Chapter 2 #2
No, the mornings that lingered in her mind were the other kind. The ones that began with a door thrown open so violently it seemed determined to come off its hinges, followed by the sharp, unmistakable sound of her mother’s footsteps cutting across the floor with purpose rather than grace.
There would usually be no warning. Only the sudden appearance of her mother, already in possession of a temper so complete it seemed to fill the room ahead of her.
The silver-handled brush would be taken from the nightstand before Caroline had even thought to move, let alone flee, and by the time she understood what was happening, her mother would already be upon her.
On those mornings, her mother’s eyes were not merely angry. They were something far more unsettling, rimmed in red as though fury itself had left its mark, making her look almost fevered with it.
The first strike was always too sudden to be properly felt in the moment.
It arrived with a flat, decisive impact from the back of the brush against the crown of Caroline’s head.
Caroline had learned, quite early and quite thoroughly, not to flinch.
Flinching, she had discovered, was not a mercy but an invitation.
It altered her mother’s expression in a way that suggested more pain was imminent.
The second blow followed with greater certainty, as though the first had merely been polite.
By the third, Caroline had already taken refuge in disassociation.
Her gaze settled upon a small flaw in one of the perfume bottles upon the vanity, a tiny trapped bubble suspended in green glass, and she fixed upon it with the devotion of someone studying a landscape rather than enduring a punishment.
She breathed in. She breathed out. She waited, as she always did, for the moment to pass.
The pain itself was never the most dreadful part, though it was certainly real enough. On more than one occasion, it had been enough that the sight of blood at Caroline’s temple had given even her mother pause, as though the reality of the situation had momentarily intruded upon her.
No, what was most painful was not the pain but the words.
They came in a steady stream, low and relentless, delivered with the casual cruelty of habit. Each strike was accompanied by an accusation, each movement by a reminder of deficiency. Worthless. Ungrateful. A burden of the most disgraceful kind.
And always, inevitably, the same final refrain, spoken with particular emphasis, as though it were the one truth that required no refinement at all. She never should have given birth to her.
It had been a very long time since Caroline had thought about the little perfume bottles on her childhood vanity.
When she was a child, Caroline had never understood why, out of her mother’s three children, so much of her bottled wrath only seemed to find its way to her.
She was not even the only daughter, after all, and yet Louisa had always been spared the worst of it, as though some invisible line had been drawn between them at birth.
It was only later, when she was old enough to listen properly and young enough still to be horrified by what she heard, that she learned all the unpleasant little details.
How her father had been the one to suggest the name Caroline, after his mistress at the time.
How her mother had agreed, in the faint, desperate hope that it might render him less indifferent toward the child who would bear it.
And how, when no such miracle occurred, Caroline had been quietly reassigned in her mother’s mind from daughter to reminder, a living, breathing testament to her husband’s ongoing infidelities.
Caroline sat on the bench and thought about the maid’s face that morning.
The way the girl’s composure had fractured.
The way she had made herself small in the doorway, careful in the manner of someone faced with an authority’s displeasure, and how she had withdrawn from the room as though retreat itself were a practiced art.
She had seen that expression before. Worse, she had once been responsible for producing it.
She had told herself for years that she was nothing like her mother.
That she was sharp, certainly, and possessed of very little inclination to disguise this fact from the comfort of others.
But she was not cruel. That, she had always believed, was the defining distinction, the firm and reassuring line between them.
And yet sitting there in a garden in Hertfordshire, with the quiet pressing in around her, she was no longer entirely certain that the distinction held the moral clarity she had once assigned to it.
It would have been easier, Caroline thought, to have been raised by an ordinary mother.
One of those women spoken of in warm, gently approving tones, whose affection was presumed to be as steady as sunrise and just as unremarkable.
She had long suspected such mothers were the invention of sentimental storytellers, a comforting fiction offered to those who preferred their family life neatly arranged and pleasantly dull.
She was now beginning, with no small degree of reluctance, to suspect she might have been wrong.
Even allowing for the inevitable imperfections of parenthood, most mothers were, she was quite certain, considerably less disastrous than her own had managed to be.
Caroline had never permitted herself the indulgence of self-pity on the subject.
She had always considered it a thoroughly inefficient emotion, entirely lacking in practical application, and therefore not worth her time.
And yet she found herself, in moments like this one, lingering unhelpfully on the question of what might have been.
What she might have become if she had been raised by someone who looked at her not as an inconvenience or a reminder, but as a child worth noticing in her own right.
It was, she thought with some irritation, an entirely useless line of inquiry.