Cover

Dirk Bograde

JERICHO

Dedication

For

MARY DODD

with endless love
for Thursday teas

Chapter 1

Helen came into the breakfast-room that morning in her familiar way. I was pretty well used to it: dressing-gown, frill of nightdress below, hair pulled back roughly and secured with an elastic band, slippers which she had long since trodden down at heel.

She carried a tray with a jar of instant coffee, two mugs, a pot of yoghurt for herself, sugar, milk and a small dish of jam.

‘Down early. Couldn’t you sleep or something?’ She set the tray on the table.

I was reading the Guardian, I remember, but just photographed, in a blinding instant, her appearance. The normal morning arrival.

I said the kettle had already boiled, so she slopped across, switched it on, stood by the draining-board, hand on the kettle handle.

‘You didn’t say.

Couldn’t you sleep?’

‘Like a top.’

‘Lucky you, I must say, but I didn’t exactly turn and toss about. Bloody worn out.’

‘Giles all right this morning?’ A mild question. I was folding the Guardian more times than was necessary. Anxiety perhaps; the end of a union is always unsettling.

She poured hot water into the mugs, then spooned in instant coffee. ‘He’s fine. Just one of those things kids get.’ She switched off the kettle. ‘Probably eaten something disgusting at school. School dinners: all chips and jelly-stuff.’ Took the kettle back to the stove, stirred the mugs, pushed mine across the table towards me.

Mine had a Mucha print on it, hers a clown with a red nose and a pointed hat. We always used the same mugs: it had become a habit from the start, fourteen years ago.

Her mug and mine. Amazing, considering how much she broke generally, that they had lasted so long. But it was her idea, not mine. Like the whole dreary kitchen: a mixture of the twee and the dreadful. Pitch pine, jars of pasta, bunches of crumbling herbs, a trug basket hanging from the ceiling filled with dusty dried flowers, a rack of graded saucepans, chipped and burned, on one wall, and on another a set of unused jelly moulds, one a fish, one a wreath of fruit and flowers, another a sort of lobster-thing. Tarnished. The tiles which we had chosen together in high euphoria all that time ago for the work-tops no longer gleamed with bright-sparkling light: they were dimmed now by years of fry-ups and quick wipes down with a dishcloth.

‘We’ll make a country cottage kitchen in dreary old Parsons Green, won’t that be super! So cosy.’

She had said. And I agreed. There wasn’t much point in discussing things anyway; I was very much in physical love at the time and she could have turned the wretched room into a clinical operating-theatre or a copy of Versailles for all I cared.