The Mother’s Lies

The man himself, immaculate in Paul Smith, stuck his head round the bedroom door.

‘Are you getting there, Hels? The car will be here in twenty.’

Apparently they were too grand for minicabs these days.

‘Okay, thanks, I’m just going to swap this for my black one.’

‘I thought you’d got something new during the week?’ His brow creased slightly, with just the hint of a frown.

‘I didn’t find anything.’

The truth was, she’d only managed an hour to dash into a couple of local shops and, ten months after giving birth to Alys, she still found trying clothes on a miserable experience.

The business was called Date Night. Darren had started putting on these ironic telly-themed singles nights, having got the idea after watching one too many cheap nostalgic box sets. It was the seventh or eighth golden business brainwave he’d had, whilst her dull but steadily more lucrative career in financial-services HR supported them both. Finally, this one had stuck.

In a year, she’d gone from being a career girl in Shoreditch to maternity leave in Chiswick. Going back to work after Barney had felt like a return to civilisation. After Alys, though, Darren pointed out that he could pay for everything now – all the holidays they could handle. Wasn’t it better, he asked, for her to be less stressed and for the kids to be raised by their parents rather than strangers? She didn’t speak to him for three days after that and at the end of her first day back in the office she drank Prosecco with her friend Amy Stretton. Amy was in CID with the Met Police and, back then, still single. She could be relied upon to opine at length about all men being bastards.

The dress she had settled on for tonight was from the Shoreditch days. It was black, and forgivingly stretchy – although faded from too many washes. Well, surely it would be dark at the party anyway? She added a pair of silver earrings, looked in the mirror and smiled, feeling, finally, like she was herself.

‘The car’s outside, Hels.’

‘I’m coming!’

She quickly kissed her babies – they’d both been asleep for a while – then she popped into the front room to let her parents know they were off. She’d managed to persuade them down for a rare pre-Christmas visit and then Darren had casually informed her about the party. If she was being honest with herself, she’d be more comfortable booking the usual babysitter.

Darren was jiggling his keys against his hip as she came into the hallway; he looked her up and down but said nothing. His smile was flat.

*

Although it was after one a.m. by the time they got back, Barbara was not yet in bed. Instead they found her tucked in a corner of the sofa under the glow of a single lamp, peering at a laptop she had balanced on the arm of the sofa. Her dark bun had always given her something of the air of a ballerina, and she unfurled gracefully from her pose as they came into the room.

‘I hope you didn’t stay up for our sakes?’ Darren’s words were polite, but there was something querulous in his tone. He spoke more to the decanter and glass in his hand than to his mother-in-law.

‘Of course not, don’t worry.’ Barbara’s own voice was light. ‘I’m doing coursework – the time ran away with me.’ Helen and Darren had both been mildly amused when she’d announced a couple of years earlier that she was taking an OU course in computing, but although she’d initially shrugged it off as just a tactic to stay one step ahead of the endless cuts and redundancies in local newspapers, she seemed to have really taken to it.

‘Were the kids okay?’ Helen asked.

Barbara looked momentarily blank, as though she had possibly forgotten about them, but then nodded. ‘Not a peep out of either of them. All fine.’

‘Well, I’m going up,’ announced Darren, raising his whisky to them. Helen knew she should join him; after all, she had been the one who had insisted on leaving at the end of the party, rather than heading out into the West End, where many of the guests were going to continue their evening. Now she was home, though, she felt suddenly awake. And desperate to take off her heels and have a cup of tea. Barbara declined her offer and Darren slunk off.

‘Good night?’ Barbara asked as she shut down the laptop.

Helen shrugged. Had it been? She found it exhausting, having to keep track of the employees, the investors, the suppliers, the hangers-on and God knows who else. Over the years, she’d shared little of the day-to-day concerns of her life with her mother – taking her lead from Barbara herself no doubt. She wasn’t now about to start dissecting her insecurities about Darren and how she feared the business was changing him.

To be fair, the night had improved when Darren – probably irritated with her defensiveness – had insisted that she knock back a couple of glasses of champagne and led her onto the dance floor, swinging her around to Pharrell Williams. She knew they’d looked good together; they always did. And in the moment, she was ‘Happy’, just like the song said. The dancing made her feel less self-conscious about whether people were questioning what on earth he was doing with her.

Sometimes she wondered if he ever had crossed the line, and mixed play with the work he was so devoted to. She’d asked him about it once and he’d laughed. He said he’d spent thirty-five years with nothing to recommend him but his smile and his wits; he wouldn’t want to be with the sort of woman who might want him now that he had a belly and grey temples and a bit of cash. That was a couple of years ago, though. Back then he wouldn’t have slunk off to bed with a whisky. On the other hand, back then she’d probably have mustered the enthusiasm for a nightcap elsewhere.

‘Well?’ Her mother was still looking at her expectantly.

‘Sorry, I drifted off a bit – a bit woozy I’m afraid. It was lovely. The venue was spectacular.’

‘I’m glad you had fun,’ Barbara said, making Helen feel about seventeen again. Her eyes were on the laptop as it went through its shutting-down processes. It seemed Helen had no need to worry about her mother trying to get her to open up.

‘So how’s the coursework going?’ Helen asked, more to stop her own mind whirring than for any other reason. ‘I thought you were finishing up with that last spring?’

‘Yes, I did, but then I signed up for some of the degree-level modules. It’s fascinating, actually.’

‘It’s a shame you didn’t get into it when you were younger – you could have made a fortune.’

Barbara laughed lightly. ‘Yes, it would have been nice to have had the chance. But never too late, as they say – I’ve got a few little projects I’m dreaming up. Anyway, that’s my work done. I think I’ll get to bed.’

‘Night, Mum.’

But Helen’s mind had drifted back to the dance floor, to the moment when a slow Sam Smith number had come on and she’d insisted that she was exhausted and needed to go back to their table for a drink. Darren had nodded and they made their way back across to the low table where their bottle of champagne still waited, half full.

One of the new regional managers glided over, in painfully high sandals that pushed her chest forward.

‘Darren! You two were amazing on the dance floor. You kept that quiet!’

‘Louise …’ He clasped her shoulder warmly.

‘Lauren.’

‘Lauren, of course, so sorry. This is my wife, Helen.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She brushed his hand, as if to smooth away his mistake, laughing loudly. ‘There’s so many people here!’

She’d cornered them for the next ten minutes – despite Darren’s smooth attempts to move her on – sharing gossip and gushing compliments.

If he were going to get involved with someone at work, someone like Lauren would be last on the list. So why was the sound of her grating laughter continuing to rattle around Helen’s head as she failed to get to sleep?

July 2017

Helen

In the end, she didn’t get any chance to mention the note on Saturday. Neil whisked them all off to a theme park for the day, then dinner at the local Italian. ‘Take our minds off it all,’ he said, repeatedly. Helen grinned for his sake, as much as for Barney and Alys. Barbara’s enjoyment, she was sure, was just as manufactured. The thought gave her an unfamiliar sense of camaraderie with her mother – for as long as she could remember, she’d found herself siding with her dad in the face of Barbara’s quirks and moods.

On Sunday morning, however, she woke up thinking about the note. It had lurked through her dreams, which had danced from Darren, to her children, then her parents; all unformed and fast-fading glimpses. Each encounter had played out on the sickly green landscape of the notepaper – those black capitals always there but never in focus. In those giddy predawn hours, something fearful woke in her belly, and, once woken, it shifted and clawed about inside her like a rat.

She was still turning the words of the note over in her mind as the grey dawn gradually crept round the edges of the heavy velvet curtains. They were cast-offs from Neil’s sister – Aunt Vicky – given away when she moved to Málaga, to replace the yellow ones that had been up since Helen was small. Good enough for the spare room, her parents must have decided, even though the size wasn’t quite right. She’d got used to sleeping here with Darren over the years. Now she was sleeping alone in the big old bed, with no one else to see the patterns the morning light made around the badly fitting curtains.

If only she could show Darren the note. Her Darren, not the new, arm’s-length, polite-chat-about-the-weather Darren who made her skin crawl. It wasn’t that she thought he’d have all the answers, just that she wasn’t used to having no one to share things with. They’d met at school and grown up together as an ‘us’. Suddenly Helen had to work everything out as ‘me’. And everything was bloody tough.

At first, her mind had tricked itself – he was on a business trip, or working late – God knew she was used to not having him around. But now it was more than six weeks, and the reality, the permanence, of his absence was becoming undeniable. All the more so since that awful call with her dad. The old Darren might not have been around when the au pair was sick or when she needed to decide on a holiday booking, but she could be confident that if the world fell apart he’d be there to catch her. Now it had and he was content to see her in free fall.

Gradually, the lumpy shadow-scape revealed itself as her assorted bits of luggage, strewn with clothes and toys and everything else that she’d not had the will to try to tidy up. The green dizzy dreams and the clawing rat seemed to shrivel in the light. It was too bizarre. To be looking at the fresh baked-bean-juice stains on her dressing gown, or the cascade of children’s books erupting from a Gruffalo backpack, and thinking that somebody out there was happy her mother could be dying, that somebody out there wanted Barbara to suffer.

Error, as the laptop would say. Switch it off and on again. If only she could.

She kept coming up with improbable explanations – the note was a prop from a murder-mystery party, or a handwriting test, or Barbara had written it herself as some sort of weird displacement activity. But why the mention of cancer? And why had it been on the doormat when Helen arrived? There was no simple answer to explain that away.

Finally she heard Alys start up her morning whimper, which, in her usual way, would soon become a chatter and then, shortly after, a wail. As Helen quit the stale bed and pulled on the bean-juice-stained dressing gown, the demons scuttled back to their dusty recesses. She pushed the curtains back, then, still fumbling with the belt of her dressing gown, she headed upstairs.

*

Helen found the blue dress later that morning, when she was going through some stuff in her old room. She’d hoped that one of the dusty boxes stashed under the bed would hold something that might keep the kids occupied for a while.

Of course, she’d packed for the journey in a hurry, with no real idea of how long they’d be staying, and the flaws in her organisation – no charger for Barney’s tablet, DVD boxes missing their discs, and Jess the Doll’s tragically deficient wardrobe – were now becoming woefully apparent.

It must have been twenty years since Helen had seen that dress. She knew the story of Neil buying it for Barbara on honeymoon in Glasgow and the shimmer of blue – more eastern Med than western Scotland – was instantly recognisable. She found the straps and held it up, letting the layers of satin and chiffon swing free. There were details she hadn’t noticed before, or didn’t remember: the old-fashioned label, sewn in by hand, the slight discolouration under the arms. Was there a breath of Barbara’s perfume, or was that just Helen’s imagination?

‘Alys!’ she shouted, after a moment or two. ‘Come and try on this princess dress.’

She knew Barbara wouldn’t mind a bit. After all, Helen herself had spent a good year around the age of six tripping around the house in its gauzy layers, the spaghetti straps nicely set off against her utilitarian white M&S vests. She’d called it her cocktail dress. As a child, Helen had liked to imagine Barbara’s youth had been spent swishing around sophisticated parties. She had a vague fantasy that Barbara had come down in the world when she married Neil and renounced a life of leisure and glamour and quite possibly even cigarette holders for love, a red-brick semi and her baby girl. She didn’t actually have any evidence for this exotic former life, but, in the absence of evidence of anything more prosaic, it was an attractive fantasy.

Alys duly trotted upstairs, but when Helen held up the dress she looked sceptical.

‘Which princess?’ she asked.

‘Not a Disney Princess. Another Princess. Princess Alys.’

‘Daddy buy me Belle dress.’

‘Did he?’ Helen was genuinely puzzled. Alys adored Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Helen couldn’t imagine she could have received such a prize and not been full of it for days.

The girl looked sad and a little confused. ‘I get it next time, he say, next time, but …’ She faltered, and her big eyes welled with tears.

At home, Helen had had to tell her over and over that Daddy didn’t live with them any more. Each time, it cut her up inside and the tears that she managed to hold in when she was with her children spilled out with interest after bedtime. Eventually, Alys seemed to have understood, on some level at least, but the visit up here could only have confused her.

‘Blue is for boys, Mummy.’ As ever, the three-year-old’s train of thought chugged on at pace.

Helen racked her mind for some Disney Princess assistance. ‘Cinderella wears blue,’ she said, encouragingly.

‘Not that blue, Mummy – that’s boys’ blue.’

Helen looked down at the dress, as if noticing its colour for the first time. ‘Oh! You mean I should give it to Barney to wear?’

She loved her daughter’s laughter, which bubbled thick and sticky in her throat like liquid fudge. Alys liked the joke of her brother wearing the dress and her chortles brought Neil to the door.

‘Good morning, ladies,’ Neil said, making Alys giggle even more.

‘Alys thinks Barney should dress up in Nana’s honeymoon dress. What do you reckon, Granddad?’

She expected Neil to laugh along. Instead, he reached out, groping like a blind man. His fingers touched the fabric, but then it slipped out of his grasp and the dress slithered to the floor. He sat down heavily on the bed. Helen cursed inwardly. Of course, she should have realised the dress might upset him. But a moment later he was smiling again and had pulled a toffee out of his pocket for Alys.

He turned to Helen. ‘I came to tell you there’s a phone call for you, love.’

‘Darren?’ she mouthed it silently over Alys’s head, and he nodded.

‘Now, young Alys.’ His grasp on the dress was firm this time, and the wet sheen on his eyes had been blinked away. ‘The thing you have to know about this dress is that it belonged to a mermaid once. That’s why you can see all the colours of the deep blue ocean in it – in fact, I’m sure I once saw a tiny golden fish flickering through just about here …’

The phone handset sat like a grenade on a chest of drawers on the landing.

‘Hello?’ She kept her voice low, going into the spare room.

‘Hi, Hels. How’s your mum doing?’ said the voice on the line.

‘She’s okay. We went to the hospital on Friday. They’re going to operate next week. We’ll know more then.’

‘I was gutted to hear it, really I was.’ She could picture him shaking his head, sorrowfully, rubbing the back of his hand against his designer stubble in that way he had. ‘Give her my best, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, knowing she’d say nothing.

‘I’ve been trying your mobile.’

‘I know you have. It’s not the easiest time, Darren.’

‘Yeah, I understand that. But the kids’ll be missing me.’ As he spoke, she tried to push away the image of Alys’s perplexed face, talking about the stupid Disney costume. ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t have taken them up there, and we both wanted to deal with access informally, but …’

Bastard. Always trying to come across as Mr More-Than-Reasonable. He should be here with his family now, rather than having fucked off with his glossy, giggling area manager. That’s what Helen wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. She’d had explosive, raging, endless rows with Darren each day since he’d left, but only in the privacy of her own mind. When it came to real life, the words would never come.

She realised he was still talking. He was still going on in his calm let’s be adult about this voice that she’d so quickly come to despise.

‘… So I’ll come up at the weekend and stay with my mum. Just me, not Lauren – I don’t want to make things harder. But I want to see the kids properly, not just an hour over lunch or something. Okay? And I want to speak to them. Are they there just now?’

Helen pressed the handset closer to her ear. Alys’s laughter was louder now, but not so loud that he’d be able to hear it down the phone line.

‘Mum’s taken them both to the park,’ she lied. ‘You only caught Dad and I because we were finishing the dishes. We’re just going to meet them.’

‘Right.’

‘Yes.’

He sighed. ‘Look, call me later – just let me say goodnight to them at least.’ His voice might have cracked, or it might have been static on the line. She was learning, to her surprise, that Darren could be a good actor. It was bizarre, thinking back to how she’d always been able to read him like a book. Perhaps he’d never had the will to deceive her before, or perhaps it was the distance that had opened up between them making it harder for her to really see him the way she always had before. She ached even more for the man she had married.

‘I don’t want them to get upset,’ she said.

‘For God’s sake, don’t make me beg to speak to my own kids, Helen.’

He didn’t sound to her like a man who was begging. She felt the familiar lump swell in the back of her throat. This was why she couldn’t fight with him: whenever she tried to give voice to her anger, the rage choked her before she could let it out.

‘Tomorrow,’ she managed.

‘First thing.’

She nodded uselessly into the phone, tears running down both cheeks now. Finally she said ‘okay’ just about loud enough for him to hear, and then hung up.

God knew she didn’t want either of the kids to catch her looking like this; they’d seen enough tears. Taking care to be silent, she slipped out of the bedroom and walked down the stairs. She wanted to return the handset to its charger quickly. Whilst she held it, it felt as though she was carrying Darren around, and he would know that she’d lied to him and be able to see her falling apart.

Just thinking about Darren was so painful, yet she couldn’t stop herself. She had no reference point for what was happening to her and that left her completely bewildered. As she and Darren had been together since high school, she’d never had any sort of break-up before. And her parents’ relationship had always been rock solid. Barbara had her quirks – always had – she was often distant with her daughter and could be sharp with her tongue. Occasionally her claws came out and Helen could remember the odd ring of a slap or the twist of an arm when her mother was angry.

But, even though he could be on the receiving end of her sharp tongue too, Neil had adored his wife with a constancy that was unshakeable. Even more remarkably, he’d had love enough for both of them, so Helen had never felt the need to compete, and never questioned the security of their family.

Now, it looked like her own children were going to have none of that, and she veered between righteous rage towards Darren and anxious guilt about what more she could have done to keep her family together.

Helen could hear Barbara’s voice in the kitchen as she came down the stairs. Although the green and inky haze of the dreams had faded, it hadn’t left her completely. It occurred to her that if Barbara knew what the envelope contained before she picked it up from the doormat, then perhaps there had been others. She’d not thought to look for any until now, and her decision to confront her mother had lost impetus through the bittersweet family outings yesterday. The thought of interrogating Barbara about the note in the midst of the turmoil of a cancer diagnosis made her squeamish. Given how emotionally vulnerable she felt herself – her hands were still shaking after the phone call – it didn’t take much to persuade herself to put it off. She was decided; before confronting her mother, she would look for more notes.

In the hall, she replaced the phone on its cradle and pulled out a tissue. She dabbed at her face in the mirror and managed to tidy it a bit. At least she’d learned to avoid wearing mascara these days. Now that she was closer to the kitchen she could hear Barney’s voice too. He was explaining the plot of one of the films he watched endlessly. It seemed unlikely she’d be disturbed by either of them any time soon.

She retraced her steps, stealthily, to the staircase. There was a little hotel safe at the back of Barbara’s wardrobe, hidden by a clutter of shoes. It contained passports and building society books and pension stuff. Much duller stuff than Helen had hoped to find when, aged fifteen or so, she’d idly observed her mother opening it and gone on to crack the code: 2973. She could still remember it. Would Barbara have changed the code over the years?

The little door swung open smoothly, and that small disturbance was enough to shift the stack of mismatched papers. Even through the gloom, a knife-edge sliver of green caught Helen’s eye. Clearly, the note from the other night had not been the first. Again, this envelope simply said ‘Barbara’.

From the bedroom, she heard Alys pause to ask, ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Rather than risk them coming out to look for her, Helen stuffed the envelope into the large pocket on her hoodie to read later. After a few seconds, she felt safe enough to carry on. Riffling through the rest of the papers in the safe, she quickly found two more. Then she replaced everything as accurately as she could and stuck the two new envelopes alongside the first in the front of her hoodie. She’d take them back to the downstairs loo to read, where she could lock the door and not worry about being disturbed. If nothing else, this intrigue might give her something to occupy her brain other than the constant, cycling worries about Darren.

As soon as she got to the bottom of the stairs, though, Barney erupted from the kitchen and threw himself at her, without stopping for breath in his chatter. Helen twirled him around and he dragged her back to the kitchen, where she had to enthuse over the half-done jigsaw on the table. Moments later, Neil appeared in the doorway with Alys, who wanted to show off her princess dress.

While Alys performed curtsies, Helen watched Barbara applaud with no sign of sentiment over the reappearance of her dress. Barney talked all the louder for fear of his little sister getting some attention.