‘Oh, of course I did. But your father wouldn’t have it, and I felt so guilty anyway … He said it was for the best if I kept away. He told me you hated me.’
Sophie didn’t say anything. It was true: she’d hated her. This hatred had been a child’s hate, untrustworthy, carefully nurtured by her father, and therefore immature, but it was hatred nevertheless. She thought again about what she’d confessed to Dennis the previous evening, that she’d long dreamed of her mother turning up so that she could ignore her. The dream could never have been realized if Gloria had been a better, more determined, more desperate mother. They would have had a handful of unhappy meetings, and nobody would have felt the benefit, and there would have been no rage, no fire, no move to London. She would have become Miss Blackpool, and her mother would have been on a deckchair, clapping and crying. She would have married someone with a car showroom. And why stop there? What if Gloria had stayed married to her father? Where would she be now? In Blackpool, for sure. In R. H. O. Hills, probably.
She owed her mother everything and nothing, all at the same time. For a couple of hours, she wanted to celebrate the everything, so she took her mother shopping. Finally, once they were no longer looking at each other, they began to talk. It was much easier to fill in gaps and ask questions while they were going through racks of coats and rejecting handbags. Jobs, Marie, cousins, London, Bolton, back and back and back through cosmetics counters until they reached school. They didn’t talk about the day Gloria left, though. Sophie couldn’t imagine that she’d ever want to talk about that.
‘I told your Dennis I wasn’t after anything,’ said Gloria as they were walking into Selfridges. ‘And it’ll be much more expensive here than at home.’
‘Who told you he was my Dennis?’ said Sophie.
‘Isn’t he?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m engaged to Clive.’
‘You’re engaged?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re going to get married?’
Why did everyone insist on treating her engagement and her future marriage as two separate, independent events? It was as if one was a kiss and the other a pregnancy: one could lead to the other, but only if a lot of other things happened in between. And yes, she sometimes thought that the chances of her and Clive becoming man and wife were slim, but when other people took the same view, she felt patronized.
‘Yes. We’re going to get married.’
‘Really?’
‘You didn’t see me with Clive. You didn’t meet him.’
‘No, but I saw you with Dennis … He looks after you.’
‘That’s his job.’
‘He’s supposed to run after long-lost mothers and get their address?’
‘That was him poking his nose into where he doesn’t belong.’
‘He’s soft on you, though, isn’t he?’
Sophie felt a sudden catch in her throat.
‘Well, he’s very nice.’
‘You didn’t know anything about me and Clive?’
‘What would I know?’
‘Oh, there have been a couple of magazine articles and so on.’
There had been hundreds, or so it seemed to her. The agency sent her cuttings, and something came in the post every other day.
‘I haven’t seen any,’ said Gloria.
‘What do you see?’
‘I don’t get a paper. I watch the news.’
Her relationship with Clive had not been on the news.
‘Doesn’t anyone ever tear something out and give it to you?’
‘No,’ said Gloria. ‘Nobody knows you’re my daughter.’
Gloria’s secrecy, her willingness to forgo the pleasures of pride in order to atone for the sins of her past, could have been winning, if Sophie had been paying attention, but she was momentarily distracted by her mother’s ignorance. It had stung her. People like her mother should know that she was engaged to Clive. They were celebrities, and they were together, and their togetherness was a part of it all. Before she said goodbye, Sophie bought her mother a whole pile of magazines from the kiosk outside the station. There was bound to be something in one of them.
Later that week she called Diane, who came to the flat with a photographer, and the photographer snapped away while she made Clive pork medallions in Madeira sauce. After they’d finished the meal (more photos, toasting the camera with a glass of wine), they sat down on beanbags and pretended to examine her LPs (more photos, pretending to argue about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by pointing angry fingers at each other and smiling), while they talked to Diane about the future. Diane wrote two pieces, one for Crush and one for the Express. And yet when the articles appeared, Sophie was left wondering whether she’d missed the point of her conversation with her mother somehow.
19