A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor
Author:Elizabeth Mavor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00
SEVEN
âI feel damnably unhappy!â
âMight you be taking yourself a little too seriously?â
âYou always try to diminish what I do and feel.â
âNonsense! You must see that in view of your previous aptitude your present behaviour seems strangely unadaptable.â
âHow âadaptableâ, as you call it, should one be?â Hugh asked.
His mother straightened up from the plant sheâd been attending and laughed. To him it was a cruel sound. Exultant. A savage âHa! Ha!â among the trumpets.
âPerhaps you were too well organised,â she jeered, âwith your wife and your mistress, altogether too comfortable.â She turned back to her plant, her energetic fingers teak-coloured from crushing and stripping away the sugary infestation of greenfly.
Their bickering was the aftermath of confusion caused by a peremptory ring from the hospital announcing the immediate return of the crash victims. Their returnâwounded, bedridden and helplessâwas timed to coincide disastrously with the opening of the Rococo Symposium.
For Hugh, disordered by the events of the last week, and indeed for many weeks before that, his motherâs offer to accommodate the two invalids had come as an enormous relief. Jessica had already been farmed out with the sympathetic mother of a school-friend.
âYou sound as though youâre glad,â he persisted, wanting to provoke a row, if only to relax his inner tension. A moderate row yet sufficiently cathartic. He missed Belle.
âGlad!â he repeated.
âI think I am rather glad!â
âWhy?â
âMere pride of sex probably. I donât enjoy seeing my own sex so shamelessly taken advantage of.â
âThey like it!â
âSo people will tell one. Itâs perfectly true, of course, that the world was a much less complicated place when everyone thought as you do. I also see thereâs something very fetching about the idea. I mean the idea of born to rule because of your sex: that whatever you did which affected the minds, bodies and possessions of over half the worldâs population was not only natural but right. I think if Iâd been a man Iâd have liked that too.â
âSome women do like it,â he insisted. âBeing exploited. You donât, but the really feminine ones do.â
âVery possibly,â said his mother. âI suppose itâs a form of despairâliking it. Though sometimes I feel frightened when I think of what horrors may fill the vacuum created by the cynicism of people like you!â
âItâs not cynicism, itâs anthropology!â
âI know, I know. Youâll tell me, very broadly speaking, that there are two kinds of women: the matriarchal ones who, in a male-dominated society, become militant and noisy out of frustration, and the vulnerable, raped captives who either keep quiet or become nags!â
âWhich are you?â
âGuess!â
â⦠though sexual tyranny has nothing on the tyranny of parenthood,â said Hugh, nimbly changing tack. âOne canât even hit oneâs mother because thereâs some ridiculously unfair inbuilt taboo which prevents it. Mother and son! My God!â
She laughed again. âItâs really a clashing of jealousies. You are annoyed that I gave you the day as the French say, and I must agree that it is annoying to be made, created, without oneâs permissionâ¦â
â⦠and you are annoyed that you arenât a man?â
âNo! No! youâre wrong there.
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