The Silent Wife(107)
It was the one time I’d been forced to stand up to my mother when she got her needle stuck on when they were going to be confirmed. I’d fudged it by saying we’d let them decide when they were old enough. Now they were teenagers and refusing even to go to church, my mother was on a mission. But so far, neither of them appeared the slightest bit worried about going to hell.
I walked back in, concentrating on a light, sunny step.
‘So, what are you doing for the rest of the day?’ my mother asked, in a tone that suggested she’d been the highlight.
‘I’ve just been elected chairwoman of the fundraising committee at school. They want a new rugby clubhouse, so I need to go to a meeting about that.’ Even I could see that as birthdays went, it was rather short on celebration.
I was prepared for a little dig of ‘Hasn’t Mark planned anything special for you?’ but instead my mother burst out with an animated ‘Really, darling? You should have said earlier. You have done well.’
My mother wasn’t given to over-the-top praise. Any praise, in fact. But she was teetering right on the edge of a squeak of approval at my ‘news’, which was proof indeed that my bar for success was not so much low as buried. Hallelujah for climbing up another rung on the redeeming scale. I usually managed to haul myself up a notch about every five years. There was nothing she liked more than a crumb of evidence that Lydia Rushford, miscreant offspring of Arthur and Dorothy Southport, was no longer the social pariah of yesteryear.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. The softness of her skin surprised me.
I waited.
My mother selected a tone several decibels below the one she’d used to congratulate me. ‘It’s wonderful how you’ve moved on from all that…you know…’
I stared at her. In our family, no one moved on. The passage of time had covered the worst wounds with a scattering of normality. But like watchful crows gathered on a garden fence, our conflicting resentments were always waiting to swoop down for a vicious peck. Just before I took my dad’s arm to walk down the aisle to marry Mark, my mother clutched my hand and whispered, ‘It hasn’t turned out so badly, considering…’ My first born, Jamie, had barely taken a breath in the world before she murmured, ‘We’ll keep an eye on this one, we don’t want history repeating itself…’
Too flipping right about that. Whatever mistakes Jamie made, I wouldn’t cling to them like a koala to a eucalyptus for three decades.
Unfortunately, I now had my mother’s full attention. ‘What will you have to do on this committee, dear?’
The full horrors of what it would entail eluded me. Despite my mother’s delight, being voted chairwoman wasn’t a question of ‘doing well’. In any half-accurate poll, I reckoned there would be a one in two chance of people opting to clean the sports hall loos rather than chair a school committee.
Personally, I would have happily put on the Marigolds and got scrubbing. I was cringing at the thought of sitting in front of the headmaster, discussing the merits of a hog roast over a quiz evening. I should have refused immediately when the class über-rep, Melanie, had put my name forward at the coffee morning. The enthusiastic endorsements from the others had paralysed me. It seemed easier to get the spotlight off me if I agreed than to explain why the very word – headmaster – made me want to hide behind the bike sheds and start smoking for the first time in my life.
When I tried to discuss my misgivings with my mother, she might as well have stuck her fingers in her ears and tra-la-la’d. ‘You spend your life fiddling about with balloons and coffee in that wedding business of yours, don’t you? You’ll be perfect.’
After all these years, it was astonishing that my mother could still engender a little frisson of fury every time she talked about my career. ‘That business of mine’ often took care of the exorbitant school fees, plus the running of the whole Rushford household whenever Mark’s kitchen business was in a slump. But unlike my doctor brother who saved lives, my job keeping bride and groom calm with precision event planning was a little frippery – a small step up from origami and pom-pom making.
‘I’m not centre stage at work. No one is watching me. I’m just creeping about behind the scenes, straightening bows and making sure there are enough wine glasses.’
But nothing would derail my mother from her cock-a-hoopness that her daughter had reached the pinnacle of social acceptability. Who could blame her? After the miracle of snagging a husband in the first place, I’d spent nearly two decades airbrushing myself into a perfect wife. Just enough small talk, Boden and discreet pearl earrings to pass through life, slipping under the radar, as unremarkable as a mid-range estate car. No wonder Melanie had peered at all the mothers scrabbling down the hallway, FitFlops flapping at the mere mention of ‘volunteers needed’ and thought, ‘Where’s Lydia? She can organise baskets of almond favours and rose petals on tables. A couple of quizzes and a raffle should be well within her grasp.’
As a measure of my mother letting her hair down in wild celebration, she sawed another slice off the birthday Battenberg, saying, ‘I shouldn’t really,’ and mumbling, ‘Accolades like that don’t come along every day.’ If I’d just kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t have to endure months of my mother wanting to know the minutiae of every tedious meeting. Or worse, grilling me on my social connections: had I met any lawyers, doctors or dentists? Whether or not they were nice, decent people didn’t even feature. And now her interrogations were spreading down the generations with ‘innocent’ enquiries whenever she clapped eyes on my children –