Mrs Carson helped her to her feet. A.J.L. hovered solicitously. Outsize Dorothy picked up the cup and saucer.
‘I’m quite all right,’ Michael’s mother kept repeating. ‘There was something slippy on the floor, I’m quite all right.’
She was led to a chair by A.J.L. ‘I think we’d best call on Sister,’ he said. ‘Just to be sure.’
But she insisted that she was all right, that there was no need to go bothering Sister. She was as white as a sheet.
Michael’s father and Gillian came up to her and said they were sorry. Michael could see Tichbourne and Carson nudging one another, giggling. For a moment he thought of running away, hiding in the attics or something. Half a buttered bun had got stuck to the sleeve of his mother’s maroon coat when she’d fallen. Her left leg was saturated with tea.
‘We’ll drive you into town,’ his father said. ‘Horrible thing to happen.’
‘It’s just my elbow,’ his mother whispered. ‘I came down on my elbow.’
Carson and Tichbourne would imitate it because Carson and Tichbourne imitated everything. They’d stand there, pretending to be holding a cup of tea, and suddenly they’d be lying flat on their backs. ‘I think we’d best call on Sister,’ Carson would say, imitating A.J.L.
His father and Gillian said goodbye to Outsize Dorothy and to A.J.L. His mother, reduced to humble silence again, seemed only to want to get away. In the car she didn’t say anything at all and when they reached Sans Souci she didn’t seem to expect Michael to go in with her. She left the car, whispering her thanks, a little colour gathering in her face again.
That evening Michael had dinner with Gillian and his father in the Grand. Tichbourne was there also, and Carson, and several other boys, all with their parents. ‘I can drive a few of them back,’ his father said, ‘save everyone getting a car out.’ He crossed the dining-room floor and spoke to Mr Tichbourne and Mr Carson and the father of a boy called Mallabedeely. Michael ate minestrone soup and chicken with peas and roast potatoes. Gillian told him what the twins had been up to and said his father was going to have a swimming-pool put in. His father returned to the table and announced that he’d arranged to drive everyone back at nine o’clock.
Eating his chicken, he imagined his mother in Sans Souci, sitting on the edge of the bed, probably having a cry. He imagined her bringing back to London the stuff she’d bought for a picnic in her room. She’d never refer to any of that, she’d never upbraid him for going to the Grand for dinner when she’d wanted him to be with her. She’d consider it just that she should be punished.
As they got into the car, his father said he’d drive round by Sans Souci so that Michael could run in for a minute. ‘We’re meant to be back by a quarter past,’ Michael said quickly. ‘I’ve said goodbye to her,’ he added, which wasn’t quite true.
It would perhaps have been different if Tichbourne and Carson hadn’t been in the car. He’d have gone in and paused with her for a minute because he felt pity for her. But the unattractive façade of Sans Souci, the broken gate of the small front garden and the fishermen gnomes would have caused further nudging and giggling in his father’s white Alfa-Romeo.
‘You’re sure now?’ his father said. ‘I’ll get you there by a quarter past.’
‘No, it’s all right.’
She wouldn’t be expecting him. She wouldn’t even have unpacked the picnic she’d brought.
‘Hey, was that your godmother?’ Tichbourne asked in the dormitory. ‘The one who copped it on the floor?’
He began to shake his head and then he paused and went on shaking it. An aunt, he said, some kind of aunt, he wasn’t sure what the relationship was. He hadn’t thought of saying that before, yet it seemed so simple, and so right and so natural, that a distant aunt should come to a confirmation service and not stay, like everyone else, in the Grand. ‘God, it was funny,’ Carson said, and Tichbourne did his imitation, and Michael laughed with his friends. He was grateful to them for assuming that such a person could not be his mother. A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard knew she was his mother, and so did the Reverend Green, but for the remainder of his time at Elton Grange none of these people would have cause to refer to the fact in public. And if by chance A.J.L. did happen to say in class tomorrow that he hoped his mother was all right after her fall, Michael would say afterwards that A.J.L. had got it all wrong.
In the dark, he whispered to her in his mind. He said he was sorry, he said he loved her better than anyone.
A Complicated Nature
At a party once Attridge overheard a woman saying he gave her the shivers. ‘Vicious-tongued,’ this woman, a Mrs de Paul, had said. ‘Forked like a serpent’s.’
It was true, and he admitted it to himself without apology, though ‘sharp’ was how he preferred to describe the quality the woman had referred to. He couldn’t help it if his quick eye had a way of rooting out other people’s defects and didn’t particularly bother to search for virtues.
Sharp about other people, he was sharp about himself as welclass="underline" confessing his own defects, he found his virtues tedious. He was kind and generous to the people he chose as his friends, and took it for granted that he should be. He was a tidy man, but took no credit for that since being tidy was part of his nature. He was meticulous about his dress, and he was cultured, being particularly keen on opera – especially the operas of Wagner – and on Velázquez. He had developed his own good taste, and was proud of the job he had made of it.
A man of fifty, with hair that had greyed and spectacles with fine, colourless rims, he was given to slimming, for the weight he had gained in middle age rounded his face and made it pinker than he cared for: vanity was a weakness in him.
Attridge had once been married. In 1952 his parents had died, his father in February and his mother in November. Attridge had been their only child and had always lived with them. Disliking – or so he then considered – the solitude their death left him in, he married in 1953 a girl called Bernice Golder, but this most unfortunate conjunction had lasted only three months. ‘Nasty dry old thing,’ his ex-wife had screamed at him on their honeymoon in Siena, and he had enraged her further by pointing out that nasty and dry he might be but old he wasn’t. ‘You were never young,’ she had replied more calmly than before. ‘Even as a child you must have been like dust.’ That wasn’t so, he tried to explain; the truth was that he had a complicated nature. But she didn’t listen to him.
Attridge lived alone now, existing comfortably on profits from the shares his parents had left him. He occupied a flat in a block, doing all his own cooking and taking pride in the small dinner parties he gave. His flat was just as his good taste wished it to be. The bathroom was tiled with blue Italian tiles, his bedroom severe and male, the hall warmly rust. His sitting-room, he privately judged, reflected a part of himself that did not come into the open, a mysterious element that even he knew little about and could only guess at. He’d saved up for the Egyptian rugs, scarlet and black and brown, on the waxed oak boards. He’d bought the first one in 1959 and each year subsequently had contrived to put aside his January and July Anglo-American Telegraph dividends until the floor was covered. He’d bought the last one a year ago.
On the walls of the room there was pale blue hessian, a background for his four tiny Velázquez drawings, and for the Toulouse-Lautrec drawing and the Degas, and the two brown charcoal studies, school of Michelangelo. There was a sofa and a sofa-table, authenticated Sheraton, and a Regency table in marble and gold that he had almost made up his mind to get rid of, and some Staffordshire figures. There was drama in the decoration and arrangement of the room, a quite flamboyant drama that Attridge felt was related to the latent element in himself, part of his complicated nature.