Read Online The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna - Free Book Online Page A

the matter was that Susan could not get Elizabeth to come out from under the dryer until she’d finished reading an article in Cosmopolitan entitled, “Does He Only Want You for Your Breasts? 10 Ways to Tell.”
    “Mother, please…” Lydia continued to eat her pudding, sitting straight-backed in the bentwood chair, chewing each mouthful slowly and thoroughly, her silver spoon dipping in and out of the bowl at regular intervals.
    “You haven’t told me much about your Women’s Institute outing. Ballymena can’t have been that uninteresting.” Lydia was steering the subject away from the post. Her mother could be a proper old Miss Marple when she applied herself—a tendency which, to Lydia’s dismay, seemed to grow stronger with age.
    “What’s any town like these days: only full of shops and vulgar pubs? And Beatrice couldn’t walk too far with her corns, so we had to sit down most of the time in tea rooms. And you know most of these places don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea. They don’t warm the pot first. Beattie and me, we could always tell right away after the first sip.”
    “Didn’t you complain?”
    “We did the first time, and the manager came out. Oh, you know the type: not long out of short trousers…a young galoot in a ready-made suit and rubber slip-ons. And he looked at Beattie and me as if we were crazy and said: ‘Ladies, where d’you think we are, Victorian England? This is a cafeteria and d’you see that big five-gallon steel vat over there that’s boilin’ and bubblin’ away? That’s the twentieth-century version of the teapot, and that big teapot serves everyone who comes in here, and I’ve never hey any complaints till now.’ (You know how they have trouble with their vowel sounds in County Antrim). And it was terrible because his voice was rising and his face was getting red and people started looking. Beattie and me were mortified.”
    “How awful.” Lydia reached for her napkin. “So what did you do?”
    “Well, I thought I’m not going to let the young pup away with that, so I said, ‘I’ll thank you to mind your manners, young man.’”
    “Good for you! And what did he say to that?”
    “Oh, he got worse. He said: ‘May I suggest that if you don’t like my tea you take your custom elsewhere, because I hey a business to run and no time to stand around here discussin’ the virtues of tea-making with a couple of oul’ buzzards like you.’”
    “The cheek of him!”
    “Exactly: the cheek of him. So we got up, and poor Beattie with her corns and all could hardly walk, and she said: ‘Don’t worry, we’re going. You’re badly brought up and I don’t mind saying it, and if you were a son of mine, I’d box the ears off you!’ And d’you know what, the people in the café gave us a round of applause as we left, and he was livid, so he was.” Elizabeth pushed the dessert bowl aside. “Is there any tea?”
    “Of course there is. I’ll make it now and I promise to heat the pot,” said Lydia, smiling. “I am sorry, Mother. That doesn’t sound as though you had such a good day after all.”
    “Oh, we got over it soon enough. We weren’t going to let that young rascal spoil the rest of our day. We treated ourselves to a few wee things. Beattie got a nice paint-by-numbers set called Horse and Foal by Lake and I bought that cottage tapestry and that pair of elastic stockings, the Wolford ones with the reinforced toes. The ones I showed you. And then later on we had a nice spread in the Lakeside Hotel. Oh, they know how to do things there…”
    Lydia got up to prepare the tea.
    “…Georg Jensen silver and that Blushing Rose china your Aunt Hattie adored. You know, she took a liking for it in Belgium when she was there in nineteen thirty-one. She went to work as an au pair to the Vansittart family. Oh, they were very grand you know, aristocratic I believe…”
    “Really…?” Lydia scarcely listened. She was used to her mother’s ramblings,