Love Among the Single Classes Read Online Free Page B

efficient.
    This Monday morning all three of them are once againsitting round the breakfast table, since both Cordelia and Max have been home for the weekend, as much to catch up on one another’s news as to see me. Cordy, in her final year at university, lives in a student house near college and Max, who has a job, lives with his current girlfriend in a squat. At first I hated this idea. The very word ‘squat’ was repellent and seemed to conjure up a squalid, lavatorial image. When I eventually visited them I found to my surprise that they lived in a perfectly ordinary terraced house which they shared with another couple. All four had spent a good deal of time and care on repairing and decorating the house, and had persuaded the council to reconnect the electricity and water in return. They proudly pointed out items of furniture rescued from skips or kitchen things picked up for less than a pound at local bazaars and jumble sales. I realized then for the first time that my children attached a very different importance to their possessions. They didn’t care about inherited furniture, ‘good’ furniture, and thought it even more absurd to spend money on buying things new. On the contrary, they were proud of the fact that they had equipped the whole house for less than £500. It would have been tactless to point out how many bits and pieces of my own I recognized about the place.
    Their clothes are acquired in the same haphazard way: by borrowing, swapping, rummaging in sales or charity shops, and the end result is a faded, pouchy, comfortable look. Only their hair is elaborately savage. I am touched by their skills in dressing and living – born of the necessity for economy, but carried off with great style. I envy their freedom from the constraints that bedevilled me at their age. My clothes, chosen by my mother, paid for by my father, were safe, dull and expensive – camel coats and leather gloves and Harris tweed skirts – proclaiming me a nice middle-class girl, safe, dull and expensive. Yet I didn’t feel myself to be any of those things, and I seethed under this false image.
    Over breakfast the children sort out their immediate needs.
    â€˜Max, can I borrow your leather jacket for a couple of weeks?’ asks Cordy.
    â€˜Yeah, great, and what am I supposed to wear?’
    â€˜I’ll swap you for the Crombie.’
    â€˜I didn’t know you had one.’
    It’s Ben’s, but he won’t mind.’
    â€˜Hasn’t got much choice, has he? Yeah, OK. Give it back next time I see you.’
    â€˜What time do you have to be at work?’
    â€˜Half nine-ish.’
    â€˜If you got there early we could all leave together,’ says Kate, pleadingly.
    â€˜Get your skates on, then …’
    And in a hectic ten minutes they’re suddenly all gone. I should be hurrying too, but instead I pour myself another cup of tepid coffee and sit at the breakfast table, its cloth warmed by the sun pouring in through the breakfast room windows. The children had been tactful about my late return home last night, but I sensed their unspoken questions.
    Only Kate voiced her feelings directly.
I
thought he was very
foreign,’
she had said, meaning, Am I going to be supplanted? Do you still love me? We don’t want him here.
    Cordy, voicing my own uncertainty, had asked, ‘Are you going to see him again?’
    â€˜I don’t know yet, but I think so. I hope so. We didn’t exactly arrange anything but … well, yes, probably.’
    â€˜Were we OK at lunch? Any mother would be proud of us, all that sort of stuff?’
    â€˜Shut up Max. You were fine.’
    â€˜Wait till he gets to know what we’re
really
like!’ said realistic Kate.
    I get to work eventually, a bit late, but nobody much comes into the library first thing on a Monday morning. A few old people, anxious for company after a solitary weekend; a few who’re