Undue Influence Read Free Page A

if one were very lucky, attain to a similar plateau of satisfaction. The woman in the pancake hat wears an elusive smile. Maybe her husband is not such a bore after all.
    I do not wish this consummation for myself. Rather, I wish it retroactively for my mother, of whose life it is so natural for me to think. My mother was taken straight from her parents’ house to this slightly forbidding flat where her husband had pitched his tent some years previously. The kitchen cupboards were still filled with his first wife’s glass and china. There had been no children of that earlier marriage, although my mother would have welcomed them—she was still young enough to crave companions. And the stout authoritative man to whom she was married was no companion. I knew this at once, from a very young age. It was not given to my mother to wear the elusive smile of the woman in the magazine. Her smile was always a little puzzled, as she made her dutiful way round the galleries. I dare say my birth was the ultimate proof of her married life. For that reason she loved me too much, as I loved her. We were both discreet about this, tacitly acknowledging theabsence of a man who would have made possible an easier relationship, one less charged with the mournful consciousness of lost alternatives. I never heard her complain, yet as my father grew more handicapped and more selfish her smile became more diplomatic, as if aware at last that this was not a normal life for a woman with a simple, loving nature. As a widow she remained virginal. I would have liked her to marry again; instead she kept up an unalterable wifely routine, shopping in the morning, looking at pictures in the afternoon, I was a sort of company, I suppose. Not for a moment did I seriously think of leaving her alone, and yet it now occurs to me that this was what she was waiting for, her final release into freedom.
    On the evening of the day on which she had died, and died in the company of strangers, I said something of this to Wiggy, who merely remarked, ‘It’s you who are free now. Will you make any changes, do you think?’ She views our lives as anomalous, as I do. She loves her married man, but knows that he has arrested her development: no garden gate and shopping basket for her, and yet I know that with her country background she would accede almost gratefully to such a condition. As for me, my days have settled into not very interesting compartments: our life, now my life, at home, and the excursions into what I think of as cathedral territory, where minor adventures may or may not take place. None of this is entirely satisfactory, which is why I have become something of a mental stalker. In my observations, as I go about my days, I feel as if all my activity has been forced upwards, into my head. I know remarkably few people in what I am tempted to call real life, and yet I seem to get closer to them when I construct their lives for myself. Wiggy says I should write a novel, but in fact I read very little. Working in a bookshop makes one acquaintedwith titles rather than texts, and in the evenings I long to get out and about. I walk a lot. That is how most evenings are spent.
    ‘When will you go back to work?’ Wiggy asked me.
    ‘In a day or so, I suppose. Well, no, after the funeral, in fact. They won’t want to see me before then.’
    All at once I was filled with a painful longing for my working life, now denied to me for a decent interval of observance. (But it seemed to me that my mother had died long ago, and more recently in those mute days at the hospital, when she was almost pulseless.) I love my work, which takes place at the top of Gower Street, in a second-hand bookshop called Ex Libris. It belongs to two aged sisters, the Misses Collier, Muriel and Hester, although only Muriel sits behind a desk, usually reading. Hester, who is the elder of the two, and that means in her mid-eighties, turns up every afternoon with a cake for our tea, which is my