This whole story started with my gran dying and my mum losing her job. Good start huh? Well gran was in her nineties, ninety-three, I think. She'd been unable to look after herself properly for a decade and in that time mum had acted as her carer, on top of having a day job. Of course, there are nursing homes, but they're expensive and we were generally broke. In fact, the local authority would have paid for the basics but my mum is quite stubborn sometimes; she saw it as her duty for look after her mother. I tried to talk her into putting gran into a home many times. Mum always listened, with that serious face of hers, then said she wouldn't be able to live with herself if she stuck her mother in a local council home. There was a sister, my aunt Katherine, a couple of years older than mum, who could have helped but she'd taken the precaution of marrying a Scotsman and moving to Edinburgh. So there was just mum, and me.
From my point of view it was deadly. Living in a house dominated by the presence of an invalid, the scent of illness and death always lurking in the corners. Not a place where you wanted to bring mates or girlfriends. So after I finished university, and got a job, I found my own flat. Cowardly, I know, but I did plenty to help: I did all the weekly shopping, took gran out in her wheelchair whenever she was up to it and did odd jobs around the house. And the gardening.
I suppose now's a good time to say something about my mum, as she's the focus of this story; the events I'm writing about couldn't have happened if she'd been a different person. She and gran lived in a run-down but respectable suburb of north Oxford; my flat was about a mile away, closer to the city centre. Mum was an assistant librarian for one of the lesser-known Oxford colleges and it's difficult to imagine anyone more stereotypically a librarian than my mother: hushing the students who'd come to chatter rather than work, fussing over late returns and tidying up the piles of books left on the desks at closing time. She looked the part too. It would be easy to say she had awesome tits and perfect make-up and all my mates drooled over her but she wasn't like that at all. Liz Wright (strictly speaking Doctor Liz Wright -- she had a doctorate in mediaeval English) was tall and thin and severe. Her hair was light brown, lacklustre and fading to grey and framing a face that was long and horsey with a rather pointed nose and chin. She also had a full lower lip and slightly too large protruding front teeth, which you could see when she smiled, which she didn't do very often. She was almost flat-chested and narrow hipped and walked with long strides. And she wore spectacles, with thick, black frames, before such things became a fashion statement.
On the positive side, she had beautiful, serious grey eyes and her legs were pretty impressive too. Long and shapely and with exquisitely slim ankles. Not that she ever showed them off; she mostly wore trousers. And if she did wear a skirt or dress she'd wear flat shoes -- espadrilles or schoolgirl sandals. Her other fine feature was her hands. They were long and slender with tapering fingers and perfect oval nails. A few brown spots had started to appear now but there was a time when those hands could have made her fortune on television. Of course, she wore no rings. She didn't have pierced ears either and the only cosmetic she wore was moisturising cream.
She did her best to be a good mum to me, but in all honesty she wasn't really cut out for it. It was like she'd read a book about parenting and was following it to the letter, apart from the bits that talked about smiling and laughing and having fun. I was different, always laughing and joking. I was pretty popular at school and had plenty of friends and I spent a lot of time out of the house while I was growing up. I even went on holidays with some of my schoolmates which was good as mum couldn't afford things like that on her salary. So all in all it wasn't so bad and I guess I loved my mum and wanted to see her happy.
I'm going to fast-forward to the day after gran's funeral. Gran had outlived all her contemporaries and mum hardly had any friends so it was a bit like Eleanor Rigby's funeral -- nobody came. The following afternoon mum and I were sitting in the front room of her house, drinking tea, not talking and contemplating the future. At least, I was, you never knew what mum was thinking. The front room -- gran would never have called it a lounge -- was large and shabby. The whole house was large and shabby. An Edwardian semi in a street of genteel poverty, most of the houses had been converted to student flats and looked about as badly maintained as gran's. Because it had been gran's house, and she'd left it equally to me and mum. The older sister, Katherine, didn't get a look in. I was the one who broke the silence, predictably.
'I'd like to make one thing very clear, Mum: the house is yours to live in as long as you want it. I'm not going to insist on selling up so I can realise my half of the equity.'
She gave me a small smile. She really hadn't expressed any emotion over gran's death, at least, not outwardly. There'd been no tears, no grief, nothing. But that was mum. It wasn't to say she didn't care. And besides, she'd looked after her mother for a decade. Hard not to see the death as an opportunity. Though mum wasn't the type to take opportunities. Not the
carpe diem
sort. Which made her next statement all the more surprising.
'Thank you, Jack. I probably won't be doing anything in the short-term but after that, who knows?' She looked across the room at me and appeared to be going through some internal debate. 'I've decided I'd like to meet someone.'
Well I didn't see that one coming and I just stared at her, which made mum smile a bit wider.
'Not what you expected to hear?' she asked.
'What, a man?' I said, stupidly.
'Yes,' she replied calmly, 'a man.'
My mother had never, so far as I could remember, shown any interest in men, other than professionally through the library. She'd certainly never dated! Then there was the age thing. You may have been wondering how come gran was ninety-three and how old did that make my mum? Well, she was sixty-two, which is a bit late to start dating, isn't it? I'm twenty-five, in case you were wondering and there's a story behind that age difference too, which I suppose I should tell you, as it's pretty pertinent to the whole dating thing.
Liz, my mum, was a sensible and plain girl. Most ladies in that situation meet and marry a sensible and plain man, but she never did. She never dated in fact. Ever. Was quite content with hitching a ride through life as a non-descript lady in a non-descript job. And so things might have gone on into middle-age and confirmed spinsterhood had it not been for the 1995 annual University Librarians' Symposium. This was a glorified term for an annual shindig held in some august establishment, though as all the attendees were librarians, there probably wasn't a lot going on. Until 1995, anyway.
Mum normally wasn't invited to this event. She wasn't the librarian, only an assistant. And she'd have hated it anyway. But that year the head honcho was recovering from rheumatic fever and the senior assistant couldn't make it either as she was due to give birth imminently, so Elizabeth was asked. She wanted to refuse but hated to disappoint her boss. So off she went, during the summer recess, to Leeds. And her life was never the same again.
The symposium started with the usual introductions, guest speaker and ice-breaking cocktail party. Now mum wasn't a big drinker, as you might imagine, but she did enjoy a glass of port and on this occasion, perhaps because she was nervous, and felt out of place, she had one or two more. Then someone latched on to her and plied her with refills. Mum's recollection of the rest of the evening is hazy, and incomplete. What is more definite is that when she woke up in her room at five o'clock the following morning, and lurched to the bathroom to be sick, there was a stranger in the bed beside her, which was good going as it was a single bed. Then he wasn't there when she eventually got back from the bathroom. Whether or not he stayed for the rest of the symposium she never knew. Probably wouldn't have recognised him, anyway, let alone known his name. But she didn't stay around to find out. Embarrassed and hungover, she took a taxi to the station and returned to Oxford where, a couple of months later, her doctor informed her that she was, in his opinion, around eight weeks pregnant.
Gran told me all this before I went off to university. Mum had never breathed a word to me. Obviously I'd been curious about who my father was, and why he wasn't around, but I'd always been fobbed off with a terse 'never you mind about all that.' When gran told me what she knew I was at first excited, thought about tracking dad down. But then I realised that he'd just be a librarian too, albeit a somewhat racier one. So I was probably better off not knowing. What difference would it make? Which explains my shock at mum's disclosure.
'Why now?' I asked.
'It's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, a few years actually. Obviously I couldn't do anything while your gran was alive but now she's gone, and I don't have a job, time's going to hang pretty heavily on my hands. And I'm not getting any younger. It's now or never, in fact.'
'If it's about money,' I began, 'I can help you out -- you know that.'
'Oh goodness me, it's not about money. The house is paid for and gran left a lump sum too, you know. My pension might be small but it'll be enough. I can always earn a bit more by editing students' essays. No, it's not about money; I'm not looking for a sugar daddy, if that's the right expression. I,' she hesitated. 'I don't want to be lonely.'
'I'll always be here, Mum.'
