All My Mothers Read online

  ALL MY MOTHERS

  Joanna Glen

  Copyright

  The Borough Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

  Copyright © Joanna Glen 2021

  Jacket design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Jacket images: Shutterstock.com

  Author photograph © Eva Tarnok

  Joanna Glen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008410582

  Ebook Edition © August 2021 ISBN: 9780008410605

  Version: 2021-06-09

  Praise for The Other Half of Augusta Hope:

  ‘A therapeutic dose of high-strength emotion’

  Guardian

  ‘This gem of a novel entertains and moves in equal measure’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Keep the tissues close’

  Good Housekeeping

  ‘An irresistible message of redemption and belonging’

  Red magazine

  ‘Full of the reality of hope and despair in everyone’s lives’

  Miranda Hart

  ‘Heartening and hopeful’

  Jess Kidd, author of Things in Jars

  ‘It’s going to be all over every book club in Britain before you can say Burundi’

  The Times

  ‘Mesmerizingly beautiful’

  Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus

  ‘An extraordinary masterpiece’

  Anstey Harris, author of Where We Belong

  Dedication

  In memory of my beloved mother,

  Jennifer Simmonds.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for The Other Half of Augusta Hope

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Part 2

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Part 3

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Acknowledgements

  Postscript

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Glen

  About the Publisher

  To Beth from Eva – March 2008

  From the beginning, there were bumps under the rug where things had been swept, which meant I couldn’t walk the way other people did.

  Free and easy.

  With a bounce in my step and my head held high.

  That’s the way I want you to walk, Beth.

  I’ve swept nothing under the rug in this story.

  Our story.

  The story of you and me and your mother.

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  We’re supposed to begin as the apple of our mother’s eye.

  But I was more the maggot in the apple.

  Speaking of my mother’s eyes, they were always darting about, as if she was following a fly, and not seeing me properly.

  My father (who veered between London and his family’s estate in Jerez de la Frontera) seemed to see me better. We liked to talk, he and I, and I often had the feeling that he was on the cusp of telling me something important and deciding against it.

  Perhaps you’d like to hear about the little girl I was.

  I was full of the most unbearable longing.

  The Portuguese have a word for it: saudade – a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never existed. My saudade was like travelling in
a car on a dark road and seeing, for a second, a lit window, and then, very quickly, not seeing it.

  I grew up in a smart part of London called Chelsea, like the football team, although I can’t imagine that any of our neighbours were interested in football. They were interested in expensive cars and chauffeurs and the shape of their bay trees, which sat on highly polished steps around our private lawned square, in which there was a golden-rain tree, a row of cherry blossoms and beds of tall tulips in spring.

  Our big posh house, at the corner of the square, was four storeys high, with a shiny black front door. My father’s domain within the house was painted white with splashes of multicolour made by his modern Spanish paintings. It included the tiled hall, his study, packed with books from floor to ceiling, and the garden room, which led onto a courtyard.

  When we first arrived in Chelsea from Spain, my father asked Rory the gardener to turn our courtyard into an Andalusian patio, sending him off on an aeroplane to Córdoba because the patio-gardeners of Córdoba are the best of anywhere in the world. (And, although he was wrong about most things, my father was right about this.)

  On the ground floor there was a large kitchen, for which my father had bought black chairs with chrome-tubed legs that didn’t meet my mother’s approval. Next to the kitchen, there was a small apartment I never visited, where Mean Mary, our housekeeper-nanny, lived.

  The rest of the house (except the roof terrace) was my mother’s domain, and from the first floor to the fourth, it was rouge-pink, with ruched rose curtains and pink velvet sofas, my mother having rejected the teak and oatmeal fashionable in London circles at the time. There were thick carpets and fat cushions and triple-lined curtains, too heavy for my small hands to draw.

  The school I went to was St Hilda’s – a smart little private school, where smart little girls wore olive-green and grey uniforms.

  I started there on 5 September 1979, the same day as Lord Mountbatten’s funeral, which was taking place down the road at Westminster Abbey.

  ‘The queen is extremely upset,’ said my mother.

  ‘Did she phone you?’ said my father, not looking up from his enormous newspaper, which he held in his outstretched arms. The backs of his hands were covered in black hair. In fact, all of my father was covered in black hair. It burst out of his shirt collar and the tops of his socks, like those chimpanzees they used to dress up for tea adverts.

  My mother stepped past him.

  Her blond bob shimmered with Elnett hairspray.

  She looked like my Barbie doll, which I never played with.

  She took my hand, and I could feel her brittle fingernails against my skin.

  In my palm, I felt the imprint of some softer hand.

  A long time ago.

  In some other place.

  With some other feeling.

  And here came the saudade longing, strong enough to break me in two.

  Our hands fell apart as we walked, like they always did.

  In the playground, you couldn’t move for mothers’ legs: tan-stockinged; bare and stubbly; fat as hams; or covered by enormous bell-bottom jeans.

  Above me, the mothers gesticulated and shrieked.

  One tiny girl was completely enveloped in her mother’s lion-mane of hair, sobbing. Her mother was saying, ‘I love you, darling,’ over and over again, as if one of them was about to be taken off to be shot.

  The girl’s grey socks and polished brown shoes were spattered by tears.

  One girl was making her baby sisters laugh by pulling funny faces and crossing her eyes. She was laughing her head off. So was her mother.

  I loved this girl immediately.

  I felt a kind of fizzing sparking feeling inside me right there in the playground as I wondered what it would be like to be her.

  To be happy.

  I moved a little closer to her.

  I wondered what it would be like to laugh and laugh and laugh.

  I loved her dark curly hair.

  I loved the way one of her socks had fallen down to her ankle.

  The girl stopped making funny faces and turned around.

  ‘I’m called Bridget Blume,’ she said. ‘Shall we go in together?’

  Chapter 2

  I followed Bridget into the classroom, anxiously.

  There was a balloon for each of us, cut out of coloured card, blu-tacked to the wall, high up, underneath the Victorian cornicing.

  Eva Martínez-Green, it said on my lime-green balloon.

  31 January 1975, written underneath my name.

  My birthday.

  Always a strange nervy day, my mother’s eyes darting about worse than ever, my father over-cheerful and all of us nauseous with sugar-icing.

  I could read by the time I arrived at St Hilda’s, Spanish and English: my father had started me off, and I’d kept going – there was nothing else to do. I had no brothers or sisters in my house to distract me. I asked my mother and father daily for a kitten. And daily they said no.

  I was a bit disappointed that our teacher, Miss Feast, had chosen lime-green for my cardboard birthday balloon. I don’t think lime-green is anyone’s favourite colour, and it felt like a slight against me.

  Miss Feast paused, opened a thin black hardback book and broke the silence with unfamiliar names, which would turn into girls, girls we would love and hate for seven years, who would run like ghosts through our memories.

  ‘Lily Betts?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Feast.’

  With a little sob – she was still convulsing from the separation from her mother – like a newly dead fish.

  ‘Bridget Blume?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Feast.’

  The happy girl from the playground, gorgeous as anything, all blue eyes, smiles and hope.

  I smiled at her.

  She smiled back.

  Bridget Blume liked me.

  My mother didn’t exactly seem to dislike me, but she skirted around me as one might an unpredictable horse. My father quite liked me and, when he was home, he hung me upside down from my ankles (as some men do) or else he read me storybooks, which I preferred.

  Onwards we went through the alphabet.

  ‘Eva Martínez-Green?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Feast. And also,’ I started, in a very quiet voice, because there were eyes everywhere looking at me.

  Miss Feast raised a dark eyebrow.

  I stammered: ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, Miss Feast. But it’s Eva as in ever. Not Eva as in evil.’

  Miss Feast smiled at me, and the mole above her lip quivered.

  ‘I will remember that,’ she said. ‘Forever Eva.’

  Forever Eva – a name made especially for me, by Miss Feast, the actual teacher!

  The syllables seeped through my skin and circulated in my bloodstream, making me warm inside. Nobody else – at all at all at all – had been given a special name in the course of our first registration!

  Oh, the untold joy!

  Chapter 3

  ‘Are we ready to read?’ sang Miss Feast.

  ‘Yes we certainly are!’ we sang back, as we’d been taught, as Miss Feast didn’t like untidy words flying about on the classroom air.

  She gathered us around her like a clutch of green chicks, and Bridget Blume wriggled over to me on her bottom and took my hand. My heart started racing. I looked down at our hands wrapped up in each other – my brown fingers and her white fingers. It was the nicest thing I’d ever seen, and the nicest feeling I’d ever had.

  ‘The Rainbow Rained Us!’ said Miss Feast.

  We all listened, spellbound, as a small rabbit threw a stone at the rainbow from Noah’s ark (Miss Feast turned the page) and the rainbow broke apart into hundreds of multicolour mothers who repopulated the earth with their children (Miss Feast turned the page) because the original families – along with every living thing except the ones on the ark – had all drowned in the flood, though this unfortunate fact wasn’t mentioned.

  Miss Feast let us pass the book around, an
d Bridget and I had to undo our hands. I remember running my finger, mesmerised, over the slightly textured splashes of gorgeous reds and blues and golds and greens, which were forming into mother-shapes, and I was shivering all over, and the saudade longing was making griping pains in my belly.

  ‘Please pass the book on, Eva,’ said Miss Feast.

  The sound of my name made me blush.

  ‘Aren’t mothers wonderful?’ said Miss Feast.

  The other girls all nodded – all nodded.

  The wonderfulness of mothers was not a subject for debate in our classroom, and this was a terrible moment because I knew for certain that my mother wasn’t wonderful, and she was supposed to be.

  (My poor mother, you’re probably thinking, and that’s right, but she’d made her bed – and now she had to lie in it. And she did love lying in bed.)

  ‘Turn to the person next to you!’ said Miss Feast in her sing-song voice. ‘And tell her about your mummy! Anything you like!’

  My heart was trying to leap out of my chest because I couldn’t think of one thing to say. It was as if I didn’t know my mother, as if I’d never got beyond the surface of her. My panic rose as things came pouring out of Bridget’s mouth: her mother was an artist; she loved patchwork; and pinafores; and clompy boots; and telling the truth; and the sea; and making birds out of feathers; and cakes with butter icing; and on she went, smiling and sparkling, until Miss Feast blew her whistle and reopened the book. She held it outwards, so that we could see each different-coloured mother as she appeared on her own lusciously illustrated double page, with her happy, matching family.

  There Blue Mother stood in a mesmerising cornucopia of blues, at the edge of the turquoise sea, laughing, the wind in her hair, surrounded by her blue family.

  ‘Blue Mother is free and open and speaks from her heart.’

  She sounded exactly like Bridget’s mother – utterly perfect.

  Miss Feast turned the page: Green Mother was serene and beautiful, barefoot in a glimmering field beside a mossy waterfall, her green daughters aloft in the grass.

  ‘Green Mother is full of hope and healing.’

  Miss Feast turned the page: Gold Mother, standing by her gate, a little sinister, seemed to be welcoming children into her perfect golden garden for a treasure hunt with prizes.

  I didn’t like her at all.

  Grey Mother was soft-faced, wearing pince-nez glasses in a room full of rickety bookshelves, with a globe and an atlas.