Sunday Best by Bernice Rubens Page A

ought to leave?’
    I detected a distinct pleading in her voice, a helplessness, as if she were placing the decision for her whole future into my hands, and as if to confirm this, she laid her hand on my knee.
    Now I want to make a few things clear at this point. I had nothing to do with that initial move. My knee just happened to be there, but it was she who put her hand on it, and a woman’s hand on a man’s knee, and a bereaved hand at that, can be the beginning of many things. And of course, my knee trembled. I defy any man to keep a stiff upper knee in such circumstances. She took it as response, as well she might. ‘D’you think I ought to leave?’ she said again, with more of a challenge this time.
    In response, I placed my hand on her knee, not crosswiseover hers, for that, I intuitively felt, would be asking for trouble, but lying as a parallel, a position slightly more thoroughbred, and still, though marginally so, excusable by affection. I should, of course, have taken the precaution of occupying my other hand, in my pocket perhaps, but since it was free, she took it, and placed it, quite logically I suppose, given as she was to symmetry, on her other knee. There was now no longer any need for conversation, for there was already enough between us, and it had nothing to do with love. I knew that for my part at least, it was lust. Nothing more, nothing less. And I assumed that for her it was likewise, prompted perhaps by a need to confirm herself once again amongst the living. But all this is irrelevant, since lust does not concern itself with motivation. On reflection, it is of course possible, that both of us, having been accused, thought that we might as well be guilty. And so our hands wandered, detached from all thought, manoeuvring a gradual state of undress.
    And it was thus that Tommy, arriving slippered on the edge-to-edge, found us, fumbling, writhing and apart.
    I looked at him, not immediately connecting the horror on his face with my own state of partial undress. And then I saw his mother’s skirt hoiked up to her thigh, and I thought she was disgusting.
    â€˜You’re filthy and rotten,’ he shouted at us both, ‘and I’m going to tell my Dad.’ He drew his breath, stunned by his own horrible confusion. ‘I’m going to tell everybody,’ he screamed. ‘Everybody. I’ll shout it in the street.’
    I clapped my hand over his mouth. ‘You don’t understand,’ was all I could say. ‘Your mother was overwrought.’ I realized that at one time I had offered that plea for his mother before.
    â€˜Overwrought,’ he sobbed, and I found it hard to stifle a feeling that he couldn’t even spell the word, ‘You’re always saying that. But I’ll tell everyone. I mean it. You’re just dirty and rude. ’Er too,’ he nodded in the direction of his overwrought mother who, by this time, had lowered her skirt.
    â€˜You’re not old enough to understand,’ she said.
    â€˜I don’t care. You’re rude and filthy, and I’m old enough to understand that, and I don’t care if you are my father, or my teacher,’ he was screaming again, ‘I’m going to tell them all in school, and the headmaster, too. You filthy rude things.’His dearth of vocabulary infuriated him, and knowing my penchant for synonyms, he felt bound, out of spite if nothing else, to repeat himself again in the same manner. ‘Filthy and rude, both of you.’
    He was over to the door, out of reach, and he gave himself a moment’s pause. Breathless with rage, he stared at the floor. ‘A pair of fucking pigs, both of you.’
    His mother crossed over to him, no longer the accused, and slapped him roundly across the face. ‘I don’t know where you learn such language,’ she said, ‘unless you pick it up at school.’ She turned on me with a look of hatred, and the sudden