The Girl from Station X (2 page)

My mother takes snaps of me and Raymond. Here we are, at Comillas, just the two us, in our sun hats, digging in the sand with our spades.

How sweet my mother is then. She calls me, her eldest, ‘my old love’ and Raymond, born in Spain, ‘my Spanish love’. I want to be with my mother all the time.

My mother is always happy and smiling. When she narrows her blue eyes against the sun I try to copy her. When we are in an aeroplane flying back to England to visit our grandmother, it is I who
sit with my mother, and Raymond who’s with our young nanny, Doreen. I announce very loudly: ‘I’ve got fleas!’ I don’t understand why all the adults around us
laugh.

When we leave Spain for good, my mother hoards many objects from there: in our house in Sussex are black and white mantillas, castanets, green and yellow cups and saucers with little deer
running round them, fans like lace, a big orange bull and, on either side of the dining-room fireplace, two pictures of Spanish gypsies, a man and his wife, their skin the colour of purple grapes.
At Christmas, she puts out a Spanish crib. The Moor – one of the Three Wise Men – rides a camel and wears a turban.

When I was seven, my mother took me back to Spain, to a village near Seville, on holiday. She dragged me through streets full of naked children to a shop where she had ordered a donkey harness.
I stood outside, staring at a pale canary in a tiny cage. Later, as we walked back, I became worried by the thin mules and dogs, the naked hungry children and the imprisoned canary, and remarked
how poor the village was.

‘Why can’t you notice the
nice
things?’ she said.

My mother showed the first signs of Alzheimer’s in 1991, when she was seventy-seven, the year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Perhaps the shock of that finally did
for her – the possibility that yet another of her four children might predecease her.

Over the next few years friends, usually hers, would often ask: ‘How’s your mother?’

I would reply, with apparent nonchalance: ‘Oh, she’s completely crackers.’

She had planned to take me and my children to the Russian Circus one afternoon in that August of 1991. But we had to go without her. Instead, she was being operated on – again. She had
fallen, drunk, the night before. I never actively fought with my mother, but after she broke her leg or hip, for the second or even third time, I began to get anxiety pains in my chest.

Six weeks later, I was in hospital myself. Soon after my mother’s fall, I had a lump removed from my breast. Ten days later my lymph glands were taken out, to see if the cancer had spread;
it had. In hospital, I was getting persistent calls about my mother’s drinking. One of my friends insisted that I must not see her during my impending eight months of radiotherapy and
chemotherapy; I should concentrate on my two children and on getting well.

I stuck to this arrangement for a while but I did see my mother that Christmas – she stayed with me, my ex-husband and our two children at our house in Sussex near hers. She brought me a
present of a silver ship which she had just taken out of storage – I wonder now if it had belonged to her maternal grandmother, born in Chile. I saw my mother on other occasions during that
period, out of duty. I rang her once after chemotherapy, thinking that she might drive over and see me – a fifteen-minute car journey. But she did not, and she did not come to the telephone
either. I was told by the person who’d answered her phone that she’d said she was too tired.

When I had come out of hospital the previous autumn my Aunt Rosemary, my father’s sister, in her eighties and nervous of travelling alone, had come on a coach to see me from her home over
two hours away.

I did not really expect emotional support from my mother during my breast cancer treatment. Nevertheless, I remember complaining to a close friend who’d visited me in hospital just before
my second operation that my mother was never there when I needed her. It was
her
mother that I longed for, and that night, after my friend left, I dreamed that my grandmother, now dead, was
waiting for me outside her house, Knowle.

My mother had a better relationship with my daughter than she did with me. My daughter was not angry with her as I was, and, indeed, did not have so much reason to be. My
mother, though not in England for her birth, subsequently seemed genuinely delighted by the baby. I have a photograph of her standing in her garden looking down shyly at the child in her arms, as
though she can hardly believe her luck. And whenever I later criticised my mother, my daughter would defend her, saying: ‘She never did anything nasty to me!’ At seven, after her first
night alone with her grandmother, she declared: ‘I love Granny, I really love her!’

My mother on that occasion taught my daughter Snakes and Ladders. When I went to collect her, we all three played Cluedo and my mother, who loved board games, surprisingly didn’t remember
that she was Miss Scarlett. It was 1989. Later I interpreted this as a sign of her encroaching Alzheimer’s. I also remember her bobbing up and down in front of her drinks tray that day, as
though doing knee exercises, talking incomprehensibly about ‘The Blue Lady’. After several minutes, during which I speculated that the Blue Lady might even be a ghost, I realised that
she was imitating the audience in the Albert Hall at the Last Night of the Proms, which had just been on TV. The soprano had worn a bright blue dress.

Despite these flashes of empathy – no one else understood what she had meant by the Blue Lady – my anger against her had increased, as a result of her many drunken falls. After my
separation from my husband, a friend had sent me to a therapist who by chance specialised in alcoholism, and, over the next few years, I was encouraged to acknowledge for the first time that my
childlike parent had frequently been the centre of attention when I desperately needed help myself. My marriage was over and my son, Nicholas, at six, had had to go to a special needs school. The
day that my mother imitated the Blue Lady he had waved a carving knife at me and threatened to jump out of our kitchen window in front of a car.

Although slipping further into madness, my mother still sometimes made sensible remarks. During all those years, as she grew worse, I visited her regularly. My diary of April 1994 describes her
being brought downstairs, a bright blue cardigan over her nightdress, dark green trousers underneath. Every so often, she tried to go back up. She asked me about her American cousin Peggie, and
whether I thought that Peggie still wanted her to come and stay in America, where she used to go often. I rang America, but unfortunately Peggie was out.

I asked Mr Mainwaring, who worked for my mother, to ring Peggie again after we’d gone, but he said that my mother might be too tired by then.

Mr Mainwaring was kind, but uncouth compared to my grandmother’s butler at Knowle, Mr Tash, whom I had loved as a child. He would let me help make an Old-fashioned for my grandmother,
placing in it a cherry on a stick. Then he would give me my own cherry to eat from their jar full of syrup. Mr Tash would wear a butler’s black cutaway jacket with a starched white shirt and
would call my grandmother ‘Madam’, in his soft, gentlemanly voice. Mr Mainwaring, in an anorak, hung around in the room with us, even lighting a cigarette for my mother from his own
mouth. My mother seemed to like him being there and once she took his arm and coyly teased him about a group holiday they had been on.

That day, as I rose to leave, my mother plucked at my sleeve and begged me: ‘Don’t leave me too much alone!’

When I look back at her remark now – she must have realised that she was slowly losing her mind – I feel sad, even a little guilty. While I was embarking on a new life – having
just divorced and having, I hoped, got over cancer – my mother, for one of the few times I can remember, had spoken to me directly. Also, she had conveyed what I had so often longed to hear,
that I, her only daughter, meant more to her than those who looked after her daily with such devotion.

But although I wrote down her plea in my diary, I didn’t take it in. I couldn’t afford to. I was still terrified that I would never be rid of her; that she would always cripple me.
Indeed, I see with a shock that a few days after that I wrote in my diary:
I wish with all my heart my mother would die
.

I had just received a letter from my literary agent saying that my first book, a black comic diary about the time I had cancer, would be published the following year. At last, my life might
belong to me.

In autumn 1992, my mother decided to go to Madrid. She was hoping to see some of the friends that she and my father made there when I was a baby. (‘Prehistoric
peeps!’ he had pronounced disparagingly, when she had first suggested a visit. Now, nearly twenty years after he’d died, she was attempting, without him, to fulfil her wish.) But most
of those friends were dead.

Some were from old Spanish families, and had appealed to my mother’s romantic side. There were Marquesas, Duques, Condesas. There was Margarita Taylor, a lady of Irish origin who ran the
tea room by the British Embassy. During the war, it had been a conduit for getting refugees from the Nazis, mainly Jews, British officers and Poles, across the Pyrenees and out of Spain through
Gibraltar and Galicia. Margarita Taylor had dressed the refugees as British customers while they waited to be told their escape plans. I even remembered being taken there by my mother as a little
girl to eat cakes. Then there was Russian Natasha, who, my father said, had once resembled a gazelle but by middle age had turned into ‘a hideous old buffalo’ (she had offended him by
complaining that his dog Raven murmured in his sleep, demanding: ‘Stop him groaning!’). Natasha’s maiden name, Bagration, was an aristocratic Georgian name, like that of General
Bagration in
War and Peace.
My father teased my mother, referring to Natasha as ‘Buggeration’, but remained fond of her English husband Charlie, who, years after he retired from
the Foreign Office, did a superb translation into English verse of Pushkin’s long poem
Eugene Onegin.

Another friend from ‘the old days’ in Madrid – my mother’s pet phrase – was the Marques de Santo Domingo, or Paco. Paco’s life had been saved during the
Spanish Civil War by his English governess, Miss Ettie, who had hung a Union Jack out of the window, declaring to ‘the Reds’ that only British lived there. My mother loved that
story.

On a holiday to Spain when I was seven, my mother had taken me to stay with Paco and Miss Ettie near the old walled town of Avila. I had been unable to chat to the friendly local children, who
kept asking in Spanish: ‘Have you made your first Communion?’ Instead, I wandered in Paco’s garden, floating the heads of huge overblown red roses in his fishpond. Paco and I
named the stately blooms ‘The Princesses’.

My mother took me to the market below the walls and told me of Santa Teresa, so badly treated by the people of her town that she left Avila forever, shaking its dust from her shoes.

On that visit of autumn 1992, my mother had chosen the Ritz, because it was where she and my father and their friends of forty years ago would congregate for their midday
drink. She seemed pleased to be back there and said that she recognised the manager, a tall dark man who looked aristocratic.

Her first wish was to glimpse our old house, and we took a taxi there. Doreen, who had looked after me and Raymond as children in Spain, and Nicholas, now eight, were with us. On the way, my
mother told me that there was an apricot tree in our garden, where I used to run about. But, today, although we searched the street, there was no sign of our old home, and my mother, back in the
town after so many years away, seemed deflated. She decided to return to the hotel with Doreen, and I began walking with my son in the place where I spent the first years of my life.

I half-remembered our house and I certainly remembered our young Spanish maid Julia – ‘Hoolia’ – with her quick movements and long thick black hair down her back, and
Nanny Benny, the Scottish nanny who came before Doreen. I recalled my mother, on one of Nanny’s days off, trying to button my light blue ‘cherry dress’, fumbling with its red
cherry buttons and laughing happily at her incompetence.

I remembered our drives to the mountains outside Madrid on Sundays and how the car invariably broke down, leaving us waiting in the parched landscape. My visiting grandmother was furious when I
refused to walk on ‘the prickies’ – my word for the coarse Spanish grass. ‘What a town-bred child!’ she’d declared.

Then a village
fiesta
– how happy my mother looked! Older Spanish girls in scarlet skirts invited me to ride with them in a donkey cart, but I was too shy. Doreen came out from
England after my brother Raymond was born and fed him out of a silver porringer, his christening present. I remember the smell of blackberries cooking in a house by the sea.

Now my grandmother, my father and Raymond were dead. Doreen was seventy-four and my mother seventy-eight. Doreen appeared to be in good health but my mother had become vague. Sometimes I
wondered if she was pretending to be more confused than she was, to avoid responsibility. She had always been an escapist, and now surely this new forgetfulness was the perfect excuse.

That evening, we met in the Ritz drawing room, which had a ceiling as tall as a church’s, high-backed chairs covered in pink and huge vases of flowers placed near oval
mirrors, so there seemed to be double the number of blossoms in the room. Molly, who did part-time secretarial work for my mother in Sussex, was also with us. It was she who had helped organise the
trip. I did not expect attention to be given to me or to my son; all, I knew, would be given to my mother.

My mother’s younger English friend Maria, who lived part of the year in Spain, had left a plant for her, with a note saying that she would return tomorrow. My mother kept referring to
Maria as ‘Carmen’ – Carmen was Maria’s Spanish mother-in-law and a friend of my parents from ‘the old days’. She kept repeating: ‘Carmen’s coming
tomorrow.’