The Long Room Read Online Free Page B

they had inherited them, as if clothes were valuable possessions, to be bequeathed by fathers to sons and worn by those sons with pride. Second-hand clothes, in Stephen’s childhood, were a source of shame. Cast-offs and hand-me-downs, smelling of mildew and desperation, piled in depressing heaps on trestle tables in church halls at jumble sales, picked over by sad-eyed women old before their time. It had come as a surprise when he first heard a boy boast of owning his grand-father’s dinner jacket. However hard the times were when Stephen was growing up, his mother had insisted on new clothes. Before he went to Oxford she took a day off work so that they could shop together for the evening dress that Coralie believed her son would wear on a regular basis. In the gents’ department of Elliston & Cavell she had examined the rows of shiny jackets and trousers with a single stripe, fingering the satiny lapels, shocked at their cost but nonetheless determined that Stephen should be suitably caparisoned at this new stage of his life.
    He remembered their worry over ties. Red silk or black? In the end she had chosen for him: black and velvet, secured around the neck by an elastic band, as the alternative – a perplexingly thin strip of fabric – could not by any stretch of their imaginations be envisaged as a bow. When, at home, he had tried the new tie on, he had thought it was perhaps a littlelarge. Above it, his face looked round and pale; the face of a kitten in a noose, suspended in cruel jest before it’s drowned.
    Coralie had taken that day of shopping seriously. She carried a list, based partly on the recommendations made in a helpful letter from a second-year student at Stephen’s college, and partly on her own notion of what an up-and-coming man should have. A kettle, sheets and towels and coffee cups were obvious; cut-glass ashtrays, a decanter and a leather desk-set not.
    Addicted to lists she was, his mother, then and even more so now. She’d be composing one this very moment. She had a special pad for them, with each sheet headed ‘Shopping’, and an illustration of cottage loaves and wheat sheaves at the foot.
    Harpic
    Whiskas
    Raspberry jam
    Sardines
    Trifle sponges
    Domestic litanies, the rosary beads of Coralie’s week.
    Later today, after dinner – after lunch? – Coralie will tear this new list from her pad and read it aloud to Stephen. Then she’ll tuck it carefully into her handbag and prepare for their expedition to the shops. Now that her arthritis has made it hard for her to leave the house, that expedition will be one of the few she makes this week. Coralie can just about reach the bus stop on her own but even that short walk will tire her, and anyway she isn’t fit to carry any weight. Her condition has worsened steeply over the past year and she is increasingly dependent onher son. Without perhaps intending to, they have fallen into a routine: Stephen will drive down on Saturdays and, since he is there, and the drive not inconsiderable, he might as well stay the night.
    And so, that Saturday, as usual, Stephen rings his mother’s front-door bell. It was his own front door for many years, and he keeps a key, but he doesn’t like to use it. She takes a while to open the door; in greeting they do not touch or kiss. Lunch is almost on the table, as he knew it would be; the soup in its saucepan ready; the meat and the vegetables in the oven staying warm.
    Coralie is fretting about turkey. Christmas falls on a Saturday this year and Stephen doesn’t get off work until the day before. That’s Christmas Eve, of course. The shops will be extra busy that day and there is a risk they may run out of what she needs. If she could, she would do the necessary shopping at least two days before. But, as it is, she has a problem on her hands. She doesn’t own a freezer, having made do until now with the ice-making compartment of her fridge. And, although for most of the year that’s perfectly adequate,