I left my money on the counter and headed back out to wait in the sun.
When I got back to London I had dinner with my mother, she’d booked a table at Andrew Edmunds, downstairs—“my treat”—but I felt oppressed by the dark green walls and confused by the surreptitious glances of the other diners, and then she unclenched my right hand from its death grip on a phone and said: “Look at this. Look what she’s doing to you. No nails and bleeding fingers.” I wondered when my mother started eating in Soho, and why she looked so thin, and where Miriam was. Maybe I would have thought a little more deeply about all of these questions if there had been any space in which to seriously consider them, but that evening my mother was on a talking tear, and most of the meal was taken up with a monologue about London gentrification — addressed as much to the nearby tables as to me — stretching from the usual contemporary complaints back through the years until it became an impromptu history lesson. By the time the main course turned up we’d arrived at the early eighteenth century. The very row of townhouses in which we sat — a backbench MP and a pop star’s personal assistant, eating oysters together — was once the accommodation of joiners and sash makers, bricklayers and carpenters, all of whom had paid a monthly rent which, even when adjusted for inflation, would not presently cover the single oyster I was putting in my mouth. “Working people,” she explained, tipping a Loch Ryan down her throat. “Also radicals, Indians, Jews, runaway Caribbean slaves. Pamphleteers and agitators. Robert Wedderburn! The ‘Blackbirds.’ This was their spot too, right under Westminster’s nose… Nothing like that happens round here now — sometimes I wish it would. Give us all something to work with! Or toward! Or even against…” She reached out to the three-hundred-year-old wood paneling beside her head and gave it a wistful stroke. “The truth is most of my colleagues don’t even remember what the real Left is, and believe me they don’t want to remember. Oh, but once upon a time it was a real hotbed around here…” She went on in this vein, for a bit too long, as usual, but in thrilling full flow — nearby diners leaned in to catch the scraps of it — and none of it was barbed or directed at me, all her sharp corners had been filed off. The empty oyster shells were taken away. Out of habit I started in on the skin around my cuticles. As long as she is talking about the past, I thought, well then she isn’t asking me about the present or the future, when I’ll stop working for Aimee or have a baby, and avoiding this two-pronged attack had become my first priority whenever I saw her. But she didn’t ask me about Aimee, she didn’t ask me about anything. I thought: she’s reached the center at last, she’s “in power.” Yes, even if she likes to characterize herself as a “thorn in the party’s side,” the fact is she’s at the center of things, finally, and this must be the difference. She had now what she’d wanted and most needed all of her life: respect. Maybe it didn’t even matter to her any more what I did with my life. She didn’t have to take it as a judgment upon her any longer, or on the way she raised me. And though I noticed she wasn’t drinking, I chalked this up, too, to my new version of my mother: mature, sober, self-confident, no longer on the back foot, a success on her own terms.
It was this train of thought that left me unprepared for what came next. She stopped talking, rested her head in a hand, and said: “Love, I have to ask for your help with something.”
She winced as she said it. I steeled myself against some form of self-dramatization. Terrible to think back now and realize this grimace was most likely a real, involuntary reaction to a genuine physical pain.
“And I wanted to deal with it myself,” she was saying, “not to bother you with it, I know you’re very busy, but I don’t know who else to turn to at this point.”
“Yes — well, what is it?”
I was very involved in trimming the fat off a pork chop. When I at last raised my eyes to my mother’s face she looked as tired as I’d ever seen her.
“It’s your friend — Tracey.”
I put down my cutlery.
“Oh, it’s ridiculous, really, but I got this e-mail, friendly… it came to my surgery. I hadn’t seen her in years… but I thought: Oh, Tracey! It was about one of her children, the eldest boy — he’d been expelled from school, she felt unfairly, and she wanted my help, you see, and so I replied, and at first it really didn’t seem that strange, I get these kinds of letters all the time. But now, you know, I do wonder: was it all just a ploy?”
“Mum, what are you talking about?”
“I did think it was a bit odd, the amount of e-mails she was sending, but… well, you know, she doesn’t work, that’s clear, I don’t know if she’s ever worked, really, and she’s still in that bloody flat… That would drive you crazy by itself. She must have a lot of time on her hands — and right away it was a lot of e-mails, two or three a day. It was her opinion the school unfairly expelled black boys. I did make some inquiries, but it seemed in this case, well… the school felt they had a strong case and I couldn’t take it any further. I wrote to her and she was very angry, and sent some very angry e-mails, and I thought that was the end of it, but — it was the beginning.”
She scratched anxiously at the back of her head-wrap, and I noticed the skin at the top of her neck was raw with irritation.
“But Mum, why would you reply to anything from Tracey?”—I was holding the sides of the table—“I could have told you she’s not stable. I’ve known that for years!”
“Well, firstly she’s my constituent, and I always reply to my constituents. And when I realized she was your Tracey — she’s changed her name, you know — but her e-mails have become very… weird, very peculiar.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“About six months.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it before!”
“Darling,” she said, and shrugged: “When would I have had the chance?”
She had lost so much weight her magnificent head looked vulnerable on its swan-like neck, and this new delicacy, this suggestion of mortal time working on her just as it works on everybody, spoke to me more loudly than any of the old accusations of daughterly neglect ever had. I lay a hand over hers.
“Odd in what way?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it in here. I’ll send some of the e-mails on to you.”
“Mum, don’t be so dramatic. You can give me an idea.”
“They’re quite abusive,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes, “and I haven’t been feeling very well, and I’m getting a lot of them now, sometimes a dozen in a day, and I know it’s stupid but they’re upsetting me.”