The Trick of It by Michael Frayn & 9780571304097

Author:Michael Frayn & 9780571304097 [Michael Frayn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571304097
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Avery hurried note to say how truly sorry I am about Daniela. Unforgiveable of me not to write before, after your first great bust-up with her in the carpark outside the French Department. But then you wrote to say it was all on again … I can’t believe I didn’t write then. Oh Christ. I can only say that I’ve been busier these past few months than I have ever been in my life before. Not with partings and reconciliations, like you – not even with departmental budgets and examiners’ meetings. With aunts and uncles. Also mothers and greatnieces. The majwoot has picked up old buckets and boxes in the dark corners of my life and found all these creatures creeping about – cousins and mothers and people I scarcely knew existed. Did you know I had a second cousin who holds a very senior position in the West Midlands Regional Health Authority? Of course not – I’ve kept the old newspapers on top of his hiding-place, and if by some chance you’d picked them up and discovered him you’d have been polite enough to put them back again without inquiring further. Not so the maj. Who’s this? How’s he related to her? We’ve been crawling into little nooks and crannies all over England shaking their feelers. She puts down pots of home-made jam for them and gives them strange woolly garments to munch. So naturally they’ve been scurrying out into the light and infesting the spare room here. They think she’s crazy. No, they don’t, as a matter of fact. They think she’s wonderful, just as everyone else does. We’ve seen my mother more often this summer than I remember seeing her when I was a boy. Up and down the motorway we’ve been ever since I passed the test. Wrecked the car, in fact – no one told me you had to put oil in it if you’re going to go screaming all over the country looking at mothers. So now I’m back on the bloody Kawasaki. At least Daniela’s spared you all that kind of thing. No, sorry, that’s absolutely crass. All part of the terrible smugness of marriage. At least you’re avoiding that. I do in fact realize how you must be feeling. I’m just a little distracted because I can see some of them in the garden. I mean some of these things out of the family woodwork. Funny – she slaughters the centipedes and replaces them with pests that are about a thousand times larger and five thousand times more destructive. Now of course she’s upstairs working and they’re bashing about around her esparto grass with a football, totally bored, and I know that sooner or later if I don’t go out and entertain them they’re going to … They have. Sorry – write a proper letter tomorrow.

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