Stewart

My mother phoned me. She almost never phoned and there was no coherence coming from her. I got frustrated.
'Who fucking died?'
Her pause told me that I had hit the nail on the head and someone had, indeed, died.
'Stewart'
This time, the pause was mine while I worked out who the hell 'Stewart' was. She never called him 'Stewart' to me, it was always 'Your Dad', as if that was my fault, and also as if it was true, a fact.
'That was one of Your Dad's tricks' she would say about some way someone had treated someone, some small manipulative device, long long after either of us had spoken to him or seen him.
'Do you know, that man never said one bad word about you?' I eventually pointed out.
This was true. In fact, he never said anything at all about her to me. When I was still in Primary School he gave me a lift every day. This considerable inconvenience to him was my mother's doing, guilting him into it when they hadn't got back together as promised, and I had desperately wanted to return to my old school. What should have happened is that I should have been sent to the local school where I might have had a chance at making friends, but instead he picked me up and drove me the twenty odd miles each morning. Each evening my mother picked me up from the childminder, and, as soon as I got in the car, would ask
'What did you and Your Dad talk about this morning?'
It seemed impossible to understand that we did not talk, at all. We said 'hello' at one end, and 'bye' at the other, and that was it. Every day I gave her the same answer.
'Nothing'
Eventually, after many months of the asking, I had had enough.
'Look, I don't mean that we talk but not about much, I mean that we say nothing to each other. I say nothing, he says nothing, we sit in silence for the whole journey. Ok?'
I don't remember her asking after that. I do remember her looking at me with the face and demeanour of a small child getting a telling off. At the time, I didn't really understand why she was asking, that she was fishing for information about his life. At the time, I was only beginning to work out what sort of cunt my mother actually was. My dad's (he was my dad then, still, just) lack of communication, apparent lack of interest in me, I interpreted it as disinterest, and maybe it was, but that wasn't the whole story. Really, he had my mother worked out long before I did.

I still do not understand the mechanics of how the news of his demise got to my mother. She'd had enough of the pauses and started garbling instead.
'... got hold of Russell to get hold of me to tell you...' is what I remember her saying, but there is so much that doesn't track about that sentence. Why would anyone from Drumalven have Russell (my uncle, my mother's brother's) phone number? And how the hell would they get hold of it if they did not? And why would Russell have my mother's phone number when they hadn't spoken in twenty years and her phone number was only a few years old. I still don't know how it all unfolded, but what I understood from all the garbling was that someone had gone to considerable effort to let me know.
Stewart was in his eighties by the time he died, and I had wondered from time to time if he was still alive, if I would bother to find out one day when he died. What I did not expect was that someone would go to the trouble of finding me to tell me.
'Did you get their number?'
Because surely it would be right and proper to tell the person who had gone to this trouble that the news had reached me, and to thank them. Obviously, this never crossed my mother's mind, because she had not bothered to get the number.
'Well phone Russell back and get it, fuck.'

When she phoned back ten minutes later normal service had been resumed and she was perfectly businesslike, reading out the landline number as I wrote it down.
'Who was it that phoned?'
'His wife'
'He had a wife?'
My mother protested that of course I knew this, she was sure she told me etc. She had not told me, and there was no way that not telling had been anything other than intentional.
'It was that woman he was with, Anne'
I remembered her, they had got together not long after my parents split up, when I still got a lift to school, when he and I still had to spend every second Saturday together. I saw her once when she was getting out of my dad's car as I was getting in. She smiled at me and I didn't smile back because I wasn't supposed to, and my mother was somewhere in the vicinity. Most of what I knew of her came from my mother, who was predictably vile about this woman who I don't think she ever met. She didn't have much to go on, and the fact that Anne only seemed to own one coat, which was a very pedestrian brown colour, but seemed to have multiple umbrellas in different colours, made her worthy of derision and ridicule in my mother's eyes. I don't even think she had that many umbrellas, I just think that she left one in my dad's car a couple of times. My mother wanted us to laugh together about her, but really, there wasn't much to go on and I failed to get invested in the game.

I felt bad that this woman who had just lost her husband had to go to such lengths to get hold of me. Really, it should have either been much easier than that, or not done at all. I phoned her back.
'I wanted to do the right thing' she told me.
The implication was that the right thing had not been done by me thus far, and I got the sense that she had been in my corner in some small way. I asked her if she had kids. One daughter, about the same age as me, who had a son. I wonder about them, this little family, not so much in that moment, but from time to time over the years that came after this phone call.

My mother must have been watching the local papers like a hawk because at some point a few days later she sent me a screenshot of the funeral notice, asking
'Should we go?'
That 'we' was problematic. I hadn't decided whether I would go or not, but it had not occurred to me that my mother would think she should attend. Really, I should have known her better. I should have caught up with Stewart by then, when it came to Dealing With My Mother.
'What?' Best to keep it simple, though.
'The notice says that all friends and family are welcome, so the ball is in our court'
Her language wanted to make us a team, and I could almost see the fantasy playing out in her mind. Estranged first wife and daughter make an appearance at the funeral, making everyone else uncomfortable. No chance, hen. Absolutely not on my watch.
'And which are you?' I asked, 'Friend or family? Because I don't feel like either.'
'Neither do I'
'Well, then.'
She didn't mention it again. I had scored a neat win.
Right up until the morning of the funeral I was undecided, but when I woke up, I realised that I didn't belong there, that it was a place for his family. It would have been rude of me, the 'real' daughter, to show up around these people who were his family a lot longer, and hopefully more closely, than I was. I've seen enough of families I was excluded from to last me a lifetime. Some things are better left alone.

Before I got off the phone with his wife, before the window closed on the only conversation I would ever have with my stepmother, I felt compelled to ask
'Was he happy?'
She paused, and her response was carefully considered.
'I think so'
From that answer, it was clear she knew him as well as he could be known, and understood him in a way my mother never did.