Enchantment Read Online Free Page B

She stumped the awkward distances between stove and sink and refrigerator with her knees straight and her legs rather wide apart, like artificial ones, mashing potato and slicing vegetables and making rich gravy as zestfully as she had done all Tim’s life.
    Tim’s sister Sarah was in the house, but she was up in her room, so he sat at the kitchen table with a beer, because his mother would not let him help. He told her about his week, with a few added attractions to stop her saying, ‘I worry about you,’ and she told him one of her tall tales about a deliveryman who she imagined was a disgraced financier.
    Tim was happy to let it wash over him, but he could not be bothered to join in with her speculations about whether the man had escaped from prison and stolen the van, or was working to atone. When Tim was a child with no sense of himself, he had shared all this with her eagerly. Now her endless romances about other people were boring and irrelevant. Let people invent their own dramas and dreams. The true romances were only about the self.
    The back door opened wide on the cold evening air, and remained open while Tim’s father bent over on the step and coughed as if he had swallowed a hedgehog.
    â€˜Come in and shut the door,’ his wife said.

    No one sympathized with Wallace’s cough, since he was not prepared to give up smoking just to please his family and the doctor. No one told Wallace Kendall what to do. In his powerful days as Clerk of the Works for the Town Council, he had told everybody else what to do. Why should he change with retirement?
    He came into the kitchen and banged the door hard enough to bring one of Annie’s silly little texts off its nail. KISS THE COOK. It lay on the floor and he stepped over it.
    His son, the son he had wanted born first, not last, and strong and manly instead of – well, his size was not his fault, but other things were – was lolling at the table while his poor mother did all the work.
    â€˜â€™Lo, Father.’ It was a current affectation among Wallace’s children to call him Father in a derisive way, as if he were something the cat had dragged in. ‘How’s it going?’
    Before Timothy had even finished the question, he had obviously stopped listening.
    â€˜I finished two salad bowls, if you’re interested.’ Wallace stood looking down at the irritating top of Tim’s small head. ‘Why didn’t you come earlier? I wanted you to do a bit of hand sanding for me. Was that too much to ask?’
    â€˜You shouldn’t have stayed out so long, Wallace,’ Annie said, in the comfortable way she tried to soothe people down if she could see they were a bit upset. ‘It’s getting dark.’
    â€˜I couldn’t see a bloody thing. Nearly cut my finger off, if you want to know.’
    â€˜Oh dear, let’s see.’
    You could come in with half your thumb hanging off, and she’d still coo at you as if you were a two-year-old with a scratched knee.
    â€˜It’s all
right
.’ He snatched away his hand. ‘No thanks to working with sharp tools in that bad light, waiting for this young man.’
    â€˜His name is Tim,’ his wife reminded him, ‘and he’s only just got back from working hard all day.’
    Implying her husband had done nothing. But I’ve worked more Saturdays than my children have had hot dinners, and that’s saying something with this mother who buys love with food. Out all weathers on the housing sites. Mud and clay up over your boots, from cutting the first sod to tightening the last door handle. Everything that went wrong was always my fault, and I’d to answer for it. Floods, electrical blow-outs, poor workmanship, the lot.
    â€˜Just back from work?’ he tapped the back of Tim’s head with the handle of his penknife. ‘You go to the shop in jeans these days?’
    â€˜I went home to change.’
    â€˜Must