Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [65]
She’d gone home to tell Mum. Who had hugged her, hard, and then, pulling back and searching her face, gave a small triumphant cry, and said, “Thank God!”
“I have,” she said now, to Stephen.
“Good. Then we can go out. What are you doing on Friday night?”
Just like that.
WHEN STEPHEN ARRIVED HOME THAT NIGHT, IT WASN’T THE smell of something good cooking on the stove top, or the open bottle of wine, or the soft music playing in the living room that surprised him. It was that Jennifer came to the door when she heard his key turn in the lock. That she put her arms around his neck and hugged him tight before he had even closed it behind him. And that she seemed so pleased to see him.
BARBARA’S JOURNAL
My Mum
I’ve been writing about being your mum, so I thought I probably ought to write a bit about being my mum’s daughter. It’s all related, isn’t it? Are we the mothers we had ourselves, or do we make a choice to be different? What kind of mothers will you be?
We’re on holiday. A long weekend in Bath. We’re staying in a hotel on Great Pulteney Street—that lovely wide Regency street the BBC always uses in Jane Austen adaptations. We’ve got a bedroom at the front, and I’m sitting at an armchair with a great view of the comings and goings. Mark’s gone to watch rugby. It’s bloody cold, but the sun is streaming in through the window. We’ve had tea at the Pump Room, and sat on deck chairs in the gardens by the river, and toured the spa (maybe I should have taken the waters—couldn’t have hurt!) and done a bit of shopping. Great shops here. We’ve bought Mark some lovely new suits and ties. Can’t really get interested in shopping for myself. Bath is full of Americans. They come here from Salisbury and Stonehenge. They think everything is adorable.
We’ve had a lovely time. Isn’t it funny how sometimes a couple of days away can feel like a two-week holiday?
Hannah is on the school ski trip. A week in the French Alps. We spoke to her last night. They had fresh snow the day before they arrived—by coach, poor things—and the skiing is apparently amazing. She’s beyond blues, now, she claims, and happiest on the reds. How terrifying! Gets that from her father…Nothing to do with her French ski instructor, she says. She sounds really happy and quite mad. God knows how the teachers who accompany them cope. (Note to Hannah: You said you didn’t want to go. You didn’t want to leave me, you said. In case something happened…I made you go. And I’m fine.)
So…my mum.
I think only children are a really bad idea. I mean, I know that for some people it’s okay. Some people CAN only have one child, and one is better than none. But I don’t think it was a great thing for me. For one thing, most women, if they are only going to have one child, would want that child to be a daughter. Not my mum—she wanted me to be a boy. She always said so. She’d had brothers. Her brothers were younger, and she had had a hand in raising them. She said boys were nicer than girls. More straightforward and simple. Less devious. You knew where you were with boys, she said. Often. From when I was young. I once, as a teenager, suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t have said it to me, so often, when I was younger. She was clearly mystified that it should have bothered me. Another stranger to the self-help section of the bookshop, clearly, my mum. Didn’t quite catch that groundbreaking work on bolstering your daughter’s self-esteem. I never quite knew why I was an only child. I would never have asked. Not that I recall ever seeing a single gesture of affection between my parents. What kept them together—if anything actually did, bar habit and necessity—was conducted behind closed doors. There wasn’t a lot of cuddling for me, either. They never hit me or were cruel. It was just that home was