The Backward Shadow Read Free Page A

imagine how Father, and my aunts and uncles and cousins, had blinked back their tears with stiff upper lids at the funeral (I was still in hospital from David), concealing their genuine grief behind impassive British façades. I imagined Addy, somewhat improbably dressed in her voluminous canvas gardening apron, so tough she could keep shears in its pocket, and her muddy Wellingtons, looking on with disappointment and contempt. As I bent now over the droopping dahlias, scattering them with un-English tears and making a noise that would not have shamed an Arab wake, I could hear her saying: ‘That’s more like it! I was beginning to wonder if anyone had noticed I was missing!’ Suddenly the misery of wanting her sank down another fathom inside me; my legs went weak with sorrow and I found myself sitting on the wet grass, bawling, my head between my knees …
    Suddenly I straightened up and listened. I had competition—David was bawling too. I rushed in to him; even by my haphazard standards, it was hours past his feeding time. I scooped him out of the wooden cradle so swiftly I left it rocking, and in two seconds the bawling had stopped—both lots. It was difficult to be unhappy with him in my arms, quite impossible while he sucked me. He tucked his near-side arm under mine, and I could feel his hand clutching my ribs in spasms of ecstasy as he drank.
    I dressed him more warmly than usual (a jacket as well as a nightgown) and put him down to sleep in his pram in the garden. He didn’t feel like sleeping right away, so we had a nice long stare at each other, which was good for meditation. His eyes were not going to be blue, after all—one more unlike-Terryitem which I added to his mounting score of good points. His hair, practically partable already, looked rather like Kenneth Kaunda’s—it gave him a perpetually startled look, even when he was asleep. Suddenly, for no good reason, he grinned at me. It was his first recognisable smile
at me
, as distinct from indiscriminate face-experiments. I straightened up from my slouched position over the pram-handle. His eyes followed me, and he grinned again. I felt like a lioness whose offspring brings her his first kill.
    If only Dottie
would
come tonight! Perhaps he would do it again for her. Her reactions to such an achievement were bound to be entirely satisfying. Only it wasn’t Saturday, so how could it be her? Tantalising. I left David asleep, climbed into Addy’s aged Morris, and drove into the village, where I resolutely put the two red figures on my bank statement from my mind and laid in a pot roast with every trimming I could think of, including a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape.
    While I was in the pub I put through a call to Billie Lee. It was not very easy to say what I had to say, but she was so unexpectedly good about it—sympathetic in a terse how-
damned
-awful-I-
am
-sorry way—that I didn’t start crying again as I’d feared.
    â€˜Well, m’dear,’ said her deep, mannish voice, ‘it all devolves on you, then.’ She paused, and then added, ‘You know, I’m not only sorry for you, losing your aunt, I’m actually jolly sorry for myself as well. I
had
so looked forward to meeting her … damn. What a bitch life is. Oh well, I suppose we must just do our best for her book … she’s left something of some importance behind, at least, which is more than most of us will.’
    She went on to tell me the details of the American sale. It seemed the advance royalties were something in the neighbourhood of four hundred pounds, and even while I was glorying in relief, I was wondering for the first time whether there wasn’t something rather dreadful about spending Addy’s money. I felt I should keep it for her, somehow—as if she’d be needing it.
    You poor eedjit, what d’you think I left it to you for? And mind you do something exciting with it, too, and