“He’s having to work this weekend, but we’re going to celebrate tonight.”
“Good. Well, sorry I didn’t send a card. I forgot to post it. It’s sitting here on the desk. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on . . . Anyway, how are you?”
I pause, wrong-footed by this chitchat.
“Er, so-so.”
“Oh dear,” she murmurs.
“How are you?” I ask. Keep to safe subjects. “How’s your hip?”
“Er, aching,” she says. “I’m all right. Emma? Are you still there?”
The tension in my throat is making me gag and I don’t speak for a second or two. I retreat to the secret place inside my head, where everything is known, where I am safe.
“Yes,” I croak, eventually. And wait. I should say something, preempt it. Say, all casually, that I’ve seen they’ve dug up the body of a baby in our old street. Fancy that . . .
But I’m not sure I can have a pretend conversation about it. I might break down and cry. And she’d start asking questions. She used to put me to bed with a hot water bottle—her panacea for all that ailed me—when I was a teenager and say: “You are getting yourself all upset again, Emma. Have a little sleep and things will look better.”
But of course they didn’t. It must have been terrible for her, having to cope with my moods, but she said a lot of teenagers went through the same thing. “Hormones. It’s all part of growing up,” she said. At first. But the excuses started to pall. And patience never was her virtue. I stopped crying when she stopped reacting. Tough love, she called it. It didn’t solve anything for either of us. I started shouting and breaking things instead. Until she threw me out.
I try not to blame her. Not now—I might have done the same if I’d been the mother. But then . . .
“There’s someone at the door, Jude,” I say suddenly, wrapping my fist in my sleeve and rapping on the table to support my lie. “Sorry, I’ll call you back later.”
“Oh, Emma,” she says.
“I’m expecting a parcel,” I say desperately, tangling myself in the fabrication.
“Oh, go then,” she says. “I’ll call back.”
I put down the phone and the relief makes me giddy. But I know I’ve only postponed the inevitable.
The phone rings again five minutes later, and for a split second I consider not picking up. But I must. She’ll only keep ringing until she gets me.
“Why don’t you come over?” Jude says, as if there has been no break in the conversation. “You’ve never seen my flat and it’s been months since we saw each other.”
I react immediately. Guilt and shame—the Catholic twins and my Pavlovian response to my mother’s passive-aggressive parry.
“It’s a bit difficult. I’m trying to finish this book by my deadline.”
“Well, if you’re too busy. You must prioritize, I suppose.”
“That’s not fair,” I say. “Of course my work is important to me, but so are you.”
“Right,” she says. “But not enough to spend some time with me. Never mind. There’s a new Sunday serial starting on the radio. I won’t be bored on my own.”
“I’ll come, I’ll come,” I say, back to being the sulky teenager.
“Lovely,” Jude says. “I’ll cook a birthday lunch tomorrow, then. Will Paul be coming? He’s always welcome, of course, but it might be nice to just be the two of us.”
I’m silently furious on Paul’s behalf, but he wouldn’t want to be there, anyway. He has tried his best to like Jude, but he struggles.
“I admire your mother’s intellect,” he’d said after meeting her for the first time at a particularly sticky Sunday lunch in Covent Garden. “But she is determined to be the cleverest person in the room, isn’t she?”
His tiny revenge is to call her Judith, a name she detests.
“Actually, Paul’s busy with an open day at college, so it will only be me, anyway,” I say.
“See you at twelve, then. Don’t be late,” she says. “Lots to talk about.”
ELEVEN
Jude
SUNDAY, MARCH 25, 2012
She’d put the food on to cook far too early in her eager anticipation of Emma’s arrival and she could smell it beginning to catch.
The fug of simmering lentils had fogged up the window when Jude went into the kitchen. She whipped the saucepan off the electric ring and put it on the draining board, ready to reheat once Emma arrived.
She went to look out of the sitting room window again. Hovering. Restless. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been looking forward to seeing her spiky only child. It had been at least six months since the last time—maybe nine. She didn’t know why she bothered. Emma clearly didn’t.
From the moment she’d brought Emma home, she’d been determined to have a completely different bond with her daughter from the tense relationship she had had with her own mother. She played the big sister card, treating Emma as an adult instead of as a child, but it had exploded in her face.
The terrible teens. Jude leaned her forehead on the cool windowpane as her mind filled with the vision of Emma screaming and slamming doors. And the silence as she’d trudged away from her, up Howard Street, two bulging carrier bags pulling her shoulders down. Her own shoulders drooped and she closed her eyes. She could still taste the dry, sour fear she’d felt as she watched her child disappear.
She’d had to throw her out. Well, hadn’t she? “The monster in our midst,” her boyfriend Will had said.
But, that was then, she told herself firmly as the doubts threatened to overwhelm her again. Emma’s an adult now. We have both moved on.
She focused on the lovely time they were going to have and put on a Leonard Cohen CD to give herself something to do, singing along with the well-worn lyrics and pushing books and papers into more pleasing piles.
But five minutes later, she was back at the window to watch the street for her child.
“I wish she’d just get here,” Jude suddenly said out loud. She was talking to herself more and more lately. An unattractive habit, she felt. It made her sound a bit mad and old, but the words just spilled out of her before she could stop them.
Funny how things change, she thought.
There’d been a time when she would have paid money to get rid of Emma for an afternoon. She was a little chatterbox, going on and on about things until Jude’s head hurt.
And she never stopped talking about her father. Her bastard father. Ironic how absence makes the heart grow fonder, Jude thought. The unknowing heart.
She remembered how Emma used to invent stories about him. He was always the hero, of course. Brave, kind to animals, handsome, and once, at the age of eight, in a piece of homework titled “My Family,” even a member of royalty.
Jude had been called in by the teacher to be told her daughter had an impressive imagination, but they needed to be careful this imagination didn’t spill over into telling lies. The teacher had called her Mrs. Massingham even though she knew Jude was unmarried.
Her face darkened at the memory of how she’d slunk away, admonished. She’d wanted to tear the teacher’s head off, but she didn’t want to draw more attention to herself. Or to Emma. But she remembered very clearly her anger when she got home. Emma was down the street at Mrs. Speering’s, doing her homework.
She’d snapped at her child about calling her father a prince and Mrs. Speering had laughed, thinking it was a joke, but she’d shut up when she realized it was serious.
Emma had looked up—cool as a cucumber, Jude recalled—and said: “I heard you say he was called Charlie. That’s the name of a prince.”
Jude had wanted to shake her. Instead she’d told Emma her father wasn’t a prince. He was nothing.
Her child had looked devastated and Jude always suspected that it was at that moment that her daughter became determined to find out the truth.
As far as Jude was concerned, the Truth was greatly overrated. It could be so many things to different people.
But she’d ended up fueling her daughter’s mission. Her obsession.