She spins her ring on her slender finger and frowns.
‘And Mrs Potts, our school cook, smokes over the food.’ He doesn’t tell her that he’s quite fond of Mrs Potts, and if he gets to the kitchen early enough she lets him watch her work.
Evelyn wipes her mouth with a napkin. ‘Oh dear,’ she murmurs, two worry lines at the bridge of her nose.
The waitress comes and refills Evelyn’s teacup. In less than two hours he will be saying goodbye to her until Christmas. His insides soften.
‘But she’s kind to me,’ he adds, ‘just not as good a cook as you.’ He reaches across his plate to touch her hand. The smell of egg yolk makes him feel full, and if he doesn’t keep his elbow high it will drag over his chips.
Her smile is back. ‘And?’ she says. ‘Anything else to tell me?’
He swallows a chip and looks at the length of gristle running through the ham on his plate. So she knows already.
‘Who told you?’
‘No one important, only your headmaster.’ She leans towards him. ‘I’m waiting to hear it from you.’
The headmaster’s always telling them they have to stand on their own feet now, look after themselves, but he’s been talking to his mother behind his back all along. His indignation is too weak though, her excitement, directed at him, too strong, and a smile sweeps his face. He gives himself up to the joy of having good news for someone completely on his side, whose happiness depends on nothing more than his own. Evelyn puts her cutlery down.
‘Come on, tell your mother how bloody marvellous her son is!’
‘Naughty!’ He wags his finger at her and she laughs.
The clatter of voices, the chink and scrape of cutlery, the waitresses in their black and white uniforms, all recede. Him and her, back in their bubble. He tells her – even though she already knows – that because Martin was sick, he sang a solo and did so well that Phillip wanted him in the choir by half-term, helped by Porter’s voice breaking.
‘So from next week, I’ll be sitting with the choristers, next to Martin.’
Evelyn has picked up her cutlery and is struggling to chew her food because of the smile splitting her face. William wants to keep her happy.
‘At practice yesterday, Phillip asked me to sing on my own and afterwards he said, “That’s the sound I want, boys! Sing like that.”’
And it is wonderful that those words, the same words that brought a brief but thick silence over the choir, now make his mother clap her hands and laugh. ‘I knew it! Your Uncle Robert can put that in his pipe and smoke it. You’re headed for the auditorium, William, not the gloomy funeral business!’
William looks down at his plate, impales a chip with all four tines of his fork, ploughs it through the puddle of egg yolk and taps the end in the ketchup. It’s a cold but flavoursome mouthful that he takes his time to chew. He looks up at Evelyn. She winks, her left cheek bulging with food. Happiness always takes the edge off her table manners. Her unkindness towards Robert always takes the edge off William’s happiness.
In the two years since his dad died, Uncle Robert has been a flesh and blood link to his father. Memories of him are no longer as sharp and reliable as William would like. He remembers being thrown into the air by him and sitting on his lap, burying his face in a brown wool jumper and breathing in the rich, twiggy smell of pipe smoke. He remembers standing next to him at the newsagent’s on a Sunday morning, waiting for their quarter-pound of chocolate caramels to be poured into the bag from the wide metal scoop of the scales. He remembers him chasing Evelyn around the kitchen in a rubber gorilla mask, arms stretched out to reach her, making loud monkey noises, her screaming and laughing and surprising William at how fast she could move while making all that noise.
When he worries about forgetting, Uncle Robert’s very existence is a comfort. Because not only were Robert and his father brothers and best friends, they were also identical twins. William can understand how it’s hard for his mother to be reminded so much of his father, but it troubles him that sometimes she doesn’t even seem to like Robert. Or Howard.
After lunch, they walk left along Trumpington Street and look at the lions guarding the Fitzwilliam Museum. William notices Fitzbillies on the other side of the road as they make their way back towards the school.
‘Martin always goes there with his parents for a Chelsea bun. He says they’re world famous.’
‘I’ve got biscuits for us today,’ Evelyn says, taking his hand, ‘but next time we can do it. Oh!’ She stumbles into the open gutter, landing with one knee in the water. Her face twists in pain, and William is not fooled by the sudden smile and laugh as she gets up. She’s hurt but doesn’t want him to worry.
Back on King’s Parade, they watch a copper beech leaf scooped upright by the wind and pushed along as if it’s running. Once it falls from the kerb into the gutter, Evelyn sits on the low wall and pats the spot to her left. William sits as she reaches into her bag and pulls out a Tupperware box. She holds it up, a playful look in her eye. Through the plastic, he recognises his favourites: butter biscuits. Unexpectedly, his eyes prickle.
She plonks the box on William’s lap. Saliva makes his mouth tingle. He wants to pull the lid off, but waits. Evelyn leans down and pulls two napkins from her bag, the brown linen ones that live in the drawer next to the sink. He sniffs the one she hands him and thinks of the wooden spoons and rotary whisk they sit alongside. She nods for him to open the box and the sugar coating glitters on the top biscuit.