‘WAS he a good man?” I asked my wife, on opening the front door to our little white house, where she was standing on the dimpled mat, twirling her umbrella to release sprays of the graveyard rain, which had been sweeping in from a squally sky. The hunched crow sulking on a nearby tree screwed his head deeper into his neck and shifted his weight from foot to foot – as for a moment the sun glimpsed through the rushing clouds, shuddered, yawned, and then retreated wearily to bed.
“A good man?” considered my wife with a sigh, as she dried more thoroughly in the hall. She had returned from meeting with some anonymous official, responsible for an absurdly complicated detail of our financial affairs. “His smile was like the sweat of death, so I knew instantly that he was a bureaucrat,” she replied, anger briefly darkening the lovely turquoise of her eyes, before the oval of her mouth spread into a wide smile, as she savoured the imagery in her words. “You know what they are like,” she continued. “They are all the same, dripping dandruff in industrial quantities while ticking boxes – and sucking peppermints to hold off the halitosis.”
“But,” I said, “all societies, even the great civilisations, have been built on dull men and women. The trouble is that we need them to keep us all on a steady course – but they can manage fine without us. My dear old mum was to learn the truth of that on a cultural sojourn, during which, by her own noble efforts, she had hoped to break the shackles harnessing her to the hum-drum world.”
You see, as the autumn years had stretched before her, she excited her taste for cultural ascent by enrolling at a municipal arts and crafts college. There, she and her fellow students were taught to make lampshades, cushion covers, romper-suits and antimacassars, as they advanced through knitting and embroidery on their way to the giddy heights of tapestry. Never before in human history had so many tea cosies been produced in celebration of the free human spirit. My mother and her pals were at one with the great sculptors, painters and thinkers. “Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, Tiziano Vecellio, Sandro Botticelli and Alighieri Dante,” she recited in a lightly grilled Scottish accent, turning their very names into a poem.
To my mother, Italy seemed to be Heaven on Earth, which came as a surprise to those of us who knew that Lower Bebington was only a short bus ride away. So it was that she and some pals, all by then octogenarians, decided, against the advice of more timorous souls, to lubricate their hip replacement joints by taking a three-day coach trip that would embrace the great sights of Rome, Venice, Verona and Florence. To comply with the schedule, they were catapulted from gallery to gallery at about the same speed as those perilous rides favoured by the daredevils at fairgrounds. Anyway, on the second night my mother arrived exhausted and a trifle tetchy at her luxury hotel to find that the plug was jammed in its hole on the basin of her bathroom. After some unsuccessful tinkering with her finger nails, she headed at a steady hobble for the desk of the receptionist, a young woman of elegance and sophistication, who appeared to be considering a course in business studies at Harvard, having already graduated in philosophy at the Sorbonne.
