“Why don’t you just let Miriam deal with it? She deals with your communications, doesn’t she?”
She took her hand back and assumed her backbench face, a tight, sad smile, suitable for combating questions about the health service but unnerving to see over a dinner table.
“Well, you’ll find out sooner or later: we’ve split up. I’m still in the flat on Sidmouth Road. I have to stay in the neighborhood, obviously, and I won’t find another deal like that, at least not right away, so I asked her to move out. Of course, it is technically her flat, but she was very understanding about it, you know Miriam. Anyway, it’s not a big deal, there’s no hard feelings, and we’ve kept it out of the papers. So that’s the end of that.”
“Oh, Mum… I’m sorry. Really.”
“Don’t be, don’t be. Some people can’t deal with a woman having a certain amount of power, and that’s just how it is. I’ve seen it before and I’ll see it again, I’m sure. Look at Raj!” she said, and it was so long since I’d thought of the Noted Activist by his real name that I realized I’d forgotten it. “Running off with that fool girl as soon as I finished my book! Is it my fault he never finished a book?”
No, I assured her, it was not her fault Raj never finished his book, on “coolie” labor in the West Indies — though he had been working on it for two decades — while my mother began and finished her book, on Mary Seacole, in a year and a half. Yes, the Noted Activist had only himself to blame.
“Men are so ridiculous. But it turns out so are women. Anyway, it’s a good thing in a way… at a certain point I really felt she was trying to interfere in ways that… Well, this obsession of hers with ‘our’ business practices in West Africa, human-rights abuses, and so on — I mean, she was encouraging me to ask questions in the House — in areas I’m not really qualified to speak on — and in the end I think what it was really about, in a funny way, was trying to drive a wedge between me and you…” A less likely motivation for Miriam I could hardly imagine, but I held my tongue. “… And I’m getting older and I don’t have as much energy as I did, and I really want to be focused on my local concerns, my constituents. I’m a local representative and that’s what I want to do. I haven’t got ambitions any further than that. Don’t smile, dear, I really don’t. Not any more. At one point I said to her, to Miriam—‘Look, I’ve got people walking into my surgery every day from Liberia, from Senegal, from the Gambia, from Côte d’Ivoire! My work is global. This is where my work is. These people are coming from all over the world to my constituency, in these terrible little boats, they’re traumatized, they’ve seen people die right in front of them, and they’re coming here. That’s the universe trying to tell me something. I really feel this is the work I was born to do.’ Poor Miriam… she means very well, and God knows she’s well organized, but she lacks perspective sometimes. She wants to save everybody. And that kind of person does not make the best life partner, for sure, though I will always consider her a very effective administrator.” It was impressive — and a bit sad. I wondered if some similarly chilly epigraph existed for me: She was not the best daughter, but she was a perfectly adequate dinner date.
“Do you think,” asked my mother, “do you think she’s unhinged… mentally ill or…”
“Miriam’s one of the sanest people I’ve ever met.”
“No — your friend Tracey.”
“I wish you’d stop calling her that!”
But my mother wasn’t listening to me, she was in her own dream: “You know, somehow… well, she’s on my conscience. Miriam thought I should have just gone to the police about the e-mails in the first place but… I don’t know… when you get older, somehow things from the past… they can weigh on you. I remember when she used to come for counseling at the center… Of course I didn’t see her notes, but I got the sense, speaking to the team there, that there were problems, mental-health issues, even back then. Maybe I was wrong to stop her coming in, but it really wasn’t easy to get her the placement in the first place, and I’m sorry, but at the time I really and truly felt that she had abused my trust, your trust, everybody’s… She was still a child, of course, but it was a crime — and it was a lot of money — I’m sure it all went to her father — but what if they’d blamed you? At that point it was just best to sever all connections, I thought. Well, I’m sure you have lots of judgments about what went on — you always have a lot of judgments — but I wish you would understand that it was not easy raising you, I was not in an easy situation, and on top of everything I was focused on trying to get myself educated, trying to get myself qualified, maybe too much so in your opinion… but I had to make a life for you and for me. I knew your father couldn’t do it. He wasn’t strong enough. No one else was going to do it. We were on our own. And I had a lot of balls in the air, that’s how it felt to me, and—” she reached across the table and grabbed my elbow: “We should have done more — to protect her!”
I felt her fingers pinching me, bony in their grip.
“You were lucky, you had this wonderful father. She didn’t have that. You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really you were born lucky — but I know. And she was a part of our family, practically!”
She was pleading with me. The tears that had been gathering now fell.
“No, Mum… no, she wasn’t. You’re misremembering: you never liked her. Who knows what went on in that family or what she needed protecting from, if anything? No one ever told us — she certainly never did. Every family on that corridor had secrets.” I looked at her and thought: do you want to know ours?
“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.”
She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks.
“That’s true,” she said. “Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”
The next morning my British mobile rang, a number I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t my mother, or Aimee, or either of the fathers of her children, or the three college friends who still hoped, once or twice a year, to lure me out for a drink before my flight departed. I didn’t know the voice at first, either: I’d never heard Miriam sound so stern or cold.
“But you understand,” she asked me, after a few awkward pleasantries, “that your mother is really ill?”
I lay on Aimee’s plush gray couch, looking out over Kensington Gardens — gray slates, blue sky, green oaks — and found, as Miriam explained the situation, that this view merged with an earlier one: gray cement, blue sky, over the tops of the horse chestnuts, past Willesden Lane, toward the railway. In the next room I could hear the nanny, Estelle, trying to discipline Aimee’s children, in that lilting accent I connected with my earliest moments, with lullabies and bathtime and bedtime stories, thwacks with a wooden spoon. Headlights of passing cars at night, gliding over the ceiling.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
Stage three: it had begun in her spine. Partially successful surgery, back in February (where was I, in February?). Now she was in remission, but the last bout of chemo had left her frail. She should have been resting, allowing herself to recover. It was crazy that she was still going to the House, crazy that she was going out to dinner, crazy that I had let her.