Expo 58: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

this,’ said his mother.
    ‘I know.’
    ‘What on earth’s that big hole over there?’
    ‘I started a goldfish pond,’ said Thomas.
    ‘I thought you were planning to grow vegetables.’
    ‘I am. I’m going to plant some potatoes and beans. It’s too early yet.’
    Then he told his mother about the meeting with Mr Cooke and Mr Swaine and Mr Ellis of the Foreign Office. He told her that they were asking him to go to Belgium for six months.
    ‘What does Sylvia say?’ she asked him.
    ‘I haven’t mentioned it to her. I’m waiting for the right moment.’
    ‘Could you take them with you?’
    ‘It’s been suggested. I don’t think it sounds ideal. We’re not sure what the accommodation’s going to be like yet. It could be pretty basic.’
    His mother looked very doubtful. ‘You shouldn’t have told me first. You should have discussed it with your wife.’
    ‘I’m going to.’
    She held up a warning finger. ‘Don’t neglect her, Thomas. Be a good husband to her. This –’ (she gestured into the near distance, beyond the unfinished goldfish pond, beyond the air-raid shelter in which Thomas kept his few garden tools, beyond the railway embankment, and towards the dreary flatlands of Tooting itself) ‘– is not her home, you know. Not really. It’s not what she’s used to. And it’s no fun being a long way from home with a man who doesn’t care for you.’
    Thomas knew that she was talking about her own experience, about her marriage to his father. He didn’t want to hear it.
    ‘Your father had affairs, you know.’
    ‘Yes. I know.’
    ‘I put up with it. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t mind.’ Mrs Foley shivered, and wrapped her shawl more closely around her shoulders. ‘Come on. I think we’d better get inside. It’s getting chilly.’
    She was about to get up, but Thomas laid a restraining hand on her arm, and said earnestly: ‘I’ll be in Brussels, Mother. Close to Leuven, close to where the farmhouse was. Only about half an hour away. I can go there and – I know the house isn’t there any more – but I can see where it used to be, and . . . talk to people, and . . . take pictures . . .’
    Mrs Foley rose stiffly to her feet. ‘Please don’t do that. Not on my account. I don’t think about any of those things any more. What’s gone is gone.’

These are modern times
    Four-thirty on Tuesday afternoon found Thomas walking through St James’s Park, on his way to a meeting in Whitehall. Despite the steady downpour of rain, there was an unaccustomed jauntiness to his step, and under his breath he was singing to himself a cheerful tune he had caught on the Light Programme the night before: ‘The Boulevardier’ by Frederic Curzon.
    Things had progressed pretty smoothly since the weekend. Over last night’s dinner, he had finally told Sylvia about the Brussels assignment. She had been shocked, at first: the thought of coming with him did not seem to cross her mind (nor did he suggest it), and the prospect of being left alone for six months certainly alarmed her. But Thomas’s reassurances were convincing: there would be letters, there would be telephone calls, there would be weekends when he flew home to see her. And the more he told her about the fair itself, the more she came to see that this was an opportunity he could not afford to turn down. ‘So, really,’ she had said – at last beginning to see the thing clearly, as pudding was dished up and she poured condensed milk over her slender portion of apple pie – ‘it’s a great honour that Mr Cooke has singled you out in this way. He didn’t ask any of the others. And you’ll be rubbing shoulders with people from all sorts of places: Belgians, French – even Americans . . .’ And Thomas had realized, when she said this, that from one point of view Sylvia was actually willing him to go, already: that in her eyes, painful though the separation would be for both of them, he would grow in stature from this