A Bit of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

my wife died too.’
    â€˜Oh yes.’
    Silence.
    â€˜Well,’ Guy ploughed on, ‘as I said, I’m very sorry about your son. And I wondered if I might come and see you. I think we should meet. There are some …’
    â€˜If this is about insurance …’
    â€˜No, no,’ said Guy, ‘it’s nothing to do with that at all. I just wanted, thought that we should meet, pay my respects …’
    â€˜That would be all right. I’m in most of the time. But my brother-in-law, he’s been very good, sorting things out, he said, but if it isn’t about any insurance …’
    â€˜Really, it’s not. It’s, well, our families are linked now, and I just wanted to … It’s a very difficult time, isn’t it? Could I have your address?’
    â€˜It’s Flat 26, Greenacres, Market Street.’
    â€˜Oh, I know where that is.’
    â€˜Julius bought it for me. He was a good son to me.’
    â€˜I’ll come tomorrow morning if that’s all right. Maybe about ten.’
    Tomorrow came. Guy dropped Felix off at nursery and managed to avoid any conversation with the woman in charge. He drove to the supermarket for milk, bread and cereal. He abandoned his place in a checkout queue to go back for some flowers. The late summer flowers had arrived. He didn’t want gladioli. For once chrysanthemums seemed appropriate, white ones. How unpleasant they smelled. They promised a vase life of at least two weeks. He decided to take a bunch of yellow button ones too. As he queued up again he noticed that their sell-by date was even longer than that of the white ones.
    He had once loved sell-by dates. As a boy he’d felt a shiver of excitement at the appearance of any sell-by date that reached beyond his birthday or Christmas. You could ignore the ones on things that lasted practically for ever, but when it was some sort of medium-length-life thing, say a block of cheese or a tub of margarine, it started to get really interesting.
    â€˜Look!’ he’d tell his family. ‘We have to eat this by Boxing Day.’ Or ‘Guess what? We can even eat these ginger nuts on my birthday!’ He had liked the way sell-by dates proved that time was marching on, and that other people wereguaranteeing that it would pass. It had pleased him that there was nothing that he could do to stop it. Nowadays, ‘sell by’ was more often ‘use by’, or just ‘exp’, and he was mocked by the dates on packets and tins and tubs and jars in the cupboards at home; all the things that Susannah had bought, but would never use.
    Greenacres in Market Street was easy to find. The market was a pay-and-display car park most of the time. Greenacres looked like a new block of old people’s flats, new flats for old people, new flats for the old and the newly old – Guy couldn’t think how to put it. He pressed the buzzer for Flat 26.
    â€˜Hello?’
    â€˜It’s Professor Misselthwaite,’ he said, ‘I rang you yesterday.’ He thought that the use of ‘Professor’ would help, that it would make her think that he was to be trusted, as presumably she had trusted her own son, or that his visit was in some sort of official capacity, and that she should answer his questions.
    The door was buzzed open. In he went through the lobby, past an empty umbrella stand and some everlasting aspidistras. Weren’t aspidistras unpleasant and depressing enough without being made everlasting? They were protruding from fake brown compost with fake white plastic balls in it. He went up in the lift.
    She was waiting just inside her open front door. She was tiny, must have been less than five foot and, he guessed, in her late seventies. Her hair was exactly the same shade of pale grey as her trousers and sweatshirt. They looked like clothes for being miserable in. He could see no resemblance at all between Julius East and this woman.
    A