Make Death Love Me Read Online Free PDF

cinemas, long-playing records and odds and ends like Playboy magazine and bottles of wine and after-shave and cassettes. Jillian sometimes came in when she had nothing better to do. This Saturday she had something better to do, though what it was she hadn’t bothered to inform her parents.
    In the afternoon Alan pulled weeds out of the garden, Pam turned up the hem of an evening skirt and Wilfred Summitt took a nap. The nap freshened him up, and while they were having tea, which was sardines and lettuce and bread and butter and madeira cake, he said he had seen a newsflash on television and the Glasgow bank robbers had been caught.
    â€˜What we want here is the electric chair.’
    â€˜Something like that,’ said Pam.
    â€˜What we want is the army to take over this country. See a bit of discipline then, we would. The army to take over, under the Queen of course, under Her Majesty, and some general at the head of it. Some big pot who means business. The Forces, that’s the thing. We knew what discipline was when I was in the Forces.’ Pop always spoke of his time at Catterick Camp in the nineteen-forties as ‘being in the Forces’ as if he had been in the navy and air force and marines as well. ‘Flog ’em, is what I say. Give ’em something to remember across their backsides.’ He paused and swigged tea. ‘What’s wrong with the cat?’ he said, so that anyone coming in at that moment, Alan thought, would have supposed him to be enquiring after the health of the family pet.
    Alan went back into the garden. Passing the window of Pop’s bed-sit, he noticed that the gas fire was full on. Pop kept his gas fire on all day and, no doubt, half the night from September till May whether he was in his room or not. Pam had told him about it very politely, but he only said his circulation was bad because he had hardening of the arteries. He contributed nothing to the gas bill or the electricity bill either, and Pam said it wasn’t fair to ask anything from an old man who only had his pension. Alan dared to say, How about the ten thousand he got from selling his own house? That, said Pam, was for a rainy day.
    Back in the house, having put the garden tools away, he found his daughter. His reading had taught him that the young got on better with the old than with the middle-aged, but that didn’t seem to be so in the case of his children and Pop. Here, as perhaps in other respects, the authors had been wrong.
    Jillian ignored Pop, never speaking to him at all, and Pam, though sometimes flaring and raving at her while Jillian flared and raved back, was generally too frightened of her to reprove her when reproof was called for. On the face of it, mother and daughter had a good relationship, always chatting to each other about clothes and things they had read in magazines, and when they went shopping together they always linked arms. But there was no real communication. Jillian was a subtle little hypocrite, Alan thought, who ingratiated herself with Pam by presenting her with the kind of image Pam would think a fifteen-year-old girl ought to have. He was sure that most of the extra-domestic activities she told her mother she went in for were pure invention, but they were all of the right kind: dramatic society, dressmaking class, evenings spent with Sharon whose mother was a teacher and who was alleged to be helping Jillian with her French homework. Jillian always got home by ten-thirty because she knew her mother thought sexual intercourse invariably took place after ten-thirty. She said she came home on the last bus, which sometimes she did, though not alone, and Alan had once seen her get off the pillion of a boy’s motor-bike at the end of Martyr’s Mead.
    He wondered why she bothered with deception, for if she had confessed to what she really did Pam could have done little about it. She would only have screamed threats while Jillian screamed threats back. They