Patrick Parker's Progress Read Free Page A

she would leave well alone. The godfathers were distant relatives - one no more than a lad himself, the least godly and not at all likely to interfere. Florence was not having anyone come between her and her son.
    George's daft sister Ada soon found herself under a burnt-out bus, not much more than a pile of ashes herself. The war did terrible, terrible things to communities, it was true, thought Florence, as she sat holding baby Patrick at the funeral - but there was always a bright side to everything ... For instance, she was able to nurse baby Patrick for the first two and a half years of his life without anyone taking exception. And that kept him close to her. You might almost say, tied. Before the war it was becoming fashionable to use bottles for babies but not now. A good mother was a production unit like everything else. The war was useful in respect of this. Nobody bothered to tell you what to do and what not to do when the sirens sounded. Florence could pretend to the world, perhaps to herself, that she was still nursing him beyond his second birthday because it was convenient and best for him and natural. Nobody remarked on it. Only Dolly Wapshott's visit changed things. Dolly, whose baby girl Little Audrey arrived nine months after Patrick (the juxtaposition of two bodies, one male, one female, sharing a small single bed for several nights while Florence and son reposed in their double one awoke a surprising urge in Dolly and her husband). Little Audrey had already been weaned by the time she was one year old.
    'And that,' Dolly told Florence firmly, 'was considered late ... Who knows what's waiting for us at the end of this war?' she said firmly. 'It doesn't do to make a milksop. They need to be a bit independent in this day and age. My little Audrey can chew on anything nowadays.'
    Very reluctantly, Florence yielded up her last two pleasurable moments with him - first thing in the morning and last thing at night - and it should be said that Patrick did not object very strongly. On
    the first night of the withdrawal of the maternal tit, when Auntie Dolly put a sweetened dummy in his mouth at the moment the tears began to well, he sucked on it and became quite cheerful again. Mother or sugary rubber teat, it was all the same to him. It was, after all, something new and therefore interesting. Patrick might not know the word but he knew the sensation: the world was an interesting place and he was ready to enjoy each new experience.
    "There you are, you see -' said Dolly in triumph. 'He doesn't need it at all.'
    She playfully chucked her own chubby daughter beneath the chin and the child chomped on a bickey-peg and smiled through its fat red cheeks. 'Quite the independent Little Audrey, aren't you?' she proudly said. Florence sniffed, looking at her own little angel as he lay in his cot, eyes closed, dummy moving rhythmically. Despite his having arrived early he was a perfect shape - neither fat, nor thin - and he was elegant, cautious - not one to do anything unforeseen - a thinking child, and quick on the uptake. From his earliest days, when the merest movement in his cot, the lightest change in his breath, the slightest flicker of his eyes brought his mother to his side to see what was required, Patrick had a way of looking out at the world that said he knew he was very important. Florence stroked his long, artistically shaped fingers and then looked at her friend's daughter's plump digits. 'Little Audrey?' she said suddenly, and acidly. 'Nothing little about it'
    'Got George's fingers, I see,' said Dolly, by way of a counter. She knew where Flo's bodies were buried if she'd a mind to.
    Florence was not one to find anything appealing apart from her son, even baby girls. Girls had a way of looking at you that went straight through and out the other side. Patrick just looked up at her, and trusted. That was what counted. To her Patrick she was everything, or almost everything. Not quite, because for some irritating