I laughed out loud at the look of utter horror on Raymond’s face.
“Mum, Eleanor doesn’t want to be bored to death looking at our old photos,” he said, blushing in a way that I supposed some people might consider charming. I thought for a moment about insisting that I’d love to see them, but he looked so miserable that I couldn’t do it. Conveniently, my stomach gave a loud rumble. I’d only had the Wagon Wheel since my lunchtime repast of spaghetti hoops on toast. She coughed politely.
“You’ll stay for your tea, won’t you, Eleanor? It’s nothing fancy, but you’re very welcome.”
I looked at my watch. It was only five thirty—an odd time to eat, but I was hungry, and it would still allow me time to go to Tesco on the way home.
“I’d be delighted, Mrs. Gibbons,” I said.
We sat around the small table in the kitchen. The soup was delicious; she said she’d used a pork knuckle to make stock, and then shredded the meat through the soup, which was also full of vegetables from the garden. There was bread and butter and cheese, and afterward we had a cup of tea and a cream cake. All the while, Mrs. Gibbons regaled us with tales of her neighbors’ various eccentricities and illnesses, along with updates on the activities of their extended family, which seemed to be of as little relevance to Raymond as they were to me, judging by his expression. He teased his mother frequently and affectionately, and she responded with mock annoyance, gently slapping him on the arm or chiding him for his rudeness. I was warm and full and comfortable in a way I couldn’t remember feeling before.
Raymond’s mother heaved herself to her feet and reached for her walking frame. She had crippling arthritis in her knees and hips, Raymond told me, while she hobbled upstairs to the bathroom. The house wasn’t really suitable for someone with limited mobility, but she refused to move, he said, because she’d lived all her adult life there and it was the place where she’d brought up her family.
“Now then,” she said, returning from upstairs, “I’ll wash these few dishes and then we can settle down and watch a bit of telly.” Raymond got straight to his feet.
“Sit down, Mum, let me do it—it won’t take a minute. Eleanor will help me, won’t you, Eleanor?”
I stood up and began gathering up the plates. Mrs. Gibbons protested vehemently, but eventually sat back down in her chair, slow and awkward, and I heard a tiny sigh of pain.
Raymond washed and I dried. This was his suggestion—somehow, he’d noticed my red, sore hands, although he didn’t make a hullaballoo about it. He’d merely nudged me away from the sink and thrust a tea towel—a rather jaunty one with a Scottie dog sporting a tartan bow tie—into my damaged fingers.
The tea towel was soft and fibrous, as though it had been washed many times over, and had been ironed carefully into a neatly pressed square. I cast an eye over the plates before stacking them on the table for Raymond to put away. The crockery was old but good quality, painted with blowsy roses and edged in faded gilt. Mrs. Gibbons saw me looking at it. There was certainly nothing wrong with her powers of observation.
“That was my wedding china, Eleanor,” she said. “Imagine—still going strong almost fifty years later!”
“You, or the china?” Raymond said, and she tutted and shook her head, smiling. There was a comfortable silence as we worked on our respective tasks.
“Tell me, are you courting at the moment, Eleanor?” she asked.
How tedious.
“Not presently,” I said, “but I have my eye on someone. It’s only a matter of time.” There was a crash from the sink as Raymond dropped the ladle onto the draining board with a clatter.
“Raymond!” his mum said. “Butterfingers!”
I’d been keeping track of the musician online, of course, but he’d been rather quiet, virtually speaking. A couple of Instagram snaps of some meals he’d had, a few tweets, uninteresting Facebook updates about other people’s music. I didn’t mind. It was merely a matter of biding my time. If I knew one thing about romance, it was that the perfect moment for us to meet and fall in love would arrive when I least expected it, and in the most charming set of circumstances. That said, if it didn’t happen soon, I’d need to take matters into my own hands.
“And what about your family?” she said. “Do they live close by? Any brothers or sisters?”
“No, unfortunately,” I said. “I would have loved to have had siblings to grow up with.” I thought about this. “It’s actually one of the greatest sources of sadness in my life,” I heard myself say. I had never uttered such a sentence before, and, indeed, hadn’t even fully formed the thought until this very moment. I surprised myself. And whose fault is that, then? A voice, whispering in my ear, cold and sharp. Angry. Mummy. I closed my eyes, trying to be rid of her.
Mrs. Gibbons seemed to sense my discomfort. “Oh, but I’m sure that must mean you’ve got a lovely close relationship with your mum and dad, then? I bet you mean the world to them, being the only one.”
I looked at my shoes. Why had I selected them? I couldn’t remember. They had Velcro fastenings for ease of use and they were black, which went with everything. They were flat for comfort, and built up around the ankle for support. They were, I realized, hideous.
“Don’t be so nosy, Mum,” Raymond said, drying his hands on the tea towel. “You’re like the Gestapo!”
I thought she’d be angry, but it was worse than that; she was apologetic.
“Oh, Eleanor, I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to upset you. Please, hen, don’t cry. I’m so sorry.”
I was crying. Sobbing! I hadn’t cried so extravagantly for years. I tried to remember the last time; it was after Declan and I split up. Even then, those weren’t emotional tears—I was crying with pain because he’d broken my arm and two ribs when I’d finally asked him to move out. This simply wasn’t on, sobbing in the kitchen of a colleague’s mother. Whatever would Mummy say? I pulled myself together.
“Please don’t apologize, Mrs. Gibbons,” I said, my voice croaking and then splitting like a teenage boy’s as I tried to calm my breath, wiping my eyes on the tea towel. She was literally wringing her hands and looked on the verge of tears herself. Raymond had his arm around her shoulder.
“Don’t upset yourself, Mum. You didn’t mean anything by it, she knows that—don’t you, Eleanor?”
“Yes, of course!” I said and, on impulse, leaned across and shook her hand. “Your question was both reasonable and appropriate. My response, however, was not. I’m at a loss to explain it. Please accept my apologies if I’ve made you feel uncomfortable.”
She looked relieved. “Thank God for that, hen,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting tears in my kitchen today!”
“Aye, it’s usually your cooking that makes me cry, Ma,” Raymond said, and she laughed quietly. I cleared my throat.
“Your question took me unawares, Mrs. Gibbons,” I said. “I never knew my father, and I know nothing about him, not even his name. Mummy is currently . . . let’s just say she’s hors de combat.” I received blank looks from both of them—I was clearly not among Francophones. “I don’t ever see her, she’s . . . inaccessible,” I explained. “We communicate once a week, but . . .”
“Of course—that would make anyone sad, love, of course it would,” she said, nodding sympathetically. “Everyone needs their mum now and again, doesn’t matter how old they are.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “if anything, weekly contact is too much for me. Mummy and I—we’re . . . well, it’s complicated . . .”
Mrs. Gibbons nodded sympathetically, wanting me to continue. I, on the other hand, knew that it was time to stop. An ice-cream van went past in the street, the chimes playing “Yankee Doodle,” pitched a few painful hertz below the correct notes. I recalled the words, feathers in caps and macaroni, from some deep and completely useless vault of memories.