Chapter Thirty-Six
It was hard to believe that after fifteen years of silence, Sariah was setting off to meet her mother for the third time in as many months.
Last night, her phone rang just as she got back to her room.
As she kicked off her court shoes and flopped onto the bed, she barely looked at the screen before she answered it.
Her mother’s voice sounded like it was playing at half speed, not slurred, but definitely slower. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, after some preliminaries, ‘that you don’t have happier memories of your childhood. That wasn’t how it was meant to be.’
‘Mum?’ Sariah had sat up. Was she hearing right – an apology from her mother, who never gave an inch?
The sound of Grace drawing deeply on a cigarette came down the line. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say, we loved you. But it wasn’t the start to my married life I’d imagined and maybe that got in the way.’
Sariah’s first thought was that this had a whiff of Step Nine of the Twelve Step Programme – to make direct amends – but that didn’t fit with Grace’s lazy intonation. Perhaps her mother had another reason for wanting to make her peace. ‘Are you ill, Mum?’ she asked.
‘No more than usual.’ Her mother broke into a wheezy laugh. Then she cut to the chase. ‘Can we meet again? Just us this time. Now we’re back in touch there are some things I should say.’
And that was how Sariah came to be driving back into Redruth on her morning off, checking her make-up in the rear-view mirror every time she stopped at a set of traffic lights.
She was wearing her hotel uniform. She told herself this was because she was back on shift in a few hours, but it was also because it made her feel in charge, efficient, and she needed that illusion now more than ever.
Frankly, she couldn’t face another visit to her childhood home, so they had arranged to meet at a café called the Copper Pot, where the waitresses wore fancy aprons and pinched expressions.
Grace was already sitting at a table when she walked in and it was clear she’d made an effort.
Her hair looked washed and she was wearing a pretty dress, yellow with a tiny sprig pattern.
Sariah thought it might even be the same one she’d worn for the fateful parents’ evening, when she’d let rip at the teacher.
A lump formed in Sariah’s throat, remembering that misguided effort at motherly love.
Despite the café being almost empty, the tables were all uncomfortably close together and the chairs didn’t fit properly underneath.
In a fit of exasperation, Sariah started removing a spare chair from their table.
‘Don’t,’ Grace whispered and Sariah had to bite her tongue, because this was her family’s way, an ingrained fear of attracting attention or doing the wrong thing.
But, obediently, she left the chair where it was, rammed too close to her own.
They settled on tea and scones for two and her mother began rooting around in her huge black shoulder bag for her purse. Sariah put her hand on the bag’s chunky zip and said, ‘Please, my treat.’
‘I’d have had the carrot cake if I’d known,’ Grace muttered.
Sariah counted to ten. ‘So, you wanted to chat.’
Her mother didn’t look at Sariah, but seemed to choose a spot in the middle distance to stare at as she said, ‘Yes, I thought it was time for a proper talk. Now we’re back in touch.’
Sariah resisted the urge to point out that Grace, or Sariah’s brothers, could have come looking for her if they had wanted: her name and photo were right there on the Warburn Spa website. She’d left, but she was easy enough to find.
‘After you were born, it was hard,’ Grace began.
‘Me and your dad, we thought we were grown-up, but we weren’t: I was only twenty, your dad a couple of years older.
There wasn’t much money so at first we were still living at your grandma and grandpa’s.
Nobody tells you, but a tiny baby is exhausting. Non-stop. And oh, how you cried!’
Sariah crossed her arms. ‘As usual, my fault then?’
‘No, love,’ Grace said softly. ‘I’m just saying it was a shock. And so soon in our married life.’
‘Again, not my fault.’ The fact Sariah had been born five short months after the wedding was never spoken of. ‘Not a shotgun wedding,’ her dad said once. ‘But we certainly got a running start.’
‘Of course, your Grandma Karensa helped, but it was still a lot. And lots of people in a little house. Me and your dad in my old bedroom; Mum and Dad; then after Rose came back, it felt like there was barely enough space to turn around . . .’ She took a sip of tea.
‘It was simpler once we got our own place. But, like I said, it wasn’t the easiest start, and your dad was useless. But I think we got stuck like that, you and me. Because life was different, once Jamie and Liam came along a few years later.’
‘Quite a gap,’ Sariah said. ‘Before you had them.’
‘True. But you can’t control Mother Nature, can you?’
Sariah really didn’t want to get into discussing the birds and the bees and her parents, so she steered the conversation back to the early days, when her mum and dad had felt out of their depth in Grandma Karensa’s cramped house. ‘So you said after Rose came back. Where had she been?’
‘Oh, she was in Plymouth,’ her mother said vaguely. ‘But she wasn’t herself for a while. Not much use.’
Sariah sensed she wasn’t getting the whole truth. Had Auntie Rose been ill? Was this why everyone treated her with kid gloves?
‘But where did she go?’ she persisted. ‘It must have been something quite bad to miss her own sister’s wedding. I’m surprised Grandma Karensa allowed it, to be honest.’
A beat followed before Grace said, ‘She went to stay with a lady.’
Oh. This sounded slightly different. Had this been the start of Rose learning her airs and graces, beginning to separate herself from her working-class roots?
Sariah imagined elocution lessons – ‘How now, brown cow’ – and Auntie Rose walking around with a book balanced on her head. But, no, that didn’t seem right.
‘What sort of lady?’ she asked.
‘Someone who took girls in. Girls in trouble. Your Auntie Rose, she was only fifteen, see, and Mum didn’t want her at the wedding, not like that.’
Sariah stared at her mother. Rose, pregnant? At fifteen?
‘The lady was a nurse. She’d trained at the old mother and baby home over in St Agnes.
Course that had long since closed down, but that didn’t stop there being a need for girls who got caught out.
If you were too far gone, it was easier to disappear for a few months, escape the gossip and come home once it was all sorted.
’ Grace dabbed her lips, as if passing on a family scandal over tea and scones in the Copper Pot was an everyday event.
‘What? So Auntie Rose had a baby?’ Sariah couldn’t calibrate this information. She felt as if she needed to spool back all her family memories and reframe them. ‘And so young, poor thing. Who was the father?’
‘She never did say. I think it was either someone as young and innocent as her, because she wasn’t that sort of girl, she really wasn’t.
Or it could have been someone older who knew exactly what they were doing.
But Rose wouldn’t say and Mum, your grandma, didn’t like to keep asking.
She wanted Rose to put it behind her, go back to school and everyone move on, like nothing had happened. ’
Sariah gritted her teeth at how a fear of gossip had cowed her family.
Perhaps this helped explain why Auntie Rose had left her family behind and reinvented herself as a prim and proper teacher with a cut-glass accent who lived up country and only visited at Easter and Christmas.
Like Sariah, she’d found it easier to make a clean break.
‘And the baby?’
‘Adopted,’ her mother said plainly. ‘Anyway, with all that going on, it was a difficult year. Not that I’m asking for sympathy – I just thought you should know. We tried our best, but it’s possible you didn’t get the attention you deserved and I suppose it set a pattern.’
Grace looked at Sariah for a long time, her eyes bright. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last.
Sariah didn’t know how to respond, because she barely recognised this softer version of her mother.
‘Anyway, I know you’re very busy, so I won’t keep you.’ Grace began to shoulder on her coat. She held on to her black bag tightly and, before Sariah could stop her, she stood up, gave an odd little bow and said with strained formality, ‘Thank you for the cream tea.’
There was a tinkle of the old-fashioned bell as she pulled open the door and Sariah watched in confusion as her mother scurried across the road and disappeared around the corner.
It felt as if Sariah had been travelling on an escalator and missed her footing at the bottom: one minute she and her mum had been talking with refreshing honesty and the next, boom, her mother had walked out, as if she’d suddenly remembered this wasn’t how they did things.
A waitress in a frilly apron that had seen better days rang up their bill and nodded her thanks when Sariah dropped a ￡2 coin into the tips dish.
There was still over an hour left on her parking ticket, but there was nothing left for her in this town, so Sariah slowly walked back to the car park, past chicken shops, boarded-up shops and charity shops (perhaps Evelyn should have come along after all).
She felt a bit silly now, all dressed up in her uniform for no good reason, and a little queasy from the scones with cream and too-sweet jam.
On the drive back the sun came out and she could smell the minibus’s fake leather seats warming up. She made the mistake of taking the long way back to Portheast, along smaller, winding roads, and each time she had to pull into a passing place, she revved the engine with barely suppressed anger.
She’d gone all that way, used up her morning off and for what? Some sob story about how Grace had lived at home for too long in a too-small house with a crying baby, a scandal-dodging sister and a rubbish husband who was yet to show his true colours.
A white 4x4 appeared in the middle of the road ahead and Sariah had to give her steering wheel a sharp turn to the left, pulling into a gap just in time.
She took a deep breath and turned off the ignition and then got out, suddenly desperate for air, and with one hand on the minibus’s ticking bonnet she tried to make sense of the things she’d been half-told, about one teenage sister in a fix, the other just married and a family desperate to avoid gossip.
She got out her phone and Grace picked up on the second ring.
‘It was me, wasn’t it?’ she said in a rush.
She heard an intake of breath.
‘Wasn’t it?’ Sariah repeated. ‘I was Rose’s baby.’