The Accidental Mother (26 page)

A
fter they had gone, Sophie sat in the shadows and listened to the silence of her home. It was a sound she had grown used to in her years in the flat, the sound of her private life, her very own bubble—a contented background hum. But somewhere lost in the silence was Bella, and suddenly Sophie wished with all her heart for noise and plenty of it.

She thought about Louis describing his daily walks with Bella, their exploration of the coast of St. Ives, the ideas and the stories they’d created as they walked. Either he was an excellent actor and a consummate con man
or
Tess was right—he was basically a good man who’d done some very stupid things. But how do you explain all that to a girl who once idolized her father and had found out that he was only human?

It seemed as if Bella was holding too tightly to herself and her sister to be able to consider letting anyone else, even her father, in. She was trying, with all her might, to hold on to Carrie and to love her in exactly the same way that she had when she had been dropped off for school on the day Carrie had died. No one knew better than Sophie how hard that was and how such an effort could wear you out.

Poking out from under the corner of Artemis’s chair was one of Bella’s many drawings. Sophie bent over and scooped it up. As usual it was a picture of the sea, drawn with bold swirls of gray, green, and blue felt-tips, leaving intentional gaps of white paper that did make it look as if it were a body of water rising and falling with the tide. In the midst of the sea were the mermaids, ten or so little curly, brown-haired girls garlanded with flowers, laughing and playing. They reminded Sophie of someone—Carrie, of course. In the background Bella had drawn the shore, always the same in each picture, a hill rising out of the sea with little box-shaped houses on its crest, carefully colored around so that they remained white.

Sophie looked at the drawing for a long time, and then she realized. The houses weren’t a fantasy, another construct of Bella’s fertile imagination—they were the houses in St. Ives. Bella had been drawing home.

Sophie placed the drawing on the coffee table and looked at her watch as she made her way to the bedroom. It was just after two—they had plenty of time before Izzy and Louis would be back from the show. Time to show Bella something that, for some reason, Sophie thought might be really important.

Sophie walked into the room and switched on the light. “We’re going out,” she said, throwing Bella’s coat at her.

Offended by the sudden glare, Artemis scampered out the window with an angry yowl, and Bella sat up, rubbing her eyes as her vision adjusted to the brightness. “I don’t want to go out,” she said bluntly.

“Yes you do,” Sophie said, “Come on, no arguments, just you and me. I’m taking you to see something really special.” Sophie did her best to sound enticing and keep her apprehension out of her voice.

“I’m not going to
The Little Mermaid,
am I?” Bella asked with a heartbreaking mixture of belligerence and hope.

Sophie shook her head. “No,” she said. “This trip is just for you and me. Come on.”

Bella’s second trip on the Tube was much less eventful than the first and much quieter. She sat next to Sophie, her hand, still in its glove, slotted into Sophie’s. As Sophie counted the stops, Bella stared at everyone else on the train with open curiosity until they coughed and raised their books or magazines a little higher. The train rattled down the Victoria line, through Pimlico to Vauxhall, where finally they got off at Blackfriars.

“Where are we going?” Bella asked again as Sophie marched her briskly through the wet streets, the pavements streaked with reflections of colored light.

“We’re going to see a painting,” Sophie told her, taking a corner at such a high speed that Bella’s feet almost didn’t touch the ground as she struggled to keep up.

“A painting?” Bella said, clearly disappointed that it wasn’t a musical extravaganza on ice. “Where?”

Sophie stopped at the slope that led down to the entrance of the Tate Modern. “Here,” she said.

Bella looked up at the huge bulk of the converted power station standing stalwart against the silvered sky. “Wow.”

“Exactly. Come on.”

They were lucky. The rain, the season, the day of the week, and the hour had all conspired to keep the gallery relatively unclogged, so for once a visitor could enjoy the functional majesty of the building as well as the exhibits it contained.

“Ooooh,” Bella exclaimed, gawking at the huge sculpture that filled the foyer. “It’s gigantic!”

Sophie paused and looked up at Antony Gormley’s work.

“It is,” she agreed, flicking open the folded map. “According to this, I think the painting I want to show you is quite far up the escalators. Let’s go and look at it first, and then afterward we can have a look at anything else you want, okay?”

Bella nodded and hopped readily onto the escalator next to Sophie. Sophie felt a knot in the pit of her stomach. She had no idea if what she was about to show the child would mean anything to her. But also she worried that it might mean too much, and if it did, Sophie realized she didn’t know what she would do next. But she knew, whatever happened, she had to go forward because there was nowhere else to go. And anyway she had a feeling it would turn out all right, a feeling her mother would call intuition.

With another quick look at her map, Sophie led Bella, whose head was generally pointed in the opposite direction from which they were walking, to the modern British painters’ wing and then to a small room at the back of a network of galleries that overlooked the river. She pointed at a sign on the left of the entrance to the room. “What does that say?” Sophie asked.

Bella looked at the sign for a moment and smiled. “The St. Ives School of Art!” she exclaimed. “Are Mrs. Benson’s sunflower paintings in there?” she said, hopping toward the door in anticipation.

“No,” Sophie said. “At least I don’t think so. I think these paintings are a bit older.” As they entered, Sophie scanned the room, hoping and praying that the canvas she was looking for was here, that it hadn’t been placed in storage when the collection was moved from Tate Britain some years ago. And then she saw it, smaller than a painting should be, she had thought the first time she saw it, almost inconsequential. In fact, when Carrie had brought her to see it in its old home across the river, her first words had been, “A child could do better than that.
I
could do better than
that
!” But then Sophie’s appreciation of art had always been much less sophisticated than Carrie’s.

Sophie took Bella over and showed her the painting.

“St. Ives, Version Two, 1940,”
Sophie read out the label for Bella, who studied the painting closely. “It’s by a man called Ben—”

“Nicholson,” Bella finished. “I know. Mum used to take us to the Tate St. Ives all the time. Some of his pictures are there too.” She looked at the painting. “Home,” she said, pointing to the top right-hand corner, where Nicholson had painted the beach and part of the town of St. Ives.

Sophie stood behind Bella and rested her hands lightly on her shoulders. She took a deep breath and began to say what she had brought Bella all this way to hear. “They had this big exhibition of St. Ives artists years and years ago, when your mum still lived near me in London. We were doing our A levels at the time. We were supposed to be revising—practicing—for our test. But your mum didn’t really like practicing. She said we needed to get out, get some sunshine and fresh air before we went bonkers.” Bella smiled. “She brought me to see this painting. Well, not just this painting, she made me see the whole exhibition. But it was this painting especially that really got to her. I don’t know why this one, but the minute she saw it she loved it.” Sophie paused and moistened her dry lips, realizing she was nervous. Bella stood perfectly still, looking at the picture, but Sophie sensed she was listening very closely.

“To be honest with you,” Sophie said, “I never really got it. I think your pictures are better than this one. But your mum said it was called…um, abstract constructivism, or something
ism
anyway,” Sophie said hurriedly, glossing over the parts she didn’t understand. “She said—now let me think—she said that it was so powerful and emotional that the painter had caught a moment in time and trapped it with light on the canvas forever.” Sophie smiled as the conversation came back to her sentence by sentence. “I said, ‘It looks like a painting of a mug to me,’ and she said there was no point in her practicing for her art exam anymore because she’d never be that good. Well, I thought she had gone bonkers, but anyway, she sat and looked at this painting for a long long time. I moped around waiting for her, until eventually I had to drag her away. I think I wanted to go to the café and have cake. Carrie looked at me and she said, ‘I’m going there, one day.’ ‘What? Where?’ I asked her, or something like that. ‘There, St. Ives,’ she said. ‘I want to sit exactly where he was when he made that. I want to see that view and feel that light on my face. It’s like someone’s finally shown me where my home is. And I’m going there as soon as I can. To live and fall in love and have my children and paint. Then I’ll be free of this dirty old city and free of my—’” Sophie stopped herself from saying “my mother” and instead inserted, “‘free of school and I’ll be happy. I just know I will,’ she said,” Sophie told the top of Bella’s head, in Carrie’s own words. “I don’t know why, I just know that when I’m there I’ll be so happy. This painting told me so.”

Sophie knelt down beside Bella so their heads were level. “And she
was
happy, wasn’t she? Because she had the sea, and the light, and Izzy and you. And she loved you both so much, Bella.”

On the last word, Bella crumpled suddenly to the floor and buried her face in her hands. For a split second Sophie watched her shoulders shudder and shake and realized that for the first time since her mother had died, Bella was crying.

“It’s okay,” Sophie said. “It’s okay, darling, it’s okay.” She put her arms around Bella, who turned in to her embrace.

“Mummy,” she said, through her sobs. “I just want my mummy back.”

Sophie was glad that the people who happened into the small gallery took one look at the distraught child on the floor and walked right out again. She and Bella sat there for a long time, until Sophie felt the damp of Bella’s tears pervade her jacket, until Bella’s shoulders stilled except for the occasional long and deep, shuddering breath and at last she was quiet. It was then that Sophie realized she had been rocking the girl. She stopped and brushed the damp hair from Bella’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I didn’t want to make you sad.”

“But I’m sad anyway,” Bella said softly. “All the time.”

Sophie nodded. “I know.”

“Because it was just like a normal day,” Bella said, and Sophie held perfectly still, as if any sudden movement might frighten Bella back to silence. “We’d stopped on the corner so that I could walk into school with Lucy like always, and she rolled down the window for a kiss. It always stuck halfway, so I had to stand on my toes to kiss her. And then I ran off and never thought about her again until—I never looked back or waved good-bye or anything.”

Sophie didn’t know what to say, so she stayed silent.

“One of our gerbils died, before,” Bella said. “He was the only person I’d ever known who died, and Mummy got us another one that looked just the same, and after a while Izzy forgot it was a different gerbil. I don’t want her to forget Mummy and just remember
him. I
don’t want to forget Mummy. I keep expecting her to come and collect us. I keep wishing she would just
come.
But she won’t.”

“No,” Sophie agreed gently. “She won’t. But listen, Bella, you and Izzy, you’re not alone in the world. You have me, and Grandma and Tess, and you have Louis. You have your dad.”

“I don’t want him,” Bella said but without anger.

Sophie kissed the top of her head. “Don’t you?” she asked gently. “Are you sure? You must remember how much you loved him once, otherwise you wouldn’t hate him so much now.”

“He just went too,” Bella said. “He didn’t say good-bye to me like I didn’t say good-bye to Mum. He can’t just come back and be all happy when Mum can’t. He just
can’t,
it’s not fair.”

Sophie understood Bella’s logic perfectly, and she knew that, in some ways, she was right. It wasn’t fair.

“I don’t think he thinks that he can,” she said. “I think he just wants to make friends with you again. He said he wishes you’d never fallen out, and I believe him.” Sophie thought about everything Tess had said to her that morning. “Look, when he first came, I was angry with him too, but I don’t think he did what he did to hurt you. I think he sort of did it to hurt himself.” Bella looked up at Sophie with a furrowed brow. “What I mean is, I think he’s a good person and that you should give him a chance.”

Bella did not look convinced.

“Okay,” Sophie tried again. “I loved your mum and your mum loved me, I think. What do you think?”

Bella smiled. “Yes, she used to tell us about you,” she said. “You made her laugh a lot.”

“Well, before all this happened, I hadn’t seen your mum for ages, for years actually. But I still loved her. I still knew that when we saw each other the next time, things would be like they always were between us, because I still loved her. And when—when I realized that I’d missed my chance to see her again, I was very angry with myself. I still am. But I still let you and Izzy come and stay with me even though you are noisy, messy
brats.
” Bella smiled and nodded in agreement. “I didn’t do it because I loved you, you pair of hooligans. I did it because I still loved your mum. Even after all those years and even though she was dead, I still wanted to be a friend to her. It is possible to still care about a person even when you are miles away. Even when you don’t see them all the time.”