Read Me and Mr Booker for Free Online Page A

hear it again.
    ‘After that I had to promise never to mention Ralph Wesker’s name again. So I never did. But then I spent years thinking it was him I should have married instead of your father.’
    ‘So why didn’t you?’ I said.
    ‘Because he was a Jew.’
    I had heard this before too, how my grandmother had taken my mother aside and forbidden her to see Ralph Wesker ever again.
    ‘What did she have against Jews?’ I said.
    ‘God knows,’ said my mother. ‘She’d never met a Jew before she met Ralph.’
    ‘Why didn’t you tell her to mind her own business?’ I said.
    ‘That’s what I wonder myself,’ said my mother. ‘Maybe it was her fault I turned into such a wimp.’
    She smiled at me then and I saw how beautiful my mother must have been when she was twenty-four and just married. Her face was strong and delicate at the same time. She was like a pedigree cat with eyes the colour of seawater.
    ‘Were you in love when you married Victor?’ I said.
    ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.
    ‘How could you forget something like that?’ I said.
    ‘Because at some point it didn’t matter any more whether I was or I wasn’t,’ she said. And then she said she thought it was like that for the Bookers. She said she thought they were just going through the motions, like a lot of married people do, particularly when there are no children to distract them.
    ‘But he seems to light up when you walk in the room,’ she said.
    ‘I haven’t noticed,’ I said.
    My mother must have known it was a lie because she just looked at me and told me to be careful. I said I would, and then I thought of telling her that Mr Booker had called me to ask if I would like to have lunch with him at the university one day, just him and me. But I decided not to, in case it made her worry.
    In hindsight I think it was a mistake not to say anything to my mother. I think her advice might have been helpful to me at that point. Not that my mother was the type to tell Eddie and me what to do. She used to say she had enough trouble salvaging her own life, let alone telling other people how to live theirs. Still, she might have saved me a lot of trouble if she’d just said what needed to be said, which was that a man like Mr Booker was no good for a girl like me, and that I should wait a while until I found somebody better, except that I wouldn’t have listened because by then I was deaf to any sort of common sense.
    Mr Booker’s cramped office was on the second floor. His name was on the door, which was already open when I arrived. I didn’t know anything about his work because he never talked about it unless it was to complain about how tired it made him feel to watch all the brown-nosing that people had to do to get ahead.
    ‘I find it takes all my strength just to stay in the one spot,’ he said.
    I knocked and waited for him to answer before I went in. It made me nervous to see him without Mrs Booker. It meant that something had changed. I knew what it was. I knew that Mr Booker wanted to kiss me again but there hadn’t been a good time because Mrs Booker was always there. I didn’t mind. I wanted to tell him I had already imagined him kissing me again so many times that I was waiting for it to happen, and for him to do other things to me after that, none of which I could name.
    ‘Good God in Heaven,’ he said, when he saw me come through the door. ‘If it isn’t Bambi.’
    He stood up and came around the desk and I thought he was going to shake my hand but he put his arms around me instead and pulled me towards him and we stood there like that for a while, holding each other and not saying anything. He smelled of aftershave and soap and I could hear his blood thumping next to my ear like surf pounding on the beach.
    The room was almost bare, except for the furniture and shelving all along the back wall, which was empty except for a few books and papers. His desk was bare as well apart from a pile of essays he was marking