From Jester To King XXXVIII
By Simon Barget
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In days gone by when Linden Lea was still known as Lindawiddy, my parents came very close to divorcing. I took against my mother’s defiance even more than I did against my father’s weak will and sense of disenfranchisement. My mother was like a proud peacock. I remember how she made out like it was nothing that the house at the end of the cul de sac off Totteridge Lane was actually hers and not the Kennet’s as we’d all thought, and that she had in fact been living there with someone on and off for years. Again it was not so much the fact on its own but the manner of its deliverance, coupled with my father’s defeatism and weakness, I was just furious at the whole thing. And beyond all the anger there was this deep deep fear, this fear just lay in the background until the initial annoyance had passed and then it came out afterwards to haunt me. I’d really taken my mother to be a scrupulously honest person, I really thought that out of any of the children she’d at least let me in on her secrets, keep me as confidant, and that’s really what peeved me, not just the bombshell itself, but also the fact that I’d misjudged her and that I clearly occupied no special position vis a vis her confidences.
So from then on I saw her as different, even physically as different, instead of occupying a clean cut figure in my mind I saw her as raggedy and unkempt with lustreless hair such that a feminine or a lesbian might have had. She no longer held her benighted position. I remember standing in the garden of that weird new house with its weird old wagon propped up, surveying the scene, absorbing the news, wondering what it was going to be like to be with a mother who had lied and who would be spending time away from us going forward. What were we even doing in the garden conciliating as if my mother didn’t deserve to be ranted and raved at for now and forever? I remember how my father literally said nothing fading into the ether, and how it was as if my mother was telling him how it would be and that she knew very well that he was going to lie down and accept it and that there was no point in going through the motions and pretending she didn’t. I remember the thought of her being with someone else, as someone else’s object. I remember how icky and counter to all my urges it went, how it was so difficult to absorb it. And yet despite her lacklustre appearance this was her rebirth, it was as if she was a totally new woman, a different woman, one not to be subject to claims by anyone, not the new man, whoever he was, not my father, not any of the other children and not me, and there was certainly something in that. But as I said there was a sadness in it for me, this was a rent in our family, one that could never be remedied
But they never actually divorced. Our family stayed together, she lived in the house and I visited her whenever it suited. Then the man must have died because one day she came back, came back to us and my father, she was her old self again, and through the look in her face there might have been contrition, I can’t recall if I was even there to greet her, but the whole episode is hazy, not necessarily the bit where my mother came back, but the whole separation and fear thing, it was all so long ago and for the meantime, things have recovered their shape.
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