by David Nobbs
At last, I felt ready to produce the cake.
'Some cake?'
'Thank you.'
I was being given tea by Lawrence and Jane. I could hardly bear to sit with them in the cool elegance of the sitting room of Kierkegaard, eating tiny sandwiches, cutting my piece of cake with an antique cake fork, sipping Lady Grey tea from a Royal Doulton cup.
'There's good news, Alan. Very good news,' said Lawrence. 'I've got you that sabbatical. No problem.'
'There you go,' I thought. Even Lawrence is saying 'No problem' now. The language is dead. I was surprised his invitation hadn't said 'will u come 4 t?' (Ange had shown me her text messages. Oh, Ange, Ange, Ange, to have you here now, in this room, outraging these sad people.)
A year's freedom on full pay. It was meaningless now. I tried to look enthusiastic, but I knew that I was using too many adjectives to compensate for the lack of excitement in my eyes.
'Terrific,' I said. 'That's wonderful. That's really good news. Oh, how splendid. That is exciting. Thank you, Lawrence.'
They looked at me with synchronised concern.
'How are you?' asked Jane.
'Yes, how are you,' echoed Lawrence.
'I'm fine,' I said. 'Lovely cake.'
An imp tried to persuade me to add, 'I'm trying to bake cakes. I'm having no luck.'
I resisted.
There was a slightly awkward silence.
'So,' I said, 'I gather from your card – thank you for that, incidentally . . .'
'No problem.'
'I gather that young Mallard made a bit of a mess of the Ferdinand Brinsley.'
'He was out of his depth.'
'Oh dear. I'm sorry.'
'Yes, it was sad.'
There was another slightly awkward pause.
'That girl,' said Lawrence. 'Ange, was it?'
'It was.'
'Are you still seeing her?'
'Yes. Yes. Yes.'
There was a silence, a horrible silence, a deep silence this time, not a slight silence. In the depth of the silence my stomach gurgled. I was on my third cup of tea.
I heard my father saying, 'Don't be soppy, boy. Don't be weedy. Face the music. Always better when you face the music.'
'I use the word "Yes" in a rather personal sense, meaning "No",' I said. 'She didn't turn up for her birthday. I think she's jilted me.'
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Jane's eyes and lips both said. 'Well, we did warn you', but she resisted the temptation to say the words, and I was grateful for that.
'I didn't know people used that word any more – "jilted",' said Lawrence at last.
'Lawrence!' said Jane. 'I'm sorry, Alan. Only a man who puts language before emotion could have said that.'
'I don't think Alan is in the mood to hear us washing our dirty linen in public,' said Lawrence.
'Nor to listen to clichés,' I said.
'Quite right, Alan,' said Jane sweetly. 'Well said.'
I knew that Jane was only being nice to me because she wanted to score off Lawrence, but I was grateful none the less. What an attractive face she had on the rare occasions when she wasn't looking superior.
'I hope you don't use clichés in your novels, Lawrence,' I said. 'I ought to read one some time and find out.'
He flushed slightly. Jane smirked slightly. I prided myself slightly – everything was being done in such a restrained manner, as befitted such an elegant tea – on the way I had introduced the lie that I had never read any of Lawrence's books, and could not therefore have got the poisoned cake idea from him. I felt that I was thinking of everything, minimising every risk. I think now that it shows how unhinged I was at that time. The risk was enormous. There could be no other suspect, if my mother died from poisoned cake that I had brought.
'We're sad to see you like this, Alan,' said Jane. 'Very sad . . . but, as you may well come to realise one day, it is probably the best thing for you.'
'No!' I said, with passion.
Jane frowned. My passion clashed with the room.
'No!' I repeated. 'Never. You despise her, but we have been so good for each other. We went to Italy. I taught her about Palladio and she taught me about Fellatio.'
They stared at me, open-mouthed. It was a good moment, but I was too tense to enjoy it.
I had a second slice of cake, and went home, and baked . . . the cake.
I telephoned Ange twice that evening, uncertain whether I was doing it in moments of strength or moments of weakness. Once I rang off before she had a chance to answer. The other time I hung on and on, but there was no answer machine, and no reply. I could hear the phone, ringing out over that drab street near Gallows Corner. I could smell the emptiness of the house.
Why was the house empty? Where had Ange gone? Where had her mother gone?
I was shaking as I slipped the poison into the mixture for my chocolate sponge cake, carefully following Lawrence's instructions in his book.
I was shaking as I slipped the fatal cake into my rusty old oven.
I was shaking as I removed it.
It looked good. It looked appetising. It was her favourite. There was no doubt that she would cut herself a slice.
But was it good inside? Was it too dry or too heavy or too soggy? If so, she might not eat enough.
I had to take it on trust. I couldn't cut it open to see.
I set off, in my ancient Saab, to murder my ancient mother.
TWENTY-FOUR
It seemed to take for ever, that momentous journey to the Home, the journey that I made every week. I always felt nervous, but I had never before felt this powerful mixture of dread and excitement. It was one of those days when every slow driver in the county has decided to crawl to town, frightened of entering roundabouts, willing the traffic lights to turn red before they got to them. Old men with square heads and caps, tiny women dwarfed by their steering wheels, learner drivers on their second lesson, repair men in white vans who wanted to ensure that they only had time to do three calls in the day, they were all out that afternoon.
I pulled in under the chestnut tree in the vast car park, as the sun had returned and I didn't want the cake to sag in the heat. I couldn't take the cake in with me, because, if I did, I would have to eat a piece. I would have to go out for it when I left, having pretended that I had forgotten it.
I took the carrier bag in with me, in the hope that Mother would assume the cake was in it and not ask questions.
I had an irrational hope that she would have died just before I arrived to kill her, but what were the chances of that? She looked particularly hale that day.
'Hello, dear,' she said, and she said it quite warmly, which disappointed me. I hoped that she'd be in one of her really crabby moods. She'd be easier to kill. Please don't think, incidentally, that I was finding this easy.
We exchanged the usual passionless kiss, two flaccid cheeks connecting for a second.
'Is it warm out?'
'Very.'
'I thought so. All this horrid sun.'
My mother didn't like the heat.
'Were the roads busy?'
'Very.'
'I'm glad I don't drive any more.'
I would never have to endure another conversation like this. Never ever.
But then she said, 'I've been thinking.'
'Oh?'
'You get a lot of time for thinking in here.'
'Well if you'd go downstairs . . .'
'Mrs McAllister just sits in her chair and snores, and Mrs Purkiss eats with her mouth open. You can see all the food. It looks bad enough on the plate. Who wants to see it churning around all wet in an old woman's mouth? And Miss Furlong gives that silly smile of hers all day long. I tried it, Alan, for your sake. I couldn't stand it.'
'I didn't want you to do it for my sake. I wanted you to do it for your sake.'
'Well anyway I couldn't stand it.'
Silence followed.
'Come on then, Mother,' I said. 'What have you been thinking about? You s
aid you'd been thinking.'
'I have.'
'Well, what have you been thinking about?'
It was like drawing teeth.
'Oh, this and that.'
'Oh, come on, Mother, you can't just say you've been thinking and leave it at that. You sounded as if you'd been thinking about something important.'
'I have. I've been thinking about your father.'
This was a surprise. She very rarely mentioned my father these days.
'What about him?'
'He was a good man, your father.'
'Of course he was. But?'
'What do you mean, "but"?'
'You were going to say he was a good man, but . . .'
'I wasn't. I won't hear a word against your father.'
'Of course not.'
'He was a good man. But . . .' She was choosing her words carefully, and this time I had the sense not to interrupt. '. . . he didn't understand women.'
I paused, and then said, 'In what way exactly?' very gently. I was aware that by chance my mother had chosen this very afternoon to unburden herself of something.
'He . . . didn't understand that we like to be told things.'
'What things?'
'Certain things.'
'Like?'
'Well, don't take this the wrong way, Alan, your father was a very kind man, but he never, not once ever, told me that he loved me.'
'Of course he loved you.'
'Yes, I know he loved me, but he never said it, and I wanted him to. Once would have been enough. He'd say, "Chin up, old girl" if he knew I wasn't happy, or "Well done, my girl" if I'd made him a nice meal. I mean, we were very happy, but . . . he wasn't what I would call a passionate man. We were very lucky to have you.'
'What?'
'Statistically, I mean.'
'That's a funny way of putting it, Mother.'
'Well, you know what I mean, and we weren't brought up to talk about such things. Besides, maths is part of your philosophy that you teach, isn't it?'
Of all the things a man doesn't want to hear from his mother, tales of her bad sex life must rank highly. Perhaps only tales of her good sex life would be worse.
'Anyway, that wasn't important in those days, or so we were led to believe, but it seems to have been important to the Bloomsbury Set and people like that: all sorts of things were going on that we knew nothing about in our suburbs until we read about them much later in the papers, and I must say I do feel a bit cheated. I think the way we were has a lot to do with the way you are.'
You have no idea of the way I am, Mother, not any more.
'You have been thinking.'
'You do when you get old. I haven't got very long to live, Alan. No, don't deny it.'
I wasn't going to.
'You do get to thinking in those circumstances. Your father . . . he never really noticed me, not really. He never noticed my clothes. I bought new hats and he just didn't see them. I had to say, "I've bought a new hat, Archie," and he'd say "Oh yes," and I'd say. "Do you like it?" and he'd say, "It's very nice." I had to drag it out of him, and I knew that he'd say it was very nice even if it wasn't. Then he'd say, "How much did it cost? Not that I'm worried," and I'd say "Forty pounds," when it was sixty but I didn't dare admit it, and he'd say, "Forty pounds! That seems steep. Not that it matters. We aren't paupers." Just once he was really upset by something I'd been thrilled to buy – a lovely skirt, a bit bold, I suppose – and he said, "You aren't coming out in that, are you?" '
'I'm sorry, Mother.'
'You don't need to sympathise. I don't need sympathy. We had a good life. It's just . . .'
'It could have been better.'
'I suppose you can say that about anybody's life.'
Then she said something that really did astonish me.
'Come and sit closer.'
I moved my chair up close to hers. She reached out and held my hand.
'Do I smell?' she asked shyly.
'What?'
'My breath. Does it smell?'
'No.'
'You'd tell me if it did?'
'Yes!'
'Margaret's does. It's very kind of her to come, but I dread it and she comes every month. Without fail. She's boring too. I'm very nice to her. I should get remission for good behaviour.'
'Mother!'
'Oh, I'm not complaining. I daresay I'd miss her if she didn't come, though I doubt it somehow. Alan?'
Her tone sent a shiver down my spine. It suggested that real confessions were on the way.
'What is it, Mother?'
'I've been a bad mother.'
'Mother!'
'No. I have. What it is, I needed your father to teach me how to love. It . . . it doesn't come naturally to me. I . . . but Alan, in my way, I . . .'
I waited. When it came it was little more than a whisper.
'I do love you.'
I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. I just let the incredible words sink in.
'Do you love me?'
I had dreaded the question. I respected her too much at that moment to just say 'Yes.' It was almost as if I suddenly realised that I loved my lonely old mum – I longed to call her 'Mum' – too much to give her the easy answer that I loved her.
'You haven't given me a lot of chance to love you, Mother.'
I was sweating, from emotion as well as from the heat in that stifling room, with its faint smell of the commode.
She squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers.
'It's just that . . .' she began.
'Just that?' I prompted.
'Just that . . . don't take this the wrong way, Alan, but I can't help wondering, is it our fault, is it my fault, that you're the way you are?'
'What way am I, Mother?'
'You know.'
