Free Mischief by Fay Weldon

Minette’s pleasantries. Presently she falls silent too. He adorns a plate of scrambled eggs with buttercups and adjures the children to eat them. Minette has some vague recollection of reading that buttercups are poisonous: she murmurs something of the sort and Edgar winces, visibly. She says no more.
    No harm comes to the children, of course. She must have misremembered. Edgar plans omelette, a buttercup salad and nettle soup for lunch. That will be fun, he says. Live off the land, like we’re all going to have to, soon.
    Minette and Mona giggle and laugh and shriek, clutching nettles. If you squeeze they don’t sting. Minette, giggling and laughing to keep her children company, has a pain in her heart. They love their father. He loves them.
    After lunch – omelette with lovely rich fresh farm eggs, though actually the white falls flat and limp in the bowl and Minette knows they are at least ten days old, but also knows better than to say so, buttercup salad, and stewed nettles, much like spinach – Edgar tells the children that the afternoon is to be spent at an iron age settlement, on Cumber Hill. Mona weeps a little, fearing a hilltop alive with iron men, but Minnie explains there will be nothing there – just a few lumps and bumps in the springy turf, burial mounds and old excavations, and a view all round, and perhaps a flint or two to be found.
    ‘Then why are we going?’ asks Mona, but no one answers. ‘Will there be walking? Will there be cows? I’ve got a blister.’
    ‘Mona by name, moaner by nature,’ remarks Edgar. But which comes first, Minette wonders. Absently, she gives Minnie and Mona packet biscuits. Edgar protests. Artificial sugar, manufactured crap, ruining teeth, digestion, morale. What kind of mother is she?
    ‘But they’re hungry,’ she wants to say and doesn’t, knowing the reply by heart. How can they be? They’ve just had lunch.
    In the car first Mona is sick, then Minnie. They are both easily sick, and neatly, out of the car window. Edgar does not stop. He says, ‘You shouldn’t have given them those biscuits. I knew this would happen,’ but he does slow down.
    Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona. Biscuits, buttercups and boiled nettles. Something’s got to give.
    Cumber Hill, skirted by car, is wild and lovely: a smooth turfed hilltop wet from last night’s rain, a natural fort, the ground sloping sharply away from the broad summit, where sheep now graze, humped with burial mounds. Here families lived, died, grieved, were happy, fought off invaders, perished: left something of themselves behind, numinous beneath a heavy sky.
    Edgar parks the car a quarter of a mile from the footpath which leads through stony farmland to the hill itself, and the tracks which skirt the fortifications. It will be a long walk. Minnie declines to come with them, as is her privilege as her father’s daughter. She will sit in the car and wait and listen to the radio. A nature programme about the habits of buzzards, she assures her father.
    ‘We’ll be gone a couple of hours,’ warns Minette.
    ‘That long? It’s only a hill.’
    ‘There’ll be lots of interesting things. Flints, perhaps. Even fossils. Are you sure?’
    Minnie nods, her eyes blank with some inner determination. ‘If she doesn’t want to come, Minette,’ says Edgar, ‘she doesn’t. It’s her loss.’
    It is the first direct remark Edgar has made to Minette all day. Minette is pleased, smiles, lays her hand on his arm. Edgar ignores her gesture. Did she really think his displeasure would so quickly evaporate? Her lack of perception will merely add to its duration.
    Their walking sticks lie in the back of the car – Minette’s a gnarled fruit-tree bough, Edgar’s a traditional blackthorn (antique, with a carved dog’s head for a handle, bought for him by Minette on the occasion of his forty-second birthday, and costing too much, he said by five pounds, being twenty pounds) and Minnie’s and Mona’s being stout but