The Displaced Nation

“And then what happened?” Maggie tops up our glasses with Rioja. “Did he tell you all about his bigamist father and you said, ‘That’s fine, sweetheart’ and everything was tickety-boo between you again?”

Maggie’s summary isn’t incorrect, but it goes further than that.

“Something like that. He’s trying very hard, and…” I shrug.

“You mean,” Maggie says, “that the balance has shifted and you’ve got the upper hand for once?”

I consider this. I did the midnight feed last night, but this morning Oliver got up early to make breakfast for Jack and help him get dressed while I slept. I only woke up when Oliver brought a cup of tea and the twins to me in bed.

Does that mean I have the ‘upper hand’?

“No,” I say. “I mean that the balance, for once, is exactly right.”

* * *

Take this evening, for example. Tonight I’m at Maggie’s house, on my own, sans children, who are tucked up in bed while Oliver holds the fort and figures out the intricacies of mixing formula milk. This wouldn’t have happened a week ago, when the balance of power was tipped in his favour, when Oliver considered himself wronged, and behaved accordingly badly.

But all that has changed now.

Oh yes.

The evening after he had been to see Maggie, he told me about his father. He helped put the children to bed, and insisted on tidying up after dinner. “You go and put your feet up, Libs,” he said, and brought me, instead of an olive branch, a dish of ice cream. When he finally joined me, I was lounging on the sofa, taking up all the cushion space, and holding up a magazine in front of my face. After removing a few of Jack’s toys from a nearby armchair, Oliver also sat down.

“Libs.”

I turned a page. “Mmm-hmm.”

Ungracious? Yes, maybe. It takes more than a bit of washing up and Ben & Jerry’s to get round me these days.

“We should talk,” he said, then stopped. From behind my magazine, I saw him glance sideways at me. I said nothing, and continued flicking through the pages of Good Housekeeping. I was damned if I was going to make this easy for him.

He sat forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, hands dangling, his eyes fixed on a spot on the floor.

“He had three wives, you know. Mum was the third.”

A few seconds went by, then I said, “Yes. I do know, now. No thanks to you.”

His head drooped even lower. “I’m doing my best here, Libs. It’s very hard for me to talk about this. Don’t make it more difficult for me than it already is.”

I slapped the magazine down on my lap. “And don’t you lay that guilt trip rubbish on me! You’ve had ten years to tell me about your family history, but no, I had to watch our wedding outtakes video to find out why you were being such a shit about my little experiment with genealogy. So don’t preach at me about making things difficult.”

Oliver got up and walked out of the room. I think I was supposed to follow him at this point, and beg forgiveness. A very short time ago, I would have done — but not any longer. Instead, I picked up my magazine again and read an article about extreme bathroom makeovers; a pointless article when you live in rented accommodation. After about fifteen minutes, Oliver returned to the room.

“Shall we start again?” he asked in a quiet voice.

I sniffed.

“If you like.”

“Could you put the magazine down?”

I elaborately laid it on the side table, folded my arms, and raised my eyebrows at him. “Happy?”

He didn’t rise to my bait. It was a bit disappointing. “Mum was his third concurrent wife,” he said in a rush. “They’d been married for six years. The others had been married to him for nine and eleven years. None of them suspected a thing, despite the fact that they all lived within twenty-five miles of one another.” He paused. “If it hadn’t been for that pile-up on the M1, they might still be happily married today, for all I know.”

He flexed his fingers, then cracked his knuckles — a sure sign that Oliver’s under stress.

“Tell me.” I tried to make my tone offhand, but from the grateful expression on Oliver’s face, I must have injected more affection than intended.

“Mum saw the report on the local news about a big pile-up on the M1 at Luton,” he began, sounding hesitant. “Lots of pictures of cars crumpled up and skewed sideways in the road, ambulances and fire engines and police everywhere. The reporter said that four people had already been confirmed dead. Mum didn’t think much about it because Dad said he was working in the Lake District that week. Then, apparently — I don’t remember it, but she tells me this is what happened — I shouted that I could see Daddy’s car on the television.”

“And was it his car?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t have been. Dad had called Mum only an hour before from Carlisle — or at least, that’s where he said he was — so as far as she was concerned, there was no way he could have driven 300 miles in one hour. But yes. It was his car. The cameraman zoomed in on this bashed in blue Cortina, and Mum could make out the numbers on the licence plate.”

I was quiet again, but not in order to punish Oliver. I was visualising the scene in Sandra’s house, the turmoil in her mind as she wondered if her husband had survived the wreckage…

“Then what happened?”

Oliver squeezed his eyes shut. “She drove to the hospital that the news reports mentioned. Kicked up a fuss at reception, screaming that she’d just seen her husband’s car on TV in the pile up and she demanded to know where he was. The woman at the desk asked her what her husband’s name was, and when Mum told her, the woman got all confused and told her there must be some mistake because the family of that person had already been notified.”

Poor Sandra. I didn’t like her — never had — but no one deserved that.

“And if you think it couldn’t get any worse, the final wife turned up at the hospital twenty minutes later, having also seen the news and the picture of the car, and the same thing happened all over again. I can’t really remember what happened after that. Probably just as well, really. I only remember a lot of days that Mum either cried or threw things out of the window or into the street. Everything belonging to Dad, everything he had ever given me or Mum, it all disappeared from the house. I never saw him again.”

I thought of the toy tiger and the birthday card, the two hidden items that had sparked this whole mess between Oliver and me. I asked how they had escaped the evacuation.

“They turned up in the post a couple of days after my sixth birthday, a few months later, addressed to me. The postman rang the doorbell, and because it was Saturday and Mum was still in bed, I answered the door and got the parcel myself. I never told Mum I’d received them. By that time, I’d already lost my favourite teddy bear and lots of toys, just because Dad had bought them for me.”

My pity for Sandra evaporated as I thought of a little boy, not much older than Jack, trying to comprehend why all his beloved toys were being thrown in the dustbin.

I sat up and stretched my hand out to stroke Oliver’s arm.

“Poor you,” I said. “That’s awful. Really terrible.”

Oliver absently put his hand on top of mine.

“I found out, much later, that he must have sent that parcel just before he went to prison.”

“Prison?”

“Bigamy’s an prison offence. He was in for a few months, I believe.”

Sorry as I felt for Oliver, I still had to have my say.

“But why didn’t you tell me? Have you any idea how much you’ve hurt me by not trusting me like that?”

He rubbed his eyes, and squeezed my hand tighter.

“It’s got nothing to do with trust. It was all down to a promise I made to my mother, not to tell anyone. She was humiliated beyond belief — I see that now — and I didn’t want to break that promise by telling every girl I met.”

“But I wasn’t ‘every girl’!” I said. “I was your wife!”

“Not at first, you weren’t. And by the time I felt it was OK to tell you without also betraying Mum, we’d known each other for a long time, and by then — well, I felt it was too late. You’d always ask me why I hadn’t said anything before.”

Hmm. It sounded good, but I wasn’t completely convinced by this argument. Oliver’s doe-eyed love for his mother was so great that I couldn’t see him ever breaking that promise unless he was forced, like this fiasco had forced him. For the sake of familial peace and marital harmony, though, I was prepared to go along with his white lies — this time, anyway.

“Anything else you’d like to tell me?” I asked. “Anything other skeletons in the cupboard I should know about before I start on our family tree again?”

Oliver shook his head. “None that I know of. You might find something, but I promise you, it will be as much a surprise to me as to you.”

* * *

“And that was it?” Maggie asks.

“Not quite. I got up and went to the mall for three hours. Left him to sort out the twins, who apparently woke up the minute I closed the garage door and wouldn’t entertain the idea of going back to bed until ten minutes before I came back. When I got home, all three of them were asleep on the sofa with a Wiggles DVD still playing.”

I smiled at the memory. Oliver had been dying to complain and play the martyred father, but he didn’t dare.

“And that’s not even the best of it,” I said. “His mother emailed him yesterday, asking when she could come over to see her ‘new precious angels’, as she calls the twins.”

Maggie gasped. “Oh no! She’s not coming over again, is she? You’ve only just recovered from her last visit.”

“Damned right she’s not coming over again. We are going over to England instead. Do you realise I haven’t been home since we moved here, this time last year? We can’t go back to our old house, because the old witch is living in it, and I can’t face the idea of seeing the mess she’s made of it, so we’re renting a house in the Cotswolds for two weeks in September. If she wants to see her ‘new precious angels’”— I pretended to stick two fingers down my throat — “she can stay in the Travelodge down the road.”

Maggie clapped her hands. “Bravo, Libby!”

I grinned.

“Yes,” I said. “I think this qualifies as the first gold for Team LP.”

*  *  *

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #58 – Careless whispers

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #56 – Falling up

A note for Libby addicts: Check out Woodhaven Happenings, where from time to time you will find more posts from other characters.  Want to remind yourself of Who’s Who in Woodhaven? Click here for the cast list!

Read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, when our agony aunt, Mary-Sue, pays the Displaced Nation a visit to assist residents who may be suffering from the post-Olympics blues.

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalphotos.net

I’m trapped in a dream and am falling, falling, falling, towards a pit of boiling lava. It serves me right, I tell myself in my dream, for believing pink satin pointe shoes would be appropriate attire in which to climb Mount Etna. Having lost my balance while performing an arabesque on the rim of the volcano, I’m now drifting towards the centre of the earth at a languid pace. “If I’d only practised harder at ballet, this would never have happened,” I admonish myself on the way down, regardless of the fact that I’d never taken a ballet class in my life, and wouldn’t know an arabesque from the macarena.

With a jolt and a kick to the duvet, I wake myself up just before my satin-clad feet hit the churning lava.

Sweating slightly from the warm night, and from relief that the dark nightmare has ended, I lie still, breathing hard. The relief doesn’t last long, though, because after a few seconds, my brain kicks into semi-wakefulness and the real nightmare comes flooding back — the one in which my husband came home last night to a silent house, made a secretive phone call to a mystery woman — of course it was a woman — and immediately went out again to see her.

That is not a nightmare I can wake up from. When we were kids, we used to say that if you actually hit the ground in that falling dream, it would be too late and you’d be dead for real from a heart attack. For a second I contemplate the possibility of finding a high building, enacting the dream, hitting the ground and ending it for real, but the obligations of being a mother to Jack and the twins are too great, and—

The twins. I spring upright in bed, and strain my eyes to see the time on the digital alarm clock. It’s getting light outside; I have slept — I do a quick calculation — six hours straight, and neither twin has woken me for a wee hours feed.

I swing my legs out of bed, pull on a dressing-gown, and pad over to their matching Moses baskets, under the window in the alcove of the bedroom.

The baskets are empty, the covers pulled back.

I panic. You hear of these kidnap-to-order abductions. Then — oh, thank God! — I hear a muffled cry from somewhere else in the house. It’s George, not Beth; George’s cry is hoarse, loud, and very persistent.

I run out of the bedroom, in the direction of the stairs, and stop when I hear the cry again. It’s coming from the spare bedroom where Oliver has slept for the last six weeks or so.

Pushing the spare bedroom door open, I peer across the room. Oliver lies in the middle of the bed, a twin snuggled under each arm. His right hand is awkwardly curved round as he holds a bottle of milk to George’s mouth.

I reach to the side of the door and turn the landing light on. Oliver looks up. He gives me a half-smile, then mouths “Shhh.”

Shhh? I don’t think so. For the last three months, I have single-handedly looked after our three children and run our home while Oliver indulged himself in his midlife crisis. Knowing what I do now, after last night’s little secret-phone-call episode, I’m in no mood to Shhh.

“What are you doing?” I ask. My voice sounds very loud in the dawn quiet, when even the birds are still rubbing sleep from their eyes.

“I’m feeding the twins. This is George’s second bottle. He eats a lot, doesn’t he?”

If Oliver had paid any attention to his children over the last few weeks, this wouldn’t have been a revelation to him.

“Why are you doing that?” I ask.

Oliver shifts slightly in the queen-sized bed, and removes the bottle from George’s mouth with a gentle popping sound. George lies back, his eyes almost closed, a dribble of milk running from one side of his mouth. Automatically, I reach into my dressing-gown pocket for a clean tissue, and lean forward to wipe the dribble away before it solidifies in the folds of his fat little neck.

“You needed a break,” Oliver answers.

Sorry. It’s too late for that. “Guilty conscience at last, eh? Or did she tell you to keep me sweet? ‘Oliver, you must be nice to poor Libby.’ Well, I’m telling you, I’ve managed perfectly well since April, and just because your fancy woman tells you to feel sorry for me—”

“Wait.” Oliver tries to raise his head, but Beth whimpers in protest at the change in her sleeping position. “Wait. What woman?”

“The one you were out with last night!” My voice is raised now, but I don’t care. “I heard you on the phone, making plans for a hot date. ‘I can see you now,’ you said. ‘She’s in bed,’ you said. ‘See you in fifteen minutes,’ you said. Who is it? Did Melissa Harvey Connor finally get her claws into her latest victim?”

I stand back, arms folded.

To my astonishment, Oliver starts to laugh.

“How dare you laugh!” I shout, and both babies fling their arms out, startled. I can’t remember the last time I screamed like this at my husband, but it feels good. All the pent-up anger and frustration is coming out now — and yet all he can do is laugh?

Oliver stops laughing. “You thought I was out with Melissa? Please.”

“So who was it?”

He’s quiet for a moment.

“There is no one else. I was at Maggie’s.”

I’m silent. I can’t think what to say.

“Why?” I ask eventually. “Why with Maggie and not with me?”

He breathes in, holds it for a few seconds, then lets it out in a rush.

“Because she wanted to bawl me out. She thinks I’ve been a complete bastard.” He looks down at Beth and drops a kiss on her head. “And she’s right,” he said quietly.

I sit on the edge of the bed, but still don’t say anything.

“My father,” Oliver says hesitantly. He takes another deep breath. “I know you know about it. I should have told you before, but my mother made me promise never to say anything. You know what she’s like, not that it’s an excuse, but…I should have told you. I should have broken that promise to my mother.”

He stops. The light coming in at the window is stronger now, and I can see tears shining in his eyes.

I can’t help it. Despite everything I’ve gone through recently, despite the way he’s behaved, I feel sorry for him. When all’s said and done, he’s my Oliver, we have three children together, and we owe it to them, and ourselves, to make this work.

“When you’re ready,” I say, and reach across and squeeze his hand.

He squeezes mine in return. We glance shyly at each other, then look away.

It’s going to be all right, I think. It will take a while — but it’s going to be all right.

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #57 – Coming clean

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE  – Oliver’s side of the story 

A note for Libby addicts: Check out Woodhaven Happenings, where from time to time you will find more posts from other characters.  Want to remind yourself of Who’s Who in Woodhaven? Click here for the cast list!

Read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

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A note before Libby begins her journal entry: If you’re a Libby addict, check out Woodhaven Happenings, where from time to time you will find more posts from other characters. The latest is a post from Maggie, describing her side of the story of last week’s meeting with Libby. Want to remind yourself of Who’s Who in Woodhaven? Click here for the cast list!

*  *  *

The babies are in bed. They have been bathed, fed, patted, soothed, and tucked up for the night. After protesting at similar treatment at a too-early hour, Jack is also away for the night.

I sit in the gradually darkening den, watching the sun set behind the trees in the back yard, and wait for Oliver. This is the room he usually heads for when he comes through the door. The temptation to turn on the TV is great, but I resist, knowing I need to channel my thoughts and energy into the inevitable scene that lies ahead tonight, not into another episode of How I Met Your Mother. Also, if I am quiet, I will be able to hear him arrive home.

Oliver’s evening arrivals have been getting later and later. When I comment, mildly, upon this — I never question — he replies in a tone that indicates it’s hardly worth him opening his mouth. “Work,” he says. “Overtime.” “Customer with a problem.”

“What about a wife with a problem?” I want to scream. “Don’t I deserve some of your overtime too?”

But I never do. I’m my mother’s daughter, after all. After the brief interlude here when she abandoned her role as Dutiful Wife To Keith in favour of Fun-Loving Single Woman For Now, she’s back to tiptoeing around the house and fetching Dad his warmed slippers. She gave me the hint about Oliver’s parentage, but I can’t work out what I was supposed to do with the information. Silently store it and sympathise with Oliver, I think she meant.

Thankfully, I have another mother who is not afraid of sticking an oar in when necessary, even if it means breaking a promise to not interfere.

“I used to interfere,” Maggie said, after she had hauled me, the children, and Fergus back to her house earlier today. “All the time. Making that promise to your mother not to get involved nearly killed me.”

“But you decided to go ahead and get involved anyway.”

“You’re like a daughter,” Maggie said, “the daughter I haven’t had for twenty-five years. I could no more stand by and watch you fall to pieces than I was able to watch Sara.”

Maggie sat in her wooden rocking chair, gazing out of the window at the maple tree in the yard. Her eyes were open very wide, as people’s are when they are trying to make tears disobey gravity. Half of me wanted to ask more about the mysterious daughter, but the other half didn’t want to rake over old memories for Maggie.

Also — I have to be honest — I was more intent on getting my own life straightened out. Whatever happened to Maggie and her daughter twenty-five years ago has little to do with what is going on now between me and Oliver.

“What shall I do?” I asked her instead. “How do I talk to a man who won’t talk back?”

Maggie turned slightly, blinking.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “You know your own husband. At least, you thought you did. But however you do it, you have to keep telling yourself that you deserve better than this.”

I didn’t dare ask her what she meant by that.

* * *

The sun has been below the horizon for fifteen minutes now, and an occasional firefly flickers among the rhododendrons. The den is completely dark. Oliver is still not home. I curl up on the sofa without bothering to turn on the lamp beside me, and rehearse tonight’s conversation in my head. It’s difficult, of course, because in this imaginary exchange Oliver answers the way I would like him to. We have a reasoned, adult conversation, resulting in a reasoned, adult compromise. He does not mutter monosyllables, or stomp upstairs to the guest bedroom where he has taken to sleeping under the pretext of not getting enough sleep in the same room as the twins, who supposedly wake him up every time they murmur in the night.

I hear the rattle of the garage door and the hum of the car engine as it pulls into the parking bay. The back door opens, then closes again. Oliver’s uncertain footsteps into the unlit kitchen, heading into the hall, then back into the kitchen. Apart from a nightlight glowing on the landing upstairs, the house is in darkness.

Oliver’s footsteps stop. I hear the fridge door open, and the faint light from the fridge interior illuminates the hallway outside the den. Funny how a small light can make such a difference in a dark house. I am reminded of my grandfather’s stories of German air raids and belligerent blackout wardens.

The fridge door closes, the light goes off.

The pop and hiss of a Coke can top, some glugs. A stifled belch.

Another noise. Beeps — ten of them.

I stiffen, listening hard.

Then a quiet voice from the kitchen, speaking into a cellphone.

“Hey. It’s Oliver.” Silence, broken by the tossing of an empty Coke can into the recycling bin. “Change of plan. I can see you now…Yeah, no problem. She’s in bed. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

The back door opens and closes, the garage door rattles open, and the car engine hums again as Oliver reverses onto the driveway.

I stay where I am, motionless, and watch the fireflies for a long time.

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE: Oliver’s side of the story

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #54 – Opening the cocoon 

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Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

There’s probably a word for it in the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. An obscure word that only makes an appearance on Radio 4 intellectual game shows. Something like:

Tri-gami-matri-taci-filial (noun, Old English) — the silence of a son regarding his mother’s marriage to a serial bigamist after the father’s third marriage.

Then people like Stephen Fry and Paul Merton would make clever, rude jokes about this word, and you’d wonder why the English language possessed such an item, because such a situation was unlikely to exist.

Except the situation does exist, and consequently I’d like to know the word that has this definition:

“The pissed-off feeling after realising that your husband of nearly seven years has accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to tell you that his estranged father was a serial bigamist and didn’t run off with a local librarian like he and your mother-in-law had always led you to believe.”

I mean, it’s not as if it would have mattered, is it? If Oliver had told me on our second date, “Oh, by the way, Libs, I didn’t grow up with a father because my mum found out that he was married to a couple of other women at the same time” — I would hardly have stomped out of the restaurant before he could ask me out on a third date.

Did he really think I would have said, “God, Oliver, I’m glad you came clean with me now because obviously, there is no way I could marry the spawn of such pond slime”?

I know what you’re thinking. If it wouldn’t have been such a big deal on our second date, why am I making a fuss now?

Because it’s gone past the point of being an unfortunate fact about Oliver’s ancestry. Ten years ago, before our engagement, I could have processed the knowledge and said, “Poor Oliver. Your poor mum. What a terrible thing to happen.”

Now, although I still think that way, pity has been overtaken by hurt that Oliver couldn’t see fit to tell me.

I am being treated like the criminal, but why? The real criminal is Oliver. He has known about this all along, and in the ten years we have known each other, has never told me this story, although it’s obvious that he knew. Why did he not feel he could tell me, his girlfriend, his fiancé, his wife, his soulmate? Has he so little faith in me? I feel bereft, my faith in Oliver plundered.

But self-pity inevitably mutates into anger.

Today, I am angry, and everyone knows it.

Well, nearly everyone. Jack knows it, George knows it, and Beth knows it. The only person who is oblivious is Oliver himself, the object of my anger, and as usual he’s out, avoiding the issue. Avoiding me.

Meanwhile, rage swirls around my head and seeps out through my ears, filling the house with noxious atmosphere.

I’ve been passive too long.

I gather up the twins and strap them into the double stroller. Jack peeps cautiously at me from behind the sofa where he is quietly playing with Lego bricks.

“Put your sneakers on,” I say. “We’re going out.”

*  *  *

It’s a long time since we’ve been out.  Nursery school has finished for the summer. After the first couple of weeks when the Coffee Morning Posse delivered freezer casserole after freezer casserole, no one has been to visit — not even Maggie. I suppose they think I’ve got enough to do without catering to visitors. Even my mother has been quiet, phoning only once since she got back home. For the last few weeks, I’ve holed myself up in the house, seeing no one, ordering groceries online, too depressed and timid to put a foot outside.

But today is a beautiful, sunny day, my anger is invigorating, and I’m tired of being a hermit. I make Jack hold the handle of the stroller, loop Fergus’s leash round my wrist, and off we set, along Juniper Close.  We are walking to Main Street, to a place of busy-ness, to be with other people who will only coo at my babies and won’t see the rage and hurt in the back story.

Fergus, however, has other ideas. He crosses the street docilely enough, but as we turn right towards the road that leads to Main Street, however, he lags behind and his leash pulls on my wrist. He wants to go the other way.

I tug on the leash. He sits. I tug again. He lies down.

It’s an impasse. Fergus and I stare at each other. He usually wins these stare-down contests, but I’m in no mood for defeat. Today, I’m determined to win, so I don’t break my gaze, not even when I hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind me. Whoever it is can step onto the road and walk around us.

The footsteps slow, then stop.

“We first met,” I hear Maggie say, “when there was another drama going on between you and this dog. I haven’t seen you out with these children for weeks. Were you coming to see me?”

I continue to stare at Fergus so I don’t have to meet Maggie’s eyes. She’s right. I haven’t seen her since the twins were a couple of weeks old. How time flies when you’re having fun.

“If I hadn’t seen you today,” she goes on, “I’d have come to visit. I don’t like to intrude, but…”

“It’s been difficult,” I mutter. “The twins — they’re a lot of work.”

“I’m sure they are,” she says. “And from what I hear, so is your husband.”

She has my attention now.

“How do you know?” I demand. “What do you know?”

Maggie places a hand on my forearm and takes Fergus’s leash from my wrist. She gives the leash a gentle shake, and he gets up to stand by her, as docile as you please.

“Your mother and I became pretty good friends while she was here, you know. We made an agreement. I would be there for her daughter in America, and if the need ever arises, she will be there for mine in England.”

Mums’ Army. The Maternal Foreign Legion.

“Come on, Jack,” Maggie says, taking his hand. “Back to Granny Maggie’s house.”

With difficulty, I turn the wide stroller around to face the other direction.

“‘Granny Maggie’?” I ask. “Does that make you my mother, then?”

Maggie smiles, just a little.

“The next best thing on this side of the ocean,” she says.

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE # 55 – Dark secrets

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #53 – Preserved on tape 

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Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post — a Dolce Vita Slideshow!

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

I stare at the dark computer screen, wondering if my overactive imagination is misleading me.

Only one way to find out. An imagination doesn’t mislead twice. Not in the face of hard facts from a digital camera.

I hit “Play” on the screen again, and scroll through our unedited wedding footage until the time elapsed says 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Act 1:

The evening party at our wedding. To the left of the stage where the band is playing a particularly sickly version of  Stevie Wonder’s “I just called to say I love you” (look, my dad booked the band, OK?) a large clock on the wall shows the time to be 9:40.

At 9:40pm on our wedding day, Oliver and I were on the other side of London, in the bar at the Heathrow Hilton, ready for our flight to Ibiza the next morning.

This is all the stuff that happened after we left our party. It’s fascinating and morbid at the same time. Like watching your own funeral.

No one appreciates the band’s rendition of Stevie Wonder, and the only person on the dance floor is a little girl in a pink frothy frock — the daughter of Mum’s cousin. Yasmin, her name is. She  twirls around in circles, round and round and round again, until she is dizzy and falls down, laughing up at the camera. The camera zooms out, and to the right of the dance floor reveals a cluster of small, circular tables, covered with empty glasses and plates of half-eaten vol-au-vents. We were supposed to have had wait staff all night at the reception, but apparently they disappeared as soon as the Adorable Couple had left the bash.

At one of the small tables, on her own and nursing a glass of what looks like water but is most likely vodka, sits Sandra. She hunches to one side, leaning against the wall, a morose expression on her face as she swigs from the glass. She’s not happy that her little boy has another woman in his life.

The camera swings down in a jerky movement and drops its gaze to the floor. A man’s foot in a  scuffed black shoe — the videographer’s. (I’m guessing he’s had quite a bit of party bubbly and is merely filming for his own amusement, since the day’s main attractions are now propping up a different bar in a Hilton forty miles away.) Then up again, focusing on the little girl in the pink dress, who is dancing a ballet routine to the band playing a different song — a slow one by Journey, I think. A few feet behind the little girl, my mother comes into view. The mother of the bride is resplendent in a fuchsia pink wedding suit that would have been more at home at a wedding in 1987. She’s heading towards Sandra.

At the little table, Mum sits down and pushes some vol-au-vents aside. She smiles brightly at Sandra; they are related now, bonded by marriage and the mutual loss of their only offspring. Mum, though, is not as heartbroken as her counterpart, because she has not really lost a daughter. Daughters are never lost; they are merely loaned to their husbands.

Sandra, however is inconsolable. Her loss is total, and she is utterly bereft. Emotion runs deep in her veins. So does the vodka.

She says something to Mum which is inaudible above the strains of the Steve Perry wannabe. She waves her glass around, and speaks some more. I know that if I could hear her, the words would be slurred.

A look of concern crosses my mother’s face.

I recognise this look. It’s the look I used to see when I came home from school, slamming my book bag on the kitchen table and muttering dire, cryptic threats against whoever had happened to piss me off that day. A quick, sideways glance, sizing up the gravity of the situation: “Is Libby really going to slash that teacher’s tyres? Do I intervene or keep saying ‘Yes, dear’?”

Mum starts to speak, and Sandra’s face crumples. Mum takes her hand and squeezes it.

I want to know more about this little scene, but the videographer is intent upon capturing Second Cousin Yasmin  and her ballet routine whose tempo is too fast for this last-smooch-at-the-disco song.

The camera zooms in on the little dancing feet in their pink sparkly Mary Jane shoes, and the unfolding drama between my mother and Sandra is lost.

Act 2

I nearly missed this part, so intent was I upon the visual aspect of the film. My mother and Sandra do not appear on the whole of the DVD again, even though there is still another forty minutes of footage to go. My goodness, but we got our money’s worth from that videographer.

A tantrum on the dance floor.

Second Cousin Yasmin has exhausted her repertoire of dance routines but, undeterred, has dragged a chair to the middle of the floor so she can show off her barre exercises.

Battements tendus — un, deux, trois. To the side — un, deux, trois.

Pleasing, perhaps, to the eyes of fond mothers at ballet school, when set to the strains of Saint-Saens and Faure, but not so pleasing to the occupants of the dance floor who are trying to boogie to the band’s version of “Love Shack.” They keep tripping over the chair and Yasmin’s outstretched limbs.

Yasmin’s father, my mother’s cousin Ted, strides onto the wooden floor. He picks up the chair in one hand, and grabs onto TwinkleToes herself with his other.

“Bang bang, on the door baby,” sings the female vocalist in little more than a whisper.

The lull in the song is Yasmin’s cue to yell, very loudly. She calls her father a name that six-year-olds are not supposed to know, let alone use in the formal setting of a wedding reception. Uncle Ted is not impressed, and tries to haul her away. It’s well past her bedtime, anyway.

Yasmin, though, doesn’t agree with this sentiment, and sits down on the floor very suddenly, knocking her father off balance. He drops the chair, trips over his daughter’s leg, and sprawls in a most ungainly manner on the floor.

The videographer, who has been professionally quiet behind the camera until this point, lets out a huge snort of amusement and backs away, towards the cluster of tables, get a better view. The band has stopped playing; I can see them conferring on stage, wondering whether to ignore the little scene, or to play a noisy song to drown it out.

In the hush, close behind the camera, a voice.

Sandra’s voice, perfectly recorded for posterity.

“I was his third. If it hadn’t been for that car accident, when Oliver and I met his other wives in the hospital, we might still all be one big happy family.”

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Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #54 – Opening the cocoon

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #52 – Life: A series of hellos and goodbyes

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode

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Mum kisses me. “I love you,” she says.

She’s done that quite a few times in the last couple of weeks, which is funny because she’s not really a kissy or “I love you” kind of person. When I was growing up, she displayed her affection via a surprise addition of homemade cake in my school lunch box, a Ladybird book from a trip to WH Smith, or a poster of Take That sneaked into the weekly shopping trolley.

But kisses and “I love you”s?

Never. “Show, don’t tell” was Mum’s philosophy. Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk.

So either her six weeks in America has rubbed off more vigorously than anyone could have anticipated — they’re very big on saying “I love you” at every opportunity here — or she’s unbearably worried.

When I was fourteen, I fell off my bike and hit my head on the tarmac. I was out cold, in hospital — for twenty-four hours, I’m told, although from my point of view it could have been anywhere between five seconds and an eternity. In the moments or hours before my eyelids fluttered open and Mum’s voice proclaimed “She’s awake!” I heard her saying the same thing, over and again. “Don’t go, Libby. Please don’t go. I love you. Please stay here, Libs. I love you.”

It had puzzled me at the time. I was in bed; of that much I was aware in my semi-conscious fog, so where could I go? Later, of course, I realised that Mum was speaking of a more permanent one-way trip, so I didn’t mention I’d overheard her bedside soliloquy. Saying “I love you” out loud like that was slightly embarrassing; like not being able to reach the bathroom on time, or having other bodily emissions erupt against our will.

It must be a British thing. We acquired our reputation of stiff upper lip and British reserve for a reason, I guess. The preschoolers’ moms here drop their children off at nursery with a chorus of “Mommy loves you, honey!”, while the kids run into school without a backward glance. I wonder how many of them grow up thinking that “Mommy loves you” is just another form of “Goodbye”, rendered less valuable by its daily usage.

You see, when my mum says it, I know it’s from the heart and not merely a salutation.

“I love you too,” I say, and kiss her cheek.

She could be saying it because she’s about to get in the Lincoln Town Car that takes her to Logan Airport for her flight back to Heathrow, but even lovey-dovey goodbyes aren’t Mum’s scene. A laconic “Well, I suppose I won’t be seeing you for a long time” would have been more her style.

No. She’s worried. I’m sure of it.

She’s worried that I’m descending into a pit of depression, which because of its timing could conveniently be classified as “post-natal” but in reality has been brought on by my husband’s ever-increasing distance from me, and his preoccupation with…what? I don’t know what. He’s got something on his mind, something to do with his father, but apparently his own wife is not allowed to be privy to those inner thoughts.

She never has been, I know now.

“All set?” the driver asks her.

Mum nods. She gets into the back seat of the long, black car, shuts the door, and winds down the window.

“Sandra,” she mouths. “Don’t forget.”

The car backs down our driveway, reverses onto Juniper Drive.

Mum waves. I wave back. So does Jack.

Oliver, naturally, is absent from the family scene.

I go inside, and for once, Oliver’s absence is a blessing. What I’m about to do wouldn’t be a good idea while he’s around.

This week I have learned from Mum that, at our wedding, after Oliver and I had left for our first night in a hotel as a married couple, my mother-in-law got falling-down drunk but unfortunately not speechlessly so, and started telling my own mother a few family secrets. Mum tried to shut her up but not before Sandra had released a collection of dead ancestors’ remains from a large cupboard — information which, I inferred, was relevant to the present situation. My mother had kept this information to herself for six years, but even now, she delicately skirted round the details of what Sandra had told her.

“It’s not my information to give,” she insisted. “You’ll have to get it from the horse’s mouth.”

Tantalising and unhelpful, albeit highly satisfying to hear my mother-in-law referred to as a horse.

And then, just this morning while I was helping Mum finish her packing, I remembered. Tucked away in a box in the basement is a box of our English DVDs. We don’t get them out because they’re in the wrong format for the DVD player here, but they will play on my laptop. The particular one I want, though, I’ve never actually played before.

With a flashlight in my hand, I descend the wooden stairs into the basement. It’s dark down here, and with the humidity rising as summer approaches, there’s a smell of musty damp in the air. A rustling noise, a scurry of rodent feet makes me jump — I’ve disturbed something the pest control people missed on their last visit — but even the threat of mouse attack doesn’t deter me.

I find the box of DVDs and, shining the flashlight on them, flick through until I see the one I’m looking for.

I double-check the label.

Yes. This is it.

“Libby and Oliver. Wedding footage (not in official video).”

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #53 – Preserved on tape

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #51-On a cliff edge

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode

STAY TUNED for Friday’s post — another Displaced Q from Tony James Slater.

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit