Free Goodness by Tim Parks

follow the argument through to some sensible conclusion and hurried from the table to go and comfort her. We cuddled, she cried, I whispered softly, we kissed, looked into each other’s red eyes, confessed, forgave, kissed again and eventually, arriving somehow in the bedroom, made love, with me foolishly, if not unnaturally, hoping the tide had turned.
    There followed a very happy two weeks of perfect reconciliation, relaxation, fun. So, yes, it was still possible. Everything was hunky-dory. Turkey was on. We bought our ferry tickets, got the car serviced. We were going to have a great time. Life was great. And then it began all over again: arguments, sulking, general bitchiness. Turkey off. Not only Turkey, but any other holidays I might be planning too. Okay? When I reminded her of all she’d said that evening, all she’d conceded, she either refused to acknowledge that such a scene had ever taken place, or she’d try some bright sardonic line like: ‘All under duress, Your Honour, under duress. My lawyer wasn’t present. I retract everything.’ Or she’d throw back her head, laughing, and say, ‘Oh George, I do love the way you always, always believe you’re right. You’re a phenomenon.’
    I spoke to no one about this. Every morning I went into work, joked with Tony, my assistant programmer, flirted mildly with the secretaries, Joyce and Sandra, reported to Johnson and Will Peacock, wined and dined clients, made rude jokey propositions down the phone to switchboard. No doubt you can picture it, the average stale-tobacco, fluorescent-lit office life, with all the little formalities and pleasantries and gallantries, the way you live and brush up against people and talk behind each others’ backs and generally get on famously.
    I spoke to no one. Probably it was the same for Shirley. Jolly and lively at work, glum and offhand at home. As if we were only our real selves of old when we arrived in the safe environment of the office, the school. If other people came, Mark and Sylvia, determined to be neighbourly (hadwe noticed the lock didn’t engage on the front door, and what about the state of the lawn?), forcing their way in with a few cans of Whitbread’s or a tin of chewy flapjacks, we put on a great front. Shirley was almost too dazzling, I drank heavily, but as soon as they were gone, we slumped. The television. A newspaper. Separate bedtimes.
    And it was on one of these evenings, as I remember it, that my heart hardened. I use that Biblical expression because at last after a childhood of Bible studies I understood what it meant: a deliberate, quite conscious shutting oneself off from the tenderer emotions. My heart hardened. I’d had enough.

This is What I Should Have Gone For
    Grandfather had become entirely incontinent. I had my suspicions frankly that the old NHS had rather cocked up the prostectomy, maybe whipped out something they shouldn’t have, bit of sphincter or something, but as Shirley said, you’d never get to the bottom of it. Nor was Grandfather likely to generate much sympathy in tabloid newspapers or even a court of law were one to try for some compensation. Instinctively people would see he deserved it. So I spent a little time every morning checking out the geriatric home situation. I gave exactly fifteen minutes, ten thirty to ten forty-five, to phoning up all the various bodies concerned. I felt in this way I’d be informed and prepared when the crunch came and wouldn’t have to lose a whole week finding out the score right at some critical moment when I had a new project on my hands or something.
    The problem, my enquiries revealed, was that the old man wasn’t suffering from senile dementia. Had he been suffering from senile dementia and hence truly in danger of doing damage to himself, accidentally putting the electric kettle on the gas, or setting his jacket on fire when lighting his pipe, then they would have taken him in (though with something like that on the cards one