and freedom and your job and who could blame you? You hate spending your days in the sickroom and your evenings washing up.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘It’s grim. I don’t suppose a salt mine could be much worse.’
‘Colder. And darker.’
I explained about the forty-watt bulbs. ‘The worst thing about it is that I don’t feel I’m doing any good,’ I concluded. ‘I could put up with it if I saw the least sign of improvement. My mother barely speaks to me and never gets any better. She seems to prefer Mrs Treadgold’s company to mine. She’s our daily. Though, heaven knows, my mother grumbles all the time about how clumsy she is. No matter how hard I try, tidying rooms, arranging flowers and so on, the entire place feels like a mausoleum for flies. When I planted some heliotrope in the urns on the terrace they went from a healthy green to brown in three days and died. I’m sure Brough watered them with weed-killer. He hates anyone to interfere with his pogrom against Nature.’
‘Can’t Mrs Threadbare do the nursing? It would save your father the cost of your keep.’
‘Treadgold. He’s actually talking about cutting down her hours. I think I might kill myself if he does.’
‘You wouldn’t consider jumping bail?’
‘What, going away and leaving them to it?’ I shook my head. ‘I admit I’ve once or twice considered it. But I can’t. I don’t trust my father and my brother to look after my mother properly.’
‘I thought you’d say that. You’ve a tender conscience.’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Do you think anyone would even ask me to devote myself to domestic vassalage? Of course not. Partly because I’m a man. And because they’d know I’d be useless. But just suppose for the sake of argument they did. I wouldn’t dream of agreeing to do it. I might put up with boredom and discomfort and the suppression of my immediate pleasure for a brief period if it was in my own interest to do so. I endure things like today’s lunch because that’s part of my job, which is supremely important to me. You, on the other hand, put up with the lunch solely to please your father.’
‘I did escape the major part of it.’
‘True. That gives me hope for you. But most people are thoroughly selfish, Roberta, and if you don’t make a fight for survival you’ll be in danger of being trampled underfoot in the rush.’
‘You make me sound feeble-minded and spineless. A doormat. I’ve always thought of myself as being someone who knew what she wanted and who went out to get it. But I hope not at other people’s expense. I know that sounds revoltingly sanctimonious,’ I added apologetically.
‘That’s quite right and proper and it’s what we’ve all been taught. But the doing of it’s so much harder than the theory would have it. If virtue is its own reward, it explains why there isn’t much goodness in the human race. I’m like everyone else in that it gives me pleasure to do good to others. I’m happy to make the relevant telephone calls, write the necessary letters, have a word in someone’s ear. I might even undertake an arduous journey or put myself through a whole evening of dreariness if it benefited someone who deserved my help. But these would be trivial privations. I should never throw away the things that make me what I am, the mainsprings of my happiness. My work, my love, my greater good.’
It occurred to me then that we might not be talking simply about the sacrifice of my joie de vivre to serfdom. Was there the suggestion that I might be giving up a valuable contribution to my happiness by withstanding his advances? Then I reminded myself that he had made none.
‘Beware the man who begins by telling you that you’ve got life all wrong,’ Kit interrupted. ‘It’s a prelude to him telling you how right you can get it if you’ll only do exactly what he tells you. And before you can say “Family Planning Clinic” you’re too busy sending him to heaven a dozen times a day to fret about a modus vivendi.’
‘Should you be exposing your own sex as a band of cynical, intriguing libertines?’
‘I’m not saying we’re all the same. Or even that the new Minister for Culture is such a one. Merely remarking that there are some snakes out there, coiled seductively in the grass. Anyway, tell me how the evening ended.’
It had ended without incident. Simon, having satisfied his thirst for speed, drove us slowly over the thin gravel beneath the horse chestnuts that lined the drive and drew up by the front steps of Cutham Hall. The house was in darkness except for a faint light from the third storey where Oliver slept.
‘Thank you for a marvellous evening.’
‘It was angelic of you to come out at such short notice.’
As the interior light flashed on I grabbed my coat and hopped out rather quickly, conscious of Simon standing to attention, his hand on the open door. Then I turned and bent my head to look back into the car. ‘I hope your meeting goes well tomorrow.’
He looked at me solemnly but again there was in his eyes something that made me suspect he might be laughing at me. ‘Thanks. Goodnight, Roberta.’
‘Goodnight.’
I smiled but probably, as my face was in shadow, he did not see me. I watched the red tail lights disappear among the deeper shadows of the chestnuts with feelings composed equally of relief and regret. Well, to be strictly truthful, there might have been a predominance of the latter. But, anyway, it hardly mattered. I was quite sure that the invitation would not be repeated.
Ten days passed in which I performed my duties with a lightened heart. Being reminded that there was fun to be had and that there were people who did not find me provoking (my mother), self-willed (my father), or bossy (Oliver) was good for my morale.
None the less it was a difficult time. Every day Oliver got up at tea-time and wrote feverishly during the night, covering pages of foolscap which the next morning I collected from the floor of his room where they lay in crumpled heaps round an empty waste-paper basket. I lent him money from my precious and dwindling fund to buy more paper. Also some biros to replace the fountain pen that leaked and was gradually staining his hands and face until he resembled an Ancient Briton decorated with woad.
My mother had been grumbling about the lumpiness of her mattress. I had a new one sent from Worping. Her complaints trebled, this time about its hardness. She sulked for a whole day when I gave her a piece of toast with her lunchtime consommé in an attempt to persuade her to eat something more nourishing than walnut whips and the violet creams that she devoured daily by the half-pound. The woman who owned the sweet shop had had to place an extra order with the wholesalers to keep up with demand. When the physiotherapist came my mother drew her sheet over her head and refused to speak to her.
‘Poor old thing,’ said the physiotherapist, whose name was Daphne, as I accompanied her to the front door. ‘They get awkward, you know. We’ll be the same, I dare say, when we’re her age.’
‘She’s only fifty-one,’ I said.
‘Never!’ Daphne riffled through a sheaf of notes. ‘Well, goodness gracious, you’re right! Dear, dear! And I’d thought she must be seventy-odd. She’s such a bad colour! And her hair’s that thin you can see her scalp.’ This was true. The quantity of hair I brushed daily from her pillow could have stuffed the offending mattress. ‘You’d better get the doctor to her.’
‘She refuses to see one.’
Daphne tut-tutted as she manoeuvred her hips behind the wheel of her tiny car. ‘Well, I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no point in my coming any more. Ta ta, love. I’d get someone in for definite.’
As I watched her chug down the drive, I wondered what I ought to do. I managed to catch my father by the front door, just as he was going out.
‘There’s nothing wrong with your mother that a bit of effort on her part wouldn’t cure,’ he said. ‘It’s all