A Spot of Bother Read Free Page A

these were.
    “Well.”
    “Well.”
    Ray crossed his arms. “So, how’s the studio going?”
    “Hasn’t fallen down yet.” George crossed his arms, realized that he was copying Ray and uncrossed them. “Not that there’s enough of it to fall down.”
    They were silent for a very long time indeed. Ray rearranged three small pebbles on the flagstones with the toe of his right shoe. George’s stomach made an audible noise.
    Ray said, “I know what you’re thinking.”
    For a short, horrified moment George thought Ray might be telling the truth.
    “My being divorced and everything.” He pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “I’m a lucky guy, George. I know that. I’ll look after your daughter. You don’t need to worry on that score.”
    “Good,” said George.
    “We’d like to foot the bill,” said Ray, “unless you have any objections. I mean, you’ve already had to do it once.”
    “No. You shouldn’t have to pay,” said George, glad to be able to pull rank a little. “Katie’s our daughter. We should make sure she’s sent off in style.”
Sent off?
It made Katie sound like a ship.
    “Fair play to you,” said Ray.
    It wasn’t simply that Ray was working class, or that he spoke with a rather strong northern accent. George was not a snob, and whatever his background, Ray had certainly made good, judging by the size of his car and Katie’s descriptions of their house.
    The main problem, George felt, was Ray’s size. He looked like an ordinary person who had been magnified. He moved more slowly than other people, the way the larger animals in zoos did. Giraffes. Buffalo. He lowered his head to go through doorways and had what Jamie unkindly but accurately described as “strangler’s hands.”
    During thirty-five years on the fringes of the manufacturing industry George had worked with manly men of all stripes. Big men, men who could open beer bottles with their teeth, men who had killed people during active military service, men who, in Ted Monk’s charming phrase, would shag anything that stood still for long enough. And though he had never felt entirely at home in their company, he had rarely felt cowed. But when Ray visited, he was reminded of being with his older brother’s friends when he was fourteen, the suspicion that there was a secret code of manhood to which he was not privy.
    “Honeymoon?” asked George.
    “Barcelona,” said Ray.
    “Nice,” said George, who was briefly unable to remember which country Barcelona was in. “Very nice.”
    “Hope so,” said Ray. “Should be a bit cooler that time of year.”
    George asked how Ray’s work was going and Ray said they’d taken over a firm in Cardiff which made horizontal machining centers.
    And it was all right. George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the Nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified or stop him wanting to run home to a book about fossils.
    “They’ve got big clients in Germany. The company were trying to get me to shuttle back and forth to Munich. Knocked that one on the head. For obvious reasons.”
    The first time Katie had brought him home, Ray had run his finger along the rack of CDs above the television and said, “So you’re a jazz fan, Mr. Hall,” and George had felt as if Ray had unearthed a stack of pornographic magazines.
    Jean appeared at the door. “Are you going to get cleaned and changed before lunch?”
    George turned to Ray. “I’ll catch you later.” And he was away, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the tiled quiet of the lockable bathroom.

5
    They hated the idea. As predicted. Katie could tell.
    Well, they could live with it. Time was she’d have gone off the deep end. In fact, there was a part of her which missed being the person who went off the deep end. Like her standards were slipping. But you reached a stage where you realized it was a waste of energy trying to change your