The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Author:Elizabeth Jane Howard [Howard, Elizabeth Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Sagas
ISBN: 9780330527262
Google: oJ1y4Cxv1ZQC
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2011-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Christopher had sat through a lunch he had not in the least wanted as he still felt sick. Car journeys were always bad: if he took off his specs he got a crashing headache; if he kept them on he was sick. At least it had been Mum driving. When it was Dad it was far worse, because Dad made him feel such a mutt and always made a fuss about stopping, so Christopher got frightened of being sick in the car, which would make a fearful row. Sometimes he actually hated Dad so much he imagined him falling down dead or just being struck by lightning so that although he might not be actually dead, he couldn’t speak another word. This, of course, made him feel wicked and ashamed of himself. But most of the time, he imagined himself doing amazing things – or perhaps quite ordinary things to most people, but things he was hopeless at – frightfully well, so that his father would say, ‘I say, Chris, old boy, that was superb. I’ve never met anyone who could do that – let alone you!’ He would bask in the glow of admiration, and sometimes his father would even throw a careless arm around him which, as they were men, implied deep affection – possibly, although it would never be mentioned, love. Sometimes, he would imagine his father making sarcastic, funny remarks not about him but somebody else, and inviting him to laugh at them with him. This was a kind of disgusting luxury: he was instantly ashamed of it, and then felt really awful. How could he agree to be an audience or party to something that he knew was so painful just because he wasn’t the victim? And he would go back to hating his father, and hating himself for wanting approval from such a foul person. He must be loathsome too, which, in turn, made it quite reasonable for Dad to go on getting at him. And it was true that he was rotten at all the things Dad thought important: sports, games, even things like making model aeroplanes and maths. And he couldn’t tell stories or make jokes and he was always knocking things over – namby-pamby bull in a cheap china shop, his father had said last week when he’d broken the sugar basin. In the last three years he’d developed a stutter which was always worse when people asked him questions, so nowadays he’d just go on trying to do whatever his father wanted, like packing the car this morning and not say anything at all. He was used to being a complete failure and only wished they’d leave him alone, but Mum was always trying to make him feel better by asking him about things she knew he was interested in, and that made him want to cry so he’d taken to not saying much to her either. He knew she must love him a lot to bother and despised her

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