the longest. So there was at least one reason why Theo's face was flushed and why his fair skin was damp and oily looking. But the other reason, she supposed, was sitting somewhere holding a dead telephone receiver in a damp palm, doubtlessly wondering why "Listen to me" had ended rather than extended a conversation.
The windows were open, but the room was insufferable. Even the walls looked as if they wanted to sweat right through their old William Morris paper. The clutter of magazines, newspapers, books, and most of all the clutter of stones -- "No, Gran, they only look like stones. They're actually bones and teeth, and here, look for yourself, this's part of a mammoth tusk," Theo would say - made the room even more unbearable, as if they raised its temperature another ten degrees.
And, despite her grandson's care to clean them, they imbued the air with a disturbingly fecund smell of earth.
Theo moved from the telephone to the broad oak table. This was finely sheened with dust because he wouldn't allow Mary Ellis to apply a rag to its surface and disarrange the fossils he'd assembled there in cubicled wooden trays. There was an old balloon-backed chair in front of the table, and he took this and swung it round to face her.
She understood that he was making a place for her, well within her reach. This realisation made her feel like pinching the lobes of his ears until he wailed. She wasn't ready for the grave despite its having been dug, and she could do without the tender gestures revealing that others anticipated her imminent demise. She chose to stand.
"And the end result?" she demanded as if there had been no break in their conversation.
His eyebrows drew together. He used the back of his curled index finger to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. His glance went to the telephone, then back to her.
"I'm not the least interested in your love life, Theodore. You'll learn soon enough that it's an oxymoron. I pray nightly that you develop the presence of mind not to be led by either your nose or your penis. Otherwise, what you do on your free time is between you and whoever shares the momentary joy of experiencing the mingling of your bodily fluids.
Although in this heat, why anyone would even think of intercourse - "
"Gran." Theo's face was flaming.
My God, Agatha thought. He's twenty-six years old with the sexual maturity of a teenager.
She could only imagine with a shudder what it was like to be on the receiving end of his earnest grappling. At least his grandfather - for all his faults, one of which happened to be dropping dead at the age of forty-two - had known how to take a woman and be done with it. A quarter of an hour was all Lewis had ever needed, and on the nights when she was extremely lucky, he managed the act in less than ten minutes. She considered sexual intercourse a medicinal requirement of marriage: One kept the juices flowing in every part of the body if one wished for health.
"What did they promise us, Theo?" she asked.
"You pressed for another special council meeting, of course."
"Actually, I ..." He remained standing as she did. But he reached for one of his precious fossils and turned it over in his hand.
9Q
"You did have the presence of mind to demand another meeting, didn't you, Theo? You didn't let those coloureds take command and do nothing about it, did you?"
His look of discomfort was the answer.
She said, "My God." He was so like his brainless mother.
Despite herself, Agatha needed to sit. She lowered her body onto the seat of the balloon-backed chair and sat as she had been taught to sit in girlhood, ramrod straight. She said,
"What on earth is the matter with you, Theodore Michael?
And sit down, please. I don't want a stiff neck to mark this encounter."
He pulled an old armchair round to face her.
It was covered in faded corduroy, upon its seat a frog-shaped stain the origin of which Agatha didn't care to speculate upon. "It wasn't the time," he said.
"It wasn't . . . what?" She'd heard him perfectly, but she'd found long ago that the key to bending others to her will was to force them to examine their own with such diligence that they ended up rejecting whatever idea they'd begun with, in favour of hers.
"It wasn't the time, Gran." Theo sat. He leaned towards her, bare arms