Iris meditated solemnly on the irony of herself and Mark relying on a child to deliver them from a sticky family situation. Like something from a sitcom. The two queerest people she knew, and the most motherly by far.
The two real, natural mothers were meanwhile beginning to raise their voices behind closed doors.
SAM WENT WIPING ROUND THE KITCHEN SURFACES AS THEY TALKED. Peggy restrained herself from commenting, though Sam’s dishrag was making some surfaces dirtier than ever.
They had once had a terrible row about this. At sixteen Sam had left home for the first time because her mother accused her of deliberately spreading germs in her kitchen. Now this was Sam’s own kitchen and it really wasn’t Peggy’s place to mention hygiene, not even if she was eating here tonight. She listened to Sam talk, but her gaze was fixed narrowly on the tannin-stained sink, which was waist-deep in greasy brown water. There were tea bags bobbing about in it. Peggy had a wistful glimpse of Iris’s kitchen, with its sanded, hard-worn surfaces, its glittering utensils.
Still, there was something touching about all this mess. It was the mess created by her younger family’s daily lives. Wallpaper, tablecloth, pictures on the wall, all clashed in uncomplimentary shades of pink, mixing gingham, stripes and floral patterns. What made it cohere was the notion of family. Blood relationships, Iris would insist, always encourage bad taste. There, above the sink, hung a calendar made at school by Sally. One of those fluorescent-paint jobs, where they make a butterfly by folding the painted paper down the middle, opening it out again. Peggy wondered why she hadn’t been offered a new calendar made by Sally. Sam’s earrings, clumpy and fake, from her last day at work—this afternoon, in fact—lay at rest on a shelf, by the scales, like golden insects. On the table by the washing machine—which was on, as it always was here, drenching their little chat in consoling noise—was splayed open a Jeanette Winterson novel of Mark’s. Peggy recognised it; Iris flicked through her books occasionally, a box of chocolates on her knee.
Seeing her mother notice this last item, Sam snatched it up on her lap round the dishrag and flipped it into the gap between washing machine and work surface. Then she flung open the oven door and went jabbing at the spitting roast potatoes with a fork.
Peggy couldn’t help advising. “Turn them over; those sides are done.” She added, “You’ve made your own Christmas pudding!”
Sam, turning the roasties over, nodded with her head in the oven.
“I don’t know how you’ve found the time. All that messing about, all those ingredients…I’ve seen them make them on daytime telly, and it looks an awful job. And you a working mother!”
Her daughter straightened up, saying, “Oh, I quite enjoyed making that. And the Christmas cake. I made a huge, fuck-off Christmas cake, do you want to inspect it?”
Peggy held up her hands. “Perhaps we can try a bit after dinner.”
“After dinner you’ll be stuffed,” Sam promised.
“Oh…good.”
“No, I had a wonderful time making all that, a few Sundays ago. Getting my hands into the mixing bowl, all those squelching ingredients, getting really dirty…” Fastidiously, Sam turned the heat upon the cooker’s rings.
“I’ve never been one for cooking,” said Peggy.
“Banana sandwiches.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve just remembered,” Sam said. “Banana sandwiches. Left on the table with crisps, when I used to come home from school. When you were up at the hospital with Dad, or when you were working. Sometimes a Mars bar, too.”
“Fancy remembering that, pet.” Peggy hesitated before glowing over fond memories.
“Didn’t you used to call them ‘funny teas’? Those snacks we used to have, sometimes even when you were home? They were fun, I remember. I used to look forward to them. I even preferred them to sit down, cooked meals when Dad was well. It was as if we were—I don’t know—girls together. With banana and sugar sandwiches…and stuff…” She refilled both their glasses.
“Nursery food,” Peggy smiled. “It’s amazing you’ve ended up so slim. By your age, I’d gone to pot. Pot-bloody-shaped.”
“Do you know, it took me years to realise that those ‘funny teas’ weren’t just for fun? I realised they must have been when you were quite…when you were really hard up.”
“I can’t really remember,” Peggy murmured into her glass, squinting as if at dregs.
“You were making the best of things. Making a virtue of them. I mean—sugar sandwiches! When I think back at all that, I can see clearly what you did. I was thinking about this the other day. It’s just heart-breaking.”
The cooker’s buzzer went off. Sam shrugged herself up from leaning against the linen closet and went to see to it.
She went on, “I suppose I can only appreciate this now, the way you had to struggle through, salvage things, keeping me in the dark, because of my being a mother now. We’re bonded in a particular way. We share things like that. I find myself struggling, keeping Sally in the dark, shielding her from the hard stuff, trying to make the visible stuff better.”
“You’re doing a grand job with her.”
“There’s so much, though, to keep her in the dark from.” As she took the warmed dinner plates out from under the grill, they clanked and jarred on Peggy’s nerves. “It’s why, Mam, I wanted you round tonight, really. Why I wanted us to talk again. Do you see? Because it’s
