The Laying on of Hands - Alan Bennett [33]
It’s all very decorous. Quite often he’ll make us a hot drink and we’ll just sit and turn over the pages of one of his many books on the subject, or converse on matters related. I remarked the other day how I’d read that Imelda Marcos had a lot of shoes. He said, ‘She did … and she suffered for it at the bar of world opinion, in my view, Miss Fozzard, unjustly.’
Little envelope on the hall table as I go out, never mentioned, and if there’s been anything beyond the call of duty there’ll be that little bit extra. Buys me no end of shoes, footwear generally. I keep thinking where’s it all going to end but we’ll walk that plank when we come to it.
I’ve never had the knack of making things happen. I thought things happened or they didn’t. Which is to say they didn’t. Only now they have … sort of.
Bernard gets an attendance allowance now and what with that and the envelopes from Mr Dunderdale I can stay on at work and still have someone in to look after him. Man this time. Mr Albright. Pensioner, so he’s glad of a job. Classy little feller, keen on railways and reckons to be instigating Bernard into the mysteries of chess. Though Mr Albright has to play both sides of course.
At one point I said to Mr Dunderdale, ‘People might think this rather peculiar particularly in Lawnswood.’ He said, ‘Well, people would be wrong. We are just enthusiasts, Miss Fozzard, you and I and there’s not enough enthusiasm in the world these days. Now if those Wellingtons are comfy I just want you in your own time and as slowly as you like very gently to mark time on my bottom.’
Occasionally he’ll have some music on. I said once, ‘I suppose that makes this the same as aerobics.’ He said, ‘If you like.’
It’s droll but the only casualty in all this is my feet, because nowadays the actual chiropody gets pushed to one side a bit. If I want an MOT I really have to nail him down.
We’re still Mr Dunderdale and Miss Fozzard and I’ve not said anything to anybody at work. Learned my lesson there.
Anyway, people keep saying how well I look.
I SUPPOSE THERE’S A WORD for what I’m doing but … I skirt round it.
Father! Father! Burning Bright
On the many occasions Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily. He died promptly, painlessly and without a struggle. Looking back, Midgley could see that even in these imagined deaths he had failed his father. It was not like him to die like that. Nor did he.
The timing was good, Midgley acknowledged that. Only his father would have managed to stage his farewell in the middle of a ‘Meet The Parents’ week. It was not a function Midgley enjoyed. Each year he was dismayed how young the parents had grown, the youth of fathers in particular. Most sported at least one tattoo, with ears and noses now routinely studded. Midgley saw where so many of his pupils got it from. One father wore a swastika necklace, of the sort Midgley had wondered if he felt justified in confiscating from a boy. And a mother he had talked to had had green hair. ‘Not just green,’ muttered Miss Tunstall, ‘bright green. And then you wonder the girls get pregnant.’
That was the real point of these get-togethers. The teachers were appalled by the parents but found their shortcomings reassuring. With parents like these, they reasoned, who could blame the schools? The parents, recalling their own teachers as figures of dignity and authority, found the staff sloppy. Awe never entered into it, apparently. ‘Too human by half’ was their verdict. So both Nature and Nurture came away, if not satisfied, at any