by Jack Tollers
Chapter Nine
A grief observed
Victoria was dead tired when she finally arrived home and dropped with relief the cumbersome sack she had been carrying. With its bulky drawing board, dozens of pencils, gouges, water-colours, temperas, folders with sketches and all the rest of the paraphernalia thought to be necessary for an Art School student, that bag was a pain in the neck. She enjoyed her classes all right but had soon found out that carrying this heavy bundle to and fro from Bella Vista to Buenos Aires—using public transport and, worse, the twelve block walk from the railway station to her place—was as irksome as inevitable.
She had started Art with girlish assurance and had naively thought that perhaps her melomania could be expressed and transferred into painting, a craft in which she had done passably well at high school. But she soon discovered that before anything else, she would have to undergo hours and hours of an exacting drill by which she was supposed to acquire the necessary expertise in drawing, a difficult technique if ever there was one. She always knew that she would have to learn to draw before going on to anything else, and yet she only began to fathom what it takes after long hours of sweat over perspective exercises, shadowing techniques and what not. The truth was that she hadn’t even completed her first term and already was beginning to have second thoughts about her chosen career. On top of it, being forced to struggle daily with her impedimenta sometimes seemed to be just too much. It was usually on these excursions that she could only dejectedly think that she was probably in the wrong business. Only thing was, she couldn’t think of anything else to do. And then, her granny Felisa was paying through her nose for the school fees, as well as for the expensive and bothersome gear. It was always with great relief that she dumped the bag as soon as she got home, the bang on the floor a clear announcement that she was back home.
‘Daddy refuses to come out. He’s done it again and just won't come out,’ Lucy, her sixteen year old sister mournfully informed her with a wrinkled forehead, ‘He hasn’t even shaved,’ she added with plain disapproval, ‘and Annie’s told me that he’s been asking for his ear-trumpet again.’
Victoria sighed. Lucy was quite different from her elder sister, a small plump girl with a rather mouse-like face in which two very black eyes made a surprising contrast with her white skin and sandy tousled hair that she always kept quite short. But what most surprised anyone meeting the two sisters was the fact that Lucy had a sharp high-pitched voice. She was of a jocular disposition and her easy-going ways captivated most of the boys she met. She was in charge while Victoria was out; there was no one else who could decently run the house since Philip had left for the Seminary and the rest of her brothers and sisters were too young to ask much of them, except Joseph who sometimes, and then reluctantly, did the shopping at the grocer's or the bakery a few blocks away. Lucy counted heavily on the two old female servants for the laundry and cooking, but even then there was all the beds to be made, the sweeping and sewing and the infinite number of requests her little brothers and sisters would daily come up with. ‘Where are my socks?’ ‘Will you come up and see me act at the school play?’ ‘Where can I find a comb?’ ‘Who's going to comb me?’ ‘Madelaine won't let me comb her’, ‘So and so has thrown the comb at me again’ and so on and so forth. Victoria found that the worse part was everything linked to their schooling, homework, uniforms et al. In those days, teachers were not as tiresome and exacting as nowadays, requiring parents and tutors to be constantly peeping over their children’s shoulders and ensuring that they do their homework, but all the same, Victoria thought she had enough on her plate as things stood without having, on top of everything else, to help the little ones draw maps or do their math exercises.
Since their mother's death, a few months before, Lucy and Victoria had had to handle the house between them, and had soon found out that it was no easy thing. Their daughterly grief was soon allayed with the responsibility that had suddenly fallen upon them. The two girls had bravely faced their bereavement but, all the same, there were times when they both just felt like sitting down and crying—which they actually did on one occasion. After that, they only had to remember the despair, the moaning and general self-pity which had been displayed on that rather morbid occasion to avert any relapse in the same direction. The girls had sensibly decided that anything was better than that.
The worse part was Professor's Wade sudden collapse. He had sailed through the first few weeks of widowhood with a grave countenance and sad smiles and remained unusually silent when he showed up for family meals. It all seemed natural enough. But for the better part of the day he remained aloof in his study listening to Bach from a small tape recorder and looking vacantly out of the window. He certainly knew nothing of the family’s ups and downs. Things had worsened when a couple of months after his wife’s death he applied for a long delayed retirement and stopped lecturing. He wasn’t even busy these days. And recently, he had returned to his old habit of feigning a case of progressive and most irritating deafness. Of, course, having seen him during the last couple of years on several occasions loaf around the house with a ridiculous ear-trumpet he had acquired some years ago, it didn’t mean much to them all. He always seemed to remember its need when particularly worried by something or other, and his late wife used to humour him while affecting not to notice it inducing the children to speak near the trumpet´s mouth at the top of their voice. That usually did the trick, and for some months the extravagant artefact was not to be seen, until he somehow stumbled, so to speak, on the trumpet, and the number was on again. An old and tired man, maybe defeated this time by grief, Victoria reflected, taking refuge in his eccentric foibles.
She sighed once more and headed for her father's study. For the last two days he had refused to eat except a few biscuits with his tea, and would not budge from his study for love or money, just snoozing from time to time in his armchair and not giving the least sign of interest in anything under the sun. And now he hadn’t even shaved, which seemed most uncharacteristic of him.
Victoria was about to enter the study when suddenly the door opened and an old man came out in something of a hurry bumping into the young girl.
‘Oh, sorry, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
It was Díaz, the physician. In effect, Lucy had summoned the family doctor, who had been examining his patient when Victoria arrived. Doctor Díaz was an old friend and promptly paid the requested visit—only to come out of the study shaking his head at the girls’ anxious questions. The quack was an impersonation of the typical family doctor with huge white whiskers, very small spectacles and his emblematic dark brown leather bag. Victoria remembered that when she was a child the old man used to come round in the evenings for a drink and a game of chess with her father, though that seemed ages ago. The times when she still had a mother, she thought, making a wry face.
There was nothing wrong with the Professor, the old man informed—nothing, that is, that he could do anything about. And he certainly was not deaf.
‘Well, what can we do?’ Victoria enquired.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t really know, dear girl,’ he answered while lighting what seemed to be a very old pipe. ‘I should try everything, from music to card playing, from gardening to the cinema or even...’ he winked at Victoria with an impish grin, ‘or even... I don´t know, getting him to meet interesting people.’ He laughed at Victoria’s censorious face. ‘Listen, my girl,’ he said assuming a grave but more sympathetic tone, ‘I’ve already tried to get him to play chess with me, and do you know what he said?’ The doctor let go of his bag and sat down on a stool that happened to be in the middle of the room. Victoria looked down at him with a mixture of interest and tiredness. ‘He said that it was too late, that it was too late now for anything but his own death.’ The old man puffed at his pipe with concentration. ‘I think he might well be right if it were not for all of you.’ With a vague swish of his right arm and a critical eye he pointedly surveyed the
untidy room. As if to underline his words, one of the twins started to cry somewhere upstairs. Victoria sighed and furiously fought back a couple of unwelcome tears that inevitably welled up.
‘So, what did you say to him?’ Lucy asked.
The man turned to Lucy. ‘Well I told him as much, but, not much more, dear girl, not much more.’ The medic got up, took his bag with a firm grip and headed for the door while Victoria followed him. He gave her a quick kiss and a pat on her head before disappearing into the evening twilight leaving a pensive girl standing on the porch.
Finally, she turned round and went to her father’s study without bothering to knock on the door. To all appearances Professor Wade was dozing but as soon as he heard her coming in he opened his eyes. ‘Oh? It’s you Victoria? Hello, dear. Please, uh, sit down. Have a nice day?’ he mumbled in a rather drowsy voice. She sat down on a little stool by her father's armchair with a stern look on her face. He smiled at her rather wanly and took her little white hand in his; she was surprised to discover how cold he was. All the reproaches she was prepared to deliver were instantly drowned in a wave of filial solicitude. ‘Father, are you warm enough? Do you think you have a temperature?’ She put a hand on his forehead. ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ she asked anxiously, ‘Won’t you have something to eat?’
He straightened himself in an unwieldy fashion on the enormous armchair and shook his head, with a fond smile. Maybe Victoria wasn’t quite aware of it, but he clearly loved her more than the rest of his children. She was his eldest daughter, and they had chosen her name because it was the name of all his expectations and all his hopes. ‘No, thanks, dear’, he smiled again, ‘I don´t feel like reading at all,’ he said, relishing the deliberate misconception with an affected drawl. Victoria deliberately shouted her question again only inches from his left ear, and that put an end to the old man´s pretence of deafness. ‘No, dear, I´m all right. Maybe I´ll muster enough energy to have dinner with you all tonight, but just now I´ll have a cigarette instead, if you don’t mind. Please.’ It was an open secret that Victoria had been smoking since she was sixteen years old, but only now did the Professor acknowledge it. So, blushing a bit, she handed over a pack and matches to her father who proceeded to light and puff at the thing as if it were a pipe, the end of the butt brightly signalling that it was well alight.
‘Do you happen to know where my ear-trumpet is?’ he asked distractedly. She shook her head impatiently.
The man sighed affectedly. ‘Do you know what old Doctor Díaz has been saying to me?’ he asked. ‘Well’, he puffed slowly at his cigarette while looking at a bookcase in front of him, ‘he reproachfully accused me of not trying to get over... I ask you... And, well, I suppose... you know, he rather bullied me a bit... uh—nothing new, what? Just what quacks usually do anyway—to the effect that I should pull myself together and get on with life and everything.’ He glanced inquisitively at his daughter searching for signs of intelligence in her face. Victoria looked on impassively. ‘Might as well try and pull myself out of a hole by tugging at my hair...’
Victoria sighed. ‘Yes, well, he actually did tell me that, yes.’ She straightened her skirt across her joined white knees and added: ‘And I must say, I find it quite a sound piece of advice.’ She sighed again, before saying straight to her father’s face: ‘We all need you, you know... so much.’ This time she couldn’t repress her tears, which flowed freely down her cheeks. The old man tightened his grip around Victoria’s hand and said nothing. There was a pause, while Victoria got hold of her handkerchief and dried her eyes. After that she lighted a cigarette, the first ever in front of her father.
‘I know how much you need me, especially now that your mother isn’t around.’ He got up with visible effort and slowly shuffled over to the bookcase where he arranged one or two books before sitting down again rather heavily. ‘But the truth is that there’s... how shall I say, Victoria?’ He shook his head. ‘There’s not much left of me to help anyway.’ He shrugged his shoulders and cleared his voice a bit, while Victoria looked up at him with interest. It was the first time since her mother’s death that her father was actually saying something. ‘I’m a bit dead myself, if you have to know.’
Victoria waited while she smoked in silence. She knew her father well enough to anticipate that he would elaborate without need of any encouragement.
‘I like that... Pull myself together, what?... I ask you... when half of me isn’t even there... No, old Díaz couldn’t understand it—he wouldn’t find anything about that in any of his mumbo jumbo treatises of his anyway—but the truth is I’m half-dead, you know, since your mother passed away. We were married till death would us part, and now that she’s gone I feel half dead, that’s all. I mean, uh, I never thought one could feel like this, but there it is, I don’t think I can quite get over this... Living without half a life, half dying all the time.’ He sighed and seemed to be on the verge of tears, except that he belonged to an older generation of men who were trained not to, ever. Certainly not with self-pity, and certainly not in front of his daughter. All the same, Victoria knew about his feelings, if not from his words, from his grip that tightened now and then like poetic overtones as it were, emphasising with his cold hand the accents of his grief.
‘It’s all very well, you know, to repeat all that cheap modern voluntarism so dear to our priests, and doctors, and aunts, and shrinks... All that crap you know, about being strong, stiff upper lip and so forth... uh... I don’t know. That I must think of the rest of the family, that life goes on, that I must be a man... I ask you, they’re telling a dead man to be a man. Well, half dead, anyway,’ he added with a weary smile. He sighed and emptied a small ashtray into a waste paper basket that was conveniently located at his side. Victoria noticed that he had put on the same black tie, as he had every single day since Saint Patrick’s day, the date of her mother’s death. On the other hand he hadn´t bothered to change his slippers, a blatant incongruity in his outfit. But the old man kept on with his ruminations.
‘I need time, you know. I’m only asking for a bit of time to get over this... if and when.’ He suddenly stopped and vacantly gazed through the window.
‘Get over... get over what?’ her daughter delicately prompted.
The old man remained silent.
But Victoria had been brought up by her parents to talk things over, as extensively, as plainly, as simply or as elaborately as possible. It was like an infectious game that had been played with relish over and over again in the Wade family, and the old professor was responsible for it. For instance, if you happened to be in that house and said that you had a headache, everyone would suddenly turn round and inquire all about your ailment, when had it started, was it recurrent, what did one do about it, could you link it to what you eat, or were you especially worried about something or the other. All the family, even the little ones would ask all sorts of questions about it and you were generally forced to admit that you hadn’t thought much about the damn thing in the first place, and yet, all the inquisitiveness was easily compensated by the general interest in your plight, and the display of good wishes would generally supply unusual comfort for anyone subjected to the Wade curiosity-game. At the same time, there was always a bit of a private joke underlying such disproportionate interest.
‘You say that you have to get over... Well? Get over what?’ she insisted.
He smiled knowingly and felt rather proud of his daughter not letting go, just as he had taught her. ‘Get over what? I’ll tell you, dear Victoria, if only you’ll listen for a while,’ he sighed again, ‘I never knew one could feel so miserable and keep on living.’
Victoria wouldn´t let go. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
‘When I met your mother nearly a quarter of a century ago, I was reading Victor Hugo: C’était une femme, donc malhereuse. Means something like, ‘she was a woman, and therefore...’ Well it can´t be translated... ‘unfortunate’ or something like that. Anyway I thought that if France
s would ever consent to marry me—something that seemed quite impossible then—’ He smiled at this, already deeply submerged in his memories, ‘As I say, I promised that, if she ever consented to such a preposterous project, I would always strive to make her happy, as happy as I could.’ He sighed again. ‘I know it sounds sort of dreamy, put that way... unless you happen to see what I’m driving at.’ He looked at his daughter suspiciously, but Victoria’s face revealed nothing. ‘Happiness is a big suitcase, full of things... but I thought I could amuse her, and cheer her up, and make her laugh, and please her, and make her feel proud of me and her family...’ The old man smiled wanly at her daughter. ‘As you see, it was a tall order and a silly thing to promise; but then, you see, I was in love and when one is young and in love, one is prone to say and do foolish things... And on the other hand, is there any other way of loving truthfully and not saying and promising impossible things? Indeed, can someone love seriously and remain self-possessed, discreet and prudent?... Indeed, be in love and not enthused?’ He looked through the window as if someone would answer back. ‘Plato says differently. And then what actually happened is that I soon forgot all about my promises and she, without having promised a thing, actually made me happy... Now don´t misunderstand me , it’s not that I made her unhappy, with a few exceptions here and there—and I’ll go into that in a minute—but, what I’m saying is that I really, completely, absolutely forgot about that. You know, about trying, at least very frequently, to ensure her a joyful day... I probably made all these rash promises only to seduce her, you know the way we men have of...’ His voice faultered while he seemed to think about what he was saying.
After a pause he gestured to his daughter for another cigarette and puffed a bit while looking down at the floor. ‘And then, as I say, she actually went out of her way to make me happy, daily, in a consistent, determined, resolute, obstinate and cheerful way. She would see to this business of having a happy husband every minute of every day with a drive, an unconquerable will, with grit and aplomb, with a decisiveness that I hadn’t imagined... It was all so invisibly done, you know. And now that I realise it... what’s the use?’ The smoke from another cigarette rose slowly towards the ceiling, and Victoria couldn’t help thinking that there was an unusual stillness in that study, that evening. She remained as quiet as ever.
‘The French poet, was it Claudel? Yes, Claudel. Well anyway, he once said that a woman is a promise she cannot keep. Well, I´ll tell you something, your mother kept it all right. Indeed. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever met, and beauty is only a promise, you know. I think Goethe once said something like that, didn’t he, something to the effect that beauty promises more than it actually delivers. But your mother was so... and to me, when we met years ago, with her swirling skirts and young laughter, seemed to be such an enormous promise. I couldn´t quite believe she had actually fallen for me. And yet she had. And she delivered so much.’ The joke hovered on his lips. ‘All of you, in the first place.’
Victoria smiled for the first time that evening.
‘We got married rather young, you know...’ he sort of hedged with different angles, juggling with each possible approach to what he wanted to say, even if the subject was only one. ‘I had to get away from home... hmmm..., Well, I suppose I´ve told you all about this before, you knowall about your grandparents and... well, anyway, I got away from them, sure enough, and the idea behind the whole thing, of running away from home and getting married was this fantastic project we had of building a new home for us. These things are easily said, but are very difficult to realise you know... And it’s not only a question of money. For one thing, I couldn’t very well run away from myself, and I carried my own bag of resentfulness and inconsistencies which made me a young man of difficult disposition, if you know what I mean.’ He smiled as he looked back on himself. ‘Still am, up to a point. Men make houses, but women make homes. She was a balm of sorts, you know, the remedy of so many... a real pick-me-up. There´s more than meets the eye in a youngster who hasn´t been happy for most of his life. Some hidden sore spots can secretly remain there, lurking in the darkness, doing quite a lot of harm, breaking you up and turning you into a thoroughly unreliable character, you know... But Frances your mother saw through me and just cured me...’ The old man sighed again. ‘Not only with caresses and fond kisses... though, mind you, there was plenty of that too...’ Victoria blushed unobserved by her father who by now was too much immersed in his memories to notice the typical embarrassment of children when they hear about their parent´s intimacies.
‘She could be quite severe too if need be. I remember the day she locked me out of home just because I was in a terrible mood and had started insulting the whole household because one of you had lost a screwdriver... That also was a cure of sorts... I finally got in through the skylight and promptly broke my leg in the process, much to your mother’s distress—and laughter. Anyway, that was the last time I made a scene because of lost tools and the like.’ He looked at his eldest daughter in a most endearing fashion, a mixed formula of laughing eyes and the tiniest of smiles. ‘She gave me all of you, she delivered excellent cooking and cordial smiles, and love words—we men need them as much as women do, you know—, and then, I don’t know... She sacrificed herself. But not a trace of bigotry there, or elsewhere for that matter, thank God. She gave herself up to all of us with such energy and purpose, devotion and kindness, with unfaultering merriment—I will always remember her humming in the kitchen, despite the fact that usually there wasn’t much food to cook, we were quite poor some years ago...’ His discourse seemed to dwindle now, but Victoria knew better.
‘I´m sorry to ramble on like this, Victoria, but... anyway, housewives like her have been the backbone of the world such as we knew it, the invisible net that held together so much merriment for so many generations.’ He inadvertently took on somewhat professorial airs. ‘And now they are being scoffed at... Our wonderful modern and oh so, so, progressive, progressive!, I ask you, world has convicted them all, uh, sentenced all our grannies and aunts, and mothers without even hearing out their case. But their work is surely the most important jobWasn’t it Lewis who asked what do ships, railways, mines, cars, governments, etc., exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? And all this stuff and nonsense is not only foolish, it’s also quite sad. This world, Victoria, is losing glee by the day, and no one seems to notice, let alone do something about it. And one of the reasons for this, dear girl, is that women like your mother are getting scarce, are constantly being mocked at, the systematic object of ridicule and derision by all that devilry of journalists and feminists, psychologists and modernist priests, liberal politicians, etc. You know, the progressive blokes that Chesterton knocked out decades ago. Intelectually, that is. But no, they never give up.’ Victoria silently observed the irate old professor she had always loved, and couldn’t quite repress a smile.
‘Just like Saint Exupéry, I hate this world with all my guts.’ He was evidently feeling a bit better after his anti-modern outburst. ‘But Frances, your mother, she didn’t. She just ignored it, peacefully. She brought you up in the sacred tradition of songs and prayer, of joyful meals and all the good old stories. She wasn’t even interested, you know, in newspapers or T.V., never questioning my decision of not allowing that silly box in the house—even when she enjoyed seeing a soap opera now and then. You could say, as I have heard more than once, that she was old fashioned... So what? She didn’t care for fashion... However, she could dress up with prim decorum when the occasion required it. And all the time, you know, she just adored The Beatles,’ he frowned a bit at this, ‘and even if she couldn’t exactly make me come round, I used to love hearing her hum “Penny Lane” in that quiet way of hers.’ He shifted in his armchair and his voice took on a slower pace, as if he were picking his words. ‘I hope you marry Peter one day and make him as happy as your mother did with me, bless your heart.’
Victoria could
n’t quite stop her tears now, suddenly awash by waves of glimpses coming back to her from her childhood. But the old man still went on and on, steeped in his own thoughts and memories.
‘She didn´t care much for what was going on you know. For instance, I remember telling her about Kennedy’s murder, or about Armstrong walking on the moon for the first time... She wasn’t very much impressed by that sort of thing because she would be typically worrying about the butcher’s mother’s state of health or something. She believed in her neighbours in a religious sort of way if you know what I mean. They were ever present to her, because she felt them, I don´t know, so near. And that´s the reason why she was so attentive, so heedful of all and sundry. Anyone in her presence could instantly feel how absorbed she would be by your problems, your life. She seemed to have a soft spot in her heart for the most unseemly people... I always liked her for that. Simone Weil says that you can’t quite love God in a direct way. Not unless you first love your neighbour. Implicit love, she calls it. I don’t know... she even says that there are times when even thinking of God separates us from him, believe it or not. Well, your mother, she knew all about that without having read Simone Weil—or anything else, for that matter.’ Victoria’s mother’s illiteracy had always been something of a family joke. ‘I stumbled over Kierkegaard’s distinction between Religion ‘A’ and ‘B’ only a couple of years ago, for God’s sake. But she knew it all along. She only talked to you about God, or Religion, when you were little, but as soon as you could reason and began to understand the world, she wouldn’t even mention the subject to you—or to me, for that matter.’ He wrinkled his forehead, stretching his memory. ‘She prayed all right, I know that, but in an unselfconscious manner, not a trace of bigotry in her. I’ve been re-reading her letters...’
Victoria looked up with sudden interest. She knew nothing about her mother’s letters. But he was referring to recent letters written to Philip, her brother, not love letters to her father.
‘Philip thought of bringing them up so I could read them. There are only two, written to him just before... uh... just before he joined the Seminary. You should read them, you know, they show in just what class your mother was. No devotional turn of phrases. No religion, in the ordinary sense of the word. Just common sense and motherly advice. Be good. Be patient. Be a good boy... And yet... There´s a quality in the way she phrases these platitudes that one can only begin to fathom after reading them a couple of times, you know. You end up seeing that if you’re not nice, in a general sort of way, you might as well chuck away the whole of your religiousness. That if you’re not patient and kind to whoever you happen to have as a neighbour, you’re done for. She even writes that one should be pleasing to oneself in the first place, which to my mind sounded quite heretical. Aversio creaturam. And yet I happened to look it up in my Concordance and, by Jove, didn´t I find the same idea in one of David´s Psalms?’
‘Well, what about the First Commandment, then? Not to mention “Please, please me”’ Victoria said with a grin.
‘Eehhh?’, the Professor only knew about The Beatles what his wife had told him—which wasn´t much, in any case.
‘Nothing, nothing, Father.’
‘Well, my girl, don’t be cheeky, taking advantage of an ailing old man like me.’
‘It’s a song by The Beatles, Father.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, Please, please me.’
He hunched his shoulders at this piece of information.
‘Not a very Christian way of putting it,’ he snorted, ‘but anyway, I suppose that’s the general idea.’ He took another cigarette from Victoria’s pack and left it between his lips while looking through the window. It was dark by now and you could only see a distant light from the neighbour’s house. Victoria shifted on her stool and waited for more.
‘Please please me, and don’t let me down, what?’
Victoria was quite surprised at this.
‘Oh, so you have actually listened to The Beatles, Dad, haven’t you?’ she enquired.
‘Not me, young girl. But as you well know, your mother was quite a fan so I couldn’t quite help hearing some of their songs... I ask you. Took quite a lot of patience from this soul I can tell you, but yes... and I once took your mother to the cinema to see that dreadful film of theirs, what was it called?’
‘Let it be.’
‘That’s the one. I fell asleep instantly and only woke at the end to find these hairy blighters singing rowdily on top of a terrace or something while the police went after them... A frightful film, if you ask me, with that horrible hairy character, George Lennon or something, all wrapped up in furs and crying out “Don’t let me down” or words to that effect.’ He turned towards Victoria with a smile. ‘Your mother just ate it.’ He sighed again. ‘But anyway, as long as she was happy I felt happy also, and then all of you felt better and the family seemed to benefit with all this... so it seemed a good investement, humouring her with all this Beatle nonsense.’
‘Maybe if you listened to them now, you’d change your mind,’ Victoria hinted with a grin.
The professor shook his head. He got up from his armchair and started a small walk along the book shelves, his back turned to his daughter, shuffling this way and that in front of them, the unlighted cigarette in his right hand.
‘You’ve got a nerve, young girl. The very idea. It would only remind me of your mother and the fact that she’s gone for ever and not, repeat, not coming back.’ He reached for the box of matches and lit up with a trembling hand. Then he turned to face the long lines of books, picking at the back of one or another. Victoria could only hear him by stretching her ears.
‘She didn’t let me down and she always pleased, pleased me until... until...’
Victoria thought she heard him sob or choke or something but didn’t dare move. By now she couldn’t quite repress her own tears.
After what seemed centuries, the old man turned and sat down in his armchair again, with a semblance of regained composure. His wrinkled face was dry and he managed to smile at Victoria.
‘Very well, young girl. Enough. Run along now and leave me for a bit. I’m dead tired. I think I’ll just have a nap until dinnertime, and then, maybe you can tell me more about that song... Now that your mother isn’t around I... uh, it’s just possible that I’ll let you harass me with those confounded, hairy, bleating upstarts. Now run along, young girl. I want to be alone for a while. Please, please me, will you?’
Victoria left the room and nearly bumped into Lucy who was in the next room waiting for news.
‘So? How’s he doing?’ the anxious girl asked.
‘Getting better,’ smiled Victoria.