Night Read Free Page A

linoleums, the madeira cakes, the wallpapers, the borderings and the wool rugs that she fashioned through the long nights. I seem to remember streaks of colour, zebras, sometimes pink, sometimes green, sometimes too green, likewise too pink. I reamed off a list, became prodigal, even resorted to shadings. I filched my ideas from nature, various spools of thread, a paint card, seed catalogues, and a luxurious vanitary shop where I sometimes go and pretend that I am contemplating buying a topaz bath. I love going there. I dress up in borrowed plumes, look like a toff. I said she might like to be extravagant, she might like to sally into inventiveness, give vent to herself, lie if needs be. No sooner had I posted the letter than I realised what a débâcleI had made. My mother is dead. To make matters worse, my mother is only fairly recently dead and I realised that the postman, who is a dunce and a dunderhead, and bunioned from his peregrinations, would deliver it out of habit. I knew that his feet would conduct him there and some other part of his palsied anatomy would haul the epistle out of his big grey canvas bag, and that he would say, as he so faithfully says, at the sight of any foreign postmark, in sentimental tones, “Hands across the water.” I realised that Boss would be aghast by the untowardness, by the brazenness, by the cruelty of such an action. Pleasant to know that he could not take action, that he would not be able to throw sticks and stones as they did to Dick Studdard. Water divides us, and more than the nine Dedannan waves at that. Hurray for all waters, spa waters, bog waters, lone wells, tobhairs, lakes, rivers, streams, Baptism fonts and of course the oyster-breeding seas.
    *

Her funeral was a comic event…
    Her funeral was a comic event, despite the keenings and the ululations. A sizeable crowd, all in sable, the mourners. Grievously stung they were by nettles that grew in abundance. We took a short cut in order not to have to walk over the bordered paths. It was as if we couldn’t get her in quick enough, into the bowels of the earth, where the moles and the sprites are reputed to be, have their intricate routes and conduits. On the way, a bicycle was espied, propped up against a yew tree, a man’s bicycle, an upstairs model, flung. Some of21 the men, the more loquacious ones, interpolated on whose it could be, suggested various names, Christian names and surnames and nicknames, but having reached no conclusion then started to wonder aloud why the owner had left it thus, what importunity had overtaken him, and they agreed that he had either gone because he got taken short, or to have a fit, or to find a well of water, or to pray to God, or to lie down for bucolic reasons with a woman or a travelling woman, or a married woman, or a beast, or no other agent at all. Then came the suggestion that the rider of the bicycle might have been a she who had gone to do any one of the aforementioned things or to deliver herself of a bastard child. Not the most reverential thought. The clay got richer, redder, the deeper they dug. They were quick with the spade, made darty incisions; and of course there were fine manifestations of sorrow – dribbles, sniffles, tears, gulps all stifled by handkerchief or make-do handkerchief. A stripling went by, a fellow with unmatching eyes, looking for sheep of his that had strayed. Five or six. God dammit, a matchless eyed man of miserable means ought to know whether he had lost five sheep or six. Seeing the coffin and the mourners, he realised what he had blundered into and squatting to denote his sympathy, he removed his cap and asked whose funeral it was. At the crucial moment I made an ape of myself, behaved in the following manner. I jumped in, prostrated myself, bawled, and woe betide, a second, a more ludicrous disaster, I sprained my ankle. I need hardly tell you of the furore that ensued. Excitement craned its head. Maybe that is22 why I