Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar Read Free Book Online

wage war just as passionately as I would ever wage it on my own.
More
passionately. It was a prayer which harried me all night.
    But towards the morning I regained some sort of peace. Some sort of dull perspective. I could even laugh.
    “I’m afraid, God, I was probably a bit demanding! Oh dear! Perhaps you’re going to see me now as something of a handful?”
    Or wasn’t that respectful? I was glad at any rate to have kept my sense of humour—glad at any rate that even in London, and after the kind of night which I had just experienced, I could retain a vestige of my gaiety.

9
    “And,” i had said, “I
have
got a bit of money set aside.” In fact it was just over £20,000: mainly what my mother had left me.
    I hadn’t liked my mother—as the woman from the café could doubtlessly have told you. On one occasion I’d dreamt vividly that my father had returned in the dead of night, shiningly resurrected, no scars or stitches from the mine. He’d left a kiss on my forehead, an apple and a book beside my pillow and when I’d stirred and sleepily opened my eyes had winked at me outrageously, jerked his head and drawn a hand across his throat... after which he’d slowly disappeared into the wall, still blowing me kisses. I had at once pushed back the bedclothes and tiptoed into my mother’s room—and there sure enough had found her staring at the ceiling all glassy-eyed and with her throat cut. It wasn’t a nightmare. I went back to my own room and gave my hair a hundred brush strokes then got back into bed and ate the apple. “Thank you, Daddy. I do love you.” Whereupon I picked up the book he’d left me—I was always an avid reader—and started on another dream.
    But that was the one I remembered in the morning: patchily at first but coming back to me with ever-greater clarity as I lay quietly endeavouring to recall it. And before I got dressed I wrote it down in my notebook, feeling pleasantly like Coleridge Taylor, a sly Coleridge Taylor, because of always referring to my father as Lancelot and to my mother as Morgan le Fay—in case the latter should
again
take it into her head to go prying through my things. And I even thought about turning it all into a poem. But that isn’t to say I didn’t feel a bit shifty when first confronting my mother over her breakfast tray. More than a bit. After all, she again lay in the very bed from which—blank-eyed and slit from ear to ear—she had so recently been called to meet her Maker. And that morning I seem to recollect I was extra attentive to her; although by evening if not indeed midday my usual mixture of impatience and resentment had probably returned.
    Yet the money when it came did partially make up. It couldn’t wholly make up because—I don’t apologize for this—there
are
things that money can’t buy, things like fresh youth to replace the one you’ve hardly been aware of, things like lost opportunities which might conceivably have led to nothing, but which on the other hand might have led to fulfilment and serenity and new lives and passionate involvement. (Along, of course, with disinheritance!) And human nature being what it is
this
is the version you’ll unquestionably believe.
    But all the same it was nice to watch the money grow. There was a definite satisfaction in that, an excitement possibly comparable to hearing the first word or to seeing the first step.
    It had been a little under £14,000 when it came to me, a sum I’d invested nervously but with some audacity (the lady takes a gamble; the lady indeed takes quite a few!)—at bottom trusting no one, not even my stockbroker. And Sylvia, it hardly needs to be said, had never received the slightest hint.
    I wasn’t just a miser, though, as was now fully proven—at least to my own satisfaction—for otherwise how could I have been so ready after all these years to raid that cache beneath the floorboards? It was perfectly true, of course, that bricks and mortar make a sound