Undue Influence Read Free Page B

signal to emerge from the basement and put on the kettle. Hester is pretty deaf, but very spirited; Muriel is more austere. They were both Land Girls during the war, which may explain their durability, despite Muriel’s knotted legs and Hester’s hearing aid. They seem to be in the best of health, although both are frighteningly thin. It is difficult to imagine their existence away from the shop, which they inherited from their father, St John Collier, on whom they have bestowed the status of a man of letters, although I dare say he had already claimed this for himself. It is their intention that his various writings should be gathered into publishable form, be privately printed, and be available in the shop. They are, and always have been, unmarried. Father looms large in their conversation. Mother rarely gets a look in.
    My job is to extract St John Collier’s articles from the piles of rotting newspapers and magazines, to transcribe them on Muriel’s huge upright Royal, and to arrange them in some sortof order. ‘Naturally you will feature in the acknowledgements,’ I am assured. The late man of letters operated on several fronts, as a minor belletrist, as a contributor of nature articles to Reynolds News , and, on the strength of having been a lay preacher in his youth, as the author of homilies in those women’s magazines that I find so beguiling. These homilies are not half bad, if you care for that sort of thing. Reassurance seems to be the keynote, as if God had cheerful plans for us all. To tell the truth I prefer these messages to the ones about the spotted wagtail and the willow warbler, which occupy another sizeable section of his output, but I plough on conscientiously, amid the smells of defunct newsprint and the occasional floating fragment of disintegrating paper. I do all this in the basement, where the foreign language books are kept. I am rarely disturbed by customers. In fact most people do not realize that the shop is open for business, since the door sticks so badly that it is almost impossible to gain admittance.
    ‘You must do something about the door, Muriel,’ shouts Hester.
    Muriel looks up briefly from whatever she is reading. ‘We need a man for that,’ she says, and the subject is dismissed.
    I have no fantasies regarding Muriel and Hester, who have always struck me as creatures of the utmost rectitude, and therefore somehow not interesting. I prefer those who go about their business with an obvious burden of feeling. ‘The Man of Feeling’ was the title of an (unpublished) essay by St John Collier, which will be the lead in our book. It is incredibly complacent, like his interpretation of God’s purpose. But I know those unconscious gestures, those suddenly lowered eyes that give away inner conflict. I can read them like a book. This I prefer to all those books I have not read and whose titles I know so well. I could sell you anything in the shop, sinceI am so familiar with the stock. But I prefer the living flesh and its ambiguity. I am in my element there, a hunger artist whose hunger is rarely satisfied.
    During the few days I spent alone after my mother’s death I was able to observe a slight alteration in my behaviour. These days were worse than I had anticipated. The floorboards echoed as I moved from my bedroom to the sitting-room, and I was reminded of my father’s lumbering progress, and also of the slight feeling of fear I had always experienced at his approach. This fear had always been baseless; my father was not a threatening figure, merely an inconvenient one, but it now occurred to me that he must have been unhappy. He was in a position to register his deterioration; his one good eye was sharp, and he knew that he was now a clumsy elderly man, whose wife’s relative youth disturbed him, as if he had not sought it in the first place.
    Their marriage had always struck me as a cynical arrangement. My mother, impractical as she was, had little hope of an independent