Chapter 13
The family home – Salty Towers II – was a substantial terraced town villa just outside Penistone. It had high ceilings, period features and large square rooms. Despite the chunky central heating radiators, Marnie’s principal memory of the house was that it was always cold. Judith had never liked the house; she had preferred the one they had before in Wakefield. The one they’d had to move from. Because of Marnie, as she was so often reminded.
Marnie hadn’t seen her mother since she’d dropped off her present before Christmas. She rang once a fortnight – never the other way around – and sometimes her mother picked up, sometimes the answering machine did. The conversations were always short and dutiful: was her mother all right, did she need anything? Her mother always replied that she was perfectly fine and if she wanted anything, she would ask. There was little more to the interchange than that. Marnie had long since learned that any attempt at telling her mother what was going on in her life was met with indifference, although she sometimes still tried, ever hopeful of a breakthrough.
Marnie carried her boxes into the garage, storing them neatly at the back, then went into the house. Her mother hadn’t put the kettle on, she wouldn’t have even thought to. Marnie thought she’d lost weight that she didn’t have to lose; the skin at her neck looked more sunken in than usual and gave the impression that her head was being supported by tent poles. She was huddled in a thin cardigan, a step away from teeth-chattering.
‘It’s cold in here, Mum,’ said Marnie.
‘I’m not putting the central heating on in May,’ said Judith. ‘Besides, I’m not sure it would make any difference.’
‘Well it would,’ argued Marnie. ‘You’d be warm for a start, you look frozen.’
Judith walked over to the mantelpiece and took a card from it which was propped up against a clock. ‘I’ve never liked this house,’ she said and Marnie knew what was coming next. ‘I never wanted to leave the lovely one we had in Wakefield. Here.’ She handed the card to Marnie. ‘I didn’t have a chance to post it.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Marnie thinking that all roads led to the lovely house in Wakefield, and the wonderful rose-tinted life they’d all led there until she ruined it. She could have started a conversation about Charles Manson and in three steps, her mother would have bent it around to the lovely house in Wakefield.
‘So where are you going?’ asked Judith.
‘I’m staying in the Dales for a while.’
‘The Dales? Whatever for? How are you going to get to Leeds every morning from the Dales.’
She imbued the word with all the disapproval that she might have saved for a sewerage leak.
Marnie braced herself for the onslaught that would surely come. ‘I’m not working in Leeds any more. I’ve got a new job, for now anyway.’
She really hoped her mother wouldn’t ask what that new job was.
‘Gabrielle has a new job too,’ said Judith, nibbling a rough edge from one of her short, neat nails. ‘It involves a lot of travelling to New York.’
‘Oh, good for her,’ said Marnie, fearing that it had come out sounding sarcastic.
‘Business class too. She doesn’t travel anywhere these days unless it’s first class, she says.’
Marnie did her best not to react. Her job would sound extra shit at the side of Miss Bloody Perfect Gabrielle’s international career. She would have to lie if asked. She couldn’t tell her mother the truth.
‘How long are you intending to leave that stuff here?’ asked Judith.
‘A few weeks. Is that all right?’ Surely it would be, considering that her boxes and a chest freezer were the only things in the garage. Her mother didn’t drive; she took taxis when she needed to go anywhere, or someone from her bridge club gave her a lift.
‘I suppose so,’ said Judith; her stock, weary phrase. ‘What sort of job are you doing now, then?’
International envoy for Yorkshire, Marnie was tempted to say. It involves lots of travelling to the space station – beat that, Gabrielle.
Then Judith said under her breath, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be an upward move,’ and Marnie felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to rise.
‘I’ve opened up a cheesecake factory,’ she heard herself saying as her mouth broke loose from the straps tethering it to the sensible part of her brain.
There was an obvious silence after that, broken only by Judith Salt’s jaw hitting the floor. Then her mother said:
‘CHEESECAKE? CHEESE. CAKE?’
‘Yes, Mum, cheesecake.’
‘You are not telling me that you are leaving your job to—’ The sentence was severed and Judith’s face formed that mask of disappointment that Marnie had seen so many times and Gabrielle had seen just the once, when she had failed her Grade 8 flute for playing some bum notes.
‘Yes, I’m telling you exactly that.’ I’m thirty-two, I’m not asking for your permission, Marnie added to herself before continuing. ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking but I’m a big girl now and I—’
‘HUH.’ Judith’s single hard note of acerbic laughter held a library’s-worth of words.
Marnie sighed. She wouldn’t get through to her mother. She never had and probably never would. She might not have needed her permission but, however much she tried not to, she really, really would have liked her approval. If this had been Gabrielle, she might have been praised for her derring-do and enterprise (despite embarking on a sinful relationship with sugar and fats), but this was Marnie and the old adage of blood being thicker than water always held true in the Salt family.
‘Well, it’s your own life, I suppose,’ supposed Judith Salt yet again. ‘Yours to make a hash of if that’s what you want to do. As you say, you’re a very big girl now.’
Marnie wanted to point out that the ‘very’ hadn’t been there when she said it. But she knew that was another sly dig. A size fourteen wasn’t big, but it was when you came from a family of willowy saplings. Her BMI wasn’t pulsing out danger lights, she was healthy, could put her socks on without turning a dark shade of aubergine and went in and out in all the right places. She certainly looked healthier than her mother did at the moment: pale and brittle, more so than usual.
Her mother was talking under her breath now, quiet words that weren’t meant to be overheard, apart from one that was: disappointment.
Tears rushed to Marnie’s eyes. Despite all those years of hearing that word levelled at her, she had never quite hardened herself to it. It hit the bullseye of her heart every time. And though she had always swallowed it in the past, this time she couldn’t.
‘Yes, Mum, I know I am,’ she said, struggling to keep the wobble out of her voice. ‘You’ve always made that perfectly clear.’
‘Can you blame me? After all the trouble you’ve caused.’ Judith Salt flew back at her sharply, eyes narrowed and glittering with anger.
‘All the trouble I . . .’
But Judith hadn’t finished.
‘I wonder about your sanity sometimes, Marnie. I really do.’
‘What?’ That was one she hadn’t heard before and made her mouth curve with disbelief, a smile with no humour in it that further infuriated Judith.
‘Yes, you would find it funny. Who throws away a career to go and make . . . buns?’
‘I’m not exact—’
But Judith was on a rant now.
‘You were awkward from the off. You wouldn’t sleep, such high maintenance.’ She shook her head disapprovingly. It took Marnie a few seconds to realise her mother was talking about her as a baby.
‘You mean when you adopted me? When I was one?’
‘You were manipulative even at that age.’
Marnie did laugh then. A high-pitched bark of incredulity.
‘I was one year old, Mum.’
Marnie thought there was nothing new left to hear from her mother but she was wrong. The word cheesecake had taken the stopper off a bottle and it wouldn’t go back in. Things that Judith Salt had been holding back for years started frothing up inside her.
‘He would never have left me if it wasn’t for you. I thought you’d glue us back together, but you didn’t you drove us apart.’
‘I drove . . . ? Glue? What do you mean?’
‘They told me I couldn’t have children. He agreed to adopt, to save us, but he couldn’t take to you. He wanted his own child. He wanted a son. When he found out I was carrying another daughter, he left. Don’t you see?’
Marnie swallowed. Dad. The father that wasn’t really hers and that she couldn’t even remember. The one who had to pay maintenance for her and had resented every penny of it.
‘I see that he was a real catch.’
Judith screamed at her. ‘She was our little miracle. She would have kept us together. He would have loved her if you hadn’t put him off having a daughter.’
Marnie got it now. Gabrielle. All hopes and dreams had been transferred to her sister. All the sins of the father heaped on the adopted daughter. The cuckoo in the nest.
‘Is that what you really think, Mum?’ Mum. The word didn’t fit properly in her mouth. It never had.
‘And I was right,’ screamed Judith. ‘You spoiled everything. You tried to alienate my family from me. We had the perfect school . . .’
Marnie felt the heat of discomfort flare in her stomach. ‘I have to go.’ She couldn’t have that conversation. Not again.
‘You destroyed us. Gabrielle would have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, her teachers said so . . .’
‘Goodbye, Mum. My mobile number is the same if you need anything.’
She opened the door and Judith’s voice followed her out, at a pitch that Marnie had never heard before.
‘I don’t need anything from you. Don’t ring me. And stay away from my daught—’
Marnie shut the door behind her, slicing off her mother’s words. She didn’t even realise she was crying until she felt the itch of tears on her cheek.
Marnie walked away from her mother’s house. She had never thought of it as home; even when she was a little girl it had always felt as if there was a plastic layer over everything that stopped her being part of the Salt family. She might have had their name, but she’d never been one of them.
She was running away because she’d been a disappointment to herself. Possibly even more than she was to her mother. And that really was saying something.
She opened the birthday card in the car. It wasn’t a daughter one with a gushy verse about how special she was, but a generic one with a drawing of a woman in a stylish hat and an impossible figure. Inside was blank except for one word, ‘Mum’, and a cross that followed it, so tiny it looked as if it had been written under duress.
Marnie threw the card on the passenger seat and drove on.