Free Death of a Perfect Mother by Robert Barnard Page A

being called narrow-minded, ‘it’s what the neighbours might say. You know what people are.’
    Still, Wednesday night was bingo night for her, and now and again as Spring had approached things had been possible under the inky grey skies. In the Coponawi Islands Debbie would already be a mother, and about to take on those extra rolls of flesh that were the signs of status and prosperity in those latitudes. Mr Achituko certainly did not think of himself as debauching a minor, but neither did he think of taking her with him when he returned home: he had no very high opinion of the chastity or housekeeping of English women, and it might have caused trouble with his wife and three children on the islands.
    This Wednesday he was staying home to rough out a chapter of his thesis, dealing with various exciting Coptic heresies, but he had managed to exchange a couple of words with Debbie as she flew for her school bus, and he felt the day was likely to be a satisfying mixture of the sacred and the profane. However his sally to the gate had been observed, and when his landlady came to clear away his breakfast things she lingered meaningfully, and finally said: ‘Quite friendly with the Hodsdens, aren’t you?’
    â€˜So-so,’ said Mr Achituko, flashing his irresistible black and white smile. ‘I see them sometimes in the Rose and Crown.’
    â€˜So I heard,’ said Mrs Evangeline Carstairs (Eve to her friends), a considerable, opinionated and not unattractive woman whose husband worked in Bristol and was generally only to be seen at weekends, exhausted by work, Mrs Carstairs and British Rail. ‘Of course, it’s just a matter of taste, isn’t it?’
    â€˜You dislike them, do you?’ asked Achituko, who preferred to come out into the open with her, since her opinions were pithier when there were no polite manœuvrings.
    â€˜Oh, the children are all right,’ said Eve Carstairs, crashing plates and saucers around on the tray. ‘Thoughif you ask me, the boys are a poor-spirited lot to put up with it the way they do . . .’ She ostentatiously said no more.
    â€˜But the parents—?’
    â€˜Well, you couldn’t say anything against Fred, I suppose, because there’s really nothing there, is there? More like a tadpole than what I’d call a man. But her—if you ask me she lets the road down and has since the day she came here. She’s common as dirt, and if you believe half of what you hear around town, she’s got the morals of an alley cat with it!’
    â€˜Really?’ said Mr Achituko, who in fact knew infinitely more about Lill’s activities than Mrs Carstairs. ‘I must admit that at times I find her a little—embarrassing.’
    â€˜Don’t we all? ’Course, you’ve got the colour thing with it, which makes it worse. Still, it’s that daughter of hers I feel really sorry for: you feel it at that age. I expect Debbie does, doesn’t she?’
    She looked at him with a knowing air.
    â€˜Very likely,’ said Achituko noncommittally. He wondered for a moment if—were things to come out into the open—Mrs Carstairs would be persuaded to give her blessing to his activities with Debbie. But, wisely, he remembered her age and refrained. And in fact Mrs Carstairs had quite other things on her mind, for as she took the tray out she said:
    â€˜If I was the girl I’d leave town as soon as I could. Get a job somewhere—she’s not stupid. But nobody around here who knew the mother would want anything to do with the daughter. Whatever they say, there’s such a thing as bad blood!’
    For Eve Carstairs did not look with favour on Mr Achituko’s choice. After all, she was herself a woman in the prime of life, magnificently fleshed, and in all the time he had been there Achituko had come no closer to the personal than to praise her Yorkshire