The Ends of Our Tethers Read Free Page B

our first weeks together were very happy. She added little to my housework. Former wives had insisted on making meals or being taken out for them. Tilda ate what I served without a word of complaint, nor did she litter the rooms with cosmetic tubes, powders, lotions, toilet tissues, fashion magazines and bags of shopping. She hated shopping and refused to handle money. I gathered that “her people” had never given her any, paying the caravan rent and Red Fox food bills by bank order. She brought to my house only the clothes she wore, clothes passed to her by someone of similar size, I think an older sister. By threatening to chuck her out unless she accompanied me and by ordering a taxi Igot her into the women’s department of Marks and Spencer. Buying her clothes was not the slightly erotic adventure I had hoped as she cared nothing for what she wore and would have let me dress her like an outrageous prostitute had the garments been comfortable. But there is no fun in buying sexy clothes for folk who don’t feel sexy, so I bought simple, conventional garments of the kind her sister had given, but more modern and in better-matching colours. I did not then notice that her attitude to clothes and making love were the same. She never restricted the pleasures I had with her in bed once or twice a night, so only later did I see she was indifferent to them.
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    Being together outside bed was also easy because we had no social life and did not want one. Since expulsion from her people’s “rather grand place” her only society seemed to have been fellow diners in The Red Fox, and she would not have eloped with “that other man” if she had liked them much. My own social life once depended on friends met through my wives and a job in local housing, but during the last marriage I had become afreelance working at home, which perhaps drove away wife number 3. Since then I had managed without friends, parties et cetera . I like films and jazz I enjoyed in my teens. I play them on my computer and discuss them over the internet with fellow enthusiasts in England, Denmark and America so need no other society. An afternoon stroll in the park kept me fit. Tilda managed without even that. Apart from the Marks and Spencer’s visit she has only left the flat once since entering it.
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    Our daily routine was this. After an early morning cuddle I rose, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers in bed, laid out her clothes for the day, put dirty clothes in the washing machine, started work. Tilda arose around ten, I made coffee for us at eleven thirty and a snack lunch at one. Then came my afternoon stroll and shopping expedition which she bitterly resented. I insisted on being away for at least ninety minutes but had to mark the exact minute of return on the clock face, and if I was a single minute late she got into a furious sulk. Then came a cup of tea and biscuit, then two or three hours of more programming, then I made theevening meal, we consumed it, I did some housework, internetted for a little and so to bed. And wherever I was working Tilda sat on the floor, looking perfectly relaxed, sometimes frowning and pouting but often with a strange little satisfied smile. I assumed she was remembering the people and place she had escaped from. I once asked what she was thinking about and she murmured absent-mindedly, “Least said soonest mended. Curiosity killed the cat.”
    I asked if she would like a television set? A Walkman radio? Magazines? She said, “A properly furnished mind cunt is its own feast cunt and does not need such expensive and foolish extravagancies.”
    But she did not often use the cunt word now and when she saw an arresting image on my screen sometimes asked about it. I always answered fully and without technical jargon. Sometimes she heard me out and said “Right”, sometimes cut me short with a crisp “Enough said”, so I never knew how much