She knew Layla blamed her. It had hurt Layla terribly, being parted from Max, but Annie had got custody and so it was a done deal. And now there was this great yawning gulf between mother and daughter. Annie seemed incapable of reaching across it, to touch Layla as she wished she could, to see her daughter smile at her with unguarded love instead of sullen wariness, to be vulnerable and sweet as she had been when she was a little girl.
At the moment, Layla was in the adjoining room, asleep. Or so Annie had assumed. But maybe it was Layla who’d woken her up. Maybe she couldn’t sleep either. Annie felt a surge of maternal pride as she thought of how hard Layla worked, how conscientious she was. Who’d have thought a kid of hers would end up a trainee accountant? Wherever Layla had got that weird gift for figures, it certainly wasn’t from her.
From Max, must be, thought Annie.
Again she felt that stab of pain. No, she wasn’t going to think about him. She was over that. She had even dated other men since the divorce. Well, two. Just two. Disasters, both of them, and best forgotten. Her mind spun away from that and back to Layla. Her terribly strait-laced and difficult-to-know daughter, who poured all her energy into her job. Maybe Layla couldn’t sleep because something work-related was bothering her? Not that she would ever confide in her mother. Her father? Yes. Her mother, forget it.
Annie thumped the pillows and lay down. Her relationship with her own mother had been unhappy. Maybe there was a pattern there? Connie Bailey had been a single mum. Her husband had taken off for pastures new, leaving her with two young daughters – Annie and her older sister Ruthie – and bills to pay. And the drink.
Oh God yes, the drink.
People were always saying, The best years of your life, growing up, aren’t they? Happy childhood years.
Annie’s childhood had been far from happy. Her mother had detested her, preferring gentle, quiet, well-behaved Ruthie.
Maybe I reminded her of Dad, thought Annie.
It was too late to ask her mum about any of that. Mum was gone.
Her memories of her mother were not fond. They were of Connie lying on the sofa, drunk out of her skull, and the rent man or the milkman or the baker or some fucker banging on the front door demanding to be paid.
Her and Ruthie would be cowering behind the sofa pretending they were out. There was always fear, a constant endless nagging fear, that one day they would come home and Connie would finally have downed one drink too many and seen herself off to that great ever-open bar in the sky.