There was a moment in the last year when her mother suddenly disappeared. She was no longer in the kitchen, hands dusted with sugar and flour. The perpetual whirring of the sewing machine was silenced. On breezy Spring mornings, when the air was as crisp and green as an apple, there was no washing billowing on the line. The house was a vacuum from which all comfort and softness had retreated.
No reason was given for the absence. There was no explanation, no discussion. Years later, Esther would understand that was their family’s way. Powerful currents of emotions were to be quelled. Feelings weren’t ‘seemly’. It was better to let a thin crust of diffidence develop, like the skin on a rice pudding. Briskness was the appropriate response to tragedy. Restraint was a balm to disagreeable feelings. Simple denial could sustain the illusion of normality.
There were occasional visits to the flat, cheerless hospital ward. When they entered, her Mum would be sitting up in bed, hair carefully brushed, flannel nightie crisp and fresh. Her lovely face, as pale and serene as a marble statue, turned towards the door expectantly. She would hold out her arms and smile, but Esther thought the smile was strained, fragile; its warmth and light could only flicker weakly, like a candle guttering in a draught.
The other ladies on the ward, most of them elderly, clucked and fussed effusively over Esther when she visited. They would admire the gifts brought she brought for her mother: hand-painted cards, wallflowers picked from the garden, boxes of paper hankies in shades of pink and lilac.
‘You’re so lucky, Winnie. To have such beautiful bairns.’
‘Ah, they’re canny. So well behaved.’
‘A credit. A real credit.’
There were the times when her mother came home. A bed was set up downstairs in the sitting room. Kindly, smiling nurses, round and cheerful as Christmas robins, popped in at all hours. Esther loved the nurses. She believed nothing terrible could happen while they were there. Sometimes they would just sit and talk with her mother while she watched shyly from the door. Her mother looked so young, like a child, in her forget-me-not blue nightie. She was stripped of the adornments of grown womanhood: her smartly ironed clothes, her handbag full of plasters for grazed knees and barley sugar for poorly tummies, her sturdy brown shoes, her silver house keys. While laughing girlishly with the nurses, she would glance over at Esther in the doorway. She would raise her eyebrows and smile, as if to say ‘Isn’t this fun!’ In unguarded moments though, Esther thought she could see the strain of anxiety in her mother’s face, like desolate landscape being revealed by the momentary passing of a cloud from the sun. But then, the nurses, with just the touch of a cooling hand, seemed to be able to soothe away the worry. What a gift, Esther thought, to be able to comfort another with such grace and ease. How is it that they can do that when we cannot? Why should tenderness come from outside of the family?
Her mother was shrinking too. She was a neat, outdoorsy woman who had always been pleasingly plump. She had soft, curly brown hair and skin that turned freckly and golden in summer. She rarely bothered with make-up or perfume. She’d thought such things fripperies. She sewed all her own clothes, gently flared and buttoned dresses in shades of autumn: ochre, redcurrant and olive. The homely dresses emphasised her roundness, her femininity, the benevolence of her role as a mother and teacher.
Now though, in her pastel, shop-bought nighties from C&A, bought for her by her sisters in law (in insipid colours her mother never wore), she was diminishing day by day. Shrinking before the family’s eyes, like the cruel trick of a tyrannical magician. It was not possible now to sink into the plush softness of her body when curling in for a story. The arms that wrapped around Esther now were stick thin and dappled with bruises. Skin hung slackly from bones and crinkled like tissue paper when touched. Hugs revealed a body that was becoming angular and tense; an embattled body, a body in crisis.
Once Esther, eager to show her mother a watercolour of some daffodils, rushed over to the bed in the sitting room and threw her arms around her mother’s failing body. All the way home from school, Esther had been filled with love for her mother. She fizzed with it, like a shaken pop bottle. She was longing to see her. She’d not been able to concentrate in class. All her subtraction sums were wrong. Miss Finch didn’t tell her off though. She just smiled softly and said, ‘Never mind. We’ll try some tomorrow, shall we? We’re going to do some painting later. You could do a picture for your mum.’
Even during story-time, usually her favourite part of the day, Esther’s eyes kept being drawn to the bare branches of the trees bowing in the wind in the school ground. They were stippled with fresh, budding leaves, caterpillar green. Spring was coming. She wondered if her mother was watching the lilac tree in the garden from her bed. Soon, Esther thought, she would gather the sweetly fragrant blossoms in a china blue vase and set them by her mother’s bed. She would love that.
Esther understood her mother was gravely poorly. Miss Finch asked her every single morning how her mum was doing. ‘Getting better,’ or ‘Fine, thank you,’ were her usual replies. And she believed them to be true. She didn’t know what was wrong with her mother, and she would have cut her tongue out rather than ask, but she was certainly getting better. She must be. That’s what the endless hospital stays and nurses were for.
Then, on that grey March afternoon, her daffodil painting still damp in her hands, Esther whirled into the sitting room and dived on the bed, hugging her mother tightly to her. As she did this, she felt her mother flinch and heard a muffled cry of pain. She pushed Esther away sharply and curled in on herself, like a wounded creature retreating into its shell. Esther was horrified. She dropped the painting and ran from the room upstairs to her bedroom. With each stomping step, she could hear her mother weakly calling that she was fine, that everything was fine, but Esther knew now that could not be the truth. Her mother was lying to her. She’d hurt her mother that day. She’d caused her to whimper like a kicked dog. Esther would not risk getting so close again.
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