The Last Dress from Paris(82)
I enter through her double-height, blond wooden door and onto a gleaming marble floor that’s more like the intimidating lobby of a city bank than someone’s actual home. Then the space opens out into a cavernous living area, bigger than my local library and with ceilings so high they practically disappear from view. To one side of three central stone pillars, she has a dining table that can comfortably seat twenty, and I wonder, who are all these people she’s entertaining? She doesn’t have a boyfriend—the mere idea is weird to me. She was never going to make space in her diary for a date over a business debrief. I’ve never once heard her talk of dinners or parties or late nights that have taken place here. Certainly none that I’ve ever been invited to.
I follow her into the kitchen, a space that looks nothing like one until she starts gently stroking doors and they slide or bounce open to reveal the fridge or a wine chiller. She has already laid lunch out for us in the center of her comically long dining table, and I can physically feel myself stiffen, like I might at a job interview. I toss my bag casually to the floor, making it the single piece of clutter in the place, and she notices as a hair-filled brush tumbles out. She opens her mouth to complain, then obviously thinks better of it despite the mess making her uncomfortable. Her eyes continually flick back to it.
“I’m so glad you could come over, Lucille. I’ve been feeling rotten while you’ve been away.” She pours me a glass of white wine, and I can’t be bothered to tell her I much prefer red.
“Have you been unwell too?”
“Unwell? Try abandoned and forgotten.” We both take a seat on wide polished wooden benches to either side of the table.
“Oh, come on, Mum, you’ve lost your job. I know it seems unfair, but you haven’t just been diagnosed with something terrifying.” I smile to indicate that while I might be making light of the situation, I am still on her side—to the degree that being related to her demands.
“It might feel that way to you, but it doesn’t to me. I know career has never been terribly important to you, Lucille—you are, after all, contemplating walking away from a perfectly good role without another one to go to—but I’ve spent my entire life building that business up. I’ve wiped out whole weekends, when everyone else was out in the sun, to work on pitches. I said no to countless social invitations to work on new protocols, so many that the invites just stopped coming after a while. If I added up the hours I have spent at the office versus in my own home, it would be shocking, frankly.” I fear this little speech is going to run and run, but then she pauses and gulps back a huge glug of wine, sighing loudly as she gently replaces the long-stemmed glass on a coaster, perfectly aligning the two.
“None of this is news to me, Mum. I lived through it with you. Or rather, I didn’t.” She’s starting to spoon some of the three large salads onto her plate, and all I can see on her face is excitement. She’s thinking only of the pricey asparagus covered in Parmesan shavings, the gnocchi with pesto that isn’t out of a jar, and the caramelized bulbs of fennel that are scattered with wild rice and pine nuts. Looking at it, I’m guessing she’s spent one hundred pounds in one of her favorite organic delis this morning. What is completely absent is any sense of regret, and I can’t let her get away with it.
“Do you feel bad looking back, Mum, like you missed out?” I say it gently. I don’t want to attack her, but I do want her to think about it for once.
“What do you mean?” she asks as she’s forking the food into her mouth.
“Now you can see that despite all your devotion and hard work, in the end you are dispensable. Just like the rest of us. That perhaps they didn’t value you as highly as the sacrifices you made. Was it all worth it?”
She drops her fork to her plate, pleased at the abrupt clatter it makes as it lands. “I had to earn a living, Lucille. Who else was going to? If I had stopped to ask myself these questions, what good would it have done me? Or you? I might have come to the same conclusions you seem to have reached, but then what? At least I can say you never wanted for anything.” And I want to tell her, Yes, I did, I wanted you, my mum. That she might have been far from perfect, but no one is perfect, and besides, she was mine and I needed her. But the words stick in my throat, because it will make me the bad person, the ungrateful one, if I voice them.
“Is that what you think? I did all right?” I try again, but I can see the irritation building in the color of her cheeks. Her defense mechanism is about to kick in. She’s not embarrassed; she’s getting cross because she doesn’t want to face what we have both avoided for years. In the past this would have been enough to silence me, or at least force a change of subject. I help myself to a large swig of wine too. If I’m going to do this, I’ll need some fortification, I realize. The three feet she’s sitting across the table from me suddenly doesn’t feel like far enough.
“Didn’t you?” Her tone is challenging, and she’s moving toward the fight, trying to scare me off the subject because it’s too painful to confront. I can hear it building in her deep inhalations. It’s my warning not to take this any further. This is supposed to be the lunch where she ticks Lucille time off her to-do list, dispenses some unwanted career advice that will make her feel motherly, has a moan about how unfairly she’s been treated, and then sends me on my way.