A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [27]
He could use the edge of the Radio Times.
His mother thought he was Rembrandt and regularly gave him cheap sketchpads which she had bought with the housekeeping, on condition that he did not tell his father. George had drawn him once, when he was asleep in an armchair after Sunday lunch. He had woken up unexpectedly, grabbed the piece of paper, examined it, torn it into pieces and thrown it on the fire.
At least he and Brian had escaped. But poor Judy. Their father dies and six months later she marries another bad-tempered, small-minded alcoholic.
Who would have to be invited to the wedding. He had forgotten that. Oh well. With any luck, the infamous Kenneth would pass rapidly into a coma, as he did the first time round, and they could dump him in the box room with a bucket.
The knobs on the television were wrong. It had been a mistake to attempt the knurling on the sides. Too many lines in too small a space. The entire cabinet, in fact, had a slightly drunken feel to it, stemming, possibly, from his poor memory of the rules of perspective and the flexibility of the Radio Times.
At which point a lesser man might have allowed negative thoughts to enter his head, given that he was spending eight thousand pounds constructing a building in which he planned to draw and paint objects far more complex than either rubber plants or televisions. But that was the point. To educate himself. To keep his mind alive. And the Gold C gliding badge was really not his thing.
He looked up and gazed through the window onto the garden. The bubble popped and he realized that, in his absence, the rain had ceased, the sun had come out and the world had been washed clean.
He removed his drawing from the pad, tore it carefully into small pieces and pushed them to the bottom of the kitchen bin. He stacked the pad and pencils out of sight on top of the dresser, put on his boots and headed outside.
21
Jean met Ursula in the coffee shop in Marks and Spencer.
Ursula snapped the little biscuit over her cappuccino to stop the crumbs falling on the table. “I’m really not meant to know about this.”
“I know,” said Jean, “but you do know about it. And I need some advice.”
She didn’t really need advice. Not from Ursula. Ursula only did Yes and No (she’d gone round the Picasso Museum saying exactly that, “Yes…No…No…Yes,” as if she was deciding which ones to get for the living room). But Jean had to talk to someone.
“Go on, then,” said Ursula, eating half her biscuit.
“David is coming to supper. George invited him. We bumped into him at Bob Green’s funeral. David couldn’t really refuse.”
“Well…” Ursula spread her hands on the table, as if she was flattening a big map.
And this was what Jean liked about Ursula. Nothing fazed her. She’d smoked a marijuana cigarette with her daughter (“I felt seasick, then threw up”). And, in actual fact, a man did try to mug them in Paris. Ursula shooed him away as if he were a bad dog, and he retreated at speed. Though, when Jean thought about it later, it was possible that he was simply begging or asking for directions.
“I don’t really see the problem,” said Ursula.
“Oh, come on,” said Jean.
“You’re not planning to be lovey-dovey with each other, are you?” Ursula ate the second half of her biscuit. “Obviously you’ll feel uncomfortable. But, frankly, if you can’t live with a bit of discomfort you really shouldn’t embark on that kind of adventure.”
Ursula was right. But Jean returned to the car feeling troubled. Of course the dinner would be fine. They’d survived far more uncomfortable dinners. That dreadful evening with the Fergusons, for example, when she found George in the toilet listening to cricket on the radio.
What Jean didn’t like was the way everything was becoming looser and messier, and moving slowly beyond her control.
She pulled up round the corner from David’s house knowing that she had to apologize to him for George’s invitation,