Secrets of the Past by Estella McQueen

Author:Estella McQueen [McQueen, Estella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Once upon a time, Charlie mused, his mother must have been able to dismiss Stuart Gilchrist’s foibles as the price to be paid for living with such an intelligent, eccentric and cerebral man.

The unfathomable part was what made his parents get married in the first place. There probably wasn’t another couple on the planet so thoroughly ill suited. Her teenage fantasy to study in England and bag herself a well-educated native, didn’t quite come off. The sort of man who earned enough money to own a decent flat in the centre of town, a cottage in the country (preferably within driving distance of Stonehenge) and a lifelong membership to the All England Tennis Club, never materialised. What Gail ended up with was a man who was allergic to pollen, who lived and worked in the London suburbs, whose friends were all academics, and who’d rather cycle everywhere on a twenty-year-old Raleigh than sit behind the wheel of a Jag. Stuart Buchanan ignored all the usual conventions of marriage and carried on as if he was single: finishing work at six; having dinner at seven; retreating to his study by eight. ‘My husband,’ Gail had once despaired, ‘would have been older than me even if he was younger than me.’

His sombre, starry eyed father had been blown away by Gail’s brash, strident American-ness; like stepping onto a fast moving skateboard for the first time, and it wasn’t until they hit a bump in the tarmac and he ended up on the ground with a ‘what just happened’ look on his face that he realised it was too late to turn back.

‘Don’t you want to show me the delights of your country?’ she’d asked him. ‘Don’t you want to take me up a mountain in Scotland, or to the lakes where the poets hung out? Don’t you want to take me to one of those seaside places where they eat cream teas with ‘jam’? Or to Kew Gardens and Buckingham Palace?’

‘Not with my hay fever,’ he’d replied. ‘Take the kids.’

And so mother and sons did the sights together, in the school holidays and at weekends.

They’d never been in tune, his parents, never really understood what made the other one tick. Opposites attract didn’t even come into it. At some point during their unlikely courtship they must have thought formalizing the relationship was a good plan.

It wasn’t ordinary things like being unable to endure his Dad’s habit of staying in of an evening to watch old recordings of ‘Silent Witness’, or his insistence on using an elaborate acquiescence when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would do – for example: ‘Do you want a custard cream with your tea?’ Answer: ‘It wouldn’t hurt, would it?’ ‘Would you like chips with your lasagne?’ ‘What a delightful idea.’ ‘It’s raining, do you want a brolly?’ ‘That’s an extremely sensible suggestion.’ No, it was major league things like Dad taking the rotting window frame in the spare bed room apart, on the very day that Mum had invited friends to stay.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.