Thicker Than Water

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"She led the way into the living room, which in true Walton style opened directly off the street with nothing in the way of a porch or hall. It was a room that exemplified my mother’s virtues: four-square, clean, and without a book or an ornament to be seen, apart from her much-loved print of Edward John Poynter’s Faithful Unto Death - which shows a Roman soldier remaining at his post, nervous but steadfast, as the ashes of Vesuvius rain down around him. The picture has taken on a darker and darker yellow-brown cast over the years, caused by nicotine deposits staining the glass despite regular and vigorous polishing.

There was a single armchair and a narrow two-seater sofa, both in gaudily patterned fabrics, a portable TV about the size of a matchbox with an indoor aerial sitting on top of it, and a coffee table much marked with the whitened rings left by a thousand cups of hot tea - which brought to mind, rather too vividly, the young loup-garou on the train.

‘Bit early in the day, Mum,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

‘Away, away with rum,’ my mother said, quoting Mike Harding’s mock-temperance song: that was always her answer, whenever anyone commented on her drinking. She’s not an alcoholic, not by her own definition: she never lets herself get drunker than the business of the day requires.

‘I will for now,’ I said, hedging my bets.

She went through into the kitchen, and I stayed behind in the living room. Channelling Sherlock Holmes, I looked around for fag ends. But if Mum had start›f M"">Sed smoking again, she wouldn’t need anything as formal as an actual ashtray, and in any case I would have noticed as soon as I walked into the room: because it would have had that smell - somewhere between despair and dysentery - that smoking rooms in old hotels have.

Lots of empty beer bottles on the mantelpiece, though. Putting them there was an atavistic impulse: when I was growing up they’d served the same function as clothes pegs, holding Matt’s and my smalls in place while they dried in the warm air coming up from the fire.