Rex was tempted to pop out to the phone box, barely a minute’s walk away, but hauled temptation firmly back. He must keep his promise, at least till the evening was over. He looked at the clock. Seven and a half hours to go. How on earth was he going to bear it?
Sue had cleared away after supper, stacked the dishes in the sink and was now laying the table for breakfast. Upturned shiny brown cereal bowls, bunny egg cups, ill-matched cutlery and a scruffy plastic tub of home-made muesli with a label designed by herself.
Overhead, music thumped loudly as Amanda supposedly did her homework. Sue always thought of her offspring as Amanda. Allowing her to name the child had been one of the last indulgences that Brian had seen fit to bestow. Even then he had not had the generosity to conceal his displeasure at her choice. Pretentious. Snobbish. Affected. The baby had been ‘Mandy’ from the day of her birth and, once Brian had really got the hang of high-rise /comprehensive linguistic mores, ‘Mand.’
Sue turned on the gas heater over the sink, which popped fiercely. She made a lot of noise washing the dishes, for Brian was in the downstairs loo which opened directly off the kitchen. He never attempted to go about his business quietly, regarding any such discretion as nothing more than middle-class prudishness. Sue, on the other hand, would put toilet paper in the bottom of the bowl if visitors were present, to silence the splash. And as for doing plip-plops, well . . .
Now, after an especially defiant raspberry, she heard the squeak of the transom window opening. Brian emerged, doing up his zip. Crossing to the table, he started to fiddle with some school papers, standing them on end, jigging them into neatness, laying them on one side, tapping them level, turning them upright, jigging them again. Sue, tea towel in hand, bared her teeth in a silent grimace and stared out of the window.
Brian had his back to her. His jeans fell, straight as a yard of tap water, from waist to ankle. Sue remembered a friend at teacher-training college saying ‘Never trust a man with no bottom’.
She walked through the sitting room with the bread board, opened the front door and tipped the crumbs into the garden. Gerald’s halogen lamp was on. Sue walked down the path and looked out along the pavement. Parked on the forecourt of Plover’s Rest was a long, low silvery Mercedes. She rushed back into the kitchen, where Brian had fallen into the only armchair and was tackling the Guardian crossword.
‘Brian . . . Brian . . .’
‘Now what are you getting excited about?’ He spoke as if she spent her entire life in a ferment of agitation.
‘Max Jennings is here.’
‘I think not. It’s barely ten past seven.’
‘Who else could it be?’
‘Who else could what be?’
‘The car.’
‘Your grammar’s more bizarre than your cooking, woman. And that’s saying something.’ Brian had an irritating, snickery little laugh. He gave it now. Hyuf, hyuf.
‘If you don’t believe me, go and look.’
‘I can see I’ll have no peace until I do.’ Sighing, Brian made a great show of marking the crossword clue as if it was a riveting passage in some vastly long epic, drew on his knitted hat and gloves, which were keeping warm on the Aga, and strode out into the cold dark.
He stared sternly at the German beauty gleaming like pulsing steel in the hard white glare. It struck him as deeply unsatisfactory. Not in any way the sort of vehicle you would expect the child of cruel, poverty-stricken parents with an inclination to suicide to be riding around in. He rushed back in out of the cold.
‘He must be pretty insecure to need a car like that.’ Brian picked up his paper, sighing and smoothing it carefully, though it had not been touched since he flung it down. ‘Now . . . “Friday’s child gives one a thrill”.’
‘Frisson.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘What?’
‘I do the crossword.’
‘Why can’t we both do it?’
‘Because you always hold me up.’
Sue dried the last dish and hung the tea towel neatly over the metal arm of the sink heater. ‘We’ll have to go soon anyway.’
‘There’s fifteen minutes yet. We don’t all drop everything and jump to it just because someone semi-famous blows a whistle.’
Sue’s round moon face flushed. Over her head Take That increased in volume. Amanda clomped down the stairs, in her weighty platform shoes, clomped into the kitchen and over to the fridge.
‘Hi, Mand.’ Brian immediately put the Guardian down and bestowed upon his daughter’s back an alert and interested look. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Awri.’