I came inside, and found the dust that lay under the mat, the stale hair in the brush, the soap’s awful underside like a sweating sore. I watched a shadow garden of pot-plants bloom on the wall, the bubbles that danced in the saucepan. I saw the pleated linings of mushrooms, tomatoes ruffled by stars, carrots hung with tassels. I forgot the mould that flecked the lemon, maggots in the bin, dead flowers that smelt of ponds.

I came closer to the three who were important: to the grandmother, and saw the hair in her nostril, the dirt between her toes, dye spots in her scalp; to the great-aunt, and her parting was thick with scurf, she had wax-buds in her ear, a sour handkerchief up her sleeve. And my mother tried not to cry: face all crumpled, eyes gone blurry, ugly mouth square. I watched unmoved.

My grandmother was rooted in her garden, with cheeks ripped by thorns, mud-bruised legs, skirts always caught on a brier. The great-aunt reigned in the house: she flapped her arms and bread-crumbs and the tablecloth cut the air; she hurled knives and the apostle spoons to a silver streak. The mother tended us all: with snail-curls and lavender setting-lotion, and a needle flying on over endless wefts and warps — on and on.

My mother was elusive. I did not possess her. The grandmother and great-aunt were always there, but when I awoke she was gone: came home with the street lights, and then I didn’t know her. I met a stranger at the tram stop, and I couldn’t kiss her cheek. She wasn’t the same. Not my mother: smiling through a veil of spots and smelling like violets, with hair made Hot Chestnut, and eyes gone little with black, and a coral smile. Her heels were high, her leather toes so pointed, and she pounced in a fox-trimmed coat. (I wanted her as the other, when I felt her up against me in the bed and saw her face all small without the make-up, and shiny from dry-skin cream. And I saw the dots she let me squeeze beside her mouth, and knew the mole was there upon her back, but hidden by the nightie. She almost had no breasts, they were so small, and she was ashamed, and when the other person went out they were stuffed with handkerchiefs — I watched her put them in. Her hair was so fine she put it up every night, and under the net were rows of bobby-pin curls. I could even see a bit of pale scalp, and that made it better — she was even more mine. She was gentle like a Chinese or a quiet mouse.) When she put on the Hot Chestnut and the waves and the tortoise-shell combs and the side-bow when it came in fashion, it was different. She was almost like a princess — someone else’s mother, and I did not know her then.

For reasons I could not comprehend the princess slept beside me in the brass bed and led me to the lavatory at night. She was my mother. I linked her with the Little Mermaid and the Snow Queen. Strange ladies in trams compared her to Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, or said the pair of us resembled the Duchess of Kent and dear little Princess Alex.