On Loving Josiah by Olivia Fane Read Free Book Online Page A

course. And the difference in our ceremony will be that he will provide for you, rather than you for him.’
    ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Dr Fothering, sipping at the mug of vodka. His last sober thought was that he should go and visit Eve and Gibson at their home in a couple of days, when he was feeling a little better. He tried to remember when it was exactly that he had lost control of the conversation, but he felt confident that if he had an opportunity of beginning again, all would somehow right itself. Meanwhile he was enjoying a free-floating, rather pleasant sensation of nothing being either important or relevant; and when he heard Eve suddenly exclaim, ‘Ave Maria, Ave Maria!’ he even managed to rejoin, with surprising gusto, ‘Hallelujah!’
    ‘Yes, yes, I have it! I know exactly what our baptism needs: Latin. No proper ceremony is complete without it. Now, what Latin do you know? As godfather you have a particular duty to supply some.’
    ‘Cave canem,’ suggested Dr Fothering. ‘I’m afraid it’s all I know. You can take it or leave it.’
    ‘Well, you never know, we might be able to incorporate it somewhere,’ said Eve, graciously. ‘Gibson, you don’t know any Latin, do you?’
    But if Gibson did, he’d long since passed the speech barrier and wasn’t going to divulge it.
    ‘Now, now, wait, wait, the Latin is coming, I can feel it coming,’ and Eve closed her eyes like a medium in a trance. ‘Give me the baby! Give me Josiah!’
    ‘Asleep,’ was Gibson’s only word, as he cradled his son.
    ‘This is important, Gibson, the words are coming.’
    Gibson relented, and the pretty baby was handed over to his mother. Eve dabbed her finger in the mug of vodka which Dr Fothering was still enjoying, and tenderly placed it just above the bridge of Josiah’s nose. Her voice was solemn:
    ‘Sis sine macula
    Sis sine metu
    Sis sica inimicis
    Ama quantum bonorum
    Odia quantum malorum
    Cave canem.’
     Dr Fothering and Gibson looked blankly at her.
    ‘I shall translate, you uncultured pair,’ pronounced Eve, and did so.
    ‘May you be without stain,
    May you be without fear,
    May you be a dagger to your enemies,
    Love whomsoever is good
    Hate whomsoever is bad
    Beware the dog.’ 
    ‘Oh alas, there’s always a dog to beware, sic vita humana. Who has been the dog in your life, Dr Fothering?’  
    ‘Must Josiah be a dagger to his enemies?’  
    ‘How jolly Christian you are! I’ve always preferred the Old Testament myself. I think my little ode is quite like a psalm, don’t you?’  
    ‘I’m very impressed,’ said Dr Fothering, which he was.  
    ‘I’m going to teach Josiah Latin. He’s going to imbibe it with his mother’s milk, aren’t you darling? What a future’s in store for you, my dear one.’  
    At which news Josiah, appropriately enough, began to cry.  
    ‘Oh it won’t be as bad as all that! God, stop that! Shhhh, shhh,’ and while another mother might have offered her baby a breast, Eve was having none of that, certainly not in company, and proceeded to lift up his vest to tickle his tummy. But there was a clamp attached to the bloody stump of the umbilicus, and Eve let out a squeal when she saw it, a squeal quite worthy of Sarah Bernhardt herself confronted with a dead body.  
    A nurse, then two, ran over to see what had happened, followed seconds later by the ward sister herself, who’d already written a note in her book about Gibson putting an unwashed finger in the baby’s mouth; and hot on her heels of her was Roger Bolt, who’d already been discussing Gibson’s unwashed finger in earnest for at least ten minutes, and they’d been saying what a shame it was that the courts were powerless to make some kind of Parenting Order, by which parents could be forced to go somewhere and learn about germs and so forth, and they had both agreed that parents were very ignorant nowadays.  
    What met them were two men sitting on the bed, one drunk, the other dirty, while