Landen looked at his watch.
“Isn’t it time you were off to work, wifey darling? The good folk of Swindon would be utterly lost and confused without you to take the burden of floor-covering decision making from them.”
He was right. I was already ten minutes late, and I kissed him several times, just in case something unexpected occurred that might separate us for longer than planned. By “unexpected” I was thinking of the time he was eradicated for two years by the Goliath Corporation. Although the vast multinational was back in business after many years in the financial and political doldrums, they had not yet attempted any of the monkey business that had marked our relationship in the past. I hoped they’d learned their lesson, but I’d never quite freed myself of the idea that a further fracas with them might be just around the corner, so I always made quite sure that I’d told Landen everything I needed to tell him.
“Busy day ahead?” he asked as he saw me to the garden gate.
“A large carpet to install for a new company in the financial center-bespoke executive pile, plus the usual quotes. I think Spike and I have a stair carpet to do in an old Tudor house with uneven treads, so one of those nightmare jobs.”
He paused and sucked his lower lip for a moment.
“Good, so…no…no…SpecOps stuff or anything?”
“Sweetheart!” I said, giving him a hug. “That’s all past history. I do carpets these days-it’s a lot less stressful, believe me. Why?”
“No reason. It’s just that what with Diatrymas being seen as far north as Salisbury, people are saying that the old SpecOps personnel might be recalled into ser vice.”
“Six-foot-tall carnivorous birds from the late Paleocene would be SO-13 business if they were real, which I doubt,” I pointed out. “I was SO-27. The Literary Detectives. When copies of Tristram Shandy are threatening old ladies in dark alleys, I just might be asked for my opinion. Besides, no one’s reading books much anymore, so I’m fairly redundant.”
“That’s true,” said Landen. “Perhaps being an author isn’t such a great move after all.”
“Then write your magnum opus for me,” I told him tenderly. “I’ll be your audience, wife, fan club, sex kitten and critic all rolled into one. It’s me picking up Tuesday from school, right?”
“Right.”
“And you’ll pick up Jenny?”
“I won’t forget. What shall I do if Pickwick starts shivering in that hopelessly pathetic way that she does?”
“Pop her in the airing cupboard-I’ll try and get her cozy finished at work.”
“Not so busy, then?”
I kissed him again and departed.
2. Mum and Polly and Mycroft
My mother’s main aim in life was to get from the cradle to the grave with the minimum of fuss and bother and the maximum of tea and Battenberg. Along the way she brought up three children, attended a lot of Women’s Federation meetings and managed to squeeze a few severely burned meals somewhere in between. It wasn’t until I was six that I realized that cake wasn’t meant to be 87 percent carbon and that chicken actually tasted of something. Despite all this, or perhaps even because of it, we all loved her a great deal.
My mother lived less than a mile away and actually on the route to work, so I often dropped in just to make sure she was okay and wasn’t about to embark on some harebrained scheme, as was her habit. A few years ago she had hoarded tinned pears on the principle that once she’d cornered the market, she could “name her price,” a flagrant misunderstanding of the rules of supply and demand that did no damage to the tinned-fruit producers of the world but condemned her immediate family and friends to pears at every meal for almost three years.
She was the sort of parent you would want to have living close by, but only on the grounds that she would then never come to stay. I loved her dearly, but in small doses. A cup of tea here, a dinner there-and as much child care as I could squeeze out of her. The text excuse I gave Landen was actually something of a mild fib, as the real reason for my popping around was to pick something up from Mycroft’s workshop.
“Hello, darling!” said Mum as soon as she opened the door. “Did you get my text?”
“Yes. But you must learn how to use the backspace and delete keys-it all came out as nonsense.”
“‘L&Ks4DnRNXT-SNDY??’” she repeated, showing me her cell phone. “What else could that mean but ‘Landen and kids for dinner next Sunday?’ Really, darling, how you even begin to communicate with your children, I have no idea.”
“That wasn’t real text shorthand,” I said, narrowing my eyes suspiciously. “You just made it up.”
“I’m barely eighty-two,” she said indignantly. “I’m not on the scrap heap yet. Made up the text indeed! Do you want to come back for lunch?” she added, without seeming to draw breath. “I’ve got a few friends coming around, and after we’ve discussed who is the most unwell, we’ll agree volubly with one another about the sorry state of the nation and then put it all to rights with poorly thought-out and totally impractical ideas. And if there’s time after that, we might even play cribbage.”
“Hello, Auntie,” I said to Polly, who hobbled out of the front room with the aid of a stick, “If I texted you ‘L&Ks4DnRNXT-SNDY??’ what would you think I meant?”
Polly frowned and thought for a moment, her prunelike forehead rising in a folding ripple like a festoon curtain. She was over ninety and looked so unwell that she was often mistaken for dead when asleep on the bus. Despite this she was totally sound upstairs, with only three or four fair-to-serious medical ailments, unlike my mother, who had the full dozen-or so she claimed.
“Well, do you know I’d be a bit confused-”
“Hah!” I said to Mum. “You see?”
“-because,” Polly carried on, “if you texted me asking for Landen and the kids to come over for Sunday dinner, I’d not know why you hadn’t asked him yourself.”
“Ah…I see,” I mumbled, suspicious that the two of them had been colluding in some way-as they generally did. Still, I never knew why they made me feel as though I were an eighteen-year-old when I was now fifty-two and myself in the sort of respectable time of life that I thought they should be. That’s the thing about hitting fifty. All your life you think the half century is death’s adolescence, but actually it’s really not that bad, as long as you can remember where you left your glasses.
“Happy birthday, by the way,” said my mother. “I got you something-look.”
She handed me the most hideous sweater you could possibly imagine.
“I don’t know what to say, Mum, and I really mean that-a short-sleeved lime green sweater with a hood and mock-antler buttons.”
“Do you like it?”
“One’s attention is drawn to it instantly.”
“Good! Then you’ll wear it straightaway?”
“I wouldn’t want to ruin it,” I replied hastily. “I’m just off to work.”
“Ooh!” said Polly. “I’ve only now remembered.” She handed me a CD in a plain sleeve. “This is a preproduction copy of Hosing the Dolly.”
“It’s what?”
“Please try to keep up with the times, darling. Hosing the Dolly. The new album by Strontium Goat. It won’t be out until November. I thought Friday might like it.”