Getting It Right Read Online Free Page A

eye without expression.
    ‘You haven’t finished the coconut,’ she said, without apparently taking her eyes from her crochet.
    ‘You gave us so much, Mum.’ Gavin got up to move the plates.
    ‘You could finish it up on your pears,’ she continued inexorably. ‘They’re waiting for you outside.’
    They were indeed. Fruit out of a tin did not count as tinned food for some mysterious reason that had never been uncovered. There was a whole lot of nonsense in tins – and then fruit. The
pears were in sundae glasses, lying on what looked like raspberry jam and topped with custard. The kitchen was spotless. Salt evenings could be worse. He had a quick drink of water and switched on
the kettle. In a minute or two, she would come out and make tea for herself and Dad, and coffee for him.
    ‘Don’t you forget about the Castle puddings,’ he told her as he returned with the pears.
    ‘I won’t.’ She did not mind being admonished to make things they liked.
    ‘Pears are good for your complexion,’ she added, an unexpected number of minutes later. ‘There’s strychnine in pears.’
    He knew that with peeled, let alone tinned pears this was most unlikely, but the occasional – and surprising – pieces of misinformation were yet another spice in his mother’s
life and he was very fond of her. It was Marge who argued with their mother; they could keep the same argument going for days – for weeks now that Marge was married and they met only at
weekends, when she brought the kids over for Sunday dinner. They did not have rows, exactly, but neither of them gave an inch.
    Mr Lamb was hurrying with his pears because he wanted his tea, and then his pipe so that he could get back to television before the programmes got too highbrow. A quiet man, he none the less
enormously enjoyed violence in his viewing: sex, he often said, he had never cared for – his morality entailed knowing a great many things that were not right – but the sight of
somebody being machine-gunned to pieces or battered to death afforded him genuine entertainment. He even enjoyed the news occasionally for this reason.
    Mrs Lamb would sit with him whatever he watched, but she would not watch herself. This was not because she did not like television; she watched it in the afternoon when Fred was out building or
repairing people’s houses. It was simply that she disapproved of women doing anything
with
men: women – particularly wives – were meant simply to
be
there while
their husbands spent their leisure hours as they pleased. Now, observing that they had finished their pears, she laid the playsuit carefully beside the bear, seized their sundae glasses and nipped
into the kitchen. Gavin met his father’s eye again: they had little in common, but in particular they shared a benign conspiracy geared solely to not upsetting Mrs Lamb.
    ‘Yes, well – a nice cup of tea won’t do any harm,’ Mr Lamb said in a voice designed for his wife to hear.
    Outside, an ice cream van jingled its Greensleeves way down the road and Gavin wondered fleetingly whether this was tremendously unfair to Vaughan Williams, or whether he would have regarded it
– ruefully – as some kind of accolade – vox populi to the chime. This made him feel lonely: a spring evening with some hours in it that he could spend as he pleased. If he stayed
downstairs, he would get
The Streets of San Francisco
: if he went up, he could be alone with Brahms and he did not quite want either of these alternatives. But, when he started to think of
what he might want, he felt merely spasms of fear and a kind of despair – an almost irritable anxiety: there must be more to life, and could he stand it if there was?
    The telephone rang and he leapt to answer it. ‘I’ll go, Dad.’ It might be his friend.
    It wasn’t: it was a customer of Dad’s, having trouble with a skylight. Mum had brought in their drinks and was now quivering with anxiety to see them drink them. To make up for