A Passionate Man [antikvár]

Chapter One Old Mrs Mossop always put her teeth in for the doctor. She did not accord this honour to the vicar because the vicar was too much in earnest, and physically unprepossessing with it. But the doctor had sex appeal and to that Mrs Mossop responded, never mind being over eighty and in the process of dying slowly from a secondary cancer. So when the doctor's mud-splashed car pulled up outside her cottage - she was always on watch from her chair by the window - she would fish about in the tumbler on her windowsill where her teeth swam, and slot them into place. This little ritual was never lost upon the doctor. 'All the better to eat me with, I see.' Granny Mossop gave a high laugh. 'Spit you out again sharpish!' Archie Logan smiled. He was very fond of Granny Mossop and he found her fierce gallantry in the face of her slow inexorable dying extremely moving. The room in which she sat smelled like a mouse's nest, crammed in every corner with cuckoo-clock furniture and ornaments and crocheted mats. Over the fusty muddle the great grey face of the television set presided calmly. Granny Mossop only turned it on to watch boxing and football and disasters on the news. She didn't mind blood, she told Dr Logan. Her father had been a gamekeeper. She'd grown up with blood. He put his bag down on a fat armchair full of knitted cushions and rummaged in it. He had to toss questions nonchalantly at her or she would say, 'That'd be telling,' and they would get nowhere. 'Holding on to what you eat?' he said, his back to her.