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isn’t it? For a very small child?”
Oedipus Snark frowned. “Don’t think so,” he said. “Compact, I suppose. But that’s an advantage these days.” He paused. “Going back to germs, tell me, what do you do with the handles of public loos? Do you touch them?”
Jenny looked away. She was not sure whether she wanted to talk about that. As it happened, she made sure that she never touched such handles with her hands, and would resort to gymnastics, pulling the chain with her foot if necessary, rather than risk the very obvious bacterial contamination that awaited those unwise enough to put their hands on such things. But she was not going to tell Oedipus Snark that.
“What do you do?” she asked.
He sniffed. “I am not one of those obsessive-compulsive types,” he said. “And we all know that a few germs are necessary for the immune system to keep itself in trim. That’s why there’s so much asthma these days—people are not exposed to enough germs.”
She realised that he had not answered her question. She persisted. “So you don’t touch the handle?”
Oedipus Snark nonchalantly picked up a piece of paper from his desk and began to read it. “This is a letter from Lou Portington. Remember her? Rather large party. There’s one loo I wouldn’t touch, even with gloves on! Hah! See?”
Jenny settled herself at her minuscule desk and picked up her notebook.
Oedipus Snark continued: “She wants me to go to a dinner she’s holding for the French Ambassador. At her place. How kind of her.”
Jenny made a note in her notebook. “And the date?”
Oedipus Snark put down the letter. “Problema. La Portington has alighted on the twenty-second, which no doubt suits His Excellency but which is the evening I’ve agreed to speak at that substance abuse conference. I was due to open it, wasn’t I?”
Jenny consulted a diary. “Yes. You agreed to that eight months ago. They wrote the other day with the programme. You’re on at seven-thirty. The first plenary session.”
“Pity,” said Oedipus Snark.
“Yes.” Jenny made another note in her book. “Shall I write and give your regrets?”
“Please do. Say that I’m terribly sorry, but I just can’t manage it.”
Jenny nodded. “I’m sure that she’ll find plenty of people happy to have dinner with the French Ambassador.”
Oedipus Snark looked up sharply. “I meant that you should give my regrets to the substance abuse people. Usual thing. Sorry to cancel, etc., etc. Urgent Party business.”
She looked at him. Hateful, she thought. Hateful Snark. Dissembling, lying Oedipus.
12. Berthea Snark
THOSE WERE the very thoughts, as it happened, that Berthea Snark was entertaining about her son at that precise moment—an example of what is known as Proustian synchronicity, where the stream of consciousness of one person matches another’s and where, for a few moments, both flow in the same direction and at the same pace, like waters conjoined. This instance of synchronicity, though, was not all that surprising, for if Oedipus Snark crossed the mind of anybody at any particular time, there was a reasonable chance that his mother was also thinking of him at that same point, given that she thought about him thirty or forty times a day—possibly more. This was not just because she was his mother, but because for the past two years she had been writing her son’s un-authorised biography—a task that required frequent contemplation of the subject. Such is the lot of the biographer: to live with the subject, to inhabit his skin, to enter his mental universe, to such an extent that biographer and subject become one.
Where a mother writes her son’s biography, this notion of becoming one with the subject has, of course, an additional, striking resonance. She and Oedipus had indeed been one, when she had nurtured the Liberal Democrat politician in utero. Not that a pregnant woman thinks of the baby she is carrying as being political: a mother may wish for a Liberal Democrat baby, but may not think of the matter as determined. And there is always the possibility that the child will grow in a political direction not contemplated, or approved of, by the parent; how many parents have seen their children espouse views radically different from their own?
Berthea Snark did not disapprove of her son’s political party, which struck her as being largely benign, perhaps even a touch too well-meaning, but only a touch. Nor did she disapprove of the parties to which he was in opposition. She quite liked the Labour Party for some of its policies and