The Grandmothers Read Online Free PDF

have to guess at his condition; she knew it, because lan’s similar state had been enveloping her all night.
    Now Tom was prowling around the room, taking swipes as he passed at a chair arm, the table, a wall, returning to aim a punch at the chair next to hers, like a schoolboy unable to contain exuberance, hut then standing to stare in front of him, frowning, thinking - like an adult. Then he whirled about and was close to his mother, all schoolboy, an embodied snigger, a leer. And then trepidation - he was not sure of himself, nor of his mother, who blushed scarlet, went white, and then got up and deliberately slapped him hard, this way, that way, across the face.
    ‘Don’t you dare,’ she whispered, trembling with rage. ‘How dare you …’
    Half crouching, hands to his head, protecting it, he peered up at her, face distorted in what could have been a schoolboys blubbering, but then he took command of himself, stood and said directly to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ though neither he nor she could have said exactly what it was he was sorry for, nor what he was not to dare. Not to let words, or his face, say what he had learned of women in the night just passed, with Lil?
    He sat down, put his face in his hands, then leaped up, grabbed his swimming things and was off running into the sea, which this morning was a flat blue plate rimmed by the colourful houses of the enclosing arm of the bay opposite.
    Tom did not come into his mother’s house that day but made a detour back to Lil’s. Ian slept late - nothing new in that. He, too, found it hard to look at her, but she knew it was the sight of her, so terribly familiar, so terribly and newly revelatory, it was too much, and so he snatched up his bundle of swimming things and was off. He did not come back until dark. She had done small tasks, made routine telephone calls, cooked, stood soberly scanning the house opposite, which showed no signs of life, and then, when Ian returned, made them both supper and they went back to bed, locking the house front and back - which was something not always remembered.
    A week passed. Roz was sitting alone at the table with a cup of tea when there was a knock. She could not ignore it, she knew that, though she would have liked to stay inside this dream or enchantment that had so unexpectedly consumed her. She had dragged on jeans and a shirt, so she was respectable to look at, at least. She opened the door on the friendly, enquiring face of Saul Hutler, who lived some doors along from Lil, and was their good neighbour. He was here because he fancied Lil and wanted her to marry him.
    When he sat down and accepted tea, she waited.
    ‘Haven’t seen much of you lot recently, and I can’t get any reply at Lil’s.’
    ‘Well, it’s the school holidays.’
    But usually she and the boys, Lil and the boys, would have been in and out, and often people waved at them from the street, where they all sat around the table.
    ‘That boy, Ian, he needs a father,’ he challenged her.
    ‘Yes, he does,’ she agreed at once: she had learned in the past week just how much the boy needed a father.
    ‘I’m pretty sure I’d be a father to Ian - as much as he’d let me.’
    Saul Hutler was a well-set-up man of about fifty, not looking his age. He ran a chain of artists’ equipment shops, paints, canvases, frames, all that kind of thing, and he knew Lil from working with her on the town’s trade associations. Roz and Lil had agreed he would make a fine husband, if either of them had been looking for one.
    She said, as she had before,’ Shouldn’t you be saying this to Lil?’
    ‘But I do. She must be sick of me - staking my claim.’
    ‘And you want me to support - your claim?’
    ‘That’s about it. I think I’m a pretty good proposition,’ he said, smiling, mocking his own boasting.
    ‘I think you’d be a good proposition too,’ said Roz, laughing, enjoying the flirtation, if that was what it was. A week of lovemaking, and she was