Amongst the Dead Read Online Free

rescued from the necessity of defending myself by the arrival of Mother’s lover, Peter Gilbert. I hadn’t yet reconciled myself to the fact of their relationship, let alone to its duration. I had no wish to cast moral aspersions against my mother — although her affair with Gilbert did begin adulterously — but I couldn’t quite bring myself to greet him with anything but cool disdain. He was, anyway, impervious and insensitive to my feelings about him. Brian shook his hand warmly, and their cosy display of mateship was so cloying that I couldn’t prevent my lip from curling with disgust. Mother saw it, and shook her head slightly. I’m sure if we’d been alone this would have been one of those occasions when she claimed I reminded her of my father. I excused myself and retired.
    I didn’t sleep well, and not because of my agitation about Peter Gilbert and Mother, but because of my excitement at the prospect of returning to the stage — my natural home, and the only place where, in the guise of various characters, I could truly be myself.
    The following morning, Peter Gilbert, still in his pyjamas, intruded upon me in the bathroom while I was shaving.
    ‘It’s customary to knock,’ I said.
    ‘A custom more honourecd in the breach than the observance?’ he said, and inflected it upwards to indicate that he considered the quote so apt as to be witty.
    ‘As you see,’ I said while drawing the razor carefully across my chin, ‘the bathroom is occupied.’
    ‘And by the very person to whom I wish to speak.’ He sat on the side of the bath and crossed one leg over the other. ‘It isn’t actually any of your business, so I’m telling you this more as a courtesy than a duty. Your mother and I intend to formalise our relationship. You’ll no doubt be appalled by the resulting change in our connection; but the fact is, when we’re married, you’ll become my stepson.’
    ‘Should I congratulate you?’
    ‘It wouldn’t kill you.’
    I caught his eye in the mirror.
    ‘We should learn to tolerate each other, Will.’
    I turned to face him.
    ‘My father has been dead for sixteen years. For all of that time, and longer, you’ve been having an affair with my mother, and neither of you thought it worthwhile to mention the fact to Brian, to Fulton. or to me.’
    Peter Gilbert actually smiled.
    ‘That’s true up to a point, but both Brian and Fulton were aware of how things stood between your mother and me, and we assumed you must have known, too, but that you chose never to discuss it — a strange obstinacy, if you don’t mind my saying so, very like your father’s. To be fair, we never really talked about it with your brothers, either. It was all terribly discreet.’
    Here he paused and coughed.
    ‘I had my own family, you see.’
    ‘So this was adultery on a biblical scale.’
    ‘Fortunately, Will, we don’t get stoned to death in this country for loving the right person and marrying the wrong one.’
    I turned back to the mirror and finished shaving.
    ‘So, now you’re divorced and free to marry.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m widowed.’
    I couldn’t hide the disbelief in my voice.
    ‘You were waiting for your wife to die?’
    ‘That’s what you do when you marry a Catholic.’
    He stood up.
    ‘Now you know.’
    He crossed to the bathroom door but, before leaving he said, ‘I have two children, Will. Both of them are grown up, of course. Cloris is twenty-eight and John is twenty-six. You’ll meet them when you come back from up north.’
    I was so distracted by this avalanche of unwanted information that all I could think of to say was, ‘Your last name is Gilbert and you called your son John? Isn’t that a little vulgar?’
    ‘My father’s name was John. Not everything is connected to the movies.’
    He left. I splashed water on my face, and a little bay rum, and returned to my bedroom to get dressed.

Chapter Two
    setting out
    OUR FAREWELLS HAD BEEN AWKWARD ; or, at any rate, mine