Free A Surrey State of Affairs by Ceri Radford

alarmed to hear that son has leprosy.
Jeffrey has still not added me as a friend. Do I say anything?
       SUNDAY, MARCH 2
    Once again, Jeffrey has shirked both church and visiting Mother for a game of golf. His absence at least gave me a chanceto reflect. I studied the faces in the congregation, the white morning light falling equally on taut young foreheads and furrowed old ones, on squirming children and tired-looking mothers, on glasses and mustaches. I wondered how many of them endured the same troubles as I did, how many husbands were Facebook voyeurs, how many sons were wriggling out of relationships. I imagined few would go as far as to feign leprosy. Every now and then Reginald’s sermon—something about the futility of material wealth—distracted me, but I mostly managed to blot him out.
    After that it was onward to The Copse, where Mother was in a better mood because the
Antiques Roadshow
had featured a silver cow creamer rather like her own. She asked after Jeffrey, Rupert, and Sophie, and I replied noncommittally. Looking at her sitting there, a sturdy old woman crisscrossed with the green wool of her cardigan, chin hanging softly like a turkey’s, wedding band cutting a wedge in her finger, I realized how much of her life was a mystery to me. When I was a little girl in Shipton-under-Wychwood it simply wasn’t the done thing to consider my parents as human beings, much less human beings who had a “relationship” with each other. Father was the village vet, mother came from a wealthy family with aristocratic connections, and together they were an unassailable parental unit. As long as I tied my own shoelaces and washed my hands before tea I was largely left to my own devices. But perhaps it was not too late to find out more about my own mother, to learn from her lifetime’s worth of wisdom and apply it to my own marriage.
    “Mother,” I said. “What was Daddy really like?”
    She paused, put her glasses on, looked at me, and said, “Big feet. Liked mustard. Would snore if he slept on his left side, not his right.”
    This was not quite what I had been angling for. I tried again.
    “You were married to him for fifty years. What’s the secret of being happy for so long?”
    She snorted. “Make sure he slept on his right side. Put his socks and underpants to warm on the Aga on a winter morning. But what do you mean, happy’? What are you asking me all this for?”
    At that point I decided to drop the subject and made some bland remark about the number of daffodils in the nursing home gardens.
    When I got home, Jeffrey still wasn’t back, so I signed on to Facebook. He still had not made me his friend. Bridget had written me a nice note, though, including a startled inquiry into Rupert’s health. I wrote back to reassure her. I had a friend request from a girl at school who used to smell of mothballs, and whom I’ve not seen since our twenty-year reunion. Judging from the hairstyle, her profile picture dated from that period. She certainly looked at least ten years off fifty-three, but I approved her anyway. Then I checked on Paratweets and left a comment advising others that linseed oil was the perfect remedy for dull plumage. After that I changed my status to
is pondering the gaping chasm between the generations
and logged off.
       MONDAY, MARCH 3
    Today I called on Tanya. It’s been a whole week since I discovered Jeffrey’s Facebook page, and I’m no closer to deciding what to do beyond waiting for him to reply to my friend request. I need advice from a woman of the world, which I believe Tanya is because she sometimes wears a pink velour Juicy Couture tracksuit. When she answered the door she was red-faced and out of breath, her highlighted hair scraped back in a pastel-pink headband. “Hiya, Connie, don’t mind the state I’m in,” she said, ushering me in. It transpired that she had been exercising to a Girls Aloud dance DVD. I suppose it must burn more calories thangardening, but I