Every Day Is Mother’s Day. Hilary Mantel

       CHAPTER 2

      ‘Isabel,’ Colin said. ‘Isabel.’

      ‘Don’t slobber, Colin.’

      ‘You are unkind.’

      ‘Oh?’

      ‘You are vastly too good, Isabel. You make it plain.’

      ‘Yes.’ Isabel wound down the window of the car. A dank semirural darkness entered. She lit a cigarette.

      ‘Colin, why do you always lock the doors?’

      Heaving and sighing.

      ‘The car doors, Colin, why do you insist on locking your passengers in? Oh, come on, Colin. A bit of coherent conversation.’

      ‘The A6 murder,’ Colin said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘This. Murder. Similar. Circumstances. Night, a field, or a tract of, I don’t remember, some open ground, I suppose, by the side of the road. Hanratty. Before your time.’

      ‘Oh, Colin.’ She put out a narrow cold hand to find his face. ‘Colin, you are a worrier.’

      ‘Personally, I think the conviction was unjust,’ Colin said. ‘I’m against capital punishment. The truth is, Isabel, now forgive me, it’s rather maudlin I know, but the truth is Isabel, I’m against death. Death in any form.’

      She sighed, in the damp darkness of the passenger seat.

      ‘Sylvia,’ he said. ‘Sylvia is forbidding me eggs. My arteries. She read these things. Aagh.’ He let out a long breath, releasing his tie further with one hand. He heaved across to her, wet and sweating. ‘Do you know, sometimes I feel very much like suicide. But I had a good idea the other week. I thought I would buy myself a record of the Marches of Souza. And if I felt really tempted to suicide, I would play it. You wouldn’t kill yourself after that – after you’d marched about a bit. It would be too ridiculous. Isabel, Isabel.’ He pressed his face into her neck. It was a source of constant amazement to him that she did not pull away; not every time.

      This is October. Isabel is just a name on a letter, received by someone else.

      This is Colin off to his evening class. Sylvia is clattering the dishes together in the sink, slamming them with dangerous force on to the stainless-steel draining board. It is clear that she thinks Creative Writing a waste of time. Early evening bouts of violence echo from the lounge; the air hangs heavy and blue with gunsmoke, the children squat before the TV set, their mouths ajar.

      ‘You see nothing of them,’ Sylvia says. (This conversation has been held before.)

      Colin reverses himself and strides back into the room, swerving to avoid cracking his shins on the coffee table. Blocking the TV he treads the carpet before his offspring like a Lippizan stallion; but not very like.

      ‘They,’ he reports, ‘see nothing of me.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I wafted in there and stood in front of the television. They didn’t address me by name. They saw me merely as an obstruction to their view.’

      ‘Waft?’ Sylvia says. ‘You couldn’t waft. Never in a million years could you waft.’

      ‘They’re in a state of advanced hypnosis. Deep Trance. Tell me,’ he says, ‘why couldn’t I have gifted children? It would have been an interest for me. Why can’t they all be little Mozarts?’

      ‘We haven’t got a piano,’ Sylvia says.

      ‘I’m away.’ Going out, Colin stuffs his notebook into his pocket.

      In the hall mirror he glimpses his own face, weakly handsome, frowning, abstracted. He loosens the knot of his tie. Despite what Florence said about him aging, he looks years younger than his wife. He tries the effect of a boyish lopsided grin. It reminds him of something; his father’s hemiplegia perhaps. He erases it from his face and departs, banging the door behind him.

      There were some eighteen people in the classroom, rather more female than male, rather more old than young. Teacher was rubbing the leftover algebra off the board, a plump lady in a cardigan, and chalking up the words WRITING FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT. Excuse me, said Colin, stumbling through the desks and finding himself a seat to overflow. He looked around for Zelda Fitzgerald. She wasn’t there.

      ‘Perhaps if we all introduced ourselves,’ Mrs Wells said. ‘Perhaps if we all say a few words about the sort of writing we want to do. How we see ourselves.’

      How we see ourselves, Colin thought in querulous alarm, how we see ourselves? I am a history teacher, a teacher of the benighted past to the benighted present, ill-recompensed for what I suffer and despairing of promotion. My feet are size eight and a half, and I belong to the generation of Angry Young Men, though I was never angry until it was too late, oh, very late, and even now I am only mildly irritated. I am not a vegetarian and contribute to no charities, on principle; I loathe beetroot, and the sexual revolution has passed me by. My taste in clothes is conservative but I get holes in my pockets and my small change falls through; I do not speak to my wife about this because she is an excellent mother and I am intimidated by her, also appalled by the paltry nature of this complaint or what might be construed by her as a complaint. The sort of writing I want to do is the sort that will force me to become a tax-exile.

      He looked across the room and saw a woman, directly opposite him in the semi-circle into which they had lumbered the desks. He wondered why he had not looked up before. Habit, he told himself. Habit ends here.

      ‘My name is Isabel Field,’ she said. ‘No, I have never tried to sell any work. I am not interested in writing commercially, I am interested in increasing my clarity of expression. I am a social worker.’

      You are twenty-four or twenty-five, Colin thought, self-contained, reserved, sardonic. What struck him was

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