He Wants Read Free Page A

no sounds from inside the house. He steps into the hallway, making his way past the closed dining room door and down to the far end where he quietly opens the front door. The dog looks up, wags her tail and gets to her feet. Sydney brings her into the house and closes the door again, but the closing is louder than the opening. He can hear the man moving around upstairs now, in the front bedroom. He hears the man call out, ‘Hello?’ and after a pause, ‘Martin, is that you?’
    Sydney leads his dog back down the hallway, through the kitchen and out of the back door, which he closes behind him, leaving a trail of mud from his boots all along the hallway carpet for the man to find and puzzle over.

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    He does not want soup
    â€˜ Y OU DON’T WANT anything, do you, Dad?’ says Ruth, on her way out of the living room. Lewis opens his mouth to reply, but he can’t decide whether he does or not, he can’t say what he might want, so he doesn’t say anything.
    Ruth takes their teacups through to the kitchen, puts them heavily into the sink and turns on the tap.
    It is still close enough to winter to be dark outside at getting-up time. Ruth complains about having to drag herself out of her warm bed at what feels like four o’clock in the morning, but Lewis rather likes how it feels to wash his face in the bathroom sink before it is light. It makes him feel like a man with a job to do, like a farmer rising before dawn, like a jet-setter with an early flight to catch.
    It is dark, still, when Ruth drops her boy off at his new nursery. She has said to Lewis that it must seem to the boy as if she is leaving him with strangers in the middle of the night. ‘Yes,’ said Lewis, ‘it probably does.’
    By the time she gets to Lewis’s house, though, it is almost light.
    Sitting in his armchair in front of the television, Lewis can see her standing looking out of the kitchen window while she waits for the water to run warm, her fingertips in the cold drizzle. The snowdrops are still out and the daffodils should soon be through. She raises her voice to say to him, ‘Your lawn’s looking a bit dead.’ He once pointed out an azalea that had turned bright red – not just its flowers but its leaves as well were all scarlet, glorious, and Ruth told him it was dying. You got a final show, she said, this burst of beauty before it expired. He’d had an oleander, too, of which he was rather fond, but she took one look and said it was poisonous and that it had to go. She would not let the boy play in Lewis’s garden until the plant had gone, and even now she will not let the boy go in there, because if some toxic part of it is still lying around he will put it in his mouth.
    Whenever Ruth glances at Lewis’s garden, he holds his breath, wondering what’s coming, what will have to go.
    She washes out the cups and then stands in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a tea towel while she tells him about the course she is thinking of taking. ‘I am going to do one this year,’ she says. For years, she has been planning on doing a degree, trying to decide on one: French, with German or Italian or Spanish, with a year abroad, perhaps in Paris; or French with Chinese, a year in China; or French with European Studies or Global Studies or Philosophy, or Modern Languages with History of Art. Now that she has the boy she has been looking into evening classes instead, languages without the year abroad. She goes back into the kitchen to hang the damp tea towel over the cold radiator.
    â€˜What about the boy?’ calls Lewis. ‘I can look after him.’
    â€˜John will look after him,’ she says.
    Yes, thinks Lewis, John will look after him. John is a good man, a good father, and hospitable to Lewis, even though Lewis cannot bear, now, to be in a room with him.
    Lewis has sometimes thought about retaking his maths A level, in which he had got such a