Goodness by Tim Parks Read Free Book Online Page A

honest. It seemed that nothing was lacking. In my defence I think I can say that had it been allowed to go on this way, I would have been the last person to want to change anything.
    Shortly after they took me up to eight grand, Mavis had a third shot at killing herself, and finally got it right: whole bottle of Disprin in the early hours and then the head in the oven for good measure. I felt a little sorry for my mother who would inevitably see this as another defeat and find cause to blame herself, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling relieved that at least this weight had been taken off her shoulders.
    Inevitably I was called in to deal with the practical side, the funeral arrangements. The difficulty here was to persuade Mother to go for a reasonably priced coffin and skip the rose tree bit at the crem which would have eaten up three months of her pension and would anyway have had to be shared with two other ‘cinderellas’, as Shirley rather quaintly putit. Likewise, when the back door was rotting away, when the fridge was faulty (occasionally defrosting itself all over the lino), when the bathroom window could never be properly shut because the wood had swollen, what on earth was the point of a wreath of pinks for mad Mavis? I did my best.
    The surprise at the cremation, though, was that Grandfather cried. He said nothing, but tears streamed from his pulpy old eyes. Sitting next to him I put an arm round his thick back to comfort him and found him trembling with emotion. Foreseeing his own funeral was the only way I could explain it, for it is indeed awesome when the coffin suddenly slides away through black curtains and you know you will see that face (however unloved) never again; doubly awesome I suppose when you expect to be providing the object lesson yourself in the not too distant future.
    It rained for the event. Peggy came late, in the last stages of gestation, accompanied by a tall blonde boy who may or may not have been the father. On trying to engage him in conversation he turned out to be Czech and spoke only the most broken English. Bob/Raschid had been informed but didn’t turn up, so that apart from the family there were only two rather mysterious spinster types in plastic macs who we eventually discovered were the other founder members of the Harrow branch of the Elvis Presley Fan Club. We let them take away the deceased’s record collection, rather generously I thought, since you never know how much that kind of stuff might be worth these days. Mavis had had no life insurance so there was no windfall to give the event any cheer, and after desultory conversation over coffee and digestives at Gorst Road everybody took their umbrellas and themselves off home.
    In the Scirocco (disc brakes all round, electric windows), Shirley rather unexpectedly said: ‘I do feel sorry for your mother though.’ And over Tandoori chicken later, because we really had to get out of the house to brighten up, she said: ‘I wouldn’t mind you know if she got your Grandfather into a home now and came to live with us. She’s okay.’
    ‘No room,’ I explained promptly.
    ‘We won’t be where we are forever.’
    I shook my head: ‘He’ll never go into a home. And so long as he’s in Gorst Road she’ll stay with him. Then you’re always saying how impossibly pious she is. Think, you’d have to stop swearing about the house, you’d . . .’
    ‘It wouldn’t be the greatest of losses,’ she said coolly. ‘One grows out of swearing.’
    Could she really be serious? When we had our lives so splendidly worked out already. ‘We’d have to cut out the quickies any time we felt like it.’ Had she thought about that?
    ‘That’s true, but I’ve always preferred the unabridged bedtime version myself.’
    I stopped eating and looked at her, her long fine face, big, prominent eyes, the curve of character in her jaw, my good-looking if rather sinewy wife. ‘Come on, come on, Shirley! She’d always be