To Have and to Hold by Deborah Moggach

Author:Deborah Moggach [Deborah Moggach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

_____Fourteen_____

ANN IS STANDING in Sainsbury’s. She thinks: I’m always shopping. Why am I always shopping?

The packets bewilder and depress her. The light is so bright; it hurts her head. There are shelves of what is simply water, bottled. She wants to laugh, but she can’t. She’d make a noise and everyone would look. The planet is silting up with empty plastic bottles that once contained water. Where does madness lie?

She must move on. She walks past yoghurt pots with Mr Men on them, leering at her. She is filled with fear because she can’t make up her mind what to buy, but if she admits this the panic will get worse. Better never to speak, even to yourself. Besides, soon you might be talking out loud. In her dream she thought she knew what she was seeking. She cannot shake that dream away; it has lingered for weeks, like a taste at the back of her mouth, where the thinking begins. She had only found bags of knitting, squashed into the shelves. How large and echoing that supermarket had been; she shivers to remember it. Those silly mewlings. She had never found out what she was looking for. Now she knows that she had never deserved to.

A man passes; he is about sixty. He turns away from her to look at the meat – chops, sliced across the bone. Red and moist. Somewhere, there is a man of perhaps sixty who is her father. She feels she is walking on a moving floor; it is sliding beneath her feet like those rubber walkways at airports, and she wants to get off. How clen the sawing is – through the bone, the nerves and the flesh. Someone felt the pain; but on the other hand, who can tell?

She feels weightless, and bereft, and very, very tired. She also feels queasy, as if the bulk of her internal organs have been surgically removed. But she finishes her shopping, because she must remember that she is workable still.

‘Can I help you?’ asked the stylist.

‘Is Irene Smith here?’ asked Ann.

The young man looked in the book. ‘Have you got an appointment?’

Ann shook her head.

‘She’s got a space at three o’clock,’ he said.

‘She’s my mother.’

He laughed. ‘Sorry, I’m new.’

‘But I’ll take the three o’clock space,’ said Ann.

Ann sat at the mirror. She wore a wrap; she felt like a patient about to undergo an operation. She hadn’t been to the salon for a year; the place had been redecorated with palms and wickerwork. Frank and her mother stood behind her.

‘So he popped the question in Venice,’ said her mother. ‘He said, can we be VAT-registered together?’

‘What?’ asked Ann, looking at her mother in the mirror.

She pointed to Frank. ‘He’s made me his business partner. Aren’t you proud of your mum?’

Ann didn’t reply. Her mother pursed her mouth – such crimson lipstick – and touched Ann’s hair.

‘So what’s it to be?’

‘Just do something,’ said Ann.

‘What?’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Cut it all off. Do anything.’

Irene smiled. ‘At last she says so.

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.