Stella
Maybe as an act of penance, or maybe in self-preservation, I’ve also deleted Tangl. No notifications. No messages. I muted and archived the guys I had been talking to and officially shut up shop. No more men.
Luckily there’s something else to worry about this week, because my mother has decided to turn her focus on me.
My mother is exactly the sort of person you’d want to be friends with.
She was in PR, mostly fashion, when I was a kid.
A few years ago, after she’d divorced my poor father, she sold her business for an undisclosed (but, we’re pretty sure, massive) sum, decided that she was tired of the countryside and moved to back to London, spending her half of the family pot on a one-bed flat in Chelsea where she hosts dinner parties and makes friends with ‘interesting people’ from creative backgrounds, which is genuinely great for her and probably is, but in real terms means that I can’t visit with Rose in case she smashes something and Mum is never available to babysit.
Obviously it’s great for her and I’d be a complete dick to resent her having a sexy, exciting time in her sixties, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the cosy ex-vicarage where we grew up, or get pangs of jealousy when my friends post pictures of their nice, dowdy mums going apple-picking with their grandchildren.
Anyway, they’re coming for dinner tonight because I can’t go anywhere without getting a babysitter, so my social life basically revolves around my own kitchen.
Earlier this afternoon Rose and I did a long walk in the pram to the Waitrose that I claim is ‘down the road’ (an A road) and bought all sorts of tiny little foods to try and tempt my mother who eats like a bird and sees weight loss as being akin to getting your PhD.
On my wedding day she couldn’t think of much to say about the whole thing (admittedly I do now kind of get why) so instead she told me that I looked ‘very thin’ and it remains the best compliment I’ve ever had from her.
I’ve also managed to clean the entire ground floor despite Rose’s pathological phobia of the hoover, and I’ve washed my hair and put on a pretty white blouse and a pair of jeans that just about fit.
Then I wait for everyone to arrive and pretend that I’m not nervous, because how can I be nervous to have my own mother over for dinner?
Gavin took the radio with him when he left.
Admittedly, it’s one of few things he took, in fact, some of his stuff isn’t even unpacked from our original move.
But the radio is the thing I’ve actually been missing, so earlier today, during the big mission to Waitrose, I cracked and bought a new one.
It’s pale green and vintage-y, the same sort of thing my grandmother had on her kitchen windowsill.
I tune it on to some classical music station with intermittent chatting about movements and arpeggios, and instantly the kitchen feels better. Like people really live here.
At 5.30 p.m., I give Rose her tea – half an avocado and some raspberries because she is on a mission to bankrupt us.
She summarily rejects the fish fingers I lovingly made from scratch, including my own breadcrumbs, throwing them on the newly clean floor.
I pick them up, give them a blow and put them into Tupperware, resolving to try again tomorrow and dismissing the thought that I so deeply wish I had someone to complain about this to.
At ten past six the door opens and Lou lets herself in with her key. ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Just as a full warning, she has actually got worse. Also, where’s my baby?’
‘She’s on the playmat.’ I give Lou a hug, holding a damp tea towel in one hand. ‘What? How is that possible?’
Lou swoops in and picks Rose up. I should probably tell her that all the books say you should never interrupt when a child is playing independently but it’s too nice, watching the two people I love most, my beautiful sister’s dark hair falling over Rose’s soft, round body, Rose giggling, Lou fresh with all the energy I used to have for other people’s kids.
‘Mum didn’t happen to cancel, did she?’
‘No,’ I say, my sense prickling. ‘Why? Has something happened?’
Lou sits on the playmat, her legs twisted in front of her. ‘Nothing, I was just hoping she might not turn up.’
I laugh. ‘Why?’
‘She invited herself over to mine last week, turned up two hours late, asked me why my house is “always so cold”, showed me pictures of one of her artist friends’ kids so I could see how attractive they all are, then asked me to get her an Uber home and magically forgot that I get charged at the end of it. ’
Before I can respond that this sounds exactly what I’d expect from Mum, the doorbell goes. I take a deep breath and then answer it. And there she is, my mother. The woman who gave most of my friends their first cigarette.
‘Hello, darling,’ she says, hugging me. She’s tiny, totally birdlike. I must feel like a huge frame of meat to her.
‘How are you?’
I go back through to the kitchen and she follows me. ‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘Tired.’
‘Yes, you look it. Is she not sleeping?’
‘I mean she’s sleeping, but not through the night. She still wakes two or three times, which is developmentally very normal—’
‘I don’t know how you do it, darling,’ she says, taking her coat off and slinging it over a chair. ‘When you two were babies, you slept through the night from about six weeks.’
‘That sounds really unlikely, Mum,’ says Lou, getting up to give Mum a kiss on each cheek.
‘Do you not think maybe we were just on a different floor and you didn’t hear us?’ I ask, opening the fridge to find a bottle of wine.
‘Gosh,’ Mum says, like she’s really thinking about it. ‘I mean, I suppose that might have been it. I always thought you were just such good babies.’ She pauses again. ‘And then I was surprised when you turned into such difficult children. Mystery solved, I suppose!’
Mum goes and sits on the playmat, cross-legged in her expensive jeans.
Rose clambers into her lap and looks up at her, then gives her an enormous smile.
She’s been moving herself around lately, which is so exciting but what a traitor.
‘She’s gorgeous,’ Mum says. ‘And she looks absolutely nothing like her arsehole father.’
‘Mother!’ I say in pretend outrage. ‘We can’t talk about him like that, not in front of her.’
‘Darling, she doesn’t understand fuck all, and even if she did, the faster she learns that her father is a dull, little waste of space, the better.’
Officially, I do not approve of this kind of talk. Privately, I’d really like to give her a hug. Of course she goes on to ruin it, almost immediately. ‘I did tell you that marrying him was a mistake, if you remember.’
This is technically true. On the morning of my wedding Lou was crouching on the floor, back at my tiny flat in Clapham, hemming my ￡138 dress, bought from eBay (and only very slightly stained around the hem).
Mum came in, still wearing a jumper and trousers, sat on my bed and told me that she didn’t think any of this was a very good idea.
Which might have been well intentioned but was very deeply too late.
‘That’s really not helpful, Mum,’ says Lou, who’s been staring at her phone for the last five minutes.
‘I’m not blaming her,’ Mum counters. ‘Can I have a top-up, please?’ She gestures to her glass of wine.
‘I’m just saying, I was worried that you might have got married because your father and I had split up, as if you were sort of trying to rebuild yourself a family because I’d buggered off and your father just wanted to be alone with his books. ’
Depressingly, this is the conclusion that I’d reached with my therapist in our weekly video calls during Rose’s naptime. Apparently, I could have just called my mother and saved fifty minutes a week for the past six months and several thousand pounds.
‘See?’ Mum says, getting up from the playmat. ‘I can see it in your face, I’m absolutely right.’ Her smugness is made even worse when Rose reaches up for her. Again, what a bloody traitor.
‘I’m going to do bedtime,’ I say primly.
‘Can’t she stay up for a bit?’ asks Mum. ‘I haven’t seen her for so long.’
Whose fault is that? ‘No,’ I say, biting my tongue. ‘She needs her routine. Children do better with routines.’ She should be offended by that, because her idea of a routine was keeping the same nanny for more than six months at a time. But she doesn’t even seem to notice.
I carry Rose up to her bedroom and switch my brain off while I put her into the bath, wash her with the elephant flannel she likes, as opposed to the pony flannel she’s terrified of.
Then I give her a massage with oat-based moisturiser (paraben-free, not that I know what a paraben is, or why it’s bad).
I cuddle her, read her a story, feed her a bottle and put her into her cot with her mobile playing.
For a moment I sort of hope that she’ll cry when I leave the room and I’ll be able to stay here in the warm, pink darkness of her bedroom, smelling her baby smell.
But she does a long, deep breath and is very clearly falling blissfully to sleep.
So I force myself downstairs, my legs aching on the stairs.
Why are they aching? I’ve done basically no exercise since I got pregnant. Presumably that’s why.
Lou and Mum are sitting at the table, having made significant headway into the bottle of wine. I pick up my own untouched glass. ‘What did I miss?’ I ask.
‘It sounds like it’s more what I’ve missed,’ my mother says, like she’s in a raunchy vintage film. ‘You’ve been a busy girl.’
‘I mean I’m trying to get this place finished, and look after Rose, and think about going back to work. . .’
‘Yes, fine, but Lou said you had a date!’
I look at Lou, across the kitchen table. She drops her gaze, clearly not willing to receive the ‘I’m literally going to murder you’ look that I want to give her. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I had a date. And it didn’t go well.’