by Louise Dean
Pushing past the pussyfooting pair, Laura went with a heavy ‘excuse me’ to the bread bin. She made herself a sandwich and left the spread a mulch of crumb putty with the knife stuck in it, upright.
‘I shouldn’t be eating bread all the time. No wonder I’m borderline obese,’ she said and went into the front room to watch television.
Astrid had imagined there would be an apology. She sat up in bed, with the covers at her chest, waiting patiently and in full make-up. He looked at her nightdress pointedly, and then began to undress. She watched him hobble about the room in between the open suitcases, pulling each foot out of his trouser legs, bobbing about as if he were on the deck of a keening ship. He removed his underpants without a care, showing her his arse fully; he draped them over the chair, then pulled back the covers and climbed in.
‘What?’ he asked, opening an eye to see her looking sideways at him.
‘Nothing.’ She turned out the light, pulled the covers up to her chin and wriggled down.
After a minute his hand felt for hers. In another minute, he was asleep.
Chapter 11
‘I tell you what, Astrid,’ he says on the Saturday morning they’re off to the airport, swapping with her at the bathroom sink.
‘Listen to this. My mum used to say to me and Davie, I’m not kidding, I’ll flay you alive . . .’ He cracks a smile over the side of his face free of shaving foam. ‘I’ll give you the hiding of your life. That was another one. Not your everyday humdrum beating but something to remember.’ She loves it when he shaves the little indented furrow under his nose, the strip above the middle of his lips; what a funny face he makes then, he looks so proper. ‘Mind you, it was only talk.’
He wipes each side of his face, leaving blobs of shaving foam on his earlobes. (‘Oh, the way he holds himself, you can see he thinks himself a very fine gentleman,’ her mother said to her once, unkindly.)
‘Ken met his match with Pearl; they were both completely bloody-minded.’ The iced gem of foam on his Adam’s apple falls on to his chest. He unwraps the towel from his waist. ‘He was forty-odd when he married Mum, and he only did it because her dad died and she came into a bit of money. Sure of it.’ He opens the glass door to the shower, the frame shaking in his wake. He turns on the tap. They stand there, dark and light, facing each other, the plain glass between them. Suddenly he’s doused in water and his hair is flat to his temples.
‘Mind you, they could both scream and shout. Christ! Even the dog was a nervous wreck. You’ve never seen a dog with diarrhoea like ours had.’
He sluices under each armpit with the soap. The glass screen is splattered with soapsuds. He puts shampoo on to his head as if he’s cracking an egg on to it. His mouth bursts open into gasps, and his eyes screw tighter in the onslaught of the stream of water as he rubs and rubs his head. He looks so sweet, her one-man storm in a teacup. She puts two fingers to her lips and touches the glass screen and leaves him there.
Ten minutes later, he comes downstairs dressed as the country gent in his careful clothes, the check shirt and cords. ‘Ready?’ She trims her grin, recalling how pleased he’d been to go to Laura’s first sports day at school and been gutted to find himself opposite another father who’d been wearing identical clothes:
coral trousers, Barbour and leather hat.
They’re off to Gatwick, bound for Sicily. It will be good to have a break from this whole business with his father.
Just that very morning the phone rang at seven and it was Ken asking for the number of a fish and chip shop in the old town. ‘Silly old fuck,’ Nick said, hanging up. ‘Why call us for that?’
‘We’re not bloody directory enquiries,’ Astrid had griped from under her pillow.
According to Dave, Matt used the Internet to switch the old man’s telecoms provider to one offering free calls evenings and weekends. Great, said Nick, good on him, the little shit.
The two larger cases are in the conservatory, waiting for Nick to put them in the car, and he stands looking at them, bracing himself. The dog, their brown and white springer spaniel, peers in at them, too dirty for admission, his face craven, ready for the jackpot of a welcome as much as for the disaster of dismissal. He cocks his head.
‘Dirty old dog,’ says Astrid. ‘He knows he’s off to kennels. Bugger off, Roy.’
They thought it funny to name him this, to call out: ‘Roy, Roy . . .’ But Laura doesn’t think it’s funny; she wishes the dog were called Biscuit. ‘Whose idea was it anyway, Mum, to call him Roy?’ she asked once on the way to school and Astrid knew, sliding her eyes and pausing before answering, that in such questions there was a subtle evisceration of Nick. ‘Mine,’ she lied.
‘Yes, he knows we’re going,’ Nick says sadly, looking at Roy through the glass with a deeply sympathetic look.
They have time to lie down together and kiss before they go, don’t they? she asks him, a hand on his arm. He taps his watch and sighs as if it’s against his will. This is their shtick; he jokes that she badgers him for sex.
‘I’d best get the other bags, love.’ He plods upstairs dutifully and she follows him up, but he surprises her with an ambush at the bedroom door.
From the first night, he appointed their sides of the bed – he to the right, she to the left – and this is how he arranges them now, pulling her across him. They kiss on their bed.
‘Handsome,’ she tells him.
But he resists the tip of her tongue and jumps up. ‘Enough of this lolling about, we’ve got a holiday to get on!’ He gets up to zip the bags.
She lies there, her thoughts cramping at this small spurning. One thing leads to another: being girlfriend not wife; having no children of their own; her age; other women. This is always the terminus for this line of thinking, and on its benches sit beautiful women. Sometimes it seems to her that she lives in a flat world, like the bed they lie in. Jealousy to the east, doubt to the west, the past to the south, the future to the north – all pits to fall into.
‘Come on then, we don’t want to miss the plane,’ he calls up the stairwell.
There are fifty women to every straight man these days. She has to be vigilant. Women are fighting – liberation’s over and now it’s civil war – and she’s in the armaments industry: beauty. The other woman is rattling the handle of the bedroom door, a true competitor, just a dress size away. The sweet spot is the fear. Her fantasies thrive there; lust is a kind of terror.
When he takes Roy into the kennels, she checks her crow’s feet in the mirror. You can never be the most beautiful woman, no matter how beautiful you are, she thinks. She hopes that this Sicilian destination will not present the problems of a Caribbean or, worse, a Brazilian resort. It has scarcely any beach, so it ought to be safe from sun-worshipping nymphs. She purposely chose a place that seemed a little middle-aged so that she’d compare well. When he gets in the car, she slaps the visor to and smiles guardedly. A true smile. A grin – God forbid, a guffaw – would show her age.
When they pass the exit signs on the motorway and he has difficulty reading them, he says he thinks he might need glasses.
‘My eyesight’s not what it used to be.’
She’s pleased; every Delilah wants her Samson blind.
Chapter 12
The phone went at just after six and Ken got himself out of bed with what he deemed discretion. June rose and fell several times in his wake, as if on a raft, and received a stray cuff as he flailed about. The carpet rose and fell, and the furniture whinnied and clanked, and the last noise to betray his clandestine exit was finally and explosively a trombone salvo from the bathroom. He had misplaced faith in the thickness of those walls.
Where he goes when the phone rings, she knows very well. He is at that woman’s beck and call; she has only to snap her fingers. June knew it was her as soon as she clapped eyes on her. She met her at Pat’s do. The vol au vent cases June got from Lidl, forty-eight of them, and filled them herself. That woman – Audrey – gorged herself on them. She
must have had four or more. And Ken! He hung on to her every word, as if he were catching her crumbs. June asked people what they thought of the vol au vents and got some very kind words, but nothing from Ken. He was too busy ogling the greedy undertaker.
She has given up hope of much in the way of affection from Ken. She does feel lonely, but she’s of the generation that understood very well, thank you, that no one likes a sourpuss, or a moaner, so you keep your troubles to yourself.
She has a nice son who is forty-six and lives in Wales in the countryside and runs a holiday camp for artists. He has an Australian wife. She has the school photographs of their twin children – Jeremy and Jemima – above the gas fire. Once in a blue moon they come to Hastings and stay in the caravan park.
The day before they come, Ken picks a row, so they have a miserable time of it with him griping and carping. And when they go, he’s all good-natured – he has a certain spring in his step – and he has the cheek to ask her if she wants to say sorry to him for her behaviour of the last few days. Then he takes her out to The Italian Way and stands up at the counter, reminiscing about the days when the Dimarcos ran it and he and the Teddy Boys hung out there looking mean. As in tough, not tight, which is what he looks, standing back when the waiter brings the little plastic tray. Her purse snaps back and forth and provides the right money down to the last penny. It’s never more than eight pounds. Seven pounds eighty as a rule for two minestrone soups with rolls. And then they’re all done and back to normal again.
‘I’ve been a fool for those eyes,’ she says, lying there, hot and heavy of leg, rheumatism aching right through her, a bad taste in her mouth.
What a life. You never know how it’s going to end up, but you don’t imagine it will be like this. They ought to warn girls how it is, how it really is.
She gets up in time to see Ken, a stick figure in his black suit, up the far hill. She phones her son and gets his wife, Melinda.
‘You never imagine your husband will get a thing for an embalmer – and an outsized one at that – that’s one thing you don’t imagine. Now the thing is . . .’ she coughs, ‘excuse me,’ with nerves, ‘and I don’t know whether you should tell my Andrew this or not – you know how sensitive he is. The thing is that Ken says he wants a divorce. It’s because of her, Audrey Bury, Hastings’ biggest funeral director. Ooh, it’ll be for the money, I know that much. She’s rich, that woman, rich. Rich from cheating widows. Rich from all the gold teeth.’
Then Melinda gives her a piece of her mind and afterwards June sits down, looking at the twins in their brown and gold cardboard frames and wondering if her daughter-in-law’s fury didn’t amount to some sort of abiding affection emanating from Wales and from the hearth of her own family.
She decides the best thing to do is to eat a pack of Bourbons right now, then starve herself in front of him until he notices. But she’d best prepare herself for the worst. At the small table in the kitchen she sets out the Basildon Bond pad with its ruled guidance page underneath the top sheet and in her bird’s-foot writing she picks out the following as a note to herself, to fold and keep as a moral stiffener: Dear June – that made her feel better in itself – When you go away from Ken to Wales, please remember that he will not come after you because he’s never done it before and it’s not in his nature. When you leave Hastings, you leave Ken for good.
She won’t think about those eyes, though they’re there between the loops of the ‘o’s. She folds the note and puts it in her bag. She makes a cup of tea and puts on the wireless. On comes Otis Redding with ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’. She sits and listens to the song the whole way through, unsandwiching the chocolate Bourbons, dipping the dry sides into the tea – Ken’s way of eating them. Otis finishes things in a strangled sort of way and, when he’s done, she switches off the radio and puts the empty biscuit packet into the bin.
In the beginning she’d gone off for hours and hours after rows with him, but he never came after her and, goodness knows, she dithered by the bus stop. She was a bus-stop dallier; she’d annoy the drivers with her umming and erring, her toe pointing in, pointing out. ‘No, thank you, I’ll wait for the next one.’ And the bus would serve off in an angry manoeuvre, rejected by a little old lady with a handbag. Oh, she dreamed of seeing her Ken come up the hill for her sake, to stop her boarding the bus! ‘Dream on,’ Ken would have said.
She takes a walk up to Lidl for a look-see later on that morning, going up the hill with her heart heavy, thinking about the very idea of leaving him, her last love, and she comes back down it again with placatory words on her mind, blinking at the sea. He can’t help what he is, and she loves him! Oh, for those eyes! And the way he helps himself to a cream cracker and a bit of red Leicester in the evenings, bouncing the little plate on his knee as they watched the news together. That’s happiness enough, surely. And of course you have to bear in mind he’s never had a mother.
This is the way her thoughts are going, and she’s thinking of doing a posh dinner for him – she’s got a ready-cooked roast chicken in her bag – when towards her comes a blue double-decker bus bound inland. She loves the smell of the back-draught as you board and the comfort of the seats, so nicely sprung. That bus could take you anywhere. It’s marked up as going to Hawkhurst. From Hawkhurst you could get anywhere – London certainly, or Wales.
The bus driver is a woman. She has her head out of the side window and her hair is long and auburn, tresses and tresses of it flowing in the wind. It’s truly something to behold. It is a sign.
‘Just like Boadicea,’ June says to herself, stopping and changing the bag to her other hand. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’
When she gets in the bungalow, she sits down in her coat in the kitchen and takes the letter out of her bag, unfolds it and reads it through once more.
‘Hawkhurst,’ she says. She pushes up her glasses on one side of her face to wipe the corner of her eye. ‘That’s where I’m bound.’
Chapter 13
The rental car crosses the bridge from Syracuse to the isle of Ortygia; a baked Alaska of sandstone, melting into a turquoise sea. The outpost of successive civilizations before and since Christ, it has survived sieges and earthquakes and invaders: Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Arabs, Normans, Jews and the Sicilian aristocracy, each disinheriting each other by dismantling their churches. Where grand palm trees lean over the ruins of a Greek temple, they hesitate in their hire car at a roundabout until they are squeezed and harangued forward by a collective will and expelled like a cork out of a bottle through a narrow street of tall buildings into a courtyard.
Astrid spots the hotel’s small sign fixed to the wall. They park alongside green bins reeking of dead fish.
They are graciously received in the marble of the hotel’s reception, upgraded to a room with a sea view, and the young bellboy goes behind the little tin car, beckoning Nick with his hands to a parking space on the promenade.
‘He’s never happier than when he’s reversing into a parking space,’ she thinks, watching Nick in the car. You could drive into a space like that straight – but no, a man has to reverse into it. She stands there grinning as, from a saunter, he breaks into a little run.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
The bellboy shows them how to use the card to access the room and power it. The air conditioning hums. Nick flutters before him with the apology of a mime artist, to show that he has no change to give him.
She goes to the shutters and braces the handle on the double doors. The hum of the air conditioning stops. She tests it again. She shows him how to do it and he does it too and they look at each other.
‘Bloody clever,’ he says and does it again.
She stands on the balcony in the afternoon heat, squinting at the sea, then looks to her right across some seven other similar balconies. Above her and below her, the double-doored balconies are in symmetry. It reminds her of the advert for Chanel perfume in which rouged sirens step out on to balconies such as
these and holler elegant abuse.
‘They shout out égoïste in that advert,’ she says to him, ‘those women on their balconies. So French. It would never have worked in England. Can you imagine it? Thirty English women yelling out of their council flats at a bloke.’
‘Oy, shit’ead!’
She laughs. ‘God, Nick, you sound just like Ken.’
He’s standing outside the bathroom, dabbing his sweating face with a hand towel. He pulls the underarms of each side of his shirt to his nose and makes a quizzical face. ‘Oh shit, you are your father,’ she says.
‘’Ark at ’er, going on like a drippin’ tap . . .’
She goes to hang up their fine things, cardigans over the shoulders of dresses, his shirts folded and stacked. She leaves their underwear in the bag and closes it – you never let a cleaner glimpse your smalls.
Then she locates the minibar underneath the television and whips it open. She twists off the top of a small bottle of red wine and takes a glug and hands it to him where he sits on the bed, feet planted wide, happy to watch her.
‘I love minibars.’
‘Twice the price.’
‘Twice the fun. Always tastes better.’
‘You daft cow,’ he says, still in his father’s voice, taking the bottle from her and having some too.
‘It does, though, doesn’t it?’
They finish it off, wipe their lips and jettison the bottle in the bin.
Stepping down the grand chequered stairwell of Hotel des Etrangers et Miramare, she hears the slovenly sound of rubber hitting tile and, with effort, by splaying her toes, keeps the new flip-flops stuck to the soles of her feet and proceeds more discretely. This is Sicily! She has in her shoulder bag a photocopied map of the town and she withdraws it in the lobby and strides into the sunshine. Nick dallies, looking at prints on the walls, detaining her with his exclamations. She wants to ‘be here’, to see and be seen. She has an al fresco Martini in mind, or a Campari and soda down by the water, among the stylish.
