The Brave Read Online Free Page A

looking weary and miserable. Though, come to think of it, he nearly always looked that way. This probably had something to do with the fact that he was always being criticized or nagged by Tommy's mother. Whatever the poor man did or failed to do seemed to irritate or annoy her.
    The only occasions his father looked happy were when he was in the greenhouse, tending his tomatoes, or in his little workshop at the back of the garage, where he would sit for hours on end with a magnifying glass and a little lamp strapped to his forehead, carefully piecing together broken bits of porcelain. People would send him their smashed vases and plates and cups and saucers to mend. He was very good at it. When he'd mended something you wouldn't guess it had ever been broken.
    The most exciting, if slightly puzzling, thing about him was that he belonged to a club so incredibly secret that you weren't allowed to ask him anything about it, nor even mention that you knew about it. They called themselves The Freemasons and held secret meetings once a month on a Thursday evening at a place called The Lodge. They had a special secret handshake so that they would know immediately if you were a real member or a spy trying to infiltrate them. Tommy's father kept all his secret Masonic equipment in a slim brown leather suitcase which he hid on top of the wardrobe in his bedroom. Tommy had once sneaked a look inside it, expecting to find some sort of deadly weapon, like a ray gun or something, but all he found was a little blue-and-white satin apron, some strange-looking medals and badges and a magazine called Health & Efficiency which had pictures of naked women in it. He didn't tell anyone, not even Diane. She didn't seem to know any more about The Freemasons than he did, except that at their meetings at The Lodge everybody had to roll up their trouser legs and put hangman's nooses around their necks. She said it probably had something to do with golf because a lot of the men at his father's golf club were Freemasons too.
    Tommy heard his father's car now, crunching across the driveway and into the garage. It was a new Rover 105S in two-tone green with beige leather seats and a walnut dashboard and his father treated it as if it had been made personally for him by God. The car door clunked shut and Tommy pictured his father walking slowly around, inspecting the paintwork for any tiny chips. He did this after every trip, however short, then, with a soft cloth and a bottle of methylated spirit, he would clean the squashed insects from the headlamps and the grille.
    Arthur Bedford's reaction to his son's bed-wetting was much the same as it was to most things Tommy did. He remained wearily aloof. Cleaning up, changing the sheets and doing the laundry, along with almost everything to do with the children, was women's work. Tommy knew perfectly well however, from the sighs and the occasional overheard remark, that his father saw the problem as part of a general pattern of feminine weakness.
    It had only recently begun to dawn on Tommy that his parents were a lot older than those of other children his age. His mother was nearly fifty and his father nearly sixty. People often thought they were his grandparents. His mother had once explained that they had tried for many years for a little brother or sister for Diane but that God hadn't wanted it to happen. Then, at last, along came Tommy. He was a blessing, she said. What had changed God's mind Tommy didn't know. And he wasn't quite sure about the blessing bit either, because he'd once overheard Auntie Vera describe him as an accident. Perhaps it was possible to be both.
    "Good heavens. Still awake, are we?"
    His father was peering in from the landing outside Tommy's bedroom, his unlit pipe sticking like Popeye's from the corner of his mouth. This meant he had to talk with his teeth clenched, which made him sound like a ventriloquist's dummy. The opposite of Tommy's mother in almost every respect, his father