Griefwork Read Online Free PDF Page B

foreman up by the jib like a patch of daisies in a meadow. When the load neared the top there occurred one of those brisk claps of wind which come from nowhere and pass into nowhere, a stray lump of summer air perhaps detached from a stiff breeze a week previously and loitering lazily in its wake. It did no harm whatever to the precious mechanism now at the lamp room’s sill. All it did was catch and throw back one of the curved lattice windows. Being heavy, it moved quite slowly and jarred to rest with a thud against a wooden stop bolted to the stonework. The foreman, intent on his job, scarcely glanced up but called out ‘Latch that, Jon,’ his gloved hand on the quivering rope. As the window struck the stop a single diamond pane flew from its mounting and twirled languidly down in a bending trajectory. Hardly any of the onlookers even saw it. This flutteringglass blade took Christina at the base of the neck and killed her where she stood.
    Her child being five as well as living in isolation made it easier for the unplanned conspiracy to emerge and bear him the news that his mother had been taken seriously ill all of a sudden and wouldn’t be coming back for a while. He accepted this as any child must an adult account of disaster, at face value. At the same time his speechless part must have wondered at the incongruity, at the perfectly everyday fashion in which, only a few hours before, she had pedalled away expressing at the last moment a fake exasperation at his demand to be brought the peppermints he knew she would bring anyway. These delicious mother-and-boy games were snapped off short, at once and for ever, at midday when a motor car drove inexpertly into the yard, temporised by reversing too close to the smoke house door and cuffing it off its hinges, and reluctantly disgorged some pale village women who at once closeted his uncle. After only a few minutes they came out again and got back into the car. One of them reached out of a window with a wild smile and dropped half a bag of liquorice (which he didn’t like) towards Leon’s chest. His hands came up an instant too late, the bag fell and bounced off the running-board and there was a fossil moment. For ever afterwards the image would recur of a crumpled white bag lying on sandy ground in the sunlight, hazed about by an engine’s sound and the sweet pungency of a black tailpipe. Then the exhaust receded, the motor car departed, and everything was over.
    His uncle, bereaved brother turned cantankerous guardian, remained an unknown quantity. ‘He’s got his own problems,’ as the teenaged Leon was later to learn in the village, though he never found out what they were and by that time cared less. It was no good trying to impute to the man either a particular cruelty or emotional incompetence, especially not ina time and place which did its best to deny subtleties of feeling unless they were put into the shorthand of convention. It was easy for his uncle to offend no code but also to give no clue to his own motives when with malign scruples, as weeks lengthened to months, he met his little nephew’s tearful demands to know when his mother was coming home with vague news of her progress from one special sanatorium to another. It soon became impossible for the child to ask while looking directly at his uncle. The stoniness was unbearable. Anguish masked as stoicism? Rage at being badgered to come up with fresh fictions? He gave up asking. One sunny morning she had gone away, sprrixx, twinkling off as she always did twice a week, but she had never come twinkling back again and now she never would. That much her bereft child knew. His conviction remained that somewhere beyond the limitless polder, somewhere out in the wide world his mother lay in bed or tottered about in a dressing gown smelling frowsty and looking grey as she did when she had one of her colds. And since he could see her thus, he thought she could surely see him too. How, then, could she bear