existence of importance for Rosa than that of being her mother and her father’s wife. That had changed though when the hormones had come home to roost, and she had begun to resent the secrecy behind Rosa’s past. As a teenager, she’d desperately wanted to know her maternal history. She’d imagined the worst, no matter how many times her mother assured her there were no skeletons hidden away in her closet. Mean Nuns hadn’t reared her in a cold stone convent or anything like that; it was just a past that was not worth revisiting. This vague, hand sweeping reply had not satisfied Kitty in the slightest, but her mother would not be swayed to confide in her nor would her father whom she could normally twist around her little finger. Eventually, she ran out of steam and had to let it go, exhausted from her years of pent-up teenage frustration.
Now as a woman in her early thirties, Kitty’s romantic notions of where her mother had come from had faded to give way to thoughts that perhaps she had been abused as a child. For all Rosa’s vague hand sweeping and bravado when the topic of her childhood was raised, she couldn’t help but think perhaps she had been the daughter of a poor Magdalene girl. Despite what she said, maybe she’d spent her early years slaving in the laundry of an Irish convent. It had happened to others after all. Perhaps this was why she wouldn’t speak of her childhood. She simply did not know, and so she had come to nurture a quiet acceptance that her mother hadn’t just been her mother, she had been a person with a right to privacy. She couldn’t help but think, though, that with Rosa having passed away the rules must now have changed.
A conversation she’d held with Rosa as a child began to run through her head as though she had just pushed play on an old video recorder. The image of them both in the kitchen of Rose Cottage was vivid. She could see in her mind’s eye that the bay window, a focal point of the room, was fogged up with steam from the sink full of dishes before which her mother stood. It blocked her view out to their sprawling garden that as a child had seemed to go on forever. This illusion she knew was due to the low stone wall that encased the bottom of their garden. On the other side of the wall were fields that in summer glowed gold with rapeseed and in winter wore a snowy eiderdown. For the most part, their home with its front garden full of vibrant blooms in the summer and twiggy branches that would tap at the window in winter had been a happy one.
“Tracey at school said that her mum was an air hostess before she met Mr Hennessy. Her plane used to stop in places like Disneyland,” Kitty said this from where she was sitting up at the table; school bag abandoned at her feet while she waited for the toaster to pop. Her mother was dressed casually; her glasses pushed up on the top of her head which meant she had been studying, again. She was always doing some course; textbooks would be strewn across the kitchen table and swept away as Kitty flung the back door open home from school.
“It’s a gift to be able to learn, Kitty,” she’d say, stacking the thick tomes on the sideboard.
Kitty thought that was a dumb thing to say because the last thing she would do when she was finally old enough to leave school was more homework. And besides, her mum never actually did anything with all that stuff she was learning about.
“That’s nice for Mrs Hennessy I bet she enjoyed meeting Mickey and Minnie.” Rosa’s tongue in cheek reply came as she plunged her hands into the hot water and began to scrub at the dishes left over from breakfast and lunch. She had meant to tackle them well before Kitty got home. She’d gotten side-tracked again by picking up the book she was in the middle of and before she’d known it she’d heard the familiar sound of the front door banging shut. It announced her daughter’s arrival home for the day. Her answer sailed right over the top of nine-year-old Kitty’s head. She was intent on retrieving the freshly browned bread from the toaster and slathering it in butter. “You know madam if you ate properly at lunchtime you wouldn’t be so hungry when you get home. It’s no wonder you pick at your dinner when you’re stuffing yourself full of toast at this time of the day.”
“But I’m hungry after school not at school.” Kitty had replied perfectly logically in her opinion, her chest puffing up self-righteously as she added, “And Tracey doesn’t have to sit at the table until she’s cleaned her plate up. If she doesn’t like something, her mummy says she can give it to the dog. I’d rather play with my friends than eat a yucky old school dinner any day.” Her bottom lip jutted out; the conversation was not going the way she’d planned. She had thought that by telling her mother what Mrs Hennessy used to do her mum might have decided to tell her what it was she had done before she married her dad. She did not want to be reminded of the stinky stuff that had been plopped on her plate at lunch time. Or the unfair way in which she was never allowed to leave anything on her dinner plate, not even peas, and she hated peas, thank you very much.
Sitting there staring at her mother’s back as she bit into her toast, butter dribbling down her chin, her eyes widened as a thought popped into her head. Maybe she had been a princess once upon a time. She was pretty enough to have been one when she took her glasses off and brushed her hair properly.
Maybe, her evil stepmother the Queen had been mean to her, but then daddy had rescued her, and the stepmother had been so angry that she waved her wand and cast a spell. Just like in Sleeping Beauty, and if her mother ever spoke of having once been a princess she’d fall asleep for a hundred years! Her mother dried her hands and left the dishes to drain. She sat down at the table with the cup of tea she’d abandoned on hearing her daughter come in. Kitty wondered if it was normal behaviour for princesses to dunk biscuits in their tea.
“Your friends aren’t going anywhere Kitty, and you need to eat the meal provided at school if you’re to be able to pay attention in your afternoon lessons. Sure, how can you expect that poor brain of yours to concentrate on learning when it’s being distracted by your rumbling tummy? As the old cock crows, the young cock learns.”
Kitty frowned; she hated it when her mum spoke in riddles. She looked at the soggy biscuit she was about to pop in her mouth, it was only a plain old digestive, not the chocolate ones she liked. Still, she wondered what her chances of both toast and a biscuit before dinner were. “It was only boring old maths this afternoon,” she answered, deciding the odds probably weren’t very good. She wished, as she finished her toast, that next time her mother did the shopping she would buy some of that yummy chocolate spread stuff. Tracey said she got to have that on her toast every single morning. As she chewed, she began to ponder how she could swing the conversation back round to where she wanted it to be when her mother interrupted her plotting.
“It’s not boring old maths and boring is a word that only boring people use. Maths is very interesting when you pay attention because we use it for all sorts of everyday reasons.”
Kitty had raised a sceptical eyebrow at her the way she had seen Tracey do to Mrs Chalmers this morning when the teacher had informed her class that dolphins sleep with one eye open. It had been such a cool thing to do but then that was because Tracey was so cool. She paused in her chewing to send up a silent prayer that she would be invited to the social event of the school year, Tracey’s tenth birthday. She’d given Tracey her best Strawberry Shortcake Rubber, so she was confident that guaranteed her an invite.
“Don’t give me that look, young lady, you’re not a teenager yet, and it’s true you know, you need maths for all sorts of things like telling the time and handling money. A penny gets another penny. Sure, when you work out how much of your pocket money you are going to save and how much you are going to put aside for sweets you’re doing maths.”
Kitty scowled. “I knew you would mention saving.” Her mother was big on drumming the importance of saving into her. It was right up there with the importance of paying attention in class because both, she told her daughter regularly, would allow her to be independent when she was older.
“Alright then here’s another example, you need maths to be able to bake.”
“No you don’t, you just
