Free Man Overboard by Monica Dickens Page B

mostly Ben who knocked the lamps off their rickety tables and stands, and Geneva’s clumsier friends, like the ham-handed Major. Amy was too nimble and too familiar with the flat to knock things over, and Geneva, though neither neat nor nimble, moved among her beloved shabby possessions with the instinctive avoidance of the blind. She loved her flat, with all its quirks and inconveniences. She had not cared for her square flint house at Maidenhead any more than she had cared for the husband who had tried for twenty years to make her conform to his brutally rigid code of behaviour, and who had died without achieving it. His name had been against him from the start. Having allowed him to impose that on her, she was not going to let him get away with anything else. He would have crushed the spirit of most women. Not Geneva. Her spirit, unlike her skin, had preserved its elasticity. At seventy-two, she was stripped down to her drivingmechanism of restless energy, with a cracked laugh and an opinion about anything that came up, especially when she knew nothing about it.
    Slightly raffish in appearance, with her sparse ginger hair twisted into airedale curls, and a liking for big, shiny handbags and jewellery which clanked at her bony neck and wrists like a spectre’s chains, she was no one’s idea of a cosy grandmother. Amy and she loved each other with an independent, uncritical love which gave more than it demanded. Ben loved her too. She was one of the things he and Marion had fought about. Ben had wanted to invite Geneva out to Malta, or to stay with them at Portland. Marion did not want her because she said that her mother always had one gin too many at cocktail parties.
    Geneva lifted her skirt a little to let the warmth of the fire get at her spindly legs, and leaned back to pour her coffee back from the saucer to the cup. The coffee table was a round brass tray on legs, which gave forth a thin, resonant sound when you picked anything off it. It could never be used as a tray, because without it the legs collapsed and could not be put together again.
    Ben drank his coffee quickly. It was gritty and slightly oily, in spite of the new percolator he had given Geneva. He could make better coffee himself with an old tin mug and a can of condensed milk, but Geneva liked to do things for him. Ben’s mother would seldom sit down before lunch because of the Upstairs, but Geneva loved to drop whatever she was doing at any time of day and sit with him like this, talking, wasting the morning away, with the laundry unsorted and the sink full of breakfast dishes.
    “Another thing,” Ben said, “that makes me feel guilty. I’m fonder of you than of my mother.”
    Geneva neither protested at this nor fished for flattery. “It’s because I’m not your responsibility,” she said. “Poor Sybil is.” She had referred to his mother as Poor Sybil ever since she first met her at Ben and Marion’s wedding in that unfortunate royal blue three-quarter-length dress.
    “With parents, you see,” she went on, “it’s like this. First you are their child. Then all at once you find the balance has tipped up and they are suddenly your children. It’s hard to say exactly when it happens. With my parents, it was after my honeymoon, when I found out my mother had told me the facts of life allwrong. In your case, it was probably when they lost Matthew. That must have taken away a lot of the old dears’ stamina.” Geneva was older than either of Ben’s parents, but she referred to them as if they were a bygone generation.
    “God, yes.” Ben leaned forward and looked into the quivering heat of the fire. “They were pathetic. I remember going home that time. They hadn’t written to me, oddly enough. It was the one time Mum didn’t rush to send bad news through the mail. Dad had got leave, but he was in uniform. One of his old ones, a bit shiny. He’d been quite robust at the beginning of the war. He can’t have been much more than