The House of Hidden Mothers Read online

  Mr Lalani let the silence settle, mote by mote, like fine dust. He had been here many times before. He knew not to argue or over-sympathize. He knew it is always best to let the woman – and it is almost invariably the woman – talk and cry and vent her rage at the world, at Nature who has betrayed her. At forty-eight, the betrayal was almost inevitable. Not that he would ever say that out loud.

  ‘As I said, Mrs Shaw, please feel free to seek a second opinion, I assure you I won’t be offended. I just don’t want to raise your hopes and see you spend even more money.’

  ‘Well, there’s not much more of it to be spent, I’m afraid!’ Shyama attempted a breezy chuckle, which sounded more like a ragged, repressed sob. ‘Toby’s got some temporary work, but he’s looking for something better …’

  She knew how this sounded. It sounded exactly as her mother and some others presumed it was. Silly older woman of modest means falls for predictably handsome younger man without a steady career. She gets an ego boost and unbounded energy in bed; he gets use of the house and the car, and the soft-mattress landing of her unspoken gratitude. He kisses the scars left from a disastrous marriage – there’s not much that youthful tenderness cannot mend. He says he loves her, he wants a life with her. Above all, he would love a child with her. He is kind towards her daughter – he treads that fine line between friend and guardian, but never tries to be her father. (She has one of those, occasional as he is.) There are only fifteen years between Toby and Tara – why on earth would she want to call him Daddy? Tara didn’t call her own father that.

  ‘Mrs Shaw? Maybe you want to discuss this further with your husband before making any decisions? Perhaps you and Mr Shaw would like to make an appointment to come and see me together?’

  Shyama ought to tell him now – this gentle man who had navigated his way around her reproductive system like a zealous plumber, undaunted by the leaks, blockages and unexpected U-bends that confronted him – that she was not, in fact, Mrs Shaw. Never had been. That in a fit of misplaced modesty she had assumed Toby’s surname when they had begun this whole process four years ago. She had hurriedly reassured Toby that this was not some devious feminine wile to trap him into marriage, as she was pretty sure she never wanted to marry again – nothing personal. But she had to admit that some part of her felt, well, embarrassed to be publicly declaring their fertility issues as a co-habiting couple. She knew it was one of the few traditional tics she had left, stemming from the part of her which she always imagined to be a middle-aged Indian woman in an overtight sari blouse and bad perm, standing at her shoulder clucking, ‘Chi chi chi! Sex and babies and no wedding ring? And none of your clever-schever arguments about Indians doing it all the time and everywhere and look at population and old naughty statues. Kama Sutra was always meant for married peoples only!’

  Shyama often wished her Punjabi Jiminy Cricket wasn’t so lippy. And spoke better English. Besides, Toby had pointed out several times that declaring themselves to be a married couple wouldn’t guarantee them a faster or better result.

  ‘I mean, look at who gets knocked up the quickest. Pissed teenagers under a pile of coats at a party. I’m pretty sure marriage is the last thing on their minds …’

  ‘That’s because they’re teenagers, Toby. Youth is the one thing we can’t put on the overdraft.’

  The elephant in the room had woken up and scratched itself, sending a few ornaments crashing to the floor. There, she had said it out loud. They both knew that it didn’t matter how many sit-ups and seaweed wraps and nips and tucks a woman went through to pass herself off as a decade younger. In an age where you could cougar your way around town with a wrinkle-free smile, inside you were not as old as you felt, but as old as you actually were.

  ‘Mrs Shaw?’

  Shyama rose unsteadily, the room swimming into focus. She gathered herself, layer by layer, each one hardening into a protective skin. She and her inhospitable womb left the building.

  Outside the world still turned, the sky a torn grey rag pulled apart by a restless wind, behind each jagged seam a glimpse of blue so bright that Shyama had to look away. She walked blindly past the gracious four-storey mansions, like rows of faded wedding cakes with their tiered creamy façades and stucco doorways flanked with pillars, once rich family homes with servants in the basement and attic. Now the airy drawing rooms welcomed international medical tourists and the locals who could afford to pay, the basement kitchens where floury-armed women used to dice carrots and stuff chickens now given over to hi-tech equipment and strobing green screens, where bodies were tested and assessed.

  The wind buffeted Shyama across the A40, the main arterial road running east to west, always pulsing with traffic, the steady drum and bass of London throbbing in time to her own heartbeat. She found herself in Regent’s Park as a weak sun finally broke through, starkly yellow against the heavy clouds, the light so fluid in the breeze she wanted to open her mouth and take great gulps of it, willing it deep into her body, the body that had let her down.

  Shyama found a space on a bench, next to a mother trying to persuade her apple-cheeked toddler to take a sip from a fluorescent plastic beaker. The child, almost rigid in her quilted snowsuit, all four limbs starfish-spread, shook her head slowly and gravely from side to side, as if she was frankly disappointed with her mother for even trying this on. Everywhere there were children swaddled in warm layers, being wheeled in buggies, trotted after on tricycles and scooters or waddling along like demented ducklings, giddy with freedom, entranced by their own feet and shadows, squealing with joy, all the pre-schoolers whose carers needed to exercise them like puppies to avoid tantrums at bedtime. Shyama could just about remember Tara at this age, sensory memories mostly: the smell of her after a bath, nectar-sweet and kiss-curled; sitting in her stripy booster seat at the table, mashing spaghetti between her fingers with fascinated concentration; her laugh, which sounded unnervingly like her crying. There were so many occasions when Shyama had rushed upstairs expecting to find her trapped under the wardrobe or missing a digit, only to discover her sitting in a circle of her soft toys, serving up tea in plastic cups and chuckling loudly like an over-eager dinner host. Tara’s own favourite memory – and she claims it is her first – is when she was about fourteen months old. She had cut her two bottom teeth and Shyama suspected the top two were also trying to push their way out, so she told Tara to open wide so Mummy could have a quick feel of her gums. And as soon as her finger was in, Tara clamped her mouth shut.

  ‘It was like being savaged by a piranha, honestly!’ Shyama said, dressing it up a little just to see Tara’s delight in the retelling. ‘I mean, whoever thinks babies aren’t strong … the power in those little jaws – I couldn’t get it out. And the worst thing was you thought it was a game. The more I yelled and said let go, the more you laughed and laughed. But without letting go. You laughed through clenched teeth like some mad little goblin. That was the disturbing bit.’

  ‘No,’ said Tara. ‘I knew it wasn’t a game. I remember thinking, that’s hurting Mummy but I can’t stop. It’s too much fun. That’s the really disturbing bit, wouldn’t you say?’

  Tara then tossed her hair, or rather her hair plus the extensions she’d insisted on adding to the defiant bird’s nest perched on her head. Shyama had made the mistake once of telling Tara her theory that an Indian woman’s virtue was measured by her hair. Respectable women – in the movies and paintings, on the street – always had long straight tresses untouched by perm or primping, tamed into matriarchal buns or thick tight plaits hanging heavy like stunned black snakes. Only wild ‘junglee’ women or women in mourning uncoiled the serpents and set them free. The shorter and wilder the haircut, the looser the morals, wasn’t that the inference? It was only a theory, but within days Tara’s hair seemed to have grown up and out by several inches. Shyama’s, meanwhile, was getting longer, as if she was trying to blow-dry her way back into respectability. Well, too late for that now. Divorced, toy boy in tow and a stranger for a da
ughter. Who would have seen that coming?

  An ice-cream van pulled up at the park entrance and chimed out ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, the dissonant notes dancing into the park and sprinkling on the shifting wind. It worked. Every child suddenly stopped mid-activity, ears pricked, sniffing the air expectantly. They are like little animals, Shyama thought as several of them started galloping towards the siren call, pulling adults with them. Others less fortunate were told Not Before Tea and the coordinated wailing began. The fury of injustice made them cry louder, but No Means No and Life Isn’t Fair – best you learn that one early. Shyama’s mother had told her that when that jingle sounded it meant that the ice-cream man had just run out of ice cream and was on his way home. For years, Shyama wondered why he always seemed to finish his supplies just as he reached her house. When the truth finally dawned, she couldn’t decide if she was horrified by her mother’s cruel lie or impressed by it. How odd it was that children believe anything we tell them for years, and then one day mistrust every word that comes out of our mouths. Why did she want to do this again?

  A faint beep sounded from the depths of Shyama’s overstuffed handbag. She rummaged amongst her usual debris of tissues and vitamin-pill bottles and a half-read newspaper until she found her mobile. A text from Toby. ‘All OK?’ She hesitated. She didn’t want to talk to him yet. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to say or even how she felt … Doomed and defiant in alternating waves. Of course, she could call him back and quote him any number of women who had defied the odds and given birth way past their medical sell-by date: that woman who was a judge on some dancing talent show, she was forty-nine when she popped one out, wasn’t she? With a grown-up daughter, like Shyama herself. Probably all those years of pliés kept her fit and flexible. What was her name? Then, of course, there were all those OAPs who Zimmer-framed their way to that notorious Italian doctor who got them pregnant, though she recalled that one of them had died before her daughter’s fourth birthday. She had been a single parent, too. What had happened to that child, she wondered? Who would explain to her that Mummy had spent her savings having her in her sixties, had brought her into this world only to depart it soon after from cancer, rumoured to have been triggered by the amount of drugs and hormones she’d imbibed in order to create and sustain a life she would not see into double figures. Shyama’s finger hovered over Toby’s number. Why did she want to carry on with this?

  And then, on cue, because the universe sometimes works that way (or at least we like to think it does, so we create patterns from random collisions and see omens and signs in every coincidence, otherwise what’s the alternative? Accepting that we are merely random specks flicked around by the gnarly finger of indifference?), the apple-cheeked toddler returned. She was still in her buggy, but now holding an ice-cream cone triumphantly between her fat fists. It was already beginning to melt; vanilla tears were making their way down the rippled orange cone on to the little girl’s fingers. As her mother braved an approach with a wet wipe, the child looked up and smiled the way only children can – in the moment and with unadorned purity. Shyama’s guts clenched, holding on to nothing, muscles contracting around an empty space waiting to be filled. In a year’s time, she would look back at this moment and tell herself, there, that was the brief window when you could have recognized this yearning for what it really was, the ten seconds when you could have made a different choice and walked into a different future. But instead, she picked up her bag and wandered over to the playground, her phone to her ear, waiting for Toby to answer her call.

  ‘Ew, sir! Sir! That pig’s dead, innit?’

  Toby looked up from the sty to face a row of schoolkids with their faces pressed against the iron railings, wild delight in their eyes at the prospect of seeing a real-live dead thing.

  ‘There! In the corner! Can we touch it?’

  Toby whirled round, dry-mouthed. Christ, maybe he’d inadvertently stepped on one of the piglets – he had been so distracted since Shyama’s call. A quick glance at Priscilla confirmed she was still sprawled on her side, eyes shut, whilst her recent litter fought their squealing, desperate battle to find and hold on to a teat. It was an undignified scramble with piglets kicking each other’s snouts and climbing over each other’s heads to get to the milk. It reminded him of the buffet queue at a Punjabi wedding that Shyama had dragged him to, not long after they had first met.

  ‘This,’ she had told him, ‘is what’s known as a trial by fire. Not unlike the one that Sita had to walk through in order to prove her purity to Ram. Don’t ask now, we’re doing Hinduism on Wednesday. Today is Meet the Family day – all of them in one place, plus all their friends, acquaintances, hangers-on, people we don’t like but have to invite because we went to their kids’ weddings, and anyone else who will want to gossip about us, which is everyone. This is what’s known as the one-rip-and-it’s-off approach.’

  ‘You’re not going to make me take my trousers off and pretend it’s some ancient Indian custom, are you?’ Toby was only half joking.

  ‘No, though that’s tempting. When you have to take off a plaster, there are two ways, aren’t there? You can pick up a teeny corner and try to peel it off really slowly, wincing and hurting all the way. Or—’

  ‘One rip and it’s off?’

  ‘Exactly. Me and you becoming an item is possibly the biggest scandal on the Birmingham kitty-party circuit since Uncle Baseen’s son announced he was gay two days into his honeymoon and ran off with the cocktail waiter.’

  ‘I’m not sure we could top that.’

  ‘Well, you’re the wrong colour, you live in a bedsit, and wait till they find out how old you are.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell them, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t have to. I just want to. Ready?’

  They were standing at the rear of a purpose-built banqueting suite, a low-roofed concrete building that from the back could have been a factory or a modest shopping mall, except for the garlands of fairy lights festooned over every available inch of outside wall. ‘The only man-made structure in the West Midlands visible from space,’ Shyama told him as they pulled into the car park, her ancient hatchback out of place amongst the Mercedes and Lexuses with their personalized number plates. Now they were standing outside the car, trying to ignore the slight drizzle that had just started, and Shyama was waiting for Toby to say yes. Or go home. Those were his choices. Toby had never liked an ultimatum; he reached decisions slowly, almost unconsciously, letting the seeds of the pros and cons settle into the primal mulch in his back brain whilst he got on with something physical like chopping logs or mucking out a sty. Then hours later, when he was thinking of nothing in particular, the answer would bud and unfold, and it was always the right one because it came to him. He didn’t chase it. He wasn’t prepared to chase this woman he had only known for six months either.

  Their meeting had been like one of those moments you read about or see in cheesy films but never think is actually going to happen to you. Not to someone like him, at least, who didn’t even like surprises. It had been six years ago, not long after his twenty-eighth birthday. He had been clearing out one of the stables. Then he had heard this voice, this guffaw, deep and full-throated enough to make him turn. She had been laughing at the rabbits, a child at either side of her. Not hers but Priya’s, he found out in due course. An hour later, she’d asked for his number and in a daze he’d given it. Dates followed swiftly, increasingly; she always suggested the venue or event: restaurants he had never heard of, bars he would never have gone into without her, films he would not have chosen but usually loved. She took the lead, but subtly, without ever making him feel he didn’t have a choice. And he kept choosing to say yes.

  And now here they were, in a car park in Birmingham, on the verge of their first and maybe last row. She stood, hands on hips, only a couple of inches shorter than him, but in this mood seeming feet taller. Her normally unruly hair was a straight sheet of dark brown with red streaks. (‘I nearly did
the full Sharon Osborne after the divorce,’ she told him. ‘Short and traffic-light scarlet. But I haven’t got the guts. Or the cheekbones.’) She was wearing a sari, red and black shot through with gold thread, very dressy. He was used to seeing her in work clothes: casual suits, mannish jackets. It sounded stupid, but he hadn’t thought of her as Indian until now. The sari – what was it, just a long piece of material? – clung to her generous bust and revealed a waist and hips he knew by touch rather than sight; the jewels at her neck and on her wrists imitated the raindrops caught like tiny prisms in her hair. She looked so … foreign, like one of the busty beauties pouting out of the painted mural in his local Indian restaurant. What used to be his local – in fact, the only one within a twenty-mile radius of the Suffolk village he used to call home. Eating an occasional chicken tikka masala was the nearest he had ever come to Indian culture. And now her. Doe-eyed, firm-jawed, angle-browed, soft-curved, older than him, dark to his blond, pugilist to his pacifist – too many contradictions to work. Then he caught a glimmer of something in her eyes. Those eyes; he wasn’t a poetic man but they made him think of chocolate, fresh earth and twisted sheets. Beyond the brown was something he recognized from years of tending to unwanted animals, a kind of fear or maybe a resigned acceptance that however much you barked and spat, in the end someone was going to kick you where it hurt. He realized she didn’t want to fight. She wanted to get in first before he disappointed her. I never want to disappoint you, was his first thought, and his second caught him by surprise. That he loved her already.

  ‘Shall we?’ He smiled, offering her his arm with a self-consciously gallant swoop.