A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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she had been saying before, but the smile didn’t widen or fade. It seemed to stiffen on her mouth. They had stood quite still, just like that, for one or two seconds. And then Simon had nodded, as if he was sure now of something that he had only suspected before. He had let her go, only he hadn’t really been holding her. He had gone back to the stove and she had chatted on, but watching the back of his head because she wanted him to look round at her like that again.
When he did turn, after quite a long time, she wondered if whatever it was had ever really happened at all. There was nothing in his face to show it, and she didn’t know how to tell him that she understood.
‘Where is he now? Is he still alive?’
Harriet’s voice startled Kath. She had forgotten that she was there.
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked, is he still alive?’
Harriet was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her knees drawn up against her chest. Her face had turned pale and her eyes shone. They were fixed on Kath.
‘Simon? I don’t know, love. I left home before you were born, because your grandparents wouldn’t hear of me staying. I came down to London, you know all this, and lived with my cousins until after I had you.’
Very quietly, Harriet asked, ‘Didn’t Simon look after you?’
She saw the light that had softened Kath’s face begin to fade. There were lines in the loose flesh around her eyes and beside her mouth; her hair was permed in greying ridges. Her mother wasn’t a girl of eighteen at all, although for a moment Harriet had glimpsed that girl. She wanted to hold on to her, denying the years.
‘Why should he have done?’ Kath answered. ‘It was my own problem. You were. I wanted it that way, once I knew I couldn’t marry the father. They’d have had me back, at home, if I’d let you go for adoption. But I wouldn’t let you go, so I never went up there again.’
Harriet knew about that. Kath had told her, often, it was part of her childhood creed, I wouldn’t let you go. Kath’s possessiveness had made her both father and mother. There was no need to speculate about him. He was faceless and nameless, an ejaculation. A physical spasm, like a yawn or a shiver. The father, Kath called him, not yours. Harriet couldn’t remember her ever having said even that much before.
But today she had seen something different in her mother. She had seen youth, but she had also seen sex, with its face scrubbed bare, clean and wholesome. She had caught sight of Kath as a girl, and that girl had emitted a powerful signal. Now, at once, Harriet wanted to know about the man who had intercepted and returned that signal. She felt the crackle of its electricity, even over the remove of years. She was hungry because she had never experienced that charge herself, jolting through her bones, not with Leo nor with anyone else.
She would have to find the man, because he belonged to her. It was important to know him as part of her own history’. Harriet felt herself both set free and dangerously adrift, and she needed a new anchorage before she could set a fresh course. Names, places, even the smallest details, if she was too late for anything more, would help her to fix herself.
She left her chair and went to kneel beside her mother, resting her head against Kath’s knees.
‘Harriet? Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
Ever since she had been old enough to understand her own story, her father had had no name and no face, because that was how Kath had wished it. Harriet had felt no need for anything more, because her mother gave her all she wanted. The fierce exclusivity of their love had only been disrupted by Ken, and later by Lisa. But now, Harriet was certain that he had both a name and a face, and she understood what a chasm there was to be filled.
She was certain, without needing to ask, without changing the rule of years between Kath and herself, that Simon Archer was her father. Leo had gone, and it was both ironic and apposite that his disappearance should expose a deeper bond waiting to be uncovered.
In a light, clear voice Harriet had said, ‘I’d like to go and see where you grew up. Perhaps he … your friend is still there.’
‘He probably wouldn’t remember me, even if he was. It’s a very long time ago.’
Of course, all my lifetime.
‘I’d still like to go.’
‘But there’s no family left up there.’
There had been a reconciliation, naturally. From the age of five or six onwards, Harriet remembered visits to her grandparents. But by then they had moved away from the Midlands town, and then they moved on again. Now they lived in a retirement bungalow on the coast, with photographs of their two Trott granddaughters displayed on the mantelpiece.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Harriet said. ‘Even if there’s nothing there at all. It’s where I began, after all. I can just walk along the streets and look at it.’
She stretched up and kissed her mother, then scrambled to her feet. Looking down at her she hesitated, and then asked, ‘Why did you tell me all this today?’
Kath answered dreamily, ‘You just made me remember it.’
Of course. Beginnings and endings, one separation and another coming together.
Harriet picked up the tea-tray from between their chairs and walked away down the garden, in through the patio doors.
She was going to look for her father. And when she had found him, from that point she could start again.
The town had long ago been consumed by the city.
In the local train, looking out, Harriet imagined that in her mother’s childhood there might have been a green ribbon of woods and fields separating the last housing estate from the first filling station. Now there was no dividing line, of trees or anything else, and the backdrop of houses and shops and small factories flowed seamlessly past her.
At the station, she bought a local street map from the bookstall and sat on a bench to study it. The other passengers from the train passed her and crowded out through the ticket barrier. When Harriet looked up the train had pulled out and the platform was deserted. At once, she was aware of her isolation in an unfamiliar place. The place names on the train indicator above her head meant nothing to her, and she was ignorant of the streets that led away from the station entrance.
There was no sense of a homecoming. If she had arrived expecting anything of the kind, Harriet reflected, then she was being sentimental. But still she had felt herself irresistibly drawn here, and there had been complicated arrangements to make before she could allow herself the time off from her business. The urban anonymity she had glimpsed from the train was less than welcoming, and she allowed herself the irrationality of a moment’s disappointment. Then she stood up, closing the street map but keeping her finger in place to mark the right page, and briskly walked the length of the platform. Her heels clicked very loudly, as if to announce her arrival.
The ticket collector had abandoned his booth, and so Harriet passed through the barrier without even cursory official acknowledgement of her arrival. There were two dark-red buses waiting beside a graffiti-sprayed shelter, but neither of the destination boards offered the area she was heading for. There was also a taxi at the rank, and the driver eyed her hopefully. Harriet hesitated, and then passed him by. She didn’t want to arrive at the house on the corner by taxi, proclaiming her lack of familiarity to whoever might now live in Simon Archer’s house. If the house was even still there, she reminded herself. Her mother’s home town had changed in thirty years.
Harriet bent her head over the map once more, then hitched her bag over her shoulder and began to walk.
The scale of the map was deceptive. She walked a long way, more than a mile, and her shoes began to rub. It was a long time