In Her Mothers' Shoes (43 page)

‘This is me when I got my first job.’ She held out a black-and-white photo of a young woman in a long winter coat, low-heeled brogues and a smile so direct and confident Kate hardly recognised her. But she did recognise the teeth, the overbite and the chin, pointed slightly – Dad called it elfin. And the way the wavy hair refused to be tamed into a fringe.

‘I’ve got a photo of me at that age too,’ she said and flicked through her pile until she found the one of her taken in her mother’s back garden, standing on the lawn in a psychedelic mini-dress.

‘You do look nice.’ Liz held it next to the photo of herself. ‘But I don’t see the resemblance.’ She picked out another photo of a girl in a school uniform. ‘That was just before I had you. When I was sent down to Christchurch.’

Kate took it and saw the same familiar features that Liz didn’t – or didn’t want to – see. ‘Was that a difficult time?’ She knew it was a redundant question, but she didn’t know what else to say.

‘Mostly it was. I was very homesick. And lonely.’

‘What about when I was born?’

‘Even lonelier. I wasn’t allowed to hold you. You were taken straight from me.’ She lowered her eyes and seemed transfixed with the sugar bowl, picking up the spoon and playing with it, swishing the sugar from side to side then spooning it up, holding the spoon aloft and letting a few grains trickle back into the bowl.

Kate felt suspended, like the spoon.
Another grain fell, like sand in an egg-timer, measuring the gap in the faltering conversation.

Liz had said in her letter that she’d not been allowed to hold her daughter. But hearing it out loud somehow made it very real. She looked across the table at her; Liz was showing no emotion, just a slight quiver of the lip and flutter of the eyelids gave her away. You couldn’t read her eyes; she was still staring at the sugar bowl, even though she’d put the spoon back inside it. Kate reached out and touched her mother’s hand and felt a slight recoil, or was it a tremor?  ‘I can’t imagine how that must have been.’

Liz didn’t reply.

There was a brief moment then when Kate thought she might be able to make a connection, to break through her mother’s reserve and shyness. But her mother’s hand lay motionless on the table. She waited a moment longer, in case Liz turned her palm upwards and grasped her hand, until it became embarrassing. She withdrew her hand and returned to her soup. Suddenly it was unappetising. She didn’t want any more. Putting down her spoon, wiping her mouth with the paper napkin, she tried to think of something to say, to cover the awkwardness of the moment.

‘My daughter starts school in July,’ was all she could think of.

Liz smiled. ‘I remember when it was your fifth birthday wondering how you would like going to school.’ She looked out the window. ‘I thought about you on all your birthdays. I tried sending you a card once. I got in touch with the hospital where you were born. But of course, they wouldn’t tell me anything.’

Kate knew just how that felt. She smiled back. ‘I used to think about you a lot too. Wonder what you were like.’

Liz laughed. ‘I’m afraid I’m not very interesting. I’ve not done very much at all. Not like you.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true. Tell me what you do.’

Liz recounted her life through her husband’s and her children’s lives, and Kate learned more about the likes and dislikes of Steven Davidson than she really wanted to know. She learned about her sister Jessie, who’d worked in an art gallery in London ‘right up to the birth of her baby’ and who’d switched to managing a fitness centre part-time now her second baby was one. She learned more about brother Richard – more than he’d told her himself. Liz was proud of his role on
Gloss
but didn’t say anything about him writing plays. Maybe he hadn’t told her? Maybe she didn’t want to know? But she added that he played saxophone in a big band at a night club at weekends and grew hydroponic salad greens in his back yard, selling them at a weekend market. Kate wondered why he’d kept that to himself at the interview. She would very much like to ask him. 

‘Do you think I’ll be able to meet him? Or Jessie when she comes back?’

‘Heavens no, not yet.’ Liz looked aghast. ‘I’m not ready to tell them yet. One day, maybe. But I couldn’t now.’

Kate was annoyed. What was it about her that her mother was ashamed of? What harm would it do for them to know? ‘Why is that?’ she said.

‘I haven’t been well, you know. The doctor says it’s depression. He’s put me on medication, but I still don’t feel right. Getting a letter from you, well …’ She tailed off.

Was she trying to lay the blame for her depression on Kate? Had the letter, the first contact from her firstborn in thirty-six years, reawakened the shame and the anxiety she’d buried all that time? It was entirely possible. Kate should have realised that her mother would be shocked, possibly seriously upset, getting her letter. Her mother’s depression was more than likely Kate’s fault.

They talked some more, but she could tell that the meeting was as good as over. Kate paid the bill for two – ‘It’s the least I can do,’ she said out of guilt – and they swapped photographs, picking the ones of when they were teenagers. Kate studied it one more time before putting it in her Filofax: the image of a mother that looked just like her at that age but refused to acknowledge it.

Just as she was going, her mother called her back. She was picking at the strap of her handbag, looking anxious. ‘I really don’t want my kids to know,’ she said. ‘It would be too much for me now. I just ask you to wait a while. One day I’ll tell them. Okay?’

Kate hesitated. She wasn’t sure she could agree to this.

‘Will you promise me not to tell them?’

Kate thought for a moment. Now that she’d met her mother, she realised that the key to finding her identity, to knowing if she fitted in with her mother’s family, lay with her siblings.

‘Please Kate.’

Liz was fiddling with her locket again, twisting the fine silver chain with such an intensity Kate feared it might break.

She nodded, reluctantly. ‘I won’t tell them.’

She would wait.

~   ~  ~

Kate had booked a late flight home, leaving plenty of time for whatever the meeting might have led to. If her mother had suggested seeing her brother or coming home with her, she’d been ready. But now, as she watched her mother’s sagging navy shoulders depart down the footpath towards the bus stop, she was relieved there’d been no other family involved. Relieved and disappointed. The way things had gone, a family reunion was out of the question.

If only it had been different, if only her mother was vibrant, like Mum. Even though she was twenty years her senior, Mum could run rings around her mother. Mum would say
carpe diem
, seize the day, and she’d live each day as if it were all that mattered, rushing around in her little red Honda Civic looking after Dad, after the dreaded Great Aunt Doris before she’d died, after any sick or lonely soul she knew. But Kate didn’t think Liz had
carpe-d
diem
for some time. How she ever got herself over to London was beyond imagination.

Having thought this day would bring her face to face with her identity, she found instead she had even less idea who she was. She’d thought meeting her mother would provide the answer. But instead it raised the same question: who was she? She knew one thing for sure: she might bear physical similarities to her mother but their personalities were dead opposite. Her quiet, shy, unassuming mother, who refused to allow herself any emotion, who lived her life through her family but wanted to deny her first daughter’s existence: where did Kate fit in with that?

She hadn’t expected this. She’d expected … what? Fireworks and starshells; resonance and recognition: to find someone she looked just like, someone who thought like her. There was an undoubted physical resemblance, even if Liz didn’t see it. But their way of thinking was worlds apart. If their genes were the same, their spirit was quite different.

What about Mum? In many ways, Kate felt she was more like her. Not just the blue eyes and brown hair – the only physical similarities they shared – it was more than that. She had the same seize-the-day impatience to be getting on with things, to have lots of friends and experience as many cultural and social events as she could fit in, to be determined to make a difference and be stubborn if anyone tried to stop her.

Perhaps she was an amalgam of both her mothers? Nature
and
nurture: a product of both.

But the harsh reality was that Liz didn’t want to acknowledge even a physical resemblance. What similarity Kate had found had been brushed away; she was beginning to doubt if it had been there at all.

Kate walked into town and wandered round the shops in a desultory way, not in the mood to buy anything but with nothing better to do than try something on. But nothing seemed to fit, everything looked wrong. The trousers made her bum look big; the shoes made her feet look like paddles; the earrings were too dangly; the lipstick drained colour from her face.

Reaching the end of Lambton Quay, she crossed the road to where her father had been hit by a taxi forty-eight years ago, just before he got married: the same government buildings, probably the same busy traffic – such an innocuous stretch of road, but so dangerous. And so damaging for Dad. The doctors had said, years after his diagnosis when more was known, that the shortening of his left leg by an inch that day, its failure to heal, followed by poor conditions in the tropics when he’d been stationed in New Caledonia during the War, would most probably have brought on multiple sclerosis.

She stood for a few moments beside a bus shelter and watched the traffic whizz by. Someone was trying to cross the road, jaywalking, ignoring the crossing lights. She wanted to call out, warn them of the inherent risk this spot held. But in an instant, they were across and the traffic continued to roar past, erasing the footsteps from the road.

Crossing carefully at the lights, she climbed the hill to Parliament Buildings to see if her friend Vanessa in the Minister of Tourism’s office had time for a coffee. But she was in a meeting.

Suddenly she felt very tired. James had woken her at five in the morning wanting a feed and had then refused to settle, so there’d been no more sleep. She’d expressed more milk to join the store in the freezer and got ready for the day. Now she wanted nothing more than to get home to David and the kids, tell him all about her day over dinner, fall into bed and go to sleep.

Except what was there to tell? Would she be honest and tell the truth: that her mother was a bit dull, that there’d been no connection, no great burst of emotion or mother-daughter bonding? That it felt like a second rejection? Or would she maintain the myth? The myth she’d clung to since she was a teenager, the myth that her mother was someone special, someone to be celebrated.

The biggest lie she’d ever told was that her mother - her birth mother – was German royalty, a countess, a Hapsburg princess. She was thirteen; in all other ways honest, forthright and generally regarded as a good girl. She always had been; she had to live up to her status of being special, the chosen one. With such a reputation, she thought she’d get away with it.

What on earth had she been trying to prove?

She knew she wasn’t the only angst-ridden, pre-pubescent girl wanting to distance herself from her mother, wishing she came from a family far away, a family connected to the world of glamour, wealth and fame, a family removed from her own ordinary, humdrum, small-town existence.