Toast by Nigel Slater Read Free Book Online Page B

boat and passed round the table. There was a fight, albeit a silent one, to get to the cream jug before Auntie Fanny. Brought up in a family that had never known cream, she was making up for it now, taking almost half the jugful. You could barely see her slice of pudding under it. ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough cream there, Auntie?’ my brother would say, followed by a glaring scowl from my father. He aimed it at Adrian but it was just as much meant for Auntie Fanny.
    It was essential to get the cream before Fanny for another reason. She had a hooked beak of a nose. An Edith Sitwell sort of a nose. And on the end of that beak there was a permanent dewdrop of thin, clear snot. I can neverremember her without it, apart from a few seconds after she wiped it with her flowery hanky and tucked it up the sleeve of one of her baby-blue or lemon cardigans.
    When she got to the cream first, five pairs of eyes would focus intently on the glistening bud at the end of her nose, everyone willing the shining bead not to drop until she passed the cream jug on to someone else. Except me. I prayed that one day it would happen, and wondered what everyone would do if it did. Would we have to open another tin? Would my father cover Auntie’s embarrassment by just stirring it in and slopping it over his pud? I sat there, my fists clenched in my lap, willing, begging it to happen. I would have relished it. Even more so if no one but me had noticed.

Crisps, Ketchup and a Few Other Unmentionables
    I am not certain everything is going well at Dad’s factory. He’s been quiet lately, pensive, distant, coming in tired and late. I heard him use a low, angry voice on the phone the other night. Another night he looked crestfallen when I went into the kitchen to say hello to him. Like I was a nuisance. He hasn’t let me sit on his lap for weeks. ‘Not just now,’ he says.
    He spends a lot of time in deep discussion with my mother and when he laughs it is like he cannot stop, thenends up with tears rolling down his cheeks. After that his mood changes and he lets me climb up on his lap.
    My father and his partner Joe Ward built that business up from nothing, taking over a vast disused munitions factory and turning it into something of a gold mine. He employed about twenty men in the factory, a secretary and a clerk who did ‘the books’. There used to be an air of excitement, a barely hidden pride about how well the business was doing. He seemed to come home weary now, like he had had enough. Two years earlier, he had been investigated by the Inland Revenue for selling scrap metal from the factory, offcuts mostly, for cash. After that there was more bookwork, so much so that he and my mother used to sit for hours in the kitchen, the table barely visible under piles of receipts on wooden spikes and long hardback books with endless columns of figures and swirly, Florentine endpapers. The two of them could be there all evening, my mother on one side of the table, him on the other. Sometimes he would come and take the whisky bottle and two glasses from the bookcase-cum-drinks cabinet.
    I remember one night – they had just started doing ‘the books’ at home – when I saw something on television about President Kennedy being shot. I went in to the kitchen to tell them he was dead and they told me not to make up stories. ‘But it’s true, it’s on the television,’ I pleaded. My father threatened me with a good hiding if I didn’t stop telling tales.
    â€˜I’m sorry, darling,’ Mum said when she came into the sitting room and saw the news unfolding on the television. She just stood there, her hand clasped to her mouth, gasping, ‘I just can’t believe it.’
    â€˜I told you,’ I said, hot and frustrated that they hadn’t believed me.
    Half an hour later my father came in with a packet of crisps. ‘Have these,’ he said. It would be the nearest