Death of a Perfect Mother by Robert Barnard

for Mrs Watson,’ said Gordon. ‘I don’t need a car to go courting her—she just lives up the road.’
    â€˜Mrs Watson! That stuck-up little tailor’s dummy! Christ! Whatever gave you that idea? You’re a sight too good to take up with other men’s leavings.’
    Lill always let her family know when she changed her mind.
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    â€˜She’s screwing a car out of him now,’ said Gordon to Brian, when at last they had escaped from rusks and Ovalmix and had reached the womblike safety of theirbedroom. ‘God, what a cheek she’s got!’
    â€˜Would you have the nerve to drive round in a car that was the price of your mother’s shame?’ demanded Brian with a melodramatic gesture of the arms.
    â€˜Frankly, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. Only I don’t think I’ll be getting the chance. Lill’s next ride is going to be in the back of a hearse.’
    Brian shivered when it was put that bluntly. ‘Funny to think about it. Free, after all these years of . . . of being her doormats. I wish I felt better.’
    Gordon looked at him keenly. ‘What do you mean, better? What’s the matter?’
    â€˜Just this ruddy cough. It’s the climate. “Bronchial isle, all isles excelling”, as the poet said. They shouldn’t have put people down in this climate.’
    â€˜It’s not the climate does things to you. It’s Lill. It’s just some nervous thing. Remember last year—you weren’t any better in Tunisia.’
    Brian, lying on his bed with an unread book, shifted uneasily at the mention of Tunisia, as he always did. ‘Christ, no wonder I didn’t feel up to much,’ he muttered. ‘What with Lill and all. Remember Lill on the plane?’
    The two heads on their pillows—Gordon’s dark and purposeful, Brian’s fair and distressed—lay for a moment in silence as last year’s holiday in Tunisia came back to them. It had been explained to Lill that the firm they were travelling with was ‘up market’, and, when she expressed bewilderment, the term had been spelled out in words of one syllable. But she never quite understood that the people on this trip were a different sort from the mob they had been with to Benidorm three years before. Just in those early moments, when everyone was settling into their seats, swapping with each other at most a murmured comment on the rate of exchange or the price of Glenfiddich, Lill showed she misjudged the prevailing mood by shrieking across the plane to Gordon, six rows infront: ‘Soon be there now, Gord! How long will it be, d’you think, before some sheikh snatches me up in his passionate arms and takes me off to his harem, eh?’ And as soon as the ‘Fasten Seat Belts’ sign was switched off she was swaying along the aisle to the loo singing ‘The Sheikh of Arabee-ee’ with special smiles at all the more desirably distinguished men on the trip. One frozen air hostess at the back of the plane raised a plucked eyebrow at the other frozen air hostess at the front; the up-market travellers glanced sideways at each other and coughed in the backs of their throats. Still over the Channel, and everyone had got Lill’s number. None of them exchanged a word with Lill for the rest of the fortnight. ‘They’re a stuffy lot,’ Lill kept saying. ‘I prefer the wogs. Don’t understand what they’re going on about, but at least they’re friendly.’
    At last Brian, deep in memories, said: ‘No, it’s not the climate. It’s Lill.’
    â€˜And it’s Lill,’ said Gordon, ‘makes us the laughing-stocks of the town. Disgraces us every time we try to climb out of the mud. You know what people say about you and me?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Brian. ‘I know. Still, when all’s said and done—’
    â€˜Anyway,’