Goodness Read Free Page B

just the one orange-curtained window and a busy road behind to rattle it.
    ‘No need to do that,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’d have done that.’
    When he got closer to us you couldn’t not be aware he’d been drinking. He looked belligerent, ready to snap.
    ‘We clean the place every day,’ he insisted. His eyes were pink.
    Preparing to leave, Mother made a whole pantomine of signs with her eyes for him to come outside and have a word about Mavis. A rock would have understood, but Bob’s strained face merely filled with puzzlement. I was tugging at Mother’s coat cuff to be gone. Mavis was propped up in bed staring chinlessly. How old must she have been? Thirty-six? Thirty-eight? Mother made her signs again. Perhaps half understanding, Bob said: ‘We’re okay. We don’t need help from no one.’ He was tense.
    ‘Cheerie bye,’ Mother called past him to her sister. At the corner of the stairs we heard raised voices above us. Shouting. Mother hesitated one short second in mid step, then quickened her pace.
    With what relief I let myself out into the street and took a breath of fresh air! I had hurried on ahead. For life, as I have so often insisted to Shirley of late, should have a certain grace, shouldn’t it? A certain grace. Please. Otherwise I do believe one might as well be dead.

A Classic Case
    The first time I threw in my weight in an attempt to tip the scales toward sanity and common sense was on the occasion of Peggy’s first pregnancy. I would have been living in Leicester by then. Shirley and I had moved in together, having found ourselves quite a decent semi some miles from the university; it was pricey, but we shared with a couple of other students and Mr Harcourt, her father, unwittingly provided what I couldn’t always afford.
    It would be difficult to exaggerate what a release this change of scene was, how wonderful at last, at last, not to have to worry that Mother would find out what one was up to, not to have to face her silent and suffering reproach, her insistent, if never spoken, ‘Be thou me! Be thou me!’ I didn’t go back home from one end of term to the other and certainly not for such minor events as Grandfather’s prostectomy or Aunt Mavis’s suicide attempt. Mother wrote asking me to come and I wrote back asking what possible help could I be, and explaining that the important thing for me surely was to get the best degree possible and so escape the poverty trap that in the future world of high technology and high unemployment people from my sort of unskilled lower middle-class background were in every danger of falling into.
    Mother wrote to say she understood, though it would be nice if I could make it home just sometimes, and she kept me up to date on such events as the death of Peggy’s dog Jagger (fed chicken bones by Grandfather), the church meetings she spoke at, what she had cooked when so and so and so and so, who were missionaries in Borneo or clergymenfrom Nigeria, had come to lunch, her contacts with Peggy (scrubbing clean some slum my sister was squatting in, lending her ten pounds she would never see again), stories of a stray cat she had taken in, a tramp she had fed who had walked off with Grandfather’s favourite lighter, so and so who had been converted when so and so came to speak to the youth fellowship, conversations with the next door neighbours about the state of the sewage pipes under the garden, our sycamore that took light from their front room, the rotting fence they wanted to fix and Mother couldn’t afford to, etc. etc.
    I didn’t go home. I was happy as I had never been before: work, play, parties, independence, self-indulgence, Shirley. Until mid way through the third year Mother sent a telegram: ‘Peggy in family way, please please come.’
    It was a classic case of people not doing what was most sensible and convenient for everybody concerned, and thus a forerunner of events to come. Worth dwelling on. Mavis, I discovered on arrival home