Free Death of a Perfect Mother by Robert Barnard

the pillows. ‘Or you’ll be riding for a fall.’
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    â€˜Hey, Brian,’ said one of his classmates as they came out of a period on Palmerston’s foreign policy and headed towards the long huts where dinner was served. ‘Some of us are going over to Puddlesham to a disco on Saturday night. Are you coming?’
    â€˜Saturday night?’ said Brian, pushing back that troublesome lock of hair from over his eyes. ‘No, Saturday night I’ve got something on.’

CHAPTER 6
COLOUR SENSE
    The Coponawi Islands, which Mr Achituko had left for the drizzle and wheeze of an English winter, were dots on the map—courtesy dots at that—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from civilization, and not much nearer to Queensland. The islanders had undoubtedly been cannibal until the early eighteen-seventies, when they were Christianized by a gaunt, determined missionary, inevitably a Scot, a graduate of Edinburgh and Exeter Hall, a man so feared and respected that at his death—four years after his arrival, and before his flock could readily distinguish between Elijah and Elisha—his body was subjected to no more than the odd reverent nibble.
    His flock’s understanding of their new faith was at that point still wavering and nebulous, but some few could read, and when they discovered among his books (most of them too long and heavy for intellectual comfort) a little volume entitled The Wise and Witty Sayings of George Eliot they modelled their religion around her precepts and (in direct defiance of the good man’s commands, which they easily in their minds reversed) set up wooden idols of the Sage which visiting anthropologists from Scandinavia later mistook for some form of horse worship imported by boat people from prehistoric North Africa.
    Things had progressed rapidly in the Coponawi Islands since the Second World War. Nuclear tests had taken place in the vicinity and had put them on the map. Hippy colonies from California and Sydney had waxed there in the ’sixties and waned there in the ’seventies. Tourismhad burgeoned, concrete blocks had risen among the coconut palms, and only the occasional disappearance of a well-fed mid-Westerner, and the subsequent discovery of sneakers or orange-feathered alpine hat had led people to wonder whether old habits didn’t die hard. Mr Achituko’s mind had been formed by Peace Corps volunteers, very nearly deformed at the University of Hawaii, and now he was studying cultic offshoots of the major religions at the University of South Wessex, where a group of atheists and defrocked priests ran a very high-powered Comparative Religion Department. His was now a well-honed, highly sophisticated mind, though when he had recently visited the George Eliot Museum at Nuneaton the curator had been astonished to see him at various points during the guided tour performing the fourteen Stations of the Cross.
    Thinking it over in bed on Saturday night, after the encounter with Lill in the Rose and Crown, Mr Achituko had been highly amused that Lill should suspect him of having designs on little Mrs Watson up the road. For in fact he was sleeping, on and off, with little Debbie Hodsden down the road, and he wouldn’t have minded betting that, had she known, Lill would have been livid, not with moral outrage, but with jealousy.
    Of course, it was hardly a settled thing with Debbie and could not be yet, even if Achituko decided to stay in Britain beyond the end of the academic year. His landlady was a woman of comparatively liberal mind (he had been accepted by her as a lodger after a long succession of Todmarshians had suddenly and unaccountably decided not to let rooms to students that academic year), but she had made it clear that she drew the line at miscegenational sex. ‘It’s not so much me,’ she had explained, in fear of attracting to herself that most hated of modem labels,