The Children's Bach Read Free Page A

can’t you close that door?’
    Because it had only one source of light, a yellow-shaded standard lamp at head-height against a wall, the Fox family’s kitchen was like a burrow, rounded rather than cubed, as if its corners had been stuffed with dry grass. The air shimmered with warmth. The table, large, wooden, scarred, was laid at one end with a bleached cotton cloth, a pile of bowls, a fistful of spoons. All the objects in the room looked like cartoons of themselves: the flap-handled fridge, the brown piano grinning, the dresser where plates leaned and cups hung.
    Dexter made the presentations.
    â€˜We can’t stay, I’m afraid,’ said Elizabeth in her grand manner. The closed door next to the stove must lead to the bathroom: she could hear the dull splatter of a leaking shower tap.
    â€˜Yes you can,’ said Dexter. He took the lid off the saucepan. ‘Soup! Soup, Billy. Soup means lots. Sit up, everyone. Where’s Arthur?’
    â€˜At the Papantuanos’,’ said Athena.
    â€˜I hope he’s not watching TV.’
    â€˜They’re making suits of armour in the shed.’
    â€˜I’ll go and get him,’ said Dexter. ‘Athena – Vicki must be sat near the warmth. She’s from sunnier climes, aren’t you, Vicki.’ He rounded her up, sidling and dancing with his arms out in their big curve. Vicki scowled with embarrassment, but obeyed. Elizabeth abandoned her plan to watch ‘Sale of the Century’, and allowed herself to be shuffled to a chair. She drew off her gloves.
    A bigger boy ran in the back door, and kicked it to. He had the same home-cut hair as Billy’s, a helmet of blond silk.
    â€˜Sit Billy up, Arthur,’ said Dexter.
    Arthur seized his brother by the shoulders and turned him towards the table where the others sat watching. ‘Come on, Billy!’ he shouted. He kept his eyes on his audience and made a great business of seating Billy on the bench. He stuck a spoon in the child’s fist, and turned like an actor to face an ovation.
    â€˜What a ham,’ thought Elizabeth.
    â€˜I wonder where their TV is,’ thought Vicki.
    Athena stood up with the ladle.
    â€˜Two four six eight, bog in don’t wait,’ said Dexter.
    Vicki had never seen anything like Dexter at table. She was disgusted, and ashamed for him. He gripped the spoon so that the whole handle vanished in his paw; he bent over the bowl and slurped so loudly that he seemed not to be using the spoon at all, but to be transferring the food from bowl to mouth by suction alone. Athena could eat properly – why didn’t she correct him in private? But Athena went on spooning up her soup, glancing from time to time at the children, and spread around her a shy, attentive calm which even Elizabeth, to whom Dexter’s table manners were merely one more avenue to her complicated memories of his family, found soothing and agreeable.
    Dexter emptied his bowl for the last time, then lifted it in both hands and licked it out, pushing his face right into it. There was soup on his nose, his chin and the front of his hair. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his jumper and sat back with a sigh. He was fed: now he could be sociable again. Nothing, thought Vicki, could be worse than the way he eats. Now things can only get better.
    The soup was thick. The bread was fresh. The stove’s dry heat reddened their cheeks. The walls curved in around them. Outside the house, which was at the bottom of a neglected street, no cars passed.
    Not late, but in a starry cold that lifted them off their feet, they went out to the car.
    â€˜Christ, it’s cold,’ said Elizabeth.
    â€˜But you can smell things growing,’ said Dexter. ‘Not long now.’
    â€˜Still the mindless optimist.’
    â€˜Where’s the toilet?’ said Vicki.
    â€˜Right down in the corner of the yard,’ said Dexter.
    Vicki lit the candle. The door would not stay