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Archie and the Woman: A new short story by Louis de Bernieres
Independent, The (London), Aug 15, 1998 by Louis de Bernieres
'I'm digging the potatoes," I said to my mother, sighing as I cradled the mobile on my shoulder, and continued to turn over the heavy ochre clay. "What do you want now? Can't it wait 'til lunchtime?"
"I wanted to talk to you urgently," she replied, "whilst I remembered."
"Well, what is it?"
There was a long pause, and then she said: "Bless me, I've forgotten what it was."
"Tell me at lunch time, then, when you've remembered. What's for lunch?'
"Steak and kidney pie with mashed neeps with a fried egg on top. It'll be half an hour. I'll be ringing you when it's ready.
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She rang off and I looked at the phone. "Damn mobiles," I said to myself. It had been a curse ever since my mother had given it to me for Christmas, because it meant that she could get to me wherever I was. Nowadays she did not even see fit to come the 50 yards to the vegetable patch, and I could clearly see her through the kitchen window, putting the phone back on to its cradle and wiping the steam from her spectacles. If I left the mobile in the house then she would roundly accuse me of ingratitude, and of not having respect for her poor old legs. Sometimes I just switched it off and pretended the batteries must have run out.
"What was it then?" I asked her, as I pierced the yolk of my egg and watched the thick yellow goo trickle down the sides of the pyramid I'd made with the mashed turnip.
She put down her knife and fork and looked into her notebook. It was a small black one, with ruled lines and a red spine, and in it she kept remarks and reminders that were to be addressed specifically to me. I used to call it Mother's Book of Complaints.
"O yes," she said, "I've decided it's about time you got married."
I was aghast. I was so stricken by aghastness, or aghastitude, or whatever the word is, that my mind went quite blank, as though it were a balloon that had suddenly popped on a briar. I paused with a forkful of mash in mid-delivery, my mouth agape. "What on earth for?" I demanded eventually., "I'm only 42."
"Even so," she said.
"Oh, come off it. What would I want with being married?"
"It's not you I'm thinking of," she replied. "It's me. I need some company about the place. You're always out and about. And I can't imagine you looking after me in my old age, so you'll have to get a wife.'
"You're only 75," I said. "It'll be donkeys' years before you'll be going gaga."
Naturally, I didn't take my mother seriously. In fact, when my dear father was dying in his bed, he had called me in to give me his final blessing and, as I knelt beside him with the palm of his hand on the crown of my head, he had said, "Now son, you've got to promise me one thing."
"Father, of course I will," I had said, my eyes brimming with tears, and he had closed his eyes, as if to marshal his final strength, and he had said, "Son, promise me faithfully that you'll never take your mother seriously. I never have.'
"I swear it," I spluttered (for the tears were making speech difficult) and with that his breathing stopped. There was a horrible rattling from his throat, and my mother, who had been standing there all the while, said fondly, "The poor old sod."
As the years have succeeded one another, I have increasingly appreciated my father's wisdom, because the fact is, Mother gets curious fancies that fly into her brain one day and fly out of it the next, such as the time when she started to make cabbage wine because she had conceived the notion that it was good for the pancreas. Of course, it was undrinkable, so she gave it away at Christmas as presents for folk in the village that she didn't think highly of.
But this idea that I should get married rankled in my mind like a burr at the rim of a woolly sock. I began to think that perhaps it really would be a fine idea to have someone to share a bed with. I hadn't had a decent pillow fight for nigh on 20 years at least. And apart from that, a man needs a female other than his mother to rub along with.
The problem was, of course, that I had to find some women to meet to get some sort of idea of what was available.
I gave this a lot of thought. I ruled out the idea of an advertisement in a lonely hearts column; I hated to tell lies, and an honest description of myself would have put off all but the desperate. I wasn't so desperate that I would have taken someone else who was.
I thought about how people got to meet in my village, and suddenly realised that yes, of course, it was by way of the dogs. Almost everyone had one, and most took their animals out every day, to stretch their legs and take a gander at what Mother Nature was doing to the woods. There was a regular ritual about all this, for if one met another dog, it was obligatory to pat it on the head, ruffle its ears, unclamp it from one's leg, and discuss it with its owner while the latter performed the same ritual with one's own dog. One would enquire as to the dog's breed, which was usually a matter of some dubiety, and one would hear anecdotes intended to illustrate its irresistible appealingness, its great intelligence, and its extraordinary powers of intuition. Then one would be informed of its health problems, and be told that garlic pearls in its food had been working miracles. Naturally, one could while away many hours in doggy conversations in the process of taking a long walk, and one could come back at dusk and say, "I'm sorry I took so long, I got caught by Mrs Tibble, and she just wouldn't stop going on about that bloody mutt of hers. I'll dig the new potatoes and bring in the coal tomorrow," and my mother would tut, and say something like, "It was that Mrs Tibble's dog that put Mr Scraper's dog in the family way."
