Chapters (14)
While he’s gone, I will work on a new poem that is threatening to become something of an epic—a long poem, structured in many stanzas, mainly free verse (though there is of course no such thing—I am with Mr T.S. Eliot on this). I have my desk set up, with a lamp on a coiled metal neck that I can adjust to suit, and a pile of books to refer to (Aurora Leigh on top). A desk with a nice polished surface, and several drawers for my pencils, and notebooks, and bits of paper, and pins, and photographs, and glasses. It is the nicest workspace I have ever had. And yet I have no inclination to sit down and work there. No inclination whatsoever. All I can think of is the car coming for Owen at noon. What sort of a mother? Though Owen annoys me, and tires me, and exasperates me to my core, he is my very own little love.
Jo says it is normal for a mother to think like this and it would be strange if I did not. However, he’s practical about the arrangement: it will mean, he says, that Owen will have all the things in life he did not. It will give me time to work. My parents live too far away have a proper relationship with Owen and so he has no grandparents to speak of. Yet I know there is another unspoken consideration at play. Jo is talking of leasing a small shopfront next to La Coccinella, and setting it up as a gallery … specialising in prints and works on paper, I believe. Mr Parish is to be his principal advisor and investor—he is pivotal to the whole scheme.
So, in other words, I am trapped.
You are right when you say that mothers get too caught up in their children. You are probably right too when you say that, when I have had more children, I will be less anxious. But I am not sure I will have more children. And Owen is so small. And what sort of a mother gives her child away to another woman? I feel sure that, were I to confide in anyone other than you—if I were to tell any woman of this arrangement—I would become a very suspect creature indeed.
And yet, there is another part of me that feels guiltily, horribly relieved. Because for two days I will be spared the grizzling, the whingeing, the feeding, the playing, the interruptions, the soiled clothes and the soiled floor and the soiled table, the crying—the endless endless crying—when I just want to slam the door on the room but must sit and rock and pat and soothe and meanwhile the clock ticking ticking ticking …
Must go. I think I hear the car. Wretched thing. I now consider it a kind of hearse.
Veda x
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