Daniel Isn't Talking Read Online Free PDF Page B

part on their nest of watercress. And my profiteroles are also a disgrace, being passed over for the blackberry crumble with Bird’s Custard and a summer pudding, still slightly frozen from the box. Why do people with so much money fill themselves with such garbage? Is it some English eccentricity I will never understand?
    Stephen leans toward me, whispering, ‘You know, if you ate more, you might grow breasts again.’
    â€˜Stephen, don’t be vulgar,’ says Daphne. Like a schoolboy standing at a closed door with an inverted cup, she misses nothing.
    â€˜I’m sorry, dear,’ says Stephen’s father, sitting in his chair. He has not moved for many hours, and is engrossed in the cricket. ‘Were you talking to me?’
    â€˜No, Dad, Stephen was just being himself,’ says Cath, rolling her eyes.
    But at least Stephen defends my game hens. He finishes off two, declaring them ‘charming’ to anyone who cares to hear. I fumble with my plate, trying not to disturb Daniel, who sleeps all through lunch. Lying across me on the couch, he looks more like a puppet for a ventriloquist than a boy. In the end I find it is too much trouble to eat, and anyway, I’m not hungry.
    â€˜Sit with me,’ I ask Stephen.
    â€˜I am sitting with you,’ he says, from the other side of the room.
    Daphne steps through the house with a regal air. She wears a floor-length woollen skirt, a crisp high-necked blouse. I am too casual in chinos and a jumper. But then, last time there’d been such a gathering, I showed up in a silk skirt and heels, only to discover they expected me to go on a ‘family walk’ through half the Chilterns. I should have known I had it wrong this morning when we were dressing. Stephen polished his shoes before we got in the car.
    â€˜Why don’t you put that child down?’ says Daphne now, looking with mild disapproval at her sleeping grandson.
    â€˜He’s attached to me,’ I whisper, at which she gasps.
    â€˜You have a very odd sense of humour,’ she says, moving away.
    Her next complaint is how fat her elder son has become.‘You need to make time for the gym, dear,’ she tells David, perched momentarily beside him on the armchair, like a visiting bird.
    David doesn’t look away from the TV screen. He’s the only one who seems to like the profiteroles and has no intention of being distracted from them, or from his cricket. ‘Too much on at work,’ he says dismissively. Then he points his fork at the profiteroles. ‘Did you make these things?’ he asks me.
    I shake my head no.
    â€˜Bloody good,’ he says. Like most men of his type, David is under the impression that women cook to gain compliments from men. When we don’t cook, but instead buy food, the compliment is forfeited, unrequired. I have been instructed by my mother-in-law on more than one occasion always to admit to baking a dish from scratch, regardless. ‘Up to and until they see the bar code, it is yours,’ she told me. I am not seeking to impress but rather to deceive. If I can present a reasonable lunch, then the rest of my life is similarly ordered. That is my statement, an If/Then statement. The logic of ordinary housewives. A complete lie.
    â€˜They don’t look like something you’d make,’ says Daphne, glancing from David’s bowl to me. ‘Though I suppose someone had to make them. What I want to know is how they get the cream into that incy-wincy, tiny little hole?’
    â€˜With a gun,’ I say. Something about my tone startles everyone in the room. Stephen, David, and Daphne look at me all at once now, blinking. Raymond, who is in a corner with a book on the history of London, stares at me over his bifocals. Stephen’s father rustles from his chair as though woken from a dream. ‘A pastry gun,’ I add, trying to smile.
    In fact, I bought the profiteroles that morning at a pastry