Free Last Post by Robert Barnard

because my parents kept the village shop there. Long since gone, of course. I got to know May when I was working in the local Inland Revenue office in Halifax, and commuting to and from Crossley every day.”
    Eve thought.
    â€œYou say you got to know May. Not May and John? Didn’t you get to know my father?”
    â€œJohn? Oh yes, I got to know him. Though perhaps know is too strong a word. We’d go to the local sometimes of an evening, maybe even drive out for a pub meal. He was around the house if I went there, maybe thinking up the bubble for the next day’s cartoon. That was about it really.”
    â€œDo you mean that my mother was the dominant partner?”
    Jean looked surprised that she needed to ask.
    â€œOh, I should think so. No: I know so. You could simply tell in all their exchanges, in the way they organized their lives. John was probably the prime earner in the household: teachers were even worse paid then than they are now. John had his regular cartoon shot in the Glasgow Tribune, and he did a political cartoon for them quite often, when something struck home. He did a whole series of hard-hitting ones at the time of the Profumo affair, which were still being shown around years later when they both came to Crossley. He was technically a freelance, and was published all over, but he was still close to the Tribune . I remember that he occasionally did comment pieces—he was an artist first, but a writer second. In spite of all that, it was always May who made the decisions. That was her nature, I suppose. And his to accept it.”
    â€œDid they marry after she came down to Crossley?”
    â€œOh no. They were married long before that, and you were not born until later. She’d stressed in interviews that they were anxious to have a child, and that John would be a sort of house husband and father. That was to show you were not going to be neglected, but I bet it fazed some of the governors! But she carried all before her. I wouldn’t describe it as just by force of character. She didn’t hector or bully—not then or ever. It was the force of her integrity. She was so obviously in love with her job, regarded it as a sort of mission. But there are other people closer to her at work who can tell you about that side of her life better than I can.”
    â€œYes, of course there are,” said Eve, wondering how Jean knew so much. “I was particularly interested in what you said about her home life—her marriage, for instance.”
    â€œAs I mentioned, I can’t really tell you much about that because I didn’t see a lot of it. Often John was away in Glasgow—the paper insisted on that. Or often we—May and I—would go out together to concerts, or maybe have a meal together, all the different things that young people liked to do then.”
    â€œIt’s a long time ago,” said Eve neutrally. She was skeptical: was this really what the young women liked to go around doing in about 1970? “I was talking at the funeral to the only other family member there—Aunt Ada we called her, though she was really my mother’s cousin.”
    â€œAunt Ada . . . Ada . Not a name you hear nowadays. It rings a vague bell. Was she a rather nasty and silly person?”
    â€œYes, I think she probably is.”
    â€œ Is, I should have said. There was at the time one of May’s relations who somehow got the idea that May and I were lesbians. That wouldn’t be her, would it?”
    â€œI rather think it would.”
    Jean became lost in reminiscent thought.
    â€œShe had a quite extraordinary obsession about it. Actually followed us sometimes—to watch what we were doing. Once we realized it we put on a bit of a show for her. Then May got scared that she might be reporting back to the school governors, or the Halifax Council’s Education Committee, so we stopped that. I can’t imagine what Ada would be