Read Online Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online Page A

her friends to help anyone at any time, then there would be no conceivable need for socialism. The trouble with socialism, thought Joan, was either that it told you to do what you were going to do anyway, and therefore made you not want to do it, or else it took things out of your hands and did them worse than you would have done, but at far greater expense.
    Joan was an implacable Utopian, envisaging a world where individuals were responsible, rather than the state, and it was she and her husband, the Major, who would one day start a revolution whose aim was independence from Waverley Borough Council.
    Mrs Mac and Mrs Mac’s sister considered Joan’s offer; they had many old friends and relations to visit in the graveyard. ‘I’ll just go in and ask Mac,’ said Mrs Mac, and in she went, to see what her husband thought. ‘Mac, dear,’ she asked him, ‘Joan’s offered to take us up to the churchyard. Would you like to come?’
    It was often hard for Mrs Mac to get Mac to pay attention; he seemed to exist for much of the time in a state of profound contemplation, his head bowed, and his hands folded in his lap; extreme age had reduced him to the semblance of a philosopher. Mrs Mac repeated her question more loudly, and Mac raised his hoary head slowly. Their eyes met, and Mac’s mouth twitched at the corners into the slightest of smiles. He nodded. Mrs Mac went back outside and told Joan, ‘Mac says that he’d like to come. I do hope that that’s all right. Of course, if it’s any trouble …’
    Joan had been prepared for this; Mrs Mac was notorious for consulting Mac about every single thing, always running back and forth from the garden gate to the house, and more often than not she took him with her, talking to him continuously and very loudly in public, so that people who did not know her looked at her askance, and giggled to each other. Mrs Mac was growing deaf, and did not realise just how public her monologue was.
    Mrs Mac went back indoors to fetch Mac and re-emerged with one arm akimbo, so that Mac could thread his own arm through, for support. ‘Good morning, Mac,’ said Joan, who was used to their ways, and Mrs Mac said, ‘Mac says “Good morning”, don’t you, Mac?’ She turned to her sister and said, ‘Let’s put Mac in the middle. Then we can share him. Doesn’t know his luck, does he?’
    Mrs Mac had to cope with Mac’s usual disorientation, and spent some time coaxing him into the back of Joan’s Rover. Joan patted the gatepost cat on the head, being rewarded with the usual impartial hiss, and then she picked holly from the hedge by the bank, so that she could give it to Mrs Mac and her sister, for their loved ones’ graves. She already had variegated holly and ivy from her own garden in the boot of the car, but was determined that they should go in a vase beneath the window to St Peter, whose church it was. She had the reputation of a flower arranger
sans pareil
, and her husband, the Major, had often remarked that if she had chosen an art form less ephemeral, she might easily have become quite as famous as Picasso, but with considerably more justice. Joan was immodestly proud of her facility with sprigs and flowers, and rightly so.
    Joan drove carefully past the convent at the apex of the hill, because the nuns had a habit of emerging from their driveway at full tilt, without looking to right or left, and then she drove just as carefully through the central cluster of the village. Here the road was only a few feet wide, very sinuous, and just as likely to be carrying upon it a carload of jeopardous brides of Christ. Equally one might be run upon by Miss Agatha Feakes in her antique car, often with a piebald goat on the back seat, her white hair flying as she pumped the horn in lieu of using her brakes. They passed the hedging and ditching man, who, amid the steam of his own breath, was contemplating the skull of a fox that he had just found in the ditch. ‘Alas, poor Foxick,’