• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 552 0

a few times recently, this inability to taste or smell things. It was another way that things kept going out of focus somehow. Her attention would go wandering, not onto anything else but into blankness, like sleep. A waking sleep, from which she surfaced with a frightened jolt, as if she’d found herself a single step from the edge of a cliff. They lasted only moments, these driftings, but they scared her. Even worse were the hot surges that ran through her body. At least once or twice a day, these past few weeks. They reddened her face and made her sweat, and they brought a kind of panic with them that was like falling or drowning. It was awful when it happened at work. Just a few days ago, she’d had one of these turns while serving a customer. She’d frozen, staring down into the open till, unable to remember which coins were which.

Eventually, she’d summoned up the courage to visit the doctor. He was a posh chap a good deal younger than herself. He’d told her, briskly, that there was nothing wrong with her, that she was merely going through the Change. He gave her a Ministry of Health leaflet about it. On the cover there was a picture of a hale-looking middle-aged woman walking a large dog. A golden retriever, perhaps.

George would never stand for a dog in the house, Ruth had thought.

She’d lived a life of meager proportions, knew it was so and was content. She’d never been to a foreign country, never been to London, and didn’t want to. The only newspaper she read regularly was the North Norfolk News. The wider world was vast and therefore dangerous; Ruth excluded it because it caused her only anxiety. She’d persuaded herself that politics had nothing to do with her. And anyway, when it came to politics, she had enough to cope with at home. Maintaining the Secret Treaty of Sexual Nonproliferation between herself and her husband. The bitterly cold war between George and Win. Clem’s moodiness, his prickly neutrality toward his father. And now it seemed that her own body was rebelling against her.

She studied her husband, sidelong. There was gray in his receding hair and in his mustache (along with a spot of sauce). Outdoor work had weathered his lean face, but he was still, she thought, good-looking. He had not, like her, run to fat. She wondered what other women thought, looking at him. The question made a breach in her defenses. She blinked the wetness from her eyes.

“George?”

He lifted his knife hand to hush her.

“Hang on,” he said.

The reedy voice coming from the television belonged to a foxily handsome old man with a crest of white hair. He was the ninety-year-old peace campaigner and Nobel prize–winning philosopher Bertrand Russell.

“Huh,” George grunted after a minute. “What would he know about anything?”

Ruth said unsteadily, “There ent really gorn to be a war, is there, George? I dunt think I could go through another one, on top of everythun else.”

The news came to an end. George looked at her, frowning.

“On top of what everything else?”

She felt hot. “You know. That just dunt seem fair, after all we’re been through.”

“Fair?” George scoffed at the word. “Since when has fair got to do with anything?”

She couldn’t think of any reply.

George, as if only then realizing they were alone, said, “Where’s Clem?”

“He said to keep his warm. He’re gone out.”

“What about your mother?”

“Gone down the Brethren.”

“What, again?”

Ruth managed a laugh of sorts. “Yeah. I reckon they think if they pray hard enough, that Bomb wunt drop. D’yer want any more of that pie?”

George leaned back in his chair and felt in his overall pocket for his cigarettes.

“No, I’m all right, ta. Is there anything for afters?”

BY FRIDAY, October 26, President Kennedy had become very twitchy, and not just because of the badly mixed cocktail of drugs he was having for breakfast. Four days into the sea blockade, and no Cuba-bound Russian ships had been intercepted or turned back. No missiles or warheads had been discovered. The “quarantine” looked like it was becoming a tactical and public-relations disaster.

JFK was used to having