Another Mother's Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

a—’
    The signal cuts out.
    Dr Bennet might have been driving, or dealing with a gas leak, so I do not try again immediately. I feel relieved to have made contact, however brief. I now know there is someone I can speak to – the mother, not the father – and that Teresa sounds more like a child than the efficient, imperious person I feared. She exists. That takes a weight off my mind. Ginny Lu is the parents’ rep for Ross’s year group and everything within her scope is bona fide.
    I pour myself a glass of wine and put a wash on.
    At around nine o’clock, I call Teresa Bennet again. She seems somewhat distracted – but pleasant.
    â€˜Ross? I haven’t seen him yet but he’s probably here somewhere,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to find him?’
    A dog is barking in the background. Her voice is reedy more than girlish and she is called Frances. I apologise for getting her name wrong and say how kind she is to put up with Ross and that we would love to reciprocate and have Jude to stay.
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ Frances says. ‘Nice idea. Sorry, the dog’s going a bit mental. I’ll have to go and feed her.’
    Frances Bennet does not sound like an eye doctor, not an eminent one, anyway. I am also surprised to hear about the dog because toxoplasmosis is a terrible eye disease that children, born and unborn, can get from uncooked meat and the faeces of pets. I worried enough about it myself when the boys were little and was forever checking their hands and telling them to watch out for dog turds when they beat paths through the long grass, flailing seed heads as they went.

10
    I TRAMP THROUGH Grovelands Park for what will be the last time this year. For a short while I am on the wing – airborne. I shall miss the path over undulating ground, the stream that runs invisible among the trees crossed by little wooden bridges, the sound of children’s voices in the wood. The ground is firm, not yet spongy or fungal, and the grass smells fresh. The clocks go back at midnight. From then on the gates will shut at 16.45 and progressively earlier times. It seems too soon to call off daylight saving while there are good ways to spend it. I have lost the sense that autumn is a beginning. School and university drive it into you and growing older drives it out. Until April, I shall be walking between Palmers Green and Winchmore Hill along suburban pavements.
    Saturday tea at my father’s flat in The Heronry. The weekly pattern repeats. I cry off if something crops up and William accepts any change with equanimity. Quite simply, I like to see him and my occasional feelings of being trapped in an arrangement that could go on indefinitely are checked by remembering my mother’s death from cardiac arrest – the suddenness of it. Nothing goes on indefinitely.
    The park has altered little in the last hundred years. Humphry Repton laid out its beautiful bones. The civic amenities were added early in the twentieth century. I can imagine myself here as a child, or my parents or grandparents, also as children, because as types in a landscape we are cut and come again. The big house, built in the 1790s by John Nash for a Tottenham brandy merchant, was never demolished and has passed through many changes of use, mostly medical; it has been a military hospital, a convalescent home and, more recently, a private clinic where in 1998 General Pinochet was held under house arrest. He must from time to time have looked out of a window, contemplating the English park – a gift to the public made by Southgate Urban District Council in 1911 – though he probably would not have stood for long, as he had undergone a back operation. His gaze left no visible mark. The pitch and putt, the bowling club, the single table with umbrella in front of the shack selling ice cream and drinks exist on their own terms. The clinic lays no claims to the park. The only medical reference is on