Getting It Right by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

large walnut clock ticking. A straw hat trimmed with daisies and narrow green velvet ribbon lay on the chest below it and he knew this meant that he could go up. Her door
was also open, but the shutters were closed, making bars of aqueous light across the white bed. She wore a muslin wrapper of pale green and white so that the bed was a marvellous confusion of
stripes and her white skin was blossomed with green and gold reflections. She lay half on her side with her face resting in the palm of one hand: at affectionate ease with herself, she was asleep.
On the bed beside her lay a painted paper fan open as it had fallen from her hand. (He remained quite still to watch and enjoy her – to store and print the detail of her in his mind so that
it would be easier to return to her in the future.) Her heavy dark hair, cut short on her forehead, was long and undressed – tied back with a piece of white braid; a thin gold chain with a
cross on it lay slanted on her neck. Her ankles were negligently crossed, her feet were bare. How should he wake her, and what might happen when he did? She would speak French, he realized with
sudden panic: he would not understand her. No – she would speak just enough English; or perhaps they need not speak. He put out his hand to touch her forehead . . .
    There was a banging on his door.
    ‘You never drank your tea after dinner.’ Before he could sit up, she was in the room with a tray, and stood over the bed waiting for him to clear the bedside table of books so that
she could deposit it. She wore her spectacles and three rollers at strategic points in her hair and he could see her darting professional glances round the room to see whether he had managed to
untidy anything since this morning.
    ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’
    She took this as a compliment. ‘It will be a fine time when I can’t bring my own son some tea. There’s those shop cakes you like. You can bring the tray down when you’re
done with it. Don’t let it get cold.’ And she went.
    The tray was a round tin one with a cat crouching in some buttercups printed on it. The teapot was encased in a knitted cosy the alternating colours of a ripe banana. There were three cupcakes
arranged on a paper doily on a plate. The milk jug was shaped like a yellow chick from whose beak the milk was supposed to pour (Marge had given it to his mother at Easter), the cup was one of her
best square ones whose handle was too modern to have a hole in it. Even before he lifted the shrouded teapot he knew it would be the one with feet – amusing china boots upon it. The whole
tray was crowded with her affection – never expressed in words but in countless domestic deeds of this nature. He got up from the bed and fetched his secret cup and saucer from a cupboard. It
was a piece of early Copeland with painted violas and butterflies, the rims richly gilded. He drank his tea out of it and wondered whether he could ever get his mother to believe that he liked
China tea. She would give it to him if he asked for it, but she refused utterly to
count
it as tea, so if he had it, it simply meant that he had to drink twice as much. He still felt so
stuffed with food that the cupcakes were a problem. In the end he wrapped them in a handkerchief to take to work. He started to feel nervous about the party as he was washing his cup in the
bathroom, and decided to have a bath and listen to some music while he catalogued his newest batch of records to take his mind off the evening.
    He had a long bath, washed his hair – did some Bates work on his eyes and had a thorough inspection of his face and neck. His face wasn’t too bad, but there was a corker coming up on
his neck – too high to be concealed even with a scarf round it. He scowled at himself in the glass so that he could see how much better he looked when he stopped. Not much better, really. The
bathroom now smelled of bad eggs from his dandruff treatment and he was glad to leave