by Louise Dean
‘That there is the only woman who’s ever loved me proper,’ he’d said to Audrey when she came in.
In the middle of the road, on a traffic island, he takes a buffeting from the wind as he faces the sea. He stands there, hopeful of something from it. But since Pat never said anything to him about the sea, since she only gave it a cold shoulder, nothing helpful comes to mind.
She relied on people, did Pat, on the goodness of people, and she gave some credit to flowers and dogs but, though they lived by it all his life, she never praised the sea. She didn’t like cats neither. She was seven years older than him, his sister, and she was like a mother to him and she took real joy from doing the things he wanted to do. She was only twelve when their mum died, and she was eighteen when their dad joined up.
From time to time, on a fair day during the war, the two of them sat up on the shingle of the beach, with her calling out after him, even though he was yards from the waves, ‘Careful you don’t catch it,’ or, ‘Watch you don’t get a soaking,’ and he ran at it, made a small hullabaloo, and then ate his sandwiches next to her, keeping an eye on the demon tide she dreaded, scrutinizing it between his toes, heard its rushing and hushing
in between their chatter. They’d stay until Pat was ‘proper browned off ’ with the seagulls. ‘Gerroff out of it,’ she’d cry with a ghastly shudder as they swooped in on the scraps, and he’d chase them away for her. At the end of the picnic, tidying away, exchanging admonitions one to the other in apprehension of mess, they shook out the crumbs from the blanket and shut the tin tight, the two of them pressing it down together.
Those were the happiest days of his life.
So now, when he looks at the sea, he is appalled that it’s still there and just the same – a pale snoring ogre. It appears smooth and inscrutable, vast as any notion of God, but it’s troubled and, like a disturbed mind, it turns its problem over and over. With its undercurrent on the prowl, it’s ready to take each of us by the ankles and lay us out.
Roger’s on reception when he steps through the door. His face falls. Roger is the driver and coffin maker. He’s a loafer and slow with it, Ken thinks.
He has Roger call Audrey for him. He takes a chair and waits. Roger hands him the phone, blushing.
The man’s always blushing – more or less a simpleton, he is – and Audrey would do much better to have a pair of hands with a bit of something up top an’ all.
Chapter 17
It would be the prettiest seaside village in the south-east, if it weren’t for the parvenu that stole its name. The Old Town of Hastings nestles in a horseshoe of grassy hills, hidden from the new town that has risen beside it, beyond the West Hill. The Old Town is a haven of Tudor cottages, with stained-glass surprises, horsemen’s lanes and leafy bowers. Windows are thrown open to views on to the pebble beach, where fishing boats lie amid the black creosoted fishermens’ huts, erect as sentry boxes. Smugglers once staggered ashore here, ankle-high in stones, to slake long-salted thirsts. The morris men still come forth in May, with their blackened faces, and the beardy men dance in front of the pub on the seafront, knocking sticks, lifting their knees and sounding the springtime hoorah. There is a pretty greengrocer’s, a delicatessen, numerous fish and chip shops and a host of bohemian tattoo parlours and vintage boutiques.
Audrey Bury lives in Armada Cottage on All Saints Road, a row of medieval hovels, upper floors bellying out over lower floors, with doorways mottoed to the memory of sometime seafarers. It’s the prettiest street of all, beloved of film crews. They look quaint, those places, but you can’t live in them. The doors are four foot high. You have to stoop. The floor’s not level. Audrey’s mahogany standing mirror on wheels rolls downhill. She keeps hauling it back where she wants it, but it just trundles off again under its own steam, towards the window.
Funny, her parents thought she was up her own arse for moving to the Old Town. In a way, she is; right up it and doubled back on herself. Her back aches all the time. The only time it doesn’t ache is when she’s lying down in her bedroom, but even then she’s like an ogre with her nose against the window. They could only get the smallest of beds up the stairs in segments. It’s her crucifix. There’s just about enough space for a peck on the cheek.
A large woman, she chose this winsome confinement because the area is better than anything else Hastings has to offer; its small homely businesses are run by former Londoners, feminine men and manly women whose deft hands can convert humdrum into boho and who like a drink. You’re friends with them in minutes. Audrey shares with them the knowingness of a forty-something woman; all husky appetite and brawny forearm.
Come the odd day off, she’s outside rather than in. She dithers along the pedestrian thoroughfare of George Street. There’s the smell of weed in the air and rancid fat. The food is a very pale imitation of modern fare; they call them paninis when they’re squashed rolls, and the orange cheese runs like paint. The pubs are dingy. Gormless men congregate there with their shaven heads, a knife in one of their socks, faces pitted like oranges. Outside any pub there’s your standard loser, pulling on the choke chains of four or five bull mastiffs, feeding his dog friends chips from the bin while, in return, they pee over his shoes. Old men with long beards and novelty captains’ hats sit on benches, shaking to the tune of Parkinson’s. The gulls stir the sky, each call and cry a hackle-raising warning.
She sits down outside a bar with a large glass of red. This feels festive at least. Her mobile rings and it’s Roger, her right-hand man and the only other full-time member of staff, and he tells her Ken Goodyew’s in, just sitting, and she says that’s fine, tell him she’ll be in shortly. She drinks up. She looks at the trestle table next to her. The young people have either dyed white hair or dyed black hair. Assembled, they look like a chess set. They are discussing the benefits of being a hermaphrodite. She leaves her glass drained, squeezes past the young people, and goes to get the car.
He’s a nice old boy, Ken Goodyew. He’s a bit of vintage chic himself in his smart clothes and shiny shoes; looks like he left the hanger in his coat. Since his sister died, he’s been in every other day. She let him sit and keep the old lady company before the funeral; then, after she was buried, he just kept coming in. At first it was on the pretext of this or that to do with the headstone, but within a week or so he made her a proposal.
‘My boy Dave’s running the business and I can’t sit twiddling me thumbs. Got to have something to do. It’s a nice family sort of place ’ere, innit? I like to be useful.’
She was short-staffed and so she agreed he could help out, casually. Not that there was anything casual about Ken. He was born to the business with his dress sense.
‘Don’t want nothing for it,’ he says, but she gives him a tenner here and there. He’s been with her to a nursing home and the hospital to pick up the deceased. Far from being squeamish, he’s practical and interested in every aspect of the work. He praises the way they refer to the deceased as if they were still living: Mrs Edmondson, Mr Dixon and so on. ‘I appreciate the way you do that, Audrey,’ he says. He likes the way they dress smart and have clean hands. He likes their quiet voices and good manners.
‘I say, Audrey,’ he said one afternoon, sitting in reception having a cuppa, ‘when I come in ’ere, I feel myself.’
Roger had given her an old-fashioned look and she’d had to stop herself smiling.
In his spare time, Ken likes to pore through the funeral plan.
‘’Ere, I say, Audrey, it’s like a menu, innit? It’s like ordering off a menu. Bet you don’t get many of your punters come in and book up this way, do ya?’
‘I wish we did. It would make it much easier, Ken.’
‘Cremated or buried? Audrey? What would you ’ave?’
‘Well, it’s according to your religious views, Ken. Do you believe in the Resurrection?’
‘Oh, I dunno about that one, Audrey,’ he whistles, ‘dunno about that one . . .’
‘Well, it’s like with
a holiday; there are options. It’s how you want to travel. Whether you want to go club class somewhere or whether you’d prefer to go economy nowhere.’
‘I don’t believe in ’olidays,’ was all he said.
Later on he said, a-quiver with the giggles, ‘I say, Audrey, I’ve got time to think it through, ain’t it? I’m not kicking it tomorrow, am I? Eh? Eh?’
‘I’ve never had anything like it,’ she’d mused. ‘A groupie.’
‘He’s sweet on you,’ said Roger.
Ken had been in every day for three weeks by then.
‘It’s that or he’s a necrophiliac.’
He had a schoolboy’s sense of humour, Roger. He got a clout one afternoon from Audrey for typing up an old joke on the coffin plaque for Joyce Haynes, who died a spinster. ‘This one returned unopened’.
‘Blimey,’ said Ken, ‘that ain’t right.’ And he cast Roger heavily critical looks.
‘There’s nothing wrong with a touch of levity, Ken,’ she said to him. ‘I like to confound people’s expectations of a funeral director.’ Her parents never used to say what they did for a living. If you told people what you did when they had a hand in your bag of Revels, they’d whip it out quick as a flash, drop the chocs. They’d never take a cup of tea from you. Other times they’d ask you about the handles and whether you half-inched them.
‘Have you worked with anyone we’d know?’ a woman gushed at a house-warming party.
‘I don’t know. Do you know a lot of dead people?’
‘Oh. I thought you said you were a film director!’
Ken preferred his own jokes. ‘’Ere, Audrey, tell you what, you’ve got an advance booking from Ken Goodyew. Oy, the living are queuing up for your services! I don’t mind if you want to use it in your publicity. Get a nice picture of me. ’Ere, Audrey, listen – “Wanted dead or alive”. Eh? Eh? Get it? How about that for a caption? Tell you what, I’ll let you buy me dinner in return for using my mugshot. ’Ere, Audrey, you ever taken out an old geezer like me before?’
‘I have, Ken, but he’s been in a shroud.’
Her mother warned her not to let on about what she did for a living until she’d seen a chap a few times. Other girls were getting warned not to sleep with a man on the first date, but she was told to crack on with it. They’d been few and far between, though, and here she was forty-odd, with a clothing rack of black, a fridge full of Müllerlights, and an eighty-year-old for a suitor. It was a rum do.
She drives at a dignified speed down through the Old Town, but makes quite an impact on the traffic. In front, cars pull in, pull over; across from her, they slow down, their drivers look away; and behind her, cars slow and lengthen the distance between them. At the traffic lights, an elderly man stops, assumes a military bearing and removes his cap.
When the lights change, for the hell of it, Audrey floors it along the seafront like something out of The Dukes of Hazzard. She hits fifty as she passes the pier. She cuts quite a figure in a speeding hearse.
Chapter 18
A boat trip, lunch and a visit to the catacombs came and went the following day and Nick treated it all with mute disinterest. He was supercilious when he did speak, either lofty or cryptic.
In front of the Duomo on that Monday evening, couples stroll hand in hand across the great white marble piazza, back and forth, before settling on one of the five similar restaurants with tables for two.
Nick and Astrid watch them with pointed absorption. Each of them affects a gaunt melancholy. They reach for their glasses of wine as soon as they are served. They take dutiful sips. They have ordered a pizza to share, though they have each admitted that neither is hungry.
On the cathedral steps, a tall man with hair pulled back behind his ears holds out his hand for a woman in a strappy dress. She has the poise of a dancer. As he pulls her into him, he uses his mobile phone to take a picture of the pair of them, in front of what was once the temple of Athena. A man in a wheelchair is parked at a table next to them. His friend hoists him up. The disabled man slumps. The friend does it again. The man slumps again and his glasses on a string fall off and hang about his chin.
Astrid misses the spa. The clients she got in there were the sort of women she liked: malleable, the behind-your-back type. Fortunately, she never had to deal with any of the Annie Lennox sort: opinionated and messianic. She enjoyed conversation in the half-hour slots during which she applied the colour. She could give vent to anything she needed to, shorten a few long faces and, after a day of it, leave feeling generally very satisfied and ready for a bit of male. She missed the company of women. Especially now, when they’d had a falling-out and she had no one to speak to.
Of course she didn’t discuss the entire ins and outs of their business! She hadn’t time for the whole kit and caboodle with the apprentices doing the rest of the foils when she moved on to the next client. No, she edited the story down to what he said (that was bad) and what she did (that was good). She reasoned, as ever, that if she was telling perfect strangers the ins and outs of their life, she ought to tell her mother. So, from time to time, they met for lunch. ‘I’ve never liked any of the men in your life, Astrid,’ her mother said to her once. ‘Well, I love him,’ Astrid had replied as they worked side by side, fork by fork, through the cheesecake, coming to a truce at the crust.
* * *
‘I don’t come on holiday to get drunk as a rule,’ Nick says when she proposes another bottle of wine.
‘Oh, wicked!’
‘I’ve never liked that expression used that way.’
They sit in silence. The friend hoists the man in the wheelchair once more.
As the white facades retreat into the night, she implores him,
‘Nick? Where are you?’
He doesn’t seem to hear; he makes no answer. She pays the bill to spite him and to relish, in that curiously feminine way, grievance added to grievance.
When they go to bed, he launches himself on to his right side, facing the wall. In the morning, when there is a light between the shutters, he wakes and goes into the bathroom. Windowless, it is dark in there. He stumbles about; he’s desperate for a pee. He reaches left and right for a light pull. He tries the light switch on the outside wall. He flicks it on and off, on and off, on and off. Nothing.
‘The fucking lights are broken,’ he says out loud.
He goes to open the shutters. He goes back across the floor to the bathroom. The bathroom is still impenetrably dark. Shit, he’ll have to call downstairs and ask whether it’s normal to have a power cut here.
‘Put the key card in the slot in the wall,’ says Astrid.
‘Which slot?’
‘The one right in front of you which says, in English and Italian and French, put your card in here to turn on bathroom lights. That one,’ she says facetiously.
‘Thank you!’
When she hears the lights ping and flutter and warble into action, she rolls over on to her stomach. ‘Some holiday this is.’ She can hear him shaving, showering, drying himself – the usual routine, but at speed – and her heart beats faster as she wonders why he is getting up at this hour, and then he’s got his clothes on in what seems like seconds.
‘I’ll see you up at breakfast, I assume,’ he says dourly before he leaves.
With the wardrobe shaking in the door’s wake, she sits up and looks in the mirror at her tired face in the morning light.
Up at the rooftop restaurant, where breakfast is served, on a buffet table laid with pristine white linen, there is a crushed almond granita circulating in a drinks machine and a bottle of prosecco in a silver bucket hinting at honeymooners. Some fat-bottomed tourists in khaki shorts are bending and exclaiming over the custard-topped pastries.
Outside on the terrace, the morning is spread out over the harbour, and there is a pink and violet tinge to the birdless sky. Nick is sitting at a table for two, gazing across to the modern port with its industrial area and docks. There is a noise coming from it which sounds like
a giant vacuum cleaner.
But he is in Kent in 1987, in a field, sitting, waiting for her to come as he’d promised he would. The damp cold at his ankles, the sun on his crown, and a faint smell of sheep shit. The ghastly delay between one crow calling another. The rumble of the road.
Astrid sits down opposite him.
‘Are we to carry on with this argument all holiday, Nick?’
‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ He looks nobly pained.
From her seat, she can see the tops of the buildings, square and domed, baroque and rococo, everything adorned and embellished, everything poised for a perfect day; a ruffle on a sleeve, the flick of a lock of hair, the lifting of a baton.
‘Let’s have a nice day today,’ she says. ‘Let’s be friends again. It’s a lovely hot day for the time of year.’
He offers her a wan smile.
Making do with that, she turns to admire the far plains on the other side of the harbour. When she finishes her coffee, she catches him looking at her forlornly.
They go down to the bit of beach closest to the hotel. The hem of sand that gives on to the harbour is fringed with stones, cigarette butts and twigs from the pine trees behind. Sparkling in it are the soft gems of washed glass in all sorts of colours. Three or four old men sit in their trunks on towels on a wall; walnut-skinned, they waggle their toes, their hair silver as if the sun had taken a blowtorch to it. Three older women, large and dark, stand in bikinis and sun hats, making scornful noises, with their hands on their hips, knee-high in the water. A young black man is washing his arms. The seawater on his back is like marbles.
‘Have you seen this here?’ Nick says out of the side of his mouth, to Astrid. Beside him a young couple lie kissing.
