In Her Mothers' Shoes (34 page)

‘Well he’s not young.’ Kate fiddled with the cowbells attached to the door handle, clanging one of them against the door. ‘You’re going to have to, sooner or later.’

‘I know.’ Rose sighed and picked up the framed photo of her mother and father on their wedding day from among the other family photos on the camphor chest. She stroked the top of it absent-mindedly. ‘I’ll have to give it up soon. I’m surprised they haven’t said something already.’

She’d feared the subject might come up last month at Woodchester after she’d tried to change the seating arrangements at dinner time. In the four years she’d been there, it had seemed so silly that all the men sat together at one end of the dining room and all the women at the other. Last month, she’d decided to mix them up. She’d drawn up a carefully constructed seating plan – the slow eaters could sit at one table, the deaf at another, the politically affiliated at another. The women had loved it. But the men had thrown her dark looks and had muttered unhappily. The following night, the men rebelled and had effectively gone on strike, refusing to come into the dining room and asking for dinner in their rooms. Word would have got through to Matron for sure. But she hadn’t said anything and Rose had certainly not mentioned it to her.

She often thought back to her days as a pinkie at Public, when she’d told her fellow pinkies that one day she would be Matron. And now, here she was, Matron of a residential hospital and nursing home – at least Relieving Matron at weekends, which was almost the same. It might have come at the end of her career, when she was around retirement age and after a long break from the workforce, but she was happy to have achieved her goal at last. She knew she’d have to give it up soon, that she couldn’t keep going much after seventy – but she didn’t feel old.

Rose put down the photo and grinned at her daughter. ‘There’s plenty of life in the old girl yet. It’s the tramping keeps me young. Only three weeks to go and I’m off on the Queen Charlotte Walkway.’

‘I don’t know where you find the energy.’

‘Joan says I’ve got an extra battery.’

‘Well she’s right. All my friends say you’re a role model. Now, I really must go.’ Kate turned the door handle then stopped. ‘Where did I leave my keys?’

‘You’re always losing your keys.’

‘I’ll try the bedroom. That’s the first place I went when I arrived.’

‘Careful George doesn’t trap you again.’

Kate turned back, smiling as she disappeared into the bedroom.

Looking after George had formed a bond between Rose and her daughter, intensifying the close relationship that had developed gradually, tentatively as Kate emerged from her tempestuous teenage years. The arguments, the name-calling, the intense loathing in her eyes when she looked at Rose, it had been so bad she and George had sent Kate to a psychologist. There must surely be something wrong for her to be so angry, to hate her mother so much, to make her life so miserable. But the psychologist had explained it wasn’t unusual behaviour for the teenage years, especially for an adopted child. ‘Children of this age are obsessed with their identity and ego,’ he’d said.

Meanwhile, Kate had raged against the psychologist, against being made to see him against her will. She was even more distant and wilful.

Kate was fifteen – rebellious, rude, feisty fifteen. Rows with her mother became increasingly frequent.

Rose would never have spoken to her mother the way Kate spoke to her. Her father would have got out the cane if she had, the threat of it being sufficient deterrent alone. But Kate didn’t care what she said or how hurtful it was, and the language she used was execrable – Rose never thought she’d hear such words uttered in her home.

George remained silent while the battles raged around him. Sitting in his armchair in front of the flickering new black-and-white television, he must have heard everything but he never took part.

Rose could only guess at the awfulness of his years in the Pacific training heavy artillery at Japanese planes, years that he never discussed with her, nor with anybody. Those years must have taught him hard lessons about fighting wars: ever since, he’d been a peacemaker, he refused to take sides.

Fifteen years in a house with two women, particularly two women at the opposite ends of the hormonal spectrum, easily persuaded him the best course of action for as peaceful an existence as possible was to retreat to the sidelines while Rose was left to fight her battles alone. His refusal to take sides used to infuriate her.

It was during the worst row she and Kate ever had that his impartiality brought her to breaking point.

‘I can’t stand this any longer.’ She stood in the doorway to his study, arms folded, her voice raised higher with each word. ‘You just sit there and don’t say anything. The least you could do is stick up for me when she’s screaming at me like that.’

‘But Rose, she doesn’t really mean it. She’s . . .’

‘Did you hear what she called me?’

‘Well, I . . .’

‘A dried up old bag. That’s what she called me. And you just sat there and agreed with her.’

‘I didn’t agree. I didn’t say . . .’

‘No, you didn’t say anything. You never do.’ Rose ran into the bathroom, banging the door shut behind her.

She splashed cold water on her face, bathed her stinging eyes with a facecloth and sat on the edge of the bath for a long time, trying to calm herself down, before unjamming the bathroom door and retreating to the kitchen.

The argument had started when Kate wanted to go to the movies with some friends in Sumner – an hour and two buses away – and complained she wouldn’t be able to see the end of the movie if she had to catch the last bus home. Rose had refused to compromise, which according to Kate, meant she was paranoid.

‘Nobody else’s mother is as mean as you. Every body else is allowed out after eleven,’ Kate said.

‘I don’t believe that for one minute.’ Rose gripped the paring knife she was using to cut vegetables for dinner.

‘You never believe anything I say. I hate you!’ Kate’s eyes flashed.

Rose could feel herself start to burn with mounting anger. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’ The paring knife slipped from her grasp.

‘I hate living here,’ Kate shouted. ‘I wish I’d never been born.’

‘I wish we’d never chosen you.’ Rose clamped her mouth shut as soon as she’d said it, but it was too late to take it back. She thought of the tiny baby she’d brought home from Essex Hospital, so filled with joy and expectation. How could that tiny baby have turned into such a monster?

Rose put out her other hand in a gesture of surrender. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘I bet.’ Kate had shrugged her off. ‘You’re not my mother. You never were.’ Her gaze was searing. ‘I really hate you!’ she screamed as she fled back up the hallway to her room. The door slammed behind her.

Stunned, Rose returned to the study where the television was still flickering but the sound turned way down. George was writing down some numbers while looking at his watch.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Timing you,’ he said, adding up the numbers. ‘You’ve been arguing for over an hour and a half so far.’

Rose felt herself boiling over. ‘How could you?’ She stood in front of him, furious. ‘You’re doing it again. Just sitting there, not taking sides, not backing me up. Did you hear what she said? She said I’m not her mother.’ Just repeating it made her feel like breaking down, like crumpling in a heap on the floor and giving up entirely. What was the point?

‘She didn’t mean it.’

‘She did. You should have seen the look in her eyes.’ The hatred of the moment burned into her brain. ‘You shouldn’t let her get away with it, you should tell her to apologise instead of sitting there with your stopwatch timing us. It’s … it’s…’ She was so angry she could hardly speak.

‘What do you expect me to do? It won’t help if I get involved.’

‘It would help
me
! You should be sticking up for me, George.’

‘It sounded like it was Kate who needed sticking up for that time round.’ His mouth was in a tight line.

Rose knew the warning signs of his rare temper but she ignored it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I heard what you said. You could hear it all over the house – the neighbourhood probably. You said you wished you’d never . . .’

‘Don’t repeat it,’ she cried. ‘It was bad enough the first time.’ She sat on the chair opposite George’s and looked out the window. ‘She knows just how to wind me up.’

‘That’s no excuse, Rose, and you know it.’

She turned and faced him. ‘I’d like to see what you’d do if she called you names like that and was so vile to you.
You
wouldn’t put up with it.’

‘I would like to think I’d turn the other cheek. That’s what you should do.’

‘Oh, it’s all very well for you, Mister High and Mighty, sitting there on your throne and pretending you’re above all that. But someone’s got to run this place. Someone’s got to stop her staying out half the night. You’ve got no backbone, George. You never did have. It’s got nothing to do with your condition either. Long before you got multiple sclerosis, you would wriggle out of confrontations and sit on the fence.’

‘I say, Rose, that’s hardly fair.’

‘You’re supposed to be the man of the house. Well, it’s about time you started. Because I’m sick of making all the tough calls.’ 

George picked up his pen and waved it at her. ‘Then you should stop being so strict on her.’ His voice was getting louder with every word. ‘What does it matter if she stays out one night at her friend’s place? It won’t kill her.’

‘I might have known you’d take her side when it came down to the wire.’ Rose could feel spittle around her mouth. ‘Now I know why you never stick up for me.’

‘I’m not taking sides, Rose. I’m . . .’

‘You are. You’re sticking up for her and not me. That’s all the gratitude I get for everything I do for you.’

‘Rose, I can’t take sides . . .’

But she could hear no more. She leapt out of the chair and fled to the kitchen where she sat at the table, shaking with rage. How dare he side with Kate? After all the care and attention she lavished on him, struggling to help him shower in the morning, helping him dress, taking him breakfast, baking him muffins for morning tea, lunches, dinners, getting him back into bed at night – there was no end to it, day after day. And what thanks did she get? Instead of backing her, he’d abandoned her.

Along the end of the corridor, Kate’s record player started up, breaking the silence, music booming through the closed door: ‘Hey, Jude…’ Rose had never liked the Beatles. They were noisy and uncouth.

A cold nose nudged at her hand, lying in her lap.

‘Tess. You’ve come to stick up for me.’ The little snub-nosed King Charles spaniel had left George and come to her, which was quite something. Normally Tess remained on George’s lap or in her basket at his feet. She fondled the dog’s soft floppy ears. ‘At least you care about me.’