Notwithstanding Read Free Page B

is, but smells more sweetly.
    ‘Well, open it,’ she says.
    Jack prises off the lid with his thick yellow nails, and inside he finds six mince pies, and an envelope. Jack almost never gets Christmas cards. He feels a leap of excitement and pleasure in his belly, and hands the card to his daughter to read. It says: ‘
To dear Mr Obadiah Oak and daughter, a very Happy Christmas and New Year, from Marjorie Griffiths
.’
    ‘Well, bugger me,’ says Jack, and his daughter says, ‘Now there’s a turn-up for the books.’ Jack puts the card on the mantelpiece, crams a whole mince pie into his mouth, and delves among the clutter for a pencil and the box of yellowing cards that he bought from the village shop fifteen years ago.

ARCHIE AND THE WOMAN
    ‘ MOTHER TO ARCHIE-MASTER , come in please. Over.’
    ‘I’m digging potatoes,’ I said to my mother, sighing as I held the walkie-talkie to my ear with my right hand, and gave up turning the heavy ochre clay. I thrust the spade into the ground. ‘What do you want now? Can’t it wait ’til lunchtime? Over.’
    ‘I wanted to talk to you urgently,’ she replied, ‘while I remembered. Over.’
    ‘Well, what is it? Over.’
    There was a long pause, and then she said, ‘Bless me, I’ve forgotten what it was. Over.’
    ‘Tell me at lunchtime then, when you’ve remembered. What’s for lunch? Over.’
    ‘Steak and kidney pie with mashed neeps with a fried egg on top. It’ll be half an hour. I’ll be ringing you when it’s ready. Over and out.’
    I looked at the walkie-talkie. ‘Bloody thing,’ I said to myself, and hooked it on to the trellis. It had been a curse ever since my mother gave it to me for Christmas, because it meant that she could get hold of me wherever I was. Nowadays she did not even see fit to come the fifty yards to the vegetable patch, and I could clearly see her through the kitchen window, putting the walkie-talkie down and wiping the steam from her spectacles. If I left the gadget in the house, then she would roundly accuse me of ingratitude, and of a lack of respect for her poor old legs. Sometimes I just switched it off, and pretended that the batteries had run out.
    ‘What was it then?’ I asked her, as I pierced the yolk of my egg and watched the thick yellow goo trickle down the sides of a pyramid of mashed turnip.
    She put down her knife and fork, and looked into her notebook, a small black one, with ruled lines and a red spine. In it she kept remarks and reminders that were to be addressed specifically to me. I used to call it ‘Mother’s Book of Complaints’.
    ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve decided that it’s about time you got married.’
    I was aghast. I was so stricken by aghastness, or aghastitude, that my mind went quite blank, like a balloon that had suddenly popped on a briar. I paused with a forkful of mash in mid-delivery, and my mouth agape . ‘What on earth for?’ I demanded eventually. ‘I’m only forty-two.’
    ‘Even so,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, come off it. What would I want with being married?’
    ‘It’s not you I’m thinking of,’ she replied, ‘it’s me. I need some company about the place. You’re always out and about. When you’re not painting and decorating or gardening, you’re out playing golf. And I can’t imagine you looking after me in my old age, so you’ll have to get a wife.’
    ‘You’re only seventy-five,’ I said, ‘it’ll be donkey’s years before you’ll be going gaga.’
    Naturally I didn’t take my mother seriously. When my dear father was dying in his bed, he had called me in to give me his final blessing, and, as I knelt beside him with the palm of his hand on the crown of my head, he had said, ‘Now, son, you’ve got to promise me something.’
    ‘Father, of course I will,’ I had said. He closed his eyes, as if to marshal his final strength, and he said, ‘Son, promise me faithfully that you’ll never take your mother seriously. I never have. And try not to get