Possession Read Free

small girls as they pour into the cloakrooms between nine and nine-fifteen. As I say, what with all this, I didn’t have any chance to thrash out with her what was really the matter—if, indeed, there was anything the matter other than the shock of unexpected news.
    Ralph, thank goodness, took the whole thing much more sanely.
    “I suppose the fellow hasn’t a job, or anything?” he enquired resignedly; and I rejoiced at being able to inform him that—in marked contrast to Sarah’s previous boyfriends —Mervyn not only had a job, but a permanent job, in a firm of accountants. Not a firm of psychedelic accountants? enquired my husband unbelievingly. Not a financial rave-in ? A fiscal freak-out? No, I assured him, glancing againdown the untidy pages: it seemed to be an ordinary firm of real accountants. It seemed too good to be true; and together we pored over our daughter’s letter, looking for the snag.
    But, incredibly, there didn’t seem to be one. Mervyn had not only finished his exams without dropping-out at any stage; he actually liked accountancy. As far as we could gather from Sarah’s letter, he wasn’t planning to give it all up to become an abstract painter; it wasn’t destroying his soul or killing his creativity. Perhaps—here Ralph and I looked at each other in wild, incredulous hope—perhaps he hadn’t got any creativity! We could scarcely believe our good fortune. Could it really be that we, alone of all our friends, were to be blessed with a son-in-law who felt no impulse to free the human spirit from its chains? One who simply went out to work and earned money, unhampered by visions of a better world?
    Of course, he was thirty-one, not twenty-one. That accounted for a lot of steadiness and sanity. It also presumably meant that he had ditched some other wife somewhere along the line; but who cared? If he had the tact to keep quiet about it, we certainly wouldn’t probe. We would simply sit back rejoicing at the prospect of our wayward Sarah’s reaping the fat benefits that accrue from marrying a man already broken-in to wedlock; a seasoned man, one hammered and tempered into acceptance of the fact that if he doesn’t pay the little woman’s rent, then she will, with all that this entails in terms of male subjection and tuna fish out of tins.
    Thus Ralph and I reasoned on that damp, sunny autumn morning when we thought that what had happened to us was a wonderful stroke of luck. We reflected on the long procession of long-haired, despondent art students, big with complexes, who had hitherto sought out our pretty daughter to talk to her about suicide and the cultivation of the Real Self; and as it slowly dawned on us that the whole grisly bunch of them would now be vanishing from our lives for ever, we turned and hugged each other, right there by theabandoned breakfast table with its crumbs, and cornflakes, and smears of marmalade, all golden and glittering in the November sun. At last, we said to one another, Sarah has outgrown her tendency to take on the lame ducks of the world, to lavish on neurotic no-goods the bounteous overflow of her gay normality. At last, we thought, Sarah has found herself a real man, a man she can look up to. It’s all to the good, we said, that he should be twelve years older than she is: this is right for her, we said, it’s what she needs. And all that morning, after Ralph had gone to the office, I went singing about my work, thanking God that my beautiful, vulnerable, kind-hearted Sarah, about whom I had worried intermittently ever since she had left school, was after all to live happily ever after.
    And that was why Peggy’s reception of the news was so disconcerting. It had all seemed so perfect, right up to the moment when I had mentioned our prospective son-in-law’s name, and she had said, in that startled, taken-aback sort of voice: “Mervyn Redmayne, did you say? And he lives in Bayswater? But, darling, I know his mother, and she’s frightful ! She