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trembled. 'I hate
him!' she said.

     
     
    Mama was excited. Somehow this winter
Joshua had been different. More alive, more enthusiastic, more sure of himself,
more — mystical? Maturity. It had to be maturity. He was thirty-two now, just
about the age when a man or woman tied and neatly spliced the final cords that
bound together brain with hands as one integral unit. He was very like his
father, a late bloomer. Oh, Joe, why did you have to die? You were finally
coming into your own, you were going to make it after all. And yet, isn't it
typical of you that you didn't have the sense to find a Holiday Inn before death
found you?
    Only that wouldn't happen to Joshua. For
one thing, he was more than his father. He was her as well. In that lay his
greatest advantage. And she was still young enough to be of help to him. Years
and years of work left in these arms yet. A ton of spirit left, too.
    Every night she dealt as efficiently with
her bed as she did with the house. First the hot-water bottle, filled to the
last gasp of steam with boiling water, the hell with what they said about
leaky caps; she screwed hers down and then tightened it by sticking a
spoon handle through the loop in its top and
levering it an extra half-turn. Next she wrapped it in a thick towel, two layers
of terry between the scalding rubber and her skin, and fixed the fabric securely
around it with diaper pins. And after that she put the bottle right near the top
of the bed, just where her shoulders would rest, placed her pillow over it, and
pulled the covers over the pillow. Five minutes by the clock, and down would go
the bottle by its own width but leaving the pillow behind, down would go the
bottle five minutes at a time all the way from where her shoulders would rest to
where her feet came. At which moment in time she took off cardigan, sweater,
skirt, petticoat (she detested trousers and only wore them outdoors), undervest,
long woolly drawers, thick pantyhose and bra, sliding like an eel — nothing
middle-aged about the movement, either — into the fleecy nightgown she wore in
defiance of the cold. She would not wear Dr Denton's. Dreadful things they were,
like long johns with feet; though she would not admit it even to herself, she
was beginning to suffer from urgency of micturition in the very cold weather,
and not for anything would she have permitted herself to soil a garment while
fumbling with its trapdoor.
    The last task was to lever the top
bedclothes back just far enough to insert herself beneath them and
simultaneously to turn upward the warmed underside of her pillow. Then into the
bed like a flash, and warm warm warm warm warm. The greatest luxury of
the day, contact of herself with an actual radiator of tangible heat. She would
lie, mindless in bliss, and let the warmth soak through her skin and flesh into
her bones, as ecstatic as a child with its first ice cream. And then, with her
warmed feet encased in knitted bootees, she would ease the hot-water bottle
slowly up the bed until she could reach to drag it, beautiful warm radiant
thing, up across her chest, where it remained cradled within her arms for the
rest of the night. In the morning she used it, still
faintly tepid, to wash her hands and face.
    Yes. He was growing into his strength at
last. He was a great man, this senior son. From the moment she had known he was
conceived she had also known that no matter how many other children came out of
her body, he was the one. And so she had geared her whole life, and the
lives of her other children, to a single purpose — assisting her firstborn to fulfil his destiny.
    After Joe died it had been hideously hard
— oh, not so much from the money point of view, because Joe's people had money
and she came into his share of it, but from the fact that she was not by nature
cut out to be father as well as mother. Still, it had been done, the paternal
aspect of her troubles largely solved