Mischief by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online Page B

case no coffee available on a motorway was worth stopping for. It would be instant, not real. Why hadn’t Minette brought a Thermos, he enquired, when she ventured to suggest they stopped. Because we don’t own a Thermos, she wanted to cry, in her impossible mood, because you say they’re monstrously over-priced, because you say I always break the screw; in any case it’s not the coffee I want, it’s for you to stop, to recognise our existence, our needs – but she stopped herself in time. That way quarrels lie, and the rare quarrels of Edgar and Minette, breaking out, shatter the neighbourhood, not to mention the children. Well done, Minette.
    ‘Just as well we didn’t go to Italy,’ said Edgar, on the night of Mona’s fever, measuring out, to calm the mother-damaged, fevered cheek, the exact dosage of Junior Aspirin recommended on the back of the packet (and although Minette’s doctor once instructed her to quadruple the stated dose, if she wanted it to be effective, Minette knows better than to say so), dissolving it in water, and feeding it to Mona by the spoonful though Minette knows Mona much prefers to suck them – ‘if this is what half an hour’s English sun does to her.’
    Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona. Off to Italy, camping, every year for the last six years, even when Mona was a baby. Milan, Venice, Florence, Pisa. Oh what pleasure, riches, glory, of countryside and town. This year, Minette had renewed the passports and replaced the sleeping bags, brought the Melamine plates and mugs up to quota, checked the Gaz cylinders, and waited for Edgar to reveal the date, usually towards the end of July, when he would put his ethnographical gallery in the hands of an assistant and they would pack themselves and the tent into the car, happy families, and set off, as if spontaneously, into the unknown; but this year the end of July went and the first week of August, and still Edgar did not speak, and Minette’s employers were betraying a kind of incredulous restlessness at Minette’s apparent lack of decision, and only then, on August 6, after a studied absent-mindedness lasting from July 31 to August 5, did Edgar say ‘Of course we can’t afford to go abroad. Business is rock-bottom. I hope you haven’t been wasting any money on unnecessary equipment?’
    ‘No, of course not,’ says Minette. Minette tells many lies: it is one of the qualities which Edgar least likes in her. Minette thinks she is safe in this one. Edgar will not actually count the Melamine plates; nor is he likely to discern the difference between one old lumpy navy-blue sleeping bag and another unlumpy new one. ‘We do have the money set aside,’ she says cautiously, hopefully.
    ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he says. ‘We can’t afford to drive the car round the corner, let alone to Venice. It’ll only have sunk another couple of inches since last year, beneath the weight of crap as much as of tourists. It’s too depressing. Everything’s too depressing.’ Oh Venice, goodbye Venice, city of wealth and abandon, and human weakness, glorious beneath sulphurous skies. Goodbye Venice, says Minette in her heart, I loved you well. ‘So we shan’t be having a holiday this year?’ she enquires. Tears are smarting in her eyes. She doesn’t believe him. She is tired, work has been exhausting. She is an advertising copywriter. He is teasing, surely. He often is. In the morning he will say something different.
    ‘You go on holiday if you want,’ he says in the morning. ‘I can’t. I can’t afford a holiday this year. You seem to have lost all sense of reality, Minette. It’s that ridiculous place you work in.’ And of course he is right. Times are hard. Inflation makes profits and salaries seem ridiculous. Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona must adapt with the times. An advertising agency is not noted for the propagation of truth. Those who work in agencies live fantasy lives as to their importance in the scheme of things and their