Possession Read Free Page B

so definite a length of time as this? Usually they came to tea, and either stayed for supper, or for six weeks, or until Ralph kicked them out of the house; or else they walked in and borrowed a record and went away without speaking. There was no telling. But “Sunday teatime”! There was a Victorian touch about it which appealed to both of us.
    “Well, he’ll be different, anyway,” Janice conceded warily. “He might have some manners, or something. Just imagine! And at least he won’t be young ! That’s something !”
    “That’s what I’m looking forward to, too,” I agreed. “A proper grown-up man at last! Why, even Daddy mightn’t hate him!”
    “Oh, Mummy! Of course Daddy will hate him! I just can’t imagine Daddy actually talking to one of Sarah’s boy friends, can you? It would be unnatural. Weird. Oh no!”
    Janice shook her long dark hair decisively, and reached for another doughnut. Janice is always bringing home bags of doughnuts after school and usually she sits moaning about her weight as she munches her way gloomily through them, but today her mind was on other things. I put the bagsurreptitiously out of her reach, because she really is too fat; it’s not just one of those teenage phobias.
    “Well, personally, I hope Daddy will like him,” I reproved her gently. “After all, this time it’s not just one more of Sarah’s boy friends, it’s her fiancé; she’s really going to marry him.”
    “She’s not!” Janice’s voice was sharp, almost panicky; and as I looked up, startled, her eyes slid away from mine.
    “Well, I don’t think she is, anyway,” she muttered, in a light, strained voice. “It’s just my opinion. That’s all.”
    “But, Janice—” I was at a loss. She was sitting there, still munching her doughnut, but suddenly remote, in the disconcerting way she sometimes has. I struggled feebly against the intensity and power of her non-communication.
    “You shouldn’t talk like that, Janice,” I said ineptly. “It’s not kind to Sarah. This is the happiest thing that’s ever happened to her, and….”
    Janice’s dark, cold, calculated look reduced my words to a jumble of phoney platitudes; my voice petered out into twittering silence. Since when has Janice been able to wield this look? Since when has she discovered its power? A year ago? Six months? Does it come from deep within her—the first, terrifying sign of the harder, colder, adult woman who is one day going to oust my warm-hearted, passionate little girl from the body which I have created, fed and reared? Or is it just a trick she has discovered for getting her own way, for putting her mother down a peg or two? There is no way of knowing.
    “Have another doughnut?” I said weakly, relinquishing all authority, and fishing the requisitioned bag from under my chair.
    “Thank you,” she said with dignity; and together, without further words, we skated away from the dangerous subject. Soon she was spread out full-length on the carpet in her usual working posture, with her homework all around her, spreading like the tide further and further across the carpet. At intervals she sighed, noisily. She always wants herlabours to be noticed, but will snap at anyone who seems to notice them. Normality had returned.
    I spent the rest of that evening ringing everyone up. Grandma, Cissie, the Hardwicks, and all the mothers of all Sarah’s old school friends. It was rather like telling them about her A-level results two years ago; the same sense of having pulled a bit ahead in that unspoken race that we mothers are all running, all the time. The Cat-Race, Peggy calls it, and it begins with our babies’ births and goes on—as far as I can see—for ever. The biggest birth-weight—the rosiest cheeks—the largest circle of playmates—the highest marks—the lowest rate of pocket money—the most venturesome holidays—we would be hard put to it, most of us, to say exactly what the race is about, whither it is