A Conspiracy of Friends Read Online Free Page B

to time—he still came into it; indeed he occupied a very central place in that vision. But for many of us, she thought, it is difficult to tell those whom we love that we love them. We hope they notice, but we cannot spell it out. At least that was the situation if one was British: for others it was different, perhaps.

6. Eddie’s Weltanschauung
    W ILLIAM’S SON , E DDIE , was quite different from his father. He was not troubled by doubts—not in the slightest—and would not have recognised the soul-searching that his father engaged in from time to time. “Barmy,” he might say of such deliberations, “barmy” being the adjective that Eddie applied to anything unusual, creative or vaguely alternative. And if something went beyond barmy, it became, in Eddie’s eyes, “bonkers.” That which was barmy was at least understandable; that which was bonkers surpassed all understanding. Thus the United Nations was bonkers in Eddie’s view, as was the European Union, the management of the football team from which he had recently withdrawn his support in disgust, various archbishops and the entire massed ranks of those self-appointed opinion-formers disparagingly referred to as “the chattering classes.”
    “You know how to ruin a perfectly decent country?” Eddiewould say. “You know how to ruin it? I’ll tell you, mate. You put people who are bonkers in charge of it and then you stand back. That’s how it’s done.”
    William had long since ceased to reason with his son. He had tried, especially in what he believed were Eddie’s formative years, to bring about a more sophisticated view of the world in his son’s mind, but had given up. And that was when he realised that Eddie had already been formed by the time he reached those so-called formative years, and already it had been too late.
    “I wish you’d think a bit more before you sound off about things,” he once said to his son. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t express a view. I’m just saying that you might think a bit before you do so.”
    Eddie sniffed. “I know what’s what, old man,” he said. “Believe me.”
    William did not like being called “old man.” “I’m not all that old,” he said. “Late forties isn’t old. Not these days.”
    “Maybe not,” retorted Eddie. “But you aren’t late forties, are you? More like fifty.”
    William could hardly deny his age—or at least he could not do so to his son, who knew his own father’s date of birth—but he could resist his son’s claim to knowledge of the world.
    “I wonder if you know quite as much as you think you do,” he muttered. “You haven’t exactly done very much, have you?”
    That, of course, was true, even if it was a somewhat uncomfortable fact. Eddie had never really settled to any job and had no qualifications of any sort. “What’s the point?” he said. “What’s the point in getting a piece of paper? All it says is that you knew something on the date they tested you. But things are changing, aren’t they? You learn something today and the next moment it’s out of date. So why bother to learn it in the first place? You’d have to be barmy.”
    “Or bonkers perhaps,” sighed William.
    “Yeah, that too.”
    Eddie had outstayed his welcome in his father’s house, not moving out until he was well into his twenties. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “Mum said I could stay, you know. She told me before she snuffed it. She said I should stay and look after you.”
    William gritted his teeth. He had largely recovered from the loss of his wife, but it did not help to hear his son referring to her death in this way.
    “Your mother did
not
snuff it, as you so offensively put it.”
    “Oh yeah? So you’re telling me she’s alive?”
    “And I’m not sure that she thought you should stay … quite so long.”
    Such suggestions that Eddie should move out proved fruitless, and even William’s acquiring a dog, the Pimlico terrier known as