Goodness by Tim Parks Read Free Book Online Page B

reproaching us for not having children, you know what she’s like. Go forth and multiply, the Christian family, and so on.’
    ‘She’s never said a word about it to me,’ Shirley said, ‘in fact I’ve always thought her admirably sensitive on that point. My own mother’s much worse.’
    ‘But you can see the reproach in her eyes, for God’s sake. She doesn’t need to say anything. That’s the whole point about my mother; she is a reproach in herself.’
    Shirley smiled. ‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, that the hang-up might be yours rather than hers, I mean, you imagine her reproaching you for things you feel guilty of anyway. You’ve substituted her for your conscience, it helps you to ignore it. You think, it’s her fault I’m feeling guilty, it’s just my stupid mum.’
    ‘Three cheers for psychoanalysis,’ I said brightly, filling my mouth with some fierce sauce or other. ‘Want to know what I dreamt last night?’
    But Shirley said: ‘Anyway, I’d really rather like to have a kid now actually. Why not? In fact that’s partly what I was meaning to talk about. We could find a bigger place, have a baby and your mum could look after it while we were at work.’

Errors of Judgement
    On reflection, one of the many errors of judgement I made with Shirley was mistaking class for intelligence, class and perhaps academic ability. They had seemed such rock-solid guarantees of personality at the time. I should have reflected: a) that any society, in its struggle to maintain the status quo, has a natural tendency to associate the manners of its ruling class with an above-average mental capacity, and; b) that girls often tend to be great and successful swots during their school years, get eight As at ‘O’ Level, or whatever the new equivalent is, but that this is no indication of true intelligence, which, on the contrary, only emerges through long-term behaviour patterns and real-life choices. I should also perhaps have reflected on the lightness, even flightness with which Shirley adopts and then drops and then perhaps readopts all sorts of opinions and points of view. One week she is pro-Israeli, the next pro-Arab, depending on who has committed the most recent atrocity; one week she will stop taking sugar because it’s bad for her skin and the next she’ll start taking it again because she needs to put on weight, she needs more energy. In short, Shirley is a person who neither has nor holds any truly deep-seated opinions, is capable of following no one particular policy. So that I should have seen that her sensible line on children (that they were too risky a business and that people who wanted good careers couldn’t afford the time a baby required and deserved – opinions that more or less reflected my own) might turn out to be short-lived. Yes, I should have seen it and been ready for it. Except that we were only eighteen when we met and I was in love with her.
    ‘You do appreciate,’ I broached it carefully back home inbed, ‘that this is a complete reversal of what you were saying only a few weeks ago. You remember? When Greg and Jilly were over and you were talking about that Ian McEwan thing you’d read. About not having children while there’s this nuclear threat. A complete reversal.’
    ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m growing up.’
    ‘But we went over this before and you promised. No kids.’
    ‘But that was years ago.’
    ‘Right. Of course it was. Those are precisely the kind of things you have to decide long range.’ And remembering something Mother once said, I told her: ‘If a person can’t keep a promise then what on earth’s the point of making one? The whole point about promises is that they bind you across time. Or no?’
    Without a word she got up, pulled on her dressing gown and went into the living room to watch TV. I stayed put in bed listening to snippets of some film, sinister music, raised voices. I went over everything that had been said. I reflected