Every Day Is Mother's Day (4 page)

She looks different, Muriel notices, more harassed, more starting and looking in corners. Since last Friday’s discoveries.

She is fumbling in her purse now. She lays out certain coins on the kitchen table.

“For your tea and biscuits,” she says.

Muriel lets them lie for a time. She practises fixing her eyes on Evelyn but looking straight through her to the wood of the cupboard at her back. She practises wiping all thoughts out of her mind. At the same time she must watch Evelyn, to see that she is still mumbling over her own concerns, not looking up with the comprehension she dreads. Finally, when Muriel can bear the suspense no longer, she snatches up the coins and holds them in her hands. Evelyn lays out more on the table. “For the milk-money. Tomorrow.” Evelyn shuffles out of the kitchen, but in a moment she is back. “My envelopes,” she says, her voice querulous. “My white envelopes for putting in the milkbottles. They have torn them all.” She opens the kitchen drawer where she keeps her ration books and ends of string, her paper bags and cotton reels and farthings.

“Lock and key,” she says. “I shall have to buy more and keep them under lock and key.”

She tears the corner of a paper bag and puts the money into it. She folds the remainder of the bag and puts it back in the drawer. Once again tomorrow he will take the money and go away, without having to knock at the door; when the price goes
up he will put a note through the letterbox. They have teased her so often with their rappings that she tries not to go to the door for any unnecessary reason; tries not to set the precedent of being in a certain place at a certain time, in case they set traps. Suddenly vindictive, she turns to Muriel: “I think of stopping you going to these Handicapped Classes. What good does it do? I think of stopping you.” In a monotone, Muriel begins to repeat her words. “Stop it, stop it,” Evelyn screams at her. There is terror in the girl’s face. Evelyn waddles from the room.

And once more: the match rasps against the box, the flame wavers up; Muriel watches her flesh shrinking away from the heat, and feels pain. She allows the flame to play over her wrist until it burns out in her fingers. Feels, feels. Taking the scissors, uses the point to draw blood. Again, feels.

“If you’re going, if you’re going at all, it’s time you got ready. Are you listening to me?”

Muriel sits with her arms clamped down to her sides, willing her mother to turn. The blisters are forming now on her raw skin, the blood has dried. Evelyn shows no signs of recent pain.

“Here.” Evelyn goes to the chest of drawers and impatiently wrenches one open, tossing a cardigan and a pair of thick woollen stockings onto the bed. Her water-eyes darting, Muriel sees that Evelyn’s forearms are unmarked. So however it came about that her thoughts were read again (as good as read), even if half an hour ago Evelyn was thinking in her brain, she has not been in all parts of her today. Still, unless…unless the marks will show up later. Evelyn turns, and sees only her daughter’s shuttered face with its habitually blank gaze. She begins again to grumble about the trouble it gives her, getting Muriel ready for the class and setting her going. Only the thought of the Welfare people coming to the house stops her from keeping Muriel at home. “What do you want to go there for anyway? Going on a bus with a lot of other people with things wrong with them, cripples and people not right in the head. One day they’ll put them on that bus and take them and
gas them, and then you’ll wish you’d stayed at home with your mother.” She knows Muriel is not listening to her. She is looking sceptically at the clothes on the bed. She goes to her drawers and hunts through for the pink fluffy cardigan.

“Grey with dirt,” Evelyn says contemptuously. “If you won’t give it to me to wash I won’t let you wear it again after this week. They will suppose I don’t see to your cleanliness.”

She gapes. Her jaw unhinges and her eyes grow round. Muriel is not in any doubt now. Evelyn has not been in her body today, not even very much in her brain. She is completely surprised, Muriel thinks. To be helpful, always to be helpful, she holds up her arms for Evelyn’s inspection. A low moan comes from Evelyn.

“They have been torturing you,” she says. “They have been here in your room, torturing you.” Moaning again, she washes her arthritic hands together. Could you not cry out? You have gagged me, Muriel thinks. Up the stairs you would have come, rushing to take my pain for yourself. With what? Sharp blades and fire, Muriel says, in her casually dead voice. Now Evelyn is smashing her way out of the room and along the landing, quite heedless of the usual mockery as she passes the door of the spare room, and Muriel can hear her retching behind the closed bathroom door. Putting her hand to her belly, Muriel feels a little wash of the sickness to come.

Now Lauderdale Road, homecoming. Screened by the high bushes, Muriel takes out her coins to count them. Some of them have gone. Spent, she thinks dully, expended. What are these heads, she wonders, whose are these heads upon them? She slips a hand in her pocket and takes out the little looking-glass that she picked up from where it was lying on a counter in a shop. She presses the sides of her skull, to keep in her memory the places she has seen.

Evelyn drives questions into her like hooks. Did they see,
did they remark upon your arms, what people were there, were there baskets made at that place, was there singing of songs, of what type and number, kind and shape, were the biscuits you ate? Of the tea, was it pale or brown, is there sugar in that tea, do they give you the sugar as you are accustomed, in lumps or spoons from basins, and do they place it there for you or do you yourself take what you suppose you need? Of the singing: is there piano or other instrument to accompany it? She knows nothing, Muriel thinks with contempt. She makes her face frozen up.

“Oh, you are stonewalling again,” Evelyn says furiously. That night when she enters her room she will find it almost festal, the pieces of the torn envelopes littering the carpet and sibilating in the draughts, like confetti.

If they had not been pushing her about that morning, if they had not been trying to do her bodily injury, she would not have
smashed the plantpot or found the letter underneath, in the bottom of the basket.

This is old, she said to herself. It has been here for some time. This was May, it is now late June, therefore certainly there have been Thursdays when…there was time unaccounted for. Yet time in the house was moving now at its own speed, in fits and starts. Food decayed on the plates, insects bred in the dark. The place was more and more crowded. Useless to try to talk to Muriel, to ask her for some account of the letter. Muriel rarely spoke now; it was like going back to her childhood. More and more, when Evelyn was in a room with her daughter, she felt as if no one was there.

At first, Evelyn had said, “Perhaps you need not go to this new place. They won’t want you. They are always saying there is pressure on their faculties.” She was afraid that they would call,
and when the knocking did come, at an unaccustomed time of day, she had taken Muriel into the back room and made her sit quietly until the caller had gone away. That morning she had not felt like seeing anyone, combating them, dealing with anyone at all. It had been enough of a shock to find that morning’s trail of messages. First the little mirror that she had never seen before lying on the hall table, a tawdry affair of pink plastic, and the twist of papers round it with the insect capitals:
LOOK AT YOUR FASE
.

Then she had hunted them through the house:
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THIS PLASE
and
YOU ARE PUTING IN MY PLASE
and
SHE SHALL BE PUT IN HER PLASE
and, last of all,
ANOTHER IS IN HER PLASE
.

The day she received the second letter from the Welfare had been much calmer. There had been no messages lately, no buffetings on the landing and stairs, no thefts of her property. It had been Muriel’s problem that was uppermost in her mind; or Muriel’s condition rather. She strove to keep it in perspective. The invention and ingenuity of the parallel world had amazed her in recent months, its many and new manifestations, the closeness of its stinking breath on her neck. Periods of calm followed by new alarms, the torturing of Muriel, the closing off to both of them, permanently now, of certain parts of the house. In the circumstances, Muriel’s pregnancy could only be felt as a lesser shock.

“Both mad, if you ask me,” Florence Sidney was saying. “You might as well try to fly through the window as help either of them.”

She was standing by the window, which had perhaps helped to indicate the improbability to her mind; she was looking out at her nephew and her nieces, playing among the windfalls in the disarrayed late summer garden. “I haven’t seen Muriel
for—” She turned her head. It was painfully evident that her sister-in-law was not listening to her. Sylvia was launched on a series of questions.

“And may I ask what you intend to do with yourself now?”

“Do now? Well.” The questions seemed to make no sense. What does anyone do now?

“With your life. With the rest of your life. That’s what I’m talking about, Florence.”

“Well, I’ll do the same as everybody,” Florence said. Limp on, eyes front, towards the grave.

“I mean, it’s no kind of life, is it? For anybody?”

“What had you in mind?”

“You want to put the past behind you. Get out and live a bit. You want to join some Societies. Get yourself a new girdle.”

Florence didn’t speak. She came away from the window; she never admitted it, but the antics and the shrieking of the children got on her nerves.

“The trouble with you is that you don’t make the best of yourself,” Sylvia said. “I’m not running you down, I’m only telling you out of the kindness of my heart. You’re no beauty queen, but you could do yourself up.”

“What for?” Florence sat down by the tea-trolley.

“For the fellers,” Sylvia said conspiratorially.

“I don’t know any fellows.”

“Well, and you never will, will you, if you keep mouldering in the house? What’s stopping you now? Your mother’s been put away, you don’t have to stop in and mind her anymore.”

“I wish you would not use that expression,” Florence said. Any of those expressions really; redolent of your time at the cooked meats factory. Sylvia laughed; she patted her hair, puffed out and lacquered in a style that had passed its apogee some years before. It was impossible to imagine her without this hairstyle; like a helmet, it covered her weakest point, the head. She was, Florence thought, a strange blend of savage self-
assertion and abject dependence; pathetic and ferocious by turns. Florence knew so little of the married women of her generation that she imagined Sylvia to be unusual.

“It is a home for the elderly,” Florence said. “A sanctuary for the twilight years.”

“Get away,” Sylvia said. “Your mother’s off her rocker. Colin doesn’t keep any secrets from me.”

“Really?” Florence said. “By the nature of a secret, you would not know if he did.”

“You’ve room to talk, about the folks round the corner.”

“It wasn’t idle gossip. I haven’t seen them for some time. They are old neighbours, though they are not people whom we have known. I am concerned.”

Sylvia yawned, leaning back and allowing her fingers a token flutter before her mouth.

“You want to be concerned with yourself. I’m telling you. Smarten yourself up and get out a bit. The trouble with this family, it’s too introvert.”

“Oh, is that Colin’s trouble?” Florence asked.

“Well, he
was
introvert.”

“But you remedied it.”

“What kind of a life is that?” Sylvia asked. “I had other offers. I could have got married four times over.”

“That might have been unwise,” Florence said gently. “You know, you’ve changed, Sylvia. You will have your opinions now. I remember when Colin first brought you home.”

Sylvia blushed furiously. So she remembers too, Florence thought. Father had been alive, of course, quite hale and hearty. Mrs. Sidney wore a new Crimplene suit in powder blue with bracelet-length sleeves. She herself put on a beige jersey wool. There were fruit scones and a Victoria sandwich. Mother’s gimlet eyes spotted a traycloth insufficiently starched, and (although often they were not starched at all) she whisked it off. As she waited to meet the girl her son intended to marry, one pointed finger rubbed and rubbed at a spot on the wooden arm
of her chair. It had been summer, a day very like this. Sylvia’s substantial black brassiere had shown clearly under her short cotton frock, and she had emitted great guffaws of nervous laughter whenever she was addressed. Father had been exquisitely civil. Colin had not known where to look. Florence and her mother had agreed later that, seeing her in the setting he was used to, Colin would be sure to see that he was making a mistake. But he hadn’t.