This was certainly new. Not exactly what I wanted for my birthday, but still, a surprise. Not to be sniffed at, though hardly riveting. As she moved towards the parts of the story she found unbearable, she fought to control herself, leaving big pauses and looking right past me. She was making some sort of impersonation of female pluck, as we know it from films of the 1940s. Greer Garson, Celia Johnson — and now Laura Cromer, refusing the easy release of tears. ‘When her husband returned, my mother was pregnant.
‘Pregnant with me.
‘These things happen, of course — they always have. But they tend to be hushed up.
‘No hushing-up was done in this case.
‘In the Father column on my birth certificate my mother put the truth. She had the name of her lover entered, not the name of the man she was married to. She wasn’t going to give the world the satisfaction of making her lie. And she wasn’t going to spare me the shame that bothered her so little. Luckily’ — and here there was a laugh that did more or less come off — ‘Ivo had lost his shirt in East Africa. His hair was still dark, she told me, but his moustache had turned white.’ Many families have these tales of follicles blasted by shock, fate’s lightning earthed by the roots of the hair.
‘Anyway, after his little adventure in the coffee business he didn’t have a bean. He was in no position to dictate terms. He depended on his wife’s financial resources. He wasn’t a hero. I suppose he wasn’t a fool. He must have thought — better a cuckold than a bankrupt.
‘Better to have a bastard being brought up in your house, even one that everyone knows about, than debts that everyone knows about. Mummy’s people cut her allowance to the bone for some years, they never quite cut her off.
‘They punished her. They said she had made her bed and must lie in it, but they didn’t disown her. Perhaps they even noticed that there was someone else involved who had to lie in a bed she hadn’t chosen. That was me.
‘They have provided for me in their way, but I was never made welcome. I never felt I was part of the family, and I didn’t know why until I came of age. Then my mother was kind enough to tell me. And now I’m telling you. Now you know what my family is like.’
This was all fairly interesting, but it didn’t shake me to the core or even blight my birthday. Mum had even cheated a bit. Granny had spoiled her twenty-first birthday, not her eighteenth. From anyone else’s point of view, this was all ancient history, a grate of cold ashes, fully raked over, but it was still a live coal in Mum’s mouth, burning her tongue, and she couldn’t wait another three years to spit it out. She accepted me as an adult ahead of schedule, even if it was only to load me down with the family secrets.
I couldn’t feel particularly upset. If I had chosen Mum’s womb, hadn’t she chosen Granny’s? We both had a chance to read the fine print, between lives. There’s plenty of time. I asked, out of politeness really, ‘Did you ever see your real father?’
‘Sometimes. In church. Obviously he’d always known who I was. I only knew about him when my mother told me the story. After that I could feel him not looking at me. If you mean did we ever have a conversation about it, then no. Nothing more than Hello and How are you? I called him Uncle Arthur.’ She looked at me a little flatly. Neither of us had touched our drink. ‘I expect you need some time to take this all in.’
I didn’t think I did. I’d already taken it in, more or less. I had disappointed Mum with the evenness of my reaction. She had dropped her bombshell on the appointed day, and it had been something of a dud. The trauma fizzled, though I managed not to say, ‘Is that all?’ When Dad came in she said, ‘I’ve just been telling John about “Uncle Arthur”,’ and he only said, ‘Oh yes?’, as if this might be someone from her sewing circle. Dad was very good at letting things pass without comment, letting them more or less blow through him, and for once I followed his lead.
I don’t even remember what Mum gave me for my birthday that year — her real present was that conversation. She was issuing a sort of certificate of damage. It was official, now, that she had never had a chance of happiness, but I honestly didn’t see what it all had to do with me.
There was poignance, of course, in Mum’s status. The child of a great love, not greatly loved herself. Much was explained about her — her unending quest to be accepted by her own mother, her eagerness to get married, properly married in church and to acquire the respectability of a wife, since she had been cheated of it as a daughter. I understood better now the way Granny seemed to glide on warm and lofty currents, while Mum was always frantically flapping the middle air.
The period of impoverishment, coinciding with her early life, had obviously left its mark. It was like the period of starvation in the womb when a mother is deprived of nutrients, leaving her fœtus underdeveloped. Granny hung on to her sense of entitlement, but absolutely failed to pass it on.
There was more to the story, which I gradually pieced together. After the coffee fiasco my grandfather Ivo (though of course he wasn’t actually my grandfather) laid siege to the marital bed. He laid the ghost of Uncle Arthur, and that was the beginning of Roy.
When there was a legitimate son as well as an illegitimate daughter, mother love was poured out till it ran over. On darling Roy. Not because of his legitimacy, I don’t think, though I dare say Granny appreciated the neatness of the stitching which repaired the family’s ravelled hem. Everything looked more or less conventional again, and her family’s allowance was restored to its original value.
It’s just that Granny, from her first breath to her last, preferred men to women, boys to girls. Even if Laura had been loved in the cradle she would have been abandoned in the nursery, when Roy came along to take all the love that was going.
Mum and Roy chose the same womb, but Roy had the better sense of timing. It was a different place by the time he occupied it. As between the claims of a girl who was the child of her great love and a boy — any boy — there would never really be a contest, in Granny’s eyes. Mum had done nothing wrong. She just couldn’t do anything right.
Granny made things worse by taking in a local boy during the war. There would never be enough boys, and perhaps there was one girl too many already. I began to understand Mum’s passionate desire for a daughter, to show at least one female soul that she was welcomed, even if the idyll with Audrey hadn’t quite worked out like that.
After the birthday briefing I wasn’t supposed to think of Granny as anything but monstrous. Of course she was monstrous! But the nerve it must have taken, to insist on the truth being put down on that official piece of paper. To testify against herself in that stubborn way, insisting on disgrace.
The seeming slope of time
Mum’s sense of unbelonging was the great business of her life, but it wasn’t going to be mine. I wouldn’t let that happen. Never mind that I didn’t exactly know what the great business of my life was.
You can’t be traumatised by a history whose reality you don’t accept. I wasn’t yet an informed Hindu, but I had cottoned on to a fundamental concept. Blood isn’t thicker than water. Blood is only water carrying a particular charge of deluded affinity.