The Old Romantic

by Louise Dean

  ‘Marina was very nice,’ Astrid said, sliding her fingertips in between his legs. ‘She ought to try low carbs. Anyway. Perhaps we can have them over for lunch sometime, just your brother and his family. He’s a nice guy, huh? Salt of the earth type.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He had the length of his finger along his top lip, his thumb in the crook of his cheek.

  ‘Some lowlights would take years off her . . .’

  But he didn’t answer and she sat there, prim, thinking about his accent changing in that kitchen. She tried squeezing his hand. ‘I love you, darling.’

  His eyes were hostile. ‘Well then, next time listen to me! You had to push me into it, didn’t you? The old man was right about that! You don’t know anything about our family, so you should keep your nose out!’

  ‘Nick! Don’t turn on me, if you don’t mind! Jesus Christ. Is it catching, or something, your father’s nastiness?’

  ‘Oh, wind it in, Astrid!’

  They put it off, but an argument was brewing. She’d never known him speak to her that way. She knew what she was going to say when she had the chance, in a fight, and in drink, ‘It seems like you’ve got plenty of your father in you after all.’ But she contented herself for the time being by fixing her gaze out of her side window, crossing her legs to point away from him, and saying under her breath, ‘Gary.’

  And she found enough satisfaction in that to tide her over.

  Chapter 9

  By five in the afternoon, Ken was asleep in the reclining armchair in his house, his head thrown back, his mouth open. He looked like he’d received two thousand volts. June was sitting on the sofa with her coat still on, her ankles and hands crossed, looking at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. After a moment, she gave a loud cough. Still he did not stir. From under the sofa cushion she pulled out the Kays catalogue, and she sat there, moistening the pad of her thumb to turn the pages, occasionally folding over the corner of one and running her thumb along it to keep the place.

  Over in Fairlight, at Longwinter Farmhouse, Matt was in his room at the computer screen, biting a fingernail, waiting for a download. He was thinking about the time they took his grandfather and June to visit his other grandmother, Lyn, in the nursing home. He could see his father with his hand on the roof of the car, the door open, his face sweaty and hopeful, asking Ken to change his mind and come in. Ken would not. Matt was sitting in the back with him and June. He remembered the smell of talc from June and, curiously, the smell of a hot-water bottle. He remembered the door slamming and the car shaking, and then he looked out of his window at the man with a melted ear. Like something out of the ‘Thriller’ video, the deformed old fellow had come to the car with his cronies – some limping, some hobbling – as soon as they parked up. The man with the melted ear stood mouthing something at them; next to him was another man with a goitre. Up on the balconies, the old girls were gawping.

  ‘It gives me the willies,’ his grandfather had said. ‘Sod this.’ He’d squeezed Matt’s hand.

  When the Yahoo page came up on the screen, Matt sprang forward in his chair. He put it in again, the word ‘euthanasia’.

  ‘For the benefit of that person,’ he said aloud.

  * * *

  Emily was sitting in the toilet, looking out through the small side window and holding the bunched-up curtain against her nose. She was thinking about the girl called Laura who was her age and whether she was in some way a cousin and whether or not to put the Build-A-Bears into the attic when this girl came round. She was thinking how Astrid ran a spa. She’d go in there one day, and come out different – with long blonde hair, in curls – and people would say, ‘I totally didn’t recognize you!’

  * * *

  Dave and Marina were sitting in the kitchen. Marina was on the small sofa and Dave was in the wing-backed chair opposite. He was sitting with his head down, his feet planted wide, looking at his hands. He had been like that for half an hour. Marina turned the pages of the magazine, all the while keeping an eye on him as she would a pot on simmer. When his shoulders rounded over, she got up and kissed his head.

  ‘Issa dreadfor terribor fing,’ he said, mimicking Ken. He looked up at her and cracked a grin.

  For that was the way Ken had put it to Dave, over mugs of tea at Pelham Circle, with the old man sitting on the threadbare stairs of their latest development.

  ‘Issa dreadfor terribor fing.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘To ’ave a son and not be close to ’im. You’d never do that, wouldya?’

  ‘Matt’s a good kid.’

  ‘Yeah. He is, innie?’

  ‘Do you want a biscuit?’

  ‘Naargh. Gets under my plate. It’s the worse fing. There ain’t nuffing worse, if you think about it.’

  ‘Pass them back then, if you don’t want them.’

  ‘Than losing your son, is what I’m saying.’

  ‘No. I s’pose not.’

  ‘Issa failure, innit?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘A cock-up.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘All right!’ He’d given him his peeved look. ‘If you don’t mind!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Snarky. Rubbin’ it in!’

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  ‘But what he done was wrong, wonnit? It was him what broke the family up.’

  ‘He was only eighteen.’

  ‘This long-life milk you put in ’ere? Leaves a funny taste, dunnit?’

  ‘You tried,’ said Marina.

  * * *

  By five, things had changed. Matt was playing with a cricket ball in the garden; Dave was in the shed, finding the cricket bat; Marina was wiping the place mats; Emily was using a razor on one eyebrow.

  June was in the hall of the bungalow behind Ken, describing developments in bus services in Hastings as detailed in the free paper and matching the company names to the new routes.

  Ken was going as slowly as an iceberg through the hallway towards the front door. He parted his lips and ran his tongue across them. The words he wanted to say were moving ahead of him. The sunshine seemed to thicken behind the frosted patterned glass. When he got there, he found he had overtaken the words and lost them. He opened the door and felt the pain of the steel tread through his thin socks. The name plaque had fallen to the ground.

  ‘He’ll be ’ome by now,’ he said. He stared out on to the forecourt at the place where the great black car had been just hours before. He put his hand on the light bristle of his chin and dragged on it.

  He turned back into the fug of the hallway that smelt like cheese footballs and closed the door behind him. He picked up the phone and, squinting between numbers, going carefully, he dialled the number from the list on the wall.

  When the phone was answered, his face changed.

  ‘Oi! Big’ead! I’ll tell you what you are! You’re nothing! You’re a stuck-up, jumped-up . . . embarrassment, that’s what you are! Cambridge University? Fuck yourself ! Advice? Don’t make me laugh! Stuff it! You always was a big’ead, even as a kid. No. You and me, mate, we’re finished! We’re through! Not a penny! Not a single penny from me. I’ve got money you couldn’t even dream of. You’ve no idea, have you, how much I’ve got. Gary? You there? Gary?’

  He left the phone on the hall seat and went into the living room. He looked at June in bewilderment. ‘I think he’s hung up on me.’

  ‘Is it making a funny noise?’

  ‘Is what making a funny noise?’

  ‘The phone. Is it making a noise, Kenneth?’

  He went back to it and listened. ‘It’s going “doo-ort”.’

  ‘He’s hung up on you then.’

  He put it back to his ear and spoke. ‘Can you hear me? Son?’ Then he slammed the phone back on to its wall cradle. It fell

  off and he slung it back harder. He stood and looked at it, ready as a boxer. It stayed. He faced her next with a snarl. ‘What you got your coat on for? Eh? You going somewhere?’

  ‘I’m not sa
ying a word, Kenneth, not a word. I shan’t get myself into trouble that way.’

  ‘Oh, you! You think you’re so clever! Don’t cha? You’re no use to anyone. More lonely livin’ with ya than without ya,’ he said, and he went back up the hallway, this time closing the door between the front room and the hall, and punched more numbers into the phone.

  From her new position, crouching and bending by the side of the door where she was just looking for something round the back of the hostess trolley, June could hear him quite clearly.

  ‘Put Matt on, will you, please?’

  She touched her chest; it was not his fancy woman from the funeral parlour then.

  Chapter 10

  ‘I don’t care if he does die,’ he said. ‘I won’t go to the funeral.’ When they got home from picking up Laura at the station that evening, he was critical about the supper Astrid made; he didn’t like ‘fruit with meat’, he said, making a face at the lamb and apricot tagine. He sulked about the TV programme she put on, mocked the women on it so much she couldn’t hear it.

  ‘If they want to lose weight, why don’t they just stop eating?’ He sat in the armchair rather than on the sofa with her. He seemed stuck on the same page of St Augustine’s Confessions. He set it aside to moan that everything on the television was rubbish these days. Didn’t she think?

  ‘Hmm?’ He pressed her. She didn’t answer.

  ‘Over a hundred channels and nothing worth watching,’ said Laura, deadpan, ‘and pop stars that can’t play instruments.’ Curled up on the smaller sofa, she popped in her earphones.

  When Astrid turned the television off and picked up a book, he said that books these days were written by victims for victims. As if life were a pity contest, he said. Darwin would be turning in his grave! What was wrong with being brave? he asked her.

  When she failed to rise to that bait, he complained about her mood spoiling the evening. So she went to the kitchen to have a good time cleaning the fridge. ‘I’ve got my very own Ken now,’ she said to herself as she doused and soaped the glass shelf in the sink.

  He tried to elevate Laura by telling her how much he’d read as a child, how he’d been top of the class without fail – and never for a moment bored – and the girl raised one eyebrow and took her Nintendo DS off to the kitchen.

  He was left alone in the front room.

  ‘He reminds me of Granddad,’ Laura said to Astrid, taking up a wet cloth and wiping over the evacuated jars on the counter.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s like when you go for a walk with Granddad, he has to say stuff to spoil it, about history or nature or the sound of the river being like music or something. I never answer him. But he still does it. He says stuff like, Oh, to think the Anglo-Saxons washed their socks here, or whatever.’

  The front-room door banged against the wall as he came out to them.

  ‘Don’t you have any classical music?’ he asked, brandishing

  Astrid’s iPod. He poured himself a glass of wine.

  When Laura went up to her room, Astrid let him talk. They went to the conservatory so that he could sound off. She sat and listened with her hands clasped while he walked up and down, pointing at his reflection in the windows. First he expressed his moral outrage at having been ‘hi-jacked’ – he put it that way – over lunch, then he proceeded to console himself by taking the piss out of the old man. By way of conclusion, he announced that he was done with them, he was washing his hands of his family, for once and for all. It was final.

  But he didn’t get from her the reaction he wanted. She seemed distracted, to his mind. Oh yes, she joined in with him and echoed his sentiments and shook her head in all the right places but she didn’t seem to fully get it. He had to put things in extreme terms for her to even begin to know how he felt. He had to keep going over it. He needed something from her, but he didn’t know what it was and neither did she, so he paced and gestured and fumed and she watched him.

  ‘Poor you,’ she said, at what was possibly the end of it. He checked her face for sarcasm, but there was that faraway blithe look on it that was so impenetrable. ‘I’m glad I don’t have this trouble with my parents,’ she said.

  She was thinking whether she oughtn’t to empty the one bottle of Encona chilli sauce into the other. There were two in the fridge. Or she could just throw one away; it was manky, it didn’t look nice.

  ‘That’s a loaded comment!’ he said, eagerly following her as she slipped back into the kitchen.

  When the phone rang, he leapt at it; he snatched it from the cradle. She knelt to wipe out the bottom compartment of the fridge. He came over and kicked her bum with his socked foot and pointed to the phone in his hand. She took a deep breath.

  ‘You daft old shit!’ he shouted. ‘You’re nothing to me. Well, and you, you’ve not been a father to me! Normal? Normal? How would you know what was normal?’

  Then he put the phone back.

  ‘That was him,’ he said, pushing his hair back with his hand.

  ‘Ken.’

  ‘Yes. I thought so.’

  Words failed him. ‘For fuck’s sake! Astrid!’

  ‘Shall we unplug it? Are we in for an evening of it?’

  He sat down on a kitchen chair and looked suddenly defeated. He put his thumb to his mouth, and chewed the side of the nail.

  ‘You throwing that out?’ He nodded at the bottle she was sliding into the bin’s steel mouth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it empty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t throw it away if there’s some left.’

  ‘Thank you, but I can manage the sauce bottles all by myself. What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The usual.’ He shrugged. ‘Rubbish. I don’t know. I didn’t listen.’

  Typical bloke, she thought. ‘Poor old you,’ she said.

  He fell into a preoccupied stupor, thumbnail in mouth, eyes bulging, and – since she could get away with it – she popped into the bin the almost-empty bottle of brown sauce as well. She liked filling the bin. It was a pleasure akin to shopping. Perhaps even guiltier. She treated herself to a spot of non-recycling protocol by putting them in the household rubbish too. There were all sorts of condiments that could go.

  He got himself a new drink. He made sure she heard him unscrewing the bottle. He was having whiskey, rather ostentatiously. He would want her to comment, or ask if he wanted ice with it, so that he could say, No, I’ll have it neat. He knocked it back and made the proper noise, the sound a bus made before it moved off.

  When they came back from the holiday, he told her, he’d change their phone number. He’d refuse to take calls from his brother; he’d break off with them all for good. He’d renounce them. And be done with it. His father was an arsehole and his brother, well, the truth of it was he was a loser. He’d called him a loser when the kid was only three years old and that’s what he was: a loser.

  ‘Who is?’ said doe-eyed Laura, in her PJs in the doorway, pulling a mermaid’s comb through her long wet hair.

  ‘Nobody,’ he said.

  They had a laugh together upstairs, the girls, when Astrid took up the laundry and began sorting it in Laura’s room.

  ‘Fancy calling a three-year-old a loser!’ Laura smirked, holding up some beads to the mirror.

  ‘He’s upset. Poor Nick.’ Astrid patted the covers around her daughter’s face to frame it and kissed her nose.

  ‘ASTRID!’ he called upstairs. ‘ASTRID!’

  ‘Yes?’ They clung to each other; they could feel each other’s chest rise and fall, and they began to tremble with the wantonness of laughter.

  ‘ASTRID! SHALL I CALL HIM BACK AND TELL HIM WHAT I THINK OF HIM AND THAT NEXT TIME I SEE HIM IT WILL BE IN A BOX? NO, IT WON’T, THOUGH, BECAUSE I WON’T EVEN GO TO THE FUNERAL. SHALL I TELL HIM THAT?’

  ‘If you want to, honey!’ She stuck her nose in her daughter’s hair.

  ‘M
um.’ Laura pulled away, and splayed her fingers to check the nails she’d painted that day. ‘Mum. He’s so lost his cool, it’s like – freak out, man!’

  ‘I know! But he can’t help it.’

  ‘It’s like, whoops! There goes my charisma. I don’t know how you can fancy him. Why don’t you break up?’ She knelt up. ‘Hey. Then we could like move to London? So much cooler and we’d be nearer to my dad!’

  * * *

  On Monday Nick was back at work. By Monday evening he was saying that he was completely over it. On Tuesday he had a few drinks and went through it again with her and made a call to the old man, telling him not to call him ever again, then he did the whiskey-and-bus-noise routine, and on Wednesday night he came in miserable and just about jumped to grab the phone when it rang. His father must have slipped in something new, because Nick’s voice wobbled, and he seemed to gulp: ‘No, you did that! You did that!’

  And when she asked him what he meant, he said he’d had enough of it all, he didn’t want to talk about it. He got himself a whiskey, finishing the bottle into a tumbler, and put on the television. She stood open-mouthed, looking at him with his feet up on the coffee table. He had his shoes on.

  ‘Nick! Shoes!’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘Go and look after your daughter, or something.’

  ‘Don’t be so rude to me! It’s not all about you, Nick! Not everything’s about you!’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Astrid,’ he said.

  Quite a lot was said between them, up and down the stairs that evening, and finally he withdrew and hid under the covers while she sat downstairs with the whiskey ostentatious.

  When he came in the next evening, they were curt but courteous; they had Laura there to keep them on the toes of their manners, and neither said anything about the night before.

  ‘Would you like to eat now?’

  ‘If you do.’

  ‘Well, I’m not hungry – but if you are, we can.’

  ‘Sure. Whatever you want.’