The Late Bourgeois World Read Free Page B

the school about boxing lessons,and wanted to know if Bo were interested. Then we went to sit in the car, and he teased, ‘Why’n’t you just park in town and walk, Ma?’
    Like most boys Bobo has a feeling for cars akin to the sense of place, and when he gets into the car I can see that it’s almost as if he were home, in the flat. He noses through all the old papers that collect on the shelf beneath the dashboard and looks for peppermints and traffic tickets in the glove box. I am often called upon to explain myself.
    He was sitting beside me touching a loose knob, probably noting with some part of his mind that he must fix it sometime, and he said, ‘I don’t suppose it was painful or anything.’
    I said, ‘Oh no. You mustn’t worry about that.’ Because all his life, he’s been made aware of the necessity to recognize and alleviate suffering; it’s the one thing he’s been presented with as being beyond questioning, since the first kitten was run over and the first street beggar was seen displaying his sores.
    â€˜Just the idea.’ His head was low; now he looked round towards me without lifting it, sideways, and I knew quite well that what he was really asking about was the unknown territory of adult life where one would choose to die. But I wasn’t equal to that. He was. He blurted, ‘I feel sorry I didn’t love him.’
    I looked at him without excuses. The one thing I hope to God I’ll never do is fob him off with them.
    I said, ‘There may be talk among the boys – but you know he went after the right things, even if perhaps it was in the wrong way. The things he tried didn’t come off but at least he didn’t just eat and sleep and pat himself on the back. He wasn’t content to leave bad things the way they are. If he failed, well, that’s better than making no attempt. Some boys’ – I was going to say ‘fathers’ but I didn’t want him to go attacking all the scions of stock-broking houses – ‘some men live successfully in the world as it is, but they don’t have the courage even to fail at trying to change it.’
    He looked satisfied. He is only a little boy, after all; he said with a rough sigh, ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble through politics, haven’t we.’
    â€˜Well, we can’t really blame this on politics. I mean, Max suffered a lot for his political views, but I don’t suppose this – what he did now – is a
direct
result of something political. I mean – Max was in a mess, he somehow couldn’t deal with what happened to him, largely, yes, because of his political actions, but also because … in general, he wasn’t equal to the demands he … he took upon himself.’ I added lamely, ‘As if you insisted on playing in the first team when you were only good enough – strong enough for third.’
    As he followed what I was saying his head moved slightly in the current from the adult world, theway I have sometimes noticed a plant do in a breath of air I couldn’t feel.
    In the end he has to take on trust what he is told; the only choice he can exercise is
by whom
. And he chooses me. At times I’m uneasy to see how sceptically he reports what he is told by others. But the reaction will come with adolescence, if I’m to believe what
I’ve
been told is ‘healthy development’. He’ll tear me down. But with what? Of course I’d craftily like to find out, so that I can defend myself in advance, but one generation can never know the weapons of the next. He picked up my hand and kissed it swiftly on the back near the thumb just as he used to do suddenly, for no reason I knew, when he was little. It must be five years since he stopped doing it, out of embarrassment or because he didn’t need to. But there was no one to see, in the empty car park. He said, ‘What are you going to do