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By Root 551 0

mother had always been a pathological chatterbox, although normally, when she was out in public like this, she would lower her voice in irritating deference to those around her, so you’d always be saying “Speak up, Mum!” If somebody she hadn’t known intimately for at least twenty years turned up, her chatter would stop instantly mid-sentence, like a switched-off radio, and she would duck her head, avoid all eye contact, and smile an infuriatingly humble smile. She was so shy that when Alice and Elisabeth were at school, she became literally sick with nerves before their parent-teacher nights and would come home white and trembly with exhaustion, barely able to remember a word any of the teachers had said, as if the point of it had just been to show up, not to actually listen, which always drove Elisabeth insane, because she wanted to hear all the nice things the teachers said about her. (Alice didn’t care because she knew most of her teachers probably didn’t know who she was, because she suffered from the same shyness.)

Now Alice’s mother was talking at a normal volume (actually, even a little louder than strictly necessary) and she wasn’t darting cautious looks around to make sure any important strangers weren’t about to turn up. Also, she seemed to have developed a new way of holding her head, her chin jutting and her neck strained, like a peacock. It reminded Alice of somebody, somebody she was sure she hadn’t forgotten, somebody she knew perfectly well, although she couldn’t temporarily name that person.

“But I still don’t understand why you’re dressed like that, Mum,” said Alice. “You look . . . incredible.”

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

I was thinking to myself, “Please don’t mention Roger’s name, Mum. She can’t take another shock. Her brain might explode.

“Well, as I said, darling, Roger and I were doing a salsa-dancing demonstration up at the school when Elisabeth left the message. I got such a shock when I heard—”

“Did you say salsa dancing?”

“You can’t possibly have forgotten our salsa dancing! I’ll tell you why, because you actually described our last performance as unforgettable. It was just last Wednesday night! We had Olivia up on the floor with us, of course we couldn’t convince Madison and Tom to have a go, or you for that matter, Roger was quite disappointed, but I tried to explain—”

“Roger?” said Alice. “Who is Roger?”

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

Who was I kidding? It’s not like she ever goes more than five minutes without mentioning Roger’s name.

“Yes, Roger, of course. Now, you can’t have forgotten Roger. Can you?” Her mother looked frightened and said to Elisabeth, “This is quite serious, isn’t it. I knew she looked too pale. She is literally bleached of color.”

Alice was trying to think of other names that sounded like Roger. Rod? Robert? Her mother had a habit of getting people’s names just slightly wrong, so that Jamie became Johnny, Susan became Susannah, and so on.

“The only Roger I know is Nick’s dad,” said Alice, with a little laugh because Nick’s dad was a little laughable.

Her mother stared at her. She looked like a doll with those spiky black eyelashes. “Well, that’s the Roger I’m talking about, darling. My husband Roger.”

“Your husband?”

“Oh, give me strength,” sighed Elisabeth.

Alice turned to her. “Mum married Roger?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But . . . Roger? Really?”

“Yep. Really.”

So here was another wedding that the other Alice had attended in her place, but this was a wedding Alice couldn’t even begin to envisage.

For one thing, her mother had always refused to consider the possibility of dating other men. “Oh, I’m too old for all that,” she’d say. “You need to be young and pretty to date! And besides, you only have one love of your life, and that was your father. How could any man ever measure up to him?” And although Elisabeth and Alice had continually tried to convince her that she was still young and attractive, and that Dad would never have expected her to mourn him forever, Alice had been secretly proud of her mother’s devotion. It was