The Ends of Our Tethers Read Free Page A

all.”
    â€œHave you things in his house? Things you want to collect?”
    â€œWhat things?”
    â€œA nightgown? Clothes?”
    â€œNo. Certainly not. Not at all. Please don’t be a …” She hesitated then said quickly, “cunt give me a glass of milk.”
    It is almost impossible to judge the intelligence of someone from an alien culture so I have never discovered exactly how stupid or mad Tilda is. She behaved as if she expected to live with me. I wanted that too so it was hardly a sign of her insanity. Lunatics are supposed to have delusions. Tilda had none. She said what she meant or expected in a few clear words that always made sense. Only secrecy about her family and her compulsion to say cunt were inexplicable at first, and from remarks she passed in the following two weeks I soon pieced together an explanation.
    Â Â Â 
    Her “people” (she never said father or mother) ran a residential hotel or nursing home for “people of our own sort”. They seemed a pernickety sort because “everything has to be just so.”
    I asked what just so meant. She said, “Exactly right forever and ever world without end amen. Dinner was awful. Wehad to dress.”
    â€œIn tuxedos and black ties?”
    â€œTuxedo is an American word. We British say evening dress. Female evening wear is less uniform than male attire but more taxing. Little hankies are an endless ordeal. I fidgeted with mine which is not the done thing, in fact utterly wrong, in fact a rotten way to carry on and I became quite impossible when I started (cunt) using (cunt) that word (cunt cunt).”
    Tilda’s use of that word had obviously been an unconscious but sensible device to escape from bullying relations. They had lodged her in a caravan park very far from them (“half a day’s car ride away”) and made her promise not to mention their name because “if word gets around it will be bad for the business and we aren’t exactly rolling in money.”
    This made me think their business was a sanatorium for rich mental defectives whose guardians might have doubts about the establishment if they knew people on the staff had an eccentric daughter. I suspected too that Tilda’s people were less posh than they wished. The few very posh people I have met care nothing for elaborate etiquette and swear like labourers.But Tilda’s family had given her worse eccentricities than that Anglo-Saxon word.
    Â Â Â 
    Next day I arose later than usual, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers on a tray in bed and got down to business. At ten she came into the workroom wearing my dressing gown and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, placidly watching figures and images I manipulated on the screen. Shortly after eleven she announced that she wanted a coffee. I said, “Good idea. Make me one too.”
    She cried indignantly, “I can’t do that! I don’t know how!”
    â€œI’ll tell you how,” I said, treating the matter as a joke, “In the kitchen you will see an electric kettle on a board by the sink. Fill it with tap water and switch on the heat. There is also a jar of instant coffee powder on the board, a drawer of cutlery below, mugs hanging on hooks above. Take two mugs, put a small spoonful of powder in each, add boiling water and stir. Add milk and sugar to yours if you like, but I take my coffee black.”
    She stamped out of the room and shortly returned with a mug she slammed down defiantly on my worktop. It containedlukewarm water with brown grains floating on top. When I complained she said, “I told you I can’t make coffee.”
    I found that Tilda could wash and dress herself, eat and drink politely, talk clearly and truthfully and also (though I didn’t know how she learned it) fuck with astonishing ease. Everything else had been done for her so she stubbornly refused to learn anything else.
    Â Â Â 
    Despite which