Man at the Helm Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I were self-critical and rightly so. Our aim had been that they should have a drink and then have sex in her sitting room and do it enough times until they got engaged and then married. But we’d let him slip through our fingers with bad planning and shoddy execution.
    And though we agreed Mr Lomax wasn’t the ideal, we evaluated our efforts as if he had been, even though he most definitely hadn’t. It had been a mistake, we agreed, not to have offered any snacks or put on any music, and this might have led to Mr Lomax feeling uncomfortable and probably peckish and if there was one thing I knew for definite about men it was that they cannot perform sex if hungry. We also agreed that doing the play had only made things worse – especially that particular scene with Debbie and her being a bugger to lift. It wasn’t surprising that it freaked him out.
    We didn’t let it put us off, though. My sister consulted the Man List, crossed off Mr Lomax and added Bernard, our father’s chauffeur. I objected, saying he and our mother hated each other’s guts, but my sister mentioned the very fine line between love and hate (i.e., that you’re more likely to want to have sex with and marry someone you hate than someone you don’t care one way or the other about). Which, when I thought about it for long enough, made sense. Worryingly.
    With that in mind we added a semi-retired mechanic calledDenis who offered a taxi service in his Ford Zodiac – whom our mother also hated.
    I wondered if it might be simpler just to instigate a reunion with our father. My sister disagreed. In her opinion they were still chalk and cheese. Also, he’d begun to fade as a notion. It was the way with divorced fathers in those days. They tended to keep out of the picture from sheer politeness and convenience. Ditto non-divorced fathers, except with divorced ones you actually never saw them except for the odd Sunday lunch or to trudge across a field with a picnic. They were absent from your private life and this was hard on leftover boys like Little Jack because there was no man at home to show them how to make the noise of an explosion or tell them that West Germany were better than Ecuador. Not that our particular father would have been able to do either of those, but it was the principle of the thing. And, worse than that, they were absent from your public life, never attending parents’ evenings, sports days, school plays, and never seeing nature displays or topic books. They never saw you perform, excel, try, succeed, fail, and this was hard on my sister because it meant he never got to hear about her extraordinary cleverness in school and therefore couldn’t possibly admire her as much as he should. She did occasionally tell him about it but it always sounded boastful and far-fetched and it sickened all concerned, so she stopped.
    I was the least bothered by our father’s private and public absence. Probably because I was certain he’d have been a fine father if it hadn’t been for the divorce. I somehow didn’t need his reminders to save lolly sticks in case of a sudden urge to make a model of Leicester prison as he had done as a boy (albeit with matchsticks). I had a good memory and had heard plenty of his advice on life. Neither did I need his seal of approval. I just happened to think that, compared with everyone else on offer,he was the nicest and the best and, more importantly, the wellest known. He remained on the Man List, theoretically, but (before you get any ideas) there was never a romantic remarriage, there wasn’t even a try-out; we decided it was all just too tangled and unlikely, not to mention the travel.
    For the time being though, we decided we shouldn’t invite any of the other men on the list to meet our mother until we’d done more research and honed a routine. In the meantime we devised some in-between projects to cheer her up and hopefully prevent the writing of the play. My sister’s ideas were quick fixes –