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wasn’t quite up to my weight, your mother. Aunt Sylvie said that from the start. “She’s not up to your weight, Archie,” she said. I remember her saying that.’
    ‘What’d she mean?’ David had an incongruous picture come into his mind, and tried to keep a straight face.
    ‘Well… you know. Her father was in the hotel business.Still is for all I know. Your grandfather, of course. Funny notion, that.’
    He rambled on, working with an old toothbrush amongst the scrolled acanthus leaves of a candelabrum.
    David hated sitting here in this depressing kitchen, listening to his mother being run down. It always happened thus. He looked about him, at the enormous dresser, at dish-covers and meat dishes of a size to conceal or carry twenty-five-pound turkeys, or sucking pigs, or haunches of venison. He wondered how long ago it was that they were last used.
    ‘I only met him once or twice,’ his father was saying. ‘At the wedding of course. He was in his element then. You never saw so much champagne in all your life. It was just like a musical comedy, that do in the church. All those bridesmaids – only chosen for their looks, as you can imagine. Your cousin Ruth passed over because she had buck teeth. Of all the nonsense. And the hymns. “O Perfect Love”, or some rot like that. Well, one soon saw what happened to
that
. “The Lord’s My-hy Shepherd I’ll not want,”’ the black-smudged hand beat time to his wavering voice. ‘“God be in my head.” Well, He never was, thank God. I have other things in my head. Of course, neither your aunt nor I has any religion. But in spite of it, the Vicar still calls. I used to think he had hopes of converting her – bringing her to God, don’t they call it? But they must have gone by the board years ago. I think he just enjoys sharpening his wits on her. Your mother’s managing all right on the money, is she?’
    ‘I presume so.’
    ‘What’s she been up to lately? Does she still paint?’
    ‘Paint?’ It was an astonishing side to his mother he had never heard of before.
    ‘Her face. And all that gin.’
    ‘What do you mean “all that gin”?’
    ‘Oh, she used to like her little tipple, you know.’
    ‘Who doesn’t?’
    ‘I take your meaning. The decanter is in the usual place.’
    ‘I don’t mind if I do.’
    His father sighed. The boy was picking up some of his mother’s silly expressions.
    In the dining-room, the table was elaborately laid for Archie’s lonely dinner. More silver. More, too, on the shadowy sideboard, where the sherry decanter stood next to the tantalus, amongst biscuit-barrels and knife-boxes and epergnes. David poured out two glasses of sherry, and remembered to put them on a little silver tray.
    His father had finished his polishing and was washing his hands.
    ‘I never thought gin was quite the thing – a common sort of drink, like most of those who take it.’
    Oh, Lord, he doesn’t half go on, David thought, yawning.
    Archie looked into the oven at some simmering mince, and then began to prepare Aunt Sylvie’s tray, adding a plastic daffodil in a fluted vase.
    ‘Such a good notion, don’t you think? Nothing grows in the garden, except the Michaelmas-daisies later on, and the price of shop flowers is exorbitant. This came free, with the grocery order. It looks quite real, don’t you think? I’m sorry, my boy, to be asking you to drink sherry in the kitchen.’
    ‘What’s the odds?’
    Another of his mother’s sayings.
    ‘Smoking before dinner?’ Archie smiled and shook his head reprovingly, as if he didn’t know what the boy would get up to next. Taking the cigarette from a squashed old packet, too. Sordid.
    ‘What happened to your silver case?’
    ‘Nothing happened to it. It’s at home.’
    He must have driven Mother nearly mad, thought David.
    ‘It’s a long time to
my
dinner, anyhow,’ he said.
    ‘And when it comes it won’t be worth eating, if I know anything.’
    ‘I’m always telling you,