was a blue bunny called Thumper.'

I think I do remember a moth-eaten ugly old rabbit. Kate used to take it everywhere with her and fall into despair when she lost it, which happened frequently. It drove me mad.

‘Mum says Thumper was blue because you really wanted a boy and you got all blue things. Mum says you didn't really want a daughter.'

Sophie is munching a walnut brownie (I make them especially for her) and her enunciation is a little unclear, but there is no doubt she has just said this. She has presented it to me without animus, without any accusatory quality to the statement, in a matter-of-fact tone. It distresses me: it isn't true; and I've certainly never given Kate any reason to think it is.

‘That's not the way it was,' I say. ‘Of course I wanted your mum.'

‘She says you didn't. Mum says you only ever wanted boys. Mum says you weren't happy till you had Dominic.'

‘Well, darling, Mum's wrong.'

‘Okay. But why did you have all blue things?'

‘I didn't have all blue things. I had lots of different coloured things. In those days you didn't know what sex your baby was going to be, so I had some blue things and some pink.'

‘And some yellow?'

‘Probably.'

‘And some white?'

‘I suppose so. Sophie, it was a long time ago and I can't possibly remember what colour things I bought for your mum.'

‘Okay. That's cool, Gandie.' She is pacific as ever once her stubbornness has borne fruit.