Sweet Sorrow(18)

Mum’s response to all this constriction was to straighten up and burst the confines. Seemingly without effort she got a job at the local golf club, helping to co-ordinate events, weddings, anniversaries, seventieth birthday parties. This was the kind of institution she’d once have dismissed as provincial and square, but she had always been efficient, persuasive and capable of great charm and the money was far better than anything she could have hoped to earn back on the wards. If you’ve run the night shift on an overcrowded geriatric unit, she’d told them, then the Rotary Club’s AGM could hold no fear. In fact, they were pretty much the same thing! This was her pitch, and it worked, and we got used to her pulling on a pair of heels early on a Saturday morning and hearing the car return in the early hours of Sunday. She began to paint her nails and to iron her blouses in front of the TV. A blouse! The idea of my mum owning such a thing as a blouse or a slip, a pencil skirt, a Filofax, her own email address – the first time I’d heard of such a thing – was bizarre, but something we could live with if it meant less anxiety about the electricity bill. Perhaps we might even get used to Dad’s alarming presence at home now, the forced and manic jollity he brought to serving up breakfast, checking our homework, doing the big shop. We were catching our breath, we were getting back on our feet.

But still a deep disquiet lingered and Billie and I would lie in our bunks, twisting with anxiety as we listened to the voices, alternately snapping, shouting, soothing. ‘I think Dad’s going mad,’ said Billie one night. ‘Mad Dad.’ And that became our secret code for those moments when we’d catch him, standing and staring and staring.

Mum hung on. She made new friends, worked longer hours. She got the praise and the overtime, changed her clothes and her hair and Dad would see this and be uncharacteristically mean and sarcastic. She had always been staunchly and unsentimentally left-wing. Now she wondered – was it possible to get the bride’s helicopter to land on the 18th fairway? Now they avoided each other’s gaze, except for the times when my mother answered her mobile phone – a mobile phone! – outside of work hours, at which time they would glare at each other with barely suppressed fury while she spoke in a voice he no longer recognised. It wasn’t just love fading away. Respect and understanding were going too, with nothing we could do to stem the flow, and fear for where this might end began to wrap around and smother my every waking thought.

Just before the Easter of my final year, I returned from another undistinguished day to a silent home. I’d presumed the house was empty and so was startled and shouted out loud when I went to the sofa and found Dad lying there, his face scoured red, his hands pulled into the sleeves of his jumper.

‘Mum’s gone, Charlie,’ he said.

‘What, to work?’

‘She’s met someone else. I’m sorry.’

‘What are you talking about, Dad?’

‘Please, my love, don’t make me say it. She’s gone. She’s gone with someone else.’

‘But she’ll be back, right? She’s coming back?’ I had seen my father cry a few times but only at a party or a wedding, a sentimental reddening of the eye and never this awful grimace. It happened, I’m sure, but behind closed doors. Now here he was, curled up in a ball as if protecting himself from blows, and I wish I could say that I instinctively embraced him or tried to offer some comfort. Instead I stood some distance away, a bystander unqualified to take action and unwilling to get involved, too panicked to do anything but run outside, scramble back onto my bike and race away.

Billie was turning into the close, returning from school. ‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’

‘Go and see Dad.’

Her eyes opened wide. ‘Why, what’s happened? What’s happened!’

‘Go!’ I shouted, glancing back to see that she had broken into a run. My sister, twelve years old, would know what to do. I pounded on, out of the estate, around the ring road, to find out if she’d finally let go.





Best Behaviour


The golf club was an absurd building, as puffed up and pompous as its members. Whitewashed and crenelated, it would have made a fine location for some Agatha Christie whodunit if it weren’t for the 1980s conservatory glued to one side, and on visits with my mother I’d grown to hate the place, the odour of aftershave and gin and tonic, the guffawing from the bar, the piped classics, a loop of ‘The Blue Danube’ that followed you even into the loos, where incomprehensible golf cartoons hung at eye-level. I hated how Mum behaved when on the premises, the voice she put on, the ridiculous waistcoat. ‘Best behaviour’, she’d say. I was not prone to bad behaviour but those words made me want to snatch a heavy-headed club from one of the bastards in the lobby and set about the bowls of pot-pourri, the little packets of shortbread, the wing mirrors of the BMWs and Range Rovers in the car park, which I sprayed with gravel now, jumping from my bike and leaving it, wheels spinning as I hurtled into the lobby.

Excuse me, can I help you? Are you looking for someone? Excuse me, young man! Young man, stop! The receptionist slapped at the bell, ding-ding-ding, as I looked left and right and saw Mum approaching from the bar, clack-clack-clack, that brisk little pencil-skirt walk, smiling – smiling! – as if I’d arrived to discuss the rates for the firm’s Christmas dinner-dance.

‘Thank you, Janet, I’ll deal with this. Hello, Charlie—’