Brief Lives Read Online Free PDF

world in this way. Moreover, Mrs Savage had a certain claim on our attention, for she made no secret of the fact that she was still deeply in love with Millie’s father, and several times we sent her home with new lipstick, or eye shadow that we had decided was the wrong colour, or, once, a pair of high-heeled sandals that I had bought and found uncomfortable. Mrs Savage had the good manners of the good-hearted. ‘Kind wishes to Mother,’ she said to me, after her first visit to theflat, and later, never failed to send her her love, although they had only met once. ‘I’ll ring Isabel when I get home and tell her you’re all right,’ she would say, for by that time my mother would hardly leave her house. This was the centre of my unhappiness, but I tried to hide it, for I realized that it made the young men who took me out impatient. I would see her at the weekends and sometimes in the week as well, although my heart grew heavy as I reached the house. ‘Belle’, I called her now, as my father had done, but she looked at me as if I had committed a solecism, and turned away.
    Through all the restrictions and the worry that my mother’s condition imposed on me my love for her grew, as, I think, did hers for me. This love was not a pleasure to either of us; it was, if anything, a burden. My mother felt it harnessed her to this world, which she tried so hard to ignore and which she was ready to leave, while to me it was the magnet that drew me unwillingly home, back to that narrow house and my mother’s almost noiseless footfall, and the cup of tea that she silently put before me, as if appeasing a stranger in some primitive ritual. She had grown thin and frail; when I took her in my arms I could feel her heart beating under her cardigan. I took to staying with her until she had got into bed, and then sitting with her while she drank the hot milk and honey that I brought her. She would relax and smile at me then, briefly reverting to the mother I had always known, and I would lay my cheek on her hand in relief and gratitude. ‘You go, dear,’ she would say, with something of a return to her old manner. ‘Mind you take a taxi, now.’ Five minutes later, looking for a taxi in the dark and empty street, I would be harassed and burdened once again.
    Therefore I did not think I need take Vinnie seriously,for she conformed to no idea of motherhood that I had ever entertained. Evidently she felt the same about me: I was not the sort of girl to wrest her son away from her, although a more enlightened mother might have noticed that he was in urgent need of being rescued. Handsome, spoilt, and apparently well-off, he had been one of the youngest Battle of Britain pilots, and the experience had made him so avid for excitement, yet at the same time so devoid of any motivation of his own, that he had had trouble settling down, had taken a long holiday from work after the war, and, only at the insistence of his father’s brother, had finished his interrupted law studies and eventually joined the firm in Hanover Square. Had I been more experienced I should have seen in him the makings of a rather brutal success; the word tycoon was not yet common in those days but now that I have survived him I realize that that was what he would have become had he lived into late middle age. There was a cynicism there that I could never understand. His mother, with her anxious eyes and fashionable legs, her gin and her dazzling dusty mirrors, understood it far too well. All I knew, at our first meeting, was that the hot sun brought out the smell of her scent,
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, with something older and more hidden underneath, and drove prisms of light from the mirrors into my eyes, giving me a migraine headache, the first one I had ever had. The idea that she might become my mother-in-law did not occur to me for a single second. While as far as Vinnie was concerned I was so far removed from what she considered to be suitable that I was dismissed out of