Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart by Stephen Benatar Page A

steering.
    â€œNo. Women have a lower tolerance to alcohol.” He smiles at me, smugly.
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œCompletely.”
    â€œLife isn’t fair. Why do men have all the fun? What nice hands you have.”
    â€œThank you. You have nice hands as well.”
    â€œOne of the first things I noticed. So strong. And nice. And…nice.” I caress the hand with my forefinger, stroking the hairs on his wrist and causing them to stand up.
    â€œThat’s nice too,” he says.
    â€œEverything’s nice. It’s a nice night. It’s a nice drive. It’ll be nice to introduce you to my mother.”
    But in fact I don’t introduce them. They meet the following morning (no, the same morning, of course, just further along in it) when she knocks on his bedroom door and takes him in a pot of tea. Amazingly hangover-free, I am by then wallowing in my (once again!) unashamedly deep bath and have told her he’ll enjoy being pampered. Apparently she means only to extend a simple word of welcome but finishes by staying while he drinks three cups of tea, for he, too, is remarkably clearheaded. She hears a lot about his life at home.
    And yet she doesn’t hear about Marjorie. I discover this while the pair of us are preparing a very late breakfast, and the omission strikes me as significant. I know I mustn’t get my hopes up. But I can’t help wondering why he hasn’t made even one passing reference.
    I surmise he learned comparatively little about my mother, not because he isn’t a sympathetic listener—which, heaven knows, he is—but rather because her life now is basically so awful she doesn’t like to talk about it, not even to me. She was a widow for four years; remarried when I was sixteen. And how my stepfather changed! Though I’d always thought the generous and attentive suitor very suspect, even I was unprepared for the mean, lazy, tyrannical brute he turned into. And the sheer rapidity of the transformation made one question one’s own sanity almost as much as his. I wanted her to divorce. She spoke about the need to honour your commitments, whatever the enormity of your mistake. Later on I could have added to her knowledge of that enormity. On a night three years ago, while she was at a meeting of the Women’s Institute, he tried to rape me. Stupidly I wasn’t able to tell her and he made out that my avoidance of him, yet more assiduous after this, was solely due to jealousy.
    If I hadn’t known that he was currently in hospital I could never have contemplated even this short visit. I see my mother very rarely—mainly on snatched meetings in London. It’s a wretched situation.
    Though Matt has heard all this from me (except, that is, for the final cause of my departure, which I’d attributed entirely to the fact I wanted to feel more involved in the war effort—up till then I had been working in a canteen) the man hasn’t been mentioned by the time we start on breakfast. We’re given eggs and bacon. Shell-eggs and two rashers of bacon! I have no scruples about knowing we are doing the husband out of his but I wish my mother wasn’t making such a sacrifice, especially since Matt and I—he at his air base, I on my farm—in general do quite well. She says she finds fatty things slightly rich at the moment. Fresh eggs make her liverish; people just aren’t used to them.
    The time goes by too quickly.
    â€œI suppose, though, you two have to get to your appointment and I must go and see your father in the hospital.” She had spent most of the preceding day there, which seems to Matt and me—although of course we don’t tell her this—a wholly criminal waste of what Mr Churchill has called ‘the greatest day in all our long history’. But she assures us the nurses did everything they could to bring an air of celebration into the wards and that she listened to the