Angel Cake by Helen Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

you.’
    ‘And you?’ said Alicia. ‘Where was it you said that you worked?’
    ‘I work in a museum,’ she replied.
    Alicia laughed a hard, hurt laugh. ‘Oh,’ she said mockingly. ‘Well, I should think you’ll feel quite at home here, then, won’t you?’
    She stood up after that and told the girl that it was time for her to go. Throughout their conversation, the sardines had been darting to and fro across the back of her mind and now she could bear it no longer. They were lined up against the side of their tin aquarium, blowing shiny rings at her through the oil.
    She showed the girl as quickly as she could to the front door.
    ‘Well, thank you for letting me in,’ the girl said in the doorway. ‘I look forward to a proper conversation next week.’
    Alicia thought, We’ll see about that. She wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to go through with this caper now. Above all, she wanted the girl to be gone. She felt her day had been disrupted long enough; she yearned for the quiet of her kitchen and her blue tea-plate.
    ‘Don’t make me keep the door open,’ she grumbled. ‘I’ll catch my death.’
    She shut it on the girl’s goodbye wave. But old habits are hard to break and, despite the call of the sardines, she couldn’t resist watching the girl go on her way. From behind the front room curtain, she watched her bend over her bicycle, unlock it and switch on the lights. She was far too young, Alicia thought critically, to wear such a tatty bit of old fox round her neck.
    *
    I don’t think I truly loved anyone before Rob. There had been other people, one or two, and I wasn’t a virgin any more, but no one whom I had really and truly adored. Unless of course you count my father and since he was largely imaginary, I don’t really think you can. He left my mother and me when I was five. He went off to South America. I always imagined he had gone for the adventure, that mymother and I had simply become too boring for such an adventurous man, but thinking over all I knew about it later, I realized he probably went after a woman. My mother’s sparse thin-lipped references to his disappearance down the years – you don’t stay that jealous of a continent.
    All I remember of my father is a shape, but I loved that shape deeply. He used to come home late, when I was already in bed and bend over me and croon, ‘Bye Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting,’ every night, a tall, thin, stoop-shouldered shape, which sometimes had a smelly pipe sticking out of it. (And my mother’s voice calling in the background, ‘Oh, Edward, don’t puff your vile smoke in the child’s face!’)
    I forgave him totally for having left my mother and me because really we were not that interesting. Through all the long seasons of my childhood, I quite saw how confined and circumscribed our life was, in our cluttered little house; just my mother and I, two old maids, one who had gladly adopted old maidhood and the other who was being reared in its ways. I imagined my father far away in Brazil, tanned and stoop-shouldered, smoking his pipe and cutting down forests to make fine furniture – he dealt in exotic timber – and it wasn’t until Rob told me in horror what people like my father were doing to the forests in Brazil that it stopped seeming a grand and glamorous activity.
    Sometimes I wonder what it was about Rob that had such a strong and immediate effect on me. We are so unalike, so unsuited I would say, if it wasn’t working so wonderfully well. Apart from the indefinable magic – what Rob calls the chemistry – I think it must have been his solidity which appealed to me, his rock-solid certainty.
    Whatever it was, everything happened remarkably quickly between us. Our first dinner was at a small Indian restaurant. I remember, with still vivid embarrassment, how I had got all dressed up for a smart evening. I had a clear idea of the kind of restaurant which a glamorous television writer would choose for a first