The Racket by Anita Mason

Author:Anita Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448209002
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Rosa’s headmaster was surprised to receive a notification that the school would shortly be visited by an inspector. No inspector had visited the school for years. He could not decide whether it boded good or ill.

‘Ill,’ said Mrs Souza. She had been teaching for thirty years, and had seen most things.

Although he did not have to be at the museum until ten o’clock, Fabio got up at the same time as Rosa every morning. He did so because he knew that if he didn’t he would have difficulty in getting up at all. He vaguely expected, on the first morning, that Rosa would make breakfast for both of them, but when he popped his head round the kitchen door she was standing there with one shoe on and one shoe off, eating a piece of bread and jam with one hand and putting books into a briefcase with the other. She pushed the loaf towards him, put on her other shoe, said, ‘See you this evening,’ and left. Fabio got his own breakfast.

For the next two mornings they circled round each other, cutting and eating pieces of bread and trying not to knock over each other’s coffee. Then an idea came to Fabio. One morning he got to the kitchen before Rosa, and made breakfast. When Rosa emerged from the bathroom it was on the table: coffee, bread, jam and two eggs.

Rosa stopped half-way across the carpet in astonishment. Then a smile lit up her face. ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

Pleased with the effect, Fabio made breakfast on succeeding mornings. After a week it was a chore. He said dejectedly, ‘Do you want me to make breakfast every day?’

Rosa seemed to find this very amusing. When she had finished laughing, she said, ‘I don’t normally sit down to breakfast except at weekends.’

‘Don’t you like breakfast?’

‘I don’t usually have time.’

Fabio was hurt. He understood, of course: her priority in the morning was to get to work; but it still felt like a rejection of his gift. He wanted, in retaliation, not to do the washing up, which he now did as a contribution to the housework; but he thought that if he didn’t she would think he was being childish, after which it occurred to him that he was being childish, so he got on and did it. They settled down to an arrangement in which sometimes there was and sometimes there wasn’t breakfast.

Rosa was difficult to get to know, Fabio concluded. It had taken him a while to realize this because of the openness of her manner. The openness was genuine, but some way behind it lay a privacy which almost matched his own. He suspected that he knew next to nothing about what really went on in Rosa’s life. She didn’t talk about Sergio, or at least not in the way he expected a woman to talk about her man friend. From letters which she left lying about (he half-read a few; he was ashamed to read them through to

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