deaden the blow when she realized that Laurence was abandoning, and finally had abandoned religion.
Louisa Jepp sat at the table writing out her football pools as she waited for Laurence.
‘Come down!’ she said to the ceiling, ‘and leave off your snooping, dear.’
As soon as he appeared she told him, ‘If Manchester City had won last week I should have got thirty thousand.’
Louisa folded her football coupon and placed it under the clock. She gave all her attention to Laurence and his breakfast.
She was half-gipsy, the dark one and the youngest of a large red-haired family, which at the time of her birth owed its prosperity to the father’s success as a corn dealer. The success was owing to good fortune in the first place, his having broken jail while waiting to come before the Bench, never afterwards returning to his gipsy tribe. It was a hundred and thirty years after this event that Louisa was sitting down to breakfast with Laurence.
Louisa’s hair remains black, though there is not much of it. She is short, and seen from the side especially, her form resembles a neat double potato just turned up from the soil with its small round head, its body from which hang the roots, her two thin legs below her full brown skirt and corpulence. Her face, from the front, is square, receding in planes like a prism. The main lines on her face are deep, they must have been in gradual evidence since she was thirty, they seemed carved to the bone. But the little wrinkles are superficial, brushing the surface of her skin, coming and going like innumerable stars when she puckers a smile or unfolds a look of surprise. Her eyes are deep-set and black. Her hands and feet very small. She wears rimless spectacles. She is still alive, not much changed from that day when Laurence came down to breakfast. She was wearing a brown dress, a brown woollen jacket with gilt buttons, and a pair of diamond earrings embedded in her ears.
When Laurence had sized her up, as he always did with everyone, he dipped his fork into a jar and drew out something long, white and pickled.
‘What can this be?’
‘Chid’lings,’ she said. ‘They are beautiful.’
He was accustomed to Louisa’s food: whelks, periwinkles, milts and roes, chitterlings and sweetbreads, giblets, brains and the tripes of ruminating animals. Louisa prepared them at long ease, by many processes of affusion, diffusion and immersion, requiring many pans of brine, many purifications and simmerings, much sousing and sweetening by slow degrees. She seldom bought an ordinary cut or joint, and held that people who went through life ignoring the inward vitals of shells and beasts didn’t know what was good for them.
‘If you won thirty thousand in the pool, what would you do?’ Laurence said.
‘Buy a boat,’ she replied.
‘I would paddle you up and down the river,’ Laurence said. ‘A houseboat would be nice. Do you remember that fortnight on the houseboat, my first year at prep school?’
‘I mean a boat for crossing the sea. Yes, it was lovely on the houseboat.’
‘A yacht? Oh, how grand.’
‘Well, a good-sized boat,’ said Louisa, ‘that’s what I’d buy. Suitable for crossing the Channel.’
‘A motor cruiser,’ Laurence suggested.
‘That’s about it,’ she said.
‘Oh, how grand.’
She did not reply, for he had gone too far with his ‘Oh, how grand!’
‘We could do the Mediterranean,’ he said.
‘Oh, how grand,’ she said.
‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to buy a house?’ Laurence had just remembered his mother’s plea, ‘If you get an opportunity do try to persuade her to take a little money from us and live comfortably in her own house.’
She answered, ‘No. But if I won a smaller sum I’d buy this cottage. I’m sure Mr Webster would sell.’
‘Oh, I’d love to think of you having the cottage for your very own. Smugglers Retreat is such a dear little house.’ Even as he spoke Laurence knew that phrases like ‘your very own’ and ‘dear little house’ betrayed what he was leading up to, they were not his grandmother’s style.
‘I know what you’re leading up to,’ said Louisa. ‘Help yourself to the cigarettes.’
‘I have my own. Why won’t you let father buy the cottage for you? He can afford it.’
‘I manage very nicely,’ said Louisa. ‘Smoke one of these — they come from Bulgaria.’
‘Oh, how grand!’ But he added, ‘How extremely smart and where did you get them from?’
‘Bulgaria. I think through Tangiers.’
Laurence examined the cigarette. His grandmother, a perpetual surprise. She rented the cottage, lived as an old-age pensioner.
Her daughter Helena said frequently, ‘God knows how she manages. But she always seems to have plenty of everything.’
Helena would tell her friends, ‘My mother won’t accept a penny. Most independent; the Protestant virtues, you know. God knows how she manages. Of course, she’s half gipsy, she has the instinct for contriving ways and means.
‘Really! Then you have gipsy blood, Helena? Really, and you so fair, how romantic. One would never have thought —’
‘Oh, it comes out in me sometimes,’ Helena would say.
