Postcards From Berlin (30 page)

“Are you sure you should?”

“Darling, I know I had a problem,” she says. Brisk and impatient: a bit cross with me. “But that’s all in the past. I’ve done
the Twelve Steps; I know my limits now. Anyway, I got a nice Moselle in specially.” She goes to the fridge. “It would be a
sin to let it go to waste. Get me some glasses, would you, darling?”

I take two glasses from the cabinet in the living room. The heat has gone from the day. The blue cool air from outside brushes
my face like a hand as I pass the window. I look down into the street. The sky is deepening above the lime trees, and the
bars are opening, waiters setting tables out on the rough cobbled pavement. The Café Esposito is filling up with young people
in studenty casual clothes, combat trousers and T-shirts. Their easy talk and laughter float in through the window. And there
are musicians — a guitarist and a singer with a tambourine that he slaps against his thigh. The singer has a pleasant tenor
voice: he sings Simon and Garfunkel in heavily accented English.

My mother fills our glasses to the brim. When she bends her head, I see how sparse her hair is, the skin of the scalp showing,
pink and somehow vulnerable.

We sit by the open window, drinking quietly, suspended in this waiting summer stillness, hearing the laughter of strangers
and the singing from the street.

M
Y MOTHER CLEARS HER THROAT
.

“She’s such a pretty one, your little girl.… You were like that, Trina, the spitting image. Well, you’re still looking good,
darling,” She touches the silk of my sleeve. “This is beautiful,” she says. “I can see you’ve done really well for yourself.”

I shrug a little. I don’t know what to say.

“Don’t be modest,” she says. “I’m so happy for you, Trina. I so wanted you to do better than me, And you’ve certainly done
that, haven’t you? That’s such a comfort to me.… What does he do, your husband?”

“He’s in insurance — something in the city.”

“Oooh,” she says. “Something in the city. Very nice. And is he good to you? Is be kind?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, he’s been good to me.” I’m not sure how married I am anymore, but I don’t say that to her.

“And what about your painting?” she asks. “Are you still doing your painting?”

“Now and then. I’ve sold some pictures to a craft shop.”

“How lovely,” she says. “I always knew you’d do well. You get it from your father, of course. That arty streak. You take after
your father.…”

“You never used to talk about him much.”

“No,” she says. “No, perhaps I didn’t. Well, to be honest, I tried to forget all about him.” Slowly, she lights a cigarette,
the flame from the lighter flickering uncertainly in her eyes. “I’ve been thinking about him a bit, these past weeks, though.
Thinking back over things.” She blows out smoke. The air around her is thick; her face is veiled. “He was a total sod to me,”
she says. “He treated me very badly. But when there’s all that water under the bridge … I mean, it’s different for you, Trina,
you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.…”

“Tell me about him.”

“You’d have liked his painting,” she says. “Great big canvases, very colorful. I didn’t really understand them, to be honest.
Nudes, mostly, but he seemed to think it was all very spiritual.… He went off with one of his models in the end — when you
were just a baby.” Her voice has an edge of anger. “Well, how could I compete with that, I ask you? I was stuck in this poky
flat in Battersea, looking after you, and there she was in his studio, taking off her clothes.”

I nod, murmur something so she will carry on.

“I was head over heels to start with, mind,” she says. “That was me then. Always in love, all these dreams. It seems so strange
to me now.… He was a great romantic, was Christopher. He saw me sitting on a bus. Did I ever tell you? That was how we met.
I was just sitting there, and the bus had started to move, and he ran and caught the bus and came and sat beside me. He told
me I was the loveliest woman he’d ever seen.…” There’s pleasure for a moment in her wrecked face. “Well, I suppose I probably
did have a certain something, if I’m honest. I used to get a nice tan, and I liked to wear these little tartan skirts. Though
I say it myself, I probably looked the part. I’ve always tried to look after myself,” she says. “Well, you know that.… The
trouble is, I’ve just never had any confidence. Do you have any confidence, Trina?”

“I don’t know. Not much, probably.”

She takes a long slow sip of wine, looking out over the city. “He was the best man I ever had, really, your father,” she says
quietly.

This amazes me.

“You used to sound so angry with him.”

“Well, I was, of course.”

“Why wouldn’t you ever talk about him properly? I used to long for you to talk about him.…”

“Did you, darling?”

Outside, the sky is darkening, and there are white fairy lights at the cafés, caught like luminous little fish in the shadowy
nets of the trees. The music floats around us. The song has changed; it’s older, wilder, in some unknown language, with many
high notes, so the singer’s voice sounds like the voice of a woman: a lament, a song of infinite yearning, Slavic, perhaps,
or Yiddish, I don’t know how to tell.

“He was out of my league, if I’m honest,” she says after a while. “He had such nice manners. Classy.” She inhales deeply.
“Though I have to say he could have chosen better when he left. A right little tramp, she was,” she says with satisfaction.
“And definitely on the podgy side. Well, she was there, I suppose: conveniently to hand, so to speak.”

“What did he look like, my father?”

“I used to have a photograph,” she says. “I kept it all those years, but when I moved in with Karl I threw it away. Didn’t
I ever show you?”

I shake my head. I have a sensation of loss so bitter it’s like a taste on my tongue.

“Tell me,” I say.

She shrugs a little. “Tall, good-looking, everything you’d want. Strong looking, though appearances can be deceptive. His
health really wasn’t all that good when I met him. Trouble with this and that… But a big bull of a man — you wouldn’t know
it to look at him.”

I start to ask what kind of trouble, but she doesn’t seem to hear, she’s wandering off along some track of her own.

“You look back, and you think how it might have been different,” she says. “Well, you can’t help thinking these things. That
if this man or that man had stayed with you, it might all have worked out … I expect you think I’m hopeless, don’t you, Trina?
That I’ve got dreadful taste in men, that my life’s been a bit of a failure …”

I don’t say anything.

“That’s what you think, though, isn’t it? I know what you’re thinking, Trina. You might as well come out with it.”

And then all the hidden anger flares in me.

“Why did you do it?” My voice is harsh, loud. “Why did you send me to that place?”

“I wasn’t doing you any good,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t coping. It was all beyond me.…”

“But we could have managed. We could have got by.… Nothing could have been worse than that place. Nothing.”

It’s as if she’s flinching, pulling back into herself, as though she’s scared I’ll hit her; but she doesn’t turn away.

“I thought I couldn’t look after you,” she says. “I thought you’d have a better life. I knew I wasn’t getting it together.…
Trina, it was hard for me too. It was a hard life.”

The anger surges through me, threatens to sweep me away.

“You should never have let it happen. If was wrong, what you did.”

“But that Brian Meredith. He was nice enough, wasn’t he? He was very well turned out.”

“He was abusive. He was a cruel man.”

“He was always very nice to me,” she says. A bit hurt: as though it’s mean of me to question her opinion.

“He hit us round the head. He knew how to hit you so there wouldn’t be a mark on you. If you did something wrong — just the
stupidest little thing — you got shut in this room for weeks; you thought you’d lose your mind.”

“Those are terrible things to say, Catriona,” she says. As though it’s the saying that’s terrible, not the fact that these
things happened.

“That’s how it was. That’s where you sent me.”

“I didn’t know,” she says. “How was I to know? Why didn’t you tell me?”

This enrages me. “You never know anything. ‘It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know, …’ That’s your cop-out. So nothing
is ever your fault …” Suddenly, I can’t sit still: I get up, pace the floor. “You never loved me.” My voice is shrill, the
voice of a child. It echoes in the big room. “Not like a mother should.”

I want her to deny this, to still the echoes: Of course I love you, of course I do. She doesn’t say anything.

She’s looking away from me, staring down into the street.

“Perhaps there was something missing in me,” she says then. Slowly, edging toward the words. “I never quite felt that thing
you were supposed to feel — you know, when I had you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was fond of you, of course, and I was
proud of you because you were so cute, and people would say, What a pretty little thing, What a pretty baby … But those feelings
you’re meant to get when your baby’s put in your arms …” She shakes her head. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me,” she
says. “If you could do it again, you might want to do it differently.…”

“You stopped visiting,” I say. “You couldn’t even be bothered to visit me.”

“I knew you were angry with me,” she says. “I guess I gave up, really. I thought you wouldn’t want to see me. Well, you didn’t,
did you? Be honest, Trina. Not the way I was then … And by the time I got myself together, it was all too late.” Her voice
thickens, and the coughing starts again. “Story of my life,” she says through the cough. “I’ve never been lucky.”

The cough is her enemy: It has her in its grip now. She shakes with it; I fear that it will choke her. I get her some water,
my anger all spent suddenly. I sit beside her.

Eventually, it stops. She wipes her mouth and looks across at me.

“I’m ill,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Cancer. Too many fags.” She sounds quite matter-of-fact, but her face is troubled, darkened. “Nobody knows.…”

“Not even Karl?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t want to worry him. He’s got a lot on his mind. I said I had a little problem with my lungs.”

I think how she and I tell lies routinely, how we believe that we are kept safe by these lies.

“You ought to tell him. You can’t go through this on your own.”

She shrugs.

“But, darling, you know, he’s younger than me. He wouldn’t want to be hitched to a sick old woman. People don’t always stick
by you when you’re ill.… I can tell you because you’re family.” She taps her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray; a little
ash drifts down. “Things are as they are,” she says. “There’s nothing you can do.”

We’re very still; we just drink for a while, sitting there by the window. The rich smells of the summer city — pollen, exhaust,
decay — drift round us like a profound nostalgia. I look down into the street. At the Café Esposito the tables are all full
now. A girl is laughing, flinging back her hair, and lovers kiss under the lime trees, but the singer with the tambourine
has gone.

“I don’t pull down the blinds,” she says. “Not since they told me — you know, about the illness. I never pull down the blinds.
I like to see out of the window — to see as far as I can.”

There’s a look of such loss in her face.

I get up and go and put my arms around her shoulders. She feels frail, sparrow boned, like a child or someone very old. And
I know, as I touch her, her absolute weakness and helplessness, that something in her has died already: that she has given
up. This knowledge shocks me. That all this time, for all these years, I have felt her to have such a hold over me, to have
such power to shape and devastate me — and here she is in my arms, this tiny, shrunken women.

She rests her head against me for a moment.

“Well,” she says.

She raises her hand and puts in over mine. Awkwardly, as though it’s a gesture she doesn’t quite know how to do.

On the sofa, Daisy stirs. The beading hanging from the lamp casts broken patterns across her, lines of shadow stitching. We
watch as she turns over, flings one arm out on top of the eiderdown.

“Daisy,” says my mother. “It’s such a pretty name.… I’ve always liked flower names. I wanted to give you a flower name, you
know — I was going to call you Lily. But Christopher didn’t like it — he wanted to call you Catherine. That’s how we came
up with Catriona. I wasn’t having Catherine. I thought it was rather plain.” She pats my hand. “Not nearly special enough
— not for my baby.”

I
WAKE TO THE HOLLOW CHIMING
of a distant church clock and the high, sweet sound of swifts and the awareness, unnerving at first, in the confusion of
half wakefulness, that I am far from home. I put on my dressing gown and go quietly into the living room. My mother is there
already, in a thin robe with a tatty boa collar. She puts her finger to her lips: Daisy is still asleep, the duvet rising
gently with her even breath. We go to the kitchen and make coffee, not saying much. I feel awkward with my mother again, easily
irritated, last night’s intimacies blotted away by the white illusionless morning light. I drink my coffee quickly and dress
and go out to find a cash point, relieved be away from the flat for a while.

The street seems half asleep still. In front of the Café Esposito, the furniture is all stacked up, and the waiter is tipping
water from a bucket and brushing it over the pavement, so the flags shine in the bleached light. A smell of disinfectant catches
at my throat. I glance down a side street, where there’s a patch of waste ground, and beyond it the blank, windowless end
wall of a block of tenements. The wall is all blue-painted, and right in the middle someone has written “Ende,” high up, in
immaculate white brush strokes. A little movement of air shivers the leaves of the lime trees.