The Girl from Station X (46 page)

Did my mother fall in love with Betty that first day they met in Tobago? Her disloyalty towards Knotty, which began almost from the moment she met Betty, must have been a result of that sudden
bonding, but did not justify her behaviour – Knotty, after all, was doing her best to help, attending to my mother in her bedroom, for example, something which I did not want to do myself
because I feared her drunkenness.

The evening that my mother first got talking properly to Betty, there was a steel band playing. My mother and Dodo complained of the noise, and everyone in our group, except me and Knotty, went
to bed. We went and sat near the band. At a table near us were a mother and daughter, also staying at our hotel. The girl kept being asked by West Indian men to dance, and her mother looked furious
and worried – Knotty pointed out that she was anxiously puffing on her cigarette. At one moment the older woman looked at me and closed her eyes as if in horror.

At first the daughter seemed pleased by the attention. She half-smiled and wiggled her body to the music. She didn’t dance, however, and after a while the two of them left. The next
morning my mother said how naïve Knotty was. They were not mother and daughter, but a lesbian couple.

I became pregnant with my daughter at thirty-one, a few weeks before I got married to Andrew. Although my mother proudly announced our engagement at a Christmas drinks party
she had in Sussex, which Andrew and I attended, I did not tell her about the expected baby. Anyway, she was wrapped up in her romance with Betty at that time.

It was to a stranger I turned for advice, an Irishwoman who worked in the White Knight Laundry at Notting Hill Gate. A cheerful lady, her hair newly dyed red, she’d been spending Christmas
with one of her daughters, who’d just had
her
first baby. My Irish friend told me that she herself had had six children, including one little daughter who’d died. Her husband
had then died at only forty-seven, leaving her with her remaining five children, so she’d had to go out to work. She’d worked in a shop and was able to live in the flat above, so that
after her children came home from school they could come down to her if they needed anything. (How unlike
my
mother – it was
she
who was the needy child.)

I asked my Irish friend for a few tips.

‘When I had my first baby,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know how to hold him when he was slippery with soap. I was terrified I’d drop him. But now my daughter has a plastic
bath in which she can soap the baby without having to hold him at the same time.’

Soon after that conversation, I married Andrew in a Catholic church in Kingsway. It was a tiny wedding, with only our immediate families and one friend attending. Andrew’s maiden aunt
Jean, from Cumbria, was there and so was my Aunt Rosemary and her second husband, Harry, her first, my cousin Elizabeth’s father, having been killed in the war.

My mother, I wrote on 27 January 1981, just after my wedding, came to meet me wearing a fur jacket of Betty’s. It was snow leopard. I wrote:
Why she couldn’t have worn
her own fur I can’t imagine.

My first pregnancy was overshadowed by my mother’s troubling relationship with Betty. Betty gave me and Andrew several gifts – spring bulbs, a casserole dish and even an exquisite
baby’s matinee jacket that she’d made. However, I knew that she was jealous of me and wanted all of my mother’s attention.

My daughter was born in late August 1981. The week before, my mother went to Majorca for a whole month with Betty, who, when I had said goodbye, had remarked to my mother: ‘I hope the damn
baby doesn’t arrive while we’re in Majorca and spoil my holiday!’

The day of my daughter’s birth, 23 August, was one of the happiest days of my life. There was a storm in Majorca and the telephone lines were down. My husband tried to send his
mother-in-law a telegram. Was she, an older woman, envious of my ability to give birth? Or had she gone away because ‘I can’t face it’ – her favourite phrase? Was
any
strong emotion, even something as positive and joyful as the birth of her first grandchild, something that my mother could not handle? Or was she simply being subservient to Betty?

Years later, in one of her photo albums, I found her telegram to us, congratulating me and Andrew on the birth of our baby. Why did my mother stick that telegram in
her
album? Was she
trying to prove – to herself, or to posterity – that she was a good grandmother after all? Or was she simply scared of sharing?

My mother never changed the nappies of either of my children but on one bizarre occasion, just after we arrived to stay with her for Christmas in 1983, fourteen weeks after my son
Nicholas’s birth, my mother, laughing in a slightly embarrassed way, scooped some of Betty’s excrement off her sitting-room floor on to a small coal shovel and carried it out of the
room. No one said anything but I assume now that Betty – almost certainly my mother’s girlfriend – must have become slightly infirm.

We had hired a temporary nanny in an emergency; my lower back had collapsed and I couldn’t lift Nicholas or his carrycot. My son woke continually in the night, and was often sick just
after I had breastfed him, while I had developed something that the doctor called a rotavirus, so was on antibiotics. My daughter, aged two, no doubt jealous of the baby, was being very demanding,
shouting and giving me and Andrew orders during the night, and wanting a bottle.

Only now, over thirty years later, does it occur to me that it would have been normal for a woman with a two-year-old and a new baby to ask her own mother for help. But it never entered my head
to do so, and I did not even find it odd that my mother was more involved with her girlfriend and her new dog – another basset, Mr Plod – than with me and my children.

My grandmother had had an over-maternal mother and three loving older sisters, but I did not have one sister to help me; it was usually non-relations who did so. Mrs Dixon, who moved into the
bungalow next door in Sussex when my children were small and worked for me part-time, became my son’s surrogate grandmother and in some ways a mother to me, helping me with Nicholas and
knitting us all jumpers for Christmas – she had even knitted outfits for my daughter’s toy animals. I cannot help contrasting my mother’s emotional poverty in this respect. She
too had not been able to consult a sister, or share experiences on how to bring up children, and her own mother, I was beginning to realise now I had children of my own, had betrayed her by her
failure to look after Raymond that day. In the light of that failure, I wonder at my mother subsequently allowing me, when still so little, to be so often alone with my grandmother. Was it
generosity to entrust her with another of her young children, her only daughter? And was it later hurtful to my mother that, certainly from my teenage years, I preferred being with my grandmother
at Knowle, where I felt safe, to being with her?

After Knowle was sold, Andrew and I moved into the Sussex house that my mother had bought at the instigation of Susan S, also recently widowed, who lived at the end of the
garden. However, my mother had never moved in – she ‘couldn’t face’ clearing out her other house and selling it – and, shamefully, the house that we, and our daughter,
quickly grew to love was left empty by her for nearly two years. Betty, meanwhile, spent a great deal of time at my mother’s larger house, my mother even installing a chair-lift for her, and
once, in an uncharacteristic fit of extravagance, flying Betty, after she had been ill, in a helicopter from Battersea heliport to my mother’s Big Lawn.

Meanwhile Betty was so rude to Molly, and so interfering, that Molly left my mother’s employ. There had also been an incident with a female gardener – who had renamed Okie the
terrapin ‘Amy’, and who developed a crush on Molly. My mother, indecisive, would not get rid of the gardener or tell Betty off for meddling and it was Molly who left – she was
later very kind to the gardener when she became terminally ill.

My mother’s relationship with Betty went on. Once, when Andrew and I visited, we found them both standing together to greet us wearing exactly the same suits and shoes. No comment was made
by any one of us and I wonder now whether, by their identical outfits, they were trying to convey the closeness of their relationship, as my mother certainly would never have been able to state it
directly. Due to various comments made by close friends such as Susan S, and because of my own instinct, it seemed pretty clear that my mother and Betty were in a physical as well as an emotional
relationship.

Years later, an elderly writer friend of mine recalled socialising with my mother and Betty, with a male friend of his. Both men were homosexual and my elderly friend told me that they had
naturally assumed that my mother and Betty were a couple. Perhaps my mother felt at home in these two men’s company and was relieved that there was no need, as there was among her other, more
conventional friends, for her to pretend. Certainly, her leanings were never spelt out, but always had to be guessed at, by her husband, children, friends such as Susan S and those who worked for
her. The full extent of her intimacy with Betty was never admitted by her – certainly not to me – or, I suspect, to anybody.

If Betty had been pleasant, perhaps I could have got used to the idea of her and my mother as a couple. But Betty was ill-mannered – to me, to my mother’s friends and to those who
worked for my mother. She liked to make out that others were doing my mother down. But actually it was Betty who, well off herself, and with no children, accepted all sorts of gifts, including the
helicopter ride and several holidays in Majorca. Once, Betty told me off for ringing Peggie from my mother’s Sussex house, saying rudely that no one rang long-distance from
her
house.
My mother did not defend me, although I had rung so that my mother could talk to Peggie. Betty seemed cold and uninterested in anyone except my mother. I saw her as an interloper and was shocked
when I realised that she was sleeping in my father’s old bedroom; an adjoining bathroom led to my mother’s room.

It was in the mid-1980s that Betty became ill with what must have been osteoporosis; I recall hearing that her neck was crumbling. I cannot be sure how loyal my mother was to
her during this period, which ended in Betty’s death in 1992, and by this time, my mother didn’t seem to have very much to do with her. As usual, my mother did not divulge to me what
was going on, though I do remember Susan S explaining: ‘Your mother’s relationship with Betty was a love affair rather than a friendship, so when it was over, it was over.’

I had one confrontation with Betty, on holiday in Majorca in the early 1980s. She had seemed frightened and I realised that she was a bully, and that you had to bully her back. (I was surprised
recently to read in my diary that, about a year after, Betty unexpectedly alluded to ‘your sweet children’. And my grandsons recently both wore the exquisite matinee jacket she made for
my first baby.)

I suppose that she was a stabilising influence in my mother’s life, in that she stopped her drinking so much. My mother, I believe, had had no inkling, until she died, of how much she
depended on my father. She turned out to be hopeless on her own at home, unable to summon any inner resources. Instead of spending solitary evenings on her hobbies – photography, her old
movies of Eastern Europe, her books about Russia, or learning Russian on tape, something she had started to do years earlier – she spent the time drinking.

By the mid-1980s, with Betty ill and mostly out of the picture, my mother again became more difficult. One new friend was a librarian from San Francisco she had met on a trip,
who came to Hope Cove with us when my children were small, in the summer of 1988, when we all attended the Defeat of the Armada celebrations. My mother had broken her hip at least twice by then and
could not climb up to the field where the giant bonfire was to be lit. The American, I noted in my diary, was a slightly mysterious woman, enormously tall with a hat with a brim pulled over her
dark eyes. Andrew could not see what my mother had in common with her. She accepted everything that she was offered, mostly by my mother – the taxi from Totnes station there and back, drinks,
meals at our house and dinner in the Lobster Pot Hotel, for which she did not thank Andrew.

On our last evening at Hope Cove that summer, we invited some neighbours in for a drink and this caused frightful drunkenness in my mother. Andrew mixed her a weak vodka and tonic but when the
guests left, she rushed into the dining room saying she must have another, and sloshed an enormous amount of vodka into her glass. She then became almost incoherent, but luckily had the sense to go
to bed early.

Another woman friend after Betty was a lady who had first come as a temporary cook, then returned several times as a guest. In 1986, she and my mother ganged up on a pleasant professional
companion whom Andrew and I had engaged, out of desperation, through the London agency Solve Your Problems, for which Knotty then worked. (My mother, as a Problem, should have been permanently on
their books; though perhaps, as Unsolvable, she would have put the agency out of business.) Only a week earlier, my mother had been so drunk after the death of Mr Plod that it had been unsafe to
leave her alone in case she fell again or even set the house on fire with a dropped cigarette. My last brother’s ex-girlfriend had gone and looked after her. Andrew and I, with Knotty’s
help, had then employed Mrs Peru. Mrs Peru told us that when she had been with my mother only two days, the former cook had arrived to stay. She and my mother then confronted Mrs Peru, who was told
‘Your services are no longer required!’ and sent packing.

My mother, then in her seventies, was living her life like an irresponsible naughty child, changing her ‘best friend’ whenever it suited her, and leaving a trail of hurt or angry
female hearts in her wake. (Susan S, during the regime of the former cook, pronounced bitterly to me and Andrew: ‘I’m right in the background again as a friend. Anne has completely
dropped me.’) It is difficult for me, as a daughter, to see why, despite her bad behaviour, her friends found her so engaging. Certainly, she had a lively and original mind and an enormous
capacity for enjoyment, despite her past tragedies and her depressions, which she hid from most people and which she must have tried to alleviate by drink. Her helplessness ensured that others
would undertake practical tasks which she could, and should, have done herself. Indeed, the qualities that made her unsatisfactory as a mother, her whimsicality, childishness and unpredictability,
were perhaps what charmed others.