Getting It Right Read Online Free Page B

the
exasperating possibility that Dad’s tea would be cold before he came off the telephone, Gavin scalded his already fiery tongue on his Nescaff. Appeased, Mrs Lamb handed him the
Daily
Mirror
.
    ‘No thanks, Mum.’ He’d read the
Telegraph
on his way to work.
    ‘You ought to
look
at the paper.’
    ‘I’ve read one already. Anyway –
you
never do.’
    She seized the playsuit. ‘I’ve got better things to do with my time.’ She never read any papers on the twofold grounds that she didn’t believe a word they said and that
they never had anything in them.
    Mr Lamb returned from the telephone. ‘There’s no money in skylights,’ he said.
    ‘They make a nice light, though,’ Gavin said.
    ‘If they can’t make do with windows, they can fall back on electricity,’ said Mrs Lamb. She was watching to see whether her husband wasn’t enjoying his tea because he had
let it get cold. Mr Lamb was up to this, however; he signalled his enjoyment by wincing appreciatively at the first sip, drinking the rest in fairly noisy gulps and mopping his moustache with an
old Army handkerchief – faded khaki – out of which fell a little clutch of washers.
    ‘I wondered where they’d got to.’
    ‘You’ll wear your handkerchiefs out keeping things like that in them.’
    ‘I said to Sid last night, “You got them washers?” “No,” he said, “I ’aven’t got ’em,
you
had ’em.” “I
’aven’t got ’em,” I said and ’ere they were all the time!’
    ‘Wearing everything to a thread like that, nasty sharp things’ – she was cramming the bear’s indifferently hinged limbs into the playsuit, twisting him this way and that:
it looked quite painful, but Gavin noticed that his expression of wilful unreliability remained unchanged.
    ‘Nothing sharp about a washer, dear, unless it’s worn. Nothing sharp about a
new
washer.’ He had finished filling his pipe and leaned back to pat for his matchbox in
his jacket. ‘These are new washers,’ he explained reassuringly.
    She darted to her feet to seize his tea cup. ‘Tobacco all over the table!’
    She was always one jump ahead, Gavin thought; no sooner had they laid one anxiety at rest than she pounced upon another and they lumbered after her shovelling sand into all the ground she cut
beneath their feet: she called it ‘Where would you be without me?’ and he called it ‘Understanding women’. It gave them both a sense of domestic strategy, Gavin thought, but
it hadn’t, exactly, anything to do with
him
. He decided to ring his friend, Harry King.
    ‘Harry – ’
    ‘Oh, hullo!’ There was a faint, but unmistakable crash of breaking china. ‘Shut
up
, you silly quean, it’s Gavin. We were just finishing dinner. Why don’t
you pop round for a cup of coffee?’
    ‘Thanks: I’d like to.’
    ‘I warn you, there’s a certain amount of tension in the air.’
    Another crash – it sounded like glass this time.
    ‘Are you sure you’d like me to come?’
    ‘
I’d
like you to come, dear boy.’
    ‘Hadn’t you better ask Winthrop?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘Come on your scooter, or you’ll be all night.’
    Harry lived in an extremely small block of flats in Whetstone. It was built of concrete which looked as though it had been severely pecked by giant birds; whether this was in preparation for
some more indulgent facing or whether the concrete being some three years old had failed to stand up to the exigencies of the British climate, Gavin did not know: he
did
care, since he
thought Harry – and even Winthrop – merited a lovelier home, but he had not liked to ask. There were only six flats in the block: each containing a living room, a bedroom, bathroom and
kitchen. The living rooms sported balconies, large enough, as Harry had once said, to accommodate one deck chair or a medium-sized dog, or, alternatively, a dog in or on the deck chair – the
space involved was described by him as fanciful. The building was rather