The Second Mister Read Online Free PDF Page A

annihilation of some hapless tribe of unarmed Gauls.
    “The Achaeans are rebelling ,” she said, “ but not to worry, I’ve gone fully gerundive.”
    I was about to express my relief and congratulate her on the aptness of her grammatical condition when she suddenly looked straight into my eyes and tried to clear her throat while still speaking to me. At first I thought she might have found some evidence of Hellenic botany in her oesophagus or larynx because her expression became extremely unpleasant.
    “ What do you want? ” she asked. “ What are you looking for?”
    “Well, I just called to see you,” I said.
    “You did?” she replied incredulously and then threw the seedling on the ground and jumped on it several times. She then held the shears close to her chest ready for any eventuality either criminal or horticultural.
    “ There is another reason actually.”
    “Have you ever considered emigrating to New Zealand?”
    “Well, not really,” I replied.
    “They say New Zealand is very nice and it’s very far away. You could grow lots of roses and cordylines and keep a pet kangaroo.”
    “Australia, Aunt. Australia is where the kangaroos are.”
    “They must have moved them.”
    I shook my head and I could immediately see a cloud of disappointment cross her face.
    “There is something else...I am about to be charged with murder.”
    “ Murder? Not larceny?” she asked, but her face looked a little more cheerful.
    “Murder.”
    “So at long last you have attained the future perfect in the passive voice!”
    I was about to assure her that I would never, in fact, have to stand trial and that my innocence would become evident in due course but it seemed a pity to intrude on her delight on a pleasant autumn afternoon; I have to admit however that I lost all inclination to leave ten pounds under her aspidistra.
    I decided to leave but she took me by the arm and in a surprisingly gentle tone said:
“ You’re turning out just like your father.”
    Her voice deceived me and I suddenly felt close to my aunt in a way that I realise with hindsight should have demonstrated to me the fragility of the defences that I had erected around myself: my ramparts and bastions were made of wax and could be melted by the slightest warmth or the most fleeting perception of affection.
    Any danger that I might be engulfed by sentimentality soon passed when Aunt Gethsemane pointed her shears in the direction of a strange conifer at the bottom of the garden. This tree would not have been out of place in a horror film as it had long hanging branches which at a distance gave the impression that they were draped with thick cobwebs.
    “ Just like your father ,” she went on. “I remember one day, not long after her marriage, your mother prevailed on me to invite them both to Sunday lunch. I left the dining room for a few minutes and when I returned your father had disappeared. I ran out to the garden and spotted him behind that tree. I had no doubt at all about what he was doing: he was casing my chamaecyparis. It would have been gone by morning if I had not caught him.”
    I was about to suggest that there might have been a less heinous explanation for my father’s behaviour when my aunt said something that changed the course of my life. There are moments which stand like great pointed rocks that always remain high above the vast ocean of existence, contemptuous of tempest and turbulence, indifferent and ineluctable, immovable and inexorable: the instant between life and death, the second which it takes to sever some fond relationship that had been enjoyed for a lifetime, the painfully drawn out but infinitesimally brief period of time that ends in the explosive revelation of the self to the self.
    “I always knew your father would end up in jail,” my Aunt said as she turned away.
    I stood in the centre of the garden unable to think or even move. An incensed army of fire breathing ants danced across the back of my belly;