Father of the Man Read Online Free

“Oh, well,” she said. “You know your father. We often have our moments.”
    At first it seemed as if she might clarify these statements. But she went on: “No, no, of course there isn’t. What even made you ask?”
    She rose from her chair and went to add some more milk.

4
    There were three people ahead of him in the queue at the ticket office. The first was a soldier who was having trouble with his rail warrant; the clerk was needing to explain the same few points over and over again, his patience waning visibly at each repetition. The clerk was a young man with a ponytail and one earring, both of which assorted oddly with his collar, tie, tweed jacket. While Roger waited—there was also a male dwarf in front of him and a fat teenage mother, with a black eye and a baby—he idly looked around the vast booking hall at things which he had never noticed before: particularly at some decorative pillars high up on the walls with, between them, porthole windows encircled by stone wreathes and, beneath them, squares of green and brown marble. None of this was especially interesting but it annoyed Roger that in a year of coming and going he hadn’t once been aware of it. He was also annoyed by the obtuseness of the soldier; by the unchecked mucus running from the baby’s nose; by the minutes ticking past without apparent progress. His annoyance deepened. What was really beginning to get to him was the economy of having only one ticket window open, when the price of the annual fare to London had now risen to roughly three-and-a-half thousand pounds—when, because of this, he was having to give up his job and didn’t know what the heck he was going to do about a new one—when even trying to work out the alternatives had the power to make him speedily loose-bowelled. And in the face of all this they had only one ticket window open. You’d suppose for the prices they charged they might offer you a bit of service.
    No. That was unfair, he thought. After all, it was a Sunday afternoon; such complicated business over a rail warrant was possibly quite rare. Nor was British Rail responsible for his general lack of awareness. Nor for the baby’s mucus. Not even for that wretched sinking feeling which grew daily more weighty in the pit of his stomach.
    Well, not wholly responsible, anyway…he managed a tight grin.
    But for the moment he felt as though it were.
    The dwarf, in red lumberjacket and shiny black sneakers, who could barely reach the round portion in the window through which you were supposed to speak—and, momentarily, Roger felt guilty and ungrateful: how could he ever have supposed his own life to be difficult?—the dwarf was quickly seen to. So was the young mother, who looked strained, desperate, ground down, beaten. And where, he’d wondered, was she going, in what kind of room, amidst what degree of comfort, would she finally find some sort of refuge—and, likewise, what chance of any healthy, innocent childhood could ever exist for her baby? But what might he himself do about it; how could he possibly interfere? Potentially insult her by offering money? For he couldn’t offer her anything else, not even very much of that. He could—and did—say a silent prayer, but the fact he had only belatedly thought of it showed he didn’t basically have a lot of trust in the power of prayer.
    And then, pretty soon getting back to his own problems (of course!), he knew it didn’t really help, at least not for very long, his trying to concentrate on others who were worse off than himself; you merely had to think of Cardboard City or of all those thousands who spent the night in shop doorways, often in temperatures that must be freezing, even inside a sleeping bag…He often imagined how he would feel if he were homeless. By God, it had been bad enough during the time he’d lived in a bed-sitting-room, in Hampstead. That had been in the first year after his parents removed to Nottingham. The room had been small but