Short-a-Day: James Lasdun's "The Old Man"
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 5, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 69.A very spare and simple story in which Conrad, a loan manager, bonds with two former Czechoslovakians, an older woman ("rouged cheeks wrinkled like walnut shells") and her daughter ("a flat, handsome face and a full figure that she carried with confidence"), after he decides to lend them money for their proposed greenhouse…