Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud

Author:Esther Freud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

It’s Sunday morning before I’m strong enough to come downstairs. And even then I’m excused church service and told to stay by the fire. Father’s face looks bruised with drink. And the two smallest fingers on Mother’s hand are bandaged together in a splint. But they leave the inn, dressed in their best clothes, with Ann, head down, behind them. I sit in the big chair and stretch my feet out to the fire. My legs are thinner, my foot white as a root. I examine my knees, wide and bony, and lift my shirt to inspect the hollow of my stomach. A pure clean hunger flashes through me, and I imagine the first fat blackberry of autumn, and the sweet milk segments of a beech nut as I scoop out its insides. I could get up and search for something. But I can’t seem to move from my chair, so I sit there, breathing in the smell of our dinner cooking on the stove. Pearl-barley soup with nubs of mutton. Mother has asked that I keep one eye on it. And I wonder if this is what it feels like, to have been on a long sea voyage and finally come home.

I’m woken by the crash of a chair falling, and the clatter of a cup flying across the room. Mother has her hands over her face and Ann is crouching by the fire. ‘Get down,’ she whispers to me, and she takes my hand and pulls me to the floor. Father stands in the kitchen doorway. There is a dark, singed smell. ‘If you hadn’t stood about outside the church rabbiting like an old woman . . .’

‘The food is not ruined,’ Mother dares. And she takes the lid from the pot and peers inside. ‘It is only the base of the pan that’s burnt.’

Father turns his eyes on me. ‘And whose fault is that?’

But I don’t look at him. I will do. One day. I’ll rise up and fight him. But today my legs are trembling and my head spins and I stay crouched on the floor.

‘Let’s be grateful,’ Mother says, ‘that the fever has broken and the boy is well enough to come downstairs.’ He turns away from me and moves towards her, and I swear if she didn’t have the hot soup in her hands, he would have knocked her down. But she stands before him. The pot raised. And there is a silence before he slumps down in his chair.

‘Grateful,’ he says. And the fight goes out of him.

Mother sets the pot down on the table and ladles the scalded soup into bowls, spoon by spoon, until she reaches the thick burnt sludge. Ann takes it from her then and pours in water to lift the crust, and I pull myself up from the floor, and heave myself into my chair. But when the grace is said, and Father nods his head to show we can begin, I find for all my longing, I can’t lift the spoon to my mouth.

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