Into Suez Read Free

Archie, a Quaker, had been a conscientious objector in the war. Heworshipped the ground Ailsa walked on; in his eyes she could do no wrong. He had loved Nia as his own, taking her part even against the two boys born to Ailsa and himself. When Nia was bolshy and impossible, Archie had been a presence whose wry quietness had drawn the sting from countless quarrels and made the earth firm under her feet. She hardly remembered her own father, who was never talked of. No picture of Joe Roberts stood above the hearth or anywhere else in the house.
    Irene on the other hand prattled interminably about her husband. Roy had been a saint. If only Topher could have taken after him even a little bit. She’d spoilt the younger brother, Tim, very much at Topher’s expense: Oh, darling, you’re so like him . But Tim had grown up a bit of a creep, not above stealing from his mother’s handbag. He was all right these days, as far as she knew.
    Now Roy White counted as a fallen warrior. Nia saw that his homely face had been turned to the wall among a stack of pictures the brothers had stripped from Irene’s world.
    ‘How are you doing, Topher?’
    ‘Oh – you know. Hits you a bit, doesn’t it? There was stuff I wanted to say to Ma and ask her – it was so sudden.’
    When the blow came that took a life, it changed all the lights and shades, as Nia knew too well. Topher could have said those crucial things to Irene any day for the past four decades. But he hadn’t. He’d begrudged the words that might have touched his mother’s speechless heart. Topher had nourished a rankling grudge that had knitted itself into his very flesh and become part of him. Ignorant of where it came from.
    ‘Better for her that way,’ Nia said. ‘Going in her sleep. A heart attack can be quite a merciful thing.’
    ‘For her , maybe.’ Tears seeped from his eyes. She saw again the boy in the man. A pale-haired child crouched with bucket and spade in the sand, his bare shoulders covered in calamine lotion, crying because – and surely she had made this up – enormous hail stones were being shot at them from the sapphire blue sky. But I was never a cry-baby, Nia thought: I picked one up, big as a ping pong ball, and sucked it. She saw all this in a flash, even as she said, ‘Yes, it’s a mercy for Irene. You will feel that later, Toph, when you’re less raw. You really will.’
    Tim stood in the doorway, carrying black bin bags. ‘Hi, Nia darling, good to see you. You’ve not changed one bit,’ he said insincerely. It seemed to be the only way he could speak. Yet she had a sense that sincerity was there under the surface, repressed. He was still, in middle age, a handsome-looking man, with his mother’s delicate features. He’d done a bit of acting in his time which had delighted Irene. Nia remembered being carted along by Ailsa and Irene to an open-air production of Hamlet in the grounds of Ludlow Castle. It had rained. She could see Irene, sitting forward in her seat under the umbrella, cowled in her gabardine, ecstatic. She’d mouthed every word of Tim’s hammed-up Guildenstern. He still trod the boards as an amateur.
    Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended rang through her mind. They were three over-age Hamlets picking over the funeral baked meats.
    ‘I’m really sorry for your loss, Tim.’
    ‘Thanks, Nia love. We’re devastated. What are you doing with yourself these days?’
    ‘Still teaching – and some advisory stuff.’
    ‘You were in the news – last year, was it? Quite a celebrity. Didn’t you help change the law on something or other?’
    ‘Young offenders. Only through a committee report.’
    ‘You were always the intellectual. Your mother was so proud of you.’
    ‘You think so?’ It was the kind of thing people said. Especially when it wasn’t true. But she half-recognised the implicit truth of it. Ailsa had been proud of Nia behind her back. Behind her own back. Nia’s heart gave a huge throb and then