"I am afraid that I cannot offer you nuts," he said. "Or crisps, or biscuits, or other such snacks for I have none; to avoid temptation, you understand, I am forbidden to eat such cholesterol-laden food. However I can offer you fruit, or I can rustle up an omelette in five minutes if you are hungry; I have prosciuitto or some fine peccarino cheese or perhaps both; fat reserved for my occasional guest or visitor."
"No, not at the moment," she replied. "To be honest, I had given much thought as to how this would turn out. While I imagined that you might want to rip my throat out or at least take a shotgun to me, never did I imagine that you would be offering me gin and tonics in a crystal glass and a ham and cheese omelette to soak up the alcohol. O, how my mother would have loved this kitchen! You still love to cook? The way that you used to hang at my mother's every word, every action; so eager were you to learn that which was so unfamiliar."
"As you have found my bolthole, you should recommend a visit to your mother; I, too, would like to explore the delights of what she might create here. I am sure that it would surely be worth more than the cost of the train fare and a taxi-cab from the station to me. I can almost taste the bhuna or chana dal, the jalfreisi, the sabzi kerala and the pakoras, o the pakoras; truly your mother's pakoras were worth dying for."
"My mother died 12 years ago, although of course you are not to know," she said. "My father died but 6 months later from what must have been assuredly a broken heart; he never got over her death. Harri, you remember Harri, Harishchandra, my brother, who was always still awake at two am in the morning wondering what his sister was 'up to' on the sofa, although as I remember it, it was nothing more than innocent conversation, polite philosophical discussion; he died in a car crash, two years ago. I am now the last survivor of that abject party of innocent adults and frightened children who boarded the plane at Entebbe, a family so strong and so true, that fled, had to flee, from Idi Amin and his butchers, his stormtroopers, because there was no choice, if you wanted to remain alive. We came with nothing, the clothes on our back and a small suitcase each. We were housed in the conditions reserved for your own poor and destitute, although we were British citizens and entitled to better surely; refugees from oppression as we were. Now I am dying, Leo, a solitary, long, slow, drawn out death, untreatable and inoperable now, so the doctors say; it has a name but it is too long, full of Greek and Latin and hyphens and I have spent too long in chemo and radiation to bother with it. Too much time thinking that the occasional gut-wrenching pain must just be something to do with my age and an all too dysfunctional uterus. Now I just call it Timothy."
"I am so sorry about Timothy and nobody deserves to lose their entire family to such tragedy," he said, although he could not escape the unwelcome thought that there was much to be said in support of the concept of karma; how the ill that you visit on others will, one day, though it might be long in the coming, be returned to you in equal and just measure. However, his grasp on Schadenfreude was as tenuous as the mock anger that he used to shield himself from the vagaries of a quotidian life; from the unwelcome inconsistencies of shopping, of housework, of unlooked for and unwanted visitors, anything which persuaded him away from his work, his passion.
He gave a silent word of thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for saving him the trouble of shopping at the hypermarket in town; saved him from the inconvenience of shopping trolleys with their one misaligned and stubbornly jammed wheel; saved him from the almost ghoulish glee which staff appeared to have at their regular and all too frequent rearrangements of the aisles and at his discomfiture as he vainly sought for the mozzarella di buffalo or bindi bhaji which were no longer where he had mapped them from his last visit; truly, on-line shopping was a boon worthy of the gods.
He remembered to silently, and with heartfelt gratitude, thank Anka, dear, sweet Ania, too. Ania with the unpronounceable surname, filled to the brim with consonants and with scarce a vowel in sight, which only the Poles could ever hope to articulate; she, who had answered his advertisement in the village newsagent; she, who cleaned and polished his rambling house with such quiet efficiency and good humour; she, who repeated gossip and racy stories over cups of green tea; stories that she had overheard in the "Boar's Head" on the one evening that she permitted herself alcohol; Ania, who was such a feature of the life of the village that few would imagine that she had been there for less than three years.
"I, too, lost my father some years ago," he said. "To nothing more than old age, an incisive mind trapped in a tired and clapped-out body. It is a cross to bear that few children manage to avoid, however much we may wish that it were not so. My mother still lives, not a few hundred yards away; she is pushing up against her 90th year now and she is increasingly frail; I keep her close, but not too close, so that I may come to her aid quickly should the need arise but far enough away for her not to become accustomed to living in my pocket."
He paused to take a few sips of the gin and tonic which he had poured for himself. Normally, he would not have alcohol before the time of his evening meal, when he could finally relax, but he doubted that he would get any further with the painting today. Even if she left after a polite and respectable interval, the shock of her unexpected arrival would surely disconcert him enough to make the concentration necessary for painting a virtual impossibility.
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