There’s a moment of silence and then we both laugh, almost a real laugh, because being depressed would be so welcome compared with the pain of bereavement.
“It must be hard going through everything, having to remember it all,” she says.
“It’s not so bad, actually. The CPS solicitor, Mr. Wright, is very kind.”
“Where have you got to?”
“The park. Just after the postmortem result.”
She moves her hand to cover mine, so that we hold hands as lovers do, openly on the tablecloth. “I should have stopped you from going. It was freezing.” Her warm hand over mine makes tears start behind my eyes. Fortunately, Mum and I travel everywhere now with at least two packets of tissues in pockets and handbags, and little plastic bags to put the sodden ones into. I also carry Vaseline and lip salve and the futile-hopeful Rescue Remedy for when tears overwhelm me somewhere inappropriate like the motorway or the supermarket. There’s a whole range of handbag accessories that go with grief.
“Todd should have gone with you,” she says, and her criticism of Todd is somehow an affirmation of me.
I wipe my nose with a handkerchief she gave me last week, a little-girl cotton one with embroidered flowers. She says that cotton stings less than a tissue; besides, it’s a little more eco and I know you’d appreciate that.
She squeezes my hand. “You deserve to be loved. Properly loved.”
From anyone other than Mum it would be a cliché, but as Mum has never said any of this stuff before it feels newly minted.
“You too,” I reply.
“I’m not all that sure that I’m worth having.”
You must find this conversation strange in its directness. I have got used to it but you won’t have yet. There were always specters at our family feasts, taboo subjects that no one dared acknowledge, that our conversations tiptoed around, going into cul-de-sacs of not talking to one another at all. Well, now we strip these unwanted guests bare, Mum and I: Betrayal, Loneliness, Loss, Rage. We talk them into invisibility so that they’re no longer sitting between us.
There’s a question I’ve never asked her, partly because I’m pretty sure I know the answer and because—deliberately, I think—we’d never created the opportunity.
“Why did you call me by my second name and not my first?” I ask. I presume that she and Dad, especially Dad, thought Arabella, a beautiful romantic name, inapplicable to me from the very beginning, so they opted instead for starchy Beatrice. But I’d like the detail.
“A few weeks before you were born we’d been to the National Theatre to see
Mum’s answer is so unexpected, and I am a little stunned, actually. I wonder whether, had I known the reason for my name as a child, I’d have tried to live up to it. Instead of being a failed Arabella, I might have become a Shakespearean plucky Beatrice. But although I’d like to, I can’t linger on this. I asked the question only as a lead up to the real one.
You’re upset that she could believe you committed suicide—after Leo—and knowing the suffering it would cause. I tried to tell you, as I reported it, that she was grabbing at a safety rail, that it was a self-protection reflex, but you need to hear it from her.
“Why did you think Tess had committed suicide?” I ask.
If she’s surprised by the question, she doesn’t show it, not hesitating for a moment in her reply. “Because I’d rather feel guilty for the rest of my life than for her to have felt a second’s fear.”
Her tears fall onto the white damask tablecloth, but she doesn’t mind the waiter’s stare, not caring anymore about “form” and socially correct behavior. She’s the mother in the rustling dressing gown sitting at the end of our beds smelling of face cream in the dark. The glimpse I had as she first shed her old Mumness is now fully exposed.
I never knew so much love could exist for someone until I saw Mum grieving for you. With Leo, I was away at boarding school and didn’t witness it. I find her grief both shocking and beautiful. And it makes me afraid of being a mother, of risking what she feels now—what you must have felt for Xavier.
There’s a short silence, a hangover from a previous time of silences, but then Mum talks into it. “You know I don’t mind much about the trial. Not at all if I’m being totally honest.” She looks at me, checking for a reaction, but I say nothing. I’ve heard her say this before in myriad ways. She doesn’t care about justice or revenge, just you.
