Free Mischief by Fay Weldon Page B

Minette’s fingers was broken. He never came back. Sunday outings, thereafter, just the two of them, Minette and mother, valiantly striving for companionable pleasure, but what use is a three-legged stool with two legs? That’s what they were.
    The present? Mist, clouds, in front, behind; the wind blowing her misery back in her teeth. Minette and Mona stumble, hold each other up. The clouds part. There’s the road: there’s the car. Only a few hundred yards. There is Minnie, red hair gleaming, half-asleep, safe.
    ‘England home and safety!’ cries Minette, ridiculous, and with this return to normality, however baffling, Mona sits down on the ground and refuses to go another step, and has to be entreated, cajoled and bluffed back to the car.
    ‘Where’s Daddy?’ complains Minnie. It is her children’s frequent cry. That and ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’
    ‘We got tired and came back,’ says Minette.
    ‘I suppose he’ll be a long time. He always is.’
    Minette looks at her watch. Half-past four. They’ve been away an hour and a half.
    ‘I should say six o’clock.’ Edgar’s walks usually last for three hours. Better resign herself to this than to exist in uneasy expectation.
    ‘What will we do?’
    ‘Listen to the radio. Read. Think. Talk. Wait. It’s very nice up here. There’s a view.’
    ‘I’ve been looking at it for three hours,’ says Minnie, resigned.
    ‘Oh well.’
    ‘But I’m hungry,’ says Mona. ‘Can I have an iced lolly?’
    ‘Idiot,’ says Minnie to her sister. ‘Idiot child.’
    There is nothing in sight except the empty road, hills, mist. Minette can’t drive. Edgar thinks she would be a danger to herself and others if she learned. If there was a village within walking distance she would take the children off for tea, but there is nothing. She and Minnie consult the maps and discover this sad fact. Mona, fortunately, discovers an ants’ nest. Minnie and Minette play I-Spy. Minette, busy, chirpy, stands four square between her children and desolation.
    Five o’clock. Edgar reappears, emerging brilliantly out of the mist, from an unexpected direction, smiling satisfaction.
    ‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘I can’t think why you went back, Minette.’
    ‘Mummy was afraid of the cows,’ says Mona.
    ‘Your mother is afraid of everything,’ says Edgar. ‘I’m afraid she and nature don’t get along together.’
    They pile back into the car and off they go. Edgar starts to sing, ‘One man went to mow.’ They all join in. Happy families. A cup of tea, thinks Minette. How I would love a cup of immoral tea, a plate of fattening sandwiches, another of ridiculous iced cakes, in one of the beamed and cosy teashops in which the Kentish villages abound. How long since Minette had a cup of tea? How many years?
    Edgar does not like tea – does not approve of eating between meals. Tea is a drug, he says: it is the rot of the English: it is a laughable substance, a false stimulant, of no nutritive value whatsoever, lining the stomach with tannin. Tea! Minette, do you want a cup of tea? Of course not. Edgar is right. Minette’s mother died of stomach cancer, after a million comforting cups. Perhaps they did instead of sex? The singing stops. In the back of the car, Minette keeps silent; presently cries silently, when Mona, exhausted, falls asleep. Last night was disturbed.
    The future? Like the past, like the present. Little girls who lose their fathers cry all their lives. Hard to blame Edgar for her tears: no doubt she makes Edgar the cause of them. He says so often enough. Mona and Minnie shall not lose their father, she is determined on it. Minette will cry now and for ever, so that Minnie and Mona can grow up to laugh – though no doubt their laughter, as they look back, will be tinged with pity, at best, and derision, at worst, for a mother who lives as theirs did. Minnie and Mona, saved from understanding.
    I am of the lost generation, thinks Minette, one of millions.