Bedlam by Greg Hollingshead

Author:Greg Hollingshead [Hollingshead, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9781554689699
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

MOTHER AND SON

My next two visitors arrived together the following Wednesday.

Being in a doze when they entered, I at first mistook them for figments. But unless the gang is dream-working you with grotesque phantoms of their own making, a dream, however fantastical at first, when examined close is only ever yourself, and no less familiar. This was two other people. “You’ve come,” I whispered, or thought I did, before I opened my eyes.

There was no reply, only a rustling of skirts and a scrape as of something set on the floor.

Our embrace was a dissolve of tears. When she sat up, she looked to the one with us. I looked too.

“Hello, Papa.”

These words issued from the fairest mouth beneath the shapeliest nose and clearest eyes I ever saw. When the lips floated in for a kiss, I saw his mother’s, but those eyes spoke of my own mother’s too. “Hello, my son,” I whispered, groping for his hands, tears brimming, babbling and squeezing, hardly knowing what I said.

Margaret’s fingers were in my hair-bristles, then softly smoothing the creases at my brow.

“Your health, Father?” he asked. “Do they treat you well?”

“They treat me just as they know how to, my darling Jim—”

He smiled at this uncomprehending, but Margaret looked at me dubiously, with her old face. She’s an old woman now, and she regarded me as sceptically as I did her poor greenish-black gown and threadbare jacket as she stood behind him, with a hand on his slender shoulder. He was a flax-haired angel. Small, like me—I must adjust my wall-notch—but I would say eleven or twelve years of age, which is what he would need to be. “Do you go to school, Jim?”

“I do, Papa,” and he prattled awhile about his school and the teachers and friends he had there, until the tears flooded my cheeks, alarming him. “Is everything all right, Papa?”

“It is, Jim,” Margaret gently assured him (causing him, with a manly impatience, to shrug off her hand). “Only very happy to see you. Now you must let your father and me talk.”

“Before a keeper appears—” I confirmed, squeezing his fingers.

Sighing, Margaret sat on the edge of my bed to recount how for a decade she retailed tea, but the East India Company showing scant mercy for the independent shop, two years ago, to pay her debts, she sold all stock and furnishings to our long-time suppliers Crump & Co., who have hired her as book-keeper at their Holborn offices. Now our shop is the premises of a bespoke tailor named Hodge. Hodge of Leadenhall.

Bespoke put me in mind of Justina Latimer’s hat. My question of Margaret why our former maid was at my subcommittee hearing seemed to nonplus her. “I can’t imagine but don’t like it,” she replied, looking perturbed. “All I know is when we pass in the street she pretends not to see me. Someone said she was modelling hats in the Burlington Arcade.”

“The scarlet bonnet with the green-grapes—”

“You should see the sunflower one.”

“She was friendly enough.

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