Read Online Every Day Is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel - Free Book Online

know.” She ignored his hand. “I don’t know anything about pulse-rates.”
    “Am I embarrassing you?”
    “No.”
    “I thought I might be embarrassing you.”
    “Do I look embarrassed?”
    “No, I must admit, you look quite calm. I had to say all this, I hope you understand why. I couldn’t have lived with it for another week. To tell the truth, I can’t stand seeing you only once a week. Will you meet me some other night?”
    “Where?”
    He was aghast. “You will?”
    She gave him a level stare. “I didn’t say whether I would or not, I said ‘Where?’”
    “Wherever you like. I’ll collect you. I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?”
    “I’ll write down my address.”
    “Have you got a pen?”
    “Of course,” she said, “I have a pen.” She took a small pad out of her bag, scribbled her address, and handed him the leaf. He put it in his wallet. His face showed disbelief.
    “I live with my father,” she said.
    “Do you? I didn’t think…”
    “Why not?”
    “I imagined you having a flat somewhere. With other girls. You know. To be honest I’m glad. I couldn’t see myself calling at a flat for you. I wouldn’t like to, you know, present myself.”
    “You don’t think you’re presentable?”
    “What about your mother, is she…?”
    “Dead.”
    “Sorry. Will you introduce me to your father?”
    “I don’t think you’d have much in common. He’s old…he’s retired. He was a bank manager. He has hobbies.”
    “Oh yes?”
    “Early railways. Numismatics. Military history.”
    Colin smiled. “I’ll have to take some more evening classes.”
    “I’d rather you didn’t meet.”
    “Would he disapprove of you…going out with me?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t imagine what his opinion would be.”
    “Aren’t you close?”
    “We lead our own lives.”
    “Isn’t it a bit dull, living at home?”
    “No. It’s not dull.” She leaned forward. “So, Colin, am I right? Are you discontented?”
    “Of course I am.”
    “And do you think you will ever leave them?”
    “Yes, I…” He dropped his eyes, shifted his feet a little under the table. “Yes, I think it quite possible that one day soon I won’t find it possible to go on as I am.”
    Colin drained his half-pint. He took out a clean folded handkerchief and dabbed his top lip with it. Already he was making giant strides.
     
    Out in the conservatory. It is not really worthy of the name, just a glass lean-to at the back of the house, but Evelyn calls it the conservatory. There have never been plants in it. Clifford had not been much of a gardener. Get some flagstones down, had been Clifford’s idea. Muriel could not tell flagstones from gravestones. She referred to them as such. Her morbid fancy has by now taken a thorough grip on Evelyn, who often imagines she is walking on the dead.
    Out in the conservatory are Clifford’s collections. Newspapers: the local Reporter for all the years they had lived at Buckingham Avenue. There was no topic which had interested him, no local good work or sport or sewerage scheme. He had merely laid them aside in the spare room, week after week. After his death Evelyn had left them for a while, and then, sensing that the room was needed, had dashed them in great bales down the stairs and humped them along the hallway and out through the back door. It is absurd to say, she tells Muriel, that we do not have newspapers. They are all there, with stopped clocks and defunct lightbulbs and a mousetrap, postcards from relatives escaped to Bournemouth, Little Dorrit with the back off, a cakestand, a china duck, a railway timetable from 1954. They yellow and moulder. In a lesser neighbourhood, there would be rats. Perhaps there are.
    Muriel often comes to sit here. She thinks it as good and orderly as anywhere in the house. Sometimes she looks insidethe decaying cardboard boxes which are piled almost to the roof. There is dust an inch thick in places, spiders’ webs like veils from