Dot listens as Flora and I prod and poke our predicament into different shapes. After a while, Flora wanders toward the kitchen, muttering about omelets. Dot slips away.
I check on Ma, who is asleep now, her cigarette a wand of gray ash between her fingers. I stand watching her a while, my mother in her ice-cube-blue satin dressing gown on the battered chaise, the faint lines around her eyes and mouth that she battles with cold creams and finger-pinching and that don’t make her any the less lovely but I know bother her all the same. Her vulnerability touches and irritates me. I shut the door quickly, seek out Flora again.
Flora could almost be Ma from behind, willowy, tall, leggy, except that Ma is far more likely to be melting down an almost-finished lipstick, stretching out its life with cooking fat, than making lunch. “Get the crockery, Margot.” Flora doesn’t turn around. We can distinguish one another by the sound of our sniffs or footsteps, the particular rustle of a certain leg in a certain skirt.
Pam and Dot join us at the table and we demolish the omelets in seconds. We’re about to fall on Betty’s pound cake, fat slices that would horrify our mother, whose waistline owes much to the long ration-book years, when her voice swims toward us: “Girls?”
To our astonishment and relief, we find Ma sitting upright, bare feet planted on the floor, her fingers tucking under her curls at the nape of her neck. “I’d murder a strong cup of tea.” Her voice is frogged with cigarettes, her smile sheepish.
“I’ll make you one,” says Flora, not taking her eyes off Ma as she backs into the hallway. Without our oldest sister’s presence, there’s a sense of incompleteness. For something to do until her return, I raise the needle on the gramophone, Ma’s American jazz.
Ma starts to tap out the rhythm lightly on her knee. “Oh, this one just breaks my heart,” she says with a slow wistful smile, as if feeling sad is better than feeling nothing at all.
“Tea, Ma.” At Flora’s light-footed return, something releases. She slides the tray onto the wobbly bamboo side table: a napkin, a cup of tea the correct shade of brown, a sugar-dusted sponge finger.
Ma takes a small sip, depositing a tea-leaf beauty spot on her lip. She pats the chaise. “Here. Sit next to me, girls. I want to talk to you. I’m sure we can all fit. Yes, even you, Pam.”
We squeeze up, warm and squished. Ma lifts the sleeve of her dressing gown, releasing the smell of oranges and cigarette smoke and Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass scent. “I’ve had some time to think these last two days.”
“And drink.” Pam’s navy eyes flash beneath her heavy brows.
Ma stares down at her hands in her lap. “I am sorry if I worried you all. Really.”
“You didn’t,” says Pam sharply, because Ma doesn’t look sorry enough. “It was perfectly obvious you weren’t dying.”
“Please don’t be so cross, Pam.” Ma holds her calf, rocking back a little, so that the satin stretches and gleams across her shin. “Would you like my sponge finger?”
Pam shakes her head but keeps glancing at it.
“You certainly look better,” says Flora brightly, trying to steer us away from a screaming match. Our rows can be heard in the street. When neighbors whack on the wall, Ma whacks back with the fireside bellows.
“But we’re meant to be at school,” I point out. “It’s Monday.”
Ma covers her mouth with her hands. “What a twit I am. Well, you mustn’t let that fractious old rhino of a headmistress punish you. You must blame me entirely.”
“We will,” Pam says tightly. “And we do.”
Ma waits a moment, lets Pam’s words settle, the music rise and fall, then she clinks down her teacup and says, “Well, firstly, you may as well know that I do intend to live a little while longer. Which is a relief to me at least, although possibly not to Pam.”
Pam scowls but still can’t quite hide a minute flicker of a smile. The next moment, she swoops down on the sponge finger, which we all recognize as a forgiveness of sorts.
Heartened, Ma wiggles herself straight, her breasts shaking beneath the satin. “Secondly, who remembers the Beamishes? Old friends of your father’s. Mad Sophie Beamish. Ginger husband, Foreign Office. Enormous earlobes.” She parts her fingers a couple of inches.
We shrug, wary of the Beamishes intruding into a conversation that could career off in the wrong direction at any moment, like a bike without brakes, as charged conversations involving Ma and Pam often do.
“Well, they’ve only invited me to Marrakesh!” Ma lowers her voice conspiratorially, widens her eyes at each of us in turn. “Imagine. Bunny in the Red City.”
Flora and I exchange an alarmed look. We’d rather not.
Ma inhales before speaking, then the words rush out. “They’ve offered me a secretarial job with the consul, girls. A fancy apartment, maids thrown in.”
The sponge finger crumbles as Pam bites into it.
“Secretarial?” I splutter. My mother could start a third world war with her typos. “Why on earth—”
“Thank you, Margot,” Ma clips. “They said I’d bring color, liven the place up a bit. And I speak good French. There’s a girl to type and whatnot.”
“So you’ve said no,” Flora says.
“Well . . .” Ma’s voice wavers, betraying doubt and excitement, like a bride about to marry a man she doesn’t know as well as she should.
“Dear God,” groans Pam.
The backs of my knees immediately start to itch ferociously.
“I can’t stay here in London, bumping into Jack and that . . . that girl.” Ma’s forehead furrows, and I see the lines that are waiting for her turn to get old. It strikes me that she looks, for once, her full thirty-nine years today. “And I need to earn some proper money. Margot, stop that infernal scratching.”
“But Marrakesh.” Flora blinks very fast, trying to absorb the steamy foreignness of the word.
“For how long?” Pam demands sharply.
“Not long enough for you to forget me,” Ma tries to joke. But it falls flat. She sips her tea. The rest of us have a shocked conversation with our eyes. “A few months? A year? I’m not sure. It’ll go in a flash.”
But it is suddenly impossible to imagine Ma not on the chaise by the window, sipping tea, Fang’s paws outstretched.
“You can’t make this sort of decision now. You’ve been so upset these last two days, Ma, and you’ve not had lunch,” says Flora, stricken.
“Flora, darling, I am quite lucid, and think much better on an empty stomach. You see, as well as earning, I could let this house—there’s a housing shortage, lots of country families looking for town houses. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“What? Something old and damp in SW10?” scoffs Pam.