The Faithless - Martina Cole [9]
Mary had two daughters, and she loved them both in her own way, but she wouldn’t let one of them walk all over the other.
Chapter Six
‘He’s so handsome, Cynth!’
Mary wasn’t surprised that her daughter didn’t answer her, it was par for the course, but sometimes, like now, it grated. She looked down her bloody nose at them all, yet she still dumped the children on her parents on a regular basis. ‘He’s the image of Jimmy, but I can see you in him as well.’
Cynthia smiled but it wasn’t a real smile. She was just going through the motions.
‘We love having him over. Little Jimmy Junior!’
‘He’s James, Mum, he’ll always be James.’ Her daughter said it as if it was a matter of life and death. Which of course it was to her.
‘Well, that’s your call, love. He’s your son after all.’
Cynthia nodded in agreement. ‘Can you keep Gabriella for a few more days, just until I get into a routine?’
Mary nodded silently. She had been looking after Gabby for nearly six weeks now and, apart from Jimmy popping in most evenings to see his daughter, she might as well be an orphan, because Cynthia didn’t bother with her at all.
James Junior was now a month old, and it looked like Cynthia was going to be the same with this child as she was with poor little Gabby. She fed him, changed him, and washed him, he was immaculately turned out, and well cared for in every way – outwardly that is – but she never picked him up unless she had to. Cynthia only did what she felt was expected of her. It was frightening to admit that his own mother, her daughter, had no real love for him. Because she knew that she didn’t. She didn’t truly care for either of her children. It was as if love was beyond her. Mary wished she knew how to stop it, how to make her daughter see the mistake she was making. Tell her how she saw through her – her life, her marriage and her sorry attempt at being a mother. She never comforted or played with her children, showed them any love or maternal instinct. Yes, she catered for their welfare, but she always kept her distance from them somehow. Cynthia always seemed to be on the periphery of their lives, never at the centre of it like she should have been.
Cynthia had always been a cold fish, she had never grasped the meaning of happiness. It seemed to have eluded her somehow, and Mary wondered at times if that was her fault. But she knew logically it wasn’t anything she had done – in the beginning she had loved Cynthia as much as she had Celeste. She had loved both her girls with a deep and abiding passion from the minute she had given birth to them. But Cynthia had always had this wall around her, and nothing Mary had done had ever broken through it. So she had eventually accepted her daughter’s personality, accepted that her Cynthia was not built for big displays of affection – in fact they troubled her, bothered her. Cynthia had always been a law unto herself, and it had been hard for Mary, a genuinely warm person, to be rebuffed by her own daughter from a young age. From then on, Cynthia had been a child who was difficult to love, really love. Mary had even disliked her sometimes, and now she wondered if that was why her daughter was such a hardcase. She’d tried to understand her daughter’s personality but, if she was honest, it was beyond her. Cynthia had never been an easy child, and she was not an easy woman.
But now, her daughter’s aloofness, and her complete indifference to her own children really worried her. She knew she couldn’t do anything about it, because outwardly Cynthia was the perfect mother – who would believe her? But Mary worried that her grandchildren would suffer one day for their mother’s lack of genuine affection.
Jimmy tried to make up for it, she knew, she saw that every day, and she wished she could tell him that she understood what he was going through. But voicing her worries would