The Light of Amsterdam Read Free Page A

obligatory humiliation that attended every visit and marked him as a temporary visitor, a guest whose welcome or unwelcome status was linked entirely to the reason for his arrival. And he couldn’t just call in on a whim or to collect something – everything had to be prearranged. He couldn’t even be a father except by appointment. Only the absence of Gordon’s van lightened the moment as he waited for admission through the door that he had personally painted a very beautiful vermilion but which she had dismissed as pillar-box red.
    â€˜Thanks for coming,’ she said, opening the door and then walking back down the hall, leaving him to follow. She had pulled her hair back tightly in a ponytail and she hadn’t got her face on. Perhaps he imagined it but she seemed to have lost a little weight. There was the smell of soup cooking. Homemade soup – already he felt vulnerable. Lentil soup no doubt, thick with chicken or bacon, and served with baguette and proper butter. If it was a softener, a bribe for what she needed him to do, she was already halfway home. She still hadn’t faced him and was stirring the soup, adding a little black pepper with an elegant shimmy of her fingers.
    â€˜Did you watch the funeral on television?’ he asked in an attempt to make conversation, an act that still felt shockingly strange after the intimacy of twenty-two years of marriage.
    â€˜No, I’ve been busy. Sorting stuff out.’
    She didn’t elucidate about what stuff had preoccupied her and as she hadn’t watched the funeral there wasn’t an obvious topic to talk about. He wasn’t going to tell her that he was one of those attending because he knew she would take it as further evidence of his supposed mid-life crisis and collapse into a dangerous and unpredictable state of emotional chaos.
    â€˜How’s Jack?’
    â€˜Who knows?’ she said, turning to look at him for the first time. ‘You need a haircut,’ she added in a low voice as she inspected him and then, perhaps remembering that she no longer had proprietorial rights, stirred the soup again. ‘He’s in his room. Appeared for breakfast about an hour ago. Then disappeared.’
    â€˜And how are things?’
    â€˜With Jack? Just the same. Who knows? He hasn’t said half a dozen words in a week.’
    â€˜Is he still going out with Jasmine?’
    â€˜Think so. She was here last weekend.’
    â€˜That has to be good for him?’
    â€˜How do you work that one out? The girl never speaks either and she’s dyed her hair jet black with purple streaks. She’s wearing it over one eye like a patch. Gordon thinks she’s a Goth but when I asked Jack he nearly did his nut as if I’d insulted her.’
    It pleased him to hear that Gordon had got something wrong even though he knew it was irredeemably childish. ‘So is it Jack you wanted to see me about?’ he asked, but she looked at him as if he hadn’t been listening and already the tone of her voice suggested that whatever he had to say would at best be wrong and at worst an insult in its unfathomable depths of stupidity.
    â€˜It’s not all about Jack and I’m tired living my life worrying about my children. If I’d known there was this much worry I swear to God I wouldn’t have had them.’
    â€˜Is it Caroline? Has something happened to her?’ Already his mind was frantically freefalling through the nightmares of pregnancy, date rape, examination failure.
    â€˜No, it’s not about Caroline. Alan, just for once this is not about our children. Why can’t it be about me? I’m a person, too. And right now I don’t feel great.’
    She stirred hell out of the soup and he knew, he just knew, it was cancer. He held the edge of the table with both hands as if standing in the dock, because he was guilty, he was the one who’d brought it on, and all their friends and their