Another Mother's Son Read Online Free PDF

cook; devoted to all things Welsh though she is not Welsh herself. She cooked roast rump of black-faced lamb for my parents when they visited while on holiday in Cardiganshire. I felt she’d known him personally, my mother said. His farm, his field, how he spent the summer.
    Better prepared after the September fiasco, I use such bargaining power as I have to stop Ross from absenting himself on school nights. However, for five consecutive weekends he sleeps away. He is at Jude’s house. He has told me a million times. He sets off and returns on his bike; he is a bike ride’s distance from home. Why would he cycle fifty miles on a wet Friday evening? His bike is crap. He has never known anyone with a crappier bike. It will conk out. He can’t be ‘anywhere’. ‘Anywhere’ is ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine per cent unfeasible as a destination. He isn’t shouting at me. If he is I deserve it. I drive him nuts. Anyway, why do I need to know?
    The arguments always boil down to that. ‘Why do you need to know?’
    Jude’s surname gives some clue as to his parentage. His mother is Bennet and his father is Dutch. They live in Crews Hill; a place that in the most far-reaching of the
London A to Zs
– the
Master Atlas of Greater London
– is surrounded by white patches. There is a grown-up sister, or maybe she is a half-sister, who lives in Barcelona. Dirk Neerhoff is an eye doctor, Teresa Bennet is an eye doctor. What, both eye doctors?
    That last question does for me. The handle comes off the spade. No more digging. I am left with my own impressions. A fifties house; the kind with a chain-link fence and a frosted-glass bathroom window on the first floor, visible from the road. Grass verges to the pavements. A golf course or two at the back. No bus service – or maybe one of those small single-deckers that potter from nowhere to nowhere bearing an alpha-numeric sign. As for the Bennet-Neerhoffs themselves, I imagine a blond square-headed man and a Roman Catholic English woman. I envisage a darkened room, in the centre of which stand a slit-lamp machine and a white-coated person peering in, seeing everything, noting everything, while the patient views a tiny tunnelled world through a haze of yellow fluorescein.
    Strangely, although I construct a view of the Bennet-Neerhoff set-up that in a dreamlike way veers between the numinous and the diabolic and contains some precise images, I form no picture of Jude. He is the empty space in the frame.
    I tell Ross that it is wrong to accept hospitality indefinitely without returning it. Reciprocity, it is called. Someone gives you something and you give something back. Ross says he knows what reciprocity means. Invite Jude here for a change. Silence. Well, make it happen.

9
    I FINALLY GET hold of a telephone number for Jude’s family from Ginny Lu at the end of October. It is a mobile number and I have no idea whether I will get through to Dr Bennet or Dr Neerhoff. Ginny does not know whose number she has been given. She is friendly and brisk.
    The advantage of the telephone when introducing myself to someone new is that appearance is irrelevant. All the same, I glance in the mirror that hangs over the fireplace in the front room before calling the Bennet-Neerhoff number. I have no idea whether this is a good time. Sevenish on a Friday evening. I do not want to interrupt a clinic or their supper.
    My hair, due for a cut, falls in dense, uneven clusters to my shoulders and resembles the outline of a larch tree. This dishevelment really is of no consequence though it can affect my mood. What I look for are signs that I am ‘together’, as people used to say. I look calm enough so I move away from the mirror, press the numbers and lift the phone to my ear.
    â€˜Hello.’ It is a thin little voice against a hiss that grows louder.
    â€˜Hello. Teresa? I’m Lorna, Ross’s mum. I hope this isn’t